Excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher and Poet About twenty-five years ago Herman Grimm, a clever German writer, happened to be in the apartments of an American friend then sojourn ing in Germany. Upon the table lay a thin vol ume entitled Essays by R. W. Emerson. He glanced hastily over the leaves, but could make nothing out of their contents, and declared that they seemed to him to be sheer nonsense. His friend assured him that this was by no means the judgment of competent persons in America, where Emerson had come to be regarded as one of the foremost thinkers of the age - a man whose utterances were worthy of all attention, and, even when they seemed to be obscure, of careful study and meditation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.