stered bone-box, my body, shall my soul be then and there set free,—escaped, volatile, elemental, as wind or moonshine, having cast from it—one by one as a garment—age, sex, race, creed, and culture? But what if in this off-shedding I strip from me my personality, myself? This involuted wrapping in which I am duly done up and ticketed and passed about among my acquaintance, what if to rend this were to leave me in the shivering nakedness of the impersonal?
SHAKESPEARE
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The following notes on Shakespeare were written by Mr. Emerson for the celebration in Boston by the Saturday Club of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the poet’s birth.
In Mr. Cabot’s Memoirs of Emerson, vol. ii, page 621, apropos of Mr. Emerson’s avoidance of impromptu speech on public occasions is this statement:—
“I remember his getting up at a dinner of the Saturday Club on the Shakespeare anniversary in 1864, to which some guests had been invited, looking about him tranquilly for a minute or two, and then sitting down; serene and unabashed, but unable to say a word upon a subject so familiar to his thoughts from boyhood.”
Yet on the manuscript of this address Mr. Emerson noted that it was read at the Club’s celebration on that occasion, and at the Revere House. (“Parker’s” was the usual gathering place of the Club.) The handwriting of this note shows that Mr. Emerson wrote it in his later years, so it is very possible that Mr. Cabot was right. Mr. Emerson perhaps forgot to bring his notes with him to the dinner, and so did not venture to speak. And the dinner may have been at “Parker’s.”—Edward W. Emerson.
’Tis not our fault if we have not made this evening’s circle still richer than it is. We seriously endeavored, besides our brothers and our seniors, on whom the ordinary lead of literary and social action falls,—and falls because of their ability,—to draw out of their retirements a few rarer lovers of the muse—“seld-seen flamens”—whom this day seemed to elect and challenge. And it is to us a painful disappointment that Bryant and Whittier as guests, and our own Hawthorne,—with the best will to come,—should have found it impossible at last; and again, that a well-known and honored compatriot, who first in Boston wrote elegant verse, and on Shakespeare, and whose American devotion through forty or fifty years to the affairs of a bank, has not been able to bury the fires of his genius,—Mr. Charles Sprague,—pleads the infirmities of age as an absolute bar to his presence with us. We regret also the absence of our members Sumner and Motley.
We can hardly think of an occasion where so little need be said. We are all content to let Shakespeare speak for himself. His fame is settled on the foundations of the moral and intellectual world. Wherever there are men, and in the degree in which they are civil, have power of mind, sensibility to beauty, music, the secrets of passion, and the liquid expression of thought, he has risen to his place as the first poet of the world.
Genius is the consoler of our mortal condition, and Shakespeare taught us that the little world of the heart is vaster, deeper, and richer than the spaces of astronomy. What shocks of surprise and sympathetic power this battery, which he
