Excerpt from Emerson's Essay on Compensation<br><br>Emerson's was a varied life. His name is associ ated with many movements. Of some of them he was the vital force. Consequently to those who knew him well nothing about the man impressed them more deeply than the dimensions of his interests and influ ences. It is this, perhaps, that marks the widest gulf between him and all others of his generation. He was the first to make the outside world aware that there was such a thing as American letters. And at home he became in his own life time a cult in the broad sense, like Carlyle, like Browning. Compared with his influence as a social factor there is somewhat ephemeral in the brilliant careers of his platform con temporaries. Compared with his influence as an idol for the rising generation there is somewhat narrowly literary about Hawthorne and Poe for example: as there is about Stevenson and Pater and Arnold com pared with Browning and Carlyle.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>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.