ISSN:
0021-8758
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
English, American Studies
,
History
,
Political Science
,
Sociology
,
Economics
Notes:
He is tempted to cease battling; his blood begins to chill; he hears the frost-king's lullaby. But as he is about to yield to sleep, he is startled back into militance by the cry of a titmouse, a small “scrap of valor” that “just for play/Fronts the north-wind.” The courage of the bird returns to him his own and he adopts its Emersonian doctrine that “the soul, if stout within/Can arm impregnably the skin.”The freshness that Emerson's contemporaries found in his writings derived largely from this brisk militant quality. In an age that Emerson thought lacking in a “literature of Heroism,” his own writings were a constant call to bravery (CWE, 2, 247–48). And his most consistent image for that bravery was the soldier. Men, he said, “should calmly front the morrow” as if it were a battle-formation; they should not be “cowards fleeing before a revolution,” but instead should be “advancing on Chaos and the dark” (CWE, 2, 47, 297). One's life should be “a battle, a conquest”; one should state his convictions as boldly as if he wereopening hostilities: “Every principle is a war-note” (CWE, 9, 353). Even those in sedentary occupations should display the bravery of warriors.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800012068
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