Emerson on Love

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Living the Life Series · 12 pages

From Ralph Waldo Emerson, Love, Friendship, Domestic Life, Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1877, the essay on Love excerpted from pages 7–23, with the paragraphs numbered for reference. The epigraph is from the Koran: “I was as a gem concealed; me my burning ray revealed.”

A head-note states the reading under which the essay is offered — that the true lover beholds in the beloved only the greater beauty of the spirit that stirs his heart, and that by separating in each soul what is divine from the taint it has contracted in the world, he ascends to a beauty of knowledge and truth hidden within a triple casket, concealing itself as the tortoise conceals his head within his shell. Emerson's own opening makes the same movement in his own terms. Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments, and each of its joys ripens into a new want; nature, uncontainable and forelooking, already anticipates in the first sentiment of kindness a benevolence that will lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to that felicity, he writes, is a private and tender relation of one to one — the enchantment of human life, which like a divine rage seizes on a man at one period and works a revolution in his mind and body. What it then does is listed: it unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the senses, opens the imagination, adds heroic and sacred attributes to his character, establishes marriage and gives permanence to human society.

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