Invention and Imitation in Emerson's Early Lectures

Abstract

TN I833 Emerson underwent an intellectual experience which sigI nificantly shaped his lecture style. Having voluntarily severed himself from Unitarian ministry and all other dead forms of our forefathers (JMN, IV, 27), he travelled a year in Europe before taking up his new pulpit in lecture room, the true church of today (JMN, VII, 277-278).' Careful study of biological exhibitions at Jardin des Plantes and attendance at scientific lectures at Sorbonne had helped him to formulate his role in that new church. will be a naturalist, he wrote in his journal and recalled in his first lecture, The Uses of Natural History (JMN, IV, 406; EL, I, io). His mission, he asserted in his second lecture, was to teach that only a perfect symmetry is discoverable in his [man's] limbs and senses between head and foot, between hand and eye, heart and lungs,-but an equal symmetry and proportion is discoverable between him and air, mountains. . In a hyperbolic peroration, Emerson concluded, am not impressed by solitary marks of designing wisdom; I am thrilled with delight by choral harmony of whole. Design! It is all design. It is all beauty. It is all (EL, I, 49). Now a poet-naturalist, Emerson cultivated those aspects of his style which could best reveal to his audiences both design he perceived in, universe and astonishment he experienced at its discovery. Emerson's lectures rarely rose to excitement that we