There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts.

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses.

What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?

He liked to taste but not to drink—least of all to become intoxicated.

[N]o one has had so steady and constant and above all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and independence.

[A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary.

He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it.

He is the most original mind America has hitherto produced.

Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war.

England laughed at American authorship and we sent her Emerson...