The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]

make him savage until his furious chisel can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into doleful deserts until it finds proper vent. All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and childing, until they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious wants, aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, homestead, social connection and personal power, and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial,

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Title: The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]
Author: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882.
Canvas: Page 327
Publication: Boston ; New York :: Houghton, Mifflin,; [1903-1904].

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Collection: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Full citation: "The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]." In the digital collection The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/4957107.0007.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 14, 2025.

The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]

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