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The extracts from the early journals are not chosen for their merit alone: they show the soil out of which Emerson grew, the atmosphere around, his habits and mental food, his doubts, his steady, earnest purpose, and the things he outgrew. His frankness with himself is seen, and how he granted the floor to the adversary for a fair hearing. Also the ups and downs of the boy's health appear in the schoolkeeping days, and why, beyond all reasonable hopej considering the neglect of the body, he lived to a healthy middle life and old age by his rambling tendencies, by quietness, and bending to the blast which shattered the health of his more unyielding brothers.
In these years the young Emerson was reading eagerly and widely, and learned to find what the author or the college text-book had of hinty and leave the rest. The growth of his literary' taste, his style, independence of thought, and originality in writing verse can be traced.
But from first to last appears the value to him of his strange aunt. Miss Mary Moody Emerson, in her constant interest and stimulating influence: poor, remote, only self-educated, hungry for knowledge, extraordinarily well-read, exalted in her religious thought, critical but proud of her nephews, especially Ralph, and a tireless correspondent. The boy prized her letters, and they put him on his mettle. His most careful youthful writing is in his answers; he holds his own in them. Large extracts from her letters and his answers occur, especially in the earlier journals. He admired her rhetoric, now poetical, now fiery, now sarcastic, -- always her own.
It was Mr. Emerson's habit often in later years to copy into his journal passages from his letters to others in which he had conveyed his thought with care.
It was as natural to this boy to write as to another to play ball, or go fishing, or experiment with the tools of a neighbour carpenter, or feel out tunes on a musical instrument. When recitations were over, and study did not press, or he was not walking in Mount Auburn woods or the wild country around Fresh Pond, he betook himself to his journal. It was his confidential friend: his ambitions, his disappointments, his religious meditations, his mortifications, his romantic imaginings, his sillinesses, his trial-flights In verse, his joy in Byron and Scott, or Everett's orations, the ideas gathered from serious books, -- all went in, everything but what might be expected in a boy's diary; for of incidents, of classmates, of students' doings, there is hardly an entry.*
Throughout, and increasingly in later years, these are journals, not of incidents and persons, but of thoughts.
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