Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V: 1835–1838

“The journals covering these years are fascinating and rewarding… [Emerson] had a noble mind; and the edition of his journals now in progress is appropriately a noble edition… It is only necessary to affirm that the fifth volume is as handsomely produced and as scrupulously edited as the others.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“The period covered by this volume was the most interesting and perhaps the most important of Emerson’s life, during which he completed and published his first book ‘Nature,’ and delivered his first famous lecture, ‘The American Scholar,’ before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College… Much of the material that went into…‘Nature,’ ‘Self-Reliance,’ ‘Spiritual Laws,’ and other famous essays of the First Series, was first carefully written out in the journals included in this volume… [It] shows better than any other so far the unfolding of Emerson’s mature thought on religious and philosophical subjects, perhaps the most influential in America in the nineteenth century. Like its predecessors, this volume has been edited with learned thoroughness and admirable care.”—Virginia Quarterly Review