You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A man, yet by these tears a boy again,Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,A reminiscence sing.
Fourteen months after his wife's death, on March 29, 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson walked from Boston to the cemetery in Roxbuxry where she lay buried. “I visited Ellen's tomb,” he wrote in his journal later that day, “and opened the coffin” (7). He said nothing more.
Unadorned and unexplained, Emerson's gesture incarnates the drama of grief, human and macabre. A neophyte transcendentalist, twenty-eight years old, he stares at his wife's remains as if to assure himself that she is really dead. Having looked, perhaps now he can say goodbye, transferring her safely into the realm of mind where she'll doubtless suffer far less decay than in the grave. But whatever Emerson's private motive for lifting the coffin lid, his curiosity is oddly akin to the biographer's: who is this person, Emerson seems to be asking, where has she gone, and how can I square what she is with what she was?
Just a few months after peering into his wife's tomb, Emerson considered writing a series of biographical lectures— not about his wife, that would have been too radical, too painful—but about so-called representative men. “I would evoke the spirit of each, and their relics might rot,” he