Volume VI in this series contains quotation books and miscellaneous notebooks that Emerson kept between 1824 and 1838, and to which he added occasionally as late as the 1860's. With some attempt at a systematic listing, but more often at random, he set down an enormous variety of entries from Burke, Montaigne, Madame de Stael, Bacon, Plutarch, Jeremy Taylor, and a host of other writers both famous and obscure, with frequent comments of his own.

One book contains Emerson's lengthy translations of Goethe, while another is devoted to his brother Charles, who died in 1836, and includes,...

The pages of these five journals covering the years 1843 to 1847 are filled with Emerson's struggle to formulate the true attitude of the scholar to the vexing question of public involvement. Pulled between his belief that a disinterested independence was a requisite for the writer and the public demands heaped upon him as a leading intellectual figure, he notes to himself that he "pounds...tediously" on the "exemption of the writer from all secular works."

Although Emerson concluded his editorship of The Dial in 1844, he was continually beset by calls for public service, most...

The Civil War is a pervasive presence in the journals in this volume. "The war searches character," Emerson wrote. Both his reading and his writing reflected his concern for the endurance of the nation, whose strength lay in the moral strength of the people. He read military biographies and memoirs, while turning again to Persian, Chinese, and Indian literature. The deaths of Clough, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson prompted him to reread their letters and journals, remembering and reappraising.

These were stirring, poignant years for Emerson. The times were hard,...