24.   Ralph Waldo Emerson.  An Oration, Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837 (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1837).  Letterpress on paper; half bound in light brown morocco and marbled paper boards; original printed light brown paper wrapper retained.  Myerson A5.1.  Inscribed in Emerson’s hand: “Rev. Dr. Francis, / With the respects of R.W.E.”  From the Emerson collection of William Taylor Newton, presented by Edith Emerson Forbes and Edward Waldo Emerson, 1918.
 

   On behalf of the Phi Beta Kappa standing committee at Harvard, Dr. Cornelius Conway Felton asked Emerson to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration on August 31, 1837.  Ironically, he was requested to make what would turn out to be one of his most influential addresses in place of the Rev. Dr. Wainwright, who had agreed to speak but had backed out not long before the event.  Emerson referred to the upcoming speech in a letter to his brother William on August 7th, and on August 17th wrote Margaret Fuller, asking her to return from Cambridge to Concord with him and Lidian after its delivery.  The Emersons planned a meeting of “Mr. Hedge’s Club” in their Concord home the following day.

   Emerson read the speech, which lasted an hour and a quarter, after noon on the appointed day, in the meetinghouse at Harvard.  His audience included more than two hundred Phi Beta Kappa members and some of his close friends and associates, Bronson Alcott and Frederic Henry Hedge among them.  The orator called for a new American thought based on intellectual self-reliance rather than the thought of the past, for a new breed of American thinker freed from slavish devotion to inherited culture to realize his divinely inspired human capabilities.  Emerson closed the address powerfully: “A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” 

   The importance to Emerson of the unifying universal soul underlying the soul of each individual was jovially alluded to in a toast made at the dinner following the speech:  “ … I  suppose all know where the orator comes from; and I suppose all know what he has said; I give you The Spirit of Concord; it makes us all of One Mind.”

   The Phi Beta Kappa oration was first published in September, 1837, in an edition of five hundred copies, all of which were sold within a month’s time.  (The copy shown here was inscribed by Emerson for Convers Francis, his fellow member of the Transcendental Club.)  It was well-received, although—as with Nature—generally favorable reviewers offered criticism as well as praise.  In the Boston Quarterly Review, for example, William Henry Channing judged Emerson “true, reverent, free, and loving” but regretted “that Mr. Emerson’s style is so little a transparent one.”  It was later described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

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