Creating a bond between stars and the landscape, he furthers the theme of a chain linking everything in the universe. A child, Emerson says, accepts nature as it is rather than manipulating it into something it is not, as an adult would do. Emerson states that when he himself stands in the woods, he feels the Universal Being flowing through him. This notion of the Universal Being, which he identifies with God, is what many readers identify as transcendentalism. Chapter 2: The essay's theme of progress based on evolution, for the wind, the sun, the rain, the plants, and the animals, all work together to better mankind. Emerson discusses briefly how nature supports our earthly existence.
Chapter 3: This discussion makes clear the notion that beauty is a nobler want of humanity than commodity, which everyone must have to survive. Emerson uses the image of a circle as being the most perfect — and, therefore, the most beautiful — geometrical form. Emerson now outlines three main points concerning our use of nature's beauty: its medicinal qualities, its spiritual elements, and its intellectual properties. Recalling the paradoxical "I am nothing. I see all" phrase used earlier in the essay, Emerson points out that a person who passively loses himself in the landscape will be rewarded by nature's regenerative powers, whereas a person who consciously seeks such healing will be tricked by nature's illusions.
Taste, he says, is the love of beauty; Art is the creation of it. Chapter 4: In this fourth section, Emerson discusses the relationship between nature and language. Nature, as the interpreter between people, supplies the language that people use to communicate with. A river, for example, expresses the passage of time, and the seasons of the year correspond to the stages of human growth.Chapter 5: Everything in nature offers lessons that we can learn. Understanding requires our perceiving how natural objects differ from — and resemble — each other.
QUOTES
The narrator hates the eye and decides to kill the old man to be free of it. To that end, the narrator goes to the old man's room every night at 12am, for seven days. Each night the narrator opens the man's door and puts in a lantern. On the eighth night, the old man hears the narrator at the door and wakes up. The narrator hangs out there in the dark for a long time, then, with a scream, plunges into the totally dark room, and kills the old man.
Then three policemen come.The narrator says he screamed while sleeping, and claims that the old man is out of town. While they are all shooting the breeze, the narrator starts hearing a terrible ticking noise, which gets louder and louder until the narrator freaks out, confesses, and points the police to the old man's body, stating that the sound is coming from the old man's heart.QUOTES"It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. (2)""And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? (6)"
He loves animals and has lots of them.Taking care of his pets and hanging out with them is his favorite thing to do. Before long, he gets married. His wife loves animals too, and fills the house with a variety of them.
One of these is a humongous, all black, super-smart cat named Pluto. When the man starts drinking, his personality takes a turn for the worse. Thinking Pluto didn't want to hang out with him, he grabs the cat and cuts his eye out with a pen-knife. One morning, not long after the eye-gouging, the narrator is overcome with a perverse impulse. He hangs Pluto from a tree in his garden, murdering him. the night of the murder, the man's house catches fire and burns down.
When the narrator returns the next day, there is a crowd in his bedroom, looking at his bedroom wall. On the wall is the slightly raised image of a "gigantic cat" with a rope around its neck. Another black cat appears on the scene. This cat looks just like Pluto, except for the little white spot on his chest.
When it is discovered that this cat is also missing an eye, the man begins to despise it, while the woman loves it all the more.Oddly, the white spot now forms an image of "the GALLOWS!" (21). (The gallows is a wooden device used to hang people.) The man is too afraid of the cat to abuse it. One day he and his wife go down to the cellar of the crummy old house they live in now that they are poor. The cat follows them.
In a fit of extreme irritation, the man tries to kill the cat with an axe. The woman stops him, and the man "burie[s] the axe in her brain," killing her. After much deliberation, the man decides to hide the body in a space behind the cellar wall. the police return and search the house again, especially the cellar. Right when they are about to leave, abandoning their search of the cellar, the narrator decides to start bragging about how well built the house is. He takes his cane and hits it against the spot in the wall where he's hidden his wife's body.
The police are on it. They take down the wall only to find the dead body, with the cat on top of its head.QUOTES"I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. (6)""My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition.
I not only neglected, but ill-used them. (6)""One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree [...]. (9)"
Furthermore, she must stand on the scaffold for three hours, exposed to public humiliation. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. Her long-lost husband, who has been presumed lost at sea, angrily exclaims that the child's father should also be punished and vows to find the man. When she returns to her prison cell, the jailer brings in Roger Chillingworth, a physician, to calm Hester and her child with his roots and herbs. He demands to know the name of the child's father.
When Hester refuses, he insists that she never reveal that he is her husband. If she ever does so, he warns her, he will destroy the child's father. Hester settles in a cottage at the edge of town and earns a meager living with her needlework. She is troubled by her daughter's unusual character.
As an infant, Pearl is fascinated by the scarlet A. As she grows older, Pearl becomes capricious and unruly. The church members suggest Pearl be taken away from Hester. Hester, hearing the rumors that she may lose Pearl, goes to speak to Governor Bellingham. When Wilson questions Pearl about her catechism, she refuses to answer, even though she knows the correct response, thus jeopardizing her guardianship.
Hester appeals to Reverend Dimmesdale in desperation, and the minister persuades the governor to let Pearl remain in Hester's care. Because Reverend Dimmesdale's health has begun to fail, Chillingworth begins to suspect that the minister's illness is the result of some unconfessed guilt. One evening, pulling the sleeping Dimmesdale's vestment aside, Chillingworth sees something startling on the sleeping minister's pale chest: a scarlet A. Dimmesdale goes to the square where Hester was punished years earlier. Climbing the scaffold, he sees Hester and Pearl and calls to them to join him. He admits his guilt to them but cannot find the courage to do so publicly.
Dimmesdale goes to the square where Hester was punished years earlier. Climbing the scaffold, he sees Hester and Pearl and calls to them to join him. He admits his guilt to them but cannot find the courage to do so publicly. Hester decides to obtain a release from her vow of silence to her husband.
In her discussion of this with Chillingworth, she tells him his obsession with revenge must be stopped in order to save his own soul. Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest, where she removes the scarlet letter from her dress and identifies her husband and his desire for revenge. She convinces Dimmesdale to leave Boston in secret on a ship to Europe where they can start life anew. Pearl, however, refuses to acknowledge either of them until Hester replaces her symbol of shame on her dress. Dimmesdale loses heart in their plan: He has become a changed man and knows he is dying.
On Election Day, Dimmesdale gives what is declared to be one of his most inspired sermons. Leaving the church gathering, he immesdale stumbles and almost falls. Seeing Hester and Pearl in the crowd watching the parade, he climbs upon the scaffold and confesses his sin, dying in Hester's arms. Later, witnesses swear that they saw a stigmata in the form of a scarlet A upon his chest. Chillingworth, losing his revenge, dies shortly thereafter and leaves Pearl a great deal of money, enabling her to go to Europe with her mother and make a wealthy marriage.
Hester returns to Boston, resumes wearing the scarlet letter, and becomes a person to whom other women turn for solace. When she dies, she is buried near the grave of Dimmesdale, and they share a simple slate tombstone with the inscription "On a field, sable, the letter A gules."QUOTES
" • Appeals to private individuals to obey their consciences and to demand justice in public• Emersonian appeal to the self-reliant individual• Wants a new dynasty of "Fathers of the Country" who will lead America to a new age of Justice• Reminiscent of Winthrop's jeremiad: America, by legalizing slavery, has become a byword• Also, Enlightenment spirit of Constitution• Anticipates Thoreau's appeal to conscience• Both Fuller and Thoreau indebted to Emerson
... There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States ...
. (F)or revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival"
He spent a night in jail for this offense in 1848, and was released the next morning. Thoreau was not an anarchist; he did not believe that there should be no government, only a more just one than currently existed. If the government would not improve itself, he argued, it was a just man's duty to refuse to support it. He hid escaping slaves in his Concord home in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a crime to help slaves fleeing from slavery. "Civil Disobedience" has become a manifesto of non-violent protest, read and used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. QUOTES"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support"
Enter Bartleby, a quiet, initially efficient, anti-social little man. Bartleby proceeds to work well as a copyist, but refuses to help out with any other office tasks - or rather, he simply "prefers" not to. Bartleby is always in the office, either working or staring out the window at a facing wall, and it turns out that he actually lives in the office. Eventually, this refusal grows more bizarre, when Bartleby announces that he will no longer work as a copyist - but prefers simply to stay in the office and not do any work. Finally, he is firmly asked to leave..
.but he just doesn't. Rather than take any more drastic measures to get Bartleby out of his office, the lawyer actually picks up and moves his practice elsewhere. Another practice moves into the building, only to discover that Bartleby is still a fixture there.
The new occupants complain to the Narrator, but he tells them the truth - Bartleby isn't his responsibility. At the end of their rope, the new occupants have the police arrest Bartleby. The story concludes with Bartleby in prison. He prefers not to do anything there, either, and even prefers not to eat. The Narrator goes to visit Bartleby, but unsurprisingly, he can't get through to the strange scrivener.
Eventually, Bartleby wastes away and starves to death, leaving only the Narrator to mourn him.As a rather odd end note, the narrator informs us that Bartleby previously worked as a clerk in an obscure branch of the Post Office known as the Dead Letter Office, sorting through undeliverable mail. We have to wonder what kind of effect these "dead" letters must have had on his psyche. But still, Bartleby is a mystery left unsolved.
