Sir Walter Raleigh is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that has been reconstructed from notes he wrote for an 1843 lecture and drafts of an article he was preparing for The Dial.
It was first published in 1950, in a collection of Thoreau's writings edited by Henry Aiken Metcalf. Another version, with significant differences, can be found in Henry D. Thoreau: Early Essays and Miscellanies, edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander C. Kern.
Metcalf writes in his introduction that he knew of three drafts of this essay, and he drew on all three of them to construct the version he prepared. He hinted that there may have been an additional fourth draft that had yet to surface.
The notes to the Moldenhauer, Moser & Kern version say that Metcalf "misread the holograph at several points, omitted occasional words and phrases, ignored some pencil cancellations, and amplified Thoreau's text with passages from the working manuscripts and from the Raleigh Works. None of these changes carry authority."
Themes
The essay praises Sir Walter Raleigh as a flawed but heroic figure, who failed to use his heroic character to heroic ends. Thoreau concludes by begging America to produce such a hero:
We have considered a fair specimen of an Englishman in the sixteenth century; but it behooves us to be fairer specimens of American men in the nineteenth. The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave–but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no experience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world. In winter is its campaign, and it never goes into quarters. "Sit not down," said Sir Thomas Browne, "in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. Offer not only peace-offerings, but holocausts, unto God".
Sixteen years later, in 1859, Thoreau delivered his lecture A Plea for Captain John Brown (published as an essay in 1860). The essayist's judgment of the character of John Brown resumed and expanded upon the themes launched here.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Sir Walter Ralegh, also spelled Raleigh, was an English statesman, soldier, writer, explorer, and a favourite courtier of the English Queen Elizabeth I. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England during the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I.
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience", an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.
"A Plea for Captain John Brown" is an essay by Henry David Thoreau. It is based on a speech Thoreau first delivered to an audience at Concord, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1859, two weeks after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and repeated several times before Brown's execution on December 2, 1859. It was later published as a part of Echoes of Harper's Ferry in 1860.
Thomas Campbell was a Scottish poet. He was a founder and the first President of the Clarence Club and a co-founder of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland; he was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what became University College London. In 1799 he wrote "The Pleasures of Hope", a traditional 18th-century didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several patriotic war songs—"Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden" and, in 1801, "The Battle of the Baltic", but was no less at home in delicate lyrics such as "At Love's Beginning".
Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh was an English scholar, poet, and author. Raleigh was also a Cambridge Apostle.
Resistance to Civil Government, also called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience or Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published as a paper in the Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been reprinted in many collections.
Founded in 1941, the Thoreau Society is the oldest and largest organization dedicated to an American author. It is based in Concord, Massachusetts, United States, at the house where Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817. With members from all 50 states and countries around the world, the Society disseminates knowledge about Thoreau by collecting books, manuscripts, and artifacts relating to Thoreau and his contemporaries, by encouraging the use of its extensive collections, and by publishing two periodicals, the Thoreau Society Bulletin and the Concord Saunterer.
Walter Harding (1917–1996) was a distinguished professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo and internationally recognized scholar of the life and work of Henry David Thoreau. Harding was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and received his B.S. from Bridgewater State College in 1939, M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1947 and a Ph. D. from Rutgers University in 1950.
The Service is an essay written in 1840 by Henry David Thoreau. He submitted it to The Dial for publication, but they declined to print it. It was not published until after Thoreau's death.
Reform and the Reformers is an essay written by Henry David Thoreau. The essay was never published in his lifetime, and has been cobbled together from existing lecture notes that Thoreau himself picked over for his other writings, such as Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
"Thomas Carlyle and His Works" is an essay written by Henry David Thoreau that praises the writings of Thomas Carlyle.
Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown was a speech given by Henry David Thoreau on December 2, 1859, the day of John Brown's execution. Thoreau gave a few brief remarks of his own, read poetry by Sir Walter Raleigh, William Collins, Friedrich Schiller, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, George Chapman, and Henry Wotton, and then quoted from his own translation of Tacitus.
"Life Without Principle" is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that offers his program for a righteous livelihood. It was published in 1863.
M: Writings ’67–’72 is a book of essays by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992), first published in 1973 by Wesleyan University Press.
Odell Shepard was an American professor, poet, and politician who was the 86th Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1941 to 1943. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938.
Walking, or sometimes referred to as "The Wild", is a lecture by Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. It was written between 1851 and 1860, but parts were extracted from his earlier journals. Thoreau read the piece a total of ten times, more than any other of his lectures. "Walking" was first published as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly after his death in 1862.
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers is an anthology of works by Henry David Thoreau, edited by his sister Sophia Thoreau and his friends William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was published in 1866, after Thoreau’s death, by Ticknor and Fields, the Boston firm that had published Walden.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
