SOURCE: “Toward a Grammar of Moral Life,” in Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatic and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 181-201.

In the following excerpt, Robinson provides an assessment of Emerson's later career, noting that the author's personal struggles with authorship should prompt caution in too closely analyzing these texts as true examples of Emerson's ideas and writing.

The Universal Cipher

“I am of the oldest religion” 

(W, 12:16).

The assessment of Emerson's later career is complicated by the gradual decline in creative order that he was able to bring to his work after Society and Solitude. The pattern of revision and rearrangement of journal and lecture material into book form that had begun in the 1830s served him well in many respects, but the final process of selection, organization, and revision was always a burden to him, perhaps because it seemed further...