The Harvard Classics

This is a 100% accurate reproduction of Volume 5 of the landmark Harvard Classics series. This volume contains "Essays" and "English Traits" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Harvard Classics went out of print more than fifty years ago. Here is your chance to own a brand new copy!

The fifty-volume Harvard Classics series was first published in 1909 and 1910. It was compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles Eliot, who had claimed that it was possible to fit on a five-foot shelf enough books to contain all the knowledge necessary for a well-rounded liberal arts education. As Eliot said, "a five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of years a good for substitute a liberal education in youth to any one who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but ten minutes a day for reading."

Eliot further explained that "the principal literatures represented in the collection are those of Greece, Rome, France, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, Germany, and the United States; but important contributions have been drawn also from Chinese, Hindu, Hebrew, Arabian, Scandinavian, and Irish sources." It had "nothing less than the purpose to present so ample and characteristic a record of the stream of the world's thought that the observant reader's mind shall be enriched, refined, and fertilized by it." The series "provides the literary materials from which a careful reader might gain a fair view of the progress of man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century" and provides "the means of obtaining such a knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seems essential to the twentieth century idea of a cultivated man."

This Rogershaven Facsimile Edition is a faithful reproduction made from photographic scans of the pages of an authentic original edition. We have lovingly and carefully restored the text to ensure that this replica looks almost as good as a brand-new copy from 1909.