On 31 August of 1872, a sixty-nine year old Ralph Waldo Emerson muses in his journal about how best he might invest his remaining years:

I thought to-day, in these rare seaside woods, that if absolute leisure were offered me, I should run to the college or the scientific school which offered best lectures on Geology, Chemistry, Minerals, Botany, and seek to make the alphabets of those sciences clear to me. How could leisure or labour be better employed? 'Tis never late to learn them, and every secret opened goes to authorize our æsthetics. Cato learned Greek at eighty years, but these are older bibles and oracles than Greek.

(cf. RalphWaldoEmerson (5 Aug 2003), ...)

TopicLiterature - 2007-09-23

(correlates: EsseQuamVideri, AsimovOnPrecocity, MusicLibrary, ...)