Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate begins with a tribute to Ralph Rusk's monumental biography The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, acknowledging its supremacy as a factual telling of Emerson's life that cannot be surpassed. Whicher's book aims to be a complement to the painstakingly researched outer life of Emerson by focusing on the great sage's inner life-not just his intellectual biography but the very nature of his thinking. Whicher stresses the life of "spectator-ship" that the young Emerson, perpetually ill as he turned out to be, was condemned to. His writings, especially his private thoughts recorded in his journals, document the ebb and flow of his spirit, alternatively listless and resolute.

Famous first as a lecturer, Emerson molded his books on the rostrum. Yet, relatively few of his hundreds of lectures have ever been published. Now, in a projected series of three volumes of which this is the first, the complete surviving lectures of Emerson's earlier 'ears are made available. In a readable and critical text, these volumes will establish an important step in Emerson's creative process - that which lies between the notes jotted down in the journals and the finished text of the essays as prepared for print.

The lectures, more sustained and organized than the journals and fresher and more direct than the essays, represent the vital missing middle panel in the total picture of Emerson's literary achievement. It is in the early lectures, fruits of those vigorous and formative years, that we find the first ordering of his journal thoughts. To see his mind at its most sustained activity in these crucial few years when he was first exploring his own proper world of thought and growing with a sense of "power and hope," we need above all to have the complete, original texts of the lectures.

For the years covered by this volume, all passages later published elsewhere by Emerson and others are included together with much new material. The lectures are the immediate source of much in his essays, whose composition cannot be understood without them. As important in their own right as either journals or essays, the lectures also have a coordinate interest and should be studied with the other two forms of his writing.

This volume contains among others the lectures on Science, Biography, and English Literature. The editors have supplied extensive textual and informational notes, invaluable for an intelligent reading of material originally intended for oral communication.

The notable link between Emerson's journals and his essays is formed by the lectures that reflected his developing views on issues of his time. This second volume of a welcome edition of the early lectures follows the earlier experimental series of lectures and presents the works of Emerson the now professional lecturer who revealed to his audience central ideas and themes which later crystallized into "Essays, First Series,"

"The Philosophy of History," a series of 12 lectures, explores the nature of man in his society, past and present, and singles out the individual as the center of society and history. A second series of 10 lectures on "Human Culture" begins with the duty and the right of the individual to cultivate his powers and proceeds to consider various means by which this cultivation can be accomplished. The occasional "Address on Education," which Emerson delivered between these two series, may be seen as a link between them.

Of the twenty-three lectures in this volume, only three have been previously published. The lectures have been reproduced from Emerson's manuscripts, approximating as nearly as possible the original version read by the author to his audience.