EMERSON, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882). "Thoughts on the Religion of the Middle Ages." Pp. 404-408 in: The Christian Disciple. New Series, No. 24. [Boston:] November and December, 1822.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's first published work, written as a teenager. Rare. There are no copies in the auction records of RBH. Until 1939 and the publication of Ralph Rusk's Emerson biography, the existence of this essay was not generally known. It antedates by a full seven years The Cambridge Offering, which had hitherto been supposed to contain Emerson's earliest printed work. The concluding lines are appropriate ones to launch the career of America's most influential essayist and lecturer and the leader of the transcendentalist movement: "If the little day which we enjoy of useful institutions, of knowledge, improvement and evangelical zeal, is speedily to be clouded over, and vice and corruption are to resume their sovereign reign in the ways of this world,—still, it will not make the world, to which we are traveling, less bright, nor disturb, for one moment, its everlasting peace." He signed the essay "H.O.N." using the last three letters as his names as initials, a modest reversal of "R.W.E." Myerson E1.

Octavo (213 x 135mm). (Tiny hole in first page.) Modern plain wrappers; cloth folding box.