Emerson’s essay on friendship is his way of delineating the paths of coherence. These paths fall into two distinct kinds. The first is the consistent enunciation of a view which is the master-tone that Emerson uses from essay to essay while the second is the internal linkage of the views in the essay. Some scholars have argued that Emerson.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine.
Nearly midway through “Friendship,” Emerson inserts a short, hypothetical letter. By inserting this letter, Emerson gives readers a grounded example in an otherwise abstract essay. The letter.
In his essay “Friendship,” Ralph Waldo Emerson portrays friendship as a natural, albeit paradoxical, human need. For Emerson, humans may possess “selfishness that chills like east winds.
