In July, 1841, Emerson wrote to Carlyle: "My whole philosophy...teaches acquiescence and optimism." The journals in this volume, beginning in the summer of 1841, record the spiritual history of two years that can be viewed as the most critical test in Emerson's life of his ability to maintain the two aspects of that philosophy. Early in 1842 his son Waldo died, and the man who only months before had described himself as "professor of the joyous Science" found himself once again confronting the full implications of grief. Seeking to comprehend the loss, he used his journals to articulate and rediscover the vital faith upon which his philosophy rested. In passages that went eventually into "Experience," and in the earliest drafts of the poem "Threnody," which appear for the first time in these pages, he discovered that even this harsh event had its "compensations.
