Study for The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

This image was on the title page of the essay “Circles” by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1944 Illustrated Modern Library edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 Essays: First Series. Emerson argued that life is process and flux, rather than stasis or perfection. “The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.” He used the symbol of the circle as both a metaphor for life and as an organizing principle for his perspective, referring to the eye as the “first circle.”

Nature centers into balls,

And her proud ephemerals,

Fast to surface and outside,

Scan the profile of a sphere;

Knew they what that signified,

A new genesis were here.