A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.