Since I'm getting back into blogging (maybe) I thought I'd update on my attempt to read through the Harvard Classics.
The fifth volume consists of the Essays and English Traits Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the sixth volume is the Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
Good grief, Mr. Emerson's essays are boring. They seem to essentially cover the basic doctrines of his pseudo-religion, which consists of pantheism and reincarnation. I can't give the complete details, but nothing in the first third motivated me to look into it in any more depth. Eventually I decided that if I've finished a quarter of the work and don't want to read the rest I can skip ahead. English Traits on the other hand is quite interesting, it presents a view of England of the early 19th century which is worth reading.
Burns' Poems aren't too bad, but they suffer from being in the Scots dialect, and having a lot of them in the work, far too many to read in one go, so I also only read around a third of it. I may return to some of his poetry in future, but for now I'm moving on.
