Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

The command comes early in “Self-Reliance”, the best-known essay of Emerson’s Essays: First Series, published in 1841. Emerson has just described the moment in every education when one reaches the conviction “that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide”. Each person, he argues, holds a power “new in nature”, and “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.” After the line comes an unexpected call to acceptance: “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you”, as great men have always done.

Emerson, a former Unitarian minister who had left the pulpit in 1832, built the essay from his journals and lectures of the 1830s. A leading Transcendentalist, he held that each soul has direct access to truth, without churches or traditions in between. The essay’s first paragraph says it: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”

The “iron string” evokes a taut instrument string that sets every heart vibrating.

Self-Reliance (Essays: First Series), 1841

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