In "History," Emerson expounds on a philosophy of history and nature that holds all things—human, animal, plant, earth, universe—to be part of one essential unity of being. It would be impossible for Emerson to convey his theories without a certain amount of grandiose language, given their broad sweep and the extreme implications that they have for our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. Sure enough, Emerson turns on numerous occasions to hyperbole in order to properly capture his vision—as in the following passage:
Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,—in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or genius,—anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather it is true that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.
In this passage, Emerson uses a series of hyperbolic assertions, emphasized by Emerson's use of superlatives—"stateliest," "grandest"—to argue that even those writers that are traditionally considered to be the great geniuses of their craft cannot "lose our ear, " or shake us off from understanding and appreciating their work, because the human mind has an infinite capacity to relate to, and feel welcome within, these poems and stories. Even when Shakespeare himself creates a masterful verse fit for a king, the reader (whoever they are) will find themselves within it.
