@William,
Just beginning to look, and found this:
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/rw-emerson/essays_rwe.pdf
1.04 Mb. PDF that belongs on your hard drive! It doesn't include "Dissipation", but has "Self Reliance" and "Compensation", which are intrinsic to an understanding of what "waste" is.
It's worth visiting this site:
Lessons in Productivity from Ralph Waldo Emerson | Zen Habits Just to snag the photo of Emerson. It's the very first I've ever seen. The subject of that page goes a long way toward dealing with the subject here.
I thought "Dissipation" was an essay within "The Conduct of Life":
The Conduct Of Life / Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
This guy has done a wonderful job.Check in the upper right corner for download formats.
I used to have a single volume of his collected works, but it was given to "some girl" about 30 years ago. This should serve as well:
Online Library of Liberty - The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. (Fireside Edition). I used the search function on that page for "Dissipation", and found no essay. Among the results though, I found exactly the quote I was looking for:
Found in: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 6 (The Conduct of Life) >
II.: POWER. >
paragraph 110
"Enlarge not thy destiny," said the oracle, "endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge." The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is
dissipation; and it makes no difference whether our
dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Every thing is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, - all are distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the stop from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken 'T is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist, lacking this, lacks all; he sees the masculine Angelo or Cellini with despair. He too is up to Nature and the First Cause in his thought. But the spasm to collect and swing his whole being into one act, he has not. The poet Campbell said that "a man accustomed to work, was equal to any achievement he resolved on, and that for himself, necessity, not inspiration was the prompter of his muse."
There you have it! Who in the history of our kind has a better definition of "Waste", along with the right minded response to it!