The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature addresses and lectures [Vol. 1]

NOTES

NOTES

NATURE

IN his boyish poem "Good-bye," Mr. Emerson told how, among the cedar and barberry thickets of Roxbury, he found that

Man in the bush with God may meet.

In his boyhood, though city born, the doors of his grandfather's house by Concord River were always open to him. He knew well those meadows, the hills of Waltham and Newton, and the Chelmsford woods in his schoolboy and school-teaching days. The attractions of beautiful and living Nature grew with the increasing repulsion which he felt during his ministry from formalism and Hebraism.

As the little book Nature was Mr. Emerson's first venture in letters, yet is still held as one of his most notable works, it seems justifiable to recall, even at some length, its history and the reception it met with in America and in England.

In his journals it does not appear how long he had been meditating this book. The first mention of it occurs in his diary on shipboard, returning from his earliest visit to Europe in 1833. Just three years later the book appeared. It will be remembered that these had been sad and unsettled days for him. His home had been broken up by the death of his young wife, and his recoil from certain forms and rites in worship had driven him to part from his church. He had made the journey to Italy, France, and England to recruit his strength and prepare for a changed life. He writes, September 6, "I like my book about nature, and wish I knew

when and where I ought to live. God will show me. I am glad to be on my way home, yet not so glad as others, and my way to the bottom I could find, perchance, with less regret, for I think it would not hurt me, that is, the ducking or drowning."

In November, 1834, Mr. Emerson came to make his home in Concord and lived for a time with his venerable step-grandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley. There, in the little room in the southern gable, since known as the Prophet's Chamber, where later Hawthorne wrote the Mosses from an Old Manse, he worked on his book. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir1 1.1 says that probably the first five chapters had been for some time in hand, that the seventh and eighth chapters seem to have been written after his removal to Concord, and the sixth (Idealism) last of all, as the connection of the two. In writing to his brother William, he says:—

CONCORD, JUNE 28, 1836.

My little book is nearly done. Its title is Nature … My design is to follow it with another easy, Spirit, and the two shall make a decent volume.

AUGUST 8.

The book of Nature still lies on the table; there is, as always, one crack in it, not easy to be soldered or welded; but if this week I should be left alone, I may finish it.

It was published in September, anonymously; only five hundred copies were printed, and of these many remained long unsold, so that a second edition was not called for until 1849.

In this essay, as in the Sermon on the Lord's Supper, it is interesting to note a more ordered presentation of the ideas—such as was usual in sermons—than Mr. Emerson in the later writings cared to attempt.

Mr. Cabot in his Memoir says that "by the Christian Examiner, the chief organ of the Unitarians, Nature was treated rather indulgently as a poetical rhapsody containing much beautiful writing and not devoid of sound philosophy, but, on the whole, producing the impression of a disordered dream." He adds, "Transcendentalism was attacked (though more often sneered at) as a threat, however impotent, of radical revolution, but not often, I think, in the person of Emerson. In him, it would be felt, revolution was like the revolutions of Nature, who does not cast off her old leaves until she has got ready the new."

The Examiner's view of the work as a poetical rhapsody suggests Dr. Holmes's account of it. "Nature is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters, which might almost as well have been called cantos. Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality, and repeated the words which 'a certain poet sang to him.'" It is, however, very possible that the passage referred to, in the last chapter of Nature, was a poetical rendering of the thoughts of his new-found friend, Mr. Alcott.

Immediately on the appearance of Nature, Emerson wrote to Carlyle:—

"I send you a little book I have just now published; an entering wedge, I hope, to something more worthy and significant. This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear."

Carlyle thus hailed its appearance:—

"Your little azure-coloured Nature gave me true satisfaction.

I read it and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things, from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather a Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this where the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,—with an ear for the Ewigen Melodien which pipe in the winds round us and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut machinery, but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. You will see what the years will bring you."

In a letter written in April, 1839, he tells that "people are beginning to quote you here: tant pis pour eux. I have found you in two Cambridge books; a certain Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes, M. P., a beautiful little Tory dilettante poet and politician, whom I love much, applied to me for Nature, that be might write upon it."

And soon after he received this greeting in a letter from Sterling:1 3.1—

SEPTEMBER 30, 1839.

I have read very, very little modern English writing that has struck and pleased me so much; among recent productions,

almost only those of our friend Carlyle, whose shaggy-browed and deep-eyed thoughts have often a likeness to yours which is very attractive and impressive, neither evidently being the double of the other. … I trust that you will long continue to diffuse, by your example as well as doctrine, the knowledge that the Sun and Earth and Plato and Shakspeare are what they are by working each in his vocation; and that we can be anything better than mountebanks living, and scarecrows dead, only by doing so likewise. For my better assurance of this truth, as well as for much and cordial kindness, I shall always remain your debtor.

In this essay Emerson announced his doctrine of the Oversoul, the Universal Mind, which runs through all his work. Its keynote is given in the words "The noblest ministry of Nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual and strives to lead back the individual to it. … The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure."

Page I, note 1. Mr. Emerson loved to place a motto at the head of his chapter. Dr. Holmes suggested that the hereditary use of a text before a discourse survived thus in him. Before Nature in the first edition he placed the words of Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom,

the last thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know."

Of the verse containing the doctrine of Evolution which he wrote for the second edition, and which still stands before the Essay, something has been said in the biographical sketch.

The present motto was placed at the beginning of Nature in its second edition in 1849 instead of the sentence of Plotinus. But in the new one, Mr. William T. Harris1 4.1 finds this thought of Plotinus, whom he thus quotes: "We might say that all beings, not only rational ones, but even irrational ones, the plants, and even the soil that bears them, aspire to attain conscious knowledge," and credits to Plotinus "the suggestion of those fine poetic dreams of Schelling and Oken,—that reason dreams in the plant, and feels in the animal, and thinks in man." As has been said in the biographical sketch, Plato and his followers had prepared Mr. Emerson's mind to welcome the dawning evolution theories of Lamarck and others, which probably came to him through Lyell's work on Geology, and in conversation with scholars of science. Darwin's Origin of Species was not published until 1859.

During his short stay in Paris in 1833, Mr. Emerson visited the Jardin des Plantes, and in a lecture called The Uses of Natural History, read before the Boston Natural History Society in November of that year, told of what he saw. In it he said: "The eye is satisfied with seeing, and strange thoughts arise. The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you look along this bewildering series of animated forces. … While I stand there I am impressed with a singular conviction that not a form so grotesque, so savage, or so beautiful, but is an expression of something in man the observer.

We feel that there is an occult relation between the very worm, the crawling scorpions, and man. I am moved by strange sympathies. I say I will listen to this invitation. I will be a naturalist."

Page 4, note 1. Compare the line in "The Sphinx," Poems:—

Thou art the unanswered question.

Page 4, note 2. It should be remembered to how large a part of the educated world the first chapter of Genesis stood in 1836 as the sole and final authority on Creation. Geology and paleontology were in their infancy, comparative anatomy little advanced, and biology hardly born. The new philosophic ideas of progressive development and amelioration, fortified by the new science, were welcomed by Mr. Emerson as harmonizing with the laws of spirit.

Page 7, note 1. In the heavenly bodies Emerson early found his teachers: symbols of light and law, in their beauty, their vast excursion and sure return, they guide his thought and illuminate his works. (See especially "The Poet" [Poems, Appendix], "Woodnotes," II., "Character," and "Uriel.") His early journals show that the system of Copernicus widened his views as a minister. In 1833, in Florence, he did homage at the tomb of Galileo. He read the lives of Kepler and Newton, and Herschel's Astronomy, and often expressed the hope that old age might bring him leisure to study the stars. It was his counsel "Hitch your wagon to a star." ("Civilization," Society and Solitude.)

Page 9, note 1. Compare the sentence in a note-book of Mr. Emerson's from Plutarch's essay in the Morals, "Why the Pythian Priestess ceases her Oracles in Verse:"—

"The Sun is the cause that all men are ignorant of Apollo,

by sense withdrawing the rational intellect from that which is to that which appears."

Page 9, note 2. This sentence and what follows are distinctly autobiographical, représenting the life that Mr. Emerson led in Concord, going almost daily alone to the woods to attune himself to receive through their symbolic life hints of the spiritual life.

Page 9, note 3.

Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy, And merry is only a mask of sad, But sober on a fund of joy, The woods at heart are glad. "Waldeinsamkeit," Poems.

Page 10, note 1. Here first appears in his published writings Emerson's doctrine of the Universal Mind or the Over-soul, which thereafter ran through all his works.

The little poem "Pan" (see Poems, Appendix) is called to mind by this passage.

Page 11, note 1.

Methought the sky looked scornful down On all was base in man, And airy tongues did taunt the town, 'Achieve our peace who can!' "Walden," Poems, Appendix.

Page 13, note 1. In the journal for 1855 is written this little prose poem:—

THE YEAR.

There is no flower so sweet as the four-petalled flower which science much neglects; one grey petal it has, one green, one red, and one white.

Page 13, note 2. George Herbert's poem "Man," five stanzas of which are given in chapter viii. of this essay.

Page 14, note 1. Mr. Emerson's friend, Henry Thoreau, wrote: "I do not go there [to the woods] to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy."

Page 16, note 1. See first page of "Spiritual Laws," Essays, First Series.

Page 17, note 1. The poem "Sunrise," written probably at the same time, while Mr. Emerson lived at the Old Manse, describes the morning seen from the hill opposite. (Poems, Appendix.)

Page 18, note 1.

Ah! well I mind the calendar, Faithful through a thousand years, Of the painted race of flowers, etc. "May-Day," Poems.

Page 20, note 1. Compare quatrain "Northman," in Poems.

Page 23, note 1.

Thee, gliding through the sea of form, etc. "Ode to Beauty," Poems.

Page 24, note 1. "Each and All" and "Xenophanes," Poems.

Page 24, note 2. The theme of "The Rhodora," Poems.

Page 24, note 3. This Trinity of the different manifestations of Spirit through the universe, symbolized in matter by the Protean aspects, of light, heat, motion, was a basal thought with Emerson. It is expressed again in the chapter "Spirit" in this essay, in "The Transcendentalist" in this volume,

and in the end of "Art," Society and Solitude, and as the "three children of the Universe" in the first pages of "The Poet," Essays, Second Series. Sidney Lanier, in his last lecture before his death, at the Johns Hopkins University,1 4.2 spoke of this Trinity of Emerson's.

In Thomas Taylor's Substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, Plato's and Plotinus's Trinity, the Good, Intellect and the Soul, is discussed, and the author adds, "This theory, the progeny of the most consummate science, is in perfect conformity with the theology of the Chaldaeans. And hence is it said in one of their oracles, 'In every world a triad shines forth, of which a monad is the ruling principle.'"

Page 27, note 1. Πάντα ῥεῖ, the doctrine of the flowing of all things, taught by Heracleitus of Ephesus (536-470 B. C.), and often quoted by Plato.

Far seen, the river glides below, Tossing one sparkle to the eyes. I catch thy meaning, wizard wave; The river of my life replies. "Walden," Poems, Appendix.

The ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 30, note 1.

To clothe the fiery thought In simple words succeeds, For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds. Quatrain "Poet," Poems.

Page 32, note 1.

The mountain utters the same sense Unchanged in its intelligence, For ages sheds its walnut leaves, One joy it joys, one grief it grieves. "Nature," Fragments, Poems, Appendix.

See also the last passage in the poem "Monadnoc."

Page 34, note 1. "Can such things be?" etc. Shakespeare, Macbeth, iii. 4.

Page 39, note 1. Ἀεὶ γὰρ εὖ πίπτουσιν οι Διὸσ κύβοι. The dice of Zeus ever fall aright. From a lost play of Sophocles, Fragment 763; used also in "Compensation," Essays, First Series; also "Worship," Conduct of Life.

Page 41, note 1. This doctrine expanded in "Sovereignty of Ethics," Lectures and Biographical Sketches; ten commandments; compare end of "Prudence," Essays, First Series.

Page 42, note 1. The oracle of Nature is overheard by the listener in the wood; "Fragments on the Poet," IV., Poems, Appendix.

Page 42, note 2.

Teach me your mood, O patient stars! Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no stain, no scars, No trace of age, no fear to die. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 43, note 1. See "Xenophanes," Poems.

Xenophanes of Elea, the rhapsodist and philosopher (570-480 B. C.), taught the unity of God and Nature. His doctrine,

Ἓν καὶ πᾶν, the One and the All, constantly recurs in Emerson's writings. Xenophanes said, "There is one God, the greatest among gods and men, comparable to mortals neither in form nor thought." Mr. Arthur K. Rogers, in his Student's History of Philosophy, says that what Xenophanes taught was "that what we name God is the one immutable and comprehensive material universe which holds within it and determines all those minor phenomena to which an enlightened philosophy will reduce the many deities of the popular faith. The conception is not unlike that of Spinoza in later times."

Page 43, note 2. This passage occurs in a lecture given in December, 1832, before the Boston Society of Natural History.

Page 45, note 1. Although the "degradation" was a Platonic doctrine, I think it so contrary to Mr. Emerson's steady belief in amelioration that the expression here implies merely that the animals are lower steps in an ascending series.

Page 46, note 1. This image, slightly varied, is found in "Pan," Poems, Appendix.

Page 46, note 2. Mr. Emerson's brilliant brothers, Edward Bliss Emerson and Charles Chauncy Emerson, had died within the two years before the publication of Nature. Of Edward's powers and nobility, his brother tells in his poem, "The Dirge." Of Charles he wrote: "Beautiful without any parallel in my experience of young men was his life. … I have felt in him the inestimable advantage, when God allows it, of finding a brother and a friend in one."

Page 47, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in one of his Journals, "I remember when a child, in the pew on Sundays, amusing myself with saying over common words, as 'black,' 'white,' 'board,' etc., twenty or thirty times, until the

words lost all meaning and fixedness, and I began to doubt which was the right name for the thing, when I saw that neither had any natural relation, but were all arbitrary. It was a child's first lesson in Idealism."

Page 52, note 1. The flowing universe is told of in many of the poems, as in "Woodnotes," II., "The rushing metamorphosis," etc., and later "Onward and on, the eternal Pan," etc.

Page 53, note 1. Shakspeare, Sonnet lxx.

Page 53, note 2. Shakspeare, Sonnet cxxiv.

Page 53, note 3. In a letter written in December, 1838, to Rev. James Freeman Clarke, then editing in Ohio The Western Messenger, to which Mr. Emerson contributed "The Humble-Bee," he says:—

"I remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of yours that the verses, 'Take, O take those lips away,' were not Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that stanza. I know it is in Rollo, but it is in Measure for Measure also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not, and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we who sung this or that? It is we at last who sing."

Page 55, note 1.

The solid, solid universe Is pervious to love, etc. "Cupido," Poems.

Page 56, note 1. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), a Swiss mathematician of remarkable gifts; also a man of character and wide culture. He was called by Catherine of Russia to the Academy of St. Petersburg as professor of physics, and later of mathematics. Frederick the Great induced him to come to Berlin, where he remained many years, returning, however, to Russia. In total blindness during his last years, he did important work.

Page 57, note 1. Proverbs viii. 23, 27, 28, 30.

Page 58, note 1. Plotinus (204-269 A. D.), of Lycopolis in Egypt, a disciple of Ammonius Saccus of Alexandria, sometimes called the founder of Neo-Platonism, went to Rome and taught philosophy there. Plotinus accompanied the Emperor Gordian in his expedition into Persia, and thus came in contact with the teachings of Zoroaster. He said, "The sensuous life is a mere stage play—all misery in it is only imaginary, all grief a mere cheat of the players; the soul is not in the game; it looks on."—Student's History of Philosophy, by Arthur K. Rogers.

Page 62, note 1. "The Bohemian Hymn," Poems, Appendix.

Page 64, note 1. Milton, Comus, 13, 14.

Page 67, note 1. This passage refers to Mr. Emerson's visit to the Fardin des Plantes in Paris a few months before. See note to the motto of this essay.

Page 70, note 1. It is very possible that Mr. William T. Harris is right where he says, in speaking of Mr. Alcott's philosophy: "I have been obliged to think … that Mr. Emerson attempted to preserve in the last chapter of his book on Nature … a picture of Mr. Alcott as 'Orphic Poet' by writing out in his own words and with an effort to reproduce the style of thought, words and delivery of Mr. Alcott,

the idealistic theory which he had heard with such great interest."—Memoir of Bronson Alcott, by F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris.

Page 72, note 1. "He who desires to signify divine concerns through symbols is orphic, and, in short, accords with those who write myths concerning the Gods."—Proclus, Theology of Plato, I. iv.

Page 73, note 1. Alexander Leopold Franz Emmerich Hohenlohe (1794-1849), a priest, born at Würtemberg, of a princely family, known for the miraculous cures, attributed to his prayers, in Germany and England, and at Washington, of a Mrs. Mattingly, in 1824.

Page 73, note 2. I am indebted to Dr. Ralph Barton Perry, of Harvard University, for the following information with regard to these expressions: "The phrase (vespertina cognitio) signifies the twilight knowledge of man that is contrasted with the full-day knowledge of God (matutina cognitio). Knowledge of things in their several natures and particularity is twilight knowledge, while the knowledge of the ideas that constitute the plan of creation is day knowledge. This distinction corresponds to the technical distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge. The distinction between morning and evening knowledge refers to the direction of the partial knowledge. To glorify God, or to see him from the standpoint of darkness, is cognitio matutina; to fall away to darkness is cognitio vespertina. The angels have both in one, the vespertina being contained in the matutina. The angels have the vespertina in so far as they know the lower only through the higher—or see the higher in the lower—and so always glorify God. The use of these phrases is very curiously mingled with the problem of morning and evening as applying to the period preceding the creation of the sun and

moon.—See St. Augustine's City of God, Book XI., chapters vii and xxix, Dods's translation. Also the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, Part I., Quaestio lviii, Art. 6; Quaestio lxxiv, Art. 3."

Page 76, note 1.

Wiser far than human seer, etc. "The Humble-Bee," Poems.

Also:—

Let me go where'er I will, I hear a sky-born music still. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

In 1834 Mr. Emerson had been chosen to give the Poem at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge. Three years later he was invited to give the Address. A month before the meeting he wrote in his Journal:—

29 JULY, 1837.

If the All-wise would give me light, I should write for the Cambridge men a theory of the Scholar's office. It is not all books which it behooves him to know, least of all to be a book-worshipper, but he must be able to read in all books that which alone gives value to books—in all to read one, the one incorruptible text of Truth. That alone of their style is intelligible, acceptable to him.

In his Memoir of Emerson Mr. Cabot speaks of this address as "a much needed monition to the cultivated class of persons

in New England to think for themselves instead of taking their opinions from Europe or from books."

Mr. Lowell, speaking of this epoch of "the Newness," as the spiritual awakening of New England was sometimes called, said, "The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. … His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"1 5.1

Dr. Holmes records in his Life of Emerson that rarely has any one of the annual addresses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society been listened to with such profound attention and interest. He spoke of it as "Our intellectual Declaration of Independence."

"Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the question, 'Whether it be lawful to trust the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.' It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there. The dignity, not to say the formality of an academic assembly, was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in 'the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan.' They could understand the deep thoughts suggested by 'the meanest flower that blows,' but these domestic illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness

about them which the grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, 'Thus saith the Lord.' No listener ever forgot that address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration."

Carlyle wrote to Emerson about the oration: "My friend! you know not what you have done for me there. … Lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a man's voice, and I have a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it. I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart. … Miss Martineau tells me, 'Some say it is inspired, some say it is mad.' Exactly so; no say could be suitabler. But for you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily: May God grant you strength; for you have a fearful work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest."

Page 81, note 1." In the opening passages of an editorial paper in the Dial (April, 1843), "Europe and European Books," Mr. Emerson speaks of these as still dominant here, but prophesies thus: "This powerful star, it is thought, will soon culminate and descend, and the impending reduction of the Transatlantic excess of influence … is already a matter of easy and frequent computation. Our eyes will be turned westward and a new and stronger tone of literature will result. The Kentucky stump-oratory, the exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of western pioneers, agriculturalists, and socialists, and the letters of Jack Downing, are genuine growths which are sought with avidity in Europe, where our European-like books are of no value." He further says that the moving

centre of population and property of the English race will in time "certainly fall within the American coast, so that the writers of the English tongue shall write to the American and not to the island public, and then shall the great Yankee be born."

In editing this paper for Natural History of Intellect Mr. Cabot omitted the first three pages.

Page 82, note 1. In the "Symposium" of Plato is a version of this fable, but in his Introduction to Professor Goodwin's edition of Plutarch's Morals, Mr. Emerson says,—"What noble words we owe to him! 'God divided man into men that they might help each other.'" This idea, differently expressed, is found in the chapter "Of Brotherly Love" in the Morals, vol. iii. p. 37.

Page 84, note 1.

The horseman serves the horse, etc. "Ode inscribed to W. H. Channing," Poems.

Page 85, note 1.

Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return, etc. "Uriel," Poems.

Page 86, note 1. In this address, and throughout the Essays, and equally the Poems, are evidences of Mr. Emerson's reading in the works of the Masters of Science,—Newton, Laplace, Hunter, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Herschel, Owen, Lyell, Faraday,—and his use of their facts on another plane.

Page 86, note 2. In one of the Journals, Mr. Emerson

quotes a French author's mot: "Whether or no there be a God, it is certain that there will be."

Page 88, note 1. This recalls the definition of Art as "Nature passed through the alembic of man," in Nature, chapter iii.

Page 89, note 1. Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell, three young men at that epoch, who set an example to American scholars of independence in thought and originality in expression, spent much of their time during their college terms exploring and reading in the Library at the expense of the prescribed curriculum, thereby incurring censure at the time.

Page 91, note 1. All the influence Mr. Emerson hoped to exert on others was to show them the right of the spirit and the intellect to the same freedom as was claimed for the body. In his Journal for 1856 he writes: "I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple." The would-be disciple must go to the fountain of truth open in himself to every man, and might well get a more generous draught than he.

Compare his poem "Étienne de la Boéce."

Page 93, note 1. Mr. Emerson followed his counsel to the scholar to "read a little proudly." He soon found in a book the passages written for him and lightly passed over the others.

Page 95, note 1. In the addresses called "The Man of Letters" and "The Scholar," which are included in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, as well as in this speech, Mr. Emerson steadily holds up to the scholar the duty of active and brave manhood especially imposed upon him by his privileged lot.

Page 95, note 2. The "other me" implies a quite different view from the "Non Ego" of the metaphysician.

Page 98, note 1.

What prizes the town and tower? Only what the pine-tree yields, etc. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 103, note 1.

Who telleth one of my secrets Is master of all I am. "The Sphinx," Poems.

Page 106, note 1. In an address delivered before the Anti-slavery Society in New York, March 7, 1854, Mr. Emerson said that one comes at last to learn "that self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God." This sentence is the reconciliation of the essays on "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul."

Page 108, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in his Journal after this oration: "It was the happiest turn to my old thrum which Charles Henry Warren gave as a toast at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner: 'Mr. President,' he said, 'I suppose all know where the orator comes from; and I suppose all know what he has said. I give you—the Spirit of Concord—it makes us all of one mind.'"

Page 112, note 1. Mr. Emerson devotes a chapter to Swedenborg, the Mystic, in Representative Men.

Page 113, note 1. The writings of Pestalozzi, the earnest Swiss reformer, whose teachings have wrought so much in the improvement in education in Europe and America, had begun to be read in America. Pestalozzi's beneficent course was dogged through life by apparent failures, partly due to lack of

administrative ability in himself, largely to the condition of Switzerland during the Napoleonic wars. Mr. Emerson's friend, Mr. Alcott, in 1825, when he knew little of Pestalozzi, independently introduced a very similar system into his village school at Cheshire, and later in Boston.

Page 115, note I. This sentence might well stand as a prophecy of much of Mr. Emerson's own history.

ADDRESS TO THE SENIOR CLASS OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL

This address was given by Mr. Emerson to the Seniors in the Divinity School in Cambridge at their request. The professors in charge of the school had no official part in the choice of a speaker, and therefore were not responsible for his opinions, as, after the address, they clearly made known. Mr. Emerson's journals for the year preceding its delivery contain many expressions of disappointment in the preaching which he, then a regular and hopeful attendant, heard. In the rugged and eloquent prayer and preaching of "Father Taylor" at the Sailors' Bethel, however, he delighted,1 5.2 and spoke of him as "the Shakspeare of the sailor and the poor."

The address was given in the middle of July. On March 14th, he wrote in his Journal:—

"There is no better subject for effective writing than the clergy. I ought to sit and think, and then write a discourse

to the American clergy, showing them the ugliness and unprofitableness of theology and churches at this day, and the glory and sweetness of the moral nature out of whose pale they are almost wholly shut."

The opportunity to free his mind soon came. He was approached by some youths from the Divinity School—probably a committee to invite him to make the Annual Address.

Journal, 1st April. "The Divinity School youths wished to talk with me concerning Theism. I went rather heavy-hearted, for I always find that my views chill or shock people at the first opening. But the conversation went well, and I came away cheered. I told them that the preacher should be a poet smit with the love of the harmonies of moral nature: and yet look at the Unitarian Association and see if its aspect is poetic. They all smiled No. A minister, nowadays, is plainest prose, the prose of prose. He is a warming-pan … at sick beds and rheumatic souls, and the fire of the minstrel's eye, and the vivacity of his word is exchanged for intense grumbling enunciation of the Cambridge sort, and for Scripture phraseology."

Although he knew that what he should say must needs shock many of the elder clergy, because, tried by his standards, they were found wanting, it seemed a clear duty that had come to him to open the minds of these young apostles to the great possibilities of their calling.

The address provoked a great reaction. The authorities of the school publicly washed their hands of all complicity in the occasion. Professor Andrews Norton, a man of great worth and weight among the more liberal clergy of the day, strongly attacked the views of Emerson in the Boston Advertiser, as making light of revealed Christianity and nearly approaching atheism. Mr. Emerson's revered friend with whom

he had been associated in the Second Church, Rev. Henry Ware, then a professor in the Divinity School, felt that such a doctrine as that "the soul knows no persons" must be resisted, and soon after preached a sermon to the school on this and other points. He sent the sermon to his former colleague with a kind letter, wishing that he be not understood as attacking the new views as Emerson's, not being perfectly aware of the precise nature of his opinions, or the arguments by which they might be justified to his mind. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir says:—

"Emerson replied in a letter which has often been quoted,1 5.3 as it deserves to be, for the entire serenity of temper it displays, but also as a confession that he was incapable of reasoning. There is no one, he says, less willing or less able to be polemic. 'I could not possibly give you one of the "arguments" you cruelly hint at on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought.' He was trying to rouse his contemporaries to a livelier sense of the facts of religion, and this could never be done by argument."

In an early poem, printed after his death, in the Appendix to the Poems, "The Bohemian Hymn," which is referred to elsewhere in these notes, Emerson's thought of the inadequacy of man to express Deity is embodied. He said: "I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much. Life, personal life, is faint and cold to the energy of God. For Reason and Love and Beauty, or that which is all these,—it is life of life, the reason of reason, the love of love." Mr.

Cabot explains that "what he means by personality seems to be nothing more than limitation to an individual. … He did not deny self-consciousness to the Supreme Being." He did not want the informing Soul of the universe shut up in Jehovah.

Though much abhorrence or disavowal of the views of this address was publicly expressed, not all the hearers were troubled. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in a letter to Mr. Alexander Ireland, of Manchester, England, relates that "Dr. Channing regarded the address at Divinity Hall as an entirely justifiable and needed criticism on the perfunctory character of service creeping over the Unitarian churches at the time. He hailed the commotion of thought it stirred up as a sign that 'something did live in the embers' of that spirit which had developed Unitarianism out of the decaying Puritan churches." Mr. Moncure D. Conway tells how the young Theodore Parker went home and wrote in his Journal: "I shall give no abstract, so beautiful, so just and terribly sublime was his picture of the church in its present condition. My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the church and the duties of these times."

In the circle of Boston and Cambridge there was much disturbance for a time, and, indeed, nearly thirty years passed by before it was felt at the University that Mr. Emerson was a safe or desirable person to be called upon to take any active part in its functions.

In the controversy at the time, as Dr. Holmes wittily says: "Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus when the Greeks fought over his body." The apparent result of his address must have been somewhat disappointing, and the temporary notoriety was disagreeable to him. He had

faithfully delivered his message; let it work according to its truth. He withdrew himself to Concord to work at his other tasks.

The poem "Uriel," if carefully read, will be seen to be an account, sublimed and impersonal, but accurate in detail, of this experience when a soul, looking from a commanding central point, like the Archangel of the Sun, sees and announces a truth, new and astounding to those whose view, from their position, is more limited and eccentric, so that they cannot see all things moving and returning in their vast orbits in accordance with the beautiful law of the Universe.

On one account only had Mr. Emerson to take immediate action, involving disappointment because of the reception of his address. He had at this time great hopes that Carlyle would come to America, perhaps even to stay, and now had to urge his friend by no means to come until this "foolish clamor be overblown" about his own "infidelity," "pantheism," or "atheism;" mentioning, however, that if he (Emerson) lived, his "neighbors must look for a great many more shocks, and perhaps harder to bear."

Page 121, note I. The omnipotence and omnipresence of the perfect law, moral, intellectual, and physical, an inseparable trinity, is everywhere insisted on by Mr. Emerson. "The universe is moral." In the end of "The Poet" (Poems, Appendix), the sweetness of the Law is celebrated. See also the motto "Worship," Poems:—

More near than aught thou callest thine own, Yet, greeted in another's eyes, Disconcerts with glad surprise, etc.

Page 122, note 1. This passage, probably a very startling one to the clergymen present, has in it the doctrine to be found in "The Over-Soul," Essays, First Series.

Page 122, note 2. Compare the lines on humility from Keats's "Hyperion," quoted in "The Sovereignty of Ethics," Lectures and Biographical Sketches:—

One avenue was shaded from thine eyes Through which I wandered to eternal truth.

Page 123, note 1. Emerson's favorite doctrine of Compensation. See also "Worship" in Poems:—

This is he men miscall Fate, etc.

Page 124, note 1. Hence he did not attack others' belief, sure that the good when rightly shown, without irritating argument or ridicule, would displace the evil.

Whispered the Muse in Saadi's cot, etc. "Saadi," Poems.

Page 124, note 2.

Around the man who seeks a noble end, Not angels but divinities attend. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 125, note 1. Suggesting the lines in Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty:"—

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.

Page 125, note 2. To the same purpose as the stanza beginning:—

Brother, sweeter is the Law Than all the grace Love ever saw, etc. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 126, note 1. In Representative Men the debt of Plato to the ancient wisdom of the East is spoken of. Emerson acknowledged the same. His mind prepared for them by Plato and the Neo-Platonists, he early found the Scriptures of the Orient, and, later, delighted in their poets, especially Saadi and Hafiz; so much in the first, that in several of his poems he adopted Saadi or Seyd as a generic name for the Poet.

Page 127, note 1. "The divine nature," that is, the over-soul, the divine element shared in measure by every soul. The regeneration of the Calvinist was instantaneous; the regeneration which Emerson found was continuous, if man would only open the gates of his soul to the flood of Spirit.

Ever the words of the Gods resound, But the porches of man's ear Seldom in this low life's round Are unsealed that he may hear. "My Garden," Poems.

Page 129, note 1.

For what need I of Book or priest, etc. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 130, note 1. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir says that Mr. Emerson "was surprised to find his intention so far mistaken as to leave many of his Unitarian brethren to suppose that he was trying to belittle the character of Jesus. Far

from this, he was trying to place the reverence for Jesus upon its true ground, out of reach of the reaction that was sure to set in when the claim of exclusive revelation should lose its force." Mr. Cabot further mentions that Miss Elizabeth Peabody said in her Reminiscences of Dr. Channing that a passage to this effect was omitted by Mr. Emerson for want of time in the reading of the address, and she urged him to restore it in the printing, but that he on reflection preferred to let the paper stand as it was read. He would not explain it by what might seem an afterthought.

Miss Peabody urged him at least to put a capital F to the "friend of man," but Mr. Emerson answered, "If I did so, they would all go to sleep."

Page 131, note 1. Wordsworth, Miscellaneous Sonnets, "The world is too much with us."

Page 132, note 1. The sublimed doctrine of Self-Reliance.

Page 133, note 1.

Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond, etc, "The Celestial Love," Poems.

Page 133, note 2. To call the prophets and saints Bards was to Emerson giving them their due honor, but, perhaps, might seem to some of his clerical hearers making fiddlers of them. In the passage from the Journal, April 1, quoted in the introductory note to this address, he spoke of his wish to make a preacher a true poet.

Page 134, note 1. This is told in verse in "The Problem," Poems.

Page 135, note 1. Mr. Emerson once spoke in his Journal of "The corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street."

Page 137, note 1.

The Dervish whined to Seyd, Thou didst not tarry while I prayed, etc. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Journal, 1837. "Among provocations the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times."

Page 138, note 1. "Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things that we cannot enough despise. … And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts,—then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God."—"Education," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 142, note 1. The same thoughts in "The Sphinx," Poems.

Page 145, note 1. The text "For what is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul: or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul," stated freshly.

Page 148, note 1. "Give all to Love," fourth stanza, Poems.

Page 150, note 1. Journal, November, 1839. "The Sabbath is my best debt to the Past and binds me to some gratitude still. It brings me that frankincense out of a sacred antiquity."

Page 151, note 1. In parting from his people of the Second Church, Mr. Emerson thus indicated his hope to continue through life to be a preacher of the truth. Of the minister's office he said: "It has many duties for which I am feebly qualified. It has some that it will always be my delight to discharge according to my ability, wherever I exist. And

whilst the recollection of its claims oppresses me with a sense of my unworthiness, I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change can deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its highest functions."

Page 151, note 2.

Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn. "Uriel," Poems.

See also the second paragraph in this address, and the chapter "Circles" in Essays, First Series.

LITERARY ETHICS

Mr. Emerson, writing to his friend Carlyle, August 6, 1838, thanking him for his "friendliest seeking of friends for the poor oration" ("The American Scholar") says: "I have written and read a kind of sermon to the Senior Class of our Cambridge Theological School a fortnight ago; and an address to the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, for though I hate American pleniloquence, I cannot easily say No to young men who bid me speak also. … The first, I hear, is very offensive. I will now try to hold my tongue till next winter."

The Dartmouth address followed with but nine days' interval that to the Cambridge Divinity students. Newspapers then had only local circulation, and there was no Northern railroad; indeed it was a two days' journey by stage which Mr. Emerson made in company with a friend and neighbor, John Keyes, Esq. (a graduate of Dartmouth), and his son, to

reach Hanover. "If any rumor of the former discourse," said Dr. Holmes, "had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry as ever. Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his audience. … Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place and time was too great for any hostile feelings to be awakened by the sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker."

Page 155, note 1. This opening passage was no formal compliment, but rather a confidential and characteristic utterance by Mr. Emerson to the young scholars of his interest in them, and of his feeling, elsewhere expressed, that "the Scholar has drawn the white lot in life."

Page 155, note 2. Mr. Emerson wrote in his Journal of 1833, speaking of his brother, "Charles's naif censure last night provoked me to show him a fact, apparently entirely new to him, that my entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of particular failures, every public work of mine of the least importance having been, probably without exception, noted at the time as a failure."

Page 158, note 1. In another essay, Mr. Emerson thus asserts his belief: "He did not make his thought: no, the thought made him, and the sun and the stars also."

Page 159, note 1. In the Journal, from which this sentence comes, "The lovely invention of the dew" is the expression. The same simile is found in the early poem "Sunrise" in Poems, "Fragments on Nature."

Page 160, note 1. Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, England, in the motto to his book on Emerson, calls attention to the following passage in Plutarch's Life of Cicero, telling of his consulting the oracle at Delphi, in his youth. "Upon his inquiring by what means he might rise to the greatest glory, the priestess bade him 'follow nature and not take the opinion of the multitude for his guide in life.'"

Page 160, note 2. Mr. Emerson was of the opinion of that admirable American officer, the late General Crook, who told his officers that he thought little of the effect of general orders, saying, "Example is the best general order," and living up to his belief. Mr. Emerson greatly valued biographies, from Plutarch down, and constantly illustrated his lectures by anecdotes.

Page 160, note 3. His interest in Cudworth was not so much in the views of the author, but in Plato, whom he first came upon in Cudworth's pages, when a boy in college. The same is probably true of Tennemann, whose writings on Plato and other philosophers were accessible to him in translations.

Page 160, note 4. The poetical speculations and beliefs of the ancient philosophers were as attractive to him as the systems of the modern metaphysicians were uninteresting. It was the freedom and beauty of the Law, as reported by the prophets and singers, that he cared for. The dogmatic distinctions of the system-makers seemed unprofitable to him.

Page 161, note 1. In a letter, when a Divinity student, to his spiritual confessor, his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson (for his account of whom see Lectures and Biographical Sketches). he called himself "Ever the Dupe of Hope." Later in life, he would hardly have said "dupe." He liked to read in Plutarch of Bias's question and answer: "How do the wise differ from the unwise? In a good hope."

Page 162, note 1.

I see it all now; when I wanted a king 'T was the kingship that lacked in myself I was seeking. Lowell, "Two Scenes in the Life of Blondel."

Page 163, note 1.

This passing moment is an edifice Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 166, note 1. At village meetings for good causes, as the old Lyceum, in which debates were sometimes held, or those stirring ones in the days of the Antislavery and Free State movements, Mr. Emerson always attended, and heard with respect and often admired the good and forcible speaking of his neighbors. It was especially so at town meetings.

Journal. "The most hard-fisted, disagreeably restless, thought-paralyzing companion sometimes turns out in the town-meeting to be a fluent, various, and effective orator. Now I find what all that excess of power which chafed and fretted me so much in ——was for." Extempore speech was always very difficult for him.

Page 168, note 1.

In dreamy woods what thoughts abound That elsewhere never poet found;

Here voices ring, and pictures burn, And grace on grace where'er I turn. Fragments from Notebook.

Page 172, note 1. This passage shows the thought which justified to Mr. Emerson his plan of writing on The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy, which late in his life was partially accomplished in his philosophy courses at Cambridge (see Natural History of Intellect). Mr. Cabot says in his Memoir: "He had long cherished the thought of a more fruitful method for the study of the mind founded on the parallelism of the mental laws with the laws of external nature."

Page 172, note 2. Heracleitus's Πάντα ῥεῖ, the fluidity of all things, and the reappearance of the one in protean disguises. These doctrines appear everywhere in Emerson's prose and verse.

Page 173, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to say, "My doom and my strength is to be solitary." The gifts of solitude for the scholar are told in "Woodnotes," II., in the Poems.

Page 175, note 1. The necessity of the contact with the world and doing one's part there, of action alternating with thought, and the acquiring of facts to translate into thought, is urged alike in the early and later writings.

Page 182, note 1. Mr. Emerson's "lay pulpit," the Lyceum platform, gave such a character as this paragraph suggests to his essays, which were first delivered in country towns and frontier settlements all over the North and West, as well as before cultivated audiences in cities. He would not write down to his audience, but had faith in the perception of humble people. On the other hand, he wrote strong English

in short sentences, and in delivery introduced frequent anecdotes which would appeal to them, as they always did to him. Many of these were omitted in the severe pruning of the essays for publication.

Page 186, note 1.

Ever the words of the Gods resound, etc. "My Garden," Poems.

THE METHOD OF NATURE

In July, 1841, Mr. Emerson betook himself to the single hotel by the beautiful and lonely beach at Nantasket, to write this oration.

He found there delicious airs and sunniest waters, reminding him of the Mediterranean, as he wrote to his brother, saying, "I hoped there to write an oration, but only my outline grew larger and larger, until it seemed to defy all possibility of completion. Desperate of success, I rushed home again." Mr. Cabot hints that in the oration is "a touch of the sea, 'inexact and boundless,' yet distinct in its tone of suggestion."

In his letter to Carlyle, Mr. Emerson, remembering his friend's constant praise of Silence, wrote: "As usual at this season of the year I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence. You will say I do not deserve the aid of any Muse. O but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places! Besides, I am always lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys."

Page 192, note 1. (From the letter quoted above.) "My whole philosophy—which is very real—teaches acquiescence

and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet— for any spiritualist—in this great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue."

Page 193, note 1. Mr. Emerson would have rejoiced in William Morris's word about a work of industrial art, that it should be "a joy to the maker as well as the user," and that the cotton, or whatever, would be the better, not worse.

Page 195, note 1. To him spiritual matters were out of the possibilities of argument. There was no gainsaying the universal goodness or wisdom or beauty. It was either perceived or not perceived. He said, with Saint Augustine, "Wrangle who will, I will wonder."

Page 196, note 1. The ways were full of "monotones," as Mr. Emerson called them, in those days. Journal. "I so readily imputed symmetry to my fine geniuses in perceiving their excellence in some insight. How could I doubt that … [each] was the master mind which in some act he appeared? No; … in new conditions he was inexpert, and in new company he was dumb. The revolving light resembles the man who oscillates from insignificance to glory."

But he received each new guest, even the young student or the visitors of his children, and questioned them as if he thought that the best word might yet come from their mouths.

Page 199, note 1. It was indeed as hazardous a venture as that of Empedocles in his quoted assertion for a speaker to say in the presence of divines and professors, at a New England college festival in those days, that God appeared in man; that by obedience he became a channel through which deity

was poured out in measure on the earth. Had the oration been called a sermon and given on Sunday, its heresy would have been challenged, but, as often happened, Mr. Emerson found that on a week-day people would listen even with pleasure to words against which on Sunday they would have been on their guard. Any lapse in the speaker's life due to indulgence of the lower self might have given the satisfaction to the theologians that the casting forth by AEtna of the sandal of Empedocles did to the Sicilians.

Page 200, note 1. The ancient doctrine of "the Flowing" passing into the modern doctrine of Evolution.

Page 201, note 1.

Line in Nature is not found; Unit and universe are round, etc. "Uriel," Poems.

Page 202, note 1. This paragraph and much that follows is rendered poetically in "Woodnotes," II., in the verses beginning:—

Hark, in thy ear I will tell a sign, etc.

Page 206, note 1. "Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem to long for the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme: 'The great Pan of old,' etc."—Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Dr. O. W. Holmes.

Page 210, note 1. That men should listen in solitude for the Voice, should obey it, and report its message exactly to others was Emerson's chief doctrine.

Page 211, note 1. In this passage he makes what he considered the distinction between genius and talent.

Page 211, note 2. Compare the passage in the Divinity

School Address where he speaks of the great teachers and prophets as bards. The common preacher argues and proses, the true poet charms and uplifts.

Page 213, note 1.

Stars taunt us with their mystery. "The World-Soul," Poems.

Page 213, note 2. Mr. Emerson elsewhere quotes Plato as saying: "The man who is master of himself knocks in vain at the door of poetry."

Page 214, note 1. Probably quoted from Taylor's translation of Proclus, in which the Chaldean oracles are often referred to.

Page 220, note 1. The respect for the high ideals of the men who planted New England, who brought with them the spirit of Cromwell and of Milton, always remained with Mr. Emerson. The fiery faith and noble asceticism of these men and women living in the presence of the other world, outweighed their narrowness and sternness, in his estimation. He often spoke of a wish to write the story of Calvinism in New England, but did not do so. Yet in his "Historical Discourse at Concord" (Miscellanies), the "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England" (Lectures and Biographical Sketches), and the essay "Boston" (Natural History of Intellect), he deals with the subject, as also in the Address to the New England Society in New York in 1870, which has been recently printed, with other addresses, by that society.

Page 222, note 1. Ali Ibn Abu Talib, who married the daughter of Mahomet and became caliph.

MAN THE REFORMER

The Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, before which this Address was delivered, is mentioned by Mr. Winsor in his Historic Boston as doing a modest work with its library of some five thousand volumes as late as the year 1873.

Page 227, note 1. Compare with the passage at the beginning of "The Over-Soul:" "We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. … We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean?"

Page 229, note 1. A stronger statement of his belief, which appears in so many ways in the prose and poems, that a thought will unsettle the solidest seeming facts; that the scholar's far sight recognizes the true real.

Page 230, note 1. Emerson and many of his friends and contemporaries lived to see their ideas and reforms eagerly claimed by the men of the church, the exchange, or the forum who had rejected, derided, or even persecuted them.

Page 234, note 1. Mr. Alcott and his companions in the short-lived Fruitlands community were confronted by the dilemma that they needed land for their social experiment, yet felt that land could not be rightfully purchased; so they paid money to "redeem from human ownership" their acres of unpromising soil.

Page 236, note 1. Only a few months before the delivery of this lecture, the community at Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, under the leadership of Mr. George Ripley, began an effort to secure for each member the benefits of labor of the body and mind, and for the community the advantages of division

of labor. See "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 237, note 1. Mr. Emerson had neither the aptitude nor the training for carrying on a farm, or even a large garden, but, especially in his early years as a Concord householder, he took some care of his garden, and preferably of his orchard. But in household matters he disliked to be served by others, especially to call upon servants. He liked the verse from Horace:

At mihi succurrit pro Ganymede manus (My own right hand my cup-bearer shall be),

and a proverb, perhaps from the Persian,—

The king's servant is the king himself.

Page 238, note 1. His respect for labor was great, and is told in Oriental form in the verses,—

Said Saadi, When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver's door, etc. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 240, note 1. This passage suggests the lines of George Herbert in his "Church Porch:"—

Some great estates provide, but not A mastering mind; so both are lost thereby.

Page 248, note 1. A motto for those days in New England might have been the words put in Rob Roy's mouth by Wordsworth:—

Of old things all are over old, Of good things none are good enough; We'll show that we can help to frame A world of other stuff.

Page 249, note 1. In Mr. John Albee's excellent Remembrances of Emerson, speaking of the many young men whom "his voice reached in the most obscure and unexpected places," he says that Mr. Emerson "received us each and all with his unfailing suavity and deference. His manner towards young men. … I know no word for but expectancy, as if the world-problem was now finally to be solved, and we were the beardless OEdipuses for whom he had been faithfully waiting. … His magnanimous spirit soothed and reassured us, and to the little we brought he added a full store, inserting … a silver cup in our coarse sacks of common grain, so that we returned to our brethren with gladness and praise."

Page 251, note 1. Omar the caliph, Mahomet's distant cousin and second successor, who, first warring against him, later became converted. During his reign the Moslems were everywhere victorious. He was rigorously ascetic in his habits. This passage suggests two recent parallels,—the habit of General Gordon of going into the bloody battles of the Chinese war with only a cane in his hand, and the astonishing feat of the religious fanatics, followers of the Mahdi, who, armed with sword and shield and some primitive firearms, broke the square of the English, furnished with the best modern arms, at Tel-el-Kebir, in daylight and open country.

Page 252, note 1. The relation of employer and servants (at that period almost invariably New Englanders from neighboring towns) seemed to Mr. Emerson to put the parties in so false a position that, with his wife's concurrence, the help were invited to sit at the same table at meals. The matter was quickly solved from the kitchen side, for the woman who waited on table explained that the cook was shy and unwilling to eat with Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, and that she herself did not wish to leave the cook alone.

Page 253, note 1. Treatise of Synesius on Providence, translated by Thomas Taylor and printed with his Select Works of Plotinus, London, 1817. Synesius was later a convert to Christianity and became Bishop of Cyrene; he lived in the early part of the Fifth Century.

Page 256, note 1.

Times wore he as his clothing-weeds, He sowed the sun and moon for seeds. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Sun and moon must fall amain Like sower's seeds into his brain, There quickened to be born again. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

THE TIMES

This was the Introductory Lecture of a course of eight lectures on "The Times" given by Mr. Emerson at the Masonic Temple in Boston, in the winter of 1841-42. The others were "The Conservative," "The Poet," "The Transcendentalist," "Manners," "Character," "Relation to Nature," "Prospects."

"The Times," "The Conservative" and "The Transcendentalist," also included in this volume, were printed in the Dial (July, 1842, October, 1842, January, 1843).

"The Poet," in part, is printed in "Poetry and Imagination," in Letters and Social Aims, "Manners" and also "Character," in part,in Essays, Second Series.

Page 259, note 1. This image of godlike days humbly

disguised appears several times in Mr. Emerson's writings, especially in the poem "Days," and in "May-Day."

Page 260, note 1. As he puts it in his Journal, "Love is the solution of mine and thine."

Page 262, note 1. In this and the next pages appears the ancient doctrine of the Flowing, but applied to the human stream slowly ascending, as spirit more and more informs the clay.

Page 263, note 1. From his boyhood up, Mr. Emerson delighted in oratory. The brilliant, if florid, declamations of some students in college, especially John Everett and certain youths from the South, had a charm which caused their words to remain in his memory from those days, hard to conceive of now, when the whole college flocked to hear the Seniors declaim. As a youth he would walk far to hear Webster's mighty speech, and keenly enjoyed the graceful and studied eloquence of Edward Everett. He admired the elegant bearing, cool mastery of speech, and cutting denunciation of Wendell Phillips, who was never fully himself until challenged or menaced.

Mr. Emerson's own delivery was agreeable, his voice flexible, admirably modulated, especially in reading poetry, and of unexpected power at the right moment. Mr. N. P. Willis, in an amusing article (Hurrygraphs, New York, 1851), describes his first hearing of Emerson, and, among other things, says this of the surprise of his voice: "A heavy and vase-like blossom of a magnolia with fragrance enough to perfume a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of an aspen, would not seem more as if it never could have grown there than Emerson's voice seems inspired, and foreign to his visible and natural body."

Page 267, note 1. In Mr. Emerson's copy of Taylor's translation of Plotinus, he marked the definition of time by Archytas the Pythagorean,—a continued and indivisible flux of hours.

Page 271, note 1. It should be remembered that this lecture was written in the days when New England bristled with reforms; and their advocates, striving to outdo one another in the radical quality or the refinements of their schemes, flocked to Mr. Emerson because of his well-known hospitality to thoughts. Therefore his combination of good sense with sympathy, of good temper and of humor with just criticism, and his ability to look on these crowding causes with a due perspective, is remarkable.

Page 274, note 1. Mr. Emerson valued highly the prose as well as the poetry of Milton, especially the Areopagitica.

Page 277, note 1. Of this paragraph Dr. Holmes says: "All this and much more like it would hardly have been listened to by the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser and better one. … The charm of his imagination and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners."

Page 278, note 1.

Teach me your mood, O patient stars! Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no shade, no scars, No trace of age, no fear to die. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 280, note 1. When the Dial was under consideration, Mr. Emerson wrote in his diary, "It ought to contain the best advice on the topics of Government, Temperance, Abolition, Trade and Domestic Life. It might well add such poetry and sentiment as will now constitute its best merit."

When he was urged to edit it, he wrote: "I wish it to live, but I do not wish to be its life. Neither do I like to put it into the hands of the Humanity and Reform men, because they trample on letters and poetry, nor into the hands of the Scholars, for they are dead and dry." Yet he made it always a point of honor to defend or help the reformers at critical times.

Page 282, note 1. An ancestor of Mr. Emerson's, one of the Moodys, a forcible preacher, thus urged his parishioners: "And when ye know not what to do, do not do ye know not what!"

Page 288, note 1. In the poem "Blight" is a very similar passage.

Page 289, note 1. The doctrine of the Oneness of Being, taught by Paul at Athens, and the resulting Immortality. The same in Oriental form appears in "Brahma" (Poems).

Page 291, note 1. This passage is almost autobiographical, as is also a very similar one about Osman (an ideal man) towards the end of the chapter, "Manners," Essays, Second Series.

THE CONSERVATIVE

This lecture, as has been said elsewhere, was the second in the course on "The Times" given by Mr. Emerson in Boston in the winter of 1841-42. It was first printed in the Dial (October, 1842). Dr. Holmes says, in his Memoir of Mr. Emerson, that "it was a time of great excitement among the members of that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more beautifully than in this lecture, and in his whole course with reference to the intellectual

agitation of the period. He is as fair to the conservative as to the reformer. … He has his beliefs and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair play, and, though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be unjust to the present or the past."

Page 296, note 1. Mr. Emerson's eager listening to the men of science and his use of their facts on a higher plane is everywhere shown in his prose and verse. In "The American Scholar" he speaks of "every trifle bristling with Polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law;" in "Compensation" he devotes a paragraph to it, and it appears in the fourth verse of "The Sphinx" and elsewhere.

Page 297, note 1. Suggesting the lines in the end of "Threnody:"—

Silent rushes the swift Lord Through ruined systems still restored, etc.

Protagoras's doctrine of "becoming" in Plato's "Theaetetus" is also called to mind.

Page 299, note 1. Mr. Emerson's own strength being purely individual, and his sympathies and hopes for society primarily in the advance of the individual, his respectful allowance of the use of organization and the value of the guardians of what the Past seems to have established, coupled with his perception of the weaknesses of the reforming class, is the more interesting.

Page 304, note 1. "The strength of the Egyptians is to sit still." Isaiah xxx. 7.

Page 312, note 1. Not merely the crack-brained or narrow reformers, "the monotones," as he called them, visited Mr. Emerson, but high-minded and brave protestants against

the humdrum selfishness or artificiality of life as they found it were his neighbors and friends.

In their first reaction they undervalued the arrangements they found. Thoreau cared little for the roads, and Mr. Alcott, when called on for his tax, said that he used the fields as much, so, since they thought their money was often misapplied, they would not pay. Mr. Emerson's level head was, in the long run, a useful corrective to his friends' extreme views.

E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, And looks coolly round him with sharp common sense. Lowell, "Fable for Critics."

Page 325, note 1. This paragraph, written in 1841, concerning the hero's resolve, and therefore his own ideal, might with little change have served for Mr. Emerson's epitaph. He respected the laws, written or unwritten, results of the better tendencies of mankind in the past, yet his individual life, not dependent on these, helped to amend them.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

This lecture was the fourth in the course on "The Times," but did not, as might seem natural, follow immediately, for contrast's sake, as in this volume, on "The Conservative." "The Poet" came in as a golden mean between the extremes, which he was showing. For Mr. Emerson, when called a philosopher, said, "I am in all my theory, ethics and politics a poet," and, as Sir Leslie Stephen said, "he ridiculed the impression that his transcendentalism was a known and fixed element, like salt or meal, a rigid definite creed. All the argument and all the wisdom, he declares, is not in the

treatise on metaphysics, but in the sonnet or the play." The intervening lecture "The Poet" was not, however, the essay by that name in the Second Series, but another, much of which he printed later, with liberal additions, in "Poetry and Imagination" in the volume Letters and Social Aims.

Dr. Holmes, after speaking of the prejudice naturally existing against "the Transcendentalists" at the time of this lecture, says:—

"On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:—

"'There has sprung up in Boston,' says Dickens, in his American Notes, 'a set of philosophers known as the Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her ever-lasting wardrobe. And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.'"

Page 330, note 1. Here, as everywhere, appears the sure faith in evolution and ascension in God's own time. In the

opening passages of the essay "Poetry and Imagination" above referred to, the natural advance of the mind from materialism to idealism is described.

Page 333, note 1. In his Journal for 1838 he says, "The physician tends always to invert man, to look upon the body as the cause of the soul, to look upon man as tyrannized over by his members."

Page 335, note 1. It was charged as heresy to Mr. Emerson that he did not believe in miracles. The happiness of his life lay in his contemplation of the daily miracle wrought by sure and perfect law.

Page 337, note 1. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, a contemporary of Goethe, and a writer first of romances, then of treatises, both of a philosophic character. A believer in intuition or divine impulse, he was impatient of the formal systems of the metaphysicians.

Page 338, note 1. Yet in these very years a few of the reformers were led by their enthusiasm and faith to apostolic experiments, to go forth to share with others the light that seemed to them so important, taking no thought for the morrow,—not only bachelors, but men with families. They were bitterly condemned and ridiculed by those who claimed to believe absolutely and literally in the words of Jesus: "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin," etc., or "There is no man that hath left house or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for my sake and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, … and in the world to come eternal life."

Page 342, note 1. In this passage it is Mr. Alcott that his friend alludes to. He wrote of him to Carlyle in 1839: "A man named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul with whom

conversation is possible. He is capable of truth." Later he said of him, "Alcott astonishes by the grandeur of his angle of vision and the heaps of particulars." And again: "He is good as a lens, a mirror, a beautiful susceptibility, every impression on which is to be accounted for, and, until accounted for, registered as an addition to our catalogue of natural facts. It needs one acquainted with the lens by frequent use to make allowance for defects, but 'tis the best instrument I ever met with."

Page 342, note 2.

The civil world will much forgive, etc. "The Poet," IV., Poems, Appendix.

Page 347, note 1.

Well and wisely said the Greek, Be thou faithful, but not fond; To the altar's foot thy fellow seek,— The Furies wait beyond. "Pericles," Quatrains, Poems.

Page 350, note 1. The change to the first person in this paragraph—very likely due to a sheet introduced after the main part of the essay was written—does not mean that Mr. Emerson states here his own views. In this and what follows he only continues to be a mouthpiece for the views of these "children" with whose faith he admits a sympathy, but it is a measured one.

Page 350, note 2. Quoted from Walter Savage Landor's Pericles and Aspasia.

Page 354, note 1. This Trinity appears in the first pages of "The Poet," Essays, Second Series, and in "Art," Society and Solitude.

Page 356, note 1. Sometimes, when "weary of dealing with people each cased in his several insanity," outcries came, in the Journal at least, yet with a touch of humor and always a basis of kindness, as thus:—

Journal, 1842. "Could they not die? or succeed? or help themselves? or draw others? or draw me? or offend me? in any manner, I care not how, could they not be disposed of and cease to hang there in the horizon, an unsettled appearance, too great to be neglected, and not great enough to be of any aid or comfort to this great craving humanity?"

Page 358, note 1. The above passage is a good example of Mr. Emerson's light hand in dealing with a movement that surely had absurd aspects, but more that approached the sublime.

Journal. "Shall it be said of the hero that he opposed all contemporary good because it was not grand? I think it better to get their humble good, and to catch the golden boon of purity and temperance and mercy from these poor" [preachers and reformers].

Page 359, note 1. Mr. Emerson perhaps had here in mind some lines of Juvenal which described the "Sons of the Morning" for whose coming he was ever on the watch:—

Juvenes queis arte benigns Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan.

"Blest youths, though few, whose hearts the god of Day Fashioned with loving hand and from a nobler clay."

THE YOUNG AMERICAN

Concerning the Mercantile Library Association, before which this Address was given, Winsor, in his Historic Boston, says

that it was founded in 1820, antedating that of New York; that "it was floated for some years by the most popular system of public lectures in town," and that it succumbed in 1877 before the advancing Public Library, becoming the South End Branch of that institution.

"The Young American" was printed in the April number of the Dial for 1844. Two passages in the first pages of the Address as there printed, which Mr. Emerson chose to omit when he printed it among the Miscellanies, have now a historic interest which seemed to justify the reprinting of the greater part of them in the notes below. The first of these tells of the reading of the young scholars in the first third of the century. The second describes the additions won from the sea for Boston and the building up of the town into a city, the making of the early railroads, the coming of the Irish laborers and their endurance and cheerfulness under unmerciful taskmasters, and gives a hopeful prophecy for their future.

Page 363, note 1. This passage, printed in the Dial, is omitted:—

"Our books are European. We were born within the fame and sphere of Shakspeare and Milton, of Bacon, Dryden, and Pope. Our college text-books are the writings of Butler, Locke, Paley, Blackstone, and Stewart; and our domestic reading has been Clarendon and Hume, Addison and Johnson, Young and Cowper, Edgeworth and Scott, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. We are sent to a feudal school to learn democracy."

Page 363, note 2. From the Dial version:—

"Their alleged effect to augment disproportionately the size of cities is in rapid course of fulfilment in this metropolis of

New England. The growth of Boston, never slow, has been so accelerated since the railroads have been opened, which join it to Providence, to Albany, and to Portland, that the extreme depression of general trade has not concealed it from the most careless eye. The narrow peninsula, which a few years ago easily held its thirty or forty thousand people, with many pastures and waste lands, not to mention the large private gardens in the midst of the town, has been found too strait when forty are swelled to a hundred thousand. The waste lands have been fenced in and builded over, the private gardens, one after the other, have become streets. Boston proper consisted of seven hundred and twenty acres of land. Acre after acre has been since won from the sea, and in a short time the antiquary will find it difficult to trace the peninsular topography. Within the last year … from twelve to fifteen hundred buildings … have been erected, many of them of a rich and durable character. And because each of the new avenues of iron road ramifies like the bough of a tree, the growth of the city proceeds at a geometrical rate. Already a new road is shooting northwest towards the Connecticut and Montreal, and every line of road that is completed makes cross-sections from road to road more practicable, so that the land will presently be wrapped in a network of iron. This rage for road-building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days seemed already numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges, and officers across such tedious distances of land and water. Not only is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of

national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation goes forward and there is no danger that local peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.

"The new power is hardly less noticeable in its relation to the immigrant population, chiefly to the people of Ireland, as having given employment to hundreds of thousands of the natives of that country, who are continually arriving in every vessel from Great Britain.

"In an uneven country the railroad is a fine object in the making. It has introduced a multitude of picturesque traits into our pastoral scenery. The tunnelling of mountains, the bridging of streams, the bold mole carried out into the broad, silent meadow, silent and unvisited by any but its own neighbors since the planting of the region; the encounter at short distances along the track of gangs of laborers; the energy with which they strain at their tasks; the cries of the overseer or boss; the character of the work itself which so violates and revolutionizes the primal and immemorial forms of nature; the village of shanties at the edge of the beautiful lakes, until now the undisturbed haunt of the wild duck, and in the most sequestered nooks of the forest, around which the wives and children of the Irish are seen; the number of foreigners, men and women, whom now the woodsman encounters singly in the forest paths; the blowing of rocks, explosions all day, with the occasional alarm of frightful accident, and the indefinite promise of what the new channel of trade may do and undo for the rural towns, keep the senses and imagination active; and the varied aspects of the enterprise make it the topic of all companies, in cars and boats, and by firesides.

"This picture is a little saddened, when too nearly seen, by the wrongs that are done in the contracts that are made with the laborers. Our hospitality to the poor Irishman has

not much merit in it. We pay the poor fellow very ill. To work from dark to dark for sixty or even fifty cents a day is but pitiful wages for a married man. It is a pittance when paid in cash, but when, as generally happens, through the extreme wants of the one party, met by the shrewdness of the other, he draws his pay in clothes and food, and in other articles of necessity, his case is still worse; he buys everything at disadvantage, and has no adviser or protector. Besides, the labor done is excessive, and the sight of it reminds one of negro-driving. Good farmers and sturdy laborers say that they have never seen so much work got out of a man in a day. Poor fellows! Hear their stories of their exodus from the old country, and their landing in the new, and their fortunes appear as little under their own control as the leaves of the forest around them. As soon as the ship that brought them is anchored, one is whirled off to Albany, one to Ohio, one digs at the levee at New Orleans, and one beside the water-wheels at Lowell; some fetch and carry on the wharves of New York and Boston, some in the woods of Maine. They have too little money, and too little knowledge, to allow them the exercise of much more election of whither to go, or what to do, than the leaf that is blown into this dike or that brook to perish.

"And yet their plight is not so grievous as it seems. The escape from the squalid despair of their condition at home into the unlimited opportunities of their existence here, must be reckoned a gain. The Irish father and mother are very ill paid, and are victims of fraud and private oppression; but their children are instantly received into the schools of the country; they grow up in perfect communication and equality with the native children, and owe to the parents a vigor of constitution which promises them at least an even chance.

In the competitions of the new generation. Whether it is this confidence that puts a drop of sweetness in their cup, or whether the buoyant spirits natural to the race, it is certain that they seem to have almost a monopoly of the vivacity and good nature in our towns, and contrast broadly, in that particular, with the native people. In the village where I reside, through which a railroad is being built, the charitable ladies, who, moved by a report of the wrongs and distresses of the newly arrived laborers, explored the shanties with offers of relief, were surprised to find the most civil reception, and the most bounding sportfulness from the oldest to the youngest. Perhaps they may thank these dull shovels as safe vents for peccant humors; and this girm day's work of fifteen or sixteen hours, though deplored by all the humanity of the neighborhood, is a better police than the sheriff and his deputies."

Page 364, note 1. Mr. Emerson's own life and his influence on his countrymen was greatly affected by the rapid spreading of the branches of the Railroad tree then recently planted by the Atlantic coast. The seventeen winters following the delivery of this address, excepting that of 1847, spent in England, were passed in arduous and exposing travel, giving lectures in answer to calls from cities, villages, and recent settlements from Maine to the Mississippi, and finally beyond that stream, then dangerous enough in winter.

Page 364, note 2. From the Medea of Euripides.

Page 366, note 1. In the Journal of 1838 Mr. Emerson thus acknowledged his own debt:—

"If my garden had only made me acquainted with the muck-worm, the bugs, the grasses, and the swamp of plenty in August, I should willingly pay a free tuition. But every process is lucrative to me far beyond its economy."

The next June he admits that when tried with too much talk of the visiting philosophers, he meditates flight beyond the Acton hills. "But my garden is nearer, and my good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs … I confess I work at first with a little venom, lay to a little unnecessary strength, but by smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper; by extracting the long roots of the pipe-grass I draw out my own splinters, and in a short time I can hear the bobolink's song, and see the blessed deluge of light and color that rolls around me."

Page 366, note 2. In these very days, George William Curtis and his brother were working as laborers on the farm of Captain Nathan Barrett, and Hawthorne, recently married, was living in the Manse (built by Mr. Emerson's grandfather), all three having served an agricultural and domestic apprenticeship in the community at Brook Farm.

Page 367, note 1. Journal, 1838. "I think Tennyson got his inspiration in gardens, and that in this country, where there are no gardens, his musky verses could not be written. The Villa d' Este is a memorable poem in my life."

Page 368, note 1. The garden at home did not prove always helpful to thought, and a few months after this sentence was written, he bought the beautiful pines, that he had often looked wistfully to while weeding,—his "Sacred Grove" on the shore of Walden. It was there that his young friend, Henry Thoreau, built his cabin the next year, and lived for a time. Two years later, Mr. Emerson wrote to Carlyle of his "new plaything, the best I ever had, "which was the high wood-circled Walden Ledge on the farther shore of the pond. Of this he wrote:—

"In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every

afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures." The poem, "My Garden," describes this spot, and what its owner found there. It was close to the new Fitchburg Railroad, and later he wrote how his woods reproached him as he passed by in the train to Boston.

Page 368, note 2. These were the days when the factories, rising along the course of every river in New England, were tempting the boys and girls away from their work beside their fathers in the fields, and their mothers in the farm-house. The first wave of the immigration of the Irish peasantry to build the new railroads made this possible, for most of these, when the railroads were built, sought employment in the country towns.

Page 369, note 1.

And I affirm my actions smack of the soil. "Hamatreya," Poems.

Page 371, note 1. In a letter written shortly before this time to his unseen friend in England, John Sterling, he had said:—

"It seems to me that so great a task is imposed on the young men of this generation that life and health have a new value. The problems of reform are losing their local and sectarian character, and becoming generous, profound, and poetic."

Page 372, note 1. Mr. Emerson's optimism was of a patient kind. He often notices the small balance to the account of good. In his "Historical Discourse at Concord" (Miscellanies) he is glad that in the town meetings "if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed

in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."

Page 372, note 2. The principle of "effort" recognized by Lamarck, though ridiculed and misrepresented for more than a half century after he announced it, was recognized by Mr. Emerson as consonant with the laws which the great minds of antiquity had announced.

Page 373, note 1. The last part of the "World-Soul" (Poems) is a rendering of this passage in verse. The Darwinian doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest appears here.

Page 379, note 1. In the essay "Nature" (Essays, Secand Series) he speaks of morning sanity, when, "after every foolish day, we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours," as the lesson of the little blue self-heal that grows beneath his study windows.

Page 380, note 1. The three Communities in Massachusetts here alluded to are:—

I. Brook Farm, of which he tells in "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Mr. Charles Lane contributed a paper on the subject to the Dial, January, 1844. The magazines contain several articles on Brook Farm, notably those contributed by members of the community, Mr. George P. Bradford,1 5.4 Mrs. Sedgwick,2 5.5 and Mrs. Kirby.3 5.6 Hawthorne was a member, and many amusing comments on the life there are found in his published journals. George William Curtis, also

a member, told of his experience in his letters to Mr. John S. Dwight.1 5.7

II. Fruitlands, Mr. Alcott's community at Harvard, Mass., an account of which is given in the very interesting Memoir of Bronson Alcott, by F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris. An official communication from Fruitlands, by Mr. Alcott and his English coadjutor, Charles Lane, appears in the Dial, "Intelligence," in July, 1843, and Mr. Emerson's account of his visit there, and of his forebodings, are given in Mr. Cabot's Memoir (vol. ii. page 439), and in Emerson in Concord, by E. W. Emerson (p. 203).

III. Hopedale, near Milford, in Worcester County, founded by Rev. Adin Ballou. Its organ was a paper called the Non-Resistant and Practical Christian. The Hopedale Home School was established by this community.

All of these Communities were short-lived.

Page 382, note 1. François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a Frenchman of an artistic temperament and philosophic mind, with a broad humanity. After a short mercantile experience which gave him the opportunity of seeing other countries, yet disgusted him with the selfishness of trade and the social organization, he was swept into the French Revolution, and, after narrowly escaping the guillotine, served as a trooper until disqualified by ill health. In 1808 he published his Théordies des quatres Mouvements, et Destinées générales, which, after six years' neglect, attracted general notice. His later important work (1822) was the Traité de l'Association domestique-agricole, and the Journal de Phalanstére. On his gravestone were inscribed his three principles: I. The series distributes the harmonies of the world (i. e.) all the

harmonies of the universe grow out of a regular and uniform order). II. Attractions are proportioned to destinies (i. e.) all beings are led and kept in their true sphere, not by a principle of external force, but of internal attraction.) III. Analogy is universal. He urged that association of capital, science, and labor would prepare the way for true society; that the living in communities of some eighteen hundred persons each would be economical, secure just and appropriate division of labor, and by variety and sociablity rob labor of its irksomeness, and that all the gifts of the members would be used for the common profit and pleasure. Fourier never himself succeeded in carrying out his ideas, but they had much influence in France, England, and America for a time. Mr. Emerson wrote in the Dial for July, 1842, "Fourierism and the Socialists," and published the advocacy of these ideas by Albert Brisbane, criticising them good-naturedly himself. Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody wrote the article "Fourierism" in the April number, 1844.

Page 387, note 1. This theme is enlarged on in the essay "Aristocracy," originally called "Natural Aristocracy," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 389, note 1. One of the young men valued by Mr. Emerson, and moved by his teachings, Charles Russell Lowell, in his valedictory oration at Cambridge on the "Reverence due from Old Men to Young," said: "Therefore the old men … cannot teach us of the present what should be, for that we know as well as they or better" they should not teach us what can be, for the world always advances by impossibilities achieved." His work in his few years in civil life was remarkable. During the Civil War, as captain in the United States Cavalry, Colonel of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, and finally as commander of the Reserve Brigade of

Cavalry, he showed again and again a power of doing the apparently impossible. He had a share in turning the flood of disaster at Cedar Creek, and died in the moment of victory.

Page 389, note 2.

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, (Hae tibi erunt artes) pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. Virgil, AEneid, VI.

Page 391, note 1. At the dark and seemingly hopeless period of the agitation against slavery, it seemed to many abolitionists that, if they failed to do away with it, or check its advance, it might become the duty of the Northern States to repudiate their share in the national crime by secession.

Page 392, note 1. This lecture was delivered during the period of suffering in England, increased next year by the famine, and two years before the triumph of the Anti-corn Law League led by Cobden.

Page 394, note 1. In his second visit to England, although it seemed to Mr. Emerson that the prospects for better social conditions were increasing, and a longer stay there perhaps modified a little the views here expressed, he did not fail to bravely speak his public word, even in the fact of some remonstrance, against false, and for real aristocracy.

Notes

• 1 1.1

  A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By James Elliot Cabot.
• 1 3.1

  John Sterling, a writer of prose and verse (The Onyx Ring; The Sexton's Daughter and Other Poems; Strafford, a Tragedy, etc.), now, however, best known as the subject of biographies by Carlyle and Archdeacon Hare. With this brilliant and inspiring man Emerson formed a close friendship by letters, though they never met, lasting until Sterling's early death in 1847. See A Correspondence between Sterling and Emerson, published by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897.
• 1 4.1

  Memoir of Bronson Alcott, by F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris.
• 1 4.2

  "Moral Purpose in Art," published in the Century Magazine for May, 1883.
• 1 5.1

  Essay on Thoreau, My Study Windows.
• 1 5.2

  Rev. Edward T. Taylor, once a seaman, later a Methodist preacher. A passage from Mr. Emerson's diary expressing his admiration for this "Wonderful Man" is printed in full in Mr. Cabot's Memoir, vol. i. p. 327.
• 1 5.3

  The correspondence between these friends, which does honor to both, is printed in full in an Appendix to Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson.
• 1 5.4

  "Reminiscences of Brook Farm," Century Magazine, vol. xxiii. p. 141.
• 2 5.5

  "A Girl of Sixteen at Brook Farm, " Atlantic Monthly, vol. ixxxv. p. 394.
• 3 5.6

  "A Visit to Brook Farm, " Overland Monthly, vol. v. p. 9.
• 1 5.7

  Early Letters of George William Curtis to John S. Dwight. Edited by George Willis Cooke, Harper & Bros., 1893.