The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays. 1st series [Vol. 2]

NOTES

NOTES

AFTER the publication of Nature, the first hint that appears of the collection by Mr. Emerson of his writings into a second book, occurs in the end of a letter to Mr. Alcott, written April 16, 1839, which Mr. Sanborn gives in his Memoir of Bronson Alcott: "I have been writing a little, and arranging old papers more, and by and by I hope to get a shapely book of Genesis."

In a letter written in April, 1840, to Carlyle, Mr. Emerson thus alludes to the Essays:—

"I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie ravelled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book-to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts1 1.1 are still extant; nay, that beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better,—certainly a bigger." Four months later he tells of the problems at home,—"a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. You will naturally

ask me if I try my hand at the history of all this. … No, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write philosophy, poetry, possibility —anything but history. And yet this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and plain that every feature is apprehensible and challenges a painter. … I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house."

Soon after the coming in of the new year he sends word: "In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat. Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,—no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together."

In his Journal he wrote, in January, 1841: "All my thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadows waved. Shall I not therefore call my little book Forest Essays?"

The book was published in March, 1841, in Boston, by James Munroe and Company.

Soon after Nature had appeared, Carlyle had written to his friend: "There is a man here called John Sterling, … whom I love better than any one I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock and vanished in the Blue again.1 1.2 … Well, and what then, cry you? Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little book Nature lying here; and, across a whole silva silvarum of prejudices, discerned what was in it, took it to his

heart,—and indeed into his pocket. … This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers(such they were, both of them, to me) have met and recognized each other, and by God's blessing there shall one day be a trio of us; call you that nothing?" Sterling wrote to Emerson and a noble friendship resulted. Although they never met in the body, these friends had more in common with each other in their hope, their courage, and their desire for expression in poetry than either had with Carlyle. Sterling died in 1844.

Emerson sent Sterling his Essays, saying, "They are not yet a fortnight old. I have written your name in a copy and sent it to Carlyle by the same steamer. … I wish, but scarce dare hope, you may find in it any thing of the pristine sacredness of thought. All thoughts are holy when they come floating up to us in magical newness from the hidden Life, and 't is no wonder we are enamoured with these Muses and Graces, until, in our devotion to particular beauties and in our efforts at artificial disposition, we lose somewhat of our universal sense and the sovereign eye of Proportion. All sins, literary and aesthetic and scientific, as well as moral, grow out of unbelief at last. We must needs meddle ambitiously, and cannot quite trust that there is life, self-evolving and indestructible, but which cannot be hastened, at the heart of every physical and metaphysical fact. Yet how we thank and greet, almost adore the person who has once or twice in a lifetime treated any thing sublimely, and certified us that he beheld the Law. The silence and obscurity in which he acted are of no account, for every thing is equally related to the soul.

"I certainly did not mean, when I took up this paper, to write an essay on Faith, and yet I am always willing to declare how indigent I think our poetry and all literature is become for want of that. My thought had only this scope,

no more: that though I had long ago grown extremely discontented with my little book, yet were the thoughts in it honest in their first rising and honestly reported, but that I am very sensible how much in this, as in very much greater matters, interference, or what we miscall art, will spoil true things."1 1.3

Carlyle now had opportunity to return his friend's kindness in introducing him to American readers. In a letter written to Emerson on June 25, 1841, he said: "My second piece of news … is that Emerson's Essays, the book so called, is to be reprinted here; nay, I think, is even now at press. … Fraser undertakes it on 'half profits;' T. Carlyle writing a preface, which accordingly he did. … The edition is of Seven Hundred and Fifty. … With what joy shall I sack up the small Ten Pounds Sterling perhaps of 'Half Profits,' and remit them to the man Emerson; saying: 'There, Man! tit for tat, the reciprocitynot all on one side!' I ought to say, moreover, that this was a volunteer scheme of Fraser's; the risk is all his, the origin of it was with him: I advised him to have it reviewed, as being a really noteworthy Book. 'Write you a Preface,' said he, and 'I will reprint it;' to which, after due delay and meditation, I consented."

In a curious and characteristic preface, among other things, Carlyle said:—

"The name of Ralph Waldo Emerson is not entirely new, in England; distinguished travellers bring us tidings of such a man; fractions of his writings have found their way into the hands of the curious here; fitful hints that there is in New England some spiritual notability called Emerson glide through the reviews and magazines.

"Emerson's writings and speakings amount to something;

and yet, hitherto, as it seems to me, this Emerson is far less notable for what he has spoken or done than for the many things he has not spoken and has forborne to do. …

"For myself, I have looked over with no common feeling to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic hearth on the other side of the ocean (yet not altogether parted from me either), silently communing with his own soul and with the God's World it finds itself alive in yonder. Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of the Species, Black Emancipation, New Tariff, Eclecticism, Locofocoism, Ghost of Improved Socinianism,—these, with many other Ghosts and substances, are squeaking, jabbering according to their capabilities round this man. To one man among the sixteen millions their jabber is all unmusical. The silent voices of the stars above and of the green earth beneath are profitable to him—tell him gradually that these others are but ghosts which will shortly have to vanish; that the life-fountain these proceed out of does not vanish. …

"Emerson, I understand, was bred to theology; of which primary bent his latest way of thought still bears traces. In a very enigmatic way, we hear much of the 'Universal Soul of the,' etc., flickering like bright bodiless northern streamers. Notions and half-notions of a metaphysic, theosophic kind are seldom long wanting in these Essays. I do not advise the British public to trouble itself much with all that: still less to take offence at it. … That this little book has no system, and points or stretches far beyond all systems, is one of its merits. We will call it the soliloquy of a true soul alone under the stars, in this day."

Mr. George W. Cooke, in his careful study of the life of Mr. Emerson,1 1.4 relates that five years later the Countess

d'Agoult, who wrote under the nom de plume of "Daniel Stern," told in the Revue Indépendante (July) how having read a mention of the Essays by Philarète Chasles in an article on literary tendencies in America, and later heard a quotation from them in a lecture by a foreign poet, Mickiewicz, she tried to obtain the book in Paris, but had to send to London for it. She was greatly pleased, and in her article expressed surprise at the general ignorance concerning the writer. "The singular charm of the Essays,"she said, "is that we hold him accountable for nothing, because he pretends to nothing. He draws you after him with irresistible bonhomie. There is no difficulty in following him, for we breathe a salubrious atmosphere in his work. Nothing offends, not even the discords, because all is resolved and harmonized in the sentiment of a superior truth."

In Berlin, Herman Grimm (who later wrote the lives of Michelangelo and Raphael), while waiting his turn in the parlor of the American dentist, chanced to pick up the Essays from the table; "read a page, and was startled to find that I had understood nothing, though tolerably well acquainted with English. I inquired as to the author. In reply I was told that he was the first writer in America, an eminently gifted man, but somewhat crazed at times, and often unable to explain his own words. Notwithstanding, no one was held in such esteem for his character and for his prose writings. In short, the opinion fell upon my ears as so strange that I reopened the book. Some sentences, upon a second reading, short like a beam of light into my very soul, and I was moved to put the book in my pocket, that I might read it more attentively at home. … I took Webster's Dictionary and began to read. The construction of the sentences struck me as very extraordinary. I soon discovered the secret: they were real thoughts, an individual language, a sincere man that I had before

me; naught superficial, second-hand. Enough! I bought the book! From that time I have never ceased to read Emerson's works, and whenever I take up a volume anew it seems to me as if I were reading it for the first time."

But at home the book was not well received in all quarters.

Mr. Cooke, in his biography, quotes an author in the Princeton Review who had found the Essays "more devoid of real meaning than any other book which ever fell into his hands, and thought such essays could be produced through a lifetime as rapidly as a human pen could be made to move."

Another critic, a distinguished classical scholar connected with one of the universities, seems to have recognized Mr. Emerson's debt to the Greek and, through these, the Oriental philosophers, seeing in the ideas set forth "ancient errors, mistaken for new truths and disguised in the drapery of a misty rhetoric."

HISTORY

The first essay in the volume, "History," was not delivered as a single lecture, but in writing it Mr. Emerson made use of passages from lectures in three distinct courses; namely, that on "English Literature" (1835-36), on "The Philosophy of History" (1836-37), and on "Human Life" (1837-38), as is shown by Mr. Cabot in the chronological list of lectures and addresses in the Appendix (F) to his Memoir.

The essay is a fit gateway to those that lie behind, for on its threshold is the doctrine of the Universal Mind, and beyond will be found those depending on and illustrating this, the Unity underlying the Flowing of Nature through endless cycles of Protean disguises, the Symbolism of Nature, the beauty

of Law, working forward and upward alike in Nature, in races, and in the individual and his works.

The course on "The Philosophy of History" (1836-37) had the following lectures, many of which appear as such or in their matter in the Essays.

• I. Introduction (History has been ill written; its meaning and future, etc.)
• II. Humanity of Science.
• III. Art.
• IV. Literature.
• V. Politics.
• VI. Religion.
• VII. Society.
• VIII. Trades and Professions.
• IX. Manners.
• X. Ethics.
• XI. Present Age.
• XII. Individualism.

In his Journal, Mr. Emerson thus lays out the course in advance, with the belief in the Over-Soul as the foundation of all.

There is one soul.

It is related to the world.

Art is its action thereon.

Science finds its methods.

Literature is its record.

Religion is the emotion of reverence that it inspires.

Ethics is the soul illustrated in human life.

Society is the finding of this soul by individuals in each other.

Trades are the learning the soul in nature by labor.

Politics is the activity of the soul illustrated in power.

Manners are silent and mediate expressions of soul.

Page 2, note 1. Both of these mottoes appear in the first edition: in both is the thought of the Over-Soul, which

later appeared in Oriental form in Brahma. The desire to express himself in verse, which Mr. Emerson felt so strongly, had so far overcome his humility that during the months in which he was preparing this essay he had contributed to the first number of the Dial "The Problem," and "The Sphinx" appeared in the third.

Page 4, note 1. It will be remembered that the Sphinx's fatal riddle, which OEdipus solved, related to Man in his infancy, his prime and his decline.

In the end of Nature(vol. i.), man as a microcosm had been considered, and Herbert brought to testify in his beautiful poem "Man."

Page 5, note 1. In this passage, and one in "Self-Reliance,"—"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," with the work of St. Anthony, Luther, Fox, Wesley and Clarkson as instances,—came out Mr. Emerson's belief in the duty and the power of the man of thought, a messenger of the Eternal Mind.

Page 6, note 1. In the affectionate sympathy for reading boys, which crops out so often in his books, memories of his boyhood and of his brothers and some near friends, like Dr. William H. Furness, come to light.

Page 7, note 1.

Methought the sky looked scornful down On all was base in man. "Walden,"Poems, Appendix.

Page 8, note 1. Mr. Emerson often used to speak of the pitiful figure that certain scholars and statesmen presented, uttering elevated sentiments about Liberty and Justice in 1776, and being dumb on the subject of the flagrant violation of these principles in their own day.

Page 9, note 1. That a man was principally of value for his "atmosphere," and an event for the soul of it which survived for an example or in a poem, was a favorite idea with Mr. Emerson. He praised Sterling's line in Alfred the Harper,—

Still lives the song, though Regnar dies!

With Swedenborg he valued Nature as a symbol.

Page 10, note 1. I am indebted to Professor Charles Eliot Norton for calling my attention to the probable compounding of the name Marmaduke Robinson, through a slip of Mr. Emerson's memory, out of the names of the two Quakers hung on Boston Common in 1659, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson.

Page 12, note 1. In "The Problem" he describes the evolution of the grand architecture, the temples and cathedrals, "out of Thought's interior sphere," and Nature's ready adoption of them as her own.

Page 15, note 1.Mr. Emerson was much more alive to the beauty of form than of color. Sculpture appealed to him more than painting.

Page 15, note 2. The doctrine of the pervading unity which appears in the poem "Xenophanes," written in 1834, hence one of the earliest of the published poems.

Page 16, note 1. In the month of April, 1839, Carlyle sent Raphael Morghen's engraving of the Aurora, by Guido in the Rospigliosi palace in Rome, to Mr. Emerson, saying, "It is my wife's memorial to your wife. … Two houses divided by wide seas are to understand always that they are united nevertheless." The picture still hangs in the parlor of Mr. Emerson's home, with the inscription which accompanied it: "Will the lady of Concord hang up this

Italian sun-chariot somewhere in her Drawing Room, and, looking at it, think sometimes of a household here which has good cause never to forget hers. T. CARLYLE."

Mr. Emerson used to point out to his children how the varied repetition of the manes, heads and prancing forefeet of the horses were imitations of the curved folds of a great cumulus cloud.

Page 17, note 1.Here, as in the two essays on Art, in this volume and in Society and Solitude, the same thought appears, embodied also in "The Problem" in the lines beginning,—

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, etc.

Page 19, note 1.

Come see the north wind's masonry, etc. "The Snow-Storm," Poems.

Page 21, note 1. The works of Heeren and others on Egypt, and the architectural handbooks of Fergusson and Garbett, with some of Ruskin's writings, were read with interest by Mr. Emerson. The idea of Evolution, whether in the works of Nature or of man, early and always appealed to him.

Perhaps the first suggestion of the ideas on this page came to him in his boyhood, in the welcome form of Scott's description of Melrose Abbey in the Lay of the Last Minstrel:—

The moon on the east oriel shone Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliaged tracery combined; Thou wouldst have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined,

Then framed a spell when the work was done, And changed the willow wreaths to stone.

Page 22, note 1. Astaboras was a river of AEthiopia mentioned by Strabo.

Page 22, note 2.The following is the version of the remainder of this paragraph in the first edition of the Essays:—

"The difference between men in this respect is the faculty of rapid domestication, the power to find his chair and bed everywhere which one man has, and another has not. Some men have so much of the Indian left, have constitutionally such habits of accommodation, that at sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, they sleep as warm and dine with as good appetite and associate as happily as in their own house. And, to push this old fact one degree nearer, we may find it a representative of a permanent fact in human nature. The intellectual nomadism is the faculty of objectiveness, or of eyes which everywhere feed themselves. Who hath such eyes everywhere falls into easy relation with his fellow-men. Every man, every thing, is a prize, a study, a property to him, and this love smooths his brow, joins him to men, and makes him beautiful and beloved in their sight. His house is a wagon: he roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc."

And well he loved to quit his home And Calmuc in his wagon roam To read new landscapes and old skies. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 23, note 1. In the balancing of the claims on the scholar of society and solitude, so frequent in his writings, Mr. Emerson always gives most weight to solitude, yet admitting the necessity, for his sanity, his character, and his supply

of raw material to work on, of mingling with the world and sharing the common exposures and experiences.

In his journal of his first trip to Europe, it is remarkable how little he found to detain him and how anxious he was to return to his proper field of action and work. The same feeling was very marked during his visit to Europe and Egypt in his old age.

Page 25, note 1. The freedom, the dignity and profit of self-help was a rule of practice, not a mere theory, with Mr. Emerson.

Page 28, note 1. Many strange pilgrims were on the road in those days, ridiculous enough to the eye of the average New Englander, and these were attracted to Concord by the report that there hospitality to thought could be found. Their host ministered to their physical wants, and to their hunger to be heard. He took them by "their best handle,"—and, as he wrote of his ideal man, "The madness which he harbored he did not share."

Page 29, note 1. The respect for the old religion that made New England, remained deeply ingrained in Mr. Emerson, though he had left that phase of belief and spiritual growth behind. Yet it was always before him in the fiery faith of his Aunt Mary, and in his own household in the devoted Christianity of his mother and his wife. He was aware of the losses that might well accompany too extreme reaction from early faith, and the Luther anecdote might well have had something akin to it in his domestic experience.

Page 30, note 1. Compare Byron's Prometheus.

Titan, to whose immortal eye The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise, etc.

Page 31, note 1. The power of true vision to unsettle and move and elevate everything, indeed the old doctrine of "The Flowing" of Heracleitus, the dance of the trees and the very mountains that Orpheus led, occurs in the prose, but especially in Mr. Emerson's "Poet" in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 32, note I.

I drank at thy fountains False waters of thirst. "Ode to Beauty," Poems.

Page 32, note 2. "We probably perceive the influence of these latent inheritances" [dormant tendencies to suppressed bestial parts or traits] "when, in the battle of existence, species undergo retrograde changes, or, as naturalists phrase it, revert to a lower state of being. … In the moral as well as the physical world, we may see these hidden seeds of ancestral impulse, when no longer overshadowed by the newer and therefore stronger motives, spring into activity and win the creature back to a lower estate."—The Interpretation of Nature, by Professor N. S. Shaler. Boston, 1893.

Page 33, note 1. See the opening paragraphs of "The Poet," Essays, second series, and "Poetry and Imagination," Letters and Social Aims, for the true use of facts.

Mr. Emerson eagerly sought facts, not for themselves, but as oracles from which he was to draw the hidden but universal meaning. In his Journal in 1847, he speaks of the avarice with which he looks at the Insurance Office, and his longing to be admitted to hear the gossip of the notables of the village there: "For an hour to be invisible and hear the best informed men retail their information he would pay great prices, but every company dissolves at his approach. He so eager and they so coy. …

"We want society on our own terms. Each man has facts that I want, and, though I talk with him, I cannot get at them for want of the clue. He does not know what to do with his facts: I know.… Here is all Boston,—all railroads, all manufactures and trade, in the head of this well-informed merchant at my side.… Here is Agassiz with his theory of anatomy and nature; I am in his chamber and I do not know what question to put.… Here is all Fourier in Brisbane's head; all language in Kraitser's; all Swedenborg in Reed's; all the Revolution in old Adams's head; all modern Europe and America in John Quincy Adams's, and I cannot appropriate a fragment of all their experience.… Now if I could cast a spell on this man at my side, and see his pictures without his intervention or organs, and having learned that lesson, turn the spell on another, lift up the cover of another hive, and see the cells and suck the honey … they were not the poorer and I the richer."

Page 34, note 1. When asked by one of his children whether some verse of Shakspeare, or perhaps it was a picture by Michelangelo, really was meant to carry with it the significance attributed to it, Mr. Emerson answered: "Everyone has a right to be credited with whatever of good another can find in his work."

Page 35, note 1. Perceforest was a mediaeval French historical romance, its scene being Britain in the pre-Arthurian period.

Amadis de Gaul, a romance written in the fourteenth century, by Vasco de Lobeira, in Portugal, but which became very popular in later versions in other tongues.

The Boy and the Mantle, an ancient English ballad. See Percy's Reliques.

Page 36, note 1. This passage with regard to man's faculties

occurred in a lecture called "The Doctrine of the Hands" in the course on "Human Culture," 1837-38.

Page 37, note 1. See Shakspeare's Henry VI., Part I., Act II., Scene iii.

Page 40, note 1. It was a characteristic of Mr. Emerson's writings to concentrate attention on some aspect of the matter on which he was speaking. He did not weaken a sentence, a paragraph, even, in some cases, a whole poem or lecture, by much qualification of his statement. He reserved the counter-statement, the other aspect, to present as neatly in another place. Hence, if but one essay be read, his position with reference to the church, or towards society, or reform, might be misunderstood.

Page 41, note 1. This passage appears in verse in "Limits," Poems, Appendix.

SELF-RELIANCE

During the period of Mr. Emerson's ministry in Boston he had written thus in his Journal:—

CHARDON ST., OCT. 14TH, 1832.

The great difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment. They know not how divine is a Man. I know you say such a man thinks too much of himself. Alas! he is wholly ignorant. He yet wanders in the outer darkness, in the skirts and shadows of himself, and has not seen his inner light.

Would it not be a text of a useful discourse to young men, that every man must learn in a different way? How much is lost by imitation. Our best friends may be our worst enemies.

A man should learn to detect and foster that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within far more than the lustre of the whole firmament without. Yet he dismisses without notice his peculiar thought because it is peculiar. The time will come when he will postpone all acquired knowledge to this spontaneous wisdom, and will watch for this illumination more than those who watch for the morning. For this is the principle by which the other is to be arranged. This thinking would go to show the significance of self-education, that in reality there is no other, for all other is nought without this.

This entry is continued by the passage now appearing in the latter part of "Self-Reliance" beginning, "That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him," ending with the sentence about "the Scipionism of Scipio." After several more jottings as to what might be said on the subject, he writes:—

"Landor knows many things—treats of the continual appeal that is made from the facts to the feelings, from the world to the high, inward, infallible Judge, ever suggesting a grander creation," etc.

In the entry of the preceding day he transcribes various sentences from Landor's Imaginary Conversations (mostly from the talk of Epicurus with his friends), among them this: "Since all transcendent, all true and genuine greatness must be of a man's own raising, and only on the foundation that the hand of God has laid, do not let any touch it: keep them off civilly, but keep them off."

Thus it appears that the writings of Landor, read the year before Mr. Emerson sought him out in Rome, may have given the original push towards the writing of this essay on "Self-Reliance." A small portion of the essay came from the lecture

"Individualism," the last in the course on "The Philosophy of History" in 1836-37, and other passages from the lectures "School," "Genius," and "Duty" in the course on "Human Life," 1838-39.

In reading this essay, it is well to call to mind, Ist, Mr. Emerson's fear of weakening the effect of his presentation of a subject by qualification; 2d, That the Self he refers to is the higher self, man's share of divinity. Hence "The Over-Soul" should be read after "Self-Reliance."

Journal, Oct. 23, 1840. "And must I go and do somewhat if I would learn new secrets of self-reliance? for my chapter is not finished. But self-reliance is precisely that secret to make your supposed deficiency redundancy. If I am true, the theory is, the very want of action, my very impotency, shall become a greater excelling than all skill and toil."

Page 45, note 1. Perhaps these were the poems of Washington Allston. His "Paint-King" is quoted in the chapter on Plato in Representative Men. If not these, it is probable that William Blake's remarkable poems are alluded to.

Page 46, note 1. This image recalls the departure of the Day in his poem, when the thoughtless poet from among her proffered gifts chose—

A few herbs and apples … … I, too late, Under her soleman fillet saw the scorn.

Page 47, note 1. The doctrine of "The Over-Soul."

Page 48, note 1. Sympathy for children, loving reverence for unspoiled boys and girls, was part of Mr. Emerson's character, and appears throughout his writings, especially in "Domestic Life" and "Education."

Page 49, note 1. An annoyance at the notoriety which followed his action with regard to the rite of the Last Supper in his church, and later, on his simple statement to the Divinity students of the message that came to him with regard to the torpor of the church of that day, and their resulting duties, shows in Mr. Emerson's letters and journals at these times rather than any deeper trouble. It is that "sad self-knowledge" of Uriel.

Page 52, note 1. A characteristic case of his presentation of aspects. "But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other."—"History."

Page 52, note 2. Of his "own poor" and his own causes, Mr. Emerson was mindful, and his hand was free.

Page 54, note 1. It need hardly be said that Mr. Emerson was an independent in politics, as in social or ecclesiastical movements. He writes in his Journal: "The relation of men of thought to society is always the same; they refuse that necessity of mediocre men, to take sides. They keep their own equilibrium. The sun's path is never parallel to the equator."

Page 57, note 1. Mr. Emerson said, "I deny personality to God because it is too little—not too much."

Page 58, note 1. It may be interesting to reproduce here the version of the first edition with a ruder vigor, more adapted to delivery in the Lyceum.

"With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with pack-thread, do! else, if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict

everything you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's words. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

Page 58, note 2.

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 61, note 1. Mr. Emerson's reading was largely in biographies. For novels and romances he cared little, but the human, the heroic, the individual in historic characters, he was keen to find out, and equally so the natural speech, the independent action and native refinement in persons whom he met, whether high or low. From his childhood he copied anecdotes of persons, and he read them to his scholars. Plutarch was his delight. Dr. Holmes interested himself in making a list of the persons most often referred to by Mr. Emerson, and found that after Shakspeare, Napoleon, and Plato came Plutarch, and there were seventy references to him.

Page 62, note 1. A version of this story is the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew.

Page 64, note 1. This paragraph furnishes two instances of the nicety of Mr. Emerson's choice of words in closest accordance with their derivation to make clear his thought. His doctrine,—that there was one great source of all special manifestation of spirit, which was from the beginning [aborigine

—"In the Beginning was the Word"]; that this spirit was self-renewed in each one who would listen, by teachings from within [in-tuitions], and could go out from the receiver to help the world [tuitions],—made clearer by exactly fitting words, shows the real Self on which men shall rely.

Page 65, note 1. He went alone to the woods to listen. Perhaps his early friends among the Quakers at New Bedford had confirmed this tendency in him to wait until the Spirit spoke. He felt himself the mere ambassador charged to faithfully deliver the message committed to him. This must be its own evidence and it was not for him to argue about it.

Page 67, note 1. Compare the seventh stanza of "The Sphinx."

Page 69, note 1. Though Mr. Emerson's is by no means a Latin style, the training of his youth shows often in the use of words of Latin origin, not as adjectives but as present participles; as "man, agent and patient," and here "power not confident but agent."

Page 71, note 1.

Hold of the Maker, not the Made; Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems,Appendix.

Page 72, note 1. "Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue,—but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling."—"Education," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 74, note 1. After the somewhat startling and radical

counsels of the last paragraph, it is well that some mitigation of their drastic quality should follow. Dr. Holmes does well in calling attention to what follows to show how Mr. Emerson "guarded his proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind."

Page 76, note 1. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many a New England boy thus acquired experience and laid the foundations of his fortune, pecuniary or intellectual. Mr. Alcott went on foot with his pack more than once through Virginia and the Carolinas, furnishing Connecticut wares or teaching, at the option of the owners of the plantations.

Page 78, note 1. While studying divinity, Mr. Emerson one day, as he worked in his uncle's hayfield beside a Methodist farm-hand, fell into talk with him. This man maintained that men are always praying, and that all prayers are answered. This statement interested Mr. Emerson, and on this theme he wrote his first sermon, adding for a third point that it behooves men to well consider these acted prayers. After his "approbation to preach," he read this sermon in the pulpit of his kind uncle, Rev. Mr. Samuel Ripley, of Waltham, and the next day a stranger addressed him in the stage-coach, saying, "Young man, you'll never preach a better sermon than that."

A short paper, "Prayers," originally printed in the Dial, is included in the volume Natural History of Intellect.

Page 80, note 1.

The inevitable morning Finds them who in cellars be. "The World-Soul," Poems.

Page 82, note 1. Mr. Emerson, when he first went abroad in 1833, was sick and sad, with prospects all unsettled,

and he was little engaged by the novelty and beauty of the sights which met his eye when, after a short stay in Malta, he landed at Naples. This paragraph reflects the tone of his journals, and in them he wrote verses recording his feeling at Naples and at Rome. Both of these are printed in the Appendix to the Poems.

But his call to his appointed work made him through life a bad visitor, and also traveller, except in the line of his duty, when his lines in "Woodnotes" were true for him:—

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, … Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.

Page 83, note 1. Most of the paragraph up to this point was from the entry in the Journal in 1832, mentioned in the introduction to this essay, when the thought of writing on this theme first came to him.

Page 85, note 1. The checks in development, later much emphasized by the Evolutionists, seem to have been early apprehended by him.

Page 88, note 1. This saying of Ali is rendered in the last lines of the second motto of "Compensation."

COMPENSATION

When in 1865 Mr. Emerson met by invitation many of the ladies who, as girls, had attended the finishing school for young ladies kept in Boston by his brother William and himself, when hardly more than boys, he told them that he felt certain regrets with regard to his teaching. "I was at that very time already writing every night in my chamber my first

thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws of Compensation and of individual genius, which to observe and illustrate have given sweetness to my life. I am afraid no hint of this ever came into the school, where we clung to the safe and cold details of languages, geography, arithmetic and chemistry. Now I believe that each should serve the other by his or her strength, not by their weakness, and that if I could have had one hour of deep thought at that time, I could have engaged you in thoughts that would have given reality, depth and joy to the school, and raised all these details to the highest pleasure and nobleness."

During the days of his ministry, he wrote thus in his Journal:—

CHARDON ST., JUNE 29, 1831.

Is not the law of Compensation perfect? It holds, as far as we can see, different gifts to different individuals, but with a mortgage of responsibility on every one. "The gods sell all things."—Well, old man, hast got no farther? Why, this was taught thee months and years ago. It was writ on the autumn leaves at Roxbury in keep-school days—it sounded in the blind man's ear at Cambridge.1 3.1 And all the joy and all the sorrow since have added nothing to thy wooden book. I can't help it. Heraclitus, grown old, complains that all resolved itself into identiy. … And I have nothing charactered in my brain that outlives this word Compensation.

Three years later, in 1834, he wrote the verses entitled "Compensation" which are printed in the Poems.

It does not appear that the essay "Compensation," as it stands, was ever delivered as a lecture. No doubt portions

of it appeared in many sermons, and several pages of it came from the lecture "Duty" in the course on "Human Life," given in 1838-39.

In the first motto the image of "The lonely Earth amid the balls" is one among many instances of the charm which astronomical phenomena had for Mr. Emerson. Evidences of his reading treatises on the heavenly bodies, and of walks for the purpose of gazing on them, occur frequently in journals and writings.

Page 93, note 1. Mr. Emerson, having left the pulpit, was striving the harder to awaken real religion among those to whom he spoke, to make them feel, not only on Sundays, but through the week, day and night, a beautiful, present Deity working surely through law.

Page 94, note 1. Dr. Holmes ekes out the forlorn view of the preacher whose representations of the Christian's aims and spirit had stirred Mr. Emerson to write this discourse, by the statement of the unhappy John Bunyan:—

A Christian man is never long at ease; When one fright's gone, another doth him seize.

Page 96, note 1. This is a keynote of many of the essays.

"The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than its works."—The Over-Soul. "Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's character."—Heroism.

Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew. "The Problem," Poems.

Page 96, note 2. "In this and the following chapter."

Compensation is not so obviously treated of in "Spiritual Laws" as might be expected from this expression. Yet the doctrine is there in "A man passes for what he is worth," and other statements of the great laws of balance and return.

Page 97, note 1. Every scientific fact and law had its charm for Mr. Emerson, and he sought its spiritual correspondent. Again and again he uses polarity as a parable. It may be found in the third stanza of "The Sphinx" and in "Merlin."

The reconciliation in the very definition of Polarity1 3.2 of the apparently contradictory nations held by the early philosophers and priests, viz., of the One, and of the Duality that is more obvious in the world, delighted him.

Page 99, note 1. One day Mr. Emerson saw the little child of a neighbor, whom he had always thought to be a sulky churl, playing with a pretty painted cart. He asked the child who made it. "My Papa," answered he, and this fortified Mr. Emerson in the optimism from which he had temporarily lapsed.

Page 101, note 1.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, My oldest force is good as new, And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew. "Song of Nature," Poems.

Page 102, note 1. A fragment from a lost play of Sophocles.

Page 103, note 1. In the poem "Voluntaries," after the national crime of the long tolerance by our people of African slavery has been told, these lines follow:—

Destiny sat by, and said, "Pang for pang your seed shall pay, Hide in false peace your coward head, I bring round the harvest day."

And this Nemesis, denied the name of Fate, because justice is a beneficent force, appears as "Worship" in the poem which serves as motto to the essay so named.

Page 105, note 1.

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, Et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix. Horace, Epistles, i, 10.

Page 106, note 1. Confessions of St. Augustine, Book I.

Page 106, note 2. From the Prometheus of AEschylus.

Page 108, note 1. The same thought that is more fully expressed in the extract from the letter to Sterling given in the Introduction to the notes on the essays of this volume. It also appears in "The Problem."

Page 110, note 1. Mr. Emerson, after his return from Europe in 1833, preached often at New Bedford, and later gave a course of lectures at Nantucket, remaining for some time on the island. Those were the great days of the whaling industry of both those towns, and Mr. Emerson used to repeat the anecdotes of peril and accident in hunting the monster which had been told him by his hosts.

Page 112, note 1. Herodotus tells that Fortune had so favored Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, that his friend Amasis, king of Egypt, sent him word that to ward off the fate sure to follow unbroken prosperity, he ought to sacrifice whatever he valued most. Struck by this counsel, Polycrates cast into the sea his emerald ring. Next day it returned to him in the stomach of a fish sent as a present. Amasis at once broke off the alliance, foreseeing in this event the impending doom of Polycrates. Revolt of his subjects, and civil and foreign wars followed, and not long after the tyrant was lured out of his domain by the satrap of Sardis and crucified.

Page 113, note 1. This maxim was a household word with Mr. Emerson. He was loath to place himself under obligation. He wrote:—

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

See also in the Poems, the "Translation from Ibn Jemin."

Page 115, note 1. These thoughts find expression in the arguments used by educators in the last few years to show the mental and moral advantage of manual training schools.

Page 116, note 1. Wordsworth's Sonnets to Liberty, "September, 1802."

Page 117, note 1. This passage, expanded from an entry made in Mr. Emerson's Journal of Oct. 18, 1832, was distinctly personal in its origin, and shows his habitual humility and courage. It continues: "The stammering tongue and awkward and formal manners which hinder your success in social circles keep you true to the mark which is your own—to that particular power which God has given you for your own and others' benefit."

Page 118, note 1. This and the next two sentences are

the entry made by Mr. Emerson in his Journal, Sept. 29, 1838, two months after he had delivered his earnest message to the young divines on the eve of their entry into the ministry, and the ensuing disclaimers and attacks on his address had been made by professors and clergymen, vigorously answered by Mr. George Ripley, Mr. Brownson, Professor Parsons, and Rev. James Freeman Clarke.

Page 119, note 1.

If the Law should thee forget, More enamoured serve it yet; Though it hate thee, suffer long; Put the Spirit in the wrong. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 120, note 1. This was well said in Boston, where, within a few years, Mr. Garrison, for attempting to address an anti-slavery meeting, had been hustled up State Street with a rope around his body, by the solid men of business and of the professions; and the mayor, to save his life, had him committed to the jail as a "disturber of the peace." His statue stands now at the head of the handsomest avenue in Boston.

Page 121, note 1. The translation of "Being" in the next word into its pleasing Latin form, and immediately making it the same as God, is a striking and condensed statement of the creed Each in All, the Universal Mind.

Page 123, note 1. This passage, as written in the Journal, March 19, 1839, is perhaps more fresh and vigorous:—

"Such is my confidence in the compensations of nature, that I no longer wish to find silver dollars in the road, nor to have the best of the bargain in my dealings with people, nor that my property should be increased, knowing that all such

gains are apparent and not real; for they pay their sure tax. But the perception that it is not desirable to find the dollar I enjoy without any alloy. This is an abiding good: this is so much accession of Godhead."

The description of the growth and liberation of the ideal man, which follows, written forty years before Mr. Emerson's death, is strangely autobiographical.

Page 125, note 1. Compare the last stanza of "Give All to Love," Poems.

SPIRITUAL LAWS

This essay does not appear to have been given in its present form as a lecture; it may have been so used in Concord or some neighboring town just before the Essays were published, but was not in the Boston courses. Certain passages of the essay, however, are found in the lectures "Religion" and "Manners" in the course on "The Philosophy of History" (1836-37), in "Being and Seeming" in the course on "Human Culture" (1837-38), and in "School" and "Duty" in the course on "Human Life" (1838-39).

There was no motto to "Spiritual Laws" in the first edition.

The verses that he placed before the new edition in 1847 show the fear which he felt, especially at that period, of weakening the poetic thought by what, in the letter to Sterling which has been already quoted, he calls "meddling ambitiously." Here, in twelve strong lines presenting the great Laws of the Universal Mind, Self-Reliance, Compensation, and Good out of Evil, he followed the counsel to the bard that he puts in the lips of Merlin in his poem:—

Great is the art, Great be the manners of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number; But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. "Pass in, pass in," the angels say, "In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise."

Page 131, note 1. In the year of the publication of this essay, his honored friend, the Rev. Doctor Ripley, the minister of Concord for more than half a century, died. He had married the widow of William Emerson, his predecessor, a chaplain in the army at Ticonderoga. Dr. Ripley had been a true friend to his wife's grandchildren. Mr. Emerson tells in his Journal of his visit to the Old Manse at the time of his death:—

"His body is a handsome and noble spectacle. My mother was moved just now to call it 'the beauty of the dead.' He looks like a sachem fallen in the forest, or rather 'like a warrior taking his rest with his martial cloak around him.' I carried Waldo to see him and he testified neither repulsion nor surprise, but only the quietest curiosity. He was ninety years old. … Yet this face has the tension and resolution of vigorous manhood. … A man is but a little thing in the midst of these great objects of nature, … yet a man by moral quality may abolish all thoughts of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world."

Page 131, note 2. This passage calls to mind the "morning thought," the "Matutina Cognitio" of St. Augustine. See Notes to Nature. ("Prospects")

Page 132, note 1. He would have liked the answer which William Morris gave to one who asked if he were subject to the extreme despondency which so often accompanies the highly poetic temperament. "I dare say I am," said he, "but I've never had the time to think of it, so I really can't say."

Page 132, note 2. From Wordsworth's Sonnet XII. in Poems dedicated to National Independence, part ii.

Page 133, note 1. The relative value of his imposed and his chosen studies came up often in Mr. Emerson's mind to the advantage of the later. Always an eager and delighted reader of the books (or a few passages in books) that he knew as "written for him," he found little in the text-books at school or college, besides the classics, that interested him. In "Heroism" he tells of the power for good of a romance "over a boy who grasps the forbidden book under the bench at school; our delight in the hero is the main fact to our purpose. … If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment."

Page 134, note 1. Purified mankind as transmitters of divine thought are described in the poetical note-books as—

Pipes through which the breath of God doth blow A universal music.

Page 135, note 1. The image of Mother Nature calming her flustered little son is repeated, still with a little humor, in the poem "Experience," which serves as motto to the essay of that name in Essays, Second Series.

Page 138, note 1. Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 B. C.), a

Greek painter, poet and philosopher, who joined the expedition of Alexander to conquer the East, but returned to Elis and became a priest. "He held that the only condition worthy of a philosopher was that of suspended judgment. Virtuous imperturbability was the highest aim of life, but truth was unattainable."—Appleton's Encyclopaedia.

Page 140, note 1. During his stay in New Bedford, in 1834, while officiating for his friend the Rev. Dr. Dewey, Mr. Emerson heard the doctrine of Obedience as adopted by the Friends,—renunciation of all will, and awaiting the divine motion in the breast.

Journal. "The sublime religion of Miss Rotch yesterday. She was very much disciplined, she said, in the years of Quaker dissensions, and driven inward, drawn home to find an anchor, until she learned to have no choice, to acquiesce without understanding the reason when she found an obstruction to any particular course of acting. She objected to having this spiritual direction called an impression, or an intimation, or an oracle. It was none of them. It was so simple it could hardly be spoken of."

This statement of faith interested him, but he had already learned to yield himself to the divine stream sweeping away the distinctions of forms.

Page 141, note 1. The boast of Glendower to Hotspur, Henry IV., Part I., Act III., Scene i.

Page 142, note 1. Mr. Emerson thus celebrates the dignity of the farmer's work:—

He planted where the deluge ploughed, His hired hands were wind and cloud; His eyes detects the Gods concealed In the hummocks of the field. "Fragments," Poems, Appendix.

Page 143, note 1. This image was suggested by a passage in Scott's Old Mortality which Mr. Emerson often repeated with something of the pleasure it had given him in his boyhood. The fierce fanatic, Balfour of Burley, speaks of the possibility of influencing some opponents of the Covenanters by prospects of worldly gain, but thus tells in his wrath of the incorruptibility of the young nobleman who opposes them: "But Lord Evandale is a malignant of heart like flint and brow like adamant; the goods of this world fall on him like the leaves on the frost-bound earth, and unmoved he will see them whirled off by the first wind. The heathen virtues of such as he are more dangerous to us than the sordid cupidity of those who … may be compelled to work in the vineyard, were it but to earn the wages of sin."

Page 147, note 1.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own. Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.

Page 148, note 1. In the essay "Demonology," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, dreams are treated of. See also the quatrain "Memory" in the Poems.

Page 151, note 1. When somewhat importunately urged to be presented to a person for whom he felt no affinity, Mr. Emerson said, "Whom God hath put asunder, let no man put together."

Page 153, note 1. It was the sentence more than the paragraph in the essay that he valued, hence he strove to make every syllable tell.

Page 156, note 1. This was the remark of his honored friend, Samuel Hoar, Esq. See the notice of him in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, and the sonnet by the Mr. F. B. Sanborn prefixed to it. Also Mr. Emerson's quatrain "S. H." in Poems.

Page 164, note 1.

Jack was embarrassed,—never hero more, And, as he knew not what to say, he swore. Byron's Island, Canto III., 5.

It was, however, Jack Skyscrape and not Ben Bunting.

Page 165, note 1. Another name for the British queen Boadicea. Mr. Emerson valued certain passages in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Tragedy of Bonduca," especially the speeches of Caratach in the first scene.

Page 166, note 1. Dr. Holmes in his Life of Emerson quotes the passage, and thus comments: "This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud of George Herbert's." He alludes to "The Elixer," beginning—

Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see;

and especially to the verse—

A servant with this clause Makes drudgerie divine; Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, Makes that and th' action fine.

LOVE

This essay is almost identical with the fourth lecture in the course on "Human Life," given in Boston by Mr. Emerson in the winter of 1838-39. He made a few verbal changes and unimportant omissions in the later editions from the earlier form. Because the love that Emerson treats of here is not considered from the point of view of young lovers alone, but as life-long, and unfolding to "a love which knows not sex, nor

person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere," his poem "Eros" might have served for its motto:—

The sense of the world is short,— Long and various the report,— To love and be beloved; Men and gods have not outlearned it; And, how oft soe'er they've turned it, Not to be improved.

In a letter written to a friend in the year of the publication of this essay, this passage occurs:—

"The same Goodness in which we believe, or rather which alway believes on itself, as soon as we cease to consider persons, becomes Love, imperious Love, that great Prophet and Poet, that Comforter, that Omnipotency in the heart. Its eye falls on some mortal form, but it rests not a moment there; but, as every leaf represents to us all vegetable nature, so Love looks through that spotted, blighted form to the vast spiritual element of which it was created and which it represents. We demand of those we love that they shall be excellent in countenance, in speech, in behavior, in power, in will. They are not so; we are grieved, but we were in the right to ask it. If they do not share the Deity that dictated to out thought this immense wish, they will quickly pass away, but the demand will not die, but will go on accumulating as the supply accumulates, and the virtues of the soul in the remotest ages will only begin to fulfil the first craving of our poor heart."

Page 167, note 1. In a note-book Mr. Emerson gives the quotation from the Koran thus:—

"I was as a treasure concealed: then I loved that I might be known."

And below it his own rendering—

I was as a gem concealed; I burned with love and was revealed.

And then the second line altered thus:—

Me my burning love revealed.

Page 171, note 1. Although Mr. Emerson did not allow his mind to revert, looking ever to the brightness before, yet when, of a sudden, a memory came over him of his young wife, his brothers, his mother, gone from this life, he would, for the moment, start and moan, wrung by "infinite compunctions," due to his own tenderness and humble rating of himself, not thinking how they had prized him.

Page 172, note 1. Once a young school-teacher was invited to tea at his house. He was, as ever, courteous and kind, but after she had gone, he mentioned that, perhaps a dozen years before, he had found on the way to Walden a childish love-letter, open and weather-stained, addressed to her, and, though he did not know the schoolgirl, he had remembered her name and the little romance.

Page 175, note 1. From the Epithalamium of John Donne.

Page 176, note 1. This was a favorite line of Mr. Emerson's, perhaps written by one of his friends, but I have never been able to find whence it came.

Page 177, note 1. From A Nice Valour, by John Fletcher. III., 3.

Page 177, note 2.

He looketh seldom in their face, His eyes explore the ground,— The green grass is a looking-glass Whereon their traits are found. "Manners," Poems.

Page 179, note 1. "The end of all liberal training should be the love of beauty"—Socrates having previously described proper education as a training in virtue. (Plato's Republic, Book III.)

Page 181, note 1. This passage recalls the one from Plutarch, already quoted, to the effect that the Sun is the cause why all men are ignorant of Apollo, by sense withdrawing the mind from that which is to that which seems.

Professor Wright, of Harvard University, says of this Paragraph of Mr. Emerson's, "It is distinctly Platonic, and seems to be an echo of the Phaedrus, where the entombment of the soul is referred to, and the necessity that it must see true being before it can take human form is stated. The thought that it is 'stupefied by the light of the natural sun and unable to see any other object but those of this world, which are but shadows of real things,' is perhaps supported by the opening of the seventh book of the Republic, where appears the famous 'image of the cave.'"

Page 182, note 1. I think that the word "base" is used in its primary sense, to signify the humble foundation on the earth.

Thou shalt not scale Love's height divine By burrowing at its earthly base; Nor call the priceless treasure thine Who car'st but to affront the case. "The Angel in the House," Coventry Patmore.

Page 184, note 1. From Donne's "Elegy on Mistress Drury."

Page 185, note 1.Compare Emerson's early poem, "Thine Eyes Still Shined."

Page 186, note 1.From Abraham Cowley's "Resolved

to be Beloved," in The Mistress; or, Several Copies of Love Letters.

FRIENDSHIP

This essay was not given as a lecture under this title and as a whole in any of the Boston courses, although very probably it served in that capacity in some of the Lyceums. As is shown in Mr. Cabot's Memoir (Appendix F), portions of it were taken from the lecture on "Society," in the course on "The Philosophy of History" (1836-37), and others from "The Heart" in the course on "Human Culture," given in the Boston the following year. Several paragraphs come from "Private Life," in the course on "The Present Age" (1839-40).

Friendship, as Mr. Emerson said in the essay, seemed "too good to be believed," and he earnestly desired it, yet so high was his standard that he felt that he had not his share of this blessing and cast the blame on himself.

Friends to me are frozen wine; I wait the sun on them should shine.

He had many, in the usual sense of the word, and their number increased with the years; many also unknown to him; but he had few close friends in all his life. This lack he recognized as temperamental and deplored. But here too was "good out of evil" for him. At a little distance he could take the greatest pleasure in his friends, could see them in their proper atmosphere. The treatment that he asked for himself he gave in some tempered degree to them:—

You shall not love me for what daily spends; You shall not know me in the crowded street,

Where I, as others, follow petty ends; Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet. Nor when I'm jaded, sick, anxious or mean. But love me then and only, when you know Me for the channel of the rivers of God From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow.

In practice he was loyal and serviceable to his friends, yet preferred to see them sparingly, to find in them what they were meant to be, and "take each by his best handle."

In writing to one of his nearest friends through life, a gentleman of great charm and culture, Mr. Emerson said, probably about the new essay on "Love" or on "Friendship," a year before its publication:—

"I send you [a paper] of last winter's composition, a piece which I wrote with good heart, and trust you may find some sparks still alive in the cinders. The argument were fitter for rhyme, but that comes only by the special favor of the skies. … Certainly we discover our friends by the very highest tokens, and these not describable, often not even intelligible, but not the less sure to that augury which is within the intellect, and therefore higher. This is to me the most attractive of all topics, and, I doubt not, whenever I get your full confession of faith, we shall be at one on the matter. Because the subject is so high and sacred, we cannot walk straight up to it; we must saunter if we would find the secret. Nature's roads are not turnpikes, but circles, and the instincts are the only sure guides."1 3.3

While lecturing in Philadelphia, in January, 1843, he wrote to the same friend as follows:—

"I must thank the Quaker City, however, for a new conviction, that this whim called friendship was the brightest

thought in what Eden or Olympus it first occurred. I think the two first friends must have been travellers.—I doubt you think my practice of the finest art to be bad enough, but friendship does not ever seem to me quite real in the world, but always prophetic; and if I wrote on the Immortality of the Soul, this would be my first topic. Yet is nothing more right than that men should think to address each other with truth and the highest poetry at certain moments, far as their ordinary intercourse is therefrom and buried in trifles. I will try if a man is a man. I will know if he feels that star as I feel it: among trees, does he know them and they him? Is he at the same time both flowing and fixed? Does he feel that Nature proceeds from him, yet can he carry himself as if he were the meanest particle? All and nothing? These things I would know of him, yet without catechism: he shall tell me them in all manner of unexpected ways, in his behavior and in his repose."

Page 191, note 1. Journal, 1838. "At church I saw that beautiful child—and my fine, natural, manly neighbor, who bore the bread and wine to the communicants with so clear an eye and excellent face and manners.

"The softness and peace, the benignant humanity that hovers over our assembly when it sits down at the morning service in church."

Page 192, note 1.

The tongue is prone to lose the way; Not so the pen, for in a letter We have not better things to say, But surely say them better. "Fragments on Life," Poems.

Page 194, note 1. The high sidewalk under the warm sandy southern slope of hills opposite Mr. Emerson's house, on the "Great Road" to Boston, has a different climate from the rest of Concord, and so used to be a favorite walk in the cold half of the year. Mr. Alcott and Mr. Hawthorne lived on this road, and it was the venerable Squire Hoar's favorite walk. Not only these friends, but the farmers and laborers, the schoolgirls and the schoolboys would have been surprised if they had known with what respectful or admiring eyes Mr. Emerson looked on them from his study windows, and had heard his comments on them.

Page 195, note 1. Milton, Comus.

Page 196, note 1. Compare with this paragraph "The Park" in the Poems.

Page 197, note 1. Journal, 1833. "My entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of particular failures."

Page 197, note 2.

When half-gods go The gods arrive. "Give All to Love," Poems.

Page 199, note 1.

If love his moment overstay, Hatred's swift repulsions play. "The Visit," Poems.

Page 200, note 1. Shakspeare, Sonnet xxv.

Page 202, note 1. In his first letter to John Sterling, May 29, 1840, a few months before the publication of this essay, Mr. Emerson wrote: "I am a worshipper of Friendship, and cannot find any other good equal to it. As soon as any man pronounces the words which approve him fit for that great office, I make no haste: he is holy; let me be holy also;

our relations are eternal; why should we count days and weeks? I had this feeling in reading your paper on Carlyle, in which I admired the rare behavior, with far less heed the things said; these were opinions, but the tone was the man."1 3.4

Page 203, note 1. The allusion is to Jones Very, of Salem, a mystic and ascetic, of whom an interesting account is given in Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, vol. i., chapter x., and a fuller one by Mr. W. P. Andrews, in his introduction to Essays and Poems by Jones Very. In a letter to Miss Margaret Fuller, written in November, 1838, Mr. Emerson wrote: "Very has been here lately and stayed a few days, confounding us all with the question whether he was insane. At first sight and speech you would certainly pronounce him so. Talk with him a few hours, and you will think all insane but he. Monomania or monosania, he is a very remarkable person; and though his mind is not in a natural, and probably not in a permanent state, he is a treasure of a companion, and I had with him most memorable conversations."

He records that Very said to him: "I always felt, when I heard you read or speak your writings, that you saw the truth better than others, yet I felt that your spirit was not quite right. It was as if a vein of colder air blew across me."

Page 204, note 1. This quotation is from Montaigne, Book I., chapter xxxix., "A Consideration upon Cicero."

Page 207, note 1. In converse with Nature he felt that the same rule held. "Nature says to man, 'One to one, my dear.'"—Journal.

Page 208, note 1. Compare with this paragraph his poem "Étienne de la Boéce."

Page 209, note 1. From the recent notice of the death of a business man of integrity in Chicago, who was also a lover

of good books and a loyal friend of Mr. Emerson, I copy this anecdote showing Mr. Emerson's conscience, and that of his friend also, in the matter of rashly endeavoring to come near to those whom we admire by letters of introduction. "Mr.—wanted to know Mr. Longfellow and desired Mr. Emerson to introduce him. The cautious philosopher replied that he would do so if his young friend could truthfully say that he stood in such relation to the genius of the poet as made it fitting. This the youth decided that he could not do. There seems to me something charming in Mr. Emerson's reliance on the integral delicacy of the boy to guard him against a possible false position."

Page 212, note 1. Here followed in the first edition these two sentences: "The only money of God is God. He pays never with anything less or anything else."

Page 213, note 1. See the poem "Rubies."

Page 214, note 1. This paragraph closes in the first edition with the sentence, "It is the property of the divine to be reproductive."

Page 215, note 1. Carrying out the comparison of friends and books in the chapter "Nominalist and Realist" in the second series of Essays, Mr. Emerson writes: "I find most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. … I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment for its rich colors."

Page 216, note 1. "The astronomers are very eager to know whether the moon has an atmosphere; I am only concerned that every man have one. I observe however that it takes two to make an atmosphere. I am acquainted with persons who go attended with this ambient cloud."—"Aristocracy," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 217, note 1. This trait may be found in all Mr.

Emerson's letters to his friends, especially those to Carlyle, wherein all his friend's petulances and faults are ignored.

PRUDENCE

The greater part of this essay was probably given as a lecture in Boston, the seventh in the course on "Human Culture" in the winter of 1837-38. Mr. Emerson was by education and temperament prudent, but in no petty way. Knowing his want of practical faculty, and the idea of debt or of dependence on others being abhorrent to him, he strove to practise honorable economies. But every humblest fact was valuable to him as a symbol, and he loved to detect the workings of the great laws in small things. Recalling in one of his note-books two or three of his experiences as a young Boston minister, he wrote, "One day when I read a sermon of which the text might have been 'Don't mind trifles,' old William Little said to me at the door that, 'if he were to make the sermon, he should have taken the other side.'"

In the chapter on "Swedenborg" in Representative Men, he said, "Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts,—'tota in minimis existat natura.'" So accepting Plato's word that the macrocosm may be known by the microcosm, in spite of poetic traditions, yet, as a poet, and still young, he found pleasure in a

Theme no poet gladly sung, Fair to old and foul to young,—

as he calls it in the motto which he wrote for the second edition.

An example of the fitness and seeming originality of his English, by steadily holding its classic foundations in mind, occurs in the diminutive in the fourth line, where the little arts of which great arts are built find due recognition.

Page 221, note 1. The other Garden is described in his poem of that name. Although in the early years of his housekeeping, for economy's sake and health's, he hoed and weeded, he soon found that a higher prudence required his spending the time hitherto given to the home garden in that by Walden's shores, whence he brought home better and more lasting fruit.

Page 221, note 2. This is a good illustration of the pleasure Mr. Emerson took in "Aspects"; in coming to firm, homely ground after a high flight.

Page 222, note 1. The influence of his reading of the old philosophers, and also of Swedenborg, shows in this paragraph.

Mr. Emerson loved to look for what his friend Whittier called—

The unsung beauty hid life's common things below.

Page 223, note 1. "Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the one breaks in everywhere."—"The Preacher," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 223, note 2. A less complimentary estimate of proverbs than that given in the essay on "Compensation." It recalls Stevenson's essay "Crabbed Age and Youth" in Virginibus Puerisque, in which, among other strictures on cowardly and prudential proverbs, he says that, according to them, "never to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem to be a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit

of a coward, and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man."

Page 226, note 1. The necessary interruptions of his study and writing that befell Mr. Emerson as a householder he bore with philosophy. He never allowed himself to complain of mischances in the house or abroad, unless later to serve up his misfortune in an amusing manner. Of one thing he was sure,—that there was some modest share of benefit in it, and that was his business to find.

Page 226, note 2. The austere benefits which the North gives to her children are celebrated in the Poems in the lesson which the hardy Titmouse gives to the wanderer in the woods, in "Voluntaries," a war poem, and in the lines in "May-Day:"—

Titan-born, to hardy natures Cold is genial and dear. As Southern wrath to Northern right Is but straw to anthracite; As in the day of sacrifice, When heroes piled the pyre, The dismal Massachusetts ice Burned more than others' fire, So Spring guards with surface cold The garnered heat of ages old.

Of course the constant consideration of the effect of Slavery and Free Labor on our people before the Civil War emphasized these distinctions.

Page 230, note 1. Amidst the stream of visionaries flowing by him, often without visible means of support, it was important that some one should stand firm, with feet planted on the ground.

Page 231, note 1. Compare his poem "Limits," Poems, Appendix.

Page 232, note 1. Mr. Emerson could never hear with patience of the divorce of Morals from Intellect. There was always abatement of his enjoyment of Goethe because of his shortcomings in morals, and hence in insight.

Page 233, note 1. In scattered verses on "The Poet" or "The Discontented Poet," written in the same years with these Essays, and only gathered after Mr. Emerson's death in the Appendix to the Poems, he describes these floods and ebbs in the passage beginning—

Ah! happy if a sun or star Could chain the wheel of Fortune's car.

Page 235, note 1. Again the ancient doctrine of "The Flowing," shown in the hurrying life of the Yankee of the nineteenth century.

Page 237, note 1. "In proeliis oculi primi vincuntur" (Tacitus); a quotation often used by Mr. Emerson, but without giving the source.

Page 239, note 1. "He who taketh the sword shall perish by the sword" was a rule that Mr. Emerson held to with regard to argument, whether as a weapon offensive or defensive. His feeling on this subject is shown in his second letter to his friend, Rev. Henry Ware, after the Divinity School Address, printed by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir of Emerson, vol. ii., p. 689.

Page 239, note 2. By adhering to this simple rule and faith in "The Universal Mind," Mr. Emerson, as Dr. Holmes said, "could go anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner, such his transparent

sincerity, that it was next to impossible to quarrel with the gentle image-breaker." Suggesting George Herbert's teaching in his "Church Porch:"—

Scorn no man's love, though of a mean degree; (Love is a present for a mightie king.) Much lesse make any one thine enemie. As gunnes destroy, so may a little sling.

HEROISM

This essay is probably the lecture of that name essentially as delivered in the course on "Human Culture" in Boston, in the winter of 1837-38.

The homage which Mr. Emerson felt bound to render to the lowly virtues of Prudence, after dealing with "the fine lyric words of Love and Friendship," made an interesting contrast for his hearers, the more effective by his leading them up to the heights of Heroism in the succeeding lecture.

In a lecture called "The Present Age," delivered in the following year, this expression occurs,—his recognition of the awakening of those days to the need of individual, social, and political reform:—"Religion does not seem now to tend to a cultus, but to a heroic life. He who would undertake it is to front a corrupt society and speak rude truth, and he must be ready to meet collision and suffering."

The saying of Mahomet alone served for motto in the first edition.

Page 245, note 1. In this list of plays, all from Beaumont and Fletcher, Mr. Emerson evidently trusted to his memory, and gave to one the name from a leading character. There is no play by the name of "Sophocles," but the extract given is from

a piece called "Four Plays in One," the special play being "The Triumph of Honor." This is founded on a story of Boccaccio's in the Decameron, the tenth day and the fifth novel.

Page 247, note 1. Burley's description of the incorruptibility of the young nobleman in Old Mortality, chapter xlii.,—a passage often repeated by Mr. Emerson to his children.

Page 248, note 1. From youth to age he took delight in Plutarch, the Lives and the Morals. This passage from Mr. Emerson's Introduction to Professor William Watson Goodwin's translations of the Morals (printed also in Lectures and Biographical Sketches) shows what attracted him to Plutarch. "His extreme interest in every trait of character and his broad humanity lead him constantly to Morals, to the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the Soul."

Page 250, note 1. This paragraph is suggestive of much that is written in "Aristocracy," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 251, note 1.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

Best befriended of the God He who, in evil times, Warned by an inward voice, Heeds not the darkness and the dread, Biding by his rule and choice, Feeling only the fiery thread

Leading over heroic ground, Walled with mortal terror round, To the aim which him allures, And the sweet heaven his deed secures. "Voluntaries," Poems.

Page 253, note 1. From Shakspeare's Henry IV., Part II., Act II., Scene ii.

Page 253, note 2. In the translation of the Oriental Geography of Ibn (or Ebn) Haukal, by Sir George Ouseley, published in London in 1800, this anecdote may be found with somewhat different wording.

Page 254, note 1. One of the most remarkable instances of Mr. Emerson's applied philosophy is the absence in his journals of complaint of untimely, exacting, and wearisome visitors, towards whose bodies and souls he had to exercise hospitality. Once or twice nature asserts herself by a half-humorous explosion of protest.

The subjects that inspired the poem "The Visit" were probably unaware that they outstayed their welcome.

Page 256, note 1. Another version of this story is told by Plutarch in his "Apothegms of Kings and Great Commanders," in the Morals, "When Paetilius and Quintus accused him of many crimes before the people; 'On this very day,' he said, 'I conquered Hannibal and Carthage; I for my part am going with my crown on to the capitol to sacrifice; and let him that pleaseth stay and pass his vote upon me.' Having thus said, he went his way; and the people followed him, leaving his accusers declaiming to themselves."

Page 257, note 1. An allusion to the charm of "the novel, hardly smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother" by the schoolboy, occurs again in "Domestic Life" in the passage

which describes the home life of the Emerson brothers in childhood.

Page 258, note 1.

Because I was content with these poor fields, Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams, And found a home in haunts which others scorned, The partial wood-gods overpaid my love And granted me the freedom of their state. "Musketaquid," Poems.

Page 260, note 1. "Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do: sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive." These were the teachings which the Emerson boys received in their youth from their brilliant, loving, and eccentric aunt, Miss Mary Moody Emerson. Her nephew has left an account of her in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. His words concerning her are carved upon her gravestone in Concord Cemetery: "She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in education could supply."

Page 262, note 1. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister of intelligence, courage and blameless character, devoted himself to the cause of awakening public sentiment in the Southern and Border States to the wrong of Slavery and its evil results, and become editor of the St. Louis Observer. His press was destroyed by a mob, and he and his family were driven from the city. He then settled in Alton, Illinois, and established his paper, maintaining anti-slavery views. Riots resulted, and three presses, furnished in succession by friends of the cause, were destroyed. Mr. Lovejoy sent for another press. A public meeting of citizens was called because of the

excited state of public opinion in the city. Resolutions were passed requiring Lovejoy to retire from the charge of his paper. He stood upon his rights under the Constitution to publish his beliefs freely. To the demand that in deference to mob law he should yield up his post, he said: "This I never will do. God in his providence—so say all my brethren, and so I think—has devolved upon me the responsibility of maintaining my ground here; and, Mr. Chairman, I am determined to do it. A voice comes to me from Maine, from Massachusetts, from Connecticut, from New York, from Pennsylvania,—yea, from Kentucky, form Mississippi, from Missouri, calling upon me in the name of all that is dear in heaven or earth to stand fast, and by the help of God I will stand. I know I am but one and you are many. My strength will avail but little against you all. You can crush me if you will, but I shall die at my post, for I cannot and will not forsake it." The press arrived and was lodged by his friends in a stone warehouse belonging to one of a gallant little company who undertook to defend the right of free speech. On the night of November 7, 1837, the mob demanded the press. The city authorities gave no protection. Mr. Lovejoy's friends refused to surrender and were attacked. They resisted, and when the building was set on fire, Lovejoy coming out to prevent it was shot dead.

Mr. George P. Bradford, one of Mr. Emerson's nearest friends, described to me the occasion when he delivered this discourse in Boston. Towards the end of the lecture, while carrying his audience—the cultivated people of Boston—with him, in full sympathy with devoted courage in other times and lands, suddenly, looking his hearers in the eyes, he brought before them the instance in their own day and country, and told of the martyrdom of Lovejoy for the right of

free speech. Mr. Bradford said that a cold shudder seemed to run through the audience at this calm braving of public opinion twenty years before its ripening in the great war for freedom. Of course Lovejoy had other defenders in Boston, notably Wendell Phillips, who first entered the lists as an anti-slavery champion at the time of his slaying.

Page 262, note 2.

Freedom's secret wilt thou know? Counsel not with flesh and blood; Loiter not for cloak or food; Right thou feelest such to do.

Page 263, note 1. These lines were evidently quoted from memory from "A Dirge," one of Tennyson's early poems. The burden, "Let them rave," runs through all the verses. The following one comes as near the lines as quoted as any of them:—

Thou wilt not turn upon thy bed; Chaunteth not the brooding bee Sweeter tones than calumny? Let them rave. Thou wilt never raise thine head From the green that folds thy grave— Let them rave.

THE OVER-SOUL

This essay was not given as a lecture in the Boston courses. Portions of it came from "Religion" in that on the "Philosophy of History" (1836-37), from "Holiness" in that on "Human Culture" (1837-38); much was taken from the "Doctrine of the Soul," the first lecture in the course on

"Human Life," and a little from "School" in the same course.

Mr. George Willis Cooke in his Life of Emerson speaks of the influence first exerted by German thought in this country about the year 1830, received mainly through Coleridge as a medium, in opposition to the utilitarian views held by English moralists. I quote from his interesting chapter on "The Era of Transcendentalism:" "The new thought was everywhere a reaction against it [the philosophy of Locke and Bentham, and of many English Unitarians]. … It declared that man has innate ideas, and a faculty transcending the senses and the understanding. It identified morality and religion, and made intuition their source. Coleridge calls this transcendent faculty Reason, and regarded it as the immediate beholding of supersensual things. He says it cannot be called a faculty, and much less a personal property of the human mind. We do not possess it, but partake of it. It is identical with the Universal Reason, a spark from which enters the human mind. He says there is but one reason, which all intelligent beings share in, and it is identical in them all. This idea became most fruitful in Emerson's mind, the source of his doctrine of the Over-Soul."

It is certain that Mr. Emerson set a high value on Coleridge's teachings, through which he first came in contact with German ideas, but his eager readings of Plato, beginning in college, led him later to Plotinus, Porphyry, Synesius, Proclus, and the other Neo-platonists influenced by Oriental thought. These "great spiritual lords who have walked in the world," "the high priesthood of the pure reason,"1 3.5 had given him a broader conception than contemporary preachers entertained of "Him in whom we live and move and have our being."

Dr. Holmes, in commenting on "The Over-Soul," says: "It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words, and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of Consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea, which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision."

The only motto which was prefixed to the essay in the first edition was that from the Psychozoia, or Life of the Soul, Canto II., 19, by Henry More, printed in 1620. This verse was included by Mr. Emerson in his collection of poems, Parnassus, where he gave it the title "Euthanasia."

Page 267, note 1. Hardly anywhere in his writings has Mr. Emerson stated his belief in the sure triumph of beneficent law more compactly than in this sentence, suggesting that the leaven of conscience would work to the salvation of the race.

Page 268, note 1. This expression recalls the line in which Mr. Emerson took great pleasure in a poem sent to him by Mr. George E. Tufts, of New York:—

Life is a flame whose splendor hides its base.

Page 268, note 2. Again the doctrine of "The Flowing":

Far seen the river glides below, Tossing one sparkle to the eyes. I catch thy meaning, wizard wave; The River of my Life replies. "Peter's Field," Poems, Appendix.

Page 270, note 1. Dr. Holmes said that "In the 'Over

Soul' Emerson attempted the impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his rhapsody,—nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his readers. … The 'Over-Soul' might almost be called the Over-flow of a spiritual imagination."

Page 270, note 2. Compare the essay on "Demonology" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 270, note 3. This suggests the expressions of Coleridge as rendered by Mr. Cooke in the note at the beginning of this chapter.

Page 271, note 1. This, as Mr. Emerson says elsewhere, is the weakness of talent as compared with genius.

Page 271, note 2. Found in a list of Spanish proverbs given in one of his early journals.

Page 272, note 1.

Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

Lines from the "Ode to Beauty," Poems; used also as motto to "The Poet," in Essays, Second Series.

Page 274, note 1. In the first edition this last clause is thus given: "All else is idle weeds for her wearing."

Page 275, note 1. The doctrine of Each in All, the Ἓν καὶ πᾶν of Xenophanes, and "the venerable and awful Parmenides," is also a familiar thought of Plato.

Page 275, note 2. Through his preaching, and increasingly through his lecturing experiences, Emerson honored his hearers, however humble, by not "coming down to them," but reached them by his assuming their virtue, and speaking to the "common soul" in them.

Page 276, note 1. A favorite image with him, drawn from

the Copernican astronomy, which, by considering the system from the central sun, did away with the perturbations apparent in the Ptolemaic system. This is spiritualized in the poem "Uriel."

Page 278, note 1. John Murray Forbes, a great and silent power for good in the State and Country during and after the Civil War, and one of Mr. Emerson's valued friends, used to tell his children: "So the thing is done, it is of no consequence who does it."

Page 278, note 2. "We know better than we do," and "We are wiser than we know," recur in Emerson's teachings. The line in "The Problem,"—

He builded better than he knew,—

has passed into a proverb.

Page 278, note 3. In the end of the poem "Worship" this image is rendered in verse.

Page 279, note 1. With this may be compared a paragraph in the essay "Education" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 281, note 1. Here, as also some three pages earlier in this essay, recurs the favorite image—

Being's tide Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms Live, robed with beauty, painted by the sun; Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God, Throbs with an overmastering energy Knowing and doing. "Pan," Poems, Appendix.

Page 281, note 2. He quotes Bacon elsewhere as saying, "Nature is commanded by obeying her."

Page 282, note 1.

Blasted with excess of light. Gray, Progress of Poesy.

Page 282, note 2. It was Emerson's custom to answer the crude inquiries on great subjects of his young visitors courteously, not directly, but in a way to show the great proportions of the subject, and set them really thinking. "The gods like indirect names and dislike to be named directly."

Page 283, note 1. This is like a passage in "Demonology," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 284, note 1. Believing in the indestructibility of spirit and of matter, and regarding the latter as a method of instruction, he never disquieted himself, but, assured that he and all men shared in the universal existence, did not care to peep beyond the curtain. He said, "I am. The whole fact is here or nowhere."

Page 285, note 1. The Spirit lodged in man has spurred him to seeking light, and works out the answer in his life.

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. "Brahma," Poems.

Page 286, note 1.

Thou art the unanswered question. "The Sphinx," Poems.

God enters by a private door into every individual.—"Intellect," Essays, Second Series.

Page 286, note 2. In his first letter to John Sterling Emerson said, speaking of Sterling's paper on Carlyle, "In it I

admired the rare behavior, with far less heed the things said; these were opinions, but the tone was the man."

Page 288, note 1. Journal, 1851. "There is something—our brothers over the sea do not know it or own it; Scott, Southey, Hallam, and Dickens would deny and blaspheme it—which is setting them all aside, and the whole world also, and planting itself forever and ever."

Page 289, note 1.

Himself from God he could not free. "The Problem," Poems.

Page 289, note 2. This image is used in some lines on the transient character of grief, printed among the "Fragments on Life" in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 292, note 1. Emerson believed that in saying "I and the Father are one" Jesus meant to teach that all men could become channels of deity, instancing himself.

Page 292, note 2. Dr. Holmes spoke of him as "an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship." In quoting this passage, Mr. Cabot adds: "That is well said. But I am not sure that he took them down, or ever thought it worth while that they should come down so long as they were really objects of worship. What he wished to disturb was formalism, … the gazing after past revelations until we are blind to the present."

Page 293, note 1. This thought is found in the second motto of "Compensation," "And all that Nature made thine own," etc.

Page 293, note 2. This sentence was first an entry made by Mr. Emerson in his Journal on the eve of going to deliver his Divinity School Address in 1838. The sentence and the

entire paragraph were a portion of a sermon preached, probably in the following winter, in East Lexington. Mrs. Emerson cared so much for this passage that she gave it to her children to read while they were very young.

Page 297, note 1.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, My oldest force is good as new, And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew. "Song of Nature," Poems.

CIRCLES

No part of this essay appears to have been taken from earlier papers, and no lecture of that name is recorded. On the 12th of September, 1840, in a letter to Miss Elizabeth Hoar, Mr. Emerson wrote: "My chapter on 'Circles' begins to prosper, and when it is October I shall write like a Latin Father."

His friend, William Ellery Channing, thus spoke of the range of Emerson's mind:—

The circles of thy thought shine vast as stars, No glass shall round them, No plummet sound them, They hem the observer like bright steel wrought bars, And limpid as the sun, Or as bright waters run From the cold fountain of the Alpine springs, Or diamonds richly set in the king's rings.

Dr. Richard Garnett1 3.6 writes: "The object of this fine essay

quaintly entitled 'Circles' is to reconcile this rigidity of unalterable law with the fact of human progress. Compensation illustrates one property of a circle, which always returns to the point where it began, but it is no less true that around every circle another can be drawn. … Hence there is no security but in infinite progress. … Emerson followed his own counsel; he always keeps a reserve of power. His theory of 'Circles' reappears without the least verbal indebtedness to himself in the splendid essay on 'Love.'"

The poem "Uriel" should be read in connection with this essay.

Page 301, note 1.

Line in Nature is not found, Unit and Universe are round. "Uriel," Poems.

Page 301, note 2.

Another morn has risen on mid-noon. Milton, Paradise Lost, V., 310.

The last clause in the sentence suggests one by Mr. Emerson's neighbor poet, William Ellery Channing, in "The Poet's Hope,"—

If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.

Page 302, note 1. The old doctrine of Heracleitus again, brought to the modern use of progress by evolution. The prophecies of 1841 made in the later portion of this paragraph have been strangely fulfilled in sixty years.

Page 303, note 1.

Giddy with motion, Nature reels, Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream, The mountains flow, the solids seem,

Change acts, reacts; back, forward hurled, And pause were palsy to the world. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 304, note 1. "Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence."—Nature, chapter iv.

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

Page 304, note 2. It was a curious superstition in the Middle Ages that evil spirits could not get out of a circle drawn around them. Some American Indians leave a slight break in the colored circles that decorate their baskets for the Devil to get out.

Page 307, note 1.

Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man.

Samuel Daniels "To the Countess of Cumberland." (Quoted in "Civilization," Society and Solitude.)

Page 307, note 2. The ideas expressed in this paragraph may also be found in the Poems.

Have I a lover Who is noble and free?— I would he were nobler Than to love me. "The Sphinx," Poems.

Heartily know, When half-gods go The gods arrive." "Give All to Love," Poems.

See also "The Park."

Page 308, note 1. It was Mr. Emerson's own habit in his lectures, after presenting strongly one side of his theme, suddenly to show the other aspect of it, almost ignored before. This might be done in another lecture of the course, but often in the same one.

In vain produced, all rays return. Evil will bless, and ice will burn. "Uriel," Poems.

Page 311, note 1. In "The Poet," I. (Appendix), and in "Woodnotes," II., in the passage beginning, "Hearken once more," he tells of the instability of apparent permanencies.

Page 312, note 1. The necessary alternation from books to nature, from society to solitude, was always urged by Mr. Emerson, the latter in each case ranking the former. See the passage in "The American Scholar" beginning "Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated."

See thou bring not to field or stone The fancies found in books; Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own, To brave the landscape's looks. "Waldeinsamkeit," Poems.

Page 313, note 1. The need of direct relation of the soul with God is dwelt upon at length in the latter part of the "Address to the Senior Class of the Divinity School" in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures: "Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone … and dare to love God without mediator or veil," etc.

Page 314, note 1. The welcome idea of the symbolism of Nature he received first from Plato, and it was this which

gave him pleasure in Swedenborg's teachings. "The noblest ministry of Nature is to stand as an apparition of God."—Nature, chapter vii.

Page 314, note 2. Compare the second motto of "Compensation" in this volume.

Page 317, note 1. From Young's Night Thoughts.

Page 317, note 2. Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 B. C.) taught that truth was unattainable, and that men should be indifferent to all external circumstances.

Page 318, note 1. This consoling idea of Good out of Evil is taught in the motto for "Spiritual Laws" in this volume and in "Uriel" in the Poems.

The balance-beam of Fate was bent, The bounds of good and ill were rent, Strong Hades could not keep his own, But all slid to confusion.

Page 318, note 2. Dr. Holmes, referring to this paragraph, says: "But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his essay entitled 'Circles,' that the reader cannot take issue with him as against utterances which he will not defend."

Page 319, note 1. His poem "Terminus" shows how Emerson met advancing old age.

INTELLECT

This lecture was not given in any of the Boston courses. Passages of no great length were taken from the lectures on "Literature" in the course on "The Philosophy of History" (1836-37), and from "The Doctrine of the Soul" and "Genius" in that on "Human Life" (1838-39).

Mr. Emerson never took any pleasure in systems of metaphysics. He even once said in a lecture, "Who has not looked into a metaphysical book? And what sensible man ever looked twice?" "Yet," as Mr. Cabot says in his Memoir, "the repulsiveness lay not in the subject, but in the way in which it is treated." He wished to "state the laws and powers of the mind as simply and as attractively as the physical laws are stated by Owen and Faraday." He welcomed all the scientific discoveries of his day for their symbolic value, assured that the same laws ruled mind and matter. Hence for years he planned a work on the Natural History of Intellect. He gave three lectures on that subject in England in 1848, and later others in America, especially two courses at Harvard College. But he was prevented by failing strength from completing the work he designed. After his death Mr. Cabot collected what matter was available from the manuscripts, and this gives the title to the volume Natural History of Intellect.

The motto of this chapter appears in one of Mr. Emerson's note-books as the third verse of a short poem which is included in the Appendix to the Poems, among the "Fragments on the Poet." The introductory verses run thus:—

Pale genius roves alone, No scout can track his way, None credits him till he have shown His diamonds to the day.

Not his the feaster's wine, Nor land, nor gold, nor power, By want and pain God screeneth him Till his elected hour.

Page 325, note 1. Mr. Emerson at the age of nineteen was associated with his brother William, who taught a private school for young ladies in Boston. In this capacity he taught chemistry from some elementary text-book, possibly showing a few of the simpler experiments. Later he heard with great interest of the discoveries in that science from his wife's brother, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, an accomplished chemist and geologist. Each new fact he viewed as a symbol awaiting interpretation.

Page 327, note 1. Journal, "Of the most romantic fact the memory is more romantic."

Page 327, note 2. "Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open."

Page 328, note 1. In the early part of "Natural History of Intellect" in the volume thus named, Intellect is considered "as an ethereal sea, which ebbs and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea every human house has a water front. But this force, creating nature, visiting whom it will and withdrawing from whom it will, making day where it comes and leaving night when it departs, is no fee or property of man or angel. It is as the light, public and entire to each, and on the same terms."

Page 329, note 1. Mr. Emerson himself strove to render the thought that came to him truly, not to "meddle ambitiously" and spoil it by "what we miscall Art," as he said in his letter to Sterling.1 3.7 He brought kindred thoughts together, but purposely did not elaborate the argument, and left to the reader the pleasure of letting the electric spark pass and show the connection.

Page 332, note 1. "It is a little seed," found in the first edition, is here omitted.

Page 333, note 1. "Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange despised things. … And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts,—then finds that a day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God."—"Education," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 335, note 1. The seeming contradiction by this sentence of what has gone before, as to the reception rather than the originating of ideas, is done away with by the author's strictly classic use of the word produce,—to bring forward the ideas received, joined perhaps with others that shed light on them.

Page 336, note 1.

Unless to thought be added will, Apollo is an imbecile. Lines from one of the Note-books.

Page 339, note 1. "Excess of individualism, when it is not corrected or subordinated to the Supreme Reason, makes that vice which we stigmatize as monotones, … or, as the French say, enfant perdu d' une conviction isolée, which give such a comic tinge to all society."—Natural History of Intellect.

Page 340, note 1.

For thought, and not praise, Thought is the wages For which I sell days, Will gladly sell ages, And willing grow old, Deaf and dumb and blind and cold,

Melting matter into dreams, Panoramas which I saw, And whatever glows or seems Into substance, into law. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 341, note 1. The duties and sacrifice required of the scholar are dwelt on in "The American Scholar" in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, and in "The Man of Letters" and "The Scholar" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 343, note 1. The Egyptian god Horus is represented with his finger on his lips.

Page 344, note 1. His counsel was always to "read a little proudly," and in life he urged that one should not mistake others' chivalries for one's own.

Page 345, note 1. A name given to a group of philosophers, mostly Neo-platonists, from the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (thrice great), a Greek name for the Egyptian god Thoth, to whom many of these writings were ascribed.

Page 346, note 1. This saying is quoted from Plotinus. It is evident from his mention of these masters of ancient thought and his markings on the fly-leaves of their books, that, following his custom, he rapidly found such things as were for him, and turning their abstruse pages "read for lustres." It was evidently the lofty tone that pleased him, and certain quotations and "Chaldean Oracles."

Mr. George Willis Cooke in his book on Emerson, chapter xix., gives an interesting brief abstract of the doctrines of the Neo-platonists.

ART

In the course on the "Philosophy of History" given in Boston in 1836-37, the third lecture was on "Art," following "The Humanity of Science," and preceding "Literature." Much from this lecture appears in this essay, but some pages come from "Eye and Ear," in the next year's course.

In Mr. Emerson's youth there were almost no works of art, except portraits, to be seen in New England. At a sad epoch of his life he landed in Italy and spent a few weeks there. He saw the statues in the museums of Naples and Rome. Looking for greatness of character through works of art, endowed with a good sense of form and fitness, but little for color, and none for technique, he evidently took great and lasting pleasure in the works of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican. The temperance, simplicity and perfect taste of Greek art always charmed him. He saw the Elgin Marbles in London.

After his return he saw the paintings of Allston, enjoyed the drawings of Flaxman, and a friend, a connoisseur in art, lent him his collection of engravings and drawings, in which Mr. Emerson took great pleasure.1 3.8 Among the artists he had few friends, but he read works on art, especially valuing them for the glimpses they gave of the artist at work, and his sayings.

Dr. Holmes, while praising the clothing by Emerson of the common aspects of life with the colors of his imagination, feels that the danger line was crossed when, in the motto to "Art," he would have us give even to

Barrows, trays and pans Grace and glimmer of romance.

Yet he could do so, and see even planetary motion in a school-boy's

play. Journal. "I saw a boy on the Concord Common pick up an old bruised tin milk pan that was rusting by the roadside, and, poising it on the top of a stick, … made it describe the most elegant imaginable curves."

Page 351, note 1. Thomas Couture, in his admirable little book, Méthode et Entretiens d' Atelier, speaks thus of the portrait painter's duty of giving the best that can be seen in his sitter: "Faites faire à toutes vos formes, à toutes voslignes, un travail ascensionnel vers ce que constitue la beauté, tout en restent cependant dans les limites du vrai, et vous obtiendrez un portrait ressemblant qui, à l' étonnement de tous, excepté pourtant celui que vous aurez représenté, semblera beaucoup moins laid que le modéle."

Page 352, note 1. "The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful the individual must be submitted to the universal mind."—"Art," Society and Solitude.

Page 353, note 1. These thoughts are expressed in his poem "The Problem" and in the essay on "History" in this volume.

"Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as earth and sun."—"Art," Society and Solitude.

Page 355, note 1. Selection, "the first office of art," and then what Ruskin calls "Principality,"—the concentration of interest, or focussing in a picture,—are dwelt upon in this paragraph, and the old doctrine of the Macrocosm shown in the Microcosm.

Page 356, note 1. As stated by the squirrel to the mountain, in an early poem of Emerson's,—

Talents differ, All is well and wisely put;

If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.

Page 357, note 1. Mr. Emerson found, and said of himself, that, though he did not have a musical ear, he had "musical eyes." In the physical and metaphysical sense his eyes were opened. Like his Seyd,—

Beauty chased he everywhere,—

and he found what he looked for.

Page 358, note 1. Mr. Emerson knew well the truth which the French artist insisted on to his pupils: "It is not true that one knows what one sees. One sees what one knows."

This paragraph was taken from the lecture "Eye and Ear" in the course on "Human Culture."

Page 359, note 1. An instance of his happy use of his classical studies in the choice of this best yet unusual word.

Page 361, note 1.

Coelum non animum mutant Qui trans mare currunt. Horace.

Page 361, note 2. See Hamlet, Act I., Scene v.

Page 362, note 1. In the "Fragments on the Poet," in the Poems, he tells of a random word, overheard from the Muse,—

I travelled and found it at Rome; Eastward it filled all Heathendom, And it lay on my hearth when I came home.

Page 362, note 1. "Newton did not exercise more ingenuity, but less than another to see the world."

"Art," Society and Solitude.

Page 363, note 1. His application of the evolution doctrines of Hunter and Lamarck appears in the words tendency and effort.

Page 363, note 2. With "the negative," the dismal, or sceptical in painting or in writing he had no sympathy.

Page 364, note 1. This paragraph seems a strong instance of that quality of Mr. Emerson of stating aspects without qualification, against which he warns his readers in "Circles": "When I obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. … I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back." He valued painting, and sculpture more, and the motto, written long after the essay itself, shows his feeling of the necessity and blessing of art.

Page 367, note 1. The low state of art in his day and country should be remembered.

Page 369, note 1. Emerson's far sight and faith went beyond the materialism of his age and country, regarding these as a necessary stage in evolution.

Notes

• 1 1.1

  ¹ Nature, and the various addresses, published at first separately in pamphlet form.
• 1 1.2

  Alluding to Emerson's first visit to him among the moors of Nithsdale in 1833.
• 1 1.3

  A Correspondence between John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• 1 1.4

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philosophy. Bostons J. R. Oagood & Co. 1887.
• 1 3.1

  Referring to a time when trouble with the eyes deprived him for a time of their use.
• 1 3.2

  "Polarity (Physics). A term used to designate opposite or dissimilar properties or powers simultaneously developed by a common cause in opposite or contrasted parts, as in the extremities of a magnet, or in the sides of a polarized ray of light, situated respectively in the plane of polarization and the plane perpendicular to it."—Worcester's Dictionary.
• 1 3.3

  Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.
• 1 3.4

  Correspondence of Sterling and Emerson.
• 1 3.5

  In the last pages of the essay on "Intellect."
• 1 3.6

  Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Richard Garnett, LL. D., London, Walter Scott, 1888.
• 1 3.7

  Letters of Emerson and Sterling, No. IV.
• 1 3.8

  See Letters of Emerson to a Friend. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.