The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men [Vol. 4]

NOTES

NOTES

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

MR. EMERSON eagerly sought anecdote or evidence which made good the oracles of the inspired minds. Not only in boyhood, when such enthusiasm is natural, he took keen pleasure in brave achievement, whether in the closet or the field: all through life he held to his faith in the Individual rather than the Organization. It was largely from him that the young Charles Russell Lowell learned his faith, later acted up to on the battlefield, that "the world advances by impossibilities achieved."

The astounding passage of the Alps by the First Consul with his army would have been among the first stories of the great world that reached Emerson's ears as a boy, and later the fame of the Emperor's rapid marches across Europe and repeated overthrow of the armies of the banded monarchs of Feudalism, compelling them to treat for peace at the very gates of their capitals. Mr. Emerson used to say, "I like people who can do things." No wonder that Napoleon was chosen as one type of the great man in this book. But the moral element was lacking, and the sudden reverse of the scale—

"When one that sought but Duty's iron crown On that loud Sabbath shook the Spoiler down"—

made the lesson complete; showed the sure working of the great Law.

There is no need of seeking when the young Emerson made a friend of Shakspeare. In those serious New England days

when there were no exciting athletics, and out-of-door play was a diversion after duties were done, and when in every well-ordered home the rule prevailed, "Little folks should be seen and not heard," children naturally sought for what comfort books allowed, and sometimes, opening a cover, found it a gate to fairy-land. For happily A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth were on the shelf with Mason On Self-knowledge.

But before the elders had ceased to talk of the flood and the ebb in the fortune of Napoleon, then a captive at St. Helena, the boy, now in college and eagerly reading in the library, to the detriment of algebra, perhaps while studying for his Bowdoin prize dissertations1 1.1 came upon The True Intellectual System of the Universe by Ralph Cudworth (1678). In the review there given of the systems of ancient speculation, in order to show that belief in one sovereign God underlay the polytheism of the Pagan nations, it is probable that Mr. Emerson acquired his first knowledge of Plato's writings. In his journal for 1845 he wrote thus of an experience just after leaving college: "Men read so differently with purpose so unlike. I had read in Cudworth from time to time for years, and one day talked of him with Charles W. Upham, my classmate, and found him acquainted with Cudworth's argument and theology, and quite heedless of all I read him for,—namely, his citations from Plato and the philosophers, so that, if I had not from my youth loved the man, I suppose we might have 'inter-despised,' as De Quincey said of Wordsworth, and (perhaps) Mackintosh."

It appears from the journals that while living in Canterbury (Roxbury) in 1825, the young Emerson, flying from the

daily terrors of his school for young ladies in Boston, was seeking for some bit of spiritual refreshment in the remains of his father's library. Among the books of desiccated sermons and the commentaries on the Scriptures he came upon an odd volume of Cotton's translation of Montaigne which proved a friend indeed. In the lecture on Montaigne in this volume he relates this experience, but in the journal for 1873 he adds, "No book before or since was ever so much to me as that."

In the fourth year after leaving college, when he had left the desk of the schoolmaster for his study at Divinity Hall, Emerson read a little book newly published in Boston, The Growth of the Mind, by Sampson Reed, which first attracted his attention to Swedenborg. Its author, a quiet druggist in Boston, and a member of the Swedenborgian Church, had graduated at Harvard at the end of Emerson's Freshman year. Some early verses, never finished, entitled only S. R., seemed to show that even then something in Sampson Reed had attracted him. They begin,—

Demure apothecary, Whose early reverend genius my young eye With wonder followed and undoubting joy, Believing in that cold and modest form Brooded alway the everlasting mind, And that thou, faithful, didst obey the soul.

This book made Mr. Emerson a reader of Swedenborg, even in his days of study for the ministry.

To the writings of Goethe there can be little doubt that he was first introduced by Coleridge. In his "Blotting Book," in which he noted and copied passages which pleased him in his reading, in the autumn of 1830 are several from Wilhelm Meister and other writings of Goethe, as well as from the

Life of Goethe. It was certainly Carlyle's love of German and of Goethe that set Emerson to the task of learning the language and reading the Master in the original tongue. In the early letters that passed between the friends Goethe is discussed, Mr. Emerson never being able to share to the full in his friend's value for Goethe. But it is certain that for the love of his friend he struggled through nearly all of the fifty-five volumes of a pocket edition of the works in German, though he never really mastered the difficulties of the language.

In a letter to Carlyle on June 29, 1845, after confessing to this "gigantic anti-poet,"1 1.2 as John Sterling called him, his own recent resolve to publish a volume of poems, and excusing his friend in advance from reading a word of them, he adds: "Meantime I think to set a few heads before me as good texts for winter evening entertainments. I wrote a deal about Napoleon a few months ago after reading a library of memoirs. Now I have Plato, Montaigne and Swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind."2 1.3

Again, September 15, in the same year he writes, "I am to read to a society in Boston presently some lectures,—on Plato, or the Philosopher; Swedenborg, or the Mystic; Montaigne, or the Skeptic; Shakespeare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of the World;—if I dare, and much lecturing makes us incorrigibly rash. Perhaps, before I end it, my list will be longer, and the measure of presumption overflowed. I may take names less reverend than some of these,—but six lectures I have promised. I find this obligation usually a good

spur to the sides of that dull horse I have charge of. But many of its advantages must be regarded at a long distance." The course of seven lectures was first given before the Boston Lyceum in the Odeon in the winter of 1845-46.

When in response to the urgent invitation of several friends, Mr. Emerson, in the late autumn of 1847, crossed the ocean to lecture in England, his first course after landing, given before the Manchester Athenaeum, was that on "Representative Men." The lectures on Napoleon and on Shakspeare were later given in Exeter Hall in London.

The record of the impression made on one of his hearers by this American lecturer at his first appearance before English audiences may be interesting. It is from the Memoir by the late Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester.1 1.4

"The first impression one had in listening to him in public was that his manner was so singularly quiet and unimpassioned that you began to fear the beauty and force of his thoughts were about to be marred by what might almost be described as monotony of expression. But very soon was this apprehension dispelled. The mingled dignity, sweetness and strength of his features, the earnestness of his manner and voice, and the evident depth and sincerity of his convictions gradually extorted your deepest attention and made you feel that you were within the grip of no ordinary man, but of one 'sprung of Earth's first blood' with 'titles manifold;' and as he went on with serene self-possession and an air of conscious power reading sentence after sentence, charged with well-weighed meaning and set in words of faultless aptitude, you could no longer withstand his 'so potent spell,' but were forthwith compelled to surrender yourself to the fascination of his eloquence.

He used little or no action. … Perhaps no orator ever succeeded with so little exertion in entrancing his audience, stealing away each faculty, and leading the listeners captive to his will. He abjured all force and excitement—dispensing his regal sentences in all mildness, goodness and truth, but stealthily and surely he grew upon you from the smallest proportions, as it were; steadily increasing, until he became a Titan. … The moment he finished he took up his MS. and quietly glided away,—disappearing before his audience could give vent to their applause."

Representative Men was published January 1, 1850. A copy was sent to Carlyle, who, "a remorseful man," acknowledged it in an affectionate letter written July 19, 1850, telling, however, that his own life had been meanwhile "black with care and toil." In it he said: "Chapman, with due punctuality at the time of publication, sent me the Representative Men; which I read in the becoming manner: you now get the book offered you for a shilling, at all railway stations; and indeed I perceive the word 'representative man' (as applied to the tragic loss we have had in Sir Robert Peel) has been accepted by the Able-Editors and circulates through newspapers as an appropriate household word, which is some compensation for the piracy you suffer from the typographic Letter-of-Marque men here. I found the book a most finished, clear and perfect set of Engravings in the line manner; portraitures full of likeness, and abounding in instruction and materials for reflection to me: thanks always for such a Book; and Heaven send us many more of them. Plato, I think, though it is the most admired by many, did the least for me: little save Socrates with his clogs and big ears remains alive with me from it. Swedenborg is excellent in likeness; excellent in many respects; yet I said to myself, on reaching your

general conclusion about the man and his struggles: 'Missed the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of Philosophy, say you? By Heaven, in clutching at it, and almost getting it, he has tumbled into Bedlam,—which is a terrible miss, if it were never so near! A miss fully as good as a mile, I should say.'—In fact, I generally dissented a little about the end of all these Essays; which was notable, and not without instructive interest to me, as I had so lustily shouted 'Hear, hear!' all the way from the beginning up to that stage.—On the whole let us have another book with your earliest convenience: that is the modest request one makes of you on shutting this."

Earlier in the letter Carlyle had said, "Though I see well enough what a great deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking at this world,—I see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite again: and the two souls are at one."

The new book was well received on both sides of the ocean. It was naturally at that time a more popular book than the Essays had been. It received a most appreciative yet critical notice in the Revue des Deux Mondes from Emile Montégut, who was struck with Emerson's detachment from the political and religious excitements of the moment, for it appeared just after the Revolution in France of 1848. He said, "Revolutions and reactions intimidate him not at all and do not draw him in the least from his convictions. In nothing does he offer sacrifice to the spirit of the moment. He speaks of Swedenborg and Plato at the moment when the whole universe has ears only for Proudhon and Louis Blanc. He praises the skepticism of Montaigne as if he did not live in a century which boasts of having the most absolute philosophies."

Mr. Emerson's friend Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, in a letter written in December, 1851, said:—

"I found your Representative Men in the hands of a dame du Palais at Vienna in' 48 and have learned that she has been exiled, having made herself politically obnoxious."

This "Representative Men" may have been a newspaper report of the lectures as delivered in London, or, more probably, Mr. Greenough made a mistake either in the volume or the date.

But the book was not everywhere valued. Mr. George W. Cooke tells in his book on Mr. Emerson that a writer in the New Englander found it "purely ridiculous for any one to laboriously write out and gravely read to large assemblies such gratuitous absurdities," and made other severe strictures; among other things, saying that a large part of what Mr. Emerson had then written "must be little else than a caricature of himself." The same idea in a more courteous and complimentary form was, after Emerson's death, expressed by Dr. Holmes in his Memoir, thus: "He shows his own affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography, no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of his better worth study by those who wish to understand not Plato, not Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest us for their own sake, but we know a good deal about most of them, and Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero unintentionally, unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first to recognize."

There is a story of the effect of this book on a schoolboy looking for light which should here be told:—"I remember a day when I stood idly over a counter looking at the backs of what seemed to be newly published books. I drew out one, bound in plain black muslin. Its title, Representative

Men, attracted me, because I had just been reading Plutarch's Lives, and for the first time had been aroused by the reading of any book. Those Greek and Roman men moved my horizon some distance from its customary place. The titles of the books were at least cousins, and I wondered if there had been any representative men since Epaminondas and Scipio. I opened the volume at the beginning, 'Uses of Great Men,' and read a few pages, becoming more and more agitated until I could read no more there. It was as if I had looked into a mirror for the first time. I turned around, fearful lest some one had observed what had happened to me; for a complete revelation was opened in those few pages, and I was no longer the same being that had entered the shop. These were the words for which I had been hungering and waiting. This was the education I wanted—the message that made education possible and study profitable, a foundation, and not a perpetual scaffolding. These pages opened for me a path, and opened it through solid walls of ignorance and the limiting environment of a small country academy. All that is now far, far away, and seems indeed an alien history; yet however much one may have wandered among famous books, it would be ungrateful not to remember the one book which was the talisman to all its fellows."1 1.5

USES OF GREAT MEN

Page 3, note 1. Mr. Emerson tells in his Poems how, when the west wind was making music in the AEolian harp in his study windows,—

Not long ago at eventide, It seemed, so listening, at my side A window rose, and, to say sooth, I looked forth on the fields of youth: I saw fair boys bestriding steeds, I knew their forms in fancy weeds, Long, long concealed by sundering fates, Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates, Stronger and bolder far than I, With grace, with genius, well attired And then as now from far admired, Followed with love They knew not of, With passion cold and shy. "The Harp."

Again, perhaps recalling the good and wise women who had fostered his childhood and early youth, he tells that it is revealed to the poet,—

That blessed gods in servile masks Plied for thee thy household tasks. "Saadi."

Page 4, note 1. With Mr. Emerson the benefits and pleasures of travel were incidental. He used the opportunities by the way, but when invited to travel for pleasure, inclined to say like the young Jesus, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" Men interested him more than places: his New England village was enough for him. His journal of travel in 1833, the substance of which appears in the first chapter of English Traits, shows this. The verses, "Written at Rome, 1833," in the Poems, end with a longing to find the true man, whom a few weeks later he sought out among the Scottish moors.

Page 4, note 2. To the same purpose is a passage about "the masses" early in "Considerations by the Way," in Conduct of Life, and in a more human and sympathetic tone in the last pages of the present essay.

Page 4, note 3.

"We find in our dull road their shining track." Lowell's Commemoration Ode.

Page 5, note 1. As elsewhere this idealist concedes—"Treat men and women well. Treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are."

Page 7, note 1. It is not easy for the generation who remember only the end of the nineteenth century to believe that the persons thus described abounded in New England at the time when this book was written. When the period of unrest is again followed by one of eager aspiration, the like may occur.

Page 8, note 1. When young people brought their problems to Mr. Emerson, they may at first have experienced disappointment at not receiving the easy answers for which they hoped. His answer was a large one, more serviceable later, if they considered it. Their individualities were different from his, and scope must be left for these. He wrote in his journal, "If we could speak the direct solving words, it would solve us too." Compare the last part of the "Celestial Love" in the Poems.

Page 8, note 2. Jacob Behmen, or Boehme, a Silesian of humble birth in the sixteenth century, a mystic whose writings later attracted much attention. Mr. Emerson was early interested in his works and often mentions them.

Page 9, note 1. He welcomed each discovery for its use

and beauty, and more for its significance, which it was his delight to find. He said of Nature,—

Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more; In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door, A door to something grander,—loftier walls and vaster floor.

And Nature says,—

He lives not who can refuse me; All my force saith, Come and use me.

Page 9, note 2. Among other sentences in the original lecture which were pruned out of the essay because their substance occurs later, was this strong one: "Man is a piece of the Universe made alive."

Page 10, note 1. William Gilbert, the greatest man of science of Queen Elizabeth's reign, especially noted for his discovery that the earth is a great magnet.

Hans Christian Oersted of Denmark, who in 1820 announced his discovery of the identity of electricity and magnetism.

Page 10, note 2. Journal, 1885 (compare passage, varied, in Nature, p. 27). "Natural History by itself has no value: it is like a single sex, but marry it to human history and it is poetry. Whole floras, all Linnaeus's or Buffon's volumes, contain not one line of poetry; but the meanest natural fact, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to a fact in human nature, is beauty, is poetry, is truth at once."

Page 11, note 1.

I am the doubter and the doubt. "Brahma," Poems.

Page 11, note 2. Compare the motto of "Wealth" in Conduct of Life.

Page 13, note 1. But not forgetting, in the material gain, its main use—the spiritual.

Page 14, note 1. This idea is found in the poems "Destiny" and "Fate."

Page 15, note 1.

Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair. "Friendship," Poems.

Page 15, note 2. In his afternoon walks through the Walden woods while he was writing this book, Mr. Emerson saw with respect the unprecedented day's work of the newly imported Irishmen on the Fitchburg Railroad, then in process of construction.

Page 15, note 3. This introductory chapter to the Representative Men may be compared with Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-worship, published ten years earlier. In Mr. Emerson's essay on Aristocracy, called Natural Aristocracy when read as a lecture in England, are several passages similar to the one on this page, sympathizing with the admiration for "men who are incomparably superior to the populace in ways agreeable to the populace, showing them the way they shall go, doing for them what they wish done and cannot do;"—"the steel hid under gauze and lace under flowers and spangles."

Page 16, note 1. This was his own rule—never to "talk down" to others. When in 1834 he made his home in Concord, and began his new life as lecturer and writer, he entered in his journal this resolve:—

"Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem or

book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work. I will say at public lectures and the like those things which I have meditated for their own sake, and not for the first time with a view to that occasion." And again, "Do not cease to utter them and make them as pure of all dross as if thou wert to speak to sages and demigods, and be no whit ashamed if not one, yea, not one in the assembly should give sign of intelligence. Is it not pleasant to you—unexpected wisdom? depth of sentiment in middle life, persons that in the thick of the crowd are true kings and gentlemen without the harness and envy of the throne?"

Page 17, note 1. Mr. Emerson, in the lecture on Shakspeare in this volume, tells of such an experience while seeing Hamlet performed.

Page 18, note 1. He did not believe that men could be forced or pledged to reform. When the way was made beautiful to them, they could not choose but take it. He wished no disciples. "The poet," he said, "is the liberator."

Page 19, note 1. The Over-Soul doctrine.

Page 20, note 1. That is, the ideal, instead of the outward shows of things.

Page 21, note 1. From a noble poem by John Sterling, entitled "Daedalus," in honor of Greek sculpture and lamenting the lost art. This poem by his friend is included in Emerson's collection Parnassus.

Page 21, note 2. Out-of these losses he redeemed "Days," which he once said he thought perhaps his best poem.

Page 21, note 3. Probably suggested by Balzac's Peau de Chagrin.

Page 23, note 1. Journal, April, 1839. "Yesterday I read Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy 'The False One,' which, instead of taking its name from Septimius, ought to have been

'Cleopatra.' A singular fortune is that of the man Caesar, to have given name as he has to all that is heroic ambition in the imaginations of painters and poets. Caesar must still be the speaking-trumpet through which this large wild commanding spirit must always be poured. The Poet would be a great man. His power is intellectual. Instantly he seizes these hollow puppets of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Boadicea, of Belisarius, and inflates them with his own vital air. If he can verily ascend to grandeur,—if his soul is grand, behold his puppets attest his weight, they are no more puppets but instant vehicles of the wine of God: they shine and overflow with the streams of that universal energy that beamed from Caesar's eye, poised itself in Hector's spear, purer sat with Epaminondas, with Socrates, purest with thee, thou holy child Jesus."

Page 23, note 2.

Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles and masters the sword. "Destiny," Poems.

Page 24, note 1. Mr. Emerson gives in a journal an instance of the humble compensations—a case of a poor feeble-minded girl who went about the house bragging that she was not dead.

Page 25, note 1. He told Mr. John Albee, who, still a boy in Andover Academy, visited him, that it was a great day in a man's life when he first read the Symposium.

Page 25, note 2. Mr. Emerson had great skill in lifting the conversation from a low and gossiping level, without apparent reproof or incivility.

Page 27, note 1. "Au nom de Dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme là!"

Page 27, note 2.

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

Page 28, note 1. The Oriental doctrine, alluded to in his poem "Uriel":—

Doomed to long gyration In the sea of generation.

Page 30, note 1.

In vain: the stars are glowing wheels, 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 33, note 1. Mr. Emerson's frequent use of his classical education, not pedantically, but to secure the attention of the reader and make the expression exact and picturesque, is well shown in the choice of the word flagrant as if the human world were traced out in the general dimness by its blazing beacon lights. "Federal errors," a few pages earlier, for mistakes sanctioned by custom is another example.

Page 33, note 2. Immortality in some form seems taken for granted by this expression.

Page 34, note 1.

The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tables still unbroken. "The Problem," Poems.

Page 35, note 1. The constant security of Mr. Emerson's

belief in Evolution in its highest sense appears here as everywhere in his prose and verse, and also his belief in the genius of mankind, which is another word for the Universal Mind. He wrote thus of the Poet in his journal of 1838:—

"Morning and evening he blessed the world. Where he went the trees knew him, and the earth felt him to the roots of the grass. Yet a few things sufficed. One tree was to him as a grove; the eyes of one maiden taught him all charms; and by a single wise man he knew Jesus and Plato and Shakspeare and the angels."

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER

Dr. Richard Garnett, in his Life of Emerson, ends his comment on the previous chapter, the "Uses of Great Men," by saying that "we find ourselves landed at last in Emerson's favourite conclusion [the Universal Mind], with but slight idea how we have arrived at it. 'Genius appears as the exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of a First Cause.' It is the purpose of the remaining lectures to resolve this pure ray of primal intellect into the sixfold spectrum of philosopher, mystic, skeptic, poet, man of the world, and writer respectively personified by Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare, Napoleon, and Goethe."

In Mr. Emerson's journal in the spring of 1845 is this note: "A Pantheon course of lectures should consist of heads like these. [Here follow the six names of the subjects of these chapters.] Jesus should properly be one head, but it requires great power of intellect and of sentiment to subdue the biases

of the mind of the age and render historic justice to the world's chief saint."

As has been said in the introductory note, Mr. Emerson began in his college days to make the acquaintance of Plato, and the readings thereafter were a frequent refreshment. When he went to lonely Nantasket Beach to write his oration, The Method of Nature, he read in Plato for inspiration, and wrote thence to a friend:—

18 JULY, 1841.

I brought here Phaedrus, Meno and the Banquet, which I have diligently read. What a great uniform gentleman is Plato! Nothing is more characteristic of him than his good-breeding. Never pedantic, never wire-drawn or too fine, and never, O never obtuse or saturnine; but so accomplished, so good humoured, so perceptive, so uniting wisdom and poetry, acuteness and humanity, into such a golden average, that one understands how he shall enjoy his long Augustan empire in literature. I have also three volumes new to me of Thomas Taylor's translations, Proclus, Ocellus Lucanus, and Pythagorean Fragments.

The next year he writes to the same friend:—

CONCORD, 7 MAY 1842.

… I read last week the Protagoras and Theages of Plato. The first is excellent and gave me much to think. With what security and common sense this Plato treads the cliffs and pinnacles of Parnassus, as if he walked in a street, and came down again into a street as if he lived there.

My dazzling friends of Alexandria, the New Platonists, have none of this air of facts and society about them. This Socrates is as good as Don Quixote all the time. What impenetrable armor of witty courtesy covers him every moment.

In his journal, under the head of "The Poppy-wreath," he says, "Plato, well guarded from those to whom he does not belong by a river of sleep."

Journal, 1845. "It requires for the reading and final disposition of Plato, all sorts of readers, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, English, and Americans. If it were left to apprehensive, gentle, imaginative, Plato-like persons, no justice would be done to his essence and totality, through the excess or violence of affection that would be spent on his excellence of reason and imagination. But Frenchmen have no reverence, they seize the book like merchants, it is a piece of goods, and is treated without ceremony after the manner of commerce; and though its diviner merits are lost by their profanation, the coarser, namely, the texture and coherence of the whole and its larger plan, its French availableness, its fitness to French taste, by comprehending that. Too much seeing is as fatal to just seeing as blindness is. People speak easily of Cudworth, but I know no book so difficult to read as Cudworth proper. For, as it is a magazine of quotations, of extraordinary ethical sentences, the shining summits of ancient philosophy, and as Cudworth himself is a dull writer, the eye of the reader rests habitually on these wonderful revelations, and refuses to be withdrawn; so that after handling the book for years, the method and the propositions of Cudworth still remain a profound secret. Cudworth is sometimes read without the Platonism; which would be like reading Theobald's Shakspeare, leaving out only what Shakspeare wrote.

"I think the best reader of Plato the least able to receive the totality at first, just as a botanist will get the totality of a field of flowers better than a poet."

Page 39, note 1. The less usual use of "secular," as

applied to books, in its strict classic sense, to mean that live through the ages, is characteristic.

Omar the Caliph was Mahomet's cousin and second successor.

Page 39, note 2. Here came in, in the original lecture, the sentences: "Nothing but God can give invention. Everything else, one would say, the study of Plato would give."

Page 39, note 3. And yet Plato quotes from the earlier men, as mentioned later in this essay and in "Quotation and Originality," Letters and Social Aims.

Page 40, note 1. This rare book is thus entitled:—Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People, exhibited in its professed connection with the European, so as to render either an introduction to the other; being a translation of the AKHLAK-I-JALALY, the most esteemed work of Middle Asia, from the Persian of Fakìr Jāny Muhammad Asäad, (with references and notes), by W. F. Thomson, Esq., of the Bengal Civil Service. London, 1839.

The translator says in his introduction, "The latter half of the fifteenth century may indeed be considered as the Augustan age of Persian letters," that about that time the Akhlak-i-Jalaly was produced, and that it is "the best digest of the important topics of which it treats." He says that through the translations of the Greek philosophers, or, in some cases, the transference "in extract from writer to writer," the Moslem people came to have a knowledge of the great Greek systems of thought. "The most successful efforts of the entire people" to reconcile the Greek philosophy with the social and religious systems of the Mohammedans "may be said to be concentrated in the work before us; but the treatise from which it more particularly originates is the Kitat-at-Jaharat, an Arabic work composed in the tenth century."

This work "is an amalgam of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, carried out, however, to the most minute practical application," etc. This Arabic work, having passed with improvements, due to the increase of knowledge in five hundred years, through the hands of two Persian writers, appears as the Akhlak-i-Jalaly. It treats, after an Exordium, in Book I. of The Individual State; in Book II. of The Domestic State; in Book III. of The Political State, and in the Conclusion gives, I. Platonic Maxims on Ethics; II. Aristotelian Maxims on Politics.

Page 42, note 1. Dr. Holmes thus comments on this passage: "The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his store-houses."

Page 43, note 1. Mr. Emerson quotes Stanley as saying that Plato first used the word Poem.

Page 43, note 2. When Mr. Emerson gave this lecture in Concord, a lady walking home with her neighbor, a substantial farmer's wife, found that she did not approve of it. On pressing her to learn what she objected to, the disapproving matron said, "Well! If those old heathen did what Mr. Emerson said they did, the less said about them the better!" "Why, what do you mean?" "He said they ground their wives and children into paint!"

Page 47, note 1. The majesty of planets and suns and systems, in their ordered courses, especially appealed to Emerson from his youth. He draws constantly his imagery from astronomy, and especially honored Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. In the years between 1835 and 1845 his journals and the scattered fragments of "The Poet" (see Poems, Appendix) show how constantly he sought "the sweet influence of the Pleiades" and "Arcturus and his sons."

Divine inviters, I accept The courtesy ye have shown and kept From ancient ages for the bard.

O birds of ether without wings! O heavenly ships without a sail! O fire of fire! O best of things! O mariners who never fail! Sail swiftly through your amber vault, An animated law, a presence to exalt.

Page 48, note 1. These doctrines are discussed in the Parmenides and the Theaetetus of Plato. That of the Identity, Ἓν καὶ πᾶν, came from Xenophanes. See also Emerson's "Xenophanes" in the Poems.

Page 49, note 1. The journal of 1845 shows that Mr. Emerson was reading, not only in the Koran and Akhlak-i-Jalaly, but in the East Indian Scriptures, and he gives many quotations. He writes, "The East is grand and makes Europe appear the land of trifles." It was natural that Plato should lead him to the most ancient fountains of the religion of the Aryan race.

In the midsummer of 1840 Mr. Emerson told in a letter to a near friend of his high prizing of the Vedas.1 3.1

"In the sleep of the great heats there was nothing for me but to read the Vedas, the bible of the tropics, which I find I come back upon every three or four years. It is sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble and poetic mind, and nothing is easier than to

separate what must have been the primeval inspiration from the endless ceremonial nonsense which caricatures and contradicts it through every chapter. It is of no use to put away the book: if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, nature makes a Bramin of me presently: eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence,—this is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment—these penances expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods."

Page 49, note 2. The thought that appears in "Brahma," which is but a poetical rendering of a passage from the Bhagavat-Gita.

Page 50, note 1. This suggests Mr. Emerson's poem "Pan," which has often been alluded to in these notes because it presents the doctrine of the Over-Soul.

Page 51, note 1.

Find me, and turn thy back on Heaven. "Brahma," Poems.

Page 54, note 1. Dr. William T. Harris said of this passage: "What Emerson says of Plato we may easily and properly apply to himself. But he goes farther than Plato toward the Orient, and his pendulum swings farther West into the Occident. He delights in the all-absorbing unity of the Brahman, in the all-renouncing ethics of the Chinese and Persian, in the measureless images of the Arabian and Hindoo poets. But he is as practical as the extremest of his countrymen. His practical is married to his abstract tendency. It is the problem of evil that continually haunts him, and leads him to search its solution in the Oriental unity which is above all dualism of good and evil. It is his love of freedom that leads

him to seek in the same source an elevation of thought above the trammels of finitude and complications. Finally, it is his love of beauty, which is the vision of freedom manifested in matter, that leads him to Oriental poetry, which sports with the finite elements of the world as though they were unsubstantial dreams."1 3.2

Page 57, note 1. From the Timaeus.

Page 58, note 1.

The gods talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the long reach of the old seashore With dialogue divine; And the poet who overhears Some random word they say Is the fated man of men Whom the ages must obey. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

See also the poem "My Garden."

Page 58, note 2. Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book III., Canto XI.

Page 59, note 1. From the Theaetetus.

Page 61, note 1. From the Gorgias.

Page 61, note 2. This suggests a passage in a letter which Mr. Emerson wrote to a spiritually minded Quaker friend in 1847.

"For the science of God our language is unexpressive and merely prattle: we need simpler and universal signs, as algebra compared with arithmetic. Thus I should affirm easily both

those propositions, which our Mr. Griswold balances against one another; that, I mean, of Pantheism and the other ism.

"Personality, too, and impersonality, might each be affirmed of Absolute Being; and what may not be affirmed of it in our own mind? And when we have heaped a mountain of speeches, we have still to begin again, having nowise expressed the simple unalterable fact."

Page 62, note 1. See an early poem of Emerson's, "The Bohemian Hymn," in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 63, note 1. Compare The Republic, Book VII.

Page 63, note 2. From the Phaedrus.

Page 65, note 1. When, as a schoolboy, I was complaining of the difficulties of geometry, I was surprised at my father's words, for he had found mathematics so hopeless a study for himself that he always shared his children's feelings on the subject, much to their comfort. But on this occasion he said, "Geometry, yes, one must study geometry for its elegance." Plato had probably made it sacred to him—in theory. Yet there is some truth in Dr. Holmes's remark, "Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the Academy, over which was the inscription,—μηδεις ἀγέωμετρητος εἰδίτω—Let no one unacquainted with Geometry enter here,—would have been closed to him."

Page 66, note 1.

From the stores of eldest matter, The deep-eyed flame, obedient water, Transparent air, all-feeding earth, He took the flower of all their worth, And, best with best in sweet consent, Combinèd a new temperament. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 68, note 1. It was this doctrine of Symbolism which made Emerson prize Swedenborg so highly.

Page 69, note 1. See Republic, Book VI.

Page 69, note 2. Mr. Emerson's use of the authors was to give him a spur—he "read for lustres," and in the great masters especially. Thus, writing to Carlyle in July, 1842, he said, "I had it fully at heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer, or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse, a chapter on Poetry, for which all readings, all studies, are but preparation."

Page 70, note 1. This idea appears in "Love" in the First Series of Essays and in the poem "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love."

Page 76, note 1. This literary or philosophic coldness Mr. Emerson satirizes in some lines which, after his death, were printed in the Appendix to the Poems, under the title "Philosopher." He complained of finding this professional mood in himself at times. To pure Intellect he always assigned a lower plane than to Love. In the journal for 1845 is this passage, headed Buddha, or he who knows, and also Icy Light:—

"Intellect puts an interval: if we converse with low things, we are not compromised, the interval saves us. But if we converse with high things, with heroic persons, with virtues, the interval becomes a gulf, and we cannot enter into the highest good."

Page 78, note 1. What Mr. Emerson says here of Plato, and also a few pages earlier, "He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement," cannot but recall his own method of presenting in turn different facets of the gem of

truth. Churchman and Agnostic can easily find good weapons for argument in his works. Dr. Holmes says of this passage, "Some will smile at hearing him say this of another." It illustrates the felicity of the Doctor's remark that Emerson holds up the mirror to his characters at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero.

Page 79, note 1. Dr. Richard Garnett tells a story of an occurrence which might well have happened in England: "Can you tell me," asked an auditor of his neighbor at the lecture, "what connection all this has with Plato?" "None, my friend, save in God."

Page 81, note 1. This paragraph suggests the "Song of Nature" in the Poems.

Page 82, note 1. But these lines are but segments of great returning curves like the orbits of the heavenly bodies.

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

Page 83, note 1. The cave of Trophonius, where he delivered oracles, is more particularly told about by Plutarch in his Lives. The ring, strangely found by Gyges the shepherd, made him invisible and by means of it he won great temporal power (Republic, Book II.). The soul is figuratively represented as a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. "Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble and of noble breed, while ours are mixed, and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble, and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble, … and, as might be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them." (Phaedrus.)

"God has formed you differently. Some of you have the power of command and these he has composed of gold, wherefore

also they have the greatest honor; others of silver to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has made of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in their children. But, as you are of the same original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son or a silver parent a golden son." (Republic, Book III.)

Socrates relates that the Egyptian god Theuth, having invented the use of letters, showed them to Thamus the king. "'This,' saith Theuth, 'will make Egyptians wiser and give them better memories.' But Thamus replied, … 'This invention of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories.'" (Phaedrus.)

In the strange vision of Er, the Pamphylian, is the scheme of the planetary system whirled by the sister Fates, Lachesis singing of the Past, Clotho of the Present, and Atropos of the Future. He saw also the spirits of departed heroes choosing their destinies in a new life. (Republic, Book X.)

Page 83, note 2. Dr. Holmes says, "These two quaint adjectives are from the mint of Cudworth."

Page 85, note 1. These correspondences of matter and spirit Mr. Emerson celebrates everywhere.

Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife, Murmur in the house of life, Sung by the Sisters as they spin; In perfect time and measure they Build and unbuild our echoing clay. As the two twilights of the day Fold us music-drunken in. "Merlin," II., Poems.

Page 86, note 1.

Vast the realm of Being is, In the waste one nook is his; Whatsoever hap befalls In his vision's narrow walls He is here to testify. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 87, note 1. And yet, in the winnowing of Time, Plato is not one of those who, as poet, survived "The Test" as answered in "The Solution," in the Poems, although, strangely, Swedenborg is. Perhaps this was because Emerson chose but one representative of a nation and Homer stood for Greece.

SWEDENBORG

As has been said in the Introduction to this volume, it is almost certain that the little book by Sampson Reed, The Growth of the Mind, first interested Mr. Emerson in the writings of Swedenborg. That book was published in Boston when Mr. Emerson was twenty-three years old. A few years later he wrote in his journal:—

CHARDON ST., 9TH OCTOBER, 1829.

I am glad to see that Interpretations of Scripture like those of the New Jerusalem Church can be accepted in our community. The most spiritual and sublime sense is put upon various historical passages of the New Testament. The interpretation of the passages is doubtless wholly false. The Apostle John in Patmos and our Saviour in his talking meant no

such things as the commentator says he meant. But the sentiment which the commentator puts into their mouths is nevertheless true and eternal. The wider that sentiment can be spread and the more effect it can have on men's lives, the better. And if the fool-part of man must have the lie, if truth is a pill that can't go down till 't is sugared with superstition, why then I will forgive the last in (the) belief that the truth will enter into the Soul natively, and so assimilantly that it will become part of the soul and so remain, when the falsehood grows dry and lifeless, and peels off.

In his first letter to Carlyle, Emerson tells him that he is sending him The Growth of the Mind, and the former, in his answer, says, "a faithful thinker, that Swedenborgian druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all, Swedenborgianism must be. 'Through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the Infinite.'"

To this Emerson answered:—

NOVEMBER, 1834.

Swedenborgianism, if you should be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of attraction for you: for instance, this article, 'The poetry of the Old Church is the reality of the New,' which is to be literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the Trismegisti, the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent of the Spiritual, and part for part. … It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic, not moral, decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their AEsop. They are to me,

however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all.

The value which Mr. Emerson set upon Swedenborg was a notable case of his taking people and things "by their best handle." His recoil from all the parson and sexton and controversial elements of Swedenborg's writing, the Hebraism and prosiness of expression and the wearisome length, is sanely expressed with a kindly humour. But the perception by Swedenborg, though no poet, of the meaning of things, the rhyme of matter and spirit, delighted the poet.

Dr. Garnett says, "Nothing can be more generous than his trampling down of prejudice in recognizing the true inspiration of Swedenborg, or more crushing than his criticism of the purely mechanical element in that seer."

As a contrast and showing the difference in the temperament and the method of the men, part of Carlyle's comment on Emerson's estimate of Swedenborg already quoted may be recalled: "Missed the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of Philosophy, say you? By Heaven, in clutching at it, and almost getting it, he has tumbled into Bedlam,—which is a terrible miss, if it were never so near! A miss ••ully as good as a mile, I should say!"—Mr. Leslie Stephen, quoting this passage, says: "Emerson would apparently reply not by denying the truth of the remark, but by declaring it to be irrelevant. Swedenborg, like other prophets, fell into absurdities when he became a system-monger, and Emerson could condemn some of the results sharply enough. He was not the less grateful for the inspiration because associated with absurdities which might qualify the prophet for Bedlam." (Studies in Biography.)

Page 94, note 1. In a fragment of verse on the Poet's gifts he said:—

But over all his crowning grace, Wherefor thanks God his daily praise, Is the purging of his eye To see the people of the sky: From blue mount and headland dim Friendly hands stretch forth to him, Him they beckon, him advise Of heavenlier prosperities

Than the wine-fed feasters know. Poems, Appendix.

Page 95, note 1. This story, and the poetical quotation before it, would seem, from the context in the journal, to be from the Akhlak-i-Jalaly, referred to in the notes on "Plato; or, the Philosopher."

Page 96, note 1. The quotation came from Plato's Meno, where, as also in the Phaedrus, the doctrine of Reminiscence is brought forward, and here is reconciled with that of the Universal Mind.

Page 97, note 1. From Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel.

Page 97, note 2. Shakspeare, Hamlet, Act I., Scene iv.

Page 102, note 1. John Selden (1584-1654), jurist, antiquarian, orientalist, author. His Table-Talk was published in 1681.

Page 104, note 1. William Gilbert (1540-1603), physician to Queen Elizabeth, was a man of great scientific attainments. He wrote on the magnet and explained that the

Earth was a vast magnet. On his recumbent statue in Trinity Church, Colchester, is engraved Magneticarum virtutum primus indagator Gilbertus.

René des Cartes (1596-1650), born in France but passing much of his life in Germany, Holland, and Sweden. Dr. Alfred Weber in his History of Philosophy says of him that he should be regarded as "a geometrician with a taste for metaphysics rather than a philosopher with leanings toward mathematics," and that those who regard him as the author of the psychological method are right in so far as observation is one of the phases and the preparatory stage … in the Cartesian method, but err in regarding it as more than a kind of provisional scaffolding for deductive reasoning which is the soul of his philosophy. The schoolman had said Credo ut intelligam. Descartes said Dubito ut intelligam. Self-evidence alone was needed to make man certain of anything. Cogito ergo sum was his formula, and he held that the idea of God in the human mind implied the existence of the perfect Being. The Vortex in his philosophy was a collection of material particles forming a fluid or ether endowed with a rapid, rotatory motion about an axis and filling all space, by which Descartes accounted for the motions of the Universe.

Page 104, note 2. Marcello Malpighi of Bologna (1628-1694) is considered a founder of microscopic anatomy. At the age of seventeen he studied Aristotle and the use of the microscope. Having studied medicine, he held chairs in the universities of Pisa, Messina, and for twenty-five years at Bologna. He was physician to Innocent XII. His investigations of anatomical structure and physiological processes were crowned with great success. He discovered the capillary circulation and the minute secreting structure of the various glands.

Leucippus in the fifth century B. C. held an atomic theory, later expounded by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura.

Page 104, note 3. This statement, which, seen with after-lights, seems so rash, did not seem very startling half a century ago before the improvement of the microscope, and the general use resulting therefrom.

Swammerdam, a brilliant Dutch naturalist of the seventeenth century, especially noted for his minute studies of the viscera, and system of injection of vessels. Leuwenhoek, his countryman and contemporary, made notable discoveries with regard to capillary circulation and the blood corpuscles of man and animals; also in botany and entomology.

Winslow, a Dane, but worked in Paris, and wrote on purely descriptive anatomy. Eustachius of Salerno, a brilliant investigator of human structure, especially of the ear and the viscera, though less reputed than the great Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who was persecuted for daring to teach the real facts of human anatomy in face of the mistaken authority of Galen. Heister was also an anatomist.

Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), born in Holland and educated at the University of Leyden, to which his name and teachings later gave great fame. He studied philosophy and medicine and became a distinguished practitioner and writer mainly on medical subjects. His character and great abilities won him great and lasting honors throughout Europe.

Page 105, note 1. Natura semper sibi similis is an expression of Malpighi's, though here given as the faith of the great Swedish botanist and scholar who gave his name to and took for his device the delicate little twin-flowered Linnaea of northern forests of the Old and New Worlds. Mr. Emerson delighted to find this rare flower among the older woods near Walden.

The maxim of the broad and high-minded Leibnitz (1646-1715), Everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds, would have recommended him: and his theory of monads, each a mirror of the universe; their effort; the continuity of unorganized and organized creation, and "preestablished harmony," seemed to lead the way to the Evolution doctrines of the nineteenth century.

Page 108, note 1. Oken and Goethe saw in the skull a few modified vertebrae. To Oken the whole trunk with all its systems was repeated in the head with due modifications.

Page 109, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal while crossing the Atlantic on his return from Europe in 1833:—

"I believe in this life. I believe it continues. As long as I am here I plainly read my duties as with a pencil of fire. They speak not of death. They are woven of immortal thread."

The notion of the plane of daemonic life, between those of mortal and celestial, is told of in the Symposium of Plato, and the image is used in the poem "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love."

Page 111, note 1. Dr. James J. Garth Wilkinson, "the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to physics and to physiology a native vigor with a catholic perception of relations equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality."(English Traits.)

Page 112, note 1. Among some notes for a lecture on

Swedenborg is the following: "His brilliant treatment of natural philosophy, Miltonic, sensuous."

Page 112, note 2. The "flowing of nature" is the old doctrine of Heracleitus. The answer of Amasis, King of Egypt, is related in "The Banquet" in Plutarch's Morals.

Page 113, note 1. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Lib. I., 835.

Page 118, note 1. This paragraph suggests some lines by Samuel Daniel which are copied in Mr. Emerson's journal of 1830:—

"The recluse hermit oft-times more doth know Of the world's inmost wheels than worldlings can. As man is of the world, the heart of man Is an epitome of God's great book Of creatures, and men need no farther look."

Also the last verse in Emerson's "Sphinx":—

Thorough a thousand voices Spoke the universal dame: "Who telleth one of my meanings Is master of all I am."

Page 120, note 1. In the Timaeus it is told that Solon heard from Egyptian priests this account of the great Athenians of the first State, which was destroyed by an earthquake thousands of years earlier.

Page 121, note 1. In the journal of 1845 Mr. Emerson made these notes, headed Symbolism, the first paragraph referring to a lady visiting occasionally in Concord, whose singing always pleased him. He had little ear for musical notes, but much for expressive rendering.

'B. R.'s music taught us what song should be; how slight

and thin its particular meaning; you would not be hard and emphatic on the burden of a song, as tira-lira, etc., Lillibulero, etc.

"The world is enigmatical, everything said and everything known and done, and must not be taken literally, but genially. We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly."

Page 122, note 1. Before the passage which follows in the text, I find in some stray leaves about Swedenborg these sentences:—

"The fascination which his mind has for those bred in the old churches, in woeful Calvinism, in sentimental Christianism, is this, that they come to a mind which believes the world has a meaning, a meaning that can be known, and which the good only can know. Swedenborg is to furnish a key to the eternal and universal engine, an explanation of the sky, of the sea, of their tenants, of our doing and suffering, of our weapons and means. What! and no longer to receive certain cold results from catechism and priest, but I am to be a party to every result by seeing its reason and these results are no longer remote at arm's length, at life's length."

Page 124, note 1. Among fragmentary notes for a lecture are these with reference to the Swedenborgian sect:—

"What I mean by popular religion the Swedenborgians have not conceived, but it is true that who would see truly must forsake a great as well as a little conventionalism; that of Christendom as well as that of his parish."

"Fascination of Swedenborg.

"I cannot flatter the Swedenborgian by finding in him any resemblance to the genius and tendency of the great man whose name he bears."

"Very dangerous study to any but a mind of great elasticity

and power. Like Napoleon as military leader, a master of such extraordinary extent of Nature and not to be acted on by any other, that he must needs be a god to the young and enthusiastic."

"Exceeding good behavior of the Sect a few years ago: he was pilloried in a pamphlet of garbled extracts:—the Swedenborgians circulated his book."

"Their excellent spirit of superior tactics—nothing vulgar in their propagandism; they treated men respectfully and had the manners of people holding valuable truth."

Page 127, note 1. Casella, Dante's friend, the beautiful singer, whom meeting, in Purgatory, he besought to sing. Casella began Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, and all the souls flocked to hear.

Page 129, note 1. The poems "Give All to Love" and "To Rhea" are in this strain, and also the verses "You shall not love me for what daily spends," etc., among the "Fragments on Life" in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 132, note 1.

MANUSCRIPT NOTES FOR LECTURE ON SWEDENBORG.

"Beware of interference. Direct service the God reserves to himself. The condition of greatness, that is of health, is poise; and reception only from the Soul; illustration from men, but reception only from God through Self. Every strong individual is tyrannical—Swedenborg, Luther, Mahomet, Moses; and the Mahomets of our own acquaintance. Appease them whilst they are with you, bow and assent, if you cannot answer; but when they have taken their hats, as thou livest, recover thy erectness. No matter what they say about their credentials from God—tell them it is all gammon, self-delusion and a lie; that God never speaks by a third person, for he is

nearer than the nearest. You exist from him. It is as if some one came from the other side of the planet to tell me what I thought. We inhabit a thousand and a thousand planes. Go home now to thy closet, to thy heart, to Being, and Swedenborgize. Go, that is, and sit and ascertain what truth of you this man fantastically said, but yet said, and subtract what vast amounts of individualism have mixed with that pure universalism that is yours as well as his, neither yours nor his, but Being's."

Page 133, note 1. Journal, 1838. "Swedenborgianism is one of the many forms of Manichaeism. It denies the omnipresence of God or pure Spirit."

Journal, 1839. "The Swedenborgian violates the old law of rhetoric and philosophy Nec deus intersit dignus nisi vindici nodus in its forcible interposing of a squadron of angels for the transmission of thought from God to man. I say I think or I receive, in proportion to my obedience, truth from God; I put myself aside, and let him be. The New Churchman says,—No, that would kill you, if God should directly shine into you: there is an immense continuity of mediation. As if that bridged the gulf from the infinite to the finite by so much as one flank. Would He not kill the highest angel into whom he shone just as quick?"

Page 134, note 1. The manuscript notes above quoted furnish the following: "It was impossible also for this gifted man to say one word of God."

And of the dulness and repetition Mr. Emerson goes on to say, "I hold him responsible for every yawn of mine," and "The civilest reader at the tenth page says, 'I conceive that I read something like this once before.'"

Page 135, note 1. There is an entry in the journal for 1841: "It seems as if the Jewsharp had sounded long enough."

Page 136, note 1. One of the examples of Laconic speech given by Plutarch in the Life of Lycurgus.

Page 138, note 1.

ἐι θεοί τι δρῶσι φαῦλον, οὐκ εἰσὶν θεοί.

More literally rendered:—

If gods do wrong, surely no gods they are. Quoted in Plutarch's Morals.

Page 138, note 2. The verses in the "Fragments on The Poet" in the Appendix to the Poems are suggested:—

Let me go where'er I will I hear a sky-born music still, etc.;

and also the lines in the poem "Beauty":—

In dens of passion and pits of woe, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe.

The quoted line below is from Burns's poem, "Address to the Deil."

Page 140, note 1. Here follows in his manuscript notes the sentence: "Or, without going to eminent examples, the most eminent, the soul itself, is near enough to testify it we will hold the ear close and listen."

And again a fragmentary sheet: "Into the urn I put, The Spirit never Gossips. What we receive from any man is ever indirect truth: we learn him: we learn Swedenborg; and have huge deductions and corrections to make in order to get pure truth. I admire it as poetry; you wish I should feel it as fact. But who is Swedenborg? A man who saw God and nature as he could for a fluid moment. You cannot make

an universal self of him. My concern is with the universal truth of Plato's or Swedenborg's or Behmen's sentences, not at all with their circumstance or vocabulary. To seek too much of that were low and gossiping. He may and must speak to his circumstance and the way of events and belief around him, to Christendom or Islamism as his birth befel: he may speak of angels or Jews or gods or Lutherans or gypsies, or whatever figures come next to hand; I can readily enough translate his rhetoric into mine."

Page 141, note 1. This healthy feeling of Emerson's about the petty or besmirching quality of alleged results of prying behind the great curtain is fully expressed in his early paper on "Demonology" which was posthumously published in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

It may not be uninteresting to present here the letter received by Mr. Emerson from Mr. Wilkinson, the translator of Swedenborg, acknowledging his gift of Representative Men.

25 CHURCH ROW, HAMPSTEAD [ENGLAND], FEB. 5, 1850.

MY DEAR SIR,—

I have to thank you … for your Representative Men, read with delight a month ago. It is for me full of vistas and views, a regular exhibition of the optics of the soul. You show your men and things by new properties of light, hinting at all kinds of polarizations of these through which we see. … I am especially grateful to your Swedenborg, the Mystic, which to reverse will require some tough work at long arts and sciences. It seems to me, however, that there is yet to be a consideration of some things that you have dismissed. The spiritual world in the old ghostly and mythological sense, is deep in man's heart, and not easily to be shelved. There

are facts about it which, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must come gravely on the carpet during the experimental ages. In the presence of these, all backs feel cold streams, and all hair stands on end as of yore. … Swedenborg's allegations of his intercourse will, I believe, be found to be a genuine addition to knowledge, in no way created by those curious eyes which saw into another life. But as to any finality in Swedenborg, I give up the point at once, and concede that the spiritual world is not absolute, but fluxional or historical, and will be found changed and changing by each fresh traveller. Still I can by no means disallow it altogether. …

I need not say what I feel at your mention of me in your book. I feel now thoroughly hopeless and divided; there is the little man which is myself, and the Brocken shadow to which people are walking up. They will soon find out the truth, and say that in one instance at least you have too kindly believed in a shadow.

Yours most truly, J. J. G. WILKINSON.

Page 143, note 1. As an instance of the sweet and wholesome way in which Behmen looks at man and nature Mr. Emerson says in the journal, speaking of "this era of triviality and verbiage:" "Once 'the rose of Sharon perfumed our graves,' as Behmen said: but now, if a man dies, it is like a grave dug in the snow; it is a ghastly fact abhorrent to nature, and we never mention it. Death is as natural as life and should be as sweet and graceful."

Page 145, note 1. From a poem by Nathaniel P. Willis called "Lines on Leaving Europe," in which he thus expresses his assurance of his safe return across the ocean because of his waiting mother's love and faith.

Page 145, note 2. It is worth while to note Mr. Emerson's steady allegiance to the supremacy of right in contrasting this final weighing of Swedenborg in the balance and not finding him wanting in what was greatest, while of Goethe he says: "He has not worshipped the highest Unity. He is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. … Goethe can never be dear to men. His is … devotion to truth for the sake of culture." And of Napoleon he said: "He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without the moral principle. … It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and the world which baulked and ruined him, and the result in a million experiments will be the same."

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC

As he tells in the Essays, Mr. Emerson made a friend of Montaigne in his youth,—felt that Montaigne, three centuries earlier, had, with wit and frank courage, written of things as he himself would have liked to, in boyish protest at timid observance and decorum. There was obvious contrast between their conditions. The French lord, baptized into the communion of the Church of Rome, bred to the usual military accomplishments, with something of a courtier's experience, and a student of law, heir of a castle and full feudal rights, and living in troublous times, stirred the imagination of a delicate and studious youth, growing up well-bred but poor in the very heart of Puritan simplicity and democracy in New England. Yet there were bonds stronger than their differences,—a greater Catholicism, a brave love of truth, and disgust at cant, and desire to make their protest freely; a human way

of looking at men and things and the teaching of each day, a love of wild nature and the independence and retirement of a country householder,—these, and their common love of Plato and of Plutarch. As to writing, Emerson's word in his journal about Montaigne was true of himself: "Montaigne or Socrates would quote Paul of Tarsus and Goody Two-shoes with equal willingness."

During the time of his Boston ministry, on Christmas day, 1831, he wrote to his Aunt Mary, who eagerly followed her nephews' reading and discussed it with them:—

"No effeminate parlor workman is he on an idea got at an evening lecture or a young men's debate, but roundly tells what he saw or what he thought of when he was riding on horseback or entertaining a troop at his château. A gross, semi-savage indecency debases his book, and ought doubtless to turn it out of doors, but the robustness of his sentiments, the generosity of his judgment, the downright truth without fear or favor, I do embrace with both arms. It is wild and savory as sweet-fern. Henry the Eighth loved to see a man; and it is exhilarating once in a while to come across a genuine Saxon stump, a wild, virtuous man, who knows books, but gives them their right place, lower than his reason. Books are apt to turn reason out of doors. You find men talking everywhere from their memories instead of from their understanding. If I stole this thought from Montaigne, as is very likely, I don't care. I should have said the same myself."

Later, in his journal, appreciating the brave, out-of-door, half-military aspect of the man, he notes, "We can't afford to take the horse out of Montaigne's Essays." Again, valuing Montaigne's solid basis, he writes: "Montaigne has the de quoi which the French cherubs had not when the courteous archbishop implored them to sit down." In the story the

kind prelate said, Asseyez vous, mes enfans, and the fluttering cherubs answered, Monseigneur, nous n'avons pas de quoi.

In his first summer in Concord after he made it his home, at the age of thirty-two, Mr. Emerson made this entry in his journal:—

8th AUGUST [1835].

Yesterday I delighted myself with Michel de Montaigne. With all my heart I embrace the grand old sloven. He pricks and stings the sense of virtue in me, the wild gentile stock, I mean, for he has no Grace. But his panegyric of Cato and of Socrates in his essay On Cruelty (vol. ii.) do wind up again for us the spent springs, and make virtue possible without the discipline of Christianity; or rather do shame her of her eye-service and put her upon her honor. I read the Essays in Defence of Seneca and Plutarch; On Books; On Drunkenness; and On Cruelty. And at some fortunate line, which I cannot now recall, the spirit of some Plutarch hero or sage touched mine with such thrill as the war-trump makes in Talbot's ear and blood.

Eight years later he writes:—

"I once took so much delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; then in Plotinus, in Synesius, in Goethe,—even in Bettini; but to-day I turn the pages of either of them languidly enough, whilst I still cherish their genius. … It is too strong for us, this onward trick of Nature. Pero si muove."

Two months after the above entry, Mr. Emerson said in a letter written to his young friend Henry Thoreau, then teaching in his brother William Emerson's family in Staten Island:—

"We have had the new Hazlitt's Montaigne which contained

the 'Journey to Italy,' new to me, and the narrative of the death of the renowned friend Étienne de la Boéce."

Page 149, note 1. This image of the two-facedness of things is used to a different purpose in Emerson's poem "The Chartist's Complaint," originally entitled "Janus." But in almost every essay, though sometimes in separate essays, his own habit is to contemplate one facet of a truth at a time, and then, often abruptly, go to another point of view.

Page 150, note 1. "Aristotle, founding on the qualities of matter, is the European skeptic, Plato the believer." (Journal, 1845.)

Page 150, note 2. Strangely in contrast with this attitude of the timid or intolerant man of the gown was Mr. Emerson's own interested, respectful, and often admiring attitude towards the man of deeds, whether laborer, mechanic, merchant, or statesman.

Page 151, note 1. This recalls the first lines of Michael Angelo's sonnet to Vittoria Colonna translated by Emerson:—

Never did sculptor's dream unfold A form which marble doth not hold In its white block; yet it therein shall find Only the hand secure and bold Which still obeys the mind. Poems, Translations.

Page 152, note 1. Mr. Emerson, on his way to town meeting, saw his honest neighbor George Minot, a farmer and pot-hunter, at work, and asked him if he were not going to cast his vote for Freedom, in the sad days of the Fugitive Slave Law. "No," said Minot, "I ain't a-goin'. It's no use a-ballotin', for it won't stay so. What you do with a gun 'll stay."

Page 154, note 1. This was the remark of his next neighbor on the other side, a laborer.

Page 155, note 1. Here come in favorite images: that the planet is bearing its solidest materialists, helpless, whither they know not, at frightful speed through stellar space, drugged and cheated by the illusions of the senses which they cannot interpret, the Maia of the Oriental philosophers.

Page 155, note 2. These lines are borrowed from George Herbert's poem entitled "Affliction." When a youth he longed to leave Cambridge University, but his mother would not permit him to do so.

"Whereas my birth and spirit rather took The way that takes to town: Thou didst betray me to a lingering book, And wrapt me in a gown: I was entangled in a world of strife; Before I had the power to change my life."

Page 156, note 1. Here is a momentary indulgence at the expense of Mr. Emerson's long-sitting reformer visitors, from the journal of 1842, yet showing a magnanimity to the borers which he was fighting on his peach-trees in those days.

"The borer on our peach-trees bores that she may deposit an egg; but the borer into theories and institutions and books, bores that he may bore."

Page 157, note 1. Mr. Emerson recognized Nature's secret of Identity through all fugitive forms in the fable of the sea-god Proteus, who, when caught sleeping by a mortal, took shapes of beasts, of serpents, of fire, to disconcert his captor, yet, if held fast in spite of all, must answer his questions.

Page 158, note 1. It will be remembered that this book was written at the end of a decade which had witnessed an

extraordinary awakening in the minds and consciences of New England people and their neighbors. Mr. Emerson's papers on "The Times," "The Transcendentalist," "New England Reformers" in Nature, Addresses and Lectures, and his "Historical Notes of Life and Letters in New England" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches bear witness to the ferments that were at work on the questions of Emancipation, Temperance, Non-Resistance, Communities, Labor, as well as in Religion, Education, and Literature.

Page 162, note 1. The following passage is copied from some stray leaves of the lecture on Montaigne:—

"Talent without character is friskiness. The charm of Montaigne's egotism, and of his anecdotes, is, that there is a stout cavalier, a seigneur of France, at home in his château, responsible for all this chatting.

"Now suppose it should be shown and proved that the famous 'Essays' were a jeu d' esprit of Scaliger, or other scribacious person, written for the booksellers, and not resting on a real status picturesque in the eyes of all men. Would not the book instantly lose almost all its value?"

Page 163, note 1. The brilliant John Sterling, with whom Emerson formed a strong friendship through correspondence due at first to their common affection for Carlyle. They never met, for Sterling died in 1844. In his journal for 1843 Mr. Emerson records, almost in the same words as here, his pleasure, when a boy, in Cotton's Montaigne and his visit to Père Lachaise and of reading Sterling's "loving criticism on Montaigne in the Westminster Review," adding, "and soon after, Carlyle writes me word that this same lover of Montaigne is a lover of me. Now I have been introducing to his genius two of my friends, James and Tappan, who warm to

him as to a brother. So true is S. G. W.'s saying that all whom he knew met." Sterling's biography was written both by Archdeacon Hare, who edited his works, and by Carlyle. His Correspondence with Emerson was published in 1897.

Page 165, note 1. Mr. Emerson drew this contrast between Montaigne and Plutarch in his essay on the latter, printed in Lectures and Biographical Sketches:—

"Plutarch had a religion, which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and, though Plutarch is as plain-spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure."

Page 166, note 1. Had Montaigne been a living, instead of a dead friend, Mr. Emerson's tolerance would have been sorely strained by this habit, and he would have wished to counsel him that "there is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers," as he tells at large as a final word of advice in the essay on "Behavior" in Conduct of Life.

Page 166, note 2. Miss Edgeworth's stories for children are so little read in this generation that it may be well to say that Old Poz was a character who bore this nickname because he was positive of his knowledge on all topics.

Page 168, note 1. In the journal for 1840 are the following sentences continuous with the foregoing passage:—

"I know nobody among my contemporaries except Carlyle who writes with any sinew and vivacity comparable to Plutarch and Montaigne. Yet always the profane swearing and bar-room wit has salt and fire in it. I cannot now read Webster's speeches. Fuller and Browne and Milton are quick, but the list is soon ended. Goethe seems to be well alive, no pedant: Luther too."

Page 172, note 1. In the journal he tells of "a walk to

the river with [a friend] and saw the moon interrogating, interrogating." The skeptic considered as a man in "the vestibule of the temple," suggests what has been said by Professor Weber of Strasburg on the doubts of Descartes as "a provisional skepticism, a means which he hastens to abandon as soon as he has discovered a certain primary truth." Dubito ut intelligam.

Page 174, note 1. The valued friend here alluded to, Mr. Charles K. Newcomb, was of a sensitive and beautiful character, a mystic, but with the Hamlet temperament to such an extent that he was paralyzed for all action by the tenderness of his conscience and the power with which all sides of a question presented themselves to him in turn. He was a member of the Brook Farm Community, a welcome but rare visitor at Mr. Emerson's house, and when he came he brought his writings, which interested his host greatly. I think they never came to publication, except a few papers in the Dial. His sense of duty sent him to the war for the Union in the ranks. He remained a bachelor all his life and in his last years lived much abroad.

Page 174, note 2. The last passage appears in the journal for 1845 thus:—

"Skepticism and gulfs of skepticism; strongest of all, that of the Saints. They come to the mount, and in the largest and most blissful communication to them, somewhat is left unsaid, which begets in them doubt and horrible doubt. So then, say they, before they have yet risen from their knees, Even this does not justify: we must still feel that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed. We must fly for relief and sanity to that other suspected and reviled part of nature, the kingdom of the understanding, the gymnastics of talent, the play of fancy."

Page 175, note 1. Here appears the cause which all his life he stood for,—The Church against the churches.

Page 177, note 1. Compare in the poem "Voluntaries"

Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods, And rankly on the castled steep.

Page 177, note 2. His method of dealing with these formidable doubts in the following pages is characteristic of the man; no attempt at dogmatically solving the question for all, but throwing of side-lights here and there, suggestive perhaps to other minds both of the magnitude of the problem, and how to approach it in their own way. Among many of his sayings on the subject of Indirection these may serve as specimens: "In good society—say among the angels in Heaven—is not everything spoken by indirection." "If we could speak the direct solving speech it would solve us too."

Page 180, note 1. Journal, 1845. "There are many skepticisms. The universe is like an infinite series of planes, each of which is a false bottom, and when we think our feet are planted now at last on the adamant, the slide is drawn out from under us.

"Value of the skeptic is the resistance to premature conclusions. If he prematurely conclude, his conclusion will be shattered, and he will become malignant. But he must limit himself with the anticipation of law in the mutations,—flowing law."

Page 182, note 1. This paragraph is exactly a case of Mr. Emerson's holding the mirror to his characters at just such an angle that you see something of his own face too, as Dr. Holmes said. His ecclesiastical sin had been, in Dr. Bartol's words, his excess of spirituality, and all sorts of well-meaning men were wishing him to spend himself on details and partial

reforms while he was trying to hear and transmit the universal laws. He has honestly endeavored in this essay to state the difficult problems fully and clearly, not "Sunday objections made up on purpose to be put down." But, after all, he belongs to the minds that are made "incapable of skepticism," "a man of thought who must feel the thought which is parent to the Universe."

Page 183, note 1. About the time when Mr. Emerson was parting from his church he was reading with great pleasure the life of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, and making many extracts from it in his journal. The simple worship of the Quakers and their obedience to the moving Spirit always recommended them to him.

Page 183, note 2. In an early journal is this entry:—

"Fools and clowns and sots make the fringe of every one's tapestry of life and give a certain reality to the picture. What could we do in Concord without Bigelow's and Wesson's bar-rooms and their dependencies? What without such fixtures as Uncle Sol and old Moore, who sleeps in Dr. Hurd's barn, and the red Charity-house over the brook? Tragedy and Comedy go ever hand in hand."

And again in "The Poet":—

He, foolish child, A facile, reckless, wandering will, Eager for good, not hating ill, Thanked Nature for each stroke she dealt; On his tense chords all strokes were felt, The good, the bad with equal zeal, He asked, he only asked, to feel. Timid, self-pleasing, sensitive, With Gods, with fools, content to live. Poems, Appendix.

Page 184, note 1. This thought appears in his poem "The Day's Ration."

Page 186, note 1. In the "Woodnotes," II., the pine-tree sings—

Of tendency through endless ages.

Page 186, note 2. A line that he valued most of those of the poet Channing, his friend, from "A Poet's Hope."

There is a summary, not appearing in the essay in the journal of 1845, perhaps obscure in its ending, but interesting. The "cowage" of the first sentence was an herb which used to be prescribed for intestinal worms, and acted, not as a poison, but by piercing them with its sharp fibres.

"Montaigne good against bigots as cowage against worms, acts mechanically.

"But there is a higher Muse there, sitting where he durst not soar, a muse that follows the flowing power, a Dialectic that respects results: and it requires a muse, as Hafiz expresses himself only in musical phrases, the hyphens are small unities, not parts."

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET

This essay was read as a lecture in Exeter Hall, in London, in June, 1848.

Perhaps it is well to bear in mind that Mr. Emerson was reared for the ministry and ordained a clergyman, and that his ancestors for several generations had exercised that office, and moreover that, in New England, up to his day, theatrical representations had been looked at with disfavor by serious and God-fearing people, and the witnessing of such by a minister

would, like dancing, have been considered unbecoming indulgence. Although Mr. Emerson emancipated himself from bonds that were merely professional or artificial, he had an inbred distaste for the common amusements of society, feeling that they were unbecoming to a scholar, and that he was not adapted for them, though he was tolerant of them in other people. There was a natural earnestness, and a simple and cheerful asceticism in his early and later life. Yet once in his later life, when he had been induced to go to see Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams in some bright comedy, he praised their acting and admitted to his daughter that he really much enjoyed theatrical performances, in spite of the feeling that they were not for him. Dancing, for instance, which he considered a proper part of youths' education, would have seemed unbecoming for himself. He says, "It shall be writ in my memoirs … as it was writ of St. Pachonius, Pes ejus ad saltandum non est commotus omni vita sua." His staying away from theatrical entertainments was instinctive, but he was liberal in the matter and would go to see a real artist. He even went to see the performance of the beautiful dancer Fanny Elssler, although a story which has been too often repeated of his remarks to Margaret Fuller on the subject is as false as it is silly.

In Paris he saw Rachel during the Revolution of 1848, and often told his children of her fierce and splendid declamation of the Marseillaise in the theatre, holding the tricolor aloft. On London in that same year he wrote of seeing Macready in Lear, with Mrs. Butler as Cordelia. It was usually to see one of Shakspeare's heroes rendered by some master that he went, and probably he never was inside a theatre twenty times in his life, and, so sensitive was he to bad taste or ranting, that he was usually sorry that he had gone.

The rendering of Richard II. (I cannot remember by whom) more than satisfied him, and he liked to recall the actor's tones in reading this play, an especial favorite of his, to his children. Coriolanus and Julius Caesar too he enjoyed reading to them, and he selected passages from Shakspeare for them and trained them very carefully for their recitation in school.

He saw Edwin Booth in Boston, and met him later at the house of a friend and had some talk with him. Booth later mentioned with pleasure to their host the fact that Mr. Emerson had not once alluded to his profession or performance in their conversation.

Mr. Emerson once defined the cultivated man as "one who can tell you something new and true about Shakspeare." And he read a good omen for our age in Shakspeare's acceptance: "The book only characterizes the reader. Is Shakspeare the delight of the nineteenth century? That fact only shows whereabouts we are in the ecliptic of the soul."

In writing of Great Men in 1838 in his journal, he says:—

"Swedenborg is scarce yet appreciable. Shakspeare has, for the first time, in our time found adequate criticism, if indeed he have yet found it:—Coleridge, Lamb, Schlegel, Goethe, Very, Herder.

"The great facts of history are four or five names, Homer—Phidias—Jesus—Shakspeare. One or two names more I will not add, but see what these names stand for. All civil history and all philosophy consists of endeavours more or less vain to explain these persons."

In the journal for 1843 he writes: "Plato is weak inasmuch as he is literary. Shakspeare is not literary, but the strong earth itself." Yet from another point of view he writes, "Shakspeare and Plato each sufficed for the culture of a nation."

That Shakspeare and Milton should have been born meant much to him and to mankind. "Who saw Milton, who saw Shakspeare, saw them do their best, and utter their whole heart manlike among their contemporaries."

And again, "No man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet, Shakspeare undoubtedly transcends and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations: but Shakspeare is a voice merely: who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not."

Page 189, note 1. Mr. Emerson said of Nature:—

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;—

and her cheerful lesson for the artist or poet was that he too could forever re-combine the old material into fresh and splendid pictures. He rejoiced that "the poet is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean and the eternal sky were painted," and turning from the reading of the plays he says: "'T is Shakspeare's fault that the world appears so empty. He has educated you with his painted world, and this real one seems a huckster's-shop." Again as to his true rendering of men's characters, "I value Shakspeare as a metaphysician and admire the unspoken logic which upholds the structure of Iago, Macbeth, Antony and the rest."

Page 190, note 1. Again the ancient doctrine of the Flowing, and the modern onward and upward stream of Evolution.

Page 191, note 1.

The passive Master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned. "The Problem," Poems.

Page 192, note 1. The stage was to Shakspeare his opportunity, as the Lyceum was to Emerson.

Page 196, note 1. Henry VIII., Act V., Scene iv.

Page 196, note 2. This estimate of the value of memory to the poet, typified by the Greeks in their making the Muses the daughters of Mnemosyne, is enlarged upon in the Essay on "Memory" in Natural History of Intellect. Mr. Emerson said once, "Of the most romantic fact the memory is more romantic," and he quotes Quintilian as saying, Quantum ingenii, tantum memoriae.

Page 197, note 1. In a fragment of verse written in Mr. Emerson's journal of 1831 on the yearning of the poet to enrich himself from the Treasury of the Universe, he says:—

And if to me it is not given To fetch one ingot thence Of that unfading gold of Heaven His merchants may dispense, Yet well I know the royal mine, And know the sparkle of its ore, Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,— Explored, they teach us to explore. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 197, note 2. Milton, "II Penseroso."

Page 198, note 1. Taine, in his History of English Literature, thus justifies Chaucer's borrowing or rendering:—

"Chaucer was capable of seeking out, in the old common

forest of the middle ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil and make them send out new shoots. … He has the right and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he impresses … his original mark. He re-creates what he imitates. … At the distance of a century and a half he has affinity with the poets of Elizabeth by his gallery of pictures."

The dates of Lydgate and Caxton show a mistake as to his use of them. Caxton, following Chaucer, when he introduced the printing-press to England, printed his poems and those of Lydgate, who was younger than Chaucer. In his House of Fame, Chaucer places, in his vision, "on a pillar higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the other historians of the war of Troy,"1 7.1 a due recognition of his debt for Troylus and Cryseyde. As for Gower, he was Chaucer's exact contemporary and friend, and Chaucer dedicated this poem to him.

Page 199, note 1. Kipling irreverently tells of Homer's borrowings thus:—

"When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He 'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; An' what he thought 'e might require, 'E went an' took—the same as me!"

And says of his humble audience:—

"They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed. They did n't tell, nor make a fuss, But winked at 'Omer down the road, An' 'e winked back—the same as us!"

Page 199, note 2. Dr. Holmes's remark with regard to the preceding page is: "The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing, especially when treating of Plato and Shakspeare, is obvious enough. He was arguing his own cause—not defending himself," etc. In Letters and Social Aims, Mr. Emerson discusses Quotation and Originality.

Page 200, note 1. Mr. Emerson had tender associations with the Book of Common Prayer. His mother had been brought up in the Episcopal communion, and the prayer-book of her youth was always by her,1 7.2 though after her marriage she attended her husband's church.

Page 201, note 1. Landor says of these borrowings of Shakspeare, "He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them to life."

Page 201, note 2. The princes Ferrex and Porrex, brothers and rivals for the ancient British throne, are characters in the tragedy Gorboduc by Norton and Sackville, to which the date 1561 is assigned. Gammer Gurton's Needle is a comedy of the same period.

Page, 202, note 1. Journal, 1864. "Shakspeare puts us all out. No theory will account for him. He neglected his works, perchance he did not know their value? Ay, but he did; witness the sonnets. He went into company as a listener, hiding himself, ὁ δ' ἤιε νυκτὶ ἐοικώς; was only remembered by all as a delightful companion."

Page 203, note 1.

England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,

Gave to the mind its emperor, And life was larger than before: Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakspeare's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame. "The Solution," Poems.

Page 204, note 1. While writing this, Mr. Emerson was surrounded by persons paralyzed for active life in the common world by the doubts of conscience or entangled in over-fine-spun webs of their intellect.

Page 205, note 1. Journal, 1837. "I either read or inferred to-day in the Westminster Review that Shakspeare was not a popular man in his day. How true and wise. He sat alone and walked alone, a visionary poet, and came with his piece, modest but discerning, to the players, and was too glad to get it received, whilst he was too superior not to see its transcendent claims."

Page 206, note 1. The following is the "Exordium of a lecture on Poetry and Eloquence," given in London in 1848:

"Shakspeare is nothing but a large utterance. We cannot find that anything in his age was more worth telling than anything in ours; nor give any account of his existence, but only the fact that there was a wonderful symbolizer and expresser, who has no rival in the ages, and who has thrown an accidental lustre over his time and subject."

In the lecture on "Works and Days" he wrote, "Shakspeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest." And in that on "Inspiration" in Letters and Social Aims: "Shakspeare seems to you miraculous, but the wonderful juxtapositions, parallelisms, transfers, which his genius effected, were all to him locked together as links of a chain, and the mode

precisely as conceivable and familiar to higher intelligence as the index-making of the literary hack."

Journal, 1838. "Read Lear yesterday and Hamlet to-day with new wonder and mused much on the great Soul in the broad continuous daylight of these poems. Especially I wonder at the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and intellectual superiority find in us all in connection with our utter incapacity to produce anything like it. The superior tone of Hamlet in all the conversations how perfectly preserved, without any mediocrity, much less any dulness in the other speakers.

"How real the loftiness! an inborn gentleman; and above that, an exalted intellect. What incessant growth and plenitude of thought,—pausing on itself never an instant, and each sally of wit sufficient to save the play. How true then and unerring the earnest of the dialogue, as when Hamlet talks with the Queen. How terrible his discourse! What less can be said of the perfect mastery, as by a superior being, of the conduct of the drama, as the free introduction of this capital advice to the players; the commanding good sense which never retreats except before the Godhead which inspires certain passages—the more I think of it, the more I wonder. I will think nothing impossible to man. No Parthenon, no sculpture, no picture, no architecture can be named beside this. All this is perfectly visible to me and to many,—the wonderful truth and mastery of this work, of these works,—yet for our lives could not I, or any man, or all men, produce anything comparable to one scene in Hamlet or Lear. With all my admiration of this life-like picture, set me to producing a match for it, and I should instantly depart into mouthing rhetoric. … One other fact Shakspeare presents us; that not by books are great poets made. Somewhat—

and much, he unquestionably owes to his books; but you could not find in his circumstances the history of his poems. It was made without hands in his invisible world. A mightier magic than any learning, the deep logic of cause and effect he studied: its roots were cast so deep, therefore it flung out its branches so high."

Page 207, note 1. Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, writing in Harper's Monthly in 1882, relates how in a long drive with Mr. Emerson, after a lecture, "The conversation at last drifted to contemporary actors who assumed to personate leading characters in Shakspeare's greatest plays. Had I ever seen an actor who satisfied me when he pretended to be Hamlet or Othello, Lear or Macbeth? Yes, I had seen the elder Booth in these characters. Though not perfect, he approached nearer to perfection than any other actor I knew. …

"'Ah,' said Emerson, [after] the three minutes I consumed in eulogizing Booth, … 'I see you are one of the happy mortals who are capable of being carried away by an actor of Shakspeare. Now, whenever I visit the theatre to witness the performance of one of his dramas, I am carried away by the poet. I went last Tuesday to see Macready in Hamlet. I got along very well until he came to the passage:—

"thou, dead corse, again, in cómplete steel, Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon:"—

and then actor, theatre, all vanished in view of that solving and dissolving imagination, which could reduce this big globe and all it inherits into mere "glimpses of the moon." The play went on, but, absorbed in this one thought of the mighty master, I paid no heed to it.'

"What specially impressed me, as Emerson was speaking, was his glance at our surroundings as he slowly uttered,

'glimpses of the moon,' for here above us was the same moon which must have given birth to Shakspeare's thought. … Afterward, in his lecture on Shakspeare, Emerson made use of the thought suggested in our ride by moonlight. He said, 'That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's dimensions, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the "glimpses of the moon."' … In the printed lecture, there is one sentence declaring the absolute insufficiency of any actor, in any theatre, to fix attention on himself while uttering Shakspeare's words, which seems to me the most exquisite statement ever made of the magical suggestiveness of Shakspeare's expression. I have often quoted it, but it will bear quotation again and again, as the best prose sentence ever written on this side of the Atlantic: 'The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes.'"

Page 208, note 1.

The little Shakspeare in the maiden's heart Makes Romeo of a ploughboy on his cart; Opens the eye to Virtue's starlike meed And gives persuasion to a gentle deed. "The Enchanter," Poems, Appendix.

Page 210, note 1. And yet perhaps there is some truth in Dr. Richard Garnett's word in his Life of Emerson: "Emerson is incapable of contemplating Shakspeare with the eye of a dramatic critic."

Just after Mr. Emerson settled in Concord he read with great pleasure Henry Taylor's play Philip van Artevelde, then recently published. He wrote in his journal for 1835:—

"I think Taylor's poem is the best light we have ever had

upon the genius of Shakspeare. We have made a miracle of Shakspeare, a haze of light instead of a guiding torch, by accepting unquestioned all the tavern stories about his want of education, and total unconsciousness. The internal evidence all the time is irresistible that he was no such person. He was a man, like this Taylor, of strong sense and of great cultivation; an excellent Latin scholar, and of extensive and select reading, so as to have formed his theories of many historical characters with as much clearness as Gibbon or Niebuhr or Goethe. He wrote for intelligent persons, and wrote with intention. He had Taylor's strong good sense, and added to it his own wonderful facility of execution which aerates and sublimes all language the moment he uses it, or more truly, animates every word."

Page 211, note 1. Lowell, in one of his essays, calls attention to the survival in New England of the type of face of the English in Queen Elizabeth's day even more than in the mother country, and also to the old English expressions, obsolete in England, but still current on New England farms.

Page 212, note 1. Journal, 1838. "Shakspeare fills us with wonder the first time we approach him. We go away, and work and think, for years, and come again,—he astonishes us anew. Then, having drank deeply and saturated us with his genius, we lose sight of him for another period of years. By and by we return, and there he stands immeasurable as at first. We have grown wiser, but only that we should see him wiser than ever. He resembles a high mountain which the traveller sees in the morning, and thinks he shall quickly near it and pass it, and leave it behind. But he journeys all day till noon, till night. There still is the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings since the morning light."

Page 216, note 1.

And yet it seemeth not to me That the high gods love tragedy; For Saadi sat in the sun, And thanks was his contrition;

And yet his runes he rightly read, And to his folk his message sped. "Saadi," Poems.

Page 217, note 1. This image appears in "The Apology" in the Poems.

Page 218, note 1. The Puritan shrinking from the form in which the great poet embodied his thought or oracles or dreams still appears in the journal of 1852, yet, contrasted to the dismal seers, Shakspeare is well-nigh pardoned his levity.

"There was never anything more excellent came from a human brain than the plays of Shakspeare, bating only that they were plays. The Greek has a real advantage of them in the degree in which his dramas had a religious office. Could the priest look him in the face without blenching?"

In 1839 Mr. Emerson had written:—

"It is in the nature of things that the highest originality must be moral. The only person who can be entirely independent of this fountain of literature and equal to it, must be a prophet in his own proper person. Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, leans on the Bible: his poetry supposes it. If we examine this brilliant influence, Shakspeare, as it lies in our minds, we shall find it reverent, deeply indebted to the traditional morality, in short, compared with the tone of the prophets, Secondary. On the other hand, the

Prophets do not imply the existence of Shakspeare or Homer,—to no books or arts,—only to dread Ideas and emotions."

Page 219, note 1. All through his life Mr. Emerson felt increasing thankfulness for "the Spirit of joy which Shakspeare had shed over the Universe." In 1864 he wrote:—

"When I read Shakspeare, as lately, I think the criticism and study of him to be in their infancy. The wonder grows of his long obscurity:—how could you hide the only man that ever wrote from all men who delight in reading?"

And again he wrote: "Your criticism is profane. Shakspeare by Shakspeare. The poet in his interlunation is a critic,"—that is, his worst is criticised by his best performance.

Journal, 1864. "How to say it I know not, but I know that the point of praise of Shakspeare is the pure poetic power: he is the chosen closet companion, who can, at any moment, by incessant surprises, work the miracle of mythologizing every fact of the common life; as snow, or moonlight, or the level rays of sunrise lend a momentary glow to every pump and wood-pile."

And again: 1836. "It is easy to solve the problem of individual existence. Why Milton, Shakspeare, or Canova should be there is reason enough. But why the million should exist drunk with the opium of Time and Custom does not appear."

But even Shakspeare must not be idolized. The soul must rely on itself, that is, on the universal fountain of beauty, wisdom and goodness to which it is open. So thus he draws the moral:—

1838. "The indisposition of men to go back to the source and mix with Deity is the reason of degradation and decay. Education is expended in the measurement and imitation of

effects in the study of Shakspeare, for example, as itself a perfect being—instead of using Shakspeare merely as an effect of which the cause is with every scholar. Thus the college becomes idolatrous—a temple full of idols. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. I know not how directions for greatness can be given, yet greatness may be inspired."

Feb. 1838. "Consider too how Shakspeare and Milton are formed. They are just such men as we all are to their contemporaries, and none suspected their superiority,—but after all were dead, and a generation or two besides, it is discovered that they surpass all. Each of us then take the same moral to himself."

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD

The man of action, made on the largest pattern, with intellect to match his will, and yet a believer in his star, to which, though it turned out to be but a lurid planet, not a sun, he "hitched his wagon," could not fail to interest Emerson.

"That world's earthquake, Waterloo," occurred when he was twelve years old.

He supplemented his Plutarch's Lives by all the memoirs of Napoleon then written, and especially enjoyed his letters to his brother, the King of Spain.

Courage, address and disbelief in the impossible were virtues as much needed by the scholar as the soldier, but executive ability, knowledge how to deal directly with men and things, was admired by the man of the gown. He said, "I

like people who can do things." In his journal of 1838 he thus contrasted temperaments:—

"The advantage of the Napoleon temperament, impassive, unimpressible by others, is a signal convenience over this other tender one, which every aunt and every gossiping girl can daunt and tether. This weakness, be sure, is merely cutaneous, and the sufferer gets his revenge by the sharpened observation that belongs to such sympathetic fibre. As even in college I was already content to be 'screwed' in the recitation room, if on my return, I could accurately paint the fact in my youthful journal."

And in 1856 his interest in "other people's facts," to find in them the law applicable to his own or every man's life, thus appears:—

"'Whatever they may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with fists,' said Napoleon; 'when once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders what you have already done useless.' I find it easy to translate all his technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to me more literary and philosophical than the mémoires of the Academy."

And again in 1844:—

"I myself can easily translate, not without some terror, the maxim, 'that an army should never have more than one line of operation' and the principle of 'never joining your columns before your enemy or near him.'"

This lecture on Napoleon, like that on Shakspeare, was read in Exeter Hall, London, in 1848.

Page 223, note 1. Malpighi's dictum of tota in minimis existit Natura.

Page 225, note 1. Anecdotes of this kind, which Mr. Emerson used as parables, always interested him, and in his

lectures he found their sure value, though when he pruned these with a classic severity for his essays, many were omitted. Mrs. Emerson objected to this, but he said that when the lectures were published "they must have on their Greek jackets." On coming home from church in 1835 he wrote in his journal:—

"I cannot hear a sermon without being struck by the fact that amid drowsy series of sentences what a sensation a historical fact, a biographical name, a sharply objective illustration makes! Why will not the preacher heed the admonition of the silence momentary of his congregation and (what is often shown him) that this particular sentence is all they carry away? Is he not taught hereby that the synthesis is to all grateful, and to most indispensable, of abstract thought and a concrete body? Principles should be verified by the adducing of facts and sentiments incorporated by their appropriate imagery. Only in a purely scientific composition, which by its text and structure addresses itself to philosophers, is a writer at liberty to use mere abstractions."

Page 228, note 1. Dr. Richard Garnett in his Life of Emerson says in connection with this paragraph: "The discussion on Napoleon shows Emerson at his best as a connoisseur of men, and would alone prove that he did not addict himself to speculation out of incapacity or contempt for the affairs of the world. The ideologist judges the man of action more shrewdly and justly than the man of action would have judged the ideologist; and after having most brilliantly painted Napoleon's perfect sufficiency in all things for which virtue is not needful, puts him on his right footing with 'Bonaparte is the idol of common men,'" etc.

In the following extract from the journal the scholar owns his debt to the great soldier:—

May 1, 1838. "I sat in sunshine this afternoon beside my little pond in the woods, and thought how wide are my works and my plays from those of the great men I read of or think of. And yet the solution of Napoleon, whose life I have been reading, lies in my feelings and fancies as I loiter by this rippling water. I am curious concerning his day,—what filled it,—the crowded orders, the stern determinations, the manifold etiquette. The soul answers, Behold his day! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of those Northwestern mountains, in the workmen, the boys, the girls you meet, in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of afternoon, in the disquieting comparisons, in the regrets at want of vigor, in the great idea and the puny execution, behold Napoleon's day; another, yet the same; behold Byron's, Webster's, Canning's, Milton's, Scipio's, Pericles's day—Day of all that are born of woman."

Page 229, note 1. Mr. Emerson was alive to the failings of his class. The one fault that he finds with Plato is that in dealing with the questions of life and passion and sin and hope "he is always literary and never otherwise."

Page 230, note 1. There is in one of Mr. Emerson's note-books a newspaper cutting containing a translation of a remarkable characterization of Napoleon by Fichte in a lecture given at Berlin in 1813. The following is quoted from it:—

"Let us now look at the man who has placed himself at the head of that people. First of all, he is no Frenchman. If he were, those social fundamental views and that regard for the opinions of others, or, in short, for something outside of himself, as well as that benevolent weakness and inconsequence which manifested themselves, for instance, in Louis XIV.,—in my opinion the worst outgrowth of French national

character,—would also have been exhibited in him. But he came from a people which, even among the ancients, were notorious as savages; which at the time of his birth had relapsed into still greater barbarism, through bitter slavery; which had fought a hard struggle to break its chains, and … been cheated out of its freedom. … He received his education among the French people, whom he thus became acquainted with; the character of that nation exhibiting itself at that time in a revolution whereof he had opportunity to observe the most secret motives. He could not fail soon to comprehend with convincing clearness this people to be a very excitable body, capable of taking any direction given to it from without, but utterly incapable of giving to itself a self-determined and permanent direction. … This complete clearness concerning the true character of the nation over which he assumed supreme rule was reinforced by a powerful and inflexible will, grounded in his descent from a strong people, and hardened through his continual but secret conflict with the surroundings of his youth. Armed with these two components of human greatness, calm clearness and firm will, he would have become the benefactor and savior of mankind, if but the slightest presentiment of the moral nature of man had fallen upon his soul. But it did not. And thus he became an example for all time as to what these two components, purely by themselves and without any contemplation of the spiritual, can achieve."

Page 231, note 1. In the journal the quotation from Las Casas, which follows in the text, is preceded by this sentence: "It was observed that the Emperor was not fond of setting forward his own merits: 'That is,' said he, 'because with me morality and generosity are not in my mouth, but in my nerves.'"

Page 231, note 2. There is a remarkable passage in the oration called "Literary Ethics" (Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 179) on Napoleon's utter "faithfulness to facts" in his campaigns, but also his reserve belief "in the freedom and quite incalculable force of the soul."

Page 235, note 1. "As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, I dare not adopt the high figure I find." Note to First Edition.

Page 240, note 1. This, and the story of Caesar's civilly eating the asparagus which his poor host had dressed with a salve, and his reproving his officers for their grimaces of disgust, always strongly appealed to Mr. Emerson's natural feelings of consideration and courtesy to the humblest person. He was drawn more to Napoleon by this speech, "Respect the burden, Madam," than by any other story told of him, and he frequently used it as a lesson to his children and others, of honor and consideration for laborers and servants.

Page 242, note 1. Journal, 1836. "I like the man in O'Meara's picture. He is good-natured, as greatness always is, and not pompous."

Page 246, note 1. Mr. Emerson delights in a liberator of man. He defines the poet as such in one way, and the hero of this chapter in another way.

Napoleon's sharing the hardships of his soldiers, and personal knowledge of them, his power of labor, his faith in means, his breaking down the bars of feudalism and throwing open the door, closed for centuries to native power and merit in the humblest, went far with Emerson.

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, And power to him who power exerts.

In the essay on "Aristocracy," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, is much to this purpose.

But the touch of softness and of imagination in this Man of Destiny found in the following anecdote gave especial pleasure:

Journal, 1844. "Bonaparte was sensible to the music of bells. Hearing the bell of a parish church, he would pause and his voice faltered as he said, 'Ah! that reminds me of the first years I spent at Brienne. I was then happy.'"

The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse and lists with delight Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height. "Each and All," Poems.

Page 247, note 1. Journal. "History is zoölogy and not a chapter of accidents."

Page 251, note 1. A curious prophecy of the natural antitoxins.

Page 251, note 2. Journal, 1838. "Napoleon like all men of genius, is greatly impersonal in his habit of thought. He sees the sublime laws and not the individual men. Men are to him but illustrations, and hence a magnanimous tolerance. … The Admiral Cockburn admits that 'Napoleon is the most good-natured and reasonable of the whole set.' Able men generally have this vast fund of justice and good dispositions, because an able man is nothing else than a good free vascular organization whereinto the Universal Spirit freely flows, so that his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite."

Page 251, note 3. Journal, 1845. "Napoleon stands at the confluence of the two streams of thought and of matter, and derives thence his power."

Page 256, note 1. "Jupiter Scapin" is a title which appears to have been applied to Napoleon by Abbé de Pradt.

Page 257, note 1. Journal. "Napoleon was called by

his men Cent Mille. Add honesty to him, and they might have called him Hundred Millions."

Page 257, note 2. Journal, 1838. "The only fault in Napoleon's Biography is that he was beaten at Waterloo. What can Genius avail against Facts, which are the Genius of God?"

"Bonaparte by force of intellect is raised out of all comparison with the strong men around him. His marshals, though able men, are as horses and oxen. He alone is a fine tragic figure related to the daemons, and to all time. Add as much force of intellect again, to repair the immense defect of this morale, and he would have been in harmony with the ideal world."

Boded Merlin wise, Proved Napoleon great,— Nor kind nor coinage buys Aught above its rate. Fear, Craft and Avarice Cannot rear a State. Out of dust to build What is more than dust,— Walls Amphion piled Phoebus stablish must. Motto to "Politics," Essays, Second Series.

GOETHE, OR, THE WRITER

In the third decade of the nineteenth century New England was introduced to German thought and literature by Everett, Frothingham, Norton, Ticknor and others of her brilliant or ambitious scholars, returning from foreign travel, and

from courses at continental universities to which they had been incited by the study of Coleridge. In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," in the volume Lectures and Biographical Sketches, Mr. Emerson tells of the awakening influence of this breeze from Germany when he was an undergraduate and a divinity student. His older brother William, destined, like his ancestry for several generations, for the ministry, graduating from Harvard at the age of seventeen, had after four years of school-teaching gone to Göttingen to study, as soon as the earnings of Ralph and Edward left him free to leave the family, of which since his father's death he had shared with his mother the heavy responsibility. William's mind was exact and judicial and his conscience active. The German philosophy and the Biblical criticism shook his belief in the forms and teachings of the religion in which he had been brought up. There is a letter, still preserved in the family, to his honored step-grandfather, the Rev. Ezra Ripley of Concord, in which he respectfully but with great clearness states his reasons for thinking that the rite of the Lord's Supper was not authoritatively established by Jesus for perpetual observance as a sacrament by Christians. His brother Waldo several years later parted with his church on this issue, and, in his sermon explaining his reasons, does not urge primarily his own feeling that, as a form, it is a hindrance rather than a help to true devotion and unsuited to our race and our day, but enters, in a way unusual and remarkable for him, into a critical and systematic consideration of the scriptural authorities for the rite. There is hardly room for doubt that this argument was supplied by the elder brother. To William, beset by distressing doubt at Göttingen, it occurred that, but eighty miles away at Weimar, lived the wisest man of the age. He forthwith sought him out, was

kindly received, and laid his doubts before him. He hoped, no doubt, that Goethe could clear these up, and show some way in which he could honorably and sincerely exercise the priestly office. The counsel which he received was in effect—for unhappily there is no written record and the story rests on family tradition—to persevere in his profession, comply with the usual forms, preach as best he could, and not trouble his family and his hearers with his doubts. Happily the youth, at this parting of the ways where the great mind of the age acted the part of the Tempter, turned his back, and again listened to the inward voice. He left the ancestral path, gave up at the age of twenty-four his plan of life for which he had been with diligence and sacrifice preparing himself, and studied law. He was an honorable and successful practitioner, but his standard of work, and the sacrifices and heroic asceticism of his early life made him a sufferer all his days.

This counsel of Goethe's to William to do the expedient, not the heroic, must have made a lasting impression on the younger brother's mind, and, soon after, Wilhelm Meister, translated by Carlyle in 1824, must, in spite of its breadth and its fascination, have shocked the young New England minister with its lax continental morals. After his visit to Carlyle at Ecclefechan in 1834, his love for and faith in his friend led Emerson to comply with his urgency that he study Goethe. For Carlyle's sake immediately on his return he procured Goethe's Collected Works in the original and, hitherto unacquainted with German, set himself to read them in the original.

"NOVEMBER 20, 1834.

"Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?), Sartor Resartus, than the adulation that followed your eminent friend Goethe. With him

I am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. It is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him. I cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad influence on his genius,—that velvet life he led. … Then the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. We can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle. The sympathy his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults; but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious Dark."

In his answer Carlyle said:—"I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe: his is the only healthy mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it done): Behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man! For which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful? On the whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic); but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that one far better."

In the journal of 1836 Mr. Emerson records that he has been reading "our wise, but sensual, loved and hated Goethe," on the open secret of life: "There sits he at the centre of all visibles and knowables, blowing bubble after bubble, so transparent, so round, so coloured, that he thinks and you think they are pretty good miniatures of the all.

Such attempts are all his minor poems, proverbs, Xenien, parables. Have you read the Welt Seele? The danger of such attempts as this striving to write universal poetry is,—that nothing is so shabby as to fail.

"Yes, you may write an ill romance or play, and 't is no great matter. Better men have done so; but when what should be greatest truths flat out into shallow truisms, then are we all sick. But much I fear that Time, the serene Judge, will not be able to make out so good a verdict for Goethe as did and doth Carlyle. I am afraid that under his faith is no-faith,—that under his love is love-of-ease. However his mind is Catholic as ever any was."

Affection for Carlyle gave at first a great impulse towards the work of tunnelling through this mountain of universal learning in hard German, which never became easy for Mr. Emerson to read, but as he read, real interest grew in this mighty mind and the eye which

… bounded to the horizon's edge And searched with the sun's privilege.

In writing to his friend in April, 1840, Mr. Emerson said: "You asked me if I read German, and I forget if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else [i. e. in German]: but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time. There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books, least of all on his books; but in a lecture on Literature, in my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject, and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and send it to you?" This paper appeared in the Dial in "Thoughts on Modern Literature," now included in the volume Natural History of Intellect.

Though Goethe opened vistas of knowledge and thought, the gods were speaking in the breath of the wood a purer word, and the new day shed fresher light on things and men. So he wrote in one of the pocket volumes:—

Six thankful weeks,—and let it be A meter of prosperity,— In my coat I bore this book, And seldom therein could I look, For I had too much to think, Heaven and earth to eat and drink. Is he hapless who can spare In his plenty things so rare?

Always in his praise of Goethe there was a reserve, a protest spoken or unspoken, but, with all abatements, he acknowledged the debt of mankind to him. In the essay in this volume it is noticeable how he refrains from the obvious criticisms of Goethe's morals, of which he thought enough had been said in Old and New England. He wrote, in 1844, of strictures by a clergyman on Goethe's religious speculations:—

"—pleased the people of Boston by railing at Goethe in his Phi Beta Kappa oration because Goethe was not a New England Calvinist. If our lovers of greatness and goodness after a local type and standard could expand their scope a little, they would see that a worshipper of truth, and a most subtle perceiver of truth like Goethe, with his impatience of all falsehood and scorn of hypocrisy, was a far more useful man and incomparably more helpful ally to religion than ten thousand lukewarm church members who keep all the traditions and leave a tithe of their estates to establish them. But this clergyman should have known that the movement which in America created these Unitarian dissenters of which he is

one, began in the mind of this great man he traduces; that he is precisely the individual in whom the new ideas appeared and opened to their greatest extent and with universal application, which more recently the active scholars in the different departments of Science, of State, and of the Church have carried in parcels and thimblefuls to their petty occasions."

In the Poems he bids the severe critic of the dead Goethe's shortcomings consider, instead, his great debt to him for his vast achievement.

Set not thy foot on graves; Nor seek to unwind the shroud Which charitable Time And Nature have allowed To wrap the errors of a sage sublime. "To J. W."

Page 262, note 1. The old doctrine of "the Flowing" again in the living record of the living, changing fact,—flowing Nature as the apparition of the living God. Going down to the river, whether of Memory or Experience, we find the river the same, but the waters not those of yesterday. The motto of "Spiritual Laws" is suggested here.

Page 263, note 1. As a further instance of his doctrine of Compensation, Mr. Emerson might have mentioned that when the great anatomist Vesalius had the luck to have this vivisecting experiment performed for him by the amiable Sultan, he was on an enforced pilgrimage to the Holy Land at the edict of the Inquisition in expiation of his heresy in saying that Galen's descriptions, being founded on dissections of animals, were incorrect concerning men.

Page 265, note 1. "Let the scholar not quit his belief that a pop-gun is a pop-gun, though the ancient and honourable

of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom."—"The American Scholar," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 268, note 1. The thoughts of this paragraph are strongly presented in "Aristocracy," and those in the next, on the importance and duty of the Writer, in "The Scholar" and "The Man of Letters," all in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 270, note 1. Having all respect, and more,—wonder,—at Goethe's vast mental range and insight, and at his enormous work and achievement, Mr. Emerson chooses "instructive," and no stronger word; for, as to duties, he felt that the lesson was in what was done, and what left undone.

Page 270, note 2. Journal, 1851. "Goethe is the pivotal man of the old and new times with us. He shuts up the old, he opens the new. No matter that you were born since Goethe died,—if you have not read Goethe, or the Goethans, you are an old fogy, and belong with the antediluvians."

Page 271, note 1. Journal, 1836. "Goethe the observer. What sagacity! what industry of observation! what impatience of words! To read Goethe is an economy of time; for you shall find no word that does not stand for a thing, and he is of that comprehension as to see the value of truth. But I am provoked with his Olympian self-complacency."

Journal, 1837. "A characteristic of Goethe is his choice of topics. What an eye for the measure of things! Perhaps he is out in regard to Byron, but not of Shakspeare; and in Byron he has grasped all the peculiarities. Paper money; periods of belief; cheerfulness of the poet; French Revolution; how just are his views of these trite things! What a multitude of opinions and how few blunders! The estimate of Sterne I suppose to be one."

Page 272, note 1. Journal, 1851. "One listens to the

magnifying of Goethe's poem by his critic, and replies, 'Yes, it is good, if you all agree to come in, and be pleased;' and you fall into another company and mood, and like it not. It is so with Wordsworth. But to Shakspeare alone God granted the power to dispense with the humours of his company. They must needs all take his. He is always good; and Goethe knew it, and said, 'It is as idle to compare Tieck to me as me to Shakspeare.'

"I looked through the first part of Faust to-day and found it a little too modern and intelligible. We can make such a fabric at several mills, though a little inferior [referring to Bailey's Festus and Browning's Paracelsus]. The miraculous, the beauty which we can manufacture at no mill, can give no account of, it wants. The cheerful, radiant, profuse beauty of which Shakspeare, of which Chaucer, had the secret." Some of the above extracts and more concerning Faust are printed in "Papers from the Dial; Thoughts on Modern Literature," in the volume Natural History of Intellect.

Again of the second part of Faust he wrote in the journal of 1843:—

"In Helena, Faust is sincere and represents actual cultivated, strong-natured man. The book would be farrago without the sincerity of Faust. I think the second part of Faust the grandest enterprise of literature that has been attempted since the Paradise Lost."

Journal, Aug. 18, 1832. "To be genuine. Goethe, they say, was wholly so. The difficulty increases with the gifts of the individual. A ploughboy can be, but a minister, an orator, an ingenious thinker, how hardly! George Fox was. 'What I am in words,' he said, 'I am the same in life.' Swedenborg was. 'My writings will be found,' he said, 'another

self.' George Washington was,—'the irreproachable Washington.'"

Page 273, note 1. This line is probably a translation from some Arabic or Persian source, from the connection in which it appears in the note-book.

Page 274, note 1. Journal, 1831. "As History's best use is to enhance our estimate of the present hour, so the value of such an observer as Goethe, who draws out of our consciousness some familiar fact, and makes it glorious by showing it in the light of this [hour], is this, that he makes us prize all our being by suggesting its inexhaustible wealth; for we feel that all our experience is thus convertible into jewels. He moves our wonder at the mystery of our life."

Page 274, note 2. Journal, 1839. "Goethe unlocks the faculties of the artist more than any writer. He teaches us to treat all subjects with greater freedom, and to skip over all obstruction, time, place, name, usage, and come full and strong on the emphasis of the fact."

Journal, 1856. "When Goethe says, Nature, love, truth, insight, it is quite another thing than if some one else used those words."

Page 277, note 1. In the essay called "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," Mr. Emerson thus spoke of the first part of Faust, always distasteful to him:—

"The age of arithmetic and of criticism has set in … the age of analysis and detachment. … In literature the effect appeared in the decided tendency of criticism. The most remarkable literary work of the age has for its hero and subject precisely this introversion: I mean the poem of Faust."

And again in "The Man of Letters" in the same volume he says:—

"Our profoundest philosophy (if it were not contradiction

in terms) is skepticism. The great poem of the age is the disagreeable poem of Faust, of which the Festus of Bailey and the Paracelsus of Browning are English variations."

"Goethe, the surpassing intellect of modern times, apprehends the spiritual but is not spiritual."

Page 279, note 1. Among the few novels that Mr. Emerson read he always praised Consuelo.

Page 280, note 1. One merit noted in Wilhelm Meister is this, from the journal:—

"Goethe certainly had good thoughts on the subject of female culture. How respectful to woman and hopeful are the portraits in Wilhelm Meister."

The book is considered at some length in the "Thoughts on Modern Literature." In its realism Mr. Emerson finds thus much to his liking,—an eventual good coming out of mistakes and failures, a Power

Forging, through swart arms of offence, The silver seat of Innocence.

But he regrets that a mind like Goethe's chooses to paint the Actual. He sets him down as the poet of this, and not of the Ideal, "the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this world, and not of religion and hope; in short, if we may say so, the poet of prose, and not of poetry. He accepts the base doctrine of Fate, and gleans what straggling joys may yet remain out of its ban." Lacking "a moral sense proportionate to his powers, … the cardinal fact of health or disease … he failed in the high sense to be a creator, and, with divine endowments, drops by irreversible decree into the common history of genius."

Page 281, note 1. Journal, 1844. "Goethe with his extraordinary breadth of experience and culture, the security with

which, like a great continental gentleman, he looks impartially over all literatures of the mountains, the provinces and the sea, and avails himself of the best in all, contrasts with the vigour of the English, and superciliousness and flippancy of the French. His perfect taste, the austere felicity of his style.

"It is delightful to find our own thought in so great a man."

Page 282, note 1. But a few years after this passage was written Mr. Emerson had occasion to write the like with more vigor and feeling concerning American statesmen; as thus:—

"Very little reliance must be put on the common stories that circulate of this great senator's or that great barrister's learning, their Greek, their varied literature. That ice won't bear. Reading! do you mean that this senator or that lawyer who stood by and allowed the passage of infamous laws was a reader of Greek books? That is not the question, but to what purpose did they read. … They read that they might know, did they not? Well, these men did not know. … They were utterly ignorant of that which every boy or girl of fifteen knows perfectly,—the rights of men and women." "The Man of Letters," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 285, note 1. Yet Mr. Emerson felt that Goethe fell short of the highest culture thus elsewhere defined by him:—

"The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment. This is the fountain of power, preserves its eternal newness, draws its own rent out of every novelty of science. Science corrects the old creeds. … Yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger insights."—"Progress of Culture," Letters and Social Aims.

Page 288, note 1. Xenien, from the Greek, was used by Goethe and Schiller to denote epigrams.

Page 290, note 1. Some unfinished verses of Emerson's, which scarce need an ending, may serve perhaps for the moral.

But if thou do thy best, Without remission, without rest, And invite the sunbeam, And abhor to feign or seem;

If thou go in thine own likeness, Be it health, or be it sickness, If thou go as thy father's son, If thou wear no mask or lie Dealing purely and nakedly,—

Notes

• 1 1.1

  "On the Character of Socrates" (1820) and "On the Present State of Ethical Philosophy" (1821). These are printed in Rev. Dr. E. E. Hale's Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Brown & Co., 1899.
• 1 1.2

  A Correspondence between John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897.
• 2 1.3

  The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Supplementary Letters. Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1886.
• 1 1.4

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Genius and Writings. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1882.
• 1 1.5

  Remembrances of Emerson, by John Albee. New York: International Book and Publishing Co. 1900.
• 1 3.1

  Letters of Emerson to a Friend, edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1899.
• 1 3.2

  "Emerson's Orientalism" in The Genius and Character of Emerson, Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1885.
• 1 7.1

  Taine's History of English Literature.
• 1 7.2

  In Mr. Cabot's Memoir, vol. ii. p. 572, see Mr. Emerson's letter on his mother's death.