The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The conduct of life [Vol. 6]

NOTES

NOTES

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

THE opening pages of the new journal after Mr. Emerson reached his home, in the summer of 1848, after nine months' stay in England, seem to reflect the sense of joyful relief he found in his country, the growing, uncommitted and unbound,—even half-tamed America. In spite of hospitality and kind reception, he had found the brave and truth-speaking English not as open as his countrymen to ideas, to inspiration. He had written, "Alas! the halls of England are musty; the land is full of coal-smoke and carpet-smell: not a breath of mountain air dilates the languishing lungs…. English and Europeans are girded with an iron belt of condition." So, on the clean fly-leaf of the new journal he wrote two fragments of verse for omens: the first from the noble poem "Inspiration" of Henry Thoreau, who, like a younger brother, had manned the wall of his castle during his absence:—

"I hearing get, who had but ears, And sight, who had but eyes before, I moments live, who lived but years, And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore."

Below these lines he wrote the verses of Horace:—

"Hunc solem et stellas et decedentia certis Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla Imbuti spectent." (Epistolae, I. 6. 3, 4.)

I think that he was pleased by the possibility of construing these words, taken by themselves, in opposite significance,

oracle-like; either in obvious praise of the constant man whom nature cannot alarm, or in dispraise of the hopeless spirit destitute of wonder and awe.

He has now, in lecturing, his own people to deal with, not "persons of quality," or English men of letters, and so in one of the early pages is written the story of Edmund Kean's remark when they told him that "the boxes applauded": "The boxes! a fig for the boxes! I tell you the Pit rose to me."

Cheered by the sight of the spreading, thriving States with their hopeful vigor, and promise to all poor and oppressed European peoples, he wrote: "America is England seen under a magnifying glass. There can be no famine, no want that can't be supplied, no danger from any excess of European importation of art or learning into a country of such excessive native strength, such immense digestive power. We read without pain what the English say to the advantage of England, for are we not the heir? 'Percy is but the factor, good my lord.' And really what amount of petulant English criticism in journals and pamphlets can offset the eulogy of the swarming annual emigration from the British Isles into the United States?"

Once more at the town-meeting, the evolution of which in early New England, and its importance, he had shown in his Historical Address at Concord in 1835, he was pleased to see how well the Concord farmers, tradesmen and few professional men managed their affairs. "The American town is the unit of the Republic, as the leaf is of botany, or one vertebra is of the skeleton." He had full faith in the American idea, and wrote: "I wish to cast out the passion for Europe by the passion for America."

But the impatience, whether in letters or in arts, the make shifts and superficiality disturbed him.

"Our people do not get ripened, but, like peaches and grapes of this season, want a fortnight more of sun, and remain crude. In denser-peopled countries more caloric is generated." Then the question occurred, "Does great territory make men diminutive?" "The providing means of living now absorbs them, to the exclusion of the ends. Nothing but the brandy of politics will wake them from brute life. No song of any Muse will they hear. But the adult education must be urged. The education shall not stop with youth, but shall be as vigorously continued into maturity. Proctors we must have to drive the old fellows to school. The Commonwealth shall set its Horace Manns on applying the searching culture suggested in the Republic to adults, and so keep them up."

The idealists of the previous decade seemed to have but faintly leavened the lump, for "Anglo-Saxondom" was in the air, had won from Mexico a vast area of old Spanish territory between the Gulf and the Pacific, and was casting its audacious eyes upon Cuba and the Isthmus.

"Our country, right or wrong," was becoming a watchword which found supporters in the North. This "extending the area of Freedom" was serving the purpose of extending that of slavery for the black man, and of political power for his master. Against the strong and masterful men who were winning point after point in Congress for their political supremacy and its unhallowed institution, the Northern men of conscience counted on Daniel Webster and Charles Sumner as their champions of Freedom. In 1850, Webster, the idol of New England, startled his people by deliberately advising them to "conquer their prejudices" and support the Fugitive-Slave Bill. A few years later, after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, their incorruptible Sumner, still fighting against

the aggressions of slavery, was struck down in his seat and long disabled by a member of Congress from South Carolina. The outrages of the Border Ruffians in Kansas, countenanced to a great degree by the administration at Washington, startled the North.

Mr. Emerson had come home with love for his country and faith in her. But each succeeding year brought a new disgrace to that Republic which should guide mankind. Slavery, which, when he wrote the "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing," had seemed an evil, but remote and local, now lay like a weight upon him when he woke in the morning,—any day the law of his country might require of him, not only to deny a refuge or a couch to the hunted slave, but himself to join in the hunt. The reception of this law by the country, he said, "showed that our prosperity had hurt us, that we could not be shocked by crime,… that the old religion and the sense of right had faded and gone out: that, while we reckoned ourselves a highly cultivated nation, our bellies had run away with our brains, and the principles of culture and progress did not exist."1 1.1 This was an outcry of shame and dismay, but he never despaired of the Republic, and at the important moments he failed not to speak with all the fire and eloquence that was in him against the blot of shame that lay upon his country. He went to the anti-slavery meetings in Boston and New York, and constantly to those held in his own village. Out of means at that time straitened, he gave most liberally in help of the Free-State cause in Kansas. John Brown was his guest on at least one of the occasions of his visiting Concord. One of the most interesting of Mr. Emerson's manuscript books is that which is called Liberty, in which he gathered, with wide research, opinions of eminent

jurists, sayings of statesmen and patriots, and anecdotes, all relating to the history of Liberty, on which he seems to have contemplated writing a paper. In the year in which The Conduct of Life was published, at last the awakened conscience of the country chose Lincoln as President. But in the darkest days before this dawn Emerson wrote:—

Journal, 1857. "The politics of Massachusetts are cowardly. O for a Roman breath, and the courage that advances and dictates! When we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has made a fault, and not that we have made a thrust. Why do we not say, We are abolitionists of the most absolute abolition, as every man that is a man must be? Only the Hottentots, only the barbarous or semi-barbarous societies are not. We do not try to alter your laws in Alabama, nor yours in Japan, or the Feejee Islands; but we do not admit them or permit a trace of them here. Nor shall we suffer you to carry your Thuggism north, south, east or west into a single rod of territory which we control. We intend to set and keep a cordon sanitaire all around the infected district, and by no means suffer the pestilence to spread."

"It is impossible to be a gentleman, and not be an abolitionist. For a gentle man is one who is fulfilled with all nobleness and imparts it; is the natural defender and raiser of the weak and oppressed; like the Cid."

Throughout that struggle Mr. Emerson was mindful of the value of calmness, and the power of the great laws, "if not polemically stated." Such were the times in which he not only prepared for the press the collection Nature, Addresses and Lectures and his Representative Men, both written before, and finished English Traits, but was reading lectures near home and far abroad in the new States. He gave not only the observations and thoughts on England and France, but also

new lectures on the "Conduct of Life," which, thus tested, and refined thereafter, were gathered in this volume. Much of the matter in them was of earlier date, for the course of six lectures by that name were first delivered in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in March, 1851, and later given in Boston, and far and wide in lyceums. These trips in the dead of winter, extending yearly into the raw country not far behind the advancing western frontier, on half-built railroads, or canal-boats and untrustworthy steamboats, when ice permitted (he thrice crossed the Mississippi on foot, and once among the grinding ice-cakes in a rowboat), involving long drives over prairie to make connections for lectures almost every night, and the harboring in rudest taverns—were borne for about twenty years with cheerful courage. In Mr. Cabot's memoir may be found some fragments of these rude experiences as told in Mr. Emerson's letters.

Mr. Emerson slighted the discomforts and suffering, only alluding to them briefly and humorously, pardoned the squalor, and admired the courage and vigor and keen wits of the people; indeed, in a sense, sat at their feet as a learner, while he taught them the significance of their lives in simple but high speech, with anecdotes, which, if nothing else, might stick by them and act as a ferment. Valuing for what it was worth the great material achievement of his countrymen, he wrote in his journal at a little later period: "Machinery is good, but mother-wit is better. Telegraph, steam, and balloon and newspapers are like spectacles on the nose of age, but we will give them all gladly to have back again our young eyes."

He must recall their morning dreams to young Americans, dazzled by the shining gold of California or distracted by the manifold projects of developing their vast country.

Beside the important events and the crisis in American politics,

in the twelve years between the time of Mr. Emerson's return from England and the publication of The Conduct of Life, the following events had happened in his life:—

In 1849, the formation of the "Town and Country Club" in Boston, not of long duration. In March, 1850, the sad shipwreck, within sight of her native shores, of his friend Margaret Fuller, now the Countess d' Ossoli, with her husband and infant child. Mr. Emerson, with two other friends, William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, wrote her memoir. In May, 1852, the Hungarian patriot, Louis Kossuth, was received and spoke in Concord, Mr. Emerson introducing him. In the last months of the following year the loved and honored mother of Mr. Emerson died in his house. In the spring of 1857 he was present at a small meeting of friends to which The Atlantic Monthly owed its origin, under the editorship of Lowell. The Saturday Club originated about the same time, giving Mr. Emerson an opportunity he highly prized of meeting once a month his friends and many of the best citizens of the Republic. In August of the next year he passed the happy fortnight, which he has celebrated in his verse, in the primeval forest of the Adirondac Mountains, with Agassiz, Lowell, Jeffries Wyman, William J. Stillman, Judge Hoar, John Holmes and others of his friends. On the 25th of January, 1859, at the centennial anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, he made a short address which seems to have been one of the most effective speeches that he ever made, long remembered by those who heard it; and on the 2d of December, at the hour of the execution of John Brown, Mr. Emerson was among those who spoke to the small number of people who gathered in the Concord Town Hall to show respect to the heroic efforts of the old hero on behalf of the bondsmen.

The Conduct of Life was well received, yet not without protest, and sold rapidly. Mr. George W. Cooke in his Life of Emerson1 1.2 mentions that a writer in The New Englander criticised "the utter shallowness and flippancy of the judgments Emerson expresses concerning Christianity." The London Saturday Review thus commented: "That an American audience likes to hear the dreariest of all dreary platitudes when they are strung together in what is called an oration is a fact attested by credible proof, and must be believed, like any other strange circumstance that rests on that authority. That, being in that state of mind, mystical language should please them is what experience would suggest, if, indeed, experience applies to people who like orations. It is inconceivable that Mr. Emerson should have any claims to any higher reputation than this."

But his writing still seemed to give pleasure to his friend in England, for Carlyle wrote of The Conduct of Life in January, 1861:—

…"I read it a great while ago,… with a satisfaction given me by the Books of no other living mortal. I predicted to your English Bookseller a great sale even, reckoning it the best of all your Books.… You have grown older, more pungent, piercing:—I never read from you before such lightninggleams of meaning as are to be found here. The finale of all, that of 'Illusions' falling on us like snow-showers, but again of 'the gods sitting steadfast on their thrones' all the while,—what a Fiat Lux is there, into the deeps of a philosophy, which the vulgar has not, which hardly three men living have, yet dreamt of! Well done, I say; and so let that matter rest."

FATE

Although the course on the "Conduct of Life" was read in 1851, the following passage from a letter to Carlyle, two years later, shows that Mr. Emerson was still working on "Fate."

CONCORD, 19 APRIL, 1853.

…What had I, dear wise man, to tell you? What, but that life was still tolerable; still absurdly sweet; still promising, promising, to credulous idleness;—but step of mine taken in a true direction, or clear solution of any the least secret,—none whatever. I scribble always a little,—much less than formerly,—and I did within a year or eighteen months write a chapter on Fate, which—if we all live long enough, that is, you, and I, and the chapter—I hope to send you in fair print. Comfort yourself—as you will—you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, OEdipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into the sea. …

Page 1, note 1. A fuller form of the motto, without the last four lines, which are rather explanatory than poetical, may be found in the Appendix to the Poems among the "Fragments on The Poet."

Page 3, note 1. A book called The Spirit of the Age, by William Hazlitt (senior), was published in 1825; A New Spirit of the Age, by R. H. Horne, in 1841.

Page 4, note 1. In a letter to Miss Margaret Fuller, written in 1841, this sentence occurs: "Gray clouds, short days, moonless nights, a drowsy sense of being dragged easily somewhere by that locomotive Destiny,—which, never seen,

we yet know must be hitched on to the cars wherein we sit;—that is all that appears in these November days."

Page 5, note 1. From a Persian distich by Ali ben Abu Taleb, through the German of Von Hammer Purgstall, rendered thus into English by Mr. Emerson. It is found among the translations in his Poems.

Page 6, note 1. Because so many persons find the English of Chaucer so difficult, Mr. Emerson chose to make several modifications in the spelling to make the verses clear, some of which changes it seemed best to preserve. The passage may be found in the latter part of "The Knight's Tale."

Page 6, note 2. Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, a German mystic and theosophist, an acquaintance interesting to Goethe, who describes his character in his Autobiography.

It seems probable that Mr. Emerson by mistake wrote Robert for William Huntington. The first was a bishop and Orientalist in the seventeenth century. The latter was an eccentric popular preacher in the eighteenth century, who believed in his own inspiration and also in the direct interposition of God in the affairs of his daily life.

Page 6, note 3. In the notebook is a quotation from Saadi: "The angel who presides over the store-house of the winds, feels no compunction, though he extinguish the old woman's lamp."

In the Appendix to the Poems are some neat little verses about Water, ending,—

Well used, it decketh joy, Adorneth, doubleth joy: Ill used, it will destroy, In perfect time and measure With a face of golden pleasure Elegantly destroy.

The poet in "The Titmouse" describes the quiet overpowering onset of Arctic cold to which philosophy is resigning him until the chickadee incites brave resistance.

Page 9, note 1. Journal, 1852. "History is zoölogy and not a chapter of accidents."

1851. "There is a thick skull; that is fate. The crustacea, the birds, the tortoises are fatalists, yet amelioration must be assumed; their very walls and jails must be believed to be charity and protection; and meanness the preparation of magnificence: as madness is assumed to be the screen of the too much tempted soul."

Page 9, note 2. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), the disciple and associate of Gall in expounding the doctrines of phrenology. He lectured in Boston in 1832, where Mr. Emerson probably heard him. Spurzheim died there in the autumn of that year.

Lambert Adolphe Jaques Quetelet (1796-1874), the Belgian statistician who wrote several remarkable treatises on social and moral as well as vital and political statistics. Among them were those Sur le théorie des probabilités appliquées aux sciences morales et politiques (1846) and Sur la statistique morale et des lois qui le régissent (1848).

I remember Mr. Emerson's saying somewhat sadly of a spirited schoolboy of good blood, "But he has the hopeless adust complexion," and the subsequent history of the man, of generous traits but cursed by a passionate temperament, justified this foreboding.

Page 10, note 1.

"Some peculiar mystic grace Made her only the child of her mother, And heaped the whole inherited sin

On that huge scape-goat of the race, All, all upon the brother." Tennyson, "Maud."

Page 10, note 2. This theme is handled with characteristic delicacy and charm by Dr. Holmes in his story The Guardian Angel.

Page 10, note 3. Conversely, the vigorous preacher to the Universalist Society in Concord at about this time resigned when his salary was reduced, and in his parting sermon told his flock that they "could not have broadcloth at ninepence a yard," and went into the manufacture of gunpowder.

Page 11, note 1. This sentence, used elsewhere in the Essays, is a quotation from one of the Oriental writers. Mr. Emerson introduced it into the quatrain "Horoscope" in the Poems.

Page 11, note 2. The saying of King James I. is noted in one of the journals: "Oh ay, I can make him a lord, but I canna make him a gentleman."

Page 12, note 1. Joseph von Frauenhofer, the German astronomer, was a remarkable optician, and Dr. William B. Carpenter had newly published his work on The Microscope, its Revelations and Uses.

The attention of Dr. Holmes was evidently more attracted by the presentation, in the first part of this essay, of the apparent irresistibility of Fate, and did not follow to the hopeful correction of this in the power and triumph of effort which is shown later in this essay and in "The Tragic," in Natural History of Intellect. For he comments thus in his biography: "Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he believed in so fully: 'They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower, dangerous plane,

and invite the evils they fear.' But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words, which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:"—and he then quotes in full the passage of the detection by microscope of the Free-Soiler in embryo.

Page 12, note 2. Mr. Emerson's favorite lines in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were those in the epilogue to The Honest Man's Fortune, which he printed in his collection Parnassus, especially these:—

"Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

Page 14, note 1. Lorenz Oken of Würtemberg, in 1805, in a work called Die Zeugung, brought forward the theory that all organisms, whether vegetable or animal, came from cells, or vesicles, as he called them. Oken was also one of the discoverers of the vertebral relations of the skull.

Page 14, note 2. "On every side is an ambush laid by the robber troops of circumstance. Hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong speed."—Hafiz.

Page 15, note 1. This paragraph is the prose version of the "Song of Nature" in the Poems.

Page 17, note 1. The iron aspects of Destiny are hinted at in the "Ode, inscribed to W. H. Channing," in which the influence of the recent reading of Knox's Races of Men seems to appear.

Page 17, note 2. "Everything which pertains to the human species, considered as a whole, belongs to the order of

physical facts. The greater the number of individuals, the more does the influence of the individual will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of general facts dependent on causes by which society exists and is preserved."—Quetelet.

Page 17, note 3. Johann Fust of Mainz, the associate of Gutenberg and Schöffer in the development of printing, in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Page 18, note 1. These beautifully mottled, smooth shells used to be brought by returning American vessels from Asiatic shores and the South Sea islands. The islanders valued them for adornment, and some kinds served them for money. The orange cowry used to be worn by chiefs in the Friendly Islands.

Page 19, note 1. Thus he states so strongly the seemingly overwhelming might of Fate that some readers, like Dr. Holmes, hardly recover from the effect of the presentation of this aspect, to see how he brings forward the counterpoise in man; as Byron says of Fate in his Prometheus,—

"To which his spirit may oppose Itself, an equal to all woes."

Elsewhere Mr. Emerson shows how he counts the force of the "minority of one" that looks so slight in this paragraph. In many places in his manuscript and books he celebrates this might, symbolized in physics by the thread of water in a tube, which can balance the ocean. He tells of the founders of religions, then "sees in politics the importance of minorities of one, as of Phocion, Cato, Lafayette, Carnot; silent minorities of one also,—Thoreau, Very, Newcomb, Alcott. For the power is after reality, not after appearance." The same idea appears in "Considerations by the Way" in this volume, and in "Progress of Culture" in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 20, note 1. The Fenris Wolf, one of the evil brood of Loki, in the Norse mythology, after having burst the other bonds, was shamed into allowing himself to be bound by a soft bond which he found himself unable to break, but he was constantly fretting it, and, when it broke, he would devour the sun. In that Day of Doom the Gods, helped by the heroes, must fight against the powers of Darkness until the New Day should come.

Page 21, note 1.

This is he men miscall Fate, Threading dark ways, arriving late, But ever coming in time to crown The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down. "Worship," Poems.

Page 21, note 2. The poetry, religion and laws of the ancient Welsh people were preserved by the bards in threefold groups called Triads.

Page 22, note 1. Here he was offsetting spirit against matter. Yet the new science which taught the striving of the lowest creature against environing difficulties, and ascent in the scale towards man, at once commanded his attention. This he celebrated in his verse and prose before many naturalists admitted it. Now, the Evolution doctrine recognizes Effort for one of its most important factors, and chronicles its triumphs over adverse forces.

Page 23, note 1. Journal, 1851. "The Intellect conquers Fate,—and it is the property of men of insight to be serene." Him whose insight is highest, the poet, Mr. Emerson defines as "the liberator."

Journal. "Fate needs extended eyes,—draw out the tubes of your telescope to the point of largest vision—to see it.

"Fatalism the right formula to be holden; but by a clever person who knows to allow the living instinct. For though that force be infinitesimal against the universal chemistry, it is of that sublimity that it homoeopathically doses the system."

Page 23, note 2. This is one of the "Chaldaean oracles" ascribed to Zoroaster.

Page 24, note 1.

But well I know no mountain can, Zion or Meru, measure with man. "Monadnoc," Poems.

Mr. Emerson once said of his friend Thoreau, "One would as soon think of taking the arm of an oak-tree as Henry's."

Page 25, note 1. A passage of some length from the journal, from which this paragraph is condensed, is given in the last note to this essay.

Page 26, note 1. The almost certain misconstruction of this announcement by the multitude on a lower plane has caused the persecution or martyrdom of the greatest souls through the centuries. In "The Method of Nature" Mr. Emerson wrote, "Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought when he said 'I am God,' but the moment it was out of his mouth it became a lie to the ear, and the world revenged itself for the seeming arrogance by the good story about his shoe."

One of the sentences below, Mr. Emerson has rendered into verse thus:—

Hold of the Maker, not the Made: Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

Page 26, note 2. Mr. Emerson used not only books but men "for lustres." It is remarkable how little is recorded of his company in his journals, beyond some observation or habit

of thought or manner of some one of them which calls out the comment or the train of thought which he writes down.

Page 28, note 1. In the last pages of "Success" in Society and Solitude, and of "Natural History of Intellect" in the volume of that name, on the text Quantus amor, tantus animus, he shows the power of Love against Fate; also in the poem "Cupido" and quatrain "Love."

Page 29, note 1. Everywhere, as well as in the essay of that name, he teaches the sovereignty of ethics. He writes in his journal: "Behold these sacred persons, born of the old simple blood, to whom rectitude is native. See them,—white silver amidst the bronze population,—one, two, three, four, five, six,—I know not how many more, but conspicuous as fire in the night. Each of them can do some deed of the Impossible."

Page 30, note 1. In the notebook on Fate he classes opposing circumstances as Horses:—

They are all horses on which he rides.

The material of freedom consists of necessities.

Of higher breed, of diviner race, are ever the steeds of the soul.

The oyster hardly moves; the worm crawls; the quadruped walks; man moves on all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity; and stands already on tip-toe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element. There is nothing he will not make his footman."

Page 31, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to tell the story of two bishops who at the worst of the hurricane asked the captain if there was any hope. At his answer, "None but in God," they turned pale, and one said to the other, "And has it come to that!"

Page 32, note 1. This image is taken from Thierry's History of the Norman Conquest of England. Mr. Emerson thus versified it in the quatrain "Northman:"—

The gale that wrecked you on the sand, It helped my rowers to row; The storm is my best galley-hand And drives me where I go.

The sentences below suggest a passage in the "Wood-notes," II., in the Poems.

Page 33, note 1. Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester (1601-67), the devoted adherent of Charles I. and lord of Raglan Castle, was a remarkable experimenter, and wrote an account of his "Century of Inventions," among which was the use of the power of steam, concerning which he wrote "An Exact and True Definition of the Most Stupendous Water-commanding Engine."

Page 35, note 1. Compare the "Spiritual Laws" in the Poems. Heaven is pictured as

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

Page 36, note 1. This chapel has been called "the glory of King's College and of Cambridge University." Freeman says it is the grandest building in the late Perpendicular style, and in spite of the beauty of the windows and the fan-tracery roof "the design is as bold and simple as a Greek temple."

Page 38, note 1.

But he, the man-child glorious, Where tarries he the while? The rainbow shines his harbinger, The sunset gleams his smile.

I travail in pain for him, My creatures travail and wait; His couriers come by squadrons, He comes not to the gate. "Song of Nature," Poems.

Page 40, note 1. Here recurs the theme of Mr. Emerson's first sermon suggested to him by his Methodist fellow laborer in his uncle's hay-field,—"Men are always praying, and their prayers are granted; therefore beware for what you pray." His verse also comes to mind:—

And though thy knees were never bent, To Heaven thy hourly prayers are sent, And whether formed for good or ill Are registered and answered still. "Prayer," Poems, Appendix.

In the journal of 1851, after the death of Margaret Fuller with her husband and child, the relation of events to persons, less easy to see in that case, is thus mentioned: "It fitted exactly,—that shipwreck, thought Ellery [Channing], to the life and genius of the person. 'T was like Socrates' poison, or Christ's Cross, or Shelley's death."

Page 41, note 1.

Night dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray. Quatrain, "Memory," Poems.

Page 42, note 1. Virgil, AEneid, iv. 743.

In spite of Virtue and the Muse, Nemesis will have her dues,

And all our struggles and our toils Tighter wind the giant coils. "Nemesis," May Day (1st Edition).

Page 43, note 1. The following names are celebrated in this connection in the journal: "Mr. Erastus Bigelow, Mr. McElrath, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Crocker, Mr. Vanderbilt, the old Rotch and Rodman, Jackson, and Lowell, the Dwights at Springfield, Mr. Mills, Mr. Forbes, are each a walking city, and wherever you put them, will build one."

Page 43, note 2.

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

See also the last sentence in "Man the Reformer" in Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 43, note 3. This recalls the noble passage in Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, where the young knight, seeking Arthur's court, is met at the gate of Camelot by Merlin, who tells him it is enchanted.

"For there is nothing in it as it seems Saving the King; tho' some there be that hold The King a shadow, and the city real;"

adding that the Fairy Queens may be still building,

"seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever."

Page 44, note 1. When the war for Freedom seemed to be coming to a happy issue, Mr. Emerson said, "Everybody

has been wrong in his guess except good women, who never despair of an ideal right."

Page 45, note 1.

The semigod whom we await

is described in the motto to "Culture," in the Poems, in language like that of this paragraph.

Page 45, note 2. In the summer of 1859, Mr. Emerson sprained his ankle badly on Wachusett Mountain, and was disabled and on crutches all through the summer, his arm also suffering from pressure of his crutch, and his health from indoor confinement. Various misfortunes occurred on the farm during the summer, all sorts of unusual demands came upon him, and to cap the climax his publishers failed; yet he bore all with courage and only allowed his depression to come out in humorous allusions to himself as Mr. Crump with the sprained ankle, who presently will have it that nature and the universe have sprained theirs also.

Page 46, note 1. The House of Fame.

Page 46, note 2. This thought appears in his poem "Guy."

Page 47, note 1.

Like vaulters in a circus round, Who leap from horse to horse, but never touch the ground. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 48, note 1.

Θεοῦ θέλοντος καὶ ἐπὶ ῥίπον ἂν πλέοις Pindar.

Which verse is thus rendered by the translator of the old edition of Plutarch, who quotes it,—

"Were it the will of Heaven, an osier bough Were vessel safe enough the seas to plough."

Page 48, note 2.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 48, note 3. Mr. Emerson said that the law should always be "stated with that scope for ascension which the nature of things requires," and it is interesting to see that, true to his faith in the affirmative hopeful teaching, however strongly he states the other aspect, this ascension is sure in the end of each essay or lecture.

Page 49, note 1. It seems well to append to the essay on Fate Mr. Emerson's condensed statements of his reasonings on the subject. The first may very probably be of the date 1852.

"We have shown by straws the way the current sets by race, sex, laws of nature, climate, sea, tables of mortality, statistics.

Force of natural laws in relation to human wishes.

'T is limitation.

Limitation of what?

Of Power.

Ah! then there is Power.

We exert power. The very discovery that there is Fate, and that we are thwarted, equally discloses Power. For what is it that is limited? What but power?

And again:—

I still arrive only at three facts.

1. The revelation of thought takes us out of servitude into freedom.

2. So does the sense of right.

They are exertions of will, a blending of these two, a certain rank choice, a feeling of sovereignty, right growing out of perceiving and owing, it makes the strong will.

3. Once more. Every command, every oppression proves freedom. Dig in my field. The command implies a servant who may obey or disobey."

The following is from the journal of 1859:—

Our doctrine must begin with the Necessary and Eternal, and discriminate Fate from the Necessary. There is no limitation about the Eternal. Thought, Will is co-eternal with the world; and as soon as intellect is awaked in any man, it shares so far of the eternity,—is of the maker, not of the made. But Fate is the name we give to the action of that one eternal, all-various necessity on the brute myriads, whether in things, animals, or in men in whom the intellect pure is not yet opened. To such it is only a burning wall which hurts those who run against it.

The great day in the man is the birth of perception, which instantly throws him on the party of the Eternal. He sees what must be, and that it is not more that which must be, than it is that which should be, or what is best. To be, then, becomes the infinite good, and breath is jubilation. A breath of Will blows through the Universe eternally in the direction of the right or necessary; it is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and all things are blown or moved by it in order and orbit.

The secret of the Will is that it doth what it knows absolutely good to be done, and so is greater than itself, and is divine in doing. Whilst other choices are of an appetite or of a disease, as an itching skin, or of a thief, or sot, or striker.

Nature is the memory of the mind, said A. But come how it will, the only men of any account in nature are the three

or five we have beheld who have a will. Then we say, here is a man, and men obey him; his body is sweet, and not putrid like others; his words are loaded, and all around him is eventful. Come, then, count your reasons.

1. The belief in Fate is unwholesome, and can only be good where it teaches the strength of nature to man.

2. We only value a stroke of will; he alone is happy who has will; the rest are herds. He uses, they are used.

3. This will derives from the aboriginal nature, is perception of the Eternal Necessity.

It rests on God himself, and that is its power to shock, that it betrays his presence in this loafer; but it winds through dark channels, and one knows not how it arrived here.

It is a sharing of the true order of the world, and a push in that interest and direction. It is born freedom in the intellect. On that bright moment when we are born into thought, we are instantaneously uplifted out of the rank we had. Now we are of the maker, not of the made. Now all things have such a look as the horse has which we drive.

Perception distances this mob which so rubbed against us.

But is there not another element, or, people who are strong through love alone?

The essay on "The Tragic," in Natural History of Intellect, also deals with the question of Fate.

In conclusion, here are some sentences which may serve as a "practical application" of Emerson's sermon on Faith:—

1852. "Never was anything gained by admitting the omnipotence of limitations.

The only interest the word Fate ever has for us is when the man hears expressions like these:—

You come to your fate by the efforts you make to escape it.

In seeing him or her I met my fate.

You carry Caesar and his fate.

My task is my insurance.

In my youth I was protected from dangers in a wonderful manner. My eyes were holden that I could not see.

POWER

"It was Watt who told King George III. that he dealt in an article of which kings were said to be fond,—Power." Thus Mr. Emerson begins a chapter on Inspiration in a later volume. But he knew that there were many degrees of power, and the present essay deals with the degrees more like those which Watt had in himself, and those which he had for sale, and does not present all the aspects. In the last pages, where the essay usually ascends, he expressly reserves the higher considerations, saying, "There are sources on which we have not drawn. I know what I abstain from. I adjourn what I have to say on this topic to the chapters on Culture and Worship." But the lower forms of power only symbolize the higher, and to all one law is common. Of the preceding lecture he wrote:—

"Why preach to us the doctrine of Fate? Because under that form we learn the immutability and universality of law."

The doctrines of the conservation and correlation of force were early recognized by him, and their working watched with delight, alike in mind and matter.

Silent rushes the swift Lord Through ruined systems still restored.

Man had only to open his sluiceways, great or small, to have his share of the beneficent power. The ancient doctrine of the Flowing was akin to this. Man had but to recognize the stream of law, and go with its tide. But "brute force" was hardly a fit word for manifestations in man or nature which were only low forms of the subtile and beautiful Power that the fable of Proteus symbolized to the Greeks. "Our power consists not in abolishing, nor in creating, but in transference merely," Emerson once wrote.

In the verse which serves for motto the range of power in man is limited.

Page 54, note 1. "My hand of iron," he said, "was not at the extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head."—Representative Men.

Page 54, note 2.

And I, who cower mean and small In the frequent interval When wisdom not with me resides, Worship Toil's wisdom that abides. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 56, note 1. In the notebook "Auto" in which Mr. Emerson wrote down a few experiences and thoughts concerning himself, and criticisms, just or amusing, made by others, are several entries to this purpose: "I cannot live as you do. It is only by a most exact husbandry of my resources that I am anybody." And again: "Insufficient forces. We have experience, reading, relatedness enough,—Oh, yes, and every other weapon, if only we had constitution enough; but as Dr. Warren said in my boyhood, 'You have no stamina.'"

Page 56, note 2.

With the key of the secret he marches faster, From strength to strength, and for night brings day; While classes or tribes, too weak to master The flowing conditions of life, give way. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Journal, 1851. "We think the event severed from the person, and do not see the inevitable tie. It is like the nudicaulis plant,—the leaf invariably accompanies it, though the stems are connected underground."

Page 57, note 1. The Brunels, father and son, were eminent mechanical engineers in England, and living during Mr. Emerson's visits in 1833 and 1848. The elder, among many other great works, won distinction by tunnelling below the Thames, the younger by his great tubular bridges, and the Great Eastern, by far the largest steamship built up to his day.

Page 59, note 1. "My young friend believed his calling to be musical, yet without jewsharp, catgut or rosin. Yes, but there must be demonstration. Look over the fence yonder in Captain Abel's land. There's a musician for you, who knows how to make men dance for him in all weathers; and all sorts of men, paddies, felons, farmers, carpenters, painters, yes, and trees and grapes and ice and stone, hot days and cold days. Beat that, Menetrier de Meudon, if you can. Knows how to make men saw, dig, mow and lay stone wall, and how to make trees bear fruit God never gave them, and grapes from France and Spain yield pounds of clusters at his door. He saves every drop of sap as if it were his own blood. His trees are full of brandy, you would think he watered them with wine. See his cows, see his swine, see his horses,—and he, the musician that plays the jig which

they all must dance, biped and quadruped and centipede, is the plainest, stupidest looking harlequin in a coat of no colours. But his are the woods and the waters, the hills and meadows. With a stroke of his instrument he danced a thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand-heap on to the bog-meadow beneath us, where now the English grass is waving; with another he terraced the sand-hill and covered it with peaches and grapes; with another he sends his lowing cattle every spring up to Peterboro' to the mountain pastures."—Journal.

Page 59, note 2. Primi in proeliis oculi vincuntur.—Tacitus.

Page 61, note 1. In "Considerations by the Way," and even in "Worship," in this volume, Mr. Emerson counts health as a foundation-stone: "In laying down the first obvious rules for life… I will say, Get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise that can gain it must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of."

Page 62, note 1. Judge Emmons of Michigan, during Mr. Emerson's lecturing trip there in 1856.

Page 63, note 1. Returning from California in the spring of 1871,—whither he had gone with a pleasant party, the guests of Mr. John M. Forbes,—Mr. Emerson, with others, called upon Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, and saw and listened to him with interest. His friend, the late Professor James B. Thayer, describes the interview in A Western Journey with Emerson.

Page 64, note 1. Journal, 1857. "'Somme toute,' said Mirabeau, 'il n'y a que les hommes fortement passionnés capable d'aller au grand; il n'y a qu'eux capable de mériter la reconnaissance publique.'

"I fancy the Americans have no passions also, only appetites."

Page 65, note 1. In the years during which these lectures were read, before their publication, the spiritless concessions to the slave-holding States, in the interest of trade, were mortifying to the quick conscience of New England. Mr. Emerson, when John Gorham Palfrey, through his opposition to these, had lost his seat in Congress, and was nominated for governor of Massachusetts by the Free-Soilers, had spoken in several places in his behalf, especially denouncing Daniel Webster's recreancy to the cause of human freedom.

It was at this epoch that Lowell, in his Biglow Papers, made Hosea Biglow, his rustic mouthpiece, cry out,—

"Massachusetts,—God forgive her,— She's a kneelin' with the rest!"

Page 66, note 1. Mr. Emerson always had kindly and respectful relations with the Shakers at Harvard and Sterling near by, but he said he thought that he saw this utterance of his reflected on the faces of some of the worthy elders he met in the cars.

Page 67, note 1. This picture of Boniface was partly suggested by the traits of a Concord publican, but to make it typical the colors are perhaps heightened, and the misdeeds of the underlings added to those of the chief. On one occasion these losels put up a scurrilous sign in the middle of the village, reflecting on the character of the honorable and excellent Dr. Bartlett, the leading physician, who had been very active in the temperance cause. The people saw it, and laughed or were pained, but it remained undisturbed until Mr. Emerson, coming to the post-office, saw it. He stopped and read the inscription, then beat it with his cane until he broke it down,

and went on his way. In the afternoon a new board hung there with a rude picture of a man with hooked nose, tall hat and cane, and the inscription "Rev. R. W. E. knocking down the sign." It stayed there some hours before he found a champion.

Page 69, note 1. All of which was amusingly set forth in Mr. Lowell's Biglow Papers by his Mexican War private, Birdofreedum Sawin.

Page 69, note 2. The image is from La Fontaine's fable of the Viper and the File.

Page 69, note 3. See the quatrain "Power" in the Poems.

Page 71, note 1. Here one traces Mr. Emerson's reading, in Downing on Fruits, of the Van Mons theory of amelioration of pear-trees: that the best varieties could be produced from thrifty wild stock in a "state of variation."

Page 71, note 2. Compare the passage in English Traits in which he speaks of the men of the Elizabethan period, and the paragraphs in the first part of "Aristocracy" (Lectures and Biographical Sketches) where he speaks of the Gentleman and the "secret homage to reality and love which ought to reside in every man, … the steel hid under gauze and lace, under flowers and spangles."

Page 73, note 1. Chaldaean Oracle, attributed to Zoroaster.

Page 74, note 1. This is the theme of his poem "The Day's Ration," and is also found in "Terminus."

Page 74, note 2. "Power is never far from Necessity" is a saying of Pythagoras noted by Emerson.

Page 78, note 1. Basil Hall (1788-1844) was bred in the British Navy, in which he rose to the command of a vessel, and afterwards wrote many books, mostly on his travels.

Page 78, note 2. Mr. Emerson valued highly good reading or recitation of poetry, and not only liked to exercise his children in it, but would practise again and again the delivery of a piece which he was to read in a lecture. When he meant to introduce William Allingham's beautiful poem, "The Touchstone," into a lecture to a class in Boston, he was delighted to find how much better it seemed at each rehearsal.

Page 78, note 3. This was Mr. William Ellery Channing, whom Mr. Emerson found a most original and entertaining walking companion, with a wonderful eye for beauty.

Journal, November 17, 1849. "Walked over hill and dale with Channing, who found wonders of colour and landscape everywhere, but complained of the want of invention. 'Why, they had frozen water last year; why should they do it again? Therefore it was so easy to be an artist, because they do the same thing always, and therefore he only wants time to make him perfect in the imitation, and I believe too that pounding is one of the secrets.'"

Page 79, note 1. "Democritus of Abdera in Thrace (420 B. C.), the most learned of the Ionian physicists and the head of the ancient and modern materialistic school."—Weber's History of Philosophy.

Page 81, note 1. In the poem "Nature," II., it is told of men:—

What's most theirs is not their own, But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone, And in their vaunted works of Art The master-stroke is still her part.

Page 82, note 1. This moral of the Days, though differently drawn, suggests the poem of that name which Mr. Emerson considered perhaps his best.

WEALTH

In Mr. Emerson's lecture called "Boston,"1 2.1 this sentence occurs: "Wealth is always interesting, since from wealth power cannot be divorced." Hence this chapter, "Wealth," is interposed between "Power" and "Culture:" and power is often the seed of culture, its getting being a kind of education. One learns at least the primary fact, nothing for nothing. He wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1838, "Property is somehow intimately related to the properties of man, and so has a sacredness." Of its necessary association, in low or high forms, with man, he tells in the motto to "Compensation:"—

Man's the elm and Wealth the vine; Stanch and strong the tendrils twine: Though the frail ringlets thee deceive, None from its stock that vine can reave.

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, And power to him who power exerts, Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet, Lo! it rushes, thee to meet.

In his essay on the kindred theme, "Prudence," he indicates the degrees of proficiency in the knowledge of the world: "One class live to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men."

The conditions of Mr. Emerson's life were such as he would have chosen. The comparative poverty of the family after his father's death led to the plainest living and simple habits, and to a sense of responsibility and helpfulness for others. It knit the family bond closer, yet, thanks to generous friends and kindred, and to Madam Emerson's good management and exertions, faithfully helped by all her sons, the poverty was neither sordid nor extreme, and the boys were well educated, each, in turn, helping the other. Thus while they received the education of self-help, they duly prized their literary education and made the best of it, and their self-respect grew and their gratitude was awakened.

The accessions of property that came to Mr. Emerson in his early married life were neutralized by losses through an unfortunate investment, through fraud of trusted agents, and always by his own silent and large liberality to "his poor," and to causes that seemed commanding, in which he was nobly seconded by his wife. So in every year of his active life he had no choice but to work hard to keep clear of debt, yet not quite so hard as to distress him or disturb his thoughts. All through his life he exercised a wide but simple hospitality.

When his forces suddenly failed him at the time of the burning of his house in 1872, his wide circle of friends mustered with instant and Oriental generosity to his aid. The gift was so lovingly and delicately urged upon him by their well-chosen ambassadors, that he really could not refuse, yet he hesitated, saying 'that he had been allowed so far in life to stand on his own feet.' This gift really prolonged his life and saved his peace of mind during the remaining ten years, for he was no longer fit for the lecturing trips on which he depended, and the amount then received from his books was inadequate.

Some of Mr. Emerson's ideas of what the riches of a householder

should be occur in the early journals and are printed in the books. Two are given here in the original form:—

1842. "Rich, say you? Are you rich? how rich? rich enough to help anybody? rich enough to succor the friendless, the unfashionable, the eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the travelling beggar with his written paper which recommends him to the charitable, the Italian foreigner with his few broken words of English, the ugly lame pauper hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or half-insane wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice that made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim? What is gentle but to allow it?"

And again he thus described his ideal man with a wider charity: "Osman had a humanity so broad and deep that … there was never a poor outcast, eccentric or insane man, some fool with a beard, or a mutilation, or pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him. That great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country. And the madness which he harbored he did not share. Is not this to be rich,—this only to be rightly rich?"

Here also is a characteristic estimate of what is wealth: "There is no rich man like the self-reliant: this is royalty, he walks in a long street. Once for all he has abdicated second-thoughts, and asks no leave of others' eyes, and makes lanes and alleys palatial."

Page 86, note 1. The Michigan Central was then a pioneer railroad in the far West. Among the men whose energy and good heads built it up, and who grew with it, were youths from the shops and farms of Concord and neighboring villages,

John W. Brooks, Reuben N. Rice, the Hurd brothers and others. From them Mr. Emerson, on his Western lecturing ventures, heard with pleasure of their good work as business men and citizens, and received kindly furtherance and aid in emergencies.

Page 87, note 1. Dr. Holmes said that Franklin might have accepted this essay "as having a good sense so like his own that he could hardly tell the difference between them," and quotes this paragraph as an instance.

Page 88, note 1. Of wealth unearned he wrote in the journal of 1839: "The rich man will presently come to be ashamed of his riches when he sees he has any accidental advantage which takes away all the praise of every good thing he does. The race is run by no skill or strength of his, but by the sinews of his good horse. The serene and beneficent life he leads solves the problem of life for nobody but the rich. His wealth then, if not the earnings of his own sweat, is his back-biter and enemy in all men's ears."

Page 89, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to quote the passage where Lear's daughters are reducing his retinue of knights. Finally Regan asks, "What need one?" and the old king cries out:—

"O, reason not the need: our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm." King Lear, Act II., Scene 4.

Page 94, note 1. In Illinois, Mr. Emerson was surprised and interested to learn that the first settlers were not, as might

have been supposed, practical men, but visionaries. They took the risk, the hardship and the loss, and a later wave of cautious or worldly-wise people reaped the benefits.

Page 95, note 1. Baron Denon was the artist and archaeologist who accompanied Bonaparte in Egypt, and wrote a book on the country and its antiquities, illustrated by himself. Later the Emperor made him Inspector General of the Museums, and he accompanied Napoleon in his campaigns, selecting the works of art to be carried to Paris. William Beckford (1760-1844) was a romantic author; also a collector and virtuoso. His best known work was Vathek. He built Forthill Abbey, and the fairy palace at Cintra referred to in Childe Harold. Belzoni (1778-1823), an Italian of humble origin and romantic history, became a successful excavator and explorer of Egyptian tombs and temples, going as far as Assouan and Philae. Sir John Wilkinson was the author of Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. Austen H. Layard was the great explorer of the Mound of Nimrud and of Babylon, who brought the Assyrian Sculptures to the British Museum. The Arctic explorations of Dr. Kane, the wanderings of Dr. Livingstone in Africa, and the Egyptian researches of Lepsius are well known.

Page 95, note 2. Journal, 1838. "All that Shakspeare says of the king, the reader—the humblest boy—feels to be true of himself. So we honor the rich because they have the freedom, power and grace which we feel to be proper to men, proper to us."

Page 98, note 1. In the latter part of his life Mr. Emerson bought a very small but excellent telescope, with a legacy left him by a near friend.

Page 99, note 1. He never renounced the hope that he might hear and understand good music, yet I think the fact

was, that only singing really interested him, and then only if the singer had the power of rendering the poetry as well as the music of the song.

Page 100, note 1. Compare the poem "Fate," beginning,

Deep in the man sits fast his fate.

Page 103, note 1. Soon after the raid of John Brown on Harper's Ferry, the bailiffs of the United States Marshal endeavored to seize Mr. F. B. Sanborn of Concord at his house, at midnight, he having neglected a summons to appear at Washington to testify before a committee of investigation. The townspeople promptly mustered and rescued Mr. Sanborn from his captors. At that time Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal (possibly quoting from some one else) that a house in Concord was worth twice as much as one in another town, now that it was shown that the people would defend each other.

Page 105, note 1. Journal, 1859. "Among the moral relations of the Subject, a chief one is the fact, that credit will be as is the morality of a community.

"'A profession,' said the Welsh bard, 'is calculated for society, a treasure-bag for exile!'"

Page 106, note 1.

We grant no dukedoms to the few, We hold like rights, and shall;— Equal on Sunday in the pew, On Monday in the mall. "Boston," Poems.

Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet, Lo! it rushes, thee to meet. "Compensation," Poems.

Page 108, note 1. The St. Michael's and the Bergamot pears, in the spacious gardens of old Boston, were highly

prized in Mr. Emerson's boyhood, but failed in his garden, and everywhere, by the middle of the century, and are now probably extinct.

Page 109, note 1. It is suggested by Professor John H. Wright that Mr. Emerson may here allude to a verse from Epicharmus, preserved by Xenophon in his Memorabilia, II. 1. 20:—

Τῶν πόνων πωλοῦσιν ἡμῖν πάντα τ'ἀγάθ' οἱ θεοί,

Work is the price for which the gods sell us all our blessings.

Page 111, note 1. The microscope had recently shown the cell as a component of all animal tissues, and it appears that the various shapes of cells, with their nuclei and prolongations, were unpleasantly suggestive of spiders or polyps.

Page 112, note 1. Wordsworth's description of his Happy Warrior, as one

"Who comprehends his trust, and to the same Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim,"

expresses a favorite rule of Mr. Emerson.

Page 113, note 1. There is much to this purpose in "Aristocracy," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, and "Greatness," in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 114, note 1. A characteristically handsome concession in accordance with the doctrine of Compensation.

Page 115, note 1. Mr. Emerson knew well that his temperament and genius were not adapted to work in every organization, social or other. He wished well to Brook Farm and the societies, but kept wisely free from them, and lived the life to which he was born.

Page 116, note 1. He was a most unskilful gardener and knew little of the farmer's practical economies, though he admired these and wrought them into his writings. In the early

days of his Concord housekeeping he worked in his little vegetable garden, but needed the counsel and help of his good friends, Henry Thoreau and George P. Bradford, whose works somehow prospered better than his. Needing more elbow-room, and desiring an orchard, cornfield and larger vegetable garden, Mr. Emerson gradually increased the house-lot to nearly ten acres and employed a man to care for them. The tulips, hyacinths, roses, lilies and hollyhocks, which Mrs. Emerson brought from Plymouth and gave freely of to her neighbors, usurped the places in the first garden, and her husband planted apple and pear trees, and thereafter confined his attentions to them. They insured him sun and air for nearly an hour after breakfast before going to his study. Then he found that his real garden, where the wood-gods spoke, was by Walden.

Page 116, note 2. "A man's money should not follow the direction of his neighbor's money. … My expenditure is me. That our expenditure and character are twain is the vice of society."—"Domestic Life," Society and Solitude.

The latter pages of "Prudence," in Essays, First Series, treat of proper expenditure.

Page 118, note 1. This, of course, was a main cause of the failure of the community at Fruitlands. The humane objection of Mr. Alcott and his friends to killing cattle or enslaving them for farm work, or robbing the cow of her calf, or befouling the soil with animal manure, reduced farming to spading and hoeing, and to ashes and meadow-muck for dressing, with disastrous result.

Page 119, note 1. The essay on "Farming," in Society and Solitude, originally a Cattle-Show Address in Concord, shows Mr. Emerson's interest in his neighbors' magic. Some years earlier he wrote for the Dial a paper on "Agriculture

of Massachusetts," which is included in the volume Natural History of Intellect. This was the result of a talk with his friend Mr. Edmund Hosmer, a careful farmer of the old school.

Page 120, note 1. Most householders in the country not bred to farming soon learn, as did Mr. Emerson, a more obvious way of applying this counsel (of Bacon's?), Impera parendo, Command by obeying, namely, the learning from the hired man, by questionings veiled as much as possible, what ought to be done,—and then ordering him to do it.

The expression used below, that "things themselves refuse to be mismanaged," comes from one of his favorite Latin proverbs, Res nolunt diu male administrari.

Page 122, note 1. In Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson (vol. ii., p. 512), a letter is printed in which Mr. Emerson tells of his dining with the elder Stephenson and of being much interested in him.

In the "Woodnotes," II., Mr. Emerson wrote,—

The rain comes when the wind calls; The river knows the way to the sea; Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity.

Page 126, note 1. The following extract concerning the materialistic spirit and temperament comes from the journal of 1842:—

"It is only a young man who fancies there is anything new in Wall Street. The merchant who figures there so much to his own satisfaction, and to the admiration, or fear, or hatred of younger or weaker competitors, is a very old business. You shall find him, the whole concatenation of his opinions, the same laughter, same knowingness, same unbelief, and the same ability and taste, in Rabelais and Aristophanes.

Panurge was good Wall Street. Pyrrhonism and transcendentalism are just as old: and I am persuaded that, by and by, we shall find them in the chemical elements, as if excess of oxygen makes the sinner and of hydrogen the saint."

Page 127, note 1. In the latter pages of the shorter essay "Nature," in Essays, Second Series, is a passage concerning aimless wealth. In "The Scholar," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, it is told how the proud landlord who has built his palace beseeches Genius, the harmless poor man, "to make it honourable by entering there and eating bread;" and again, as "there was never anything that did not proceed from a thought, … the unmentionable dollar itself has at last a high origin in moral and metaphysical nature." Last, in the essay "Domestic Life," in Society and Solitude, it is said that wealth may be welcomed as "the means of freedom and benefit," but that it must keep its humble place, for "these so-called goods are only the shadow of good. … We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man."

CULTURE

Mr. Emerson reserved his words on the higher and highest aspects of Power for this and the succeeding essay. Culture, as the corrective of Wealth and the preparation for Behavior, rightly took its place between the essays thus named.

It is interesting to find in the eleven lines of the motto these favorite beliefs of Emerson; temperament, polarity, the listening, the teachings of solitude and society, reliance on the inspired self, evolution, the flowing, Each and All. Or, to put it differently, he teaches that the perfected man must be,

like a compass-needle, delicately responsive to the currents that rule alike in matter and spirit; that he must be open to the influences of Nature and Humanity, and yet, following his proper genius, help on the ascending Creation by the divinity which is in him.

Page 131, note 1. Mr. Emerson, always urging the individual to remember that he is a special channel for the flow of power or grace from the universal source, has scattered through notebooks much under the headings Bias and Temperament, often almost seeming equivalent to Fate; as, for instance, this passage from the Koran: "If ye hear that a mountain has changed its place, believe it: but if ye hear that a man has changed his disposition, believe it not." But there is a more cheerful view in such entries as the following: "Was not this Bias a dainty invention whereby the old worn world and every particle of it should be made wholly new material for you?" This thought seems to have been taken as a higher application of that concerning "the dew whereby the old, hard, peaked earth is made new each morning and shining with the last touch of the Artist's hand." (See "Literary Ethics," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.)

Page 132, note 1. Fouché, Napoleon's Minister of Police.

Page 133, note 1. In the journal for 1841 Mr. Emerson says, "I weary of dealing with people, each cased in his several insanity;" and, speaking of one, of the many who then sought him from afar, whom kindness and respect for his character prevented him from holding at arm's length, adds, "I am not large man enough to treat him firmly and unsympathetically as a patient, and if treated equally and sympathetically as sane, his disease makes him the worst of bores." They

would not let the Universal, only the particular mind manifest itself in them.

Page 133, note 2. With this may be compared the counsel to all persons not to talk of their ailments, to be found in the last pages of "Behavior."

Page 133, note 3. In "Character," in Essays, Second Series, is given the fine answer of Father Taylor, of the Seamen's Bethel in Boston, to the admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity. "My friend," he said, "a man can neither be praised nor insulted."

Page 134, note 1. Of a fine girl of so independent and original a character that her conventional friends were troubled, he wrote, "O maiden, come into port grandly, or sail with God the seas."

Page 136, note 1.

Denounce who will, who will deny, And pile the hills to scale the sky; Let theist, atheist, pantheist, Define and wrangle how they list, Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,— But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer, Unknowing war, unknowing crime, Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme; Heed not what the brawlers say, Heed thou only Saadi's lay. "Saadi," Poems.

Page 137, note 1. In the English notebook, Mr. Emerson wrote, "An American, like a German, has many platforms of thought, but an Englishman requires to be treated with tenderness if he wishes to climb."

Page 137, note 2. Mr. Emerson's guests, especially the younger ones, remembered how he drew them out in conversation

and assumed their intelligence and virtue,—even their superiority. In conversation, as in the essays, he was always ready to ascend to a new floor and hoped that the new-comer might lead the way.

Page 139, note 1. The methods of the American horse-tamer and trainer, Rarey, were attracting great attention here, and even more in England, shortly before the publication of this book. And Mr. Emerson read with interest the accounts of these humble applications of great laws.

Journal, 1861. "Yesterday I saw Rarey's exhibition in Boston. What a piece of clean good sense was the whole performance, the teaching and the doing. An attack on the customary nonsense of nations in one particular."

Page 140, note 1. He called those people who wearied him with their conceits "monotones." "Tea, coffee, music, the press, tobacco, dancing, have been in turn denounced as the sole source of social and political degeneracy," he writes in 1832; and again, "But I dread autobiography, which usurps the largest part, sometimes the whole of the discourse of very worthy persons whom I know."

Page 142, note 1. "Who is the cultivated man? He who can tell me something of Shakspeare that I did not know, but perceive at once to be true.

"'There is the same difference between one learned and one unlearned,' said Aristotle, 'as between the living and the dead.'"

Page 144, note 1. The conditions of the early life of Mr. Emerson and his brothers were such as to debar them from "the accomplishments," and he felt their importance, within due bounds, in the bringing up of young people. He himself always had suffered far more than appeared from a sense of awkwardness in company, and "to know how to enter a roomful

of people properly," if nothing else, he felt to be worth courses at a dancing-school. The riding of his forefathers' days had given place in his own to travel by stage or chaise, so that he was never proficient, but it appealed to his imagination and also he felt it an admirable "lesson in the art of power," so he took pains that his children should ride. The quotation is from the remarkable autobiography of Edward Lord Herbert, elder brother of George Herbert the poet, a book which Mr. Emerson valued.

Page 145, note 1. It was always hard for Mr. Emerson to visit or to take a vacation. Even when he yielded to the urgency of valued friends, his visits were but for a day or two, and then, if any opportunity offered, he would wander off alone to listen to the voice of the woods or of the ocean. His work, he felt, justified his existence, and he must not let slip the gift of each new day. He also felt that he must not defraud his hosts of its gift to them. He said

That each might in his house abide, Therefore was the world so wide.

Page 146, note 1.

I travelled and found it at Rome;

And it lay on my hearth when I came home. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 146, note 2. Mr. Alcott's1 2.2 virtue and genius were born in him, and he learned little from the world. Yet he, like many other New England youth, travelled in the South peddling, according to the demands of his customers, education,

or "Yankee notions" in the Connecticut sense, among the country towns and plantations. An exceedingly interesting account of these experiences is found in his biography.

Page 147, note 1. When invited to come to read lectures in England in 1847 he wrote to Carlyle: "This pleasing dream of going to England dances before me sometimes. It would be, I then fancy, that stimulation which my capricious, languid and languescent study needs. At home no man makes any proper demand upon me, and the audience that I address is a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say."

Page 147, note 2. The anaesthetic effects of sulphuric ether were discovered by Dr. Charles T. Jackson of Boston, the brother of Mrs. Emerson, by experiments upon himself. In 1846, he suggested to Mr. W. T. G. Morton, a dentist who had been his pupil, the value of this agent in surgery. After successfully using it in extraction of teeth, Mr. Morton brought it to the notice of Dr. J. C. Warren of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where the first surgical operations were successfully performed without pain, or consciousness to the patient, Mr. Morton administering the ether.1 2.3

Page 148, note 1. The need of access to the woods and waters of a quiet country village, yet not too far from the city, led Mr. Emerson to settle in the ancestral town. Yet the building of the Fitchburg Railroad in 1844 was a great boon to him, not only for his travel when lecturing, but for access to the libraries of the Athenaeum and Harvard College, and the occasional meeting of stimulating friends at the Town and Country Club, and later the Saturday Club.

Page 149, note 1. John Aubrey (1625-97), the English antiquary and writer. Among his works were Letters written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, consisting of memoirs of English poets, and a Life of Hobbes, neither published during his lifetime.

Page 149, note 2. Of Emerson's poet, who, he says,—

Loved harebells nodding on a rock, A cabin hung with curling smoke, Ring of axe or hum of wheel Or gleam which use can paint on steel;—

he goes on to tell,—

Nor loved he less Stately lords in palaces, Princely women hard to please, Fenced by form and ceremony, Decked by courtly rites and dress And etiquette of gentilesse.

Page 151, note 1. The more particularized form of some of these sentences in the journal (1850) may be of interest: "Call yourself preacher, peddler, lecturer, tinman, grocer, scrivener, jobber, or whatever lowest name your business admits, and leave your lovers to find the fine name. … How the curiosity is piqued by anecdotes of a man in plain gray clothes being Rufus King; of General Taylor's slouching farmer dress and averseness to regimentals; of Webster in broad straw hat and fisherman's gear at Marshfield; of Napoleon in plain suit in his glittering levee."

For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds. Quatrain, "Poet," Poems.

Page 151, note 2. From "The Tamer Tamed," Beaumont and Fletcher.

Page 153, note 1. Whilst Mr. Emerson was still held fast in the town as a preacher, away from the country, he wrote (1833): "If a man loves the city, so will his writings love the city; and if a man loves sweet-fern his writings will smell of it." From the car windows he could see his woods on Walden Ledge, and he said, "When I pass them on the way to the city, how they reproach me!"

Page 153, note 2. From Béranger's Les Mirmidons, ou les Funérailles d' Achille.

Page 154, note 1. Mr. Emerson ate what was set before him with natural appetite, but was simple in his tastes. If he spoke of a dish it was to praise it in an amusing manner, never to find fault with it. He discredited all special rules in diet, believed that a feast or dinner-party was a valuable contrast occasionally to simple fare, which he considered more elegant. He set wine before his guest, and took one glass with him. Discussions on the digestibility of food, he promptly suppressed, and if its composition was mentioned, he broke in with "Oh no! it is made of roses," or "It is a beautiful crystallization."

Page 155, note 1. At one time there was but one greatcoat among the Emerson boys, and their schoolfellows recognized it, and would cry, "This is Ralph's day! To-morrow it will be Edward's turn!"

Page 156, note 1. The lines in the "Woodnotes," II., here come to mind, beginning—

Whoso walketh in solitude, And inhabiteth the wood, … Into that forester shall pass, From these companions, power and grace.

Page 156, note 2. His rules to the earnest student have been often mentioned: Room alone. Keep a Journal.

Page 158, note 1. In the journal for 1850 this passage uses Tennyson's name where "Curfew" occurs in the essay, but merely in the abstract, with no personal application.

Page 159, note 1. "I find a mitigation or solace by providing always a good book for my journeys, as Horace, or Martial, or Goethe,—some book which lifts me out of prosaic surroundings, and from which I draw some lasting knowledge. A Greek epigram out of the anthology, a verse of Herrick or Lovelace, are in harmony both with sense and spirit."—"Inspiration," Letters and Social Aims.

Page 159, note 2. This extract, on the opening of the poet's eyes to the universal order and beauty, is from the journal of 1841: "You defy anybody to have things as good as yours. Hafiz defies you to show him or put him in a condition inopportune and ignoble. Take all you will, and leave him but a corner of nature, a lane, a den, a cow-shed, out of cities, far from letters and taste and culture; he promises to win to that second spot the light of moon and stars, the love of men, the smile of beauty, the homage of art. It shall be painted, and carved, and sung, and celebrated, and visited by pilgrimage in all time to come."

Page 161, note 1. Anaxagoras, the Ionian philosopher, came to Athens and did much to elevate the religious conceptions of the better class. He taught that God was the Divine Mind, explained the higher meaning of the mythology and opposed superstition, showing that prodigies were to be explained by natural causes. He showed the reason of eclipses. Popular feeling against his heresies caused his condemnation to death, but Pericles had his sentence commuted to banishment to Lampsacus, where he died, poor, but honored.

Page 162, note 1. Ben Jonson's Epigram LXV., "To my Muse."

Page 163, note 1. See the motto "Heroism" in the Poems.

Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons; Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons, Drooping oft in wreaths of dread, Lightning-knotted round his head; The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails.

Page 164, note 1. Dr. Holmes in his story of Elsie Venner dwells much on this necessary ripening of the rude blood through three generations as qualifying for the "Brahmin Caste" of New England.

In the journal for 1851, Mr. Emerson made this note:—

"In 'Natural Aristocracy,' or in 'Culture,' it needs to say, that the instinctive belief of mankind in melioration is plainly indicated in the care which each auto- or (alto-) biographer takes to show that the herd came of good blood; came of 'kenned folk;' that his ancestor was a gentleman two hundred years before."

Page 165, note 1. The doctrines of Amelioration and of Evolution so welcome to Emerson appear in a passage in the journal of 1851, in which he likens man, built up out of material of past animal life, to the sword-blades of Damascus, thus:—

"I wish I could get the fact about horse-shoe nails which, after being hammered and worn and recast and hammered and worn, are made up into Damascus steel, which is thus

a result and simmering down and last possibility of iron. I believe the tradition is fabulous, but such in nature are men, made up of monads, each of which has held governance of fish or fowl or worm or fly, and is now promoted to be a particle of man."

The following definition of Culture is from the journal of 1851. A similar passage occurs in "Natural History of Intellect" in the volume of that name.

"Culture, the height of Culture, highest behaviour, consists in the identification of the Ego with the Universe, so that when a man says, I think, I hope, I find,—he might properly say, the human race thinks, hopes and finds,—he states a fact which commands the understandings and affections of all the company, and yet, at the same time, he shall be able continually to keep sight of his biographical Ego. I had an ague, I had a fortune, my father had black hair, etc., as rhetoric, fun or footman to his public Ego, without impertinence or even confounding them."

Page 166, note 1. Mr. Emerson's method of dealing with the problem of Evil in the world, his security of faith that even the Furies and the hells are transient phases in a slow but sure ascension,

Lifting better up to best,

recalls an expression of Mr. Woodbury's, in his excellent little book,1 2.4 with regard to the different weapons which Carlyle and Emerson used against falsehood, "which they destroyed, the one with lightning and the other with light."

BEHAVIOR

"How near to what is good is what is fair! Which we no sooner see, But with the lines and outward air Our senses taken be."

These lines of Jonson express the charm which the graces had for the solitary New England scholar who believed himself sadly deficient in them. He used these verses as the motto to what a writer in a recent journal has called "his fine essay on Manners, which was the first study for his finer essay on Behavior." The allusion, in the last lines of the motto of this essay, to Endymion, whom sleeping the moon stooped to kiss, leaving the influence of that benediction while life lasted, is a statement of the author's own case. It recalls the opening verses of the "Ode to Beauty," written perhaps ten years earlier.

Page 170, note 1. George Sand's novel Consuelo was one of the few novels read and valued by Mr. Emerson, who alludes to it in the essay on "Books," in Society and Solitude, and in Representative Men.

Talma was an actor of great dignity and grace.

Page 170, note 2. In the Dial, in 1842, Mr. Emerson printed some verses called "Tact," which, though appearing in the first edition of the Poems, were so little poetical that he did not choose to keep them in the latest editions. Two verses are here given:—

What boots it thy virtue? What profit thy parts? The one thing thou lackest Is the art of all arts.

This clinches the bargain; Sails out of the bay; Gets the vote of the senate Spite of Webster and Clay.

Page 172, note 1.

I care not how you are dressed, In coarsest weeds or in the best;

But whether you charm me, Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me. "Destiny," Poems.

Page 173, note 1. Journal, 1855. "'T is a measure of culture, the number of things taken for granted. When a man begins to speak, the churl will take him up, by disputing his first words, so he cannot come at his scope. The wise man takes all for granted until he sees the parallelism of that which puzzled him with his own view."

Mr. Emerson was constantly annoyed by the discourtesy with which disputatious persons, or those who knew of no plane above that of the Understanding, attacked and baited Mr. Alcott from the outset in the "Conversations," so that he seldom was allowed to present his lofty and Platonic view to advantage. Mr. Alcott had no skill in dispute, even less than his friend, who found so much refreshment in the amplitude and height of his views, as presented in private, that he wished others should give the philosopher a fair hearing. Mr. Alcott's opponents were misled by the name "Conversations," which should have been "Philosophic Utterances."

Page 173, note 2. Asmodeus, a demon mentioned in the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha, and in the Talmud. The keeping him out of mischief by setting him to spin sand into

ropes is alluded to in several places in Mr. Emerson's work, as in "Politics" and "Resources." In a fragment of verse he likens his own task of weaving his thoughts into a coherent tissue for an essay to that of this spirit.

The Asmodean feat is mine, To spin my sand-heap into twine.

As for the "monotones," his fatigue found expression thus in the journal for 1855:—

"We are forced to treat a great part of mankind like crazy persons. We readily discover their mania and humor it, so that conversation soon becomes a tiresome effort. We humor a democrat, a whig, a rich man, an antiquary, a woman, a slaveholder and so on. All Dr. _____ _____ 's opinions are incipient insanities, and not very incipient either."

And again of his troublesome guests, who sulked when not exclusively allowed the floor at a social gathering:—

"How I hate these past and future birds who frown and attitudinize in cheerful parlors."

Page 175, note 1. The lecture on "Aristocracy" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, though dealing with Natural Aristocracy, has interest in this connection.

Page 176, note 1. John Quincy Adams is, without doubt, described in this passage. A very similar account of his appearance on public occasions is given by Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., in his biography of the younger Adams.

Page 176, note 2. The Emir Abd-el-Kader, whose energy and courage made him for sixteen years a terror to the French army in Algiers, was finally captured in 1847. He became the friend of General Daumas, who edited an exceedingly interesting book entitled Les Chevaux du Sahara, in which he recorded what the Emir told him of the Arab

horse, the tradition of his origin, the texts from the Koran concerning him, his breeding, treatment and performance, and also of the customs and modes of thought and action of the Arabs of the Desert. Mr. Emerson took great pleasure in this book.

Page 178, note 1.

With beams December planets dart His cold eye truth and conduct scanned. Quatrain "S. H.," Poems.

Page 179, note 1. In each of the poems on The Initial, The Daemonic and The Celestial Loves are remarkable passages on the eyes and their powers. In the motto to the next essay in this volume it is said that the sentiment of worship, "miscalled Fate,"

greeted in another's eyes Disconcerts with glad surprise.

Page 181, note 1. Mr. Emerson's eyes were of a clear, rather dark blue. He looked his guest kindly and searchingly in the eyes on his arrival, but, in talking with him, he looked fixedly rather beside than at him, while answering his questions not directly, but suggestively. His look was not too personal to others. In lecturing, he kept his eyes for the most part on his manuscript, but, especially in a speech on some important public issue, he emphasized the strong sentences and made them far more telling by his steadfast forward look or sudden fearless glance.

Page 182, note 1. The book of Winckelmann on Greek Art was often referred to by Mr. Emerson. Johann Caspar Lavater, the Swiss mystic, wrote a remarkable work on Physiognomy in men and animals, in which he pushed his theories to a ludicrous extreme. His Physiognomische Fragmente zur

Befor derung der Menschenkentniss and Menschenliebe was published in 1775-78.

Page 182, note 2. "A man's attire, and excessive laughter, and gait, shew what he is."—Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus xix. 30.

Page 182, note 3. Louis de Rouvroi, Duke of Saint-Simon (1675-1755), a writer of interesting Mémoires, which because of their bold and satirical character did not obtain full publication until 1829. Jean Fran&c;cedil;ois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1614-79), a man of loose morals, but much ability, became Cardinal, and Archbishop of Paris. He had many vicissitudes of fortune, being an opponent of Richelieu and Mazarin, and had to take refuge in Spain for some years. His Mémoires cover an interesting period. Pierre Louis, Count Roederer (1754-1835), a man of letters who was a statesman of remarkable intelligence and address, which saved him, although of the moderate party, in the French Revolution, throughout which he was very active. Under Napoleon he occupied places of importance, but after the return of the Bourbons he devoted himself to literature. Among his writings are the Chronique de Cinquante Fours and Mémoires pour servir a l' histoire de la Société polie en France.

Page 183, note 1. "What talent had this second Charles, that he could hold his place among the Wrens, Hooks, Newtons, Flamsteeds, Halleys, Bentleys, Pettys, Coventrys that clustered in his 'Royal Society,' and atone for the harpies and dragons and all unclean beasts which masqueraded in titles around him?"

During his lecturing expeditions Mr. Emerson enjoyed the opportunity of seeing and hearing the speech of men of affairs. He wrote, perhaps in 1852:—

"I am greatly pleased with the merchants. In railway cars

and hotels it is common to meet only the successful class and so we have favorable specimens, but these discover more manly power of all kinds than scholars; behave a great deal better, converse better, and have independent and sufficient manners."

Yet he sees his compensations as a scholar, for a different aspect of the same subject is given in an earlier journal (1845):

"Geniality, yes, very important, but so is substance. The entrance of a scholar put a whole insurance office to flight. Every elegant loafer steals out when he comes in. He deplores this Medusa-masque which scares every one from his side. The merchant he admires. See how long their conversation lasts in the rail-car! What can they have to say, that is still so fresh and so much? Yes. But they are unhappy as soon as they are alone—and he is unhappy as soon as he is not alone."

Page 185, note 1. Fuseli was banished from Switzerland for some political indiscretion. His drawing was praised by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in time he became professor of painting in the Academy. He wrote a Life of Reynolds. James Northcote, a pupil of Reynolds, became a portrait painter. His disposition and manners made him unpopular.

Page 187, note 1. From Pericles and Aspasia, by Walter Savage Landor.

Page 188, note 1. This, without doubt, was the speecl of Mr. Emerson's eccentric aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. His account of her is included in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 189, note 1. Journal, 1841. "Be calm, sit still in your chair, though the company be dull and unworthy. Are you not there? There then is the choir of your friends; for subtle influences are always arriving at you from them, and you represent them, do you not? to all who stand here.

"It is not a word that 'I am a gentleman, and the king is

no more,' but is a fact expressed in every word between the king and a gentleman."

Page 190, note 1. Jean Jacques Champollion-Figeac, the archaeologist and successful expounder of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Page 191, note 1. Franz Heinrich Jacobi, the German philosopher and correspondent of Goethe.

Page 195, note 1. Journal, 1852. "We tell our children and ourselves not to regard other people's opinion, but to respect themselves, and we send them to school or to company and they meet (as we have so often met) some animosus infans, some companion rammed with life, whose manners tyrannize over them. They have no weapon of defence against this weapon; a pound will weigh down an ounce in spite of all precepts. A quality of a different kind is yet a counterpoise: as a gas is a vacuum to every other gas."

Page 196, note 1. Journal, 1850. "My prayer to women would be, when the bell rings, when visitors arrive, sit like statues."

Page 196, note 2. Compare the passage in "The Celestial Love" beginning—

For this is Love's nobility,— Not to scatter bread and gold.

Page 197, note 1. "Hear what the morning says and believe that," was one of Mr. Emerson's finest utterances. There is a passage on morning influences in "Inspiration," in connection with Goethe's poem "Musagetes," in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 197, note 2. A positive rule which Mr. Emerson taught by constant example was, Never talk about yourself: that is, your personal self; as far as you are universal and ideal it is permitted.

Page 197, note 3. Journal, 1845. "There are persons who are always in fashion; and style and fashion and aristocracy bends itself to them, denies itself to be possessed of them."

WORSHIP

The suggestion or request has more than once been made that the essays of Emerson on Worship, The Over-Soul, The Sovereignty of Ethics, Spiritual Laws and Immortality be collected into one volume as a "religious work." This has never been done, for such grouping seemed inappropriate to the history of the writer and the character of his works. Although his conduct of public worship and his thoughts on revealed or natural religion, delivered from the pulpit, had caused doubt or alarm to those to whom faith or custom made certain forms or doctrines seem essential, a few years after he resigned his charge they heard kindred thoughts with increasing interest and pleasure in his week-day courses on "The Philosophy of History," "Human Culture" and "Human Life." As the great laws, alike for matter and spirit, everywhere prevail, it became his office to show, as he said in an early verse, that

In the darkest, meanest things There alway, alway something sings.

So, whatever the title of the lecture or essay might be, whether it dealt with farming or politics, education or poetry or aristocracy, the ascension from simple every-day matters, from symbol to meaning, was sure to be found somewhere. Even dark Nemesis is made beneficent. In the first essay in this volume Mr. Emerson said, "But to see how fate slides into freedom

and freedom into fate, observe how far the roots of every creature run, or find if you can a point where there is no thread of connection. … This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends."

This doctrine of Unity he also presents in an astronomic image in "Uriel" and elsewhere:—

Line in Nature is not found, Unit and Universe are round. In vain produced, all rays return, Evil will bless and ice will burn.

So subjects as diverse as Fate, Power, Wealth, Culture and Behavior, Emerson could not present quite apart from one another, but as parts of a wondrous tissue. More than that, Deity says, as in "Brahma:"—

They reckon ill who leave me out,—

and the workings of Spirit appear in all,—the Universal Mind or Over-Soul of which each human being is a channel. "Worship" therefore fitly follows the others, and its motto tells of man's inalienable inheritance of God.

Page 201, note 1. Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), an English philosophic divine. His principal work was The True Intellectual System of the Universe, with purpose to establish belief in human liberty as against fatalism. He also wrote a Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality.

While a student at Harvard College Mr. Emerson read Cudworth with great pleasure, because by this author he was introduced to the teachings of Plato.

Page 202, note 1. Mr. Emerson said one should not think

about one's example in good deeds, "but act always from the simplest motive." The celestial bodies and their ordered motion were a source of inspiration to him.

With aim like yours I watch your course, Who never break your lawful dance By error or intemperance. 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. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 202, note 2. Young, Night Thoughts.

Page 203, note 1. In his later years Mr. Emerson was pleased with Bret Harte's first stories in The Luck of Roaring Camp; and glad to know of the young author, like Seyd in his own "Beauty," that

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

Page 203, note 2. Mr. Emerson made visits to the Shakers of Harvard and Shirley once and again, and had friendly and respectful relations with their elders, with whom he occasionally sat and talked in the cars on their way to Boston.

Page 204, note 1. In some sheets on the New Religion, which perhaps were in "Worship" when first delivered, is the following passage, a part of which was later used in "The Preacher" (Lectures and Biographical Sketches):—

"I see movement, I hear aspirations, but I see not how the

Great God prepares to satisfy the heart in the new order of things. No church, no state, emerges. When we have extricated ourselves from all the embarrassments of the social problem, the oracle does not yet emit any light on the mode of individual life. A thousand negatives it utters, clear and strong on all sides; but the sacred affirmative, it hides in the deepest abyss. We do not see that heroic resolutions will save men from those tides which a most fatal moon heaps and levels in the moral emotive and intellectual nature. It looks as if there was much doubt, much waiting, to be endured by the best,—the heavy hours. Perhaps there must be austere elections and determinations before any clear vision of the way is given. Yet eternal joy and a light heart dwell within the muse for ever and ever, and the austerity of her true lovers can never be harsh or moping."

Page 205, note 1. Iliad, xxi. 455.

Page 205, note 2. Both of these stories of King Olaf's methods of convincing his subjects of the beauty of the Christian religion are from the Saga of King Olaf Trygvesson in volume one of Laing's Heimskringla. The incident of Raud the Strong is told in Longfellow's fine rendering of the Olaf Saga in Tales of a Wayside Inn.

Page 206, note 1. "Mathen" means moths or worms. The extract is from "Merlin" in Ellis's Early English Metrical Romances, but Mr. Emerson in some degree modified the old spelling.

Page 207, note 1. From The Legend of Good Women. In English Traits Mr. Emerson quotes the monk's story of King Richard's prayer, as showing the British spirit.

Page 207, note 2. With disgust tempered by his sense of humor, Mr. Emerson, on his return from church one Sunday in 1837, wrote:—

"The pagan theology of our churches treats Heaven as an inevitable evil which, as there is no help against, the best way is to put the best face on the matter we can. 'From whence,' said the good preacher in his prayer, 'we shall not be able to return.' Truth will out."

Page 207, note 3. Probably alluding to some communities then recently established in the Middle States, in which Free Love was one of the articles of faith.

Page 209, note 1. The "spiritual" manifestations in the shape of knockings had invaded Concord at this time. Of their chief exponent, a humble maker of pocket-books in Concord, Mr. Emerson used to say, "Mr. M— is a great wag." Judge Hoar remarked to a lady, who was suggesting that there might prove to be something in these manifestations, "But you will admit, my dear lady, that this treasure, if such it be, is vouchsafed to us in earthen vessels."

Mr. Thoreau wrote, in his disgust, that his neighbors in Concord believed in spirits that the very bullfrogs in their meadows would blackball, that no respectable junk-bottle would condescend to hold for one moment; and said that if he could be made to believe in such a heaven as the Spiritualist believed in, he "would take stock in the first Total Annihilation Company that offered."

Mr. Emerson's aversion to low peeping and prying into what was wisely veiled is shown in one of his earlier lectures, "Demonology," printed in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 209, note 2. This phrase, which, at the time these lectures were read, was much in the mouths of the brave opponents of human slavery, then propped by the law of the land, is thus alluded to by Mr. Emerson in his journal: "The worst symptom I have noticed in our politics lately is

the attempt to make a gibe out of Seward's appeal to a higher law than the Constitution, and Webster has taken part in it. I have seen him [Seward] snubbed as 'Higher-Law Seward.'" In Mr. Emerson's lecture on the "Fugitive-Slave Law," read in New York on March 7, 1854, he says of Webster, "He did as immoral men usually do, made very low bows to the Christian Church, and went through all the Sunday decorums, but when allusion was made to the question of duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said at Albany, 'Some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and the third heaven,—I do not know where.' And, if the reporters say true, this wretched atheism found some laughter in the company."

Page 212, note 1. In the first series of the Biglow Papers, Mr. Lowell made an important and witty attack on the aggressive imperialism of that day, with its watchwords as to "our Destiny," and the "Anglo-Saxon idea" (recently revived by public speakers). His rustic private from Massachusetts in the Mexican War begins to see through the politicians' oratory, and writes home,—

"Ef these creeturs Thet stick an Anglosaxon mask onto State-prison feeturs Should come to Jaalam Centre fer to argify an' spout on 't, The gals 'ould count the silver spoons the minnit they cleared out on 't."

Page 213, note 1. Attributing the lack of faith to a mere surface view, Mr. Emerson wrote at about this period in a lecture on Character, "Given the insight, and a man will find as many beauties and heroes and strokes of genius close by him as Dante or Shakspeare beheld. … You find the times and places mean—stretch a few threads over an AEolian harp and put it in the window, and listen to what it says of

the times and of the heart of Nature. You shall not believe the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out. Watch the waking morning, or the enchantments of the sunset!"

Page 213, note 2. Here he brings forward his belief, comforting and inspiring, in the Universal Mind, the Over-Soul, found in the old religions of Asia, its Christian expression being in the words, "In Him we live and move and have our being."

In his Oration at Waterville in 1841, Mr. Emerson had said, "Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the highest or trust name for our communication with the infinite,—but glad and conspiring reception,—reception that becomes giving in its turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy. I cannot,—nor can any man,—speak precisely of things so sublime, but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not exhortation, not argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy and praise. But not of adulation: we are too nearly related in the deep of the mind to that we honor. It is God in us which checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am: all things are mine: and all mine are thine.'"

In the journal for 1845 he wrote, "On great questions of thought the company become aware of their unity, aware that the thought rises to an equal height in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said as well as the sayer."

The word ecstasy in the next sentence in the text bears its exact classical meaning of the soul taking a station outside its

lower personality; as Galahad, seeing that it was written on the Siege Perilous at the Round Table, that who should sit therein should lose himself, at once sat in it, crying,—

"If I lose myself, I save myself!"

Page 214, note 1.

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

Page 215, note 1. "What anthropomorphists we are in this, that we cannot let moral distinctions be, but must mould them into human shape! 'Mere morality' means—not put into a personal master of morals."—"Sovereignty of Ethics," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 215, note 2. This passage recalls that in which Thoreau speaks of "the charm of Nature's demeanor towards us; strict conscientiousness and disregard of us when we have ceased to have regard for ourselves. So she can never offend us. How true she is, and never swerves. In her most genial moment her laws are as steadfastly and relentlessly fulfilled, though the Decalogue is rhymed and set to sweetest music, as in her sternest."

Page 216, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in "Nature:"—

"In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep."

For the religion of his fathers in their day Mr. Emerson had great respect. He said of the old Puritanism, in his sketch of Dr. Ripley, that, however in its last days it declined into formalism, in the heyday of its strength it had planted and

liberated America. To this purpose is the following, from a stray sheet: "Religion has failed; yes, the religion of another man has failed to save me. But it has saved him. We speak of the past with pity and reprobation, but through the enormities, evils, and temptations of the past, saints and heroes have slipped into heaven. There is no spot but has been a battlefield. There is no religion, no church, no sect, no year of history, but has served men to rise by, to scale the walls of heaven and feast with angels. Our fathers are saved; the same conflicts have always stood as now with slight shiftings of scene and costume."

Page 217, note 1. This thought is found in the poem which serves as motto to "Fate" in this volume. With this may be compared the lines, in the Appendix to the Poems, about the crowning grace that befalls the Poet,—

The purging of his eye To see the people of the sky.

Page 218, note 1. Quantus amor, tantus animus, is the motto of one of the journals. "Love is the solution of mine and thine," he wrote in an early essay. The omnipresent working of the god Love in a higher sense than the Greek conception is celebrated in the poem "Eros."

Page 219, note 1. Celestial motion, and polarity everywhere, were constantly used as symbols by Mr. Emerson, as in "Compensation:"—

The lonely Earth amid the balls That hurry through the eternal halls, A makeweight flying to the void, Supplemental asteroid, Or compensatory spark, Shoots across the neutral dark.

And in "The Sphinx:"—

The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, By their animate poles.

Page 219, note 2. In "Circles" he says that all nature is "the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself."

Page 220, note 1. This quality of Napoleon is dwelt upon in Representative Men.

Page 221, note 1. The epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's play, An Honest Man's Fortune, was admired by Mr. Emerson, especially the lines,—

"Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

It is printed in his collection of verse, Parnassus.

Page 221, note 2. Probably from the Vishnu Purana.

Page 221, note 3. Ἀεὶ γὰρ εὖ πίπτουσιν οι Διὸσ κύβοι, The dice of Zeus always fall aright, is a fragment from a lost play of Sophocles.

Page 223, note 1. Mr. Emerson embodied his thoughts on man's debt to the safeguards against sin in a little poem, written early, called "Grace." His friend Rev. William H. Channing made use of it in his portion of the memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (the joint work of himself, Rev. James Freeman Clarke and Mr. Emerson), crediting it there to George Herbert. When the manuscript came to Mr. Emerson, he wrote to Mr. Channing, saying that the verses, to which he had done the unspeakable honor of attributing them to Herbert, were his own, and asked him to omit them. They are printed in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 224, note 1.

Every thought is public, Every nook is wide; Thy gossips spread each whisper, And the gods from side to side. "Hush," Quatrain, Poems.

Page 224, note 2. Journal, 1851. "To every reproach I know but one answer, namely, to go again to my own work. 'But you neglect your relations.' Yes, too true; then I will work the harder. 'But you have no genius.' Yes; then I will work the harder. 'But you have no virtues.' Yes; then I will work the harder. 'But you have detached yourself and acquired the aversation of all decent people: you must regain some position and relation!' Yes, I will work the harder."

Page 225, note 1. Journal. "I have no knowledge of trade. There is not a sciolist who cannot shut my mouth and my understanding by strings of facts that seem to prove the wisdom of tariffs. But my faith in freedom of trade, as the rule, returns always. If the Creator has made oranges, coffee and pineapples in Cuba and refused them to Massachusetts, I cannot see why we should put a fine on the Cubans for bringing these to us,—a fine so heavy as to enable Massachusetts men to build costly palm-houses and glass conservatories under which to coax these poor plants to ripen under our hard skies, and thus discourage the poor planter from sending them to gladden the very cottages here. We punish the planter there and punish the consumer here for adding these benefits to life. Tax opium, tax poisons, tax brandy, gin, wine, hasheesh, tobacco and whatever articles of pure luxury, but not healthy and delicious food."

Page 226, note 1. "We say, Dear God, the life of man is not by man, it is consentaneous and far-related. It came with the sun and nature, it is crescive and vegetative, and it is with it as with the sun and the grass. The powers that I want will be supplied, as I am supplied, and the philosophy of trust is sustained by all the oracles of the universe."—Sheet from an old lecture.

Page 228, note 1. Filippo Neri (1515-95), a Florentine priest remarkable for his energy and humanity, guided by good sense and humor, with marked executive ability. He was the founder of the fraternity called the Most Sacred Trinity of the Pilgrims and the Convalescents, for the help of both these classes of persons. He also founded and was long the governor of the Congregation of the Oratory, a community of secular priests. In 1622 he was canonized.

Page 229, note 1. "Character makes flesh and blood comely and alive, adorns wrinkles and silver hairs."—Lecture on "Character," 1842.

Page 230, note 1. In the journal for 1842 this passage ends thus: "I will speak the truth also in my secret heart, or think the truth against what is called God."

Page 232, note 1. "The astronomers are very eager to know whether the moon has an atmosphere: I am only concerned that every man have one."—"Aristocracy," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 233, note 1.

Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails. "Heroism," Poems.

Journal, 1830. "We are to be so humble as to be of the greatest possible service to all men. We are to be always accessible to truth, as the proud are not. Yet every sin are we

to scorn with an imperial superiority. Then to keep an independence of all men—dazzling men and bad men—how hard! It needs this great equilibrium, the relation to God which sets all right."

Page 236, note 1. Benedict is of course mythical, but there is much biography and autobiography in the picture. "Guy," and the forester in "Woodnotes," I., in the Poems may be brought to mind by some of the sentences.

Page 238, note 1. "From God appeal to the God of God" [truth], he said, in the lecture "Character" in 1842. The beautiful poem of William Allingham called "The Touchstone" is called to mind here. It was a favorite of Mr. Emerson's and is included in his Parnassus.

Page 238, note 2. Journal, 1844. "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 sweet and graceful."

Page 239, note 1. Journal. "What is the Fall, what Sin, what Death, with this eternal Soul under us originating benefit for evermore?"

Page 241, note 1. While still the minister of the Second Church, Mr. Emerson made the following entry in the book which he called "Sermons and Journal:"—

"May 3d, 1828. It is proposed as a question whether the business of the preacher is not simply to hunt out and to exhibit the analogies between Moral and Material nature in such manner as to have a bearing upon practice."

In his course given in Boston in the winter of 1836-37, in Lecture VI., "Religion," he said:—

"The man of this age must be matriculated in the university of sciences and tendencies flowing from all past periods.

He must not be one who can be surprised and shipwrecked by every bold and subtle word which malignant and acute men may utter in his hearing; but should be taught all skepticisms and unbeliefs, and made the destroyer of all card houses and paper walls, and the sifter of all opinions, by being put face to face from his infancy with Reality.

"A man who has accustomed himself to look at all his circumstance as very mutable; to carry his possessions, his relation to persons and even his opinions in his hand, and in all these to pierce to the principle and moral law, and everywhere to find that; has put himself out of the reach of all skepticism; and it seems as if whatever is most affecting and sublime in our intercourse, in our happiness, and in our losses tended steadily to uplift us to a life so extraordinary, one might say superhuman."

Page 241, note 2. In "Self-Reliance" is this sentence, indicating the attitude receptive of the great Self, the Over-Soul, which befits the worshipping human being:—

"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams."

CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY

Among the persons who attended Mr. Emerson's courses of lectures were many who were attracted by his personality, or by friendship, or by his growing fame. Some among these would have found it hard to follow his thoughts' subtile thread, connecting his periods, or ascend to its higher levels.

To these there would have been comfort in a lecture like the present, not professing to deal with an abstract theme,—Fate or Illusion or the like,—but, below the clouds, with the day and its chances, esteemed "good" or "evil," yet all helpful in the end, human, and with a tone of cheerful health.

Merlin, the Cymrian bard and enchanter in the legends, still had a charm for this poet and seer of the latter days, and all the fragmentary remains of the songs of the Bards Mr. Emerson read with keen interest. The power of the poet, because a transmitter of divine truth, often in veiled form, yet

"Clothing the palpable and the familiar With golden exhalations of the dawn,"

was the one beneficent magic for him.

In his second volume of poems, May Day, appeared the "Song of Merlin," which, though a paraphrase of some of the Bardic Fragments, and probably with no connection with the motto of this chapter, might precede it.

Of Merlin wise I learned a song,— Sing it low, or sing it loud, It is mightier than the strong, And punishes the proud. I sing it to the surging crowd,— Good men it will calm and cheer, Bad men it will chain and cage. In the heart of the Music peals a strain Which only angels hear; Whether it waken joy or rage, Hushed myriads hark in vain, Yet they who hear it shed their age, And take their youth again.

In the motto poem Merlin gives wise counsels to the son of the great chieftain Cyndyllan: The world is as open and fresh for you as for Adam; man's hope lies in the better future; do not swaddle yourself with tradition or clog yourself with wealth; live close to nature for health and cheer; show this secret joyfully to others; your own spot of earth is best for you, and all things, including love, are there for you; in your work, if rightly chosen, is such joy that you will ask little time for play, but friendship implies eternity.

Page 246, note 1. When you learn to steer by the compass of the Over-Soul, and that "every wave is charmed," you are ready to "come into port bravely or sail with God the seas."

Page 247, note 1. Amusement, as such, had little attraction for Mr. Emerson, for his thought and reading and work called him, and his joy was in the study of nature and man. A day was a sacred gift, and to be accounted for by each person by some honest work of hand or brain or heart. For a person to devote a fresh morning to a novel or to a game seemed to him unworthy trifling with life. To go to the wood or the shore, especially if alone, was another matter: it might be an act of devotion, or a search for knowledge or inspiration.

"How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little." Tennyson, "Ulysses."

Page 249, note 1. Of this sentence, and of the next paragraph, Dr. Holmes says, in his Ralph Waldo Emerson,

"Here we have the doctrine of the 'saving remnant' which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered lecture. … After reading what Emerson says about 'the Masses' one is tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have 'a constituency' and be elected to Congress. Certainly the essay … would not make a very promising campaign document."

Page 249, note 2. Here, after his wont, leaving the modifications to another paragraph or essay, Mr. Emerson gave his statement full swing. The bad politics of the day, and the stooping of public men to court the multitude which they should enlighten and lead, no doubt gave heat to the utterance. None the less he had faith in the Republic and in true democracy reconcilable with "natural aristocracy." To give man his true dignity and scope he must be taken out of the herd that follows the bell-wether. His own work in life was to teach man his worth and possibilities, and that Mr. Emerson sincerely believed in these was shown by his daily attitude towards humble neighbors, or young people, or servants. Moreover, the service was reciprocal, for he said he found that every man could teach him something. His harshness is only for the man who sacrifices his manhood for the mass. Later in the essay he says that if a man is, he is wanted; that he is here is proof that he ought to be. "When I see the doors by which God enters into the mind; that there is no sot or fop, ruffian or pedant into whom thoughts do not enter by passages which the individual never left open, I can expect any revolution in character."—"Education," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 251, note 1. In the preceding decade the influence of Fourier, Saint-Simon and others had given rise to many experiments in communistic life. Mr. Emerson had no faith

in these. Solitude and self-help were a man's best instructors and might fit him to "leaven the lump" of society.

Page 254, note 1.

Unit and Universe are round: In vain produced, all rays return, Evil will bless and ice will burn. "Uriel," Poems.

Page 255, note 1.

"But who, if he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for human kind, Is happy as a lover, and attired With sudden brightness like a man inspired." Wordsworth, "Character of the Happy Warrior."

Page 256, note 1.

The Cossack eats Poland Like stolen fruit; Her last noble is ruined, Her last poet mute: Straight, into double band The victors divide; Half for freedom strike and stand;— The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side. "Ode, inscribed to W. H. Channing," Poems.

Page 256, note 2. In the poem "Monadnoc" is a passage on the contrast of the rude population around with the uplifting grandeur of the mountain, but the poet presently finds that

The World-soul knows his own affair, Forelooking, when he would prepare For the next ages men of mould.

Page 258, note 1. Chaldaean oracle, attributed to Zoroaster.

Page 258, note 2. Shakspeare, Measure for Measure, Act V., Scene 1.

Page 259, note 1. Compare "The Park" in the Poems.

Page 260, note 1. In his journal of 1833 Mr. Emerson said that his brother "Charles's naif censure last night provoked me to show him a fact apparently entirely new to him, that my entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of particular failures, every public work of mine of the least importance having been, probably without exception, noted at the time as a failure."

In the poem "Spiritual Laws" it is said,—

The living Heaven …

Quarrying man's rejected hours, Builds therewith eternal towers;

Grows by decays, And, by the famous might that lurks In reaction and recoil, Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil; Forging, through swart arms of Offence, The silver seat of Innocence.

Page 261, note 1. In the journal for 1856 these tests are more strikingly given. "Culture. Set a dog on him; set a highwayman on him; set a woman on him; try him with money. King Alfred, King Richard, Cromwell, George Borrow even, might stand these tests."

Page 262, note 1. In the motto to one of the early essays, Mr. Emerson, after enumerating the alarming Experiences, humanity's disguised friends, says,—

Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look. Him by the hand dear Nature took, Dearest Nature, strong and kind, Whispered, "Darling, never mind! To-morrow they will wear another face, The founder thou; these are thy race!" "Experience," Poems.

Page 263, note 1. Some persons have supposed that Mr. Emerson's apparent want of sympathy with sickness was due to his having never known it. It is true that from the time he came to Concord his health was almost uniformly good, and he bore well severe exposure in his winter lecturing. But in his youth he had much suffering and interruption to his studies from rheumatism, bad eyes and especially a persistent and threatening cough, on account of which he had to spend the winter of 1827 in the South. By good fortune and timely good sense and a certain toughness of constitution he came through his period of weakness, but his quiet courage and patience were well tested. In the Appendix to the Poems is a juvenile scrap, written while ill at St. Augustine, beginning,—

I bear in youth the sad infirmities That use to undo the limb and sense of age.

In his view, to be sick was not the crime, except in so far as it resulted from broken laws, but to misbehave when sick and give way to selfishness and fear. Though hard for him to understand or reconcile himself to sickness, he was tender to sufferers from acute illness. Nervous troubles he could hardly understand or pardon.

Page 264, note 1. In stanza v. of the "Fragments on The Poet" (see Poems, Appendix), beginning with lines which

occur in the motto to this chapter, the joy and blessing of the poet's lot remote from strife is told, as also in "Saadi."

The proverb from Holland with which the next paragraph opens was often in Mr. Emerson's mouth, as to the preservative effect of beauty to all composition.

Page 268, note 1. While studying at Divinity Hall in November, 1828, Mr. Emerson wrote: "Don't you see you are the Universe to yourself? You carry your fortunes in your own hand. Change of place won't mend the matter. You will weave the same web at Pernambuco as at Boston, if you have only learned to make one texture."

Page 269, note 1.

If Thought unlock her mysteries, If Friendship on me smile, I walk in marble galleries, I walk with kings the while. "Walden," Poems, Appendix.

Page 270, note 1. The two consecutive texts in the Proverbs of King Solomon—

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.

"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit"—seem to have been in Mr. Emerson's memory. He sometimes spoke very amusingly of the evidence in the Scriptures that the fools must have been prevalent and insistent in Ancient Judaea, as shown by the eager bitterness with which, when the fool is mentioned, the subject on hand is dropped for the moment to dwell on this calamitous interruption to the peace and pursuits of the righteous.

Page 270, note 2. The Muse gave the poet an example

of how truth should be spoken, impersonally and coldly, for she,—

When she spread her dearest spells, Feigned to speak to some one else. I was free to overhear, Or I might at will forbear; Yet mark me well, that idle word Thus at random overheard Was the symphony of spheres," etc. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Elsewhere Mr. Emerson said, "Truth ceased to be truth when polemically stated."

Page 272, note 1.

My careful heart was free again, O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee the rose is red; All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in thy worth. "Friendship," Poems.

Page 273, note 1. The motto of this chapter ends with urging friendship as an argument for immortality. Like Immortality, Mr. Emerson says in his essay on "Friendship," "it is too good to be believed." In the Appendix to the Poems is printed the following verse, called Eros, from the Dial:—

They put their finger on their lip, The Powers above; The seas their islands clip, The moons in ocean dip, They love, but name not love.

Page 274, note 1. This "convenient distance" was a carefully chosen word, two edged. For a man whose work specially called him to solitude, yet who needed and valued society, that distance had to be nicely graded.

Page 276, note 1. He thought out the other party's point of view so naturally and justly that he was always loved or respected by those about him.

Page 277, note 1.

And though thy knees were never bent, To Heaven thy hourly prayers are sent, And, whether formed for good or ill, Are registered and answered still. "Prayer," Poems, Appendix.

Page 277, note 2.

All the forms are fugitive But the substances survive.

Page 278, note 1. Jeremiah xlv. 5.

Page 278, note 2.

And ye shall succor men; 'T is nobleness to serve; Help them who cannot help again: Beware from right to swerve.

I cause from every creature His proper good to flow: As much as he is and doeth, So much he shall bestow. "Boston Hymn," Poems.

BEAUTY

The boyish writings of Emerson show little evidence of love of nature. City-bred and precociously steeped in classic English and Latin, and with mates of similar tastes who had neither guns nor boats, and hardly fishing-rods—he attended nature's school late and irregularly. The early verses "Peter's Field" (Poems, Appendix) show how to the imaginations of the Emerson brothers in the birch-girt sites of the Indian villages on the bluffs above Concord River

The fields of Thessaly grew green, Old gods forsook the skies.

All was imputed classicism. The journals of the undergraduate and the young divine show little real sense of beauty until Love, the awakener, came. The poems to Ellen when absent show that now to him, as to other lovers, the world was new. Soon after her death he shook off the Hebraism which he found a bond, and, remembering his early intuition that

Man in the bush with God may meet,

made his home in the country for the rest of his life. How he found the ancient Earth freshened with the dew, as if just from the Creator's hand each morning, all new and undescribed, he has told in "Literary Ethics," and that the wonder and charm that each day brought to the eye stood for a spiritual reality which it was for man to interpret.

The sense of beauty, once awakened, of course grew through life. Of natural beauty he had a keen sense. Thoreau showed him the secrets of the Concord region. William Ellery Channing, a humorist and a poet, if he had not an artist's hand, nor always an artist's ear, had an artist's

eye, and cultivated Emerson's in their walks. Two very near friends, Mr. Samuel Gray Ward and Miss Caroline Sturgis, and also Horatio Greenough the sculptor, were helpful to his appreciation of ancient and modern art, but the work of the Greeks, by its simplicity and repose, commanded his untutored admiration from the first.

In the Motto, Seyd (or Saadi, of which name it is another version, and by one of these names Mr. Emerson usually calls his ideal Poet), following luring and evanescent Beauty, finds that there is nothing so low but that in it the purged eye may find a trace of her; for she pervades the universe, and is synonymous with Love, the highest Wisdom. This trinity Emerson everywhere celebrates.

Thus in the "Ode to Beauty," he wrote:—

All that's good and great with thee Works in close conspiracy; Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely To report thy features only.

Page 281, note 1. Thoreau stood absolved from this charge. To the keen eye of the naturalist he added an artist's delicate sense of color, and the poet's thought. He "knew what to do with his facts," and he saw, like his friend, almost conscious life and virtue in tree or flower.

Page 282, note 1. Mr. Emerson took much pleasure in the book on birds of the more human Nuttall.

Page 282, note 2. Mr. Emerson could pardon much to men whose eager minds led them to speculations on matter and its laws far beyond what they could prove, and even fanciful, like Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Swedenborg, Lavater, Hahnemann, Oken, Gall and Spurzheim.

Page 283, note 1. Among his fragmentary verses were these lines:—

The tremulous battery Earth Responds to the touch of man; It thrills to the antipodes, From Boston to Japan.

Page 283, note 2. "He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy."—"The Transcendentalist," Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 335.

"Miracle?" he wrote in the journal, "It is all miracle!"

Page 284, note 1.

The south-winds are quick-witted, The schools are sad and slow, The masters quite omitted The lore we care to know. "April," Poems.

Page 284, note 2. A good instance of Mr. Emerson's exact and classical use of a word is this of "humor" primarily for moisture, or sap, as we might say, and incidentally in its more ordinary modern meaning.

Page 285, note 1. In contrast to the memento mori, garnishing alike the grave-stones and sermons, in Mr. Emerson's youth, he adopted Goethe's brave motto, Think on living, and saw no coming death. Nor to his mind was getting a livelihood more than a preparatory step to life.

Page 286, note 1. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), the Prussian student of ancient art, and founder of archaeology,

attracted the attention, by his work Reflections on Greek Art, of the Elector of Saxony, who pensioned him and sent him to Rome to study. His taste and attainments there procured him consideration and furtherance in his researches, and he passed the rest of his life in Italy. His History of Ancient Art was his important work. It was much valued by Mr. Emerson.

Page 286, note 2. Mr. Emerson regularly attended church during the first years of his residence in Concord. One day when the preaching was bad he wrote in the journal for 1838: "At church I saw that beautiful child _____ _____ ,and my fine, natural, manly neighbor who brought the bread and wine to the communicants with so clear an eye and excellent face and manners. That was all I saw that looked like God at church."

Page 287, note 1. In the "Poet" (Poems, Appendix) is a passage which evidently refers to his own home in youth:—

Beside him sat enduring love, Upon him noble eyes did rest, Which, for the Genius that there strove, The follies bore that it invest. They spoke not, for their earnest sense Outran the craft of eloquence.

Page 288, note 1. The demon (δαίμων), or genius presiding over the life of a man, is alluded to in Plato's Laws, the Phaedo, the Cratylus and elsewhere. In the Symposium Love is spoken of as a great spirit (δαίμων), "like all that is spiritual, intermediate between the divine and mortal for God mingles not with man, and through this power all the intercourse and speech of God with man, whether awake

or asleep, is carried on." The Neoplatonists speak of the demons. See in the poem "Daemonic Love" the lines concerning them, and also, in the "Fragments on Life" in the Appendix, these, which are very like the expressions in the text here:—

To and fro the Genius flies, A light which plays and hovers Over the maiden's head And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes. Of her faults I take no note, Fault and folly are not mine; Comes the Genius,—all's forgot, Replunged again into that upper sphere He scatters wide and wild its lustres here.

Page 289, note 1. Mr. Emerson, in his notes on Beauty, quotes this definition by Herrick:—

"Beauty no other thing is than a beam Flashed out between a middle and extreme."

Page 289, note 2. Compare the poem "Cupido."

Page 291, note 1. Journal. "Goethe said, 'The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.'"

Page 291, note 2. His ideal poet, Seyd, rejoiced in

Ring of axe or hum of wheel Or gleam which use can paint on steel. "Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 292, note 1. The onward and upward Flowing in creation appears through all Emerson's writings. He delighted to trace the doctrine in the myths of Asia or of Greece, or its modern forms in the writings of the anatomists, or to see

its workings in art-galleries, or city drawing-rooms, Concord woods or Western settlements.

Onward and on, the eternal Pan, Who layeth the world's incessant plan, Halteth never in one shape, But forever doth escape, Like wave or flame, into new forms Of gem and air, of plants and worms.

The world is the ring of his spells. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 293, note 1. The canon of Art, that transitions require attention, based on Nature's methods, alike in the race and the individual, is here used in the minor morals of taste, as elsewhere to show good out of evil.

Page 294, note 1. In the notes on Beauty Mr. Emerson quotes the line of Keats in Hyperion:—

"For 't is the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might."

Page 294, note 2.

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

Page 295, note 1. Yet Nature always outranked Art with Emerson, and he wrote, "You admire your Etruscan vase, and with reason, but I also have a cup and cover that pleases me better, to wit, the Earth and Sky."

Page 296, note 1. "Best of all is the admonition that

comes to me from a demand of beauty, so naturally made, wheresoever her eye rests, that our ways of life, our indolences, indulgences and want of heroic action are shamed. Yet I love the reproof. When that which is so fair and noble passes, I am enlarged, my thoughts grow spacious, the chambers of the brain, the lobes of the heart are bigger. How am I cheered by traits of that vis superba formae."

Page 297, note 1. Mr. Emerson found this remarkable story in a German book, published in Darmstadt in 1835, called Letters to Johann Heinrich Merck, from Goethe, Herder, Wieland and others. Among these is a letter from Sömmering to Merck, dated at Mainz, November 29, 1786, in which this enthusiastic collector asks, "Is there not in the library of your Prince the 'Paule-graphie, ou déscription des beautés de Paule de Viguier, par M. Minut, Baron de Casteras.' Inquire for it again. Do you know that I possess the hand of this Paule?1 2.5 Bear in mind that I cannot yet get any information where the book can be found. It is not in Paris, Leipsic or Göttingen. The book, from the pen of an ardent admirer, appeared in Lyons—only a few copies—and is not here [Darmstadt]. The renowned beauty, however, was really such an object of universal wonder, bewitching charm, virtue and refinement, that, according to the report of a woman who was her contemporary," etc.—here follow the words translated by Mr. Emerson in his paragraph about her.

The story of this sixteenth-century beauty whose body, unlike Helen's, seems to have been a fitting case for her soul, is so remarkable and little known that it should be given here. It is derived from the encyclopaedia of Larousse.

Paule de Viguier, baroness of Fontenille, generally known under the name of La Belle, a celebrated Frenchwoman born

at Toulouse 1518, died there 1610. Her father and mother were of noble old Languedoc families. Through her charming face, the graces of her mind, and her moral virtues she greatly interested her contemporaries. When in 1533 Francis I. visited Toulouse, they chose Paule to speak for them to him. He passed before the tower of Arnauld-Bernard, when from its top he saw the beautiful fourteen-year-old girl descend by means of a machine. She was clothed in white, wreathed with flowers, a rose-garland on her head over her curls, and her exquisite figure, girdled with blue, recalled the Greek statues then found in Italy. She made a poetic speech and then offered the keys of the city to Francis, who could not keep from a cry of admiration. He gave her the surname of Belle-Paule, by which she is always known.

Among her many lovers she chose Philippe de Laroche, baron of Fontenille, but her family made her marry the Sire de Baynaquet, counsellor of Parliament. After two years she became a widow and then married Philippe and was entirely happy. In 1563 she was at the height of her beauty, which lasted till old age. Catherine de' Medici in the tour of the provinces had Paule presented to her and said that she surpassed her reputation. The Constable of Montmorency said: "La baronne est une des merveilles de l'univers. C'est l'honneur de Toulouse et de son siècle." She received the most distinguished men of her day, was studious, and wrote elegant and graceful verses.

Her townsmen thought Paule the first of the four marvels of Toulouse: witness this bit of patois:—

"La belle Paoula, San Sarni, Lou Bazaclé, Mathali."

The beautiful Paule, the church of St. Sernin, the mill of Bazaclé and the musician Mathali. Her chronicles say that

every one followed when she went out. Then she stayed in, and they formed crowds under her windows. Finally the fathers of the city had to interfere in the interest of public safety. They required her to walk in public with her face bare two days a week.

She was nearly a centenarian when she died and was buried in the church of the Augustines. The most curious monument of her is a book by Gabriel de Minut, Baron of Casteras, Seneschal of Rouerque. Its title was "De la beauté, discours divers pris aux deux belles fa&c;cedil;ons de parler, des-quelles le grec et l'hébreu usent, l'hébreu Job, et le grec Calon k' Agathon, voulant signifier ce qui est naturellement beau, et naturellement bon; avec la Paulegraphie, un déscription des beautés d'une dame toulousaine nominée La Belle Paule." This book is rare to-day. It was dedicated to Catherine de' Medici, published in Lyons (1587 in 8vo) by Charlotte de Minut, sister of the author, "très-indigne abbesse du pauvre monastère de Sainte Claire de Toulouse."

Page 298, note 1. See the poem "Thine Eyes Still Shined."

Page 298, note 2. In the chapter "Manners," in the second series of Essays, is a passage which it pleased Mr. Emerson to put in Oriental guise, as a supposed description of the Persian beauty Lilla, which is suggested by this part of "Beauty." Also the following is from a loose sheet probably from this lecture: "The life of man is environed with beauty and, as in his habitation, so in more affecting manner, in the face and form of his race. We cannot see the effect of human beauty without suspecting for it a deeper origin than simply a material one—nor the overpowering influence of form without assurance that something higher than form is the cause. The lover invokes flowers, gems, winds, stars, angels,

gods; whatsoever the imagination or religion can suggest, unites itself with this personal image in his heart. In the mind is an instinctive connection between external grace and whatsoever is most profound in human nature. I will venture to add, in confirmation of the ancient sentence that Beauty is the flower of Virtue, that in the impression which beauty makes on us what is finest is moral. The most piquant attraction of a long descended maiden is the imputation of an immaculate innocence, a sort of wild virtue, savage and fragrant as the violets, and when we see such a charm in a crowded drawing-room the imagination is surprised and captivated at meeting the Divinity amidst flowers and trifles. A beautiful person has somewhat universal in her expression, and draws all eyes and hearts into a feeling, not of the desire of appropriation, but somewhat far higher."

Page 299, note 1.

Dearest, where thy shadow falls, Beauty sits and Music calls; Where thy form and favor come, All good creatures have their home. "Translations," Poems.

Page 300, note 1.

"Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more,"—

begins the unconscious lover of Maud in Tennyson's poem, but then goes on to discover redeeming irregularities of feature which have begun to enthral him.

As the daguerreotypist at Providence told Mr. Emerson, symmetry is the exception, asymmetry the rule. In the busts of Mr. Emerson by French and by Morse the differences in his face as seen from the right or left side are marked

and interesting, one giving the aspect of the man in solitude or in a public character and one that of friendship or domestic relations.

Page 300, note 2. Bertrand du Guesclin, the great Constable of France, who, after the death of Edward III., won back for his country most of the possessions which England had held.

Cardinal de Retz had also the detraction from his personal appearance. In some sheets, probably once part of this lecture, Mr. Emerson speaks thus of the posthumous consolations of the ugly:—

"I noticed lately that however highly we value all personal felicities and advantages, yet, in biography, we read with equal interest, that the man was ugly, or that he was poor, or awkward, etc. Of Cardinal De Retz, Tallemant des Réaux writes, 'Un petit homme noir, qui n'y voyait que de fort près, laid, et maladroit de ses mains en toutes choses.' Cromwell's warts do him no harm with the most fastidious reader of history."

Page 301, note 1. It is told of George Fuller, whose paintings have a charm of the south wind, which, as Mr.Emerson says,—

With a net of shining haze Tints the human countenance With a color of romance,—

that, when some one asked him why he did not get a prettier model for his Gypsy Girl, he cried out, "God strike me dead when I paint anything pretty!"

Page 301, note 2. From a lecture, 1866: "Beauty unequally bestowed;—Yes, but the highest beauty is that of expression, and the same man is handsome or ugly as he

gives utterance to good or bad feeling. I noticed, the other day, that when a man whom I had always remarked as a handsome person, was venting democratic politics, his whole expression changed, and became mean and paltry. That is, nature distributed vulgar beauty unequally, as if she did not value it; but the most precious beauty she put in our own hands, that of expression."

"What pity that beauty is not the rule—since everybody might have been handsome as well as not. Or, if the moral laws must have their revenge, like Indians, for every violation, what pity that everybody is not promoted on the battlefield, as our generals are, by a good action. My servant squints and steals: I persuade her to better behaviour; she restores the long-lost trinket, and, at the same moment, the strabismus should be healed."

Journal, 1839. "Beauty dwells also in the Will. You plant a tree for your son, or for mankind in the next age. Decline also the low suggestion, stablish the lofty purpose in the moment when it flits so evanescently by, and you plant bodily beauty for the next age.—Who saw you do the mean act? Ah, brother! your manners saw you and they shall always report it to men."

Page 302, note 1. Mr. Emerson was no landscape-gardener, but he found unlooked-for adornments to his pasture:—

The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin To use my land to put his rainbows in.

Page 303, note 1. In the "Ode to Beauty" we have this passage in verse:—

Thee gliding through the sea of form, Like the lightning through the storm,

Somewhat not to be possessed, Somewhat not to be caressed, No feet so fleet could ever find, No perfect form could ever bind: Thou eternal fugitive, Hovering over all that live.

Page 303, note 2. From Sir Walter Scott's "Dying Bard."

Page 303, note 3. In "Each and All" this is better told in verse.

Page 304, note 1. "I saw a hand whose beauty seemed to me to express Hope and Purity, and as that hand goes working, grasping, beckoning on, in the daily life of its owner, some of this high virtue, I think, will pass out of it."

Page 304, note 2. The Poet (in the unfinished verses of that name in the Appendix of the Poems), when his inspiration is coming on him, cries,—

How all things sparkle! The dust is alive, To the birth they arrive: I snuff the breath of my morning afar, I see the pale lustres condense to a star.

Dr. Holmes, in spite of the humor of the passage about the momentary glamour of even the stove, the pepper-pot, and the shoe-box, cannot but regard it as almost indicating momentary mental aberration, certainly as being unsafe reading for would-be poets of the late Nineteenth Century School, and sure to cost Emerson readers among solid men of Boston. But he adds that, had the reader "seen the lecturer's smile as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact unhorsed by the imagination, sometimes by

wit or humor, he would have found a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never show him." Dr. Holmes holds his friend to account for neglecting the poet's and artist's duty of Selection, and draws the line at the poet's imagination allowing itself to

Give to barrows, trays and pans Grace and glimmer of romance;

and protests at Emerson's finding that

In the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings.

Page 305, note 1. "I seek beauty in the arts and in song, and in emotion, for itself, and suddenly I find it to be sword and shield. For dwelling there in its depths I find myself above the region of Fear, and unassailable, like a god at the Olympian tables."

Thus Emerson's celebration of Beauty is, like the Psalms of King David, a Song of Degrees:—

Journal, 1850. "The artist now should draw men together by praising nature, show them the joy of naturalists in famous Indian glens,—natural botanic gardens,—in the profusion of new genera, that they could only relieve themselves by cries of joy; then the joy of the conchologist in his Helix pulcherrima, whose elegant white pattern becomes invisible in water, visible again when dry. Let him unroll the earth and sky and show the splendour of colour and of form; then let him, on the top of this delight, add a finer, by disclosing the secrets of intellectual law; tell them a secret that will drive them crazy; and things that require no system to make them pertinent, but make everything else impertinent. I think, give me the memory to tell of, or the imagination;

and I could win the ear of reasonable people, and make them think common daylight was worth something. Afterwards let him whisper in their ear the moral laws

"'More fair than heaven's broad pathway paved with stars Which Dion learned to measure with delight.'"

There was the problem to solve of the presence everywhere, alike in the household, or flitting before him in the wood-path, of this

Lavish, lavish Promiser Nigh persuading gods to err.

"Why do we seek this lurking Beauty in skies, in poems, in drawings? Ah, because then we are safe, then we neither sicken nor die. I think we fly to Beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature. We are made immortal by this kiss.

"We are immortal, at once, by the contemplation of beauty. Strange, strange that the door to it should thus perversely be through the prudent, the punctual, the frugal, the careful. And, that the adorers of Beauty, musicians, painters, Byrons, Shelleys, Keatses, and such like men, should turn themselves out of doors, out of sympathies and out of themselves!"

In the chapter on Beauty in his first book, Nature, Mr. Emerson had already arrived at the thought ever afterwards a part of his joyful faith:—

"Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same All."

ILLUSIONS

The essay that stands before that on Illusion ends by pointing to the snowy summits of Beauty above its blossoming plains as "the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind."

In the last essay in the volume there is a certain austerity for which its name hardly prepares the reader. It is not the charm of the Illusions, nor yet their office as teachers of the advancing soul, but the necessity of recognizing them and seeing through them that is urged.

The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats.

Hence in the motto, in which the doctrine of the Flowing, coming from the ancient East, appears, the waves of the river through which the mortal must pass are hated and accursed as well as adored.

As a boy in college, Emerson probably owed to Plato his first notion of the shadowy and deceptive character of events and experiences, especially to the image of the Cave in the Republic. The thoughts of Plato led him in later years to their remote source in the Hindoo Scriptures, whose influence threw new light for him upon the Bible of his youth, widening its significance.

Under whatever name,—Brahma or Jove or Jehovah or God,—the Eternal Spirit living and creating and informing Man and Nature was what he taught in the doctrine of the Over-Soul.

In Mr. Emerson's note-book called Orientalist he wrote:—

"In the history of intellect no more important fact than the Hindoo theology, teaching that the beatitudes or Supreme Good is to be obtained through science; namely, by perception of the real and unreal, setting aside matter, and qualities and affections, or emotions and persons and actions as Maias or illusions, and thus arriving at the contemplation of the one Eternal Life and Cause and a perpetual approach and assimilation to Him; thus escaping new births or transmigration.

"The highest object of their religion was to restore that bond by which their own self (atman) was linked to the Eternal Self (paramatman); to recover that unity which had been clouded and obscured by the magical illusions of reality, by the so-called Maia of Creation."

All through the Poems this doctrine of the Illusions may be traced in many forms. The

Illusions like the tints of pearl, Or changing colors of the sky, Or ribbons of a dancing-girl That mend her beauty to the eye,

are more often spoken of for their charm than as dangerous beguilers, but this essay is in the sterner vein of the seeker for truth, and one sees a more serious mood of the author in "the sad-eyed boy whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root."

But in the end of the essay the due ascension comes, though with less joy than usual. The Law is seen as permanent, the "substance that survives," though "all the forms are fugitive," and the Law is Truth, which is Goodness and Beauty. The last part of the motto to the chapter says that when

this is seen, not only power, but immortality (endurance) is won.

Page 310, note 1. Here was an instance of "finding what we look for—what we carry with us." As is shown in the opening sentence of the next paragraph, the element of his Puritan ancestry in Emerson's composition entered its protest at the false starlight, yet it is quite evident from what follows that to find in the black bowels of the earth a hint and echo of the starry heaven really pleased him, for he carried away the image and it became the motive or introduction to this essay.

Page 311, note 1. Journal, 1860. "'T is trite enough, but now and then it is seen with explaining light, that nature is a mere mirror, and shows to each man only his own quality.

"Illusions, color is illusion, you say; but how know I that the rock and mountain are more real than its hue and gleam?"

Page 312, note 1. In the paper in the Dial, "Europe and European Books," Mr. Emerson said, "Children delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in them as the servant of man, which they feel ought to be true."

Page 312, note 2.

Scott, the delight of generous boys. "The Harp," Poems.

In the chapter on "Books," in Society and Solitude, our debt, from childhood to age, to imaginative books is dwelt upon.

Page 313, note 1. D'Alembert (1717-83), the mathematician and physicist, held, with Diderot and other philosophical

precursors of the Evolutionists, the view of the ceaseless interchange of substance and perpetual circulation of life.

Page 313, note 2. Yoganidra is in the Hindoo Mythology the personification of illusion, also called Maya or Mahamaya.

The allusion to the Greek fable of Proteus changing from one alarming, disconcerting or slippery form to another, to escape the mortal who would learn the truth from his wisdom, is more readily understood than that to Momus, the God of Folly and Laughter. But Momus mocked at all the Gods save Venus, and was sometimes represented with malign features, yet holding the mask of a beautiful youth. In the Younger Edda of Snorri Sturleson is the story, better rendered the Delusion of Gylfi than "the Mocking." He was a wise king of Sweden, who, wondering what was the wisdom of the AEsir (gods), whereby all that they did was well, went to Asgard to find out, disguised as an ancient man. But the AEsir knew of his journey ere he came, and received him with illusions. A stranger received him courteously and showed him into a vast and wondrous hall, opening into other halls, where were people variously employed, and many things which seemed to him incredible. Here also were three gods in the likeness of great chieftains sitting on their thrones. Gylfi asked his guide if there were among them a sagacious man, and was told that if, in talk with them, he did not hold his own, it would be the worse for him. The questions and answers form a theme of the Younger Edda.

Page 313, note 3. Journal, 1856. "Men had rather be deceived than not; witness the secure road to riches of Barnum and the quacks.

"All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Intellect is a Thaumaturgist impatient of your pet finalities. He sees that every atom carries the whole of Nature, that every fact is bipolar."

Alway it asketh, asketh; And each answer is a lie. "The Sphinx," Poems.

Page 314, note 1. Compare the poem "Xenophanes," and, in "Threnody,"—

Blood is blood which circulates, Life is life which generates, And many-seeming life is one.

Page 314, note 2. This was a saying of Mr. Emerson's friend William Ellery Channing, that, whatever you asked for at a confectioner's, they brought you only one thing, but there were two kinds of it.

Page 315, note 1. In "Self-Reliance" Mr. Emerson confesses, "with shame," to the same fault: "Though I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."

Page 315, note 2. Exactly opposite Mr. Emerson's house, and but fifty paces from his study, was the "East Primary Schoolhouse." Before and after the morning and afternoon sessions and at the two recesses, for forty years, the throng of treble- but strong-voiced boys and girls played in the road before his gate, and, sometimes unasked, came for horse-chestnuts and apples in their seasons. On the whole, very good terms were kept with the little neighbors, whom Mrs. Emerson occasionally' invited to her garden, giving flowers and plants. On New Year's Day she invited the school to visit her, and she gave each scholar a little present and some candy and apples, and urged them to be kind to animals and

birds. Then the children wished her A Happy New Year and sang their little songs.

Page 315, note 3. Journal, 1866. "The maiden has no guess what the youth sees in her. It is not in her, but in his eyes, which rain on her the tints and forms and grace of Eden; as the Sun, deluging the landscape with his beams, makes the world he smiles upon."

Page 317, note 1. In the chapter on Napoleon in Representative Men, this other aspect of the Conqueror, and the question to his skeptical and materialistic officers about the stars, recommend him to the author.

Page 318, note 1. Mr. Emerson, when consulted by young people of serious mind, himself followed the example of the oracles, the prophets and of Nature, and answered only indirectly and by suggestion. "The Gods speak by indirection," he wrote: "the aid we can give each other is only incidental and indirect."

Page 318, note 2. See the passage in "The Poet" (Poems, Appendix), beginning,—

Beside his hut and shading oak, Thus to himself the poet spoke.

Page 319, note 1. Journal, 1863. "The youth longs for a friend: when he forms a friendship, he fills up the unknown parts of his friend's character with all virtues of man. The lover idealizes the maid, in like manner. The virtues and graces which they thus attribute, but fail to find in their chosen companions, belong to man and woman, and are therefore legitimately required, but are only really ripened, here one and there the other, distributed in scattered individuals in a wide population. But this illusion is constant, a siren song in the ears of every susceptible youth.

"The capital illusion of love is to make the cosmical beauty, or moral, or material, or even sexual excellence to be so suggested by one person, as to give him or her the benefit of all. 'Puella minima pars sui.'"

Page 319, note 2. In the Poems the Sphinx says to man,

"So take thy quest through nature, It through thousand natures ply: Ask on, thou clothed eternity; Time is the false reply."

Page 320, note 1.

And what if Trade sow cities Like shells along the shore, And thatch with towns the prairie broad With railways ironed o'er? They are but sailing foam-bells Along Thought's causing stream, And take their shape and sun-color From him that sends the dream. "The World-Soul," Poems.

Page 320, note 2. In the poem "Hamatreya," a paraphrase of a passage in the Vishnu Purana, the Earth sings:—

Mine and yours; Mine, not yours.

They called me theirs Who so controlled me;

How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?

Page 322, note 1.

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. "Fragments on The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 322, note 2. Something is said of Dreams in the essay on Demonology, in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 322, note 3. "The illusion of a firm earth is more useful and more composing than any narcotic."

Page 324, note 1. Heracleitus, in the end of the sixth century B. C., taught in his work on Nature that all bodies were transformations of one and the same element, which he held to be fire in alternations of kindling and extinguishing. Rest was a delusion. All things flow, πάντα ῥεῖ.

Xenophanes of Colophon settled in Elea. He taught that there was one God, all eye, all ear, all-knowing, who bears us in his bosom.

Diogenes of Apollonia, a disciple of Anaximenes, taught that the one original element, air, was the source of life and the essence of bodies. Intelligence was an attribute of air. He wrote, "It is obvious that the principle we assume is both great and mighty and elemental and undying and of great knowledge."

Page 324, note 2. The whole passage from the Vishnu Purana is interesting: "Thou art all bodies. This thy illusion beguiles all who are ignorant of the true nature, the fools who imagine soul to be in that which is not spirit. The notions that 'I am—this is mine,' which influence mankind,

are but delusions of the mother of the world, originating in thy active agency. Those men who, attentive to their spiritual duties, worship thee, traverse all this illusion and obtain spiritual freedom. … It is the sport of thy fascinations that induces men to glorify thee to obtain the continuance of their race or the annihilation of their enemies instead of eternal liberation. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures, the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance."

Page 325, note 1. It has been said of Mr. Emerson that, however high he held his head among the clouds, his feet never left firm ground. That was the moral law, the law that his fathers had taught, the sovereignty of ethics,—

The rules to men made evident By Him who built the Day, The columns of the firmament Not firmer based than they.

Page 325, note 2. There is in portions of the last paragraph some suggestion of a passage in the Phaedo of Plato:—

"And were we not saying long ago that the soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say. when using the sense of sight, or hearing, or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses),—were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard when under their influence.… But when returning into herself she reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness,

which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and, being in communion with the unchanging, is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom."

Notes

• 1 1.1

  "The Fugitive-Slave Law," 1855, Miscellanies.
• 1 1.2

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings and Philosophy. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1881.
• 1 2.1

  Included in the volume Natural History of Intellect.
• 1 2.2

  A. Bronson Alcott, his Life and Philosophy, by F. B. Sanborn and William T. Harris. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893.
• 1 2.3

  See "History of the Discovery of Painless Anaesthesia," by E. W. Emerson, in the Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 1896.
• 1 2.4

  Talks with Emerson, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York: Baker & Taylor Co.
• 1 2.5

  The hand alluded to was 268 years old.