But in these authors, especially Proclus, he read rather for stimulation than continuously. "I think the Platonists may be read for sentences, though the reader fails to grasp the argument of the paragraph or chapter. He may yet obtain gleams and glimpses of a more excellent illumination from their genius, outvaluing the most distinct information he owes to other books. For I hold that the grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us, is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground."
Page 203, note 1. Thomas Taylor, the enthusiastic translator of the Neo-Platonists, was a remarkable character, a high-minded Greek Pagan in London. Mr. Emerson spoke of him as "a Greek born out of time and dropped on the ridicule of a blind and frivolous age." When he was in England in 1848 he was surprised to find how little was known of Taylor and his works by the cultivated men whom he met.
Mr. Charles J. Woodbury,1 1.1 in his faithful and remarkable report of various conversations with Mr. Emerson at about the time this lecture was given, quotes him as saying of Plato, "He lifts man toward the divine, and I like it when I hear that a man reads Plato. I want to meet that man. For no man of self-conceit can go through Plato."
Page 203, note 2. Jamblichus of Chalcis, the pupil of Porphyry, succeeded him as the head of the Neo-Platonic school of Syria in the fourth century B. C. His writings combine the religious philosophies of the Greeks and Orientals.
Page 205, note 1. Journal, 1845. "Gibbon has a strength rare with such finish. He built a pyramid, and then enamelled it."
Mr. Emerson wrote in 1839 to his young cousin, David Greene Haskins (later an Episcopal clergyman and Doctor of
