had neither the patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity (odoratio quaedam venatica),—a good scent for truth and beauty,—it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that Franklin showed in the affairs of common life."
Page 12, note 1. Journal. "In good society, say among the angels in heaven, is not everything spoken by indirection and nothing quite straight as it befel?"
Delicate omens traced in airTo the lone bard their witness bear,The birds brought auguries on their wingsAnd carolled undeceiving things.
See also "Demonology" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.
Page 15, note 1. The pine-tree sings in the "Woodnotes" the parable of "the rushing metamorphosis" in the verses beginning,—
Hearken! Hearken!If thou wouldst know the mystic songChanted when the sphere was young.
Page 17, note 1. This paragraph is from the lecture on The Poet in the course on The Times given in 1841.
Page 18, note 1. In one of the Arthurian legends, perhaps in Caxton's version of the Morte d' Arthur, which Mr.
