Emerson valued highly, he was pleased with the symbol that each Knight at the Round Table when the Sangreal was near, found before him "whatsoever kind of meat liked him best."
Page 19, note 1.
Giddy with motion Nature reels,Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream,The mountains flow, the solids seem."The Poet," Poems, Appendix..
In Mr. Emerson's autobiographic notes he says, "The Ideal world I might have learned to treat as cloud-land, had I not known Alcott, who is a native of that country, and makes it as solid as Massachusetts to me."
Page 24, note 1. This alchemy of the mind on the "brute reports" of the senses is celebrated in the verses in the Appendix to the Poems, beginning,—
Let me go where'er I willI hear a sky-born music still.
Page 24, note 2. "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"—"Prudence," Essays, First Series.
Journal, 1866. "Learn from the great artist whose blood beats in our veins, whose taste is upspringing in our own perception of beauty, the laws by which our hands should work, that we may build Vaticans, or paint prophets, or sing Iliads, in fit continuation of the architecture of the Andes, the colors of the sky, and the poem of life."
