Fourscore or a hundred wordsAll their vocal muse affords;But they turn them in a fashionPast clerks' or statesmen's art or passion.I can spare the college bellAnd the learned lecture well;Spare the clergy and libraries,Institutes and dictionaries,For that hardy English rootThrives here, unvalued, underfoot."Monadnoc," Poems.
Page 125, note 2. In the lecture these words followed:—
"And hence too it is certain that all biography is autobiography; or, whatever anecdote floats in the world concerning any man was first communicated by himself to his companion;—all else is wide of the mark."
This sentence recalls Mr. Emerson's words in the Phi Betta Kappa oration of 1838:—
"The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers;—that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, most universally true."—"The American Scholar," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.
Page 129, note 1. I am indebted to Mr. F. B. Sanborn for the correct date of Lord Ashley's speech, which in previous editions has been incorrectly given. Macaulay tells the story in chapter xxi. of his History of England. Mr. Emerson apparently found it in the Letters of Lady Russell, and though
