home, and they touch me with chaste palms moist and cold, and say to me, You are ours.
"Remember to be sober, and to be disposed to believe, for these are the nerves of wisdom."
QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY
This essay was read as the second lecture in a course given at Freeman Place Chapel in Boston in March, 1859, following "The Law of Success" and preceding "Clubs." Mr. Emerson seems to have made few changes in it.
Page 177, note 1. From the Phaedrus.
Page 179, note 1. In this connection an anecdote of the time may not seem too irrelevant. Wendell Phillips had a very interesting lecture on the Lost Arts, but Mr. Emerson cautioned a young curator of the Concord Lyceum not to choose this lecture, for there was irony underlying this subject. It was meant for cowardly communities who could not face a brave word on the burning issues of their day and generation.
Page 179, note 2.
In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn."Uriel," Poems.
Page 180, note 1. "In Plato you explore modern Europe in its causes and seed,—all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or has yet to embody."—"Books," Society and Solitude.
In the chapter on Plato in Representative Men, p. 42, is a paragraph about his absorption of the wisdom of the ages gone before.
