great arteries like Cleopatra and Corinne, would be satisfying, and we should be willing to die when our time came, having had our swing and gratification. But my fine souls are cautious and canny and wish to unite Corinth with Connecticut."
Page 251, note 1. Mr. Emerson felt no responsibility for the morals of this remote Oriental Pindar, so could enjoy his sweetness and freedom the more. Time, space, race, allowance due to poetic flight and to the hyperbole of the Orient, made a purple atmosphere clothing the poet. But, had an American Hafiz sung at his door, while he would have been kind and hospitable, the virtue and temperance in thought and act of his ancestors, bred in him, would have recoiled from the superlative and the reckless, not essential to beauty. Thus he welcomed Whitman's free and New World singing (rather, however, in its promise than in its result), but, as that author has told us, and with pride that he did not yield to the friendly urgency, did his best to persuade him to keep his work always within the decencies.
At first the Oriental compliment carried to the limits of exaggeration, and the high color of the imagery, were a little hard for the New Englander to bear. Here is a note:—
"'T is with difficulty that we wont ourselves in the language of the Eastern poets and their melodramatic life. When we go down to Long Wharf we do not find an ivory boat and a pink sea."
Page 259, note 1. Mr. Emerson had, of course, when he wrote of the Persians, only Von Hammer's translations to work on. The Germans had no way of rendering the sound of J but by the clumsy dsch, so he usually spelled Jami, as in the poem "Saadi," Dschami.
Page 265, note 1. Two translations not rhymed are added from the note-books:—
