"Now the death hour comes and this day will I die.O make my grave and make it a broad and a high one,In which I could stand up to fight and load my gun in the middle;And on the right side leave for me a little window open,At which the swallows may fly in to tell me when the Spring comes,And where, in fair May moons, the nightingales may sing.""Romaic and Rhine Ballads," Dial, October, 1842.
Page 327, note 1. In an early journal (1830) Mr. Emerson wrote of his first wife: "Ellen Tucker wondered whether the spirits in Heaven look onward to their immortality, as we on Earth, or are absorbed in the present moment." In the same he wrote: "Every man contemplates an angel in his future self."
Page 328, note 1. Mr. Emerson one Monday morning in 1837 wrote, with a sad humor:—
"The Pagan theology of our churches treats Heaven as an inevitable evil, which, as there is no help against, the best way is to put the best face on the matter we can. 'From whence,' said the good preacher yesterday in his prayer, 'we shall not be able to return.' Truth will out."
Page 328, note 2. Mr. Emerson, in his journal, says that Goethe did so.
Page 328, note 3. Beaumont and Fletcher, The Double Marriage.
Page 330, note 1. Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses, p. 233.
Page 332, note 1. At this distance of time there seems no impropriety in giving the names of these friends, of whom the story is told—Lewis Cass and Albert H. Tracy.
Page 333, note 1. This passage on Divine Will comes from the sheets of the lecture on Courage:—
