The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Poems [Vol. 9]

NOTES

NOTES

GOOD-BYE. Page 3. Not without serious consideration has the editor removed the poem, which his father put at the beginning of his first volume of verse, to a later place. But he has always shared the feeling of regret that Dr. Holmes expressed in his book, that "Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians by placing the Sphinx at the entrance of his temple of song." In the mythology the Sphinx let no man pass who could not solve her riddle; and Emerson's Sphinx has no doubt cut off, in the very portal, readers who would have found good and joyful words for themselves, had not her riddle been beyond their powers.

There is some reason, from a list in the manuscript book in which are found most of the early poems, to think that the author once planned to put "Good-bye" first. It is the earliest of the poems published by him.

Mr. Emerson sent these verses in February, 1839, to his friend Rev. James Freeman Clarke, at his request, to print in The Western Messenger. Mr. Clarke then lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. Emerson wrote: "They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses, that we can

so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe I have in April or May an annual poetic conatus rather than afflatus, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days."

Mr. Emerson did not include "Good-bye" in the Selected Poems, published in 1876, but it has won its way with readers, and while this boyish utterance does not refer to his retirement to the country twelve years later, to study God in Nature, it seems a prophecy, though written in a different mood. The shy youth of nineteen, assistant in his brother William's school for young ladies in Boston, when the day's lessons were over thankfully fled to the beautiful wilderness in Roxbury (now the "Schoolmaster's Field" in Franklin Park), for his mother established the home in that region for a time.

EACH AND ALL. Page 4. The germ of this poem, perhaps, is found in this entry in Mr. Emerson's journal:—

"May 16th, 1834. I remember when I was a boy going upon the beach and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells. I picked up many and put them in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I gathered—nothing but some dry, ugly mussel and snail shells. Thence I learned that Composition was more important than the

beauty of individual forms to Effect. On the shore they lay wet and social, by the sea and under the sky."

This passage he introduced into a lecture called "The Naturalist" given in that month before the Boston Natural History Society. The poem, like "Good-bye," was published in The Western Messenger in 1839.

Page 4, note 1. Journal, 1844. "Buonaparte was sensible to the music of bells. Hearing the bell of a parish church, he would pause, and his voice faltered as he said, 'Ah! that reminds me of the first years I spent at Brienne; I was then happy.'"

Page 5, note 1. Mr. Emerson said, "I think sometimes that my lack of musical ear is made good to me through my eyes: that which others hear I see."

THE PROBLEM. Page 6. This poem, one of the few that bear a date,—10 November, 1839,—is better known and more often quoted than any other which Mr. Emerson wrote. It is also remarkable in this, that it would almost seem, like Athene, to have sprung matured and perfect from its author's brain. No fragments, no trials remain; much fewer verbal changes than is usual appear in the manuscript book of poetry, and not one since the poem saw light in the first number of the Dial in July, 1840. Mr. Emerson at first called it "The Priest." Here is the thought as recorded in the journal:—

"AUGUST 28, 1838.

"It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman Cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English Church and hear the liturgy read, yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest.

"I find an unpleasant dilemma in this, nearer home. I dislike

to be a clergyman and refuse to be one. Yet how rich a music would be to me a holy clergyman in my town. It seems to me he cannot be a man, quite and whole; yet how plain is the need of one, and how high, yes, highest is the function. Here is division of labor that I like not: a man must sacrifice his manhood for the social good. Something is wrong; I see not what."

Page 6, note 1. The same thought occurs in the essay on Compensation (Essays, First Series, p. 108), and this poem is another chapter on the Over-Soul.

Page 7, note 1. Journal, Florence, 1833. "It is in the soul that architecture exists, and Santa Croce and the Duomo are poor, far-behind imitations."

In the essays on Art (Essays, First Series and Society and Solitude) the inspiration, in its fullest sense, of the best works of man in Art and Architecture is taught.

Page 8, note 1. The gentle, serious and humane priest John of Antioch (347-407) was raised to the bishopric of Constantinople. Because of his Homilies (said to be the best in Christian literature) the name Chrysostom (Golden Mouth) was given him by the Ecumenical Council two hundred years after his death.

In sending to a friend the Confessions of Saint Augustine, "translated two hundred years ago, in the golden time when all translations seemed to have the fire of original works," Mr. Emerson said, "I push this little antiquity toward you merely out of gratitude to some golden words I read in it last summer."

Of Taylor (1613-1667), the author of Holy Living and Holy Dying, Mr. Emerson said in an early journal:—

"'T is pity Jeremy Taylor could not always remember 'rien n'est beau que le vrai.' I have been reading the 'Contemplations

of the State of Man.' An immense progress in natural and religious knowledge has been made since his death. Even his genius cannot quicken all that stark nonsense about the blessed and the damned. Yet in the 'Life of Christ' I have thought him a Christian Plato; so rich and great was his philosophy. Is it possible the intellect should be so inconsistent with itself? It is singular also that the bishop's morality should sometimes trip, as in his explanation of false witness."

TO RHEA. Page 9. This poem, probably written in 1843, appeared in the Dial in July of that year. It is not to be regarded as personal, but general,—even then as an aspect, from the cold heights of pure intellect, the same that is presented in connection with the discussion of Swedenborg's Conjugal Love, in Representative Men. But Mr. Emerson recognized the danger of individual detachment. The supremacy of the human, the moral element is recognized in all his thought. Even in the fragmentary essay on the Natural History of Intellect, in the volume thus entitled, he warns of the dangers of pure intellect and gives the other aspect: "Affection blends, intellect disjoins;" and elsewhere he gives this counsel, "The Heart knoweth."

THE VISIT. Page 12. These verses were published in the Dial in April, 1844. Great as was Mr. Emerson's hospitality, it was so often overtaxed that he felt that a word of general counsel was due on the subject of visits. For a call he used to say that fifteen minutes was the limit, except in very unusual circumstances.

Journal, 1842. "'My evening visitors,' said that excellent Professor Fortinbras, 'if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face. As soon as it is nine, I begin to curse

them with internal execrations that are minute-guns. And yet,' he added, 'the devil take half hospitalities, this self-protecting civility whose invitations to dinner are determined exclusions from the heart of the inviter, as if he said, "I invite you to eat because I will not converse with you." If he dared only say it, that exclusion would be hospitality of angels, an admission to the thought of his heart.'"

URIEL. Page 13. From its strange presentation in a celestial parable of the story of a crisis in its author's life, this poem demands especial comment. In his essay on Circles, which sheds light upon it, Emerson said, "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet." His letters and journals, even while he was a clergyman, show his belief that religion owed to Copernicus a great emancipation. In a later essay he speaks of the great astronomer's destroying the "pagan fictions of the Church by showing mankind that the earth on which we live was not the centre of the Universe, … and thus fitted to be the platform on which the Drama of the Divine Judgment was played before the assembled Angels of Heaven, … but a little scrap of a planet, rushing round the sun in our system, which in turn was too minute to be seen at the distance of many stars which we behold."1 2.1 The lapses and perturbations of the planets, as seen from the eccentric earth, which troubled the astrologers under the Ptolemaic system, gave way to the beautiful ordered dance of the heavenly bodies, including the comets, around the sun. From boyhood Emerson was familiar with Paradise Lost, and Uriel, the bright Archangel of the Sun, would best see the vast orbits, the returns and compensations, the harmony and utter order of the Universe,

—God in all. This did away with Original Sin, a separate principle of Evil, hopeless Condemnation, Mediation,—for Emerson saw in Nature a symbol. The Law was alike in matter and spirit. He had shaken off dogma and tradition and found that the Word

Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.

The earnest young men on the eve of entering the ministry asked him to speak to them. After serious thought he went to Cambridge (July 15, 1838) to give them the good and emancipating words which had been given to him in solitude, well aware, however, that he must shock or pain the older clergy who were present. The poem, when read with the history of the Divinity School Address, and its consequences, in mind, is seen to be an account of that event generalized and sublimed,—the announcement of an advance in truth, won not without pain and struggle, to hearers not yet ready, resulting in banishment to the prophet; yet the spoken word sticks like a barbed arrow, or works like a leaven.

Page 14, note 1. While the "young deities" (divines) discuss the Universe, Identity, Illumination, Being and Seeming, one startles them with the doctrine, doing away with arbitrary bound, of Eternal Return, involving Good out of Evil. They only see the Circle, not the Spiral which is Advance combined with Return, adding the element of Progress. They only see in it Revolution, not Evolution. Perhaps Uriel is not yet quite clear. In Mr. Henry Walker's fine painting of Emerson's Uriel in the Congressional Library at Washington, clouds of doubt still hang on the Archangel's brow.

Plotinus said, "The Intellect sees because it is turned back to its origin, the One; its movement is circular." Professor Andrews Norton, representing "the stern old war gods,"

said of the Address, "Theories which would overturn society and resolve the world into chaos." Rev. Henry Ware, honored and loved by Mr. Emerson, who had been associated with him as junior pastor, was one of the frowning seraphs, for he could not quite follow his young friend in his new departure. Another honored friend of Mr. Emerson, the Rev. Nathaniel L. Frothingham, soon after, in a sermon to which the Address gave rise, used as a text, "Some said it thundered, others that an angel spake."

Page 14, note 2. The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of the soul. "Every partial soul must make periods of ascent from and descent into generation, and this forever and ever." (Proclus.) The next two lines suggest a sentence of Plutarch in the Morals: "The Sun is the cause why all men are ignorant of Apollo, by sense withdrawing the rational intellect from that which is to that which appears."

Page 15, note 1. Dr. William T. Harris, in the Memoir of Bronson Alcott, apropos of this poem, quotes Plotinus thus:—

"There are two kinds of souls that descend into the world of matter, the higher order, like so many kings, associating with the governor of all things, become his colleagues in the general administration of the world. They descend for the sake of causing the perfection of the universe. The second class of souls descend because they are condemned to suffer punishment."—IV. Ennead, book VIII., chapters 4, 5.

THE WORLD-SOUL. Page 15. This poem presents with the freshness of a June morning in New England a doctrine from the ancient East. I quote from Mr. George Willis Cooke's excellent Life of Emerson1 2.2 the following passage:—

"Around Plotinus … there grew up a distinct school of thought, teaching the philosophic doctrine of the identity of subject and object, mind and matter, and making intuition the method of knowing. One of his disciples was Porphyry, who distinctly taught that matter emanates from … the soul. Amelius departed so far from Plotinus as to teach the unity of all souls in the World-Soul, a favorite doctrine of Emerson's."

Page 15, note 2. "But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? … It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. … A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."—"Self-Reliance."

Page 16, note 1. This suggests his words on the effect on the fancy of a horn blown among echoing mountains, "Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful?"—"Nature," Essays, Second Series.

Page 17, note 1. In the first few pages of the essay ("Nature") quoted in the note above, are passages on the effect of "these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, … eloquent of secret promises."

Page 17, note 2. Journal, 1851. "There is something—our brothers over the sea do not know it or own it—…which is setting them all aside, and the whole world also, and planting itself forever and ever."

Page 18, note 1. September 15, 1842. "I suppose there are secret bands that tie each man to his mark with a mighty force; first, of course, his Daemon, a beautiful immortal figure, whom the ancients said, though never visible to himself, sometimes to appear shining before him to others."—From Letters of Emerson to a Friend.

THE SPHINX. Page 20. This poem was published in the

Dial of January, 1841. The only important change it has undergone was the substitution by Mr. Emerson, when he published his Poems, of two more pleasing lines for grotesque ones in its first form. The fable is used as an illustration in Nature, Addresses and Lectures (p. 34) and in "History," in Essays, First Series.

Mr. Emerson wrote in his note-book in 1859: "I have often been asked the meaning of the 'Sphinx.' It is this,—The perception of identity unites all things and explains one by another, and the most rare and strange is equally facile as the most common. But if the mind live only in particulars, and see only differences (wanting the power to see the whole—all in each), then the world addresses to this mind a question it cannot answer, and each new fact tears it in pieces, and it is vanquished by the distracting variety."

Journal, September 3, 1838. "The Egyptian Sphinxes are observed to have all a countenance expressive of complacency and tranquillity: an expression of health. There is much history in that fact."

Page 22, note 1. "Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. … Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose."—"Self-Reliance," Essays, First Series.

Page 22, note 2. "Has turned the man-child's head."—Dial.

Page 24, note 1. "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put."—Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 4.

Page 25, note 1.

I am the doubter and the doubt. "Brahma."

In the latter part of "Nominalist and Realist," in Essays, Second Series, this thought is more fully expressed.

ALPHONSO OF CASTILE.Page 25. This poem was written in the summer of 1847.

Alfonso X. of Castile (1252-84), surnamed the Wise, was a monarch of extraordinary gifts and beneficent activity. I quote the following estimate of him from the History of Spain, by Ulick Ralph Burke, M. A.: "If his Royal Highness the present heir apparent to the crown of England were a senior wrangler and a double first-class man at our English universities, if he were called upon to fill the place of astronomer royal of England, … if he had written a more brilliant history than Macaulay, and a finer poem than Tennyson, if he were fit to teach Wagner music and Cayley mathematics, and if in the intervals of his studies he had found time to codify the entire laws of England into a digest which might endure for six hundred years to come—then and only then could the practical preëminence of his intellectual attainments in modern England represent the practical preëminence of the sabidura of Alfonso X. in mediaeval Spain."

Alfonso is reported (some say maliciously) to have said, "Had God consulted me in the making of the world, he would have made it differently." Mr. Emerson alludes to King Alfonso in "Nominalist and Realist," in Essays, Second Series, p. 238.

Page 26, note 1. "The cosmical debility" in some of the MS. verses.

Page 26, note 2. "To weltering Chaos and old Sleep."—MS.

MITHRIDATES. Page 28. Mithridates Eupator, king of Pontus, who gave the Romans so much trouble by his wiles in the first century B. C., was a man of extraordinary and varied learning. Familiar with the lore of other nations, a botanist and skilled in physic, he studied antidotes, and is reputed to have fed on poisons until he rendered himself immune from their noxious effects. Thus his name stands here as symbolic of the wise man who can find virtue in all things and escape the harm.

The poem was written in 1846.

Page 29, note 1. In the first edition the poem ended with these lines:—

God! I will not be an owl, But sun me in the Capitol.

To J. W. Page 29. The person addressed was Rev. John Weiss, a young clergyman and an able writer, who had seemed to Mr. Emerson to dwell overmuch on Goethe's failings.

DESTINY. Page 31. This poem, under the name of "Fate," appeared in the Dial, in October, 1841.

Page 32, note 1. Dr. Holmes, in his chapter on Emerson's Poems, says of the passage beginning—

Alas! that one is born in blight,—

"If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the tenui-rostrals. His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word

he wants, as the long slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines."

Page 32, note 2. "The astronomers are very eager to know whether the moon has an atmosphere: I am only concerned that every man have one."—"Aristocracy," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 32, note 3. In Mr. Emerson's essays or poems a higher note is almost always struck at the end, and here in the last two lines is a good word reserved, if he can but find it, for the "victim of perpetual slight."

GUY. Page 33. The balanced soul in harmony with Nature is here described. In one of the earlier verse-books, on the same page with an imperfect form of the six lines beginning "Fearless Guy had never foes," are the following lines, apparently destined for this poem:—

Fine presentiments controlled him, As one who knew a day was great And freighted with a friendly fate, Ere whispered news or courier told him. When first at morn he read the face Of Nature from his rising place, The coming day inspired his speech, And in his bearing and his gait Calm expectancy did wait.

Page 33, note 1. The story of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, is told by Herodotus. Fortune so constantly smiled on him that Amasis, king of Egypt, bade his friend make some great sacrifice to avert the disaster that must come to balance unbroken prosperity. Polycrates flung his wonderful emerald into the sea. It returned to him in a fish on his table next day. Amasis at once broke off his alliance, and soon overthrow and cruel death befel Polycrates.

HAMATREYA. Page 35. This poem is a free rendering of a passage in the Vishnu Purana, book IV., an everlasting theme which, by changing the imagery to that which surrounded them, Mr. Emerson made striking to his Concord neighbors. The title Hamatreya is evidently some other version of Maitreya, which occurs in this passage copied from the journal of 1845:—

"I have now given you a summary account of the sovereigns of the earth.—These and other kings who with perishable frames have possessed this ever-during world, and who, blinded with deceptive notions of individual occupation, have indulged the feeling that suggests 'This earth is mine,—it is my son's—it belongs to my dynasty,'—have all passed away. So, many who reigned before them, many who succeeded them, and many who are yet to come, have ceased or will cease to be. Earth laughs, as if smiling with autumnal flowers to behold her kings unable to effect the subjugation of themselves. I will repeat to you, Maitreya, the stanzas that were chanted by Earth, and which the Muni Asita communicated to Janaka, whose banner was virtue.

"'How great is the folly of princes who are endowed with the faculty of reason, to cherish the confidence of ambition when they themselves are but foam upon the wave. Before

they have subdued themselves, they seek to reduce their ministers, their servants, their subjects, under their authority; they then endeavor to overcome their foes. "Thus," say they, "will we conquer the ocean-circled Earth;" and intent upon their project, behold not death, which is not far off. But what mighty matter is the subjugation of the sea-girt Earth, to one who can subdue himself? Emancipation from existence is the fruit of self-control. It is through infatuation that kings desire to possess me, whom their predecessors have been forced to leave, whom their fathers have not retained. Beguiled by the selfish love of sway, fathers contend with their sons, and brothers with brothers, for my possession. Foolishness has been the character of every king who has boasted, "All this earth is mine—everything is mine—it will be in my house forever;"—for he is dead. How is it possible that such vain desires should survive in the hearts of his descendants, who have seen their progenitor, absorbed by the thirst of dominion, compelled to relinquish me whom he called his own, and tread the path of dissolution? When I hear a king sending word to another by his ambassador, "This earth is mine; resign your pretensions to it,"—I am at first moved to violent laughter; but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool.'

"These were the verses, Maitreya, which Earth recited and by listening to which ambition fades away like snow before the sun."

Page 35, note 1. Peter Bulkeley, a minister of Odell in Bedfordshire, a man of learning, piety and substance, was silenced by Archbishop Laud for non-conformity, and with many of his flock moved to New England. In company with Simon Willard, of Kent, a man of experience in trade and in military affairs, he made the first inland settlement on land purchased of the Indians, and called it Concord. One of Mr.

Emerson's ancestors married his daughter. The other names in the first line are those of some of the first settlers.

THE RHODORA. Page 37. "The Rhodora" was written in 1834 at Newton, where Mr. Emerson was visiting his uncle, Mr. Ladd. Rev. James Freeman Clarke obtained it for publication in his Western Messenger in 1839.

Page 38, note 1. "This element [Beauty] I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe."—Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 24.

THE HUMBLE-BEE. Page 38. This entry occurs in Mr. Emerson's journal for 1837: "May 9. Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine humble-bee with rhymes and fancies fine." On the next page he wrote, "The humble-bee and pine-warbler seem to me the proper objects of attention in these disastrous times."

Page 40, note 1. M. René de Poyen Belleisle, in a lecture called A French View of Emerson, given before the School of Philosophy in Concord in the summer of 1888, made use of an image drawn from honey-making (which Mr. Emerson borrowed from Montaigne in "Poetry and Imagination," Letters and Social Aims, p. 16) to illustrate his method in philosophy: "Comment Emerson se sert-il des ses idées; ou, en autres termes, quelle est sa méthode? Je prononce là un mot qui sonne étrangement quand on parle d'Emerson.… La méthode d'Emerson est toute poétique. Il y a une phrase de Montaigne, que du reste Emerson s'est appropriée, et qui exprime admirablement ce que j'ai dans la pensée. 'Les abeilles,' dit Montaigne, 'qui pillottent de ci,

de là, font le miel qui est tout leur; ce n'est plus ni thym ni marjolaine.' Le poëte est cette abeille: tout dans l'homme et dans la Nature l'attire et le miel qu'il en destille est sa pensée."

BERRYING. Page 41. Although Mr. Emerson did not give these verses a place among the Selected Poems, they are kept here as giving a pleasant picture of him strolling through the remote pastures on an August afternoon.

Page 41, note 1. In some manuscript copies, the last line has "to our berries went," in others "from," which seems to have been preferred.

THE SNOW-STORM. Page 41. "The Snow-Storm" first appeared in the Dial for January, 1841.

Journal, November 27, 1832: "Instead of lectures on Architecture, I will make a lecture on God's architecture, one of his beautiful works, a Day. I will draw a sketch of a winter's day. I will trace as I can a rude outline of the far-assembled influences, the contribution of the universe wherein this magical structure rises like an exhalation, the wonder and charm of the immeasurable deep."

WOODNOTES, I. Page 43. Mr. Emerson contributed the first part of the "Woodnotes," in October, 1840, to the second number of the Dial. He pruned it to its advantage in the Poems, but some of the omitted lines are given, as they may interest readers. It began thus:—

For this present hard Is the fortune of the bard Born out of time; All his accomplishment

From Nature's utmost treasure spent Booteth not him.

Page 43, note 1. The passage which followed in the Dial was fuller by several lines, with recurrence of the idea:—

With none has he to do, And none seek him, Nor men below, Nor spirits dim. Sure some god his eye enchants:— What he knows nobody wants: In the wood he travels glad Without better fortune had, Melancholy without bad. Planter of celestial plants, What he knows nobody wants; What he knows he hides, not vaunts.

Page 44, note 1. Journal, 1835. "Trifles move us more than laws. Why am I more curious to know the reason why the star-form is so oft repeated in botany, or why the number five is such a favorite with Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the formation of buds?"

Page 45, note 1. The passages about the forest seer fit Thoreau so well that the general belief that Mr. Emerson had him in mind may be accepted, but one member of the family recalls his saying that a part of this picture was drawn before he knew Thoreau's gifts and experiences.

Page 47, note 1. The opening pages of "Nature," in Essays, Second Series, describe the "charmed days" and influences that the author found in the woods.

Page 47, note 2. Omitted lines, from the verse-book:—

Hid in adjoining bowers, the birds Sang their old speech, older than words.

WOODNOTES, II. Page 48. The second portion of this poem appeared first in the Dial for October, 1841.

The stately white pine of New England was Emerson's favorite tree; hence the graceful drawing by Mrs. Alice Stone which adorns the title-page of these volumes. This poem records the actual fact; nearly every day, summer or winter, when at home, he went to listen to its song. The pine grove by Walden, still standing, though injured by time and fire, was one of his most valued possessions. He questioned whether he should not name his book Forest Essays, for, he said, "I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved." The great pine on the ridge over Sleepy Hollow was chosen by him as his monument. When a youth, in Newton, he had written, "Here sit Mother and I under the pine-trees, still almost as we shall lie by and by under them."

Page 49, note 1. Here followed, in the original form, these lines:—

Ancient or curious, Who knoweth aught of us? Old as Jove, Old as Love, Who of me Tells the pedigree? Only the mountains old, Only the waters cold, Only moon and star My coaevals are. Ere the first fowl sung My relenting boughs among; Ere Adam wived, Ere Adam lived,

Ere the duck dived, Ere the bees hived, Ere the lion roared, Ere the eagle soared, Light and heat, land and sea Spake unto the oldest tree. Glad in the sweet and secret aid Which matter unto matter paid, The water flowed, the breezes fanned, The tree confined the roving sand, The sunbeam gave me to the sight, The tree adorned the formless light; And once again O'er the grave of men We shall talk to each other again Of the old age behind, Of the time out of mind, Which shall come again.

Page 49, note 2. "The city would have died out, rotted and exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday that is city and court to-day."—"Manners," Essays, Second Series.

Page 50, note 1. "Those that live in solitary places are the saviours of themselves, so far as respects human causes."—Plotinus.

Page 52, note 1. Mr. Emerson's delight in the nebular hypothesis, and evolution, as far as it had then been surmised, appears again and again in his poems. Poetry and the philosophy of the ancient writers had prepared him for the latter belief, and the living Nature in his daily walks confirmed it.

Tyndall spoke of Emerson as "a profoundly religious man who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, present, past or prospective; one by whom scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world."

Page 52, note 2. The fable of Proteus, Heracleitus's doctrine of the Flowing, and the modern teaching of the correlation and conservation of force, Mr. Emerson saw as versions of Identity in Multiplicity. Among many places where he expresses this thought may be mentioned the first pages of "Circles," and in the Poems the end of "Threnody," the lines in the "Ode to Beauty," "Thee gliding through the sea of form," etc., and passages on "The Poet" in the Appendix.

Page 54, note 1. Compare "Merlin," II., celebrating the correspondences and rhymes in Nature.

Page 54, note 2. Journal, 1846. "'As for beauty, I need not look beyond an oar's length for my fill of it.' I do not know whether he [William Ellery Channing] used the expression with design or no, but my eye rested on the charming play of light on the water which he was striking with his paddle. I fancied I had never seen such color, such transparency, such eddies; it was the hue of Rhine wines, it was jasper and verd-antique, topaz and chalcedony, it was gold and green and chestnut and hazel in bewitching succession and relief, without cloud or confusion." See also "Nature," in Essays, Second Series, pp. 172, 173.

Page 56, note 1. Journal, May, 1832. "What has the imagination created to compare with the science of Astronomy? What is there in Paradise Lost to elevate and astonish like Herschell or Somerville? The contrast between the magnitude and duration of the things, and the animalcule observer.

… I hope the time will come when there will be a telescope in every street."

Page 59, note 1. "The man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, … shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet."—"New England Reformers," Essays, Second Series.

MONADNOC. Page 60. In the verse-book of the period between 1833 and 1846 is the half-erased pencilling of an improvisation, the beginning of this poem, very likely written by Mr. Emerson as he sat above the forest waiting for sunrise on the great courses of dark rock, worn by the old glacier; for above the verses is written "1845, 3 May, 4 hours, 10 m., A. M." It is as follows, the introductory passage of the poem evidently having been written later:—

I stand Upon this uplifted land Hugely massed to draw the clouds, Like a banner unrolled To all the dwellers in the plains Round about a hundred miles. In his own loom's garment dressed, By his own bounty blessed, Thus constant giver, Yielding many a cheerful river; Appearing an aërial isle, A cheerful and majestic pile, Which morn and crimson eve shall paint For bard, for lover and for saint; The country's core, Inspirer, prophet evermore;

That which God aloft had set So that men might it not forget; It should be their lives' ornament, And mix itself with each event; Their almanac and dial, Painter's palette, sorcerer's phial,

Mysteries of color duly laid By the great painter, light and shade; And sweet varieties of time And chance And the mystic seasons' dance; The soft succession of the hours Thawed the snow-drift into flowers.

By million changes skilled to tell What in the Eternal standeth well.

Page 65, note 1. In the essay in Conduct of Life, called "Considerations by the Way," is a passage similar to this.

Page 67, note 1. Mr. Emerson said that the street must be one of the orator's schools. "The speech of the man in the street is invariably strong, nor can you mend it by making it what you call parliamentary. You say, 'If he could only express himself;' but he does already, better than any one can for him,—can always get the ear of an audience to the exclusion of everybody else."—"Eloquence," Letters and Social Aims.

Page 69, note 1. "A profound thought will lift Olympus. … Go and talk with a man of genius, and the first word he utters sets all your so-called knowledge afloat and at large."—"Literary Ethics," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 71, note 1. To hazard a guess on this riddle, the answer might be, that the berry is the material Universe (whose colors are,—the woods and fields, seen from a mountain, blue and pale yellow, and the heavens, day and night, blue and gold), a symbol of divinity in which all have a share—the Over-Soul. "The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs."—"The Poet," Essays, Second Series.

Page 72, note 1. Here is a note in verse to the same purpose, apparently taken at Monadnoc:—

Our eyeless bark sails free, Though with boom and spar Andes, Alp, or Himmalee, Strikes never moon or star.

Page 73, note 1. "All good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank to-days."—"The Times," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 73, note 2. Dr. Holmes, in his Life of his friend, thus speaks of this poem:—

"How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates undertook to 'hew Mount Athos to the shape of man' in the likeness of Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes 'Cheshire's haughty hill' stand before us an impersonation of kingly humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked."

Page 75, note 1. The concluding lines of the poem are a shorter essay on Immortality.

Before leaving the subject of Monadnoc, the poems of Mr. Emerson's friends and neighbors should be remembered; Thoreau's fine poem, called "Mountains," on the blue eminences

on Concord's western horizon, and the part of Mr. Channing's long poem, "The Wanderer," called "The Mountain." This poem, though of most unequal merit, has lines and passages of great beauty and singular descriptive felicity.

There is also a poem by the late Mr. James Nesmith of Lowell, describing with strength and beauty, through all the lights and phases of the changing year, Monadnoc, where it stands

"Like a huge arrowhead in stone."

Unhappily this poem was only privately printed during the author's life, but it is to be hoped an edition may be published. It seems as if Mr. Nesmith had Mr. Emerson in mind, for he uses for the motto of his "Monadnoc" Shakspeare's line,—

"Seeing a better spirit doth use thy name."

FABLE. Page 75. This little poem was probably written in 1845. Mr. Emerson liked it well enough to include it in the Selected Poems.

ODE. INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING. Page 76. The circumstance which gave rise to this poem, though not known, can easily be inferred. Rev. William Henry Channing, nephew of the great Unitarian divine, a man most tender in his sympathies, with an apostle's zeal for right, had, no doubt, been urging his friend to join the brave band of men who were dedicating their lives to the destruction of human slavery in the United States. To these men Mr. Emerson gave honor and sympathy and active aid by word and presence on important occasions. He showed his colors from the first, and

spoke fearlessly on the subject in his lectures, but his method was the reverse of theirs, affirmative not negative; he knew his office and followed his genius. He said, "I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts."

But after the defection of Daniel Webster from the cause of Freedom, when the strife became more earnest, and Slavery more aggressive, he did important service as a free-lance against it. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, he spoke of it in public to his hearers as "a law which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion; a law which no man can abet or obey without forfeiting the name of a gentleman."

Page 77, note 1. He was impatient when men false to the cause of Liberty in their own day praised, in Fourth of July orations, the Fathers of the Republic for their sacrifices on her behalf. He wrote in his journal: "The Americans by means of this lust of extending their territory, and through this nefarious means of compromising with Slavery, enlarge the land but dwarf the men."

But when the evil was brought to his own door and by the law of the land any householder who gave help or furtherance to the poor fugitive was a felon, Mr. Emerson felt that men of honor could not leave remedy for this wrong and disgrace to geologic time, but that active help was due from them.

ASTRAEA. Page 80. Mr. Emerson's verse-books show that at first he thought of giving this poem for a title ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ, the Greek maxim signifying Know thyself; but considering that this would be intelligible only to the few, he gave it the name Astraea.

Page 80, note 1. "With this prayer on their neck."—First Edition.

Page 81, note 1. "And its lakes reflect all forms."—First Edition.

ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉCE. Page 82. The friendship of Montaigne, as related by himself, with Étienne de la Boéce (or Boetie) has, like that of David and Jonathan, become proverbial. Both were educated for the law at Bordeaux, and they later found themselves in the same parliament or court. When they first met, they ran into each other's arms, as if long acquainted. Étienne was a man who seemed made for whatever he undertook. "The happy strength of his genius rejoiced in difficulties." In troublous times he wrote a purely philosophic work, Discours de la servitude volontaire, a brave protest against the tyranny of kings. It was widely read, but brought him disfavor at court. He also wrote graceful, imaginative poems. He died in 1563, at the age of thirty-three.

Mr. Emerson used this name to stand for the perfect friend, utterly loyal, yet austere. In this poem is the spirit of the fourth verse of "Give All to Love." Its thought may be found in "Friendship" (Essays, First Series, p. 208) and in "New England Reformers" (Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 273).

It seems probable that the poem was written in 1833. In the journal of that year, opposite the account of his coming on Montaigne's Essays when a boy, Mr. Emerson writes of friends, "Echo them, and you will see fast enough that you have nothing for them. They came to you for somewhat new. A man loves a man."

COMPENSATION. Page 83. This poetical word on a favorite theme bears the date "New York, 1834."

FORBEARANCE. Page 83. In writing this poem it is possible that Mr. Emerson had in mind his friend—later his helper and biographer—James Elliot Cabot. It would even better have fitted his friend Henry Thoreau. The date of its printing in the Dial (January, 1842) makes this more likely.

THE PARK. Page 84. "The Park" appeared in the same number of the Dial with the preceding poem.

The poem describes the bewilderment which the youth with traditions and manners inbred from generations of Puritan ancestors feels when he first meets charming and gracious friends of a wider experience and culture. Yet the beauty of their behavior seems to warrant the quality of its hidden foundations.

Emerson wrote to such a friend in March, 1841:—

"I find myself, maugre all my philosophy, a devout student and admirer of persons. I cannot get used to them: they daunt and dazzle me still. I have just now been at the old wonder again. I see persons whom I think the world would be richer for losing; and I see persons whose existence makes the world rich. But blessed be the Eternal Power for those whom fancy even cannot strip of beauty, and who never for a moment seem to me profane."

FORERUNNERS. Page 85. As in the case of "The Problem," almost no trace of work on this poem in honor of the fair Ideals remains. In the book which contains most of the poems included in Mr. Emerson's first collection it appears in but one form, under the name "Guides," with only one word altered and one erased. There is no date, but Mr. Emerson said that it came to him as he walked home from Wachusett.

There is a passage about the promises, never quite fulfilled, by which Nature leads us, in the Essay of that name in the Second Series (p. 192).

SURSUM CORDA. Page 86. Mr. Emerson had reference in this title to the chanting by the priest, in the introduction to the celebration of the Mass, of the words Sursum Corda! (Up, hearts!) to the worshippers.

The thought of this piece—the exaltation that comes with utter humility—did not find quite satisfactory utterance in the poem as printed in early editions, but in its present form he included it in Selected Poems.

ODE TO BEAUTY. Page 87. The Ode was printed in the Dial in October, 1843. In the first stanza, as there printed, the third and fourth line read:—

To thee who betrayed me To be ruined or blest?

and the thirteenth and fourteenth,—

Love drinks at thy banquet Remediless thirst.

Page 87, note 1. The last four lines of this stanza were a later addition. Mr. Emerson sent the Dial to his young friend Henry Thoreau (then teaching Mr. William Emerson's boys in Staten Island), who had contributed "A Winter Walk" to that number. Mr. Thoreau in a letter of just comment on the magazine wrote, "I have a good deal of fault to find with your 'Ode to Beauty.' The tune is altogether unworthy of the thoughts. You slope too quickly to the rhyme, as if that trick should be performed as soon as possible, or as if you

stood over the line with a hatchet and chopped off the verses as they came out, some short and some long. But give us a long reel and we 'll chop it off to suit ourselves. It sounds like parody. 'Thee knew I of old,' 'Remediless thirst' are some of those stereotyped lines. … Yet I love your poetry as I do little else that is near and recent, especially when you get fairly round the end of the line, and are not thrown back upon the rocks."

Page 89, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in October, 1839, to a friend who had lent him a portfolio of engravings, then rare in this country, of the works of the Italian masters:—

"I have your portfolio in my study, and am learning to read in that book too. But there are fewer painters than poets. Ten men can awaken me by words to new hope and fruitful musing, for one that can achieve the miracle by forms. Besides, I think the pleasure of the poem lasts me longer. … But the eye is a speedier student than the ear; by a grand or a lovely form it is astonished or delighted once for all, whilst the sense of a verse steals slowly on the mind and suggests a hundred fine fancies before its precise import is finally settled."1 2.3

Margaret Fuller seems also to have sent him a portfolio of reproductions of the drawings of Guercino and Salvator Rosa.

Page 89, note 2. These four lines were used by Mr. Emerson as the motto for "The Poet," in Essays, Second Series.

Page 89, note 3. "Nature is a sea of forms. … What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony,—is Beauty."—Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 23.

Mr. Emerson quotes Proclus as saying that Beauty swims on the light of forms.

Page 89, note 4.

Hollow space and lily-bell

is the expression in the verse-book.

Page 90, note 1. The following scraps from lecture-sheets seem to be appropriate here:—

"Beauty has rightful privilege: may do what none else can, and it shall be blameless. Indeed, all privilege is that of Beauty—of face, of form, of manner, of brain or method."

"How else is a man or woman fascinating to us but because the abode of mystery and meanings never told and that cannot be exhausted? 'T is the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great."

GIVE ALL TO LOVE. Page 90. For this poem, as for the essays on Love and Friendship and the poems "To Rhea" and "The Initial, Daemonic and Celestial Love," what Mr. Joel Benton says of Mr. Emerson's verses seems true:—

"Let us admit at the outset, if you will, that the fortitude of his strain—as Matthew Arnold says of the verses of Epictetus—'is for the strong, for the few; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and gray'—and that

'The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, But to the stars and the cold lunar beams; Alone the sun arises, and alone Spring the great streams.'"1 2.4

Page 92, note 1. This thought appears in the image at the end of "The Initial Love":—

As the wave breaks to foam on shelves, Then runs into a wave again, So lovers melt their sundered selves, Yet melted would be twain.

Page 92, note 2. The last two lines of the poem are used by Kipling in a remarkable manner in his beautiful allegory "The Children of the Zodiac," for which they possibly suggested the theme. Mr. Emerson presents the same idea often in his prose writings, best perhaps in the essay on Compensation:—

"The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men."

He quotes Hafiz in the journals to this purpose: "Here is the sum, that when one door opens another shuts."

TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH. Page 93. In December, 1827,

Mr. Emerson first saw Ellen Tucker, while preaching at Concord, New Hampshire. Just a year later they were engaged to one another. She was very young, but a person of great beauty and refinement. A month after their betrothal, signs of consumption appeared, and her family carried her southward in the spring. Mr. Emerson wrote above this poem, "To E. T. E. at Philadelphia, April, 1829," although they were not married until September of that year. So the initials should have been E. L. T. In spite of her delicate health they had great happiness in the year and a half of life together that was granted them.

Mr. Emerson printed this poem in the Dial for January, 1843, under the title, "To Eva at the South," but in the first edition of his Poems he restored the name of Ellen.

TO ELLEN. Page 94. These verses, never before printed, only bear the date "December;" probably the year was 1829.

TO EVA. Page 95. This poem, also to Ellen, was printed by Mr. Emerson in the Dial, July, 1843.

LINES. Page 96. Besides the preceding poem, Mr. Emerson contributed to the first number of the Dial two poems which had sad and tender memories for him. These were his brilliant and loved brother Edward's "Last Farewell" to home and friends when he sailed for Porto Rico, where he died in 1831, and Ellen Tucker's poem written during her engagement. In the Dial it bore simply the heading, "Lines."

THE VIOLET. Page 97. One other poem by Ellen Tucker, printed by Mr. Emerson in the Dial in January, 1841, seems a fitting and a pleasant addition to this group.

THE AMULET. Page 98. This poem, with the same subject and date as the two others by Mr. Emerson which precede it, was published by him in the Dial in July, 1842.

THINE EYES STILL SHINED. Page 99. This poem also was probably written during Mrs. Emerson's absence in the South, either in the Spring before or following her marriage.

Page 99, note 1. Two pleasing verses follow here which Mr. Emerson did not print:—

With thy high form my sleep is filled, Thy blazing eye greets me at morn, Thou dost these days with beauty gild, Which else were trivial and forlorn.

What arts are thine, dear maiden, O tell me what arts are thine, To teach thy name to the rippling wave And to the singing pine?

Page 99, note 2. The poem in the manuscript has this ending:—

Why should I sing of thee? The morning sings of thee; Why should I go to seek thy face? No face but thine I see.

EROS. Page 100. This poem was printed in the Dial for January, 1844.

HERMIONE. Page 100. The history of this poem does not appear. It was written at a time when Mr. Emerson was taking pleasure in the study of the poets of Persia and Arabia.

The theme may have been one drawn from them, or it may have been his endeavor, for the consolation of some friend, "to reduce the calamity within the sphere" of the common human experience of disappointment in love. It is the drawing of a great circle around a small one. The poem presents in brief many of the thoughts in the essays on Love and Friendship, and in the poem which serves as motto for the latter.

INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE. Page 103. In all the editions until Mr. Emerson's revision called Selected Poems was published in 1876, the second division had the title. "The Daemonic and Celestial Love," and their treatment was a little confused,—passages really belonging to the "Celestial Love" coming in the second division; the third had no title. The poem as here printed is Mr. Emerson's final arrangement, but the matter, with a few omissions and corrections, is the same as in the first, the ethical confusion having been removed by taking the passage of twenty-six lines, beginning "But God said," from the "Daemonic Love," as an introduction of the "Celestial Love."

This poem on the loves on ascending planes carries farther the theme of "Hermione," expounded in full in the essay on Love. The imagery is from the Banquet of Plato, of which Mr. Emerson says (Representative Men, p. 70) that it "is a teaching … that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. … Body cannot teach wisdom;—God only." There Plato tells of a plane of Daemonic life between those of the mortal and celestial. In the chapter on Swedenborg, in Representative Men, Mr. Emerson says, "In Nature is no end, but everything at the

end of one use is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures."

Page 105, note 1. Mr. Emerson in several copies of the Poems corrected this line to

Like leaping lions on their prey,

but did not make the change in Selected Poems.

Page 107, note 1. The sentence in the early form was thus finished:—

God-like,—but 't is for his fine pelf, The social quintessence of self. Well said I he is hypocrite, And folly the end of his subtle wit.

Page 108, note 1. Two lines in the first poem are here omitted:—

Arguments, love, poetry, Action, service, badinage.

Page 109, note 1. A much stronger line than the one for which it was substituted,—

These like strong amulets preferred.

Page 110, note 1. Here followed in the original the passage later rightly placed by Mr. Emerson at the beginning of "The Celestial Love":—

But God said There is smoke in the flame, etc.

Page 110, note 2. In the note to the tenth stanza of "The World-Soul," is a reference by Mr. Emerson, quoted from a letter, to the ancient doctrine of Daemons.

In the passage on the Neo-platonists, in the essay on Books (Society and Solitude, p. 203), he said, "The imaginative scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers.

He has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and daemons and daemoniacal men, of the 'azonic' and the 'aquatic gods,' daemons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes."

Page 110, note 3. The four lines thus ending appear separately in one of Mr. Emerson's verse-books, where they are thus continued:—

Of her faults I take no note, Fault and folly are not mine; Comes the genius,—all's forgot, Replunged again into that upper sphere Which scatters wide and wild its lustres here.

Page 112, note 1. These four lines here followed in the original,—

He is an oligarch; He prizes number, fame and mark; He loveth crowns, He scorneth drones.

Page 117, note 1. The doctrine of the blessed fatality of friendship which is found in the essay on the Over-Soul (Essays, First Series, p. 294). See also the last lines of the motto of "Compensation."

Page 117, note 2. This was so true of his friend Thoreau, who yet had ever tenderness concealed under a stoic exterior, that Mr. Emerson said of him, "One would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree as Henry's."

Page 118, note 1. "Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the

breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations."—"Friendship," Essays, First Series.

Page 118, note 2. "We owe to man higher success than food and fire. We owe to man, man."—"Domestic Life," Society and Solitude.

THE APOLOGY. Page 119. This poem belongs to the early period of its author's Concord life. "May-Day" and the other poems of the later period, notably "Two Rivers," "Rubies" and "Waldeinsamkeit," show the gain in musical ear, the lack of which in early days he admitted.

MERLIN. I. Page 120. Mr. Emerson, in his recoil from academic and imitative versifying, found the rude Norse Sagas, and the no less strong but finer and more imaginative songs of the Welsh Bards, tonic and inspiring. As a boy he had delighted in Ossian. Merlin, in the old English metrical romance, but especially in the Morte d' Arthur, stirred his imagination. Then he read the fragmentary poems, not labored or polished, but struck out white-hot with enthusiasm or love or grief, that are attributed to Taliessin, Llewarch Hen and the other great Cymrian bards. Here and in other later poems (the "Song of Merlin" and the motto to "Considerations by the Way," in Conduct of Life) he uses Merlin to typify the haughty, free and liberating poet, working the magic of thought through the charm of Art.

Among notes on English poetry in 1853 he wrote:—

"I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the Vast, in the Welsh and Bardic fragments of Taliessin and his school, than in a good many volumes of British classics."

"Merlin" was finished in the summer of 1846, but in the journal of the year before are its beginnings, which may interest

the reader as showing that the finished poem expressed the author's aspiration:—

I go discontented thro' the world Because I cannot strike The harp to please my tyrannous ear: Gentle touches are not wanted, These the yielding gods had granted. It shall not tinkle a guitar, But strokes of fate Chiming with the ample winds, With the pulse of human blood, With the voice of mighty men, With the din of city arts, With the cannonade of war, With the footsteps of the brave And the sayings of the wise, Chiming with the forest's tone When they buffet boughs in the windy wood, Chiming with the gasp and moan Of the ice-imprisoned flood. I will not read a pretty tale To pretty people in a nice saloon Borrowed from their expectation, But I will sing aloud and free From the heart of the world.

Page 120, note 1. In his notes for a course of lectures in the winter of 1835-36, among the sentences on "Ideas that predominated in the old English," is this: "Their poet is not a Pope, but a Talliefer, who, whilst he sings, tosses his sword into the air and catches it as it falls." Alluding, of course, to the warrior-minstrel who rode out before the Conqueror's

array at Hastings, singing the Chanson de Roland and challenging the Saxons.

Page 121, note 1. On a stray lecture-sheet these words occur: "Do not the great always live extempore, mounting to heaven by the stairs of surprise?"

The second part of "Merlin" was omitted by Mr. Emerson in his Selected Poems, which is surprising, for it well expressed his favorite idea of correspondence, universal rhyme and harmony in Nature, and compensation in life.

Page 123, note 1. With this passage may be compared that in the "Woodnotes," II., beginning

Come learn with me the fatal song Which knits the world in music strong.

Page 124, note 1. The same thought is to be found in "Clubs," Society and Solitude, p. 230.

Page 124, note 2. "All the facts in natural history, taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life," etc.—Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 28.

Pythagoras taught that "The world subsists by the rhythmical order of its elements. Everywhere in Nature appear the two elements of the finite and the infinite which give rise to the elementary opposites of the universe, the odd and even, one and many, right and left, male and female, fixed and moved, straight and curved, light and darkness, square and oblong, good and bad."

Page 124, note 3. Journal, August, 1838. "As they said that men heard the music of the spheres always and never, so are we drunk with beauty of the whole, and notice no particular."

The building power of music is a very ancient thought;

the walls of Thebes rose to the music of Amphion's harp. Tennyson makes Merlin tell Gareth at the gates of Camelot,

"A Fairy King And Fairy Queen have built the city, son; They came from out a sacred mountain cleft Towards the sunrise, each with harp in hand, And built it to the music of their harps."

The idea is used by Mr. Emerson in his poem, "The House."

BACCHUS. Page 125. In July, 1846, Mr. Emerson wrote from Philadelphia to Miss Elizabeth Hoar, whom he always considered as a sister, of several poems which he has been writing and is impatient to show her, "especially some verses called Bacchus—not, however, translated from Hafiz."

Mr. Emerson wrote in his own copy of the Poems this motto, taken from Plato, to "Bacchus," which sheds light: "The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry."

The chapter on Idealism in Mr. Emerson's first published work Nature (see Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 47), gives a key to this poem on the inspiration which Nature gives, when seen as not final, but a symbol of the Universal Mind.

The poem has affinities with both "Alphonso of Castile" and "Mithridates," which were written about the same time.

The influence of Hafiz is apparent in the poem, though it is no translation, and the wine is more surely symbolic than his.

In a somewhat later verse-book than that which contains "Bacchus" are the beginnings of another poem of the same name, of which a portion is here given:—

Pour the wine! pour the wine! As it changes to foam So Demiourgos Rushing abroad, New and unlooked for, In farthest and smallest, Comes royally home; In spider wise Will again geometrize; Will in bee and gnat keep time With the annual solar chime; Aphides, like emperors, Sprawl and creep their pair of hours. Strong Lyaeus' rosy gift Lightly can the mountain lift; It can knit What is done And what's begun; It can cancel bulk and time; Crowds and condenses Into a drop a tun, So to repeat No word or feat; The hour an altar is of ages, Love, the Socrates of Sages.

On a brown grape-stone The wheels of Nature turn, Out of it the fury comes Wherewith the spondyls burn, And because a drop of the Vine

Is Creation's heart, Wash with wine those eyes of thine. Nothing is hid, nor whole nor part. Wine is translated wit, Wine is the day of day, Wine from the veiléd secret Tears the veil away.

In a lecture on Poetry and Imagination Mr. Emerson said: "The poet is a better logician than the anatomist. … He sees the fact as an inevitable step in the path of the Creator. … Never did any science originate but by a poetic perception. … For a wise surrender to the current of Nature, a noble passion which will not let us halt, but hurries us into the stream of things, makes us truly know. Passion is logical, and I note that the vine, symbol of Bacchus, which intoxicates the world, is the most geometrical of all plants."

Page 126, note 1. "Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground."—"Nature," Essays, Second Series, p. 181.

MEROPS. Page 127. The first rhapsody for this poem, from the verse-book (in which a more advanced form bears the title "Rhyme"), shows the writer's longing to express himself in verse, and how patiently he bore the check that his taste, which grew with this desire, put upon it.

What care I, so the things abide, The heavenly-minded, The rich and enriching presences, How long the power to give them form

Stays behind? If they remain to me, I can spare that, I can wail Till the stammering fit of life is past, Till the soul its weed has cast, And led by desire of these heavenly guides I have come into the free element And won a better instrument. They taught me a new speech And a thousand silences; For, as there is but one path for the sun, So is there ever but one word for me to say.

Merops, in the mythology, was king of Cos, and wedded one of the Oceanides, and hence, but only after his death, was granted a place as a soaring eagle among the constellations.

Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. William Sloane Kennedy says, suggested to him as a reason for the title that Merops in Greek means "articulate speech." This gives further appropriateness to the name of the poem.

THE HOUSE. Page 128. "The House," though not restored to the Poems by Mr. Cabot in the Riverside Edition, among others that had that fortune, is restored by the present editor for the charm of its last two verses, although it was not included by Mr. Emerson among the Selected Poems.

SAADI. Page 129. This poem was first published in the Dial for October, 1842.

It does not appear in what year Mr. Emerson first read in translation the poems of Saadi, but although in later years he seems to have been strangely stimulated by Hafiz, whom he

names "the prince of Persian poets," yet Saadi was his first love; indeed, he adopted his name, in its various modifications, for the ideal poet, and under it describes his own longings and his most intimate experiences.

Saadi, guarding himself from entangling alliances, living apart and simply and in the great sunny Present, recognizing living and pervading Deity, affirming only, and giving freedom and joy to human, souls, might be Emerson in Oriental mask.

In whatever form he first came on Saadi's verse, Mr. Emerson's letters show that he did not know the Gulistan until 1848, and in that year he wrote in his journal: "In Saadi's Gulistan I find many traits which comport with the portrait I drew," evidently referring to this poem, which was first printed in the Dial for October, 1842. It pleased him to find that the real Saadi approached his type of what the poet should be. In 1865 Mr. Emerson wrote the preface to the American edition of Gladwin's translation of the Gulistan, published by Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, in Boston. This explains the omission of an account of Saadi and his poems in the lecture written soon after on "Persian Poetry," now included in Letters and Social Aims.

This paragraph concerning him is from Mr. Emerson's journal of 1843:—

"Saadi was long a Sacayi, or water-drawer, in the Holy Land, 'till found worthy of an introduction to the prophet Khizr (Elias, or the Syrian and Greek Hermes), who moistened his mouth with the water of immoritality.' Somebody doubted this, and saw in a dream a host of angels descending with salvers of glory in their hands. On asking one of them for whom those were intended, he answered, 'for Shaikh Saadi of Shiraz, who has written a stanza of poetry that has

met the approbation of God Almighty.' Khosraw of Delhi asked Khizr for a mouthful of this inspiring beverage; but he told him that Saadi had got the last of it.

"'It was on the coming of Friday in the month Showal, of the Arabian year 690, that the eagle of the immaterial soul of Shaikh Saadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.'"

Page 131, note 1. This reference to the sweet wine of Malaga is a youthful reminiscence. In Mr. Emerson's obituary notice of his townsman and classmate, John Cheney, he says, "I remember the Malaga from Warland's" (the Cambridge grocer), which was the Falernian of the Pythologian club, of which he was the Horace, "as more delicious than any wine I have tasted since."

Page 133, note 1. "Life is a bubble and a skepticism. … Grant it, and as much more as they will, but thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism."—Essays, Second Series, p. 65.

Mr. George W. Cooke, in his biography, says that Emerson's Divinity School Address "became the subject of frequent sermons, and the air was full of pamphlets and newspaper articles. The Unitarian ministers debated whether Emerson was a Christian; some said he was not; some that he was an atheist; while others earnestly defended him. By some of the 'Friends of Progress' … he was pronounced a pantheist."

Page 135, note 1. Compare the passage in "The Over-Soul," Essays, First Series, p. 293.

Page 135, note 2. The image is much like that in the poem "Days."

HOLIDAYS. Page 136. This little poem was printed in the Dial for July, 1842.

XENOPHANES. Page 137. This poem bears the date "Concord, 1834." It is a less agreeable presentation of the ancient doctrine which is happily presented in "Each and All." It represents the sadder mood of Xenophanes of Elea, the rhapsodist and philosopher (570-480 B. C.), who taught the Unity of God and Nature. His doctrine, Ἓν καὶ πᾶν, the One and the All, constantly recurs in Mr. Emerson's writings, and the poem in his verse-book bears the Greek title.

Xenophanes said, "There is one God, the greatest among gods and men, comparable to mortals neither in form nor thought." Mr. Arthur K. Rogers, in his Student's History of Philosophy, says that what Xenophanes taught was "that what we name God is the One immutable and comprehensive material universe, which holds within it and determines all those minor phenomena to which an enlightened philosophy will reduce the many deities of the popular faith. The conception is not unlike that of Spinoza in later times."

It is a remarkable fact that after Mr. Emerson's return from Europe, in 1834, his first lectures were upon Natural History. In a lecture called "The Naturalist," given in May, 1834, is a passage similar to the first four lines of this poem.

Page 137, note 1. "So poor is Nature that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff,—but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety."—"Nature," Essays, Second Series.

THE DAY'S RATION. Page 138. Among the few entries in Mr. Emerson's autobiographical note-book several relate to his limited strength and, especially, animal spirits, yet the poem expresses but a mood; his days were full and happy. He had only the right proportion of divine discontent. The thought of this poem is also expressed in Representative Men, p. 184.

BLIGHT. Page 139. This poem was written in midsummer of 1843. Under the name of "The Times" it was printed in the Dial for January of the next year. The latter portion of the poem suggests "Alphonso of Castile."

Page 140, note 1. "The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs."—"The Poet," Essays, Second Series.

Page 140, note 2. The teaching of Xenophanes and the Eleatic School.

Page 140, note 3. A similar passage is found in the "Lecture on the Times," Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp. 287, 288.

MUSKETAQUID. Page 141. Though born in Boston, Mr. Emerson loved the ancestral village on the Musketaquid. The dear associations of childhood and youth with it are shown in a poem which I have called "At the Old Manse," written when he was twenty-four years old, now for the first time printed, in the Appendix. There also are found the homesick verses written at Naples in 1834. In a letter to his Aunt Mary soon after he settled in Concord, he wrote, "As men say that the apple never falls far from the stem, I shall hope that another year will draw your eyes and steps to this old, dear odious haunt of the race."

Page 142, note 1. A passage in the essay on Experience (Essays, Second Series, pp. 82, 83), and also the poem of that name, printed in this volume, which served as its motto, name "The Lords of Life."

Page 143, note 1. Two passages from the journal of 1840 are suggested by these three lines:—

"Cyrus Stow wanted his bog-meadow brought into

grass. He offered Antony Colombe, Sol Wetherbee, and whomsoever else seed and manure and team and the whole crop, which they accepted and went to work, and reduced the tough roots, the tussocks of grass, the uneven surface, and gave the whole field a good rotting and breaking and sunning, and now he finds no longer any difficulty in getting good English grass from the smooth and friable land. What Stow does with his field, what the Creator does with his planet, the Yankees are now doing with America. It will be friable, arable, habitable to men and angels yet!"

"Over every chimney is a star; in every field is an oaken garland or a wreath of parsley, laurel or wheat-ears. Nature waits to decorate every child."

Page 144, note 1. Were it not for the passage in his chapter on Swedenborg (Representative Men, pp. 113, 114), it would seem unlikely that in this line Mr. Emerson played on the word "concords;" but because of his interest at that time in Swedenborg's Animal World, with its doctrine of Microcosm and Macrocosm, the possibility may be recognized.

DIRGE. Page 145. The explanation of the first two introductory lines, which have a suggestion of Dante about them, is that they were written about the time of Mr. Emerson's thirty-fifth birthday anniversary—when he had completed half of the journey of life allotted to man in Scripture.

Madam Emerson, as she was called in her later years, had six sons: John Clark, William, Ralph Waldo, Edward Bliss, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy; and also two daughters, who died in infancy. But John died too early for his brother Waldo to have any clear remembrance of him. William thus became, on graduating from Harvard at the age of seventeen, his mother's main dependence for aid in supporting

the family, though all but Bulkeley (who remained childish through life) helped in turn. William, after teaching school successfully, studied theology in Germany, but was obliged by conscientious doubts to abandon divinity for the law, of which he became a successful and respected practitioner in New York. Waldo, Edward and Charles were drawn together by close ties of taste and sympathy, and circumstances allowed them to remain longer together. They eagerly embraced every chance to visit their grandmother, widow of the Rev. William Emerson of Concord, and later wife of Dr. Ezra Ripley, at the Old Manse. This poem and another version of it, printed in the Appendix under the title of "Peter's Field," recall the happy and sad associations with the Great Meadows and Caesar's Woods. Edward died in 1834, and Charles two years later. Dr. Holmes and Mr. Cabot in their biographies paid a tribute to these brilliant youths, dying before their prime.

Page 146, note 1. "The flower of silken leaf" was the humble lespedeza, which, in after years, Mr. Emerson seldom passed without a tender word for it to his children.

THRENODY. Page 148. This "Ode of Tears" was not all written at one time. Little Waldo, the first-born of his parents, died in January, 1842, and the first part of the poem is the expression of his father's great sorrow. The latter portion, beginning

The deep Heart answered, 'Weepest thou?'

was not written until Time and Thought had brought their healing.

A month after the child's death, his father, in writing to his childless friend, Carlyle, said, "My son, a perfect little boy

of five years and three months, has ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. … From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain."

Of the poem Dr. Holmes said, "It has the dignity of Lycidas without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture."

Two days after Waldo's death his father wrote in his journal:—

"30 Jan. What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday I awoke at three o'clock, and every cock in every barn-yard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star and the evening cloud,—how much more all the particulars of daily economy. … A boy of early wisdom, of a grave and even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness. … He gave up his little innocent breath like a bird."

Page 150, note 1. "The boy had his full swing in this

world. Never, I think, did a child enjoy more. He had been thoroughly respected by his parents and those around him, and not interfered with; and he had been the most fortunate in respect to the influences near him, for his Aunt Elizabeth [Hoar] had adopted him from his infancy, and treated him ever with that plain, wise love which belongs to her. … Then Henry Thoreau had been one of the family for the last year and charmed Waldo by the variety of toys, whistles, boats, popguns and all kinds of instruments which he could make and mend; and possessed his love and respect by the gentle firmness with which he always treated him. Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis had also marked the boy, and caressed and conversed with him whenever they were here."

Page 151, note 1. Journal. "The chrysalis which he brought in with care and tenderness and gave to his mother to keep is still alive, and he, most beautiful of the children of men, is not here."

Page 158, note 1. The idea of Deity rushing into distribution is treated at length in the first part of the Timaeus of Plato.

CONCORD HYMN. Page 158, note 2. From a copy of this hymn as first printed on slips for distribution among the Concord people at the celebration of the completion of the monument on the battle-ground, I note the differences from the poem here given as finally revised by Mr. Emerson in the Selected Poems. In the early editions of the Poems the date is given as 1836. This is a mistake. The Middlesex Yeoman gives the account of this celebration in 1837, and on the original slip in my possession some one sending it to a friend at that time, has written "Sung by the people on battle-ground at the completion of the monument, 4th of July, 1837."

The first two verses retain exactly their original form. In the third, the third line, as sung, was

We place with joy a votive stone.

The last verse originally began

O Thou, who made those heroes dare To die or leave their children free.

MAY-DAY

In 1867, Mr. Emerson gathered into a new volume the poems of the twenty-one years since the publication of the first, and gave it the name May-Day from the happy lyric in honor of Spring with which it opens. His ear had improved, and, though the original vigor remained in the poems, many of them had been kept long by him and had ripened fully. "May-Day," the poem, was probably written in snatches in the woods on his afternoon walks, through many years. Some lines are in journals of 1845. After its publication he saw that the ordering of the different passages to give the advance of Spring was not quite successful, and in the Selected Poems, published nine years later, he improved, but did not quite perfect, the arrangement, for at that time he found mental effort of that sort confusing. Therefore in the posthumous edition of the Poems in 1883, at the suggestion of the present editor, Mr. Cabot consented to a slight further change made with the same intent.

Page 163, note 1. Of the following six lines in one of the verse-books all but the first were in the first edition:—

Dripping dew-cold daffodillies, Making drunk with draught of lilies, G irls are peeling the sweet willow, Poplar white, and Gilead-tree, And troops of boys shouting with whoop, and hilloa And hip, hip, three times three.

Page 163, note 2. This line with a suggestion of English pastoral, found in the first edition, was omitted by the author:—

Or clapping of shepherd's hands.

Page 165, note 1. The stanza had, in the first edition, a different ending:—

The cowslips make the brown brook gay; A happier hour, a longer day. Now the sun leads in the May, Now desire of action wakes, And the wish to roam.

Page 165, note 2. In the verse-book here followed the couplet—

Her cottage chamber, wall and beam, Glows with the maid's delicious dream.

Page 165, note 3. It seems as if it must have been by accident that the remarkable lines, concluding this stanza, beginning "The youth sees omens,"—six of which, in a different order, served as the motto to the second edition of Nature, in 1849,—were omitted in the posthumous edition. They followed immediately in this place.

Page 166, note 1. These last four lines are often quoted to show how early Mr. Emerson accepted the doctrine of evolution. It is not certain in what year they were written,

but a sentence in the unpublished lecture on the Humanity of Science, given in Boston in 1836, has exactly the same thought. He alludes to Lamarck as "finding a monad of organic life common to every animal, and becoming a worm, a mastiff, or a man, according to circumstances. He says to the caterpillar, How dost thou, brother? Please God, you shall yet be a philosopher."

The ancient philosophers, as well as the modern savans, taught Emerson evolution. To the first edition of Nature Mr Emerson prefixed a motto from Plotinus, and Dr. William T. Harris finds the thought of the later motto in these words from the same source: "We might say that all beings, not only the rational ones but even the irrational ones, the plants and even the soil that bears them, aspire to attain conscious knowledge."

In his journal for 1849 Mr. Emerson quotes this sentence from Stallo: "The development of all individual forms will be spiral."—General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature; Boston, 1848.

Page 166, note 2. Mr. Nicholas Longworth, who practised wine-making on a large scale near Cincinnati, was Mr. Emerson's host when he lectured there, and, according to Mr. M. D. Conway, suggested this thought when he showed his wine-cellars to his guest, by telling him of the renewed activity of fermentation in the Spring.

Page 167, note 1. Journal, 1856. "April 5, Walden fired a cannonade yesterday of a hundred guns, but not in honor of the birth of Napoleon."

In Concord, by village comity, the two field-pieces of the Concord Artillery Company were too often lent to political enthusiasts to celebrate the election of their pro-slavery candidate, and the editor thinks that he remembers their firing, on the news of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.

Page 169, note 1. It is interesting to see how the association

of blessed warmth and life with his favorite South-wind led the author to forget that the southing of the sun meant the coming of winter. Yet "the northing of the sun" would have a comfortless sound.

Page 169, note 2. In his college days the boy must often have gone to the beautiful wooded hills of Mount Auburn, not then a cemetery, above the broad marshes of the Charles River. Journal, 1861. "Ah, the powers of the Spring, and ah, the voice of the bluebird and the witchcraft of the Mount Auburn dell in those days!"

Page 170, note 1. Journal, 10 June, 1838. "Noon. Mercury, 90° in the shade. River of heat, yea, a circumambient sea. Welcome as truly as finer and coarser influences to this mystic solitary 'purple island' that I am! I celebrate the holy hour at church amid these fine Creative deluges of light and heat which evoke so many gentle traits, gentle and bold in man and woman. Man in Summer is Man intensated."

Page 170, note 2. These lines of the original were omitted:

Boils the world in tepid lakes, Burns the world, yet burnt remakes; Enveloping heat, enchanted robe, Wraps the daisy and the globe.

Page 171, note 1. In one of the verse-books I find the original rhapsody of this part of the poem, which runs thus:

The Spring comes up from the South And Earth and air are overflowed, Earth with the melted ice, And air with love infusion. There is no house or hall Can hold her festival. We will go to her haughty woods Fronting the liberated floods;

We will go to the relenting mountains, And listen to the uproar of joy, And see the sparkle of the delivered rivers, And mark the rivers of sap Mounting in the pipes of the trees, And see the colors of love in birds, And in frogs and lizards, And in human cheeks, In the song of birds And songs of men.

Page 172, note 1. Here are some notes on Nature's spices, from a verse-book:—

Spices in the plants that run To bring their first fruits to the sun, Earliest heats that follow frore, Nerved leaf of hellebore, Scarlet maple-keys that burn Above the sassafras and fern, Frost survivors, berries red, Checkerberry,—children's bread,— Silver birch and black With the selfsame spice to find In polygala's root and rind; Mouse-ear, cowslip, wintergreen, Which by their beauty may repel The frost from harming what is well.

Page 175, note 1. The divine days in lowly disguise often appear in Mr. Emerson's writings in prose and verse: at best here and in the poem "Days," but also in "Works and Days" (Society and Solitude, p. 168) and in the first paragraph

of the "Lecture on the Times," in Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 177, note 1. This affectionate address to the birds may be found in another version among the "Fragments on Nature," in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 179, note 1. Mr. Emerson was told in 1874, by his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, that while making a geological survey near Pulpit Rock, on Lake Superior, he heard music like rhythmical organ or vocal chantings, and believed it to come from some singers. He went on a little farther and the music ceased; in another direction, and he heard it again; and by and by perceived that it was the sound of the beating waves on the shore, deprived of its harshness by the atmosphere. This phenomenon, which he called Analyzed Sound, he had never seen treated scientifically, except in a paper by Dr. Wollaston.

I myself, while going across the Plains in an emigrants' caravan in July, 1862, when in the neighborhood of Fort Laramie, strayed alone three or four hundred yards from our camp into a grove of large cottonwoods on the shore of the North Platte River. Suddenly I heard wonderful music not far away, which I could not account for. It seemed loud but rather sad, perhaps suggesting cathedral music, yet was indistinct and seemed unnatural. It was wholly unlike the tom-tom and hideous chanting of the Sioux, and no white settlement or gathering was near except our camp. On my return thither I asked about the music. No one had heard it. The day was cold and cloudy, after great heat,—a brisk norther blowing. We were close by the broad, rushing Platte leaping in short waves in the wind. Only some time after my return did I hear from my uncle of his similar experience.

In "May-Day," as first published, here followed the passage

on the AEolian Harp which, in the Selected Poems, Mr. Emerson preferred to print as a separate poem. It appears as such in this volume.

Page 180, note 1. From this place was omitted the line,

Nor noon nor eve this music fails.

THE ADIRONDACS. Page 182. In August, 1858, Mr. William J. Stillman, an artist by profession, but a man almost of the versatility in accomplishment of The Admirable Crichton, as painter, writer, critic, foreign consul (in which service he showed himself a chivalrous Philhellene), and last, not least, an accomplished woodsman and hunter, led a party of his friends into the then primaeval forest of the Adirondac Mountains. The party were, Stillman, Agassiz, Lowell, Judge Hoar, Dr. Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anatomist; Samuel G. Ward, a near friend of Mr. Emerson's; Dr. Estes Howe, John Holmes (brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes), Horatio Woodman, Dr. Amos Binney, and Emerson. Mr. Stillman in his autobiography1 2.5 gives a very interesting account of this company, the region, and their adventures. The following notes of the trip I find in Mr. Emerson's journals. All readers of Lowell will feel pleasure in reading the unexpected postscript to the osprey-nest story.

"Adirondac, August 7th, 1858. Follansbee's Pond. It should be called Stillman's henceforward, from the good camp which this gallant artist has built, and the good party he has led and planted here for the present at the bottom of the little bay which lies near the head of the lake.

"The lake is two miles long, 1 to ½ mile wide, and surrounded

by low mountains. Norway pine and white pine abound.

"On the top of a large white pine, in a bay, was an osprey's nest, around which the ospreys were screaming, 5 or 6. We thought there were young birds in it, and sent Preston to the top. This looked like an adventure. The tree must be 150 feet high at least; 60 feet clean straight stem, without a single branch, and, as Lowell and I measured it by the tape as high as we could reach, 14 ft. 6 inches in girth. Preston took advantage of a hemlock close by it and climbed till he got on the branches, then went to the top of the pine and found the nest empty, tho' the great birds wheeled and screamed about him. He said he could climb the bare stem of the pine, 'tho' it would be awful hard work.' When he came down, I asked him to go up it a little way, which he did, clinging to the corrugations of the bark. Afterwards Lowell watched for a chance to shoot the osprey, but he soared magnificently and would not alight.

"The pond is totally virgin soil, without a clearing in any point, and covered with primitive woods, rock-maple, beech, spruce, white cedar, arbor vitae. We have seen bald eagles, loons, ravens, kingfishers, ducks, tatlers. We have killed 2 deer yesterday, both in the lake, and otherwise fed our party with lake-trout and river-trout. The wood-thrush we heard at Stephen Bartlett's carry, but not since, and no other thrush.

"River, lake and brook trout cannot be scientifically discriminated, nor yet male from female.

"Lowell, next morning, was missing at breakfast, and when he came to camp told me he had climbed Preston's pine-tree."

Mr. Stillman painted the forest camp and the company. Mr.

Herbert W. Gleason's remarkably successful photograph of the painting (left to the Concord Library by Judge Hoar) might almost seem a photograph from Nature, so faithfully did Mr. Stillman give the character and the values of the trees. At the left of the picture, Agassiz, helped by the tall Dr. Wyman, is dissecting a fish, while Dr. Estes Howe looks on, and Mr. Holmes, who was lame, sits close by. On the right, Dr. Binney is aiming his rifle at a mark, and a little behind, Lowell and Judge Hoar are waiting their turn to shoot, and Mr. Woodman sits on the ground. The tall, lean figure behind the marksman is the painter himself, hardly distinguishable in the photograph, their tutor in the art of shooting, of which he was master. The guides at the right of the picture critically watch the mark to see the results of the amateurs.

Between the groups, admiring their accomplishments, which are yet foreign to him, but more occupied with Nature in her columned temple, is the poet. The reproduction is too small to do justice to the figure and attitude, which in the picture are given with wonderful success, and but for the unwonted, flannel shirt, it might well represent him in his daily commune with the pines.

Page 186, note 1. A remarkable picture, "The Procession of the Pines," was painted of this subject by Mr. Stillman, huge Norway pines on a high promontory standing black against the orange twilight glow, and reflected in the still lake.

Page 186, note 2. This was Mr. Emerson's own experience: paddled noiselessly by the guide, in a boat with torch and reflector in the bow, he was bidden to shoot at the staring "deer" among the lily-pads by the shore. The "square mist" was too much of an illusion, even to the student of

Oriental Mayas; he did not fire, and in an instant it was gone.

Page 188, note 1. An Adirondac Club was formed, and Mr. Stillman succeeded in buying for them a lake (Ampersand) and its enclosing mountains, sold for unpaid taxes, at a ridiculously low price. But some people of that part of New York, understanding that Boston capitalists had bought a large tract, could not credit the avowed purpose of the buyers, and, supposing that they knew of some coming railroad and had designs on the lumber, redeemed the land. The camp at Lake Ampersand was, however, occupied by the Club in 1859, but Mr. Emerson did not go there.

Page 189, note 1. Mr. Emerson always held that the introverted eye, and apprehension, had much to do with perverted digestion.

Page 192, note 1. Here is an instance of the interest and pride which this man of the spirit took even in the application of scientific discovery to the convenience of man. It represented an advance and ascent, and this particular discovery was to weld the races together in brotherhood. A prophecy of this event he wrote in his Concord "Ode for the Fourth of July" of the previous year.

Page 192, note 2. The trial for the passage in the verse-book reads thus:—

To be a brain, Or to obey the brain of upstart man, And shake the slumbers of a million years.

BRAHMA. Page 195. This poem was one of the four which Mr. Emerson contributed to the first number of the Atlantic Monthly, in November, 1857. In his note-book for the year before, where it is called "The Song of the Soul,"

are many pages of extracts from the Hindoo scriptures, yet not those to which the poem gives expression. The first appearance of the doctrine is found in an extract from Parmenides given in the notes on Degerando's Histoire Comparée des Systèmes de Philosophie, made by Mr. Emerson in 1830: "Thought and the object of thought are but one."

In the year 1845 he was reading the Vishnu Purana, and made these among other extracts:—

"He who eternally restrains this and the other world, and all beings therein, who standing in the earth is other than the earth, whom the earth knows not, whose body the earth is, who interiorly restrains the earth, the same is thy soul, and the Internal Check immortal."

"What living creature slays or is slain? What living creature preserves or is preserved? Each is his own destroyer or preserver, as he follows evil or good."

The latter extract he thus rendered in 1845:—

What creature slayeth or is slain? What creature saves or savèd is? His life will either lose or gain, As he shall follow harm or bliss.

Dr. William T. Harris, in his interesting chapter on Emerson's Orientalism,1 2.6 sheds much light on the origin of the poem, quoting various passages in the Bhagavat-Gita. The thought of the first verse is thus rendered by Thomson in his translation of the second chapter:—

"He who believes that this spirit can kill, and he who thinks that it can be killed, both of these are wrong in judgment. It neither kills nor is killed. It is not born nor dies at any time. It has no origin, nor will it ever have an origin. Unborn,

changeless, eternal, both as to future and past time, it is not slain when the body is killed."

Many passages show the independence of Brahma of Time and Space, and the absence in Indian philosophy of the dualism of the Persians, believing in separate principles of Good and Evil; thoughts conveyed in the second verse.

The equivalent of the last line in the third verse Dr. Harris finds in the tenth chapter, where Brahma says, "Of the Vedas, I am the Sáma-Veda. I am the Vrihatsaman among the hymns."

The "Strong Gods" of the fourth verse are Indra, god of the sky and wielder of the thunderbolt; Agni, the god of fire; and Yama, the god of death and judgment. These shall finally be absorbed into Brahma. The "Sacred Seven" are the Maharshis or highest saints.

The last line finds its origin in the eighteenth chapter:—

"Abandoning all religious duties, seek me as thy refuge. I will deliver thee from all sin. Be not anxious."

The striking passage from the Oriental scriptures with which the essay on Immortality concludes might well be read in connection with this poem.

In "The Sphinx," the line,

Thou art the unanswered question,

is matched by that in this poem,

I am the doubter and the doubt.

In a little book in which Mr. Emerson collected quotations concerning Love, he wrote, "The best word I know on the subject is the motto on a little engraving of the heavenly Cupid, who is represented as turning his head to look down on the towers of Heaven, and underneath is written Superna respicit Amor,—He looketh back on Heaven."

In spite of the difficulties which "Brahma" presented to many minds, and the ridicule which it excited, it presented no difficulty to others who had no Oriental knowledge except that of the New Testament. A little school-girl was bidden by her teacher to learn some verses of Emerson. Next day she recited "Brahma." The astonished teacher asked why she chose that poem. The child answered that she tried several, but could n't understand them at all, so learned this one, "for it was so easy. It just means 'God everywhere.'"

Mr. Emerson, much amused when people found "Brahma" puzzling, said to his daughter, "If you tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma they will not feel any perplexity."

NEMESIS. Page 196. This poem, from May-Day, called "Destiny" in the verse-books, is here restored.

FATE. Page 197, note 1. "The reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man; that is all anybody can tell you about it."—"Character," Essays, Second Series.

"He [man] thinks his fate alien because the copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event that shall befall it."—"Fate," Conduct of Life.

FREEDOM. Page 198. In the autumn of 1853 Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal the beginnings of this poem expressing his feeling that no muse would help should he attack in song African Slavery, the doleful theme that recurred each morning when he woke. But in life and his private and public speech he was true to Freedom.

In the first form, the lines, after the fourth, ran thus:—

But the God said, 'Not so; Theme not this for lyric flow, Keep thy counsel soft and low; Name too holy to be said, Gift too precious to be prayed, Counsel not to be exprest, But by will of glowing breast. But the power by heaven adored, With Truth and Love the Triune Lord, When it listed woke again Brutish millions into men,' etc.

The last line appears also in the forms,

"Right thou feelest rashly do," or, "instant do."

ODE. Page 199. Mr. Emerson was reluctant to mount Pegasus to war against the enemies of Freedom; but when, as he said in his speech on the Fugitive Slave Law (Miscellanies), it required him to become a slave-hunter, he was stirred to plead her cause in verse, of which this and the two following poems are examples.

The occasion on which this was sung was a breakfast in the Town Hall, on the holiday morning, to raise money for the improvement of the new cemetery in Sleepy Hollow.

BOSTON HYMN. Page 201. In January, 1862, in an address called "American Civilization" given before the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Mr. Emerson had earnestly urged the emancipation of the slaves. On the first day of the next year, when President Lincoln's Proclamation went into effect, Mr. Emerson read this poem at a great celebration of the event in Boston. It was published in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1863.

Page 204, note 1. In an address before the Anti-Slavery Society in New York in 1855, Mr. Emerson had urged the buying by the people of the whole slave property of the South:—

"I say, Buy! never conceding the right of the planter to own, but acknowledging the calamity of his position, and willing to bear a countryman's share in relieving him, and because it is the only practical course and is innocent. … We shall one day bring the States shoulder to shoulder, and the citizens man to man, to exterminate slavery. It was said a little while ago that it would cost a thousand or twelve hundred millions, now it is said it would cost two thousand millions; such is the enhancement of property. Well, was there ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this will be? The United States will be brought to give every inch of their public lands for a purpose like this. Every State will contribute its surplus revenue. Every man will bear his part. We will have a chimney tax. We will give up our coaches and wine and watches. The church will melt her plate. The father of his country shall wait, well pleased, a little longer for his monument;—Franklin will wait for his; the Pilgrim Fathers for theirs; and the patient Columbus, who waited all his mortality for justice, shall wait a part of immortality also. … The rich shall give of their riches; the merchants of their commerce; the mechanics of their strength; the needlewomen will give, and children can have a Cent Society. If, really, the thing could come to a negotiation and a price were named, I do not think that any price, founded upon an estimate that figures could fairly represent, would be unmanageable. Every man in this land would give a week's work to dig away this accursed mountain of slavery, and force it forever out of the world."

VOLUNTARIES. Page 205. This poem was printed in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1863.

Page 207, note 1. In July, 1863, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who in face of a half-hostile public opinion had given up his commission in a favorite Massachusetts regiment to take command of one of the first enlisted colored regiments, largely made up of ex-slaves, had been killed with many of his officers and men on the slopes of Fort Wagner. This poem may be regarded as their dirge.

Mrs. Ednah' Cheney describes a meeting, during the Civil War, presided over by Father Taylor, of the friends of this regiment. She says that, during the meeting, "Mr. Emerson came in from the ante-room with his face on fire with indignation, as I never saw it on any other occasion, and announced to the audience that he had just learned that South Carolina had given out the threat that colored soldiers, if captured, should not be treated as prisoners, but be put to death. 'What answer does Massachusetts send back to South Carolina?' he said. 'Two for one!' shouted voices in the audience. 'Is that the answer that Massachusetts sends?' he asked; and the audience responded with applause. He retired from the platform, it seemed to me a little appalled at the spirit he had raised."

Page 208, note 1. The last four lines of the stanza were added by Mr. Emerson in Selected Poems.

Page 209, note 1. The last stanza suggests the following passages, the first being from the journal of January, 1861, three months before the outbreak of war.

"The furious slaveholder does not see that the one thing he is doing by night and by day is to destroy slavery. They who help and they who hinder are all equally diligent in hastening its downfall. Blessed be the inevitabilities."

"The world Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind

… that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or Nature, grows over us like grass. …

"Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams."—Representative Men, pp. 177, 185, 186.

LOVE AND THOUGHT. Page 210. With this poem may be compared the seventh verse in "My Garden," and passages in "Love" (Essays, First Series, pp. 175-177) and in "Manners" (Essays, Second Series, pp. 150, 151).

UNA. Page 210. The solution of the pleasing riddle "Una," restored here to the place it held in the volume May-Day, cannot be given with authority. It might be the sense of the general beauty refreshed in a poetical mind by new scenes and friends met in travel—the momentary opening of new vistas of promise.

BOSTON. Page 212. Although this poem did not come to its birthday until December 16, 1873, when Mr. Emerson read it in Faneuil Hall, on the Centennial Celebration of the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, it was conceived years before. Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal in 1842:—

"I have a kind of promise to write, one of these days, a verse or two to the praise of my native city, which in common days we often rail at, yet which has great merits to usward. That too, like every city, has certain virtues, as a museum of the arts. The parlors of private collectors, the Athenaeum Gallery, and the college become the city of the city. Then a city has this praise, that as the bell or band of music is heard outside beyond the din of carts, so the beautiful in architecture,

or in political and social institutions, endures; all else comes to nought, so that the antiquities and permanent things in each city are good and fine."

On his walks with his children on Sunday afternoons Mr. Emerson would often recite poetry to them, and they remember well his telling of his desire to write his Boston poem, and his pleasure in this image,—

And twice a day the flowing sea Takes Boston in its arms.

In his manuscript it opens thus:—

The land that has no song Shall have a song to-day: The granite hills are dumb too long, The vales have much to say: For you can teach the lightning speech, And round the globe your voices reach.

Mr. Emerson was never able to finish the poem to his satisfaction. He wished to have a sort of refrain of two rhyming lines at the end of each verse, but after his illness in 1872 his powers of composition failed, and but a portion of his verses were thus rounded out.

The poem appeared first in print in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1876, and in Mr. Emerson's Selected Poems, published the same year, it was the concluding poem.

The motto of Boston, which precedes the poem, he translates thus in the last verse,—

GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US.

Page 217, note 1. The poem was begun in the sad days preceding the war, when its author blushed for the timidity shown by many of Boston's first citizens, scholars and merchants,

and their subservience in the interests of union and commerce to the demands made by the slave-power upon their honor and conscience. When the war had cleared the air, the poem was quite remodelled in a happier day, for the "Boston Tea-Party" celebration.

The following are some of the verses, composed at a sadder time, which, in the early form, followed the lines on Lafayette:—

O pity that I pause! The song, disdaining, shuns To name the noble sires because Of the unworthy sons; For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

But there was chaff within the flour, And one was false in ten, And reckless clerks in lust of power Forgot the rights of men; Cruel and blind did file their mind, And sell the blood of human kind.

Your town is full of gentle names By patriots once were watchwords made; Those war-cry names are muffled shames On recreant sons mislaid. What slave shall dare a name to wear Once Freedom's passport everywhere?

Oh welaway! if this be so, And man cannot afford the right,

And if the wage of love be woe, And honest dealing yield despite. For never will die the captive's cry On the echoes of God till Right draws nigh.

Here is a verse written at another time of patriotic mortification:—

O late to learn, O long betrayed, O credulous men of toil, Who took the traitor to your hearths Who came those hearths to spoil. O much-revering Boston town Who let the varlet still Recite his false, insulting tale On haughty Bunker Hill.

The following fragment in lighter vein also occurs in the verse-book:—

O Boston city, lecture-hearing, O Unitarian, God-fearing, But more, I fear, bad men revering, Too civil by half; thine evil guest Makes thee his byword and his jest, And scorns the men that honeyed the pest,— Piso and Atticus with the rest. Thy fault is much civility, Thy bane respectability, And thou hadst been as wise and wiser Lacking the Daily Advertiser. Ah, gentlemen—for you are gentle— And mental maids, not sentimental—

In the volume called Natural History of Intellect and Other

Papers, is included Mr. Emerson's lecture "Boston," in which he shows his pride and interest in his native town. Mrs. Ednah Cheney contributed an interesting chapter on "Emerson and Boston" to the book published in 1885 by the Concord School of Philosophy, called Genius and Character of Emerson.

LETTERS. Page 217, note 2. The poem at first began,

Every morning brings a ship; Every ship brings a word.

Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal, "Hear what the morning says, and believe that."

RUBIES. Page 218, note 1. There is another pleasing form of the last verse:—

But fire to thaw that ruddy snow, To break the wine-drop's prison And give love's scarlet tides to flow,— That sun is yet unrisen.

MERLIN'S SONG. 1. Page 218. This poem was suggested by the specimens of Welsh Bardic poems which Mr. Emerson took so much pleasure in, and of which he gives specimens in "Poetry and Imagination" (Letters and Social Aims, pp. 58, 59), one being not unlike this poem. In the journals are similar passages of which it is hard to tell whether they are from the Bards, or Mr. Emerson cast his own thought in that form,—as the following:—

"I know a song which, though it be sung never so loud, few can hear,—only six or seven or eight persons; yet they who hear it become young again. When it is sung, the stars twinkle gladly, and the moon bends nearer the earth."

MERLIN'S SONG. II. Page 218. Although there seems entire fitness in printing this song of Merlin, which Mr. Emerson used for the motto to "Considerations by the Way" in the Conduct of Life, in connection with the preceding one, they never appear together in the verse-books.

THE TEST. Page 220, note 1. This poem, the author's test of scholars in guessing the five poetic teachers of the race, appeared, with no Solution, in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1861. Mr. Emerson did not prize the poems sufficiently to include them in the Selected Poems.

SOLUTION. Page 220. I believe the early rhythmic ventures from which this poem grew in time must interest some readers, and therefore give them in part.

The older one (close to a rehearsal for "Alphonso of Castile") begins thus:—

Clouds on clouds, Thro' clouds of fire and seas of mist Burned the globe of amethyst, Old forces hardly yet subside Within the bounds of time and tide: Saurian, snake and dragon can Slowly ripen into man. Asia spawned its shepherd race, Egypt built its granite base; Then war and trade and clearest clime Precipitate the man of time, And forward stepped the perfect Greek To fight, to carve, to paint, to speak. Will, wisdom, joy had found a tongue In the charmed world when Homer sung.

The other beginning runs thus:—

I am the Muse, Memory's daughter, I stood by Jove at the first,— Take me out, and no world had been, Or chaos bare and bleak. If life has worth, I give it, And if all is taken, and I left, I make amends for all. Long I wrought To ripen and refine The stagnant, craggy lump To a brain And shoot it through With electric wit. At last the snake and dragon Shed their scales, And man was born. Then was Asia, Then was Nile, And at last On the sea-marge bleak Forward stepped the perfect Greek; That will, wit, joy might find a tongue, And earth grow civil, Homer sung. Pleased, the planet hummed the tunes, etc.

Page 221, note 1. This phrase from the Vishnu Purana occurs in "Hamatreya."

Page 221, note 2. Mr. Emerson, writing to a friend in 1849, spoke with praise of the translation of the "Inferno" by Dr. John Carlyle, the brother of Thomas Carlyle: "I read

it lately by night with wonder and joy at all its parts, and at none more than at the nerve and courage which is as essential to the poet as the soldier. Dante locked the door and put the key in his pocket. I believe we only value those who do so."

In the verse-book here follow four lines:—

Silence brooded in my heaven For seven times seventy and seven, Prelude of the following song Well worth such strain to tarry long.

HYMN. Page 223. Mr. Emerson wrote this hymn, to be sung at the ordination of his successor, the Rev. Chandler Robbins, as pastor of the Second Church of Boston, in 1831. He justly preferred it to one which he had written before, which, though cast aside, has so much that is pleasing that it is now printed in the Appendix. The accepted version of the hymn was not in the May-Day volume, but was included by Mr. Emerson among the Selected Poems.

NATURE. II. Page 226. In one of the earlier verse-books the lines called "The Walk," printed in the Appendix, served for the second division of the poem, and there was a third, which Mr. Emerson took for the motto to "Fate," in Conduct of Life, beginning,—

Delicate omens traced in air To the lone bard true witness bare.

Page 226, note 1. The thought here expressed is found in the essay "Art," in Society and Solitude.

THE ROMANY GIRL. Page 227. This poem was one of the group contributed by Mr. Emerson to the opening number

of the Atlantic Monthly, in November, 1857. It was written nearly three years earlier.

The books of the Englishman George Borrow, who combined in a singular manner love of wild human nature and the missionary zeal of an agent of the Bible Society, were attractive to Mr. Emerson. They gave the motive for this poem, at first in the note-book called "Gypsy Song."

Page 227, note 1. I find in a journal this uncredited line,—

Pâles filles du Nord! vous n'etes pas mes soeurs.

DAYS. Page 228. With regard to this poem, which Mr. Emerson once said he thought perhaps his best, the following remarkable entry is from the journal of 1852:—

"I find one state of mind does not remember or conceive of another state. Thus I have written within a twelvemonth verses ('Days') which I do not remember the composition or correction of, and could not write the like to-day, and have only, for proof of their being mine, various external evidences, as the manuscripts in which I find them, and the circumstance that I have sent copies of them to friends, etc. Well, if they had been better, if it had been a noble poem, perhaps it would have only more entirely taken up the ladder into heaven."

To the like purpose in the journal of the following year is this note, headed "The ivory gate":—

"Poppy leaves are strewn when a generalization is made, for I can never remember the circumstances to which I owe it, so as to repeat the experiment or put myself in the conditions."

But this image of the disguised divinities recurs again and again in his writings, as in the poem "May-Day," and twice in the "Lecture on the Times" (Nature, Addresses and

Lectures, pp. 259, 287), and in "Works and Days" (Society and Solitude, p. 168). Dr. Holmes in the interesting chapter on Emerson's Poems, in his Memoir, quotes the latter passage and says: "Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference between prose and poetry." He then gives the poem and adds, "Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball!"

"Days" was printed in the first number of the Atlantic.

MY GARDEN. Page 229. Of his Garden Mr. Emerson wrote to his friend Carlyle on May 14, 1846:—

"I, too, have a new plaything, the best I ever had,—a wood-lot. Last Fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond;—a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice a week at all seasons. My lot, to be sure, is on the farther side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore. Some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years and is growing thriftily. In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures.

"My two little girls know the road now, though it is nearly two miles from my house, and find their way to the spring at the foot of a pine grove, and with some awe to the ruins of a village of shanties, all overgrown with mullein, which the Irish who built the railroad left behind them. At a good distance in from the shore the land rises to a rocky head, perhaps sixty feet above the water. Thereon I think to place a hut; perhaps it will have two stories and be a petty tower, looking out

to Monadnoc and other New Hampshire Mountains. There I hope to go with book and pen when good hours come."

"My Garden" is the hill, with a ledge of rock cropping out, these covered by a vigorous growth of oak, on the Lincoln side of Walden, opposite Mr. Emerson's loved pine grove where Thoreau lived for two years. Destructive fires of late years, set by passing railroad trains, have ruined the forest that clothed it.

In his afternoon walks alone in the wood for many years, he strove to "put his woods in song," and to his children, when they went with him, he would often croon a few lines. The resulting verses gradually were separated, and those printed in the Appendix under the title "Walden" are mostly the earlier ones.

"My Garden" was first printed in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1866.

Page 229, note 1. The second verse in the manuscript, here omitted, was:—

For joy and beauty planted it, With faerie gardens cheered, And boding Fancy haunted it With men and women weird.

Page 230, note 1. The rising and falling of Walden's waters are curiously independent of dry or wet seasons. Its watershed is small; it is fed by springs at its bottom,—its clear water being more than one hundred feet in depth. It has no visible outlet, though it is evident that this must be by filtration through a ridge of sand and boulders one or two hundred yards thick, to a swamp, whence the waters run by the "Sanguinetto Brook," as Mr. Channing named it, to "Fairhaven Bay" on the Musketaquid or Concord River.

Page 230, note 2. This suggests some sentences on the last page of "Nature," in Essays, Second Series.

THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT. Page 232. This poem, also appearing in the Atlantic of November, 1857, was in the note-books called "Janus," but Mr. Emerson changed its name because the sad laborer, not the poet who can reconcile the two aspects, speaks. The title was more intelligible fifty years ago, when the Chartist agitation in England against privilege was recent.

THE TITMOUSE. Page 233. The chronicle of the poet's adventure with the titmouse was written in verse while it was still fresh in his mind.

The poem appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1862, and here is the story in the journal:—

March 3, 1862. "The snow still lies even with the tops of the walls across the Walden road, and, this afternoon, I waded through the woods to my grove. A chickadee came out to greet me, flew about within reach of my hands, perched on the nearest bough, flew down into the snow, rested there two seconds, then up again just over my head, and busied himself on the dead bark. I whistled to him through my teeth, and (I think, in response) he began at once to whistle. I promised him crumbs, and must not go again to these woods without them. I suppose the best food to carry would be the meat of shagbarks or Castile nuts. Thoreau tells me that they are very sociable with wood-choppers, and will take crumbs from their hands."

On the dangers of the situation, if such there were, Mr. Emerson is silent in the journal, as would be natural with him, and perhaps for Art's sake he magnifies them in the poem, but

it is to be remembered how like a lion March often comes in in Massachusetts, that the snow was deep, the woods really remote and the walker approaching his sixtieth year. The American reader will hardly find the poem so obscure as did Matthew Arnold, who said that, after all, one does n't quite get at what the titmouse really did for Emerson.

The titmouse was an old friend. Here is a passage from the journal of 1856:—

"The horse taught me something, the titmouse whispered a secret in my ear, and the lespedeza looked at me, as I passed. Will the academicians, in their Annual Report, please tell me what they said?"

THE HARP. Page 237. "The Harp" formed a part of "May-Day" when that poem first appeared. It followed the passage which tells of the harmonizing by the air of discordant natural sounds at Lake Superior.

The wild wind-harp of the pine, or the artificial one in his study-window played on by the West-wind, gave the music that stirred Emerson.

Page 239, note 1. The story, from the Morte d' Arthur, of Merlin hopelessly confined in a chamber of air, from which he speaks to the passing knights, is given in full in "Poetry and Imagination," in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 240, note 1. Journal, 1861. "What a joy I found and still can find in the AEolian harp; what a youth find I still in Collins's 'Ode to Evening' and in Gray's 'Eton College'! What delight I owed to Moore's insignificant but melodious poetry! That is the merit of Clough's 'Bothie' that the joy of youth is in it!"

Page 241, note 1. In a lecture on Italy, which Mr. Emerson gave on his return in 1834, he said:—

"On Ash Wednesday the famous Miserere was sung before the Pope and the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel. The saying at Rome is that the effect of the piece as performed in the Sistine Chapel cannot be imitated, not only by any other choir, but in any other chapel in the world. … Of its merits I am quite unable to speak who know nothing of psalmody. And yet even to me it was sweet music and sounded more like an AEolian harp than anything else."

SEASHORE. Page 242. In July, 1857, Mr. Emerson, induced by Dr. Bartol, took his family to spend two weeks at Pigeon Cove, on Cape Ann. The day after our return to Concord, he came into our mother's room, where we were all sitting, with his journal in his hand, and said, "I came in yesterday from walking on the rocks and wrote down what the sea had said to me; and to-day, when I open my book, I find it all reads as blank verse, with scarcely a change."

Here is the passage from that journal, as he read it to us: July 23. "Returned from Pigeon Cove, where we have made acquaintance with the sea, for seven days. 'T is a noble, friendly power, and seemed to say to me, Why so late and slow to come to me? Am I not here always, thy proper summer home? Is not my voice thy needful music; my breath thy healthful climate in the heats; my touch thy cure? Was ever building like my terraces? Was ever couch so magnificent as mine? Lie down on my warm ledges and learn that a very little hut is all you need. I have made this architecture superfluous, and it is paltry beside mine. Here are twenty Romes and Ninevehs and Karnacs in ruins together, obelisk and pyramid and Giant's Causeway; here they all are prostrate or half piled. And behold the sea, the opaline, plentiful and strong, yet beautiful as the rose or the rainbow, full of

food, nourisher of men, purger of the world, creating a sweet climate and in its unchangeable ebb and flow, and in its beauty at a few furlongs, giving a hint of that which changes not, and is perfect."

SONG OF NATURE. Page 244. This joyful and eminently characteristic poem seems to have been written by Mr. Emerson in 1859. His belief in the sure advance of life through the ages he had expressed long before, but now, though his belief needed no confirmation, the new and interesting lights on the subject and examples everywhere adduced by Darwin and his followers were inspiring to him, and here found expression.

Page 244, note 1. There are in the manuscript varying expressions in the foregoing poem which are interesting.

In the first, "the gulf of space" originally was "the swallowing space."

In the second, the last line ran,—

In death new-born and strong.

In the fifth verse, Mr. Emerson hesitated long, as the various trials show, before he changed his line,

My apples ripened well,

by substituting "gardens" for the more lively image.

Page 246, note 1. Readers who wish nothing unsolved are much troubled by this verse, but Nature is not statistical or immediately intelligible. Like the gods she "says all things by indirection." When the young knight was angered by Merlin's vagueness, Tennyson makes the wise man answer,—

"Know ye not, then, the riddling of the Bards? Confusion, and illusion, and relation, Elusion, and occasion, and evasion."

Nor can the editor say with authority who was meant in the third line of the next verse. Its very ambiguity was probably intentional and makes it harmonize better with the preceding verse. If it points to Egypt, some readers have suggested Moses, but Mr. Emerson would have been far more likely to refer to one of the great Alexandrian Neo-platonists.

But Italy is more strictly

Over against the mouths of Nile,

and thus the genius of classic Rome or of the Italian Renaissance, without choosing a representative, might have been indicated. If a choice must be made, the "Solution" would point to Dante. It seems remarkable that in that poem Plato, "the purple ancient … of the richest strain,"1 2.7 is not named, for the author owed far more to him than to Swedenborg.

Page 247, note 1. In the note-book, "Forces," 1863, is this entry:—

The sun has lost no beams, The earth no virtues, Gravity is as adhesive, Electricity as swift, heat as expansive, light as joyful, Air as virtuous, water as medicinal, as in the beginning. And the magazine of thought and the heart of morals Are as rich and omnipotent as at the first day.

TWO RIVERS. Page 248. This, perhaps the most musical of the poems, gives opportunity to show Mr. Emerson's later method. The thought came on the river-bank, whispered by

the ripples, and very likely was written there; if not, on his return to his study. It mainly gave the form, for "verse must be alive and inseparable from its contents." Thereafter, when the days came, as Herrick said,

"That I Fitted am to prophesy,"

he repeated or chanted the lines to himself until the right word was in an instant given to replace the awkward phrase with redundant syllables, and the polish and the music came to match the thought. Here is the poem on the day of its birth, in the early summer of 1856:—

"Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the rain, but sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou through the land.

"Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and through men and women.

"I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it."

I see thy brimming, eddying stream And thy enchantment, For thou changest every rock in thy bed Into a gem, All is opal and agate, And at will thou pavest with diamonds: Take them away from the stream And they are poor, shreds and flints. So is it with me to-day.

This rhapsody does not gain by the attempt to reduce part of it to rhyme, which occurs later in the same journal:—

Thy murmuring voice, Musketaquid, Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers silent flit Through thee as thou through Concord plain. Thou in thy banks must dwell, But The stream I follow freely flows Through thee, through rocks, through air as well, Through light, through men it gayly goes.

But Mr. Emerson kept the verses by him nearly two years before, in their perfected form, he gave them to the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1858.

Page 248, note 1. From the first, the image of the stream applied to thought and life appears in the prose and the poems, as in the "Over-Soul" (p. 268), in the first series of Essays, in "Nature" (pp. 178, 179), in the second series, and in Nature, Addresses and Lectures (pp. 26, 27). In the poem "Peter's Field," in the Appendix, the poet says,—

Far seen, the river glides below, Tossing one sparkle to the eyes. I catch thy meaning, wizard wave; The River of my Life replies.

Page 248, note 2. The words of Jesus when he talked with the Samaritan woman at the fountain, were, of course, in the author's mind.

WALDEINSAMKEIT. Page 249. Possibly the decision to use for Forest Solitude an equivalent, outlandish in the strict and

respectful sense, may have been influenced by the fact that to woods in the region of Walden more than to others, Mr. Emerson went for communion with Nature, and the German word had a kindred sound. And yet the first two lines tell the story that the poem was begun during a visit to Mr. John M. Forbes at the beautiful island of Naushon, in the summer of 1857. The poem was published in the Atlantic Monthly for October of the following year.

Page 249, note 1. "Allah does not count the days spent in the chase" was a favorite quotation, but the sea always suggested to Emerson illimitable time. Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson relates that when she was a fellow guest with Mr. Emerson at the house of a friend in Newport, he quietly asked, "Are there any clocks in Newport?" and the meaning did not instantly occur to the hearers.

Page 249, note 2. Journal, 1845. "The wood is soberness with a basis of joy." Immediately under this is written,

Sober with a fund of joy.

TERMINUS. Page 251. Terminus was to the Romans the deity presiding over boundaries and landmarks.

In the last days of the year 1866, when I was returning from a long stay in the Western States, I met my father in New York just starting for his usual winter lecturing trip, in those days extending beyond the Mississippi. We spent the night together at the St. Denis Hotel, and as we sat by the fire he read me two or three of his poems for the new May-Day volume, among them "Terminus." It almost startled me. No thought of his ageing had ever come to me, and there he sat, with no apparent abatement of bodily vigor, and young in spirit, recognizing with serene acquiescence his failing forces; I think he smiled as he read. He recognized, as none of us

did, that his working days were nearly done. They lasted about five years longer, although he lived, in comfortable health, yet ten years beyond those of his activity. Almost at the time when he wrote "Terminus" he wrote in his journal:—

"Within I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth."

Page 252, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote to his brother William in 1838,—

"All Emersons are slender. There are only two or three sound stocks of that excellent tree."

Journal, 1859. "Shall I blame my mother, whitest of women, because she was not a gypsy and gave me no swarthy ferocity? Or my father because he came of a lettered race and had no porter's shoulders?"

Page 252, note 2. There are in the verse-book lines in the last stanza which Mr. Emerson omitted in the poem. One pair, containing the nautical image, follows the line in the text,—

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime,

with

'Is the sky dark?' it saith, 'More near will stand The pilot with unerring hand.'

Another pair drop this image, for home surroundings, thus:—

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime, And hide myself among my thrifty pears, Each fault of mine masked by a growth of theirs.

THE NUN'S ASPIRATION. Page 253. This poem is but a metrical rendering of some fine and some touching passages from the journal of Miss Mary Moody Emerson, the sister of Mr.

Emerson's father. She was a person of great devoutness, the inspirer, the spur and the constant critic of her nephews, whom she loved and secretly admired. Mr. Emerson gives an account of her remarkable life in the volume Lectures and Biographical Sketches. In Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson are many extracts from the letters that passed between her and her nephews.

Page 254, note 1. In spite of Miss Emerson's temperamental eccentricities, of which she was aware, and alluded to them in her journal, she was loved by her nephews, and of her Mr. Emerson said: "She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply."

APRIL. Page 255. These verses first appeared among the Selected Poems which Mr. Emerson published in 1876. A pleasant little description of the bewitching influences of April, in a letter written to Margaret Fuller in 1840, was transcribed by him into a note-book and perhaps was the foundation of the poem.

MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE AEOLIAN HARP. Page 256. These lines accompanied Mr. Emerson's New Year's present to his daughter Edith and her husband, Colonel William H. Forbes, in 1868.

Page 256, note 1. His own delighted use of the wind-harp is shown in this fragment of an early lecture:—

"Stretch a few threads over an AEolian harp and put it in the window, and listen to what it says of the times, and of the heart of Nature. You shall not believe that the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out."

CUPIDO. Page 257. This, as well as the three poems which precede it, was first published in Selected Poems. It seems to have been written in 1843.

THE PAST. Page 257. No trace of the history of this poem remains.

Page 258, note 1. In the first pages of the essay on Memory, in Natural History of Intellect, it is said of remorseful recollection of the Past:—

"Well, that is as it should be. That is the police of the Universe: the angels are set to punish you, so long as you are capable of such crime. But … the day comes when you are incapable of such crime. Then you suffer no more, you look on it as heaven looks on it, with wonder at the deed, and with applause at the pain it has cost you."

THE LAST FAREWELL. Page 258. Mr. Emerson printed his brother Edward's sad farewell to all that was dear to him, six years after his death, in the first number of the Dial.

Page 258, note 2. Edward was born in 1805, but though two years younger than Waldo, the latter used to say that they were really very near together, as he was near the foot of his classes, and Edward at the head of his. Those who remembered him said that he was strikingly handsome, a born scholar, more brilliant in his studies and his speech than Waldo, and a favorite in society. All through college he was easily first scholar. Though of delicate constitution, his conscience and his ambition would not allow him to spare himself. Daniel Webster, in whose office he studied law, recognized his powers and his fine character, and committed to him the charge of his two sons. Yet Edward heaped other tasks upon himself, to free himself from debt incurred in the voyage to Europe for

his health, until his reason for a time gave way under the strain. This he soon regained, but his mainspring seemed broken. Advised to go to a milder climate, he took a clerkship in a business house in Porto Rico, and worked uncomplainingly there for a few years. Friends who saw his cheerful demeanor reported that he was in the way of recovery of his vigor, but it appears that he himself knew that, as he wrote, "the arrow of the angel had gone too deep." A verse telling of a private grief, which Mr. Emerson omitted, may now be restored.

IN MEMORIAM, E. B. E. Page 261, note 1. The Old North Bridge, across which the opening volleys of the Revolutionary War were fired in a battle whose field extended from the Musketaquid to the Charles River, was close behind the Manse built by Rev. William Emerson, the young patriot minister of Concord, and there his grandsons William, Ralph Waldo, Edward and Charles had spent many pleasant days in boyhood. (See the poems "Dirge" and "Peter's Field.") The two British soldiers killed at the first fire lie buried where they fell.

Page 264, note 1. The expression in this line is borrowed from Milton and used by Mr. Emerson more than once in his writings.

ELEMENTS AND MOTTOES

Page 267. The thirteen poems which follow, beginning with "Experience," were selected by Mr. Emerson from the mottoes of the Essays, of which they—all but two—bear the names, for publication in May-Day and Other Pieces in 1867. He there called the group "Elements." The

motto of the essay on Behavior he called "Manners," the essay of that name having no original motto, but one from Ben Jonson. To the motto of "The Over-Soul" he gave the title "Unity."

It has seemed to the editor that the readers of the Poems would be glad to have the other mottoes which Mr. Emerson gave to his chapters included in this volume. They therefore are printed, with a few exceptions, after the thirteen which the author preferred. The exceptions are as follows: the motto of Self-Reliance is found where Mr. Emerson placed it among the Quatrains as "Power;" the motto to "The Poet," with the exception of its first two lines, is a part of the long poem of that name in the Appendix; most of the lines of "Fate" belong among the fragments on "The Poet," in the Appendix, and the last four lines form the ending of the poem "Fate;" the motto to "Considerations by the Way" seemed better placed with the "Song of Merlin." The second motto of "Character" and that of "Beauty" are portions respectively of the "Ode to Beauty" and of "In Memoriam, E. B. E." The titles "Promise" and "Caritas" seemed appropriate to the mottoes respectively of "Nominalist and Realist" and "New England Reformers." "Love" had only a verse from the Koran as motto. The Essays in the volumes which followed Conduct of Life had no mottoes in Mr. Emerson's lifetime, and, with Mr. Cabot's sanction, I supplied these for Lectures and Biographical Sketches, in the Riverside Edition, from fragments of verse, never published by Mr. Emerson, which were printed in the Appendix. I have now ventured to do the same for Society and Solitude and Letters and Social Aims.

Page 271, note 1. Journal, 1840. "I read to-day in Ockley [History of the Saracens] a noble sentence of Ali, son-in-law

of Mahomet: 'Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.'"

See also "The Over-Soul" (Essays, First Series, p. 293).

Page 272, note 1. Compare the quatrain "Northman."

Page 273, note 1. The first six lines of this motto are from "The Poet" (see Appendix).

Page 273, note 2. This poem in the verse-book begins,—

Ah me! can maxims educate.

There is in "Fate" (Conduct of Life, p. 44) a passage on the necessity for the great to be impressionable.

Page 274, note 1. In the notes to "Friendship," Essays, First Series, p. 412, are two passages on ideal friendship from letters by Mr. Emerson.

Page 275, note 1. This poem sheds light on "Uriel" and on "Brahma." The essay on Circles, especially pages 317-318, contains much to the same purpose,—the beneficent compensations in Morals, as in Nature. Had Mr. Emerson ever resorted to italics, the use of them in the word "living" would have helped the reader in the first line, which is condensed to the last point. Thy prayers are concerned with a Heaven which is alive, is the meaning. This is shown in the first rhapsody in the verse-book:—

Heaven is alive; Self-built and quarrying itself, Upbuilds eternal towers; Self-commanded works In vital cirque By dint of being all; Its loss is transmutation. Fears not the craft of undermining days, Grows by decays,

And, by the famous might that's lodged In reaction and recoil, Makes flames to freeze and ice to boil, And thro' the arms of all the fiends Builds the firm seat of Innocence.

Page 276, note 1. Mr. Emerson's note-books are full of verses about the joyful Seyd (or Said) seeking beauty in Nature and man. These may be found in the Appendix, in "Fragments on the Poet." A few of these were taken by him for this motto.

Page 277, note 1. In "Love," Essays, First Series, pp. 176, 177, is a passage which these lines recall.

Page 277, note 2. In a letter to a near friend, written in 1841, Mr. Emerson speaks of himself as "an admirer of persons. I cannot get used to them; they daunt and dazzle me still. … Blessed be the Eternal Power for those whom fancy even cannot strip of beauty, and who never for a moment seem to me profane."1 2.8

Page 279, note 1. Mr. Emerson thus changed the title of the motto of "The Over-Soul."

Page 280, note 1. See "Fate" (p. 21 in Essays, First Series) and also the poems "Nemesis" and "Voluntaries."

Page 280, note 2. Compare the passage in the Address to the Divinity Students (Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 121).

QUATRAINS AND TRANSLATIONS

QUATRAINS. Page 291. Mr. Emerson's Oriental studies may have given him the taste for this sort of verse. In the essay on Persian Poetry he says:—

"The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life conveyed in a lively image … addressed to the eye and contained in a single stanza, were always current in the East." He gives among other specimens of these gnomic poems this:—

"'The secret that should not be blown Not one of thy nation must know; You may padlock the gate of a town, But never the mouth of a foe.'"

This may have suggested the quatrain "Hush!" Certainly the form of the specimens he gives is suggestive. Most of the Quatrains seem to have been written between 1850 and 1860; one or two much earlier.

Page 291, note 1. In the journal of 1850, Mr. Emerson speaks of the necessity of the great man being highly impressionable, and adds, "He obeys the main current,—that is all his secret, the main current is so feeble a force as can be felt only by bodies delicately poised. He can orient himself. In the woods, I have one guide, namely, to follow the light,—to go where the woods are thinnest; then at last I am sure to come out. So he cannot be betrayed or misguided, for he knows where the north is, knows painfully when he is going in the wrong direction."

Page 292, note 1. Compare Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 30, and Conduct of Life, p. 294.

Page 292, note 2. Journal, July, 1840. "Go to the forest, if God has made thee a poet, and make thy life clean and fragrant as thy office.

True Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet, Expound the Vedas in the violet.

Thy love must be thy art. … Nature also must teach thee rhetoric. She can teach thee not only to speak truth, but to speak it truly."

Page 292, note 3. "Frozen leaves or grouse's breast" was the early form.

Page 293, note 1. Journal, 1853. "The Vikings sang, 'the force of the storm is a help to the arm of our rowers; the hurricane is in our service; it carries us the way we would go.'"—Thierry's Norman Conquest.

Page 293, note 2. These lines date from May 1, 1838.

Page 293, note 3. This quatrain is Mr. Emerson's tribute to the upright citizen and lawyer, Samuel Hoar, the "Squire" of Concord, and father of his friends, Judge E. R. Hoar and Miss Elizabeth Hoar. Mr. Emerson's sketch of his life is in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 294, note 1. Compare, as to Nature's ever new allurements, Essays, Second Series, p. 192.

Page 294, note 2. The last two lines are from an Oriental source, and are also quoted in Conduct of Life, p. 10.

Page 295, note 1. The motto of "Self-Reliance."

Page 295, note 2. See Essays, First Series, p. 148; also "Demonology," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 295, note 3. Compare the ending of the verses in the Appendix, beginning,—

Love Asks nought its brother cannot give.

Note-book. "It creeps where it cannot go, it creeps under the snows of Scandinavia, and Lofn is as mighty a divinity in the Norse Edda as Camadeva in the red vault of India."

Page 296, note 1. The last two lines are a rendering of a quotation from a sermon by Caleb Vines, a Puritan, on "Caleb's integrity in following the Lord fully," preached at St. Margaret's, Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons, November 30, 1642.

Page 296, note 2. A Latin rendering of a Greek saying was spoken of by Mr. Emerson as the source of the quatrain. One asks a neighbor, "But are you not then my friend?" "Usque ad aras," is the reply—As far as the altars.

Page 296, note 3. When Dante met his friend Casella, the beautiful singer, in Purgatory, he begged him to sing. When Casella began, Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, the souls all flocked to hear.

Page 297, note 1. The title signifies, "They enjoy a tearless age."

Mr. Emerson held the poet to his office of "joy-giver and enjoyer," as he says in the poem "Saadi." It is the more remarkable that he admits Swedenborg as a poet in the "Solution," but it is on the score of his symbolism.

TRANSLATIONS. Page 298. Among the poems in his first volume, Mr. Emerson placed two translations from Hafiz, through the German, of course, less pleasing than those here given. These were omitted by him from the Selected Poems, and by Mr. Cabot in the Riverside Edition. They are not restored here, because of their length and because the space is needed for restored and early poems, and interesting fragments. In his preface to the American edition of Saadi's Gulistan, translated by Gladwin, are some of Mr. Emerson's translations

of Persian poetry, and also in the essay on that subject in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 300, note 1. Mr. Joel Benton,1 2.9 writing of the quatrains and the translations which follow, and comparing the quatrain "Hafiz" with this rendering, well says,—

"If the translation here seems (as it evidently does) a little more like Emerson than it does like Hafiz, the balance is more than preserved by his steeping his own original quatrain in a little tincture of the wine and spirit of Oriental thought. When he translated Hafiz, he was probably thinking of his own workmanship; when he described him, he was simply absorbed in the milieu of the Persian poet."

Mr. Benton says also, "What Goethe says of the Spanish poet Calderon (I quote Lord Houghton's forcible translation) serves equally well if you substitute for his name Emerson's:—

"'Many a light the Orient throws O'er the midland waters brought; He alone who Hafiz knows Knows what Calderon has thought.'"

This suggests that it very likely was Goethe who drew Emerson's attention to Hafiz.

APPENDIX

THE POET. Page 309. This poem, called in its early form "The Discontented Poet, a Masque," was begun as early as 1838, probably earlier. It received additions through several

years and was much improved, but Mr. Emerson never completed it.

"The Poet" seems to have been written parallel, so to speak, with the lectures on the same theme which are condensed into the opening essay in the Second Series. It was written in the years when Emerson, who saw God and Man and Nature as a poet in the highest sense sees them, was struggling through impediments towards a fitting expression of his vision or thought in verse. He soon discarded the first title and such morbid lines as had been written during a somewhat unrestful period. He felt, as he told a friend, that these desires contained the promise of their fulfilment. The poem truly pictures his own method of seeking inspiration, sitting under the pines in Walden woods by day and walking alone under the stars by night,—listening always. The stanza beginning,—

The sun set, but set not his hope

(used as the motto for "Character") and that preceding it, show his happy patience, secure that his time would come.

"The Poet" as here printed has a reasonable unity, but around it was a system of satellite pieces on this favorite topic, of a later date and more musical. In these, the poet is called Saadi, or, as often more convenient for metre, Said or Seyd.

Dr. Holmes was greatly interested in these poems. I quote from his Memoir of his friend:—

"If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them, and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the question, let him read the paragraph of 'May-Day,' beginning,—

'I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,'

'Seashore,' the fine fragments in the Appendix to his published

works, called, collectively, 'The Poet,' blocks bearing the mark of poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct, and last of all that which is, in many respects, first of all, the 'Threnody.'"

Page 309, note 1. Journal, 1839. "The poet is a namer. His success is a new nomenclature."

"Though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer."—"The Poet," Essays, Second Series.

Page 309, note 2. In his Introduction to Professor W. W. Goodwin's revision of Plutarch's Morals, Mr. Emerson quotes Plutarch's sentence: "Were there not a sun, we might, for all the other stars, pass our days in the 'Reverend Dark,' as Heracleitus calls it."

Page 310, note 1. Compare the last sentence in "Man the Reformer," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Page 310, note 2. Mr. Emerson once spoke of his joy when, as a boy, he "caught the first hint of the Berkeleyan philosophy. I could see that there was a Cause behind every stump and clod, and by the help of some fine words could make every old wagon and wood-pile and stone wall oscillate a little and threaten to dance; nay, give me a fair field, and the selectmen of Concord and the Reverend Pound-me-down himself began to look unstable and vaporous." He said in a lecture, of Shakspeare, "He is the chosen closet companion, who can, at any moment, by incessant surprises, work the miracle of mythologizing every fact of the common life."

Page 310, note 3. In the essay on Domestic Life, Society and Solitude, Mr. Emerson dwells on the inestimable advantage of comparative poverty to youth.

Page 311, note 1. Journal, 1838. "The intellectual nomadism is the faculty of Objectiveness or of Eyes which everywhere feed themselves. Who hath such eyes, everywhere falls into true relations with his fellow men. Every man, every object is a prize, a study, a property to him, and this love smooths his brow, joins him to men and makes him beautiful and beloved in their sight. His house is a wagon, he roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. He must meantime abide by his inward law as the Calmuc by his Khan."—See "History," Essays, First Series, pp. 22, 23.

Page 311, note 2. The correspondences and harmonies are dwelt on in other poems, as in "Merlin," II., and in the passage in the second "Woodnotes"—

Come learn with me the fatal song, etc.

Page 312, note 1. Compare the essay on the Poet, in Essays, Second Series, pp. 25 and 39.

Page 313, note 1. See in Conduct of Life, "Beauty," p. 304.

Page 314, note 1. This stanza was used by Mr. Emerson as motto for the essay on Character.

Page 314, note 2. Journal, 1837. "To-night I walked under the stars through the snow, and stopped and looked at my far sparklers and heard the voice of the wind, so slight and pure and deep as if it were the sound of the stars themselves revolving."

1841. "Last night a walk to the river … and saw the moon in the broken water, interrogating, interrogating."

Page 315, note 1. "1838, 24 June, Sunday. Forever the night addresses the imagination, and the interrogating soul within or behind all its functions, and now in the summer night, which makes the earth more habitable, the more. Strange

that forever we do not exhaust the wonder and meaning of these stars, points of light merely, but still they speak and ask and warn, each moment with new mind."

Page 315, note 2. "The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus."—"History," Essays, First Series, p. 31.

Page 316, note 1. In "The Transcendentalist" (Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp. 341-343) the eager youth who seem to themselves born out of time are described.

Page 316, note 2. Some sentences in the concluding passage of the essay on the Poet recall this stanza picturing the touching loyalty of the family to the man of genius.

Page 317, note 1. Composure is the first virtue of man, as modesty is that of woman.

Page 317, note 2. The opening passage of Mr. Emerson's first book, Nature, shows the inspiration which he found in the heavenly bodies, and the lesson to be found in their beauty and their ordered motion. Every astronomical fact interested him.

Page 319, note 1. The doctrine of the Universal Mind.

Page 320, note 1. Compare the passage in Mr. Emerson's Address to the Divinity Students beginning, "The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment," etc.

In the journal for 1840, he wrote thoughts which occur in the last two stanzas: "The moon keeps its appointment—will not the good Spirit? Wherefore have we labored and fasted, say we, and thou takest no note? Let him not take note, if he please to hide,—then it were sublime beyond a poet's dreams still to labor and abstain and obey, and, if thou canst, to put the good spirit in the wrong. That were a feat to sing in Elysium, on Olympus, by the waters of life in the New Jerusalem."

The last seven lines of the poem were, however, written in 1831.

FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT. Page 320. What Dr. Holmes says in his chapter on the Poems is especially true of these fragments: "The poet reveals himself under the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,—the flowers and jewels of his vocabulary."

The first part of this poem was written in 1845; from it Mr. Emerson took the motto for "Beauty," the first ten lines of which followed

At court he sat in the grave Divan,

and the rest of the motto followed

And etiquette of gentilesse.

Page 322, note 1. In the essay on Inspiration, in Letters and Social Aims, after quoting what the poet Gray said of the AEolian harp, Mr. Emerson adds:—

"Perhaps you can recall a delight like it, which spoke to the eye, when you have stood by a lake in the woods in summer, and saw where little flaws of wind whip spots or patches of still water into fleets of ripples,—so sudden, so slight, so spiritual, that it was more like the rippling of the Aurora Borealis at night than any spectacle of day."

Page 323, note 1. In his journal of 1842, he wrote under the heading "To-day":—

"But my increasing value of the present moment, to which I gladly abandon myself when I can, is destroying my Sunday respects, which always, no doubt, have some regard to the State and conservatism. But when to-day is great I fling all the world's future into the sea."

Mr. Emerson, from childhood to age, had reverence for

worship, and for public worship, but as he grew in mind and spirit he felt himself cramped by creeds and forms. He found he could worship to more purpose in solitude and in the presence of Nature. He always gladly heard a true preacher, and in his old age, when his critical sense was dulled and the passing Day had fewer gifts for him, he liked to go to the Concord church, were it only for association's sake.

Page 323, note 2. Hassan the camel-driver was, without doubt, Mr. Emerson's sturdy neighbor, Mr. Edmund Hosmer, for whom he had great respect. The camels were the slow oxen, then universally used for farm-work, with which Mr. Hosmer ploughed the poet's fields for him. Compare what is said of manual labor in Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp. 236-238.

Page 324, note 1. Journal, 1855. "What I said in one of my Saadi scraps of verse, I might say in good sooth, that—

Thus the high Muse treated me, Directly never greeted me, etc.

My best thought came from others. I heard in their words my own meaning, but a deeper sense than they put on them: and could well and best express myself in other people's phrases, but to finer purpose than they knew."

The thought of the last five lines is given more fully in "Art" (Essays, First Series, pp. 360, 361).

Page 326, note 1. Sun and moon and everything in Nature are symbols, seeds which quicken in their interpretation, which the poet finds for mankind.

Page 326, note 2. These lines are a more pleasing version of the motto to the essay on Fate, in Conduct of Life, with two introductory lines, and without the less poetical ending lines which were used by Mr. Emerson in the poem "Fate."

Page 327, note 1. The last verse is the motto to "Intellect" in Essays, First Series.

Page 328, note 1. This in the verse-book is called "Terminus."

Page 328, note 2. These lines appear to have been part of a poem called "Bacchus" that was never completed, referred to in the note to "Bacchus."

Page 331, note 1. This thought is more fully stated in "Fate" (Conduct of Life, p. 26) and in "Self-Reliance" (Essays, First Series, p. 71).

Page 331, note 2. See "Inspiration," Letters and Social Aims, p. 296.

Page 332, note 1. These lines, it is seen in one of the verse-books, describe the true poet; he re-creates, by showing what creation signifies, and thoughts are the seed he sows.

Page 334, note 1. "Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world."—"Politics," Essays, Second Series.

Page 334, note 2. Asmodeus was an evil spirit. He is mentioned in the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. Students of the Black Art held that demons could be kept out of mischief by setting them at hopeless tasks, like making ropes out of sand. The braid-like effect of the wave-markings in shoal water suggested the idea. Mr. Emerson always found it hard to make a tissue out of the thoughts which came to him—he spoke of them once as "infinitely repellent particles."

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE. Page 335, note 1. In the leading essay in Natural History of Intellect is this passage on the Greek symbolizing of Nature in the god Pan:—

"Pan, that is, All. His habit was to dwell in mountains, lying on the ground, tooting like a cricket in the sun, refusing

to speak, clinging to his behemoth ways. He could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd's pipe,—silent yet to most, for his pipes make the music of the spheres, which, because it sounds eternally, is not heard at all by the dull, but only by the mind. He wears a coat of leopard spots or stars. He could terrify by earth-born fears called panics. Yet was he in the secret of Nature and could look both before and after. He was only seen under disguises, and was not represented by any outward image; a terror sometimes, at others a placid omnipotence."

Page 341, note 1. This was originally in the rough draft of Monadnoc, in which is the image,—

Of the bullet of the earth Whereon ye sail, etc.

Page 344, note 1. Another version of a passage in "May-day."

This little note in praise of the animal creation is from one of the verse-books:—

See how Romance adheres To the deer, the lion, And every bird, Because they are free And have no master but Law. On the wild ice in depths of sea, On Alp or Andes' side, In the vast abyss of air, The bird, the flying cloud, The fire, the wind, the element,— These have not manners coarse or cowed, And no borrowed will, But graceful as cloud and flame All eyes with pleasure fill.

Page 345, note 1. Journal, 1853. "At Nahant the eternal play of the sea seems the anti-clock, or destroyer of the memory of time."

Page 346, note 1. These verses were probably written while Mr. Emerson was visiting Dr. Ezra Ripley (his step-grandfather, always kind and hospitable) at the Manse, after his return from Europe in 1833. Opposite the house is a pasture-hill giving a fine view of the great meadows to the eastward, and, on the western horizon, of some of the mountains on the New Hampshire line.

Page 348, note 1. Journal, 1860. "We can't make half a bow and say, I honor and despise you. But Nature can: she whistles with all her winds and—does as she pleases."

LIFE. Page 349, note 1. See the Address to the Divinity Students (Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 124).

Page 350, note 1. The Lemures were the household ghosts, and the Lares the household divinities of the Latins.

Page 351, note 1. See "Friendship" (Essays, First Series, pp. 191, 211).

Page 352, note 1. The same thought is in the poem "Rubies."

Page 352, note 2. The first four lines are in "The Daemonic Love."

Page 353, note 1. These verses are written in the older verse-book on the same page with "Eros."

Page 353, note 2. "Statements of the infinite are usually felt to be unjust to the finite, and blasphemous. Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he said, 'I am God;' but the moment it was out of his mouth it became a lie to the ear; and the world revenged itself for the seeming arrogance by the good story about his shoe" ("The Method of

Nature," Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 198). See also Conduct of Life, p. 26. Empedocles, the common people believed, threw himself into the crater of Mount AEtna that no trace of his death might appear, and it be supposed that he was translated. Hence, when the valcano cast up his brazen sandal, they were pleased.

Page 357, note 1. In the verse-book, Mr. Emerson gives to these lines the title "Rex," but "The Related Man" might have been better. He delighted in such, as much when he observed them (not, however, filling the dream of high, poetic maids, or consorting with bards and mystics) in the grocery, or insurance-office of the village, as when he saw the master minds of the growing Republic in cities, East or West.

THE BOHEMIAN HYMN. Page 359, note 1. This poem appears but once in the verse-books, and no traces of its composition remain, nor is it dated. But from the handwriting it must have been written before 1840, and the internal evidence is convincing that it was written by Mr. Emerson.

Compare a passage in Representative Men, pp. 61, 62.

GRACE. Page 359, note 2. The Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli was written by her friends, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, Rev. William Henry Channing and Mr. Emerson. Mr. Emerson, writing to Mr. Channing about their joint work, referred to this poem thus:—

"For your mottoes to your chapter, I saw that the first had the infinite honor done it of being quoted to Herbert! The verses are mine,—'Preventing God,' etc.,—so I strike them out."

The poem was published in the Dial of January, 1842.

INSIGHT. Page 360, note 1. This title was given by the editor. The verses have none, and perhaps could be better named. Mr. Emerson wrote the first line also in these forms:—

Rule that by obedience grows,

and

Power which by service grows.

PAN. Page 360, note 2. Mr. Emerson seems to have considered other titles, as "Pantheos," and "Divine Afflatus." He wrote in the second line "the breath of God," but afterwards decided to use the classical image. By the parables of the divine music played through human pipes, and of the tide of spirit inundating mankind, he teaches the ancient doctrine of Inspiration. In a note-book of 1830 he wrote, "Heracleitus said, 'The senses are canals through which we inhale the divine reason.'" Everywhere in the Essays the over-soul is taught, especially in the essay of that name.

MONADNOC FROM AFAR. Page 361, note 1. It is strange that Mr. Emerson never printed this little poem. It probably was written not much later than "Monadnoc."

SEPTEMBER. Page 362, note 1. These verses have never been printed in full except by Mr. Channing in his Thoreau, the Poet Naturalist. The text there varies slightly from that here selected as the best version from the journals.

OCTOBER. Page 362, note 2. See Society and Solitude, p. 298.

PETER'S FIELD. Page 363. This poem on the memories and associations of the field by the Concord River, where Mr.

Emerson and his brothers walked in youth, must be of earlier date than the "Dirge." It has two verses in common with this, here bracketed.

Here is another account of the brothers' joys,—

We sauntered amidst miracles, We were the fairies of the fells, The summer was our quaint bouquet, The winter-eve our Milky Way; We played in turn with all the slides In Nature's lamp of suns and tides; We pierced all books with criticism, We plied with doubts the catechism, The Christian fold, The Bible old—

Page 364, note 1. Among the more youthful pieces at the end of this volume is another poem on the River and its associations.

MUSIC. Page 365, note 1. The present editor obtained Mr. Cabot's permission to include this among the minor poems in the Appendix to the posthumous edition of the Works in 1883, even though Dr. Holmes made some protest against allowing the "mud and scum of things" to have a voice. At the celebration of the recent centenary of Mr. Emerson's birth, it was pleasant to see that the poem had become a favorite, even with children, and was often quoted.

THE WALK. Page 366, note 1. Mr. Emerson, after a happy walk with Thoreau, wrote in his journal in 1857: "To Nero advertising for a new pleasure, a walk in the woods should have been offered. 'T is one of the secrets for dodging old age."

COSMOS. Page 367, note 1. These verses have no title in the verse-books. "Cosmos" is given by the editor. They were originally trials for a "Song of Nature,"—Nature is speaking. The May element claimed the later verses, though their sequence was never made out, the first divisions harmonizing fairly, but the last two hopelessly dislocated, though they have a certain charm.

THE MIRACLE. Page 369, note 1. This poem was written at about the same period with "My Garden," "Boston" and "Waldeinsamkeit," between 1857 and 1865.

THE WATERFALL. Page 369, note 2. In addition to his Walden wood-lots, Mr. Emerson bought one on the edge of Lincoln, for the sake of a miniature waterfall in a little brook, the outlet of Flint's Pond. Mr. Thoreau showed him additional charms, certain shrubs and flowers not plentiful in Concord that grew on its banks,—veratrum with its tropical growth, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, yellow violets, and the hornbeam, arrow-wood and a bush of mountain laurel. It was a wonderful resort for the various kinds of thrushes.

WALDEN. Page 370. This poem represents the early form of "My Garden." As years went on, verses were added, and at last the groups became distinct.

THE ENCHANTER. Page 373, note 1. "Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour."—Representative Men, p. 208.

GOETHE. Page 373, note 2. Mr. Emerson read Goethe's works through, largely out of his love for Carlyle, who constantly

praised Goethe to him. Writing to his friend, in April, 1840, he said:—

"You asked me if I read German. … I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five [these were little leather-bound duodecimos], but I have read nothing else [i. e. in German], but I have not now looked even into Goethe, for a long time."

This letter shows approximately the date of the verses.

RICHES. Page 374, note 1. There seems to be no question that this is Mr. Emerson's work, in spite of the Scottish garb in which, for his amusement, he clothed the little simile. It has no title in the verse-book.

PHILOSOPHER. and INTELLECT. Page 375, note 1. There is a passage in the journal for 1845, called "Icy light," on the cold-bloodedness of the philosopher, most of which is printed in Representative Men:—

"Intellect puts an interval. … It is the chief deduction, almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato (that which is no doubt incidental to this regnancy of the intellect in his work), that his writings have not the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is an interval; and to the cohesion, contact is necessary. Intellect is the king of non-committal: answers with generalities. He gave me wit instead of love."

LIMITS. Page 375, note 2. See "History," in Essays, First Series, pp. 39, 40.

INSCRIPTION. Page 376. This was written at the request of Mrs. John M. Forbes, and is carved on a stone watering-fountain on the top of Milton Hill.

POEMS OF YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD

As was said in the Preface, these verses are printed, not for their poetical merit, but as showing the influence, on Mr. Emerson's character, thought and expression, of the sad and the happy events of the third decade of his life. Only a reserve in his strength that could hardly have been expected, together with the serenity of his nature, which was content to wait until the storm blew by, preserved his life during this period with disease ever threatening when it was not actually disabling him. After his establishment of his home in Concord and his second marriage, his health was almost uniformly good, in spite of the very serious exposure involved in his winter lecturing journeys afar, for the remainder of his life.

PRAYER. Page 380. The incident of the hayfield where the Methodist haymaker said to Emerson, raking hay beside him on his uncle's farm, that men are always praying, and that all prayers are granted, which gave him the subject of his first sermon, is told in Mr. Cabot's Memoir. It seems to have suggested lines in this poem.

TO-DAY. Page 382. Dr. Holmes has named Mr. Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837 as "Our intellectual Declaration of Independence," but this boyish poem, written thirteen years earlier, shows the germ which grew into the "American Scholar."

FAME. Page 383. This bit of youthful irony on a theme which, even in college, its author often wrote upon, "Being

and Seeming," was very possibly playfully addressed to one of his brothers, or, it may be, to himself.

THE SUMMONS. Page 384. In the year 1822, Mr. Emerson wrote to a classmate: "I am (I wish I was otherwise) keeping a school, and assisting my venerable brother to lift the truncheon against the fair-haired daughters of this raw city. …Better tug at the oar, …or saw wood, … better sow hemp, or hang with it, than sow the seeds of instruction!" Next year matters were worse, for William went abroad, leaving him the school,—a formidable experience for a shy youth, still a minor, and younger than some of his fair and troublesome pupils. The "Good-bye, proud world" was his utterance of relief when he fled from them. They were the "silken troop," skilful in producing his "uneasy blush" alluded to in the present poem. Now he was to have the pulpit for a breastwork, for in 1826 he was approbated to preach.

It is interesting to see that the image of the procession of Days, so often used later, was already in his thought.

THE RIVER. Page 385. In the same month in which these lines were written, their author told his brother, in a letter, that he meditated abdicating the profession, for "the lungs in their spiteful lobes sing sexton and sorrow whenever I only ask them to shout a sermon for me."

The poem was evidently written in the beautiful orchard running down to the Concord River behind the Manse.

GOOD HOPE. Page 387. These verses show reviving life, and very likely were written when, in December, 1827, the young minister, going to Concord, New Hampshire, to preach, first saw Ellen Tucker, a beautiful girl of seventeen.

LINES TO ELLEN. Page 387. A year from the time when he first saw Miss Tucker, Mr. Emerson again went to Concord, New Hampshire, and soon after became engaged to her.

A MOUNTAIN GRAVE. Page 390. After the death of his wife, and during the time when the enlargement of his mental horizon made Mr. Emerson regard the forms in use in the church with increasing repugnance, his health again underwent severe strain, and his future became very uncertain, as the next two poems show.

HYMN. Page 393. In the main body of this volume is printed the hymn,

We love the venerable house Our fathers built to God,

which was sung at the ordination of Rev. Chandler Robbins, Mr. Emerson's successor. The hymn here printed was probably the first trial for a fit utterance for that occasion.

SELF-RELIANCE. Page 394. These lines, without title, however, were written at the time when he resigned his place as pastor of the Second Church.

Mr. Emerson's friend, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, relates that when they were making the home voyage from England together in 1873, Mr. Emerson showed him his pocket-compass, which he said he carried with him in travelling, and added, "I like to hold the god in my hands."

NAPLES and ROME. Pages 395 and 396. Journal, Divinity Hall, November, 1827. "Don't you see you are the Universe to yourself? You carry your fortunes in your own hand."

Change of place won't mend the matter. You will weave the same web at Pernambuco as at Boston, if you have only learned how to make one texture."

Journal, 1834. "Remember the Sunday morning in Naples when I said, 'This moment is the truest vision, the best spectacle I have seen amid all the wonders; and this moment, this vision, I might have had in my own closet in Boston.'"

"Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go."—Self-Reliance.

WEBSTER. Page 398. The first of these fragments on New England's idol—until his apostasy to the cause of human Freedom, in the interests of Union—was the last verse of those beginning,

Has God on thee conferred A bodily presence mean as Paul's,

printed a few pages earlier in this book. The second was the best passage in the Phi Beta Kappa poem, not otherwise remarkable. The third was written sadly after Webster's death.

Notes

• 1 2.1

  "Historical Notes of Life and Letters in New England," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.
• 1 2.2

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philosophy. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1881.
• 1 2.3

  Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend. Edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.
• 1 2.4

  Emerson as a Poet. By Joel Benton. New York: M. L. Holbrook & Co., 1883.
• 1 2.5

  The Autobiography of a Journalist. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1901.
• 1 2.6

  Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy. Edited by F. B. Sanborn, Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1885.
• 1 2.7

  Mr. Emerson thus named him in his review of Carlyle's Past and Present. See "Papers from the Dial," in the volume Natural History of Intellect.
• 1 2.8

  Letters to a Friend, edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.
• 1 2.9

  Emerson as a Poet. By Joel Benton. New York: M. L. Holbrook & Co., 1883.