6

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." I

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.

"Nature is a sea of forms.

Page 89, note 3.
What is common to them all,

-is

is Beauty."

that perfectness and harmony,

Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 23.

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

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:

66

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

of Beauty 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? 'Tis 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, Dæmonic 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 Epicis for the strong, for the few; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and gray'

tetus

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

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 I. 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.