queror'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 The same thought is to be found in Page 124, note I. "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: 444 Pour the wine! pour the wine! New and unlooked for, 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 Lyæus' rosy gift Lightly can the mountain lift; It can knit What is done And what's begun; It can cancel bulk and time; Into a drop a tun, So to repeat No word or feat; The hour an altar is of ages, On a brown grape-stone tion. 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 veilèd 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 percepFor 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 I. " 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 They taught me a new speech 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 |