emplations 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." 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,

"Historical Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

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.

(divines)

Page 14, note 1. While the " young deities 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 soci ety and resolve the world into chaos." Rev. Henry Ware, honored and loved by Mr. Emerson, who had been associ ated 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. gration of the soul.

The Pythagorean doctrine of transmi

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 Emerson the following passage :—

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

"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 energing 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 Dæmon, 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