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 I. "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.

Dial.

Page 24, note 1.

"Has turned the man-child's head.'

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 preeminence of his intellectual attainments. in modern England represent the practical preeminence of the sabidura of Alfonso X. in mediæval 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 strongwinged 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." "6 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