/ 6 5 S 
 
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 in 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Clews to Emerson's 
 :ic Verse 
 
 By 
 
 WILLIAM SLOANE KENNEDY 
 
 THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 JUNE 190^ 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021980549 
 
Clews to Emerson's 
 Mystic Verse 
 
 By 
 
 WILLIAM SLOANE KENNEDY 
 
 THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 JUNE 1903 
 
CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE. 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 Of the following studies in Emerson's poetry, as origi- 
 nally printed,* my friends Charles Eliot Norton, William 
 Rounseville Alger, and Charles Molloy, all veteran students 
 of their revered friend's verse, and among the best living 
 interpreters of his thought, vyrote me in very flattering terms 
 expressive of their enjoyment in reading them and their 
 approval of the material as accurate and of permanent value. 
 Hence its appearance in this pamphlet form. I have availed 
 myself of Professor Norton's judgment in correcting one or 
 two points in which I was in error. The " Clews " are not 
 intended to be read independently of the poems, but as gloss 
 and commentary for one who has the poems in hand. 
 
 W. S. K. 
 Belmont, Mass., May i, 1903. 
 
 * In Poet'lore. 
 
 The- Society of American Authors is indebted to Mr. William Sloane 
 Kennedy for the entire contents of this number. 
 
CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE. 
 
 " W/ien a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man s 
 good wit seconded with the forward child Understanding, it 
 strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little 
 room." — Shakespeare. 
 
 One -would have supposed that the beauty of Emerson's 
 spheral songs would before this have given them wide vogue 
 among the circles that have recently come into the full 
 enjoyment of his philosophical prose and adopted him into 
 their calendar of saints. Instead of the two or three plain 
 and not over-attractive editions in which his poems are 
 issued it would seem as if before this the demand for them 
 would have been such that they could have been printed on 
 costly paper, filled with delicate engravings, and bound like 
 rarest missals. One trouble seems to be that the numerous 
 poems containing obscure and mystical passages have never 
 been annotated. Probably, too, the omission hitherto to 
 explain a single one of Emerson's mysterious titles has helped 
 to repel people who hate opacity in a poet. 
 
 Yet, after all, the age has caught up with Emerson. The 
 old jests about the unintelligibility of Transcendentalism are 
 out of date. The tradition that Emerson is always irritatingly 
 obscure to the general reader has drifted along unchallenged 
 as one of the cela va sans dire's. But the fact that thirty-five 
 of his poems — one-third of all — have been issued by his pub- 
 lishers in an excellent educational series for schoolboys and 
 schoolgirls, and that the notes are chiefly illustrative and not 
 the explanation of difficult thought, is proof positive that he 
 is at last one of the popular poets. He is no longer obscure, 
 except in certain of his higher mystic utterances, of which it 
 is the object of these papers to give interpretations. I 
 expressly omit passages which have heretofore anywhere 
 been cleared up. 
 
 Fifty years ago Emerson's poetry was a stumbling-block 
 and offence to all but a few. Professor Francis Bowen's 
 attempt to laugh Emerson down (in the North American 
 Review, April, 1847) affords one of the most delicious bits of 
 
THE AMBRICAN AUTHOR 
 
 fun of Transcendental times. It is, of course, a battering- 
 ram of rubber, knocking its author down by the recoil. He 
 patronizes Emerson, girds at him as a freak, a kind of 
 prestidigitator who was trying to win notoriety by startling 
 and surprising people. The funniest part of it all is his 
 solemn bewilderment over the most elementary common- 
 places of the idealistic philosophy. His avalanche of abuse 
 and ridicule was evidently intended as a crusher. He was 
 the proprietor of the Review and could beat the big drum as 
 he pleased : he writes in the catch-grin style of the anon- 
 ymous critic, and counts with good reason on guffaws of 
 approving laughter from the fellows with glue in their heads 
 for brains. At the very time he was writing, Rev. Cyrus A. 
 Bartol, Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, and Rev. Dr. F. H. Hedge 
 were printing warm etilogies of the new poetry as art, though 
 as strait-laced clerics they were scandalized by its heresies in 
 ethics and philosophy. Brownson, it is true, asserted that 
 Emerson was the hierophant to a set of neophytes made up 
 chiefly of "beardless young men and silly maidens with 
 pretty curls," and he and Bartol found the "Threnody" 
 infinitely sad, because technically non- Christian in tone ; but 
 Bartol admitted that " every touch of the pencil " in this 
 poem "draws a tear," and that "as a painting of grief it is 
 unrivalled"; while noble Dr. Hedge (the first to welcome 
 Emerson as a poet) had printed in 1845, two years before his 
 verse had appeared in book form at all, such sentences as 
 these : " He carols a lay that is tart and wholesome, and stirs 
 the blood with a keen delight, like a draught of morning air." 
 " To perceive a truth with him is to be on fire with it, is to 
 blaze with it ; it bursts from him in flashes of intense 
 illumination. Thought and word hang together like the 
 lightning and the thunder in a summer cloud." 
 
 There is one blemish in Emerson's verse that unfortunately 
 has a comic eifect, — his too frequent use of rhymes of the eye. 
 And the worst of it is that these cacophonies occasionally 
 haunt one's memory. But one can soon acquire the habit of 
 reading him by the eye and ignoring the false report to the 
 ear. The elevation and extreme beauty of the thought make 
 
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 a sympathetic reader forget the technique. Emerson's later 
 lyrics have a marvellous melody. Many of his terse epigrams 
 have long been proverbial. The diction is incompressible. 
 The verses have the symmetry of comb-honey, and the serried 
 lines are cells burdened with the nectar of thought. A kind 
 of ad unguem finish in them, a signet stamp of the predestined, 
 as if minted in the brain of Brahm. The sweet kernel of the 
 poems is a supreme ethics. They are clusters of edelweiss 
 on Alpine cliffs ; breathe also a fine sanity and pure patriot- 
 ism, and lie close to the heart and to the warm, familiar 
 landscape. The man who does not like Emerson's poetry 
 has not a shred of idealistic philosophy in his soul. 
 
 Lowell, in one of his reviews of Emerson, makes the re- 
 mark that his poems are not lyrical. He must have used the 
 word "lyrical" in its narrowest etymological sense. Emer- 
 son's poems on love, as well as his hymns, undoubtedly have 
 the lyrical quality; that is, they express personal emotion and 
 are suited for song or musical accompaniment. Then his 
 philosophical chants constitute what Theodore Watts, in his 
 admirable analytical study of poetry in the Encyclopadia 
 Britannica, calls " The Great Lyric." They are the outpour- 
 ing of the soul toward God by a man so possessed with spirit- 
 ual ideas, his soul so "imbathed with the fragrancy of 
 heaven," that he sees and feels little besides. 
 
 Let me hold up against the light a few of the occult pas- 
 sages of Emerson's lyrical chants, to detect the water-line 
 pattern within. 
 
 Initial, Demonic, and Celestial Love. 
 Briefly speaking, " Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love," 
 in Emerson's poem with that title, mean respectively the 
 physical or Cupid love, "whose roses bleach apace"; the 
 haughty, selfish love of mere beauty and intellect; and the 
 love of soul for soul, the high spiritual love, cool and philoso- 
 phical and godlike. A passage in the " Initial Love," on the 
 omens which Cupid consults, — 
 
 " And chance-dropped hints from Nature's sphere 
 Deeply soothe his anxious ear," — 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 is illustrated by a remark in the address on " The Method of 
 Nature" (1841), in which Love is pictured as consulting 
 " every omen in nature with tremulous interest."* And in 
 the following paragraph the " Daemonic Love " is in part pre- 
 figured: "And what is genius hut finer love, a love imper- 
 sonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a de- 
 sire to draw a new picture or copy of the same?" The 
 daemonic love is the fierce passion of an artist for the beauti- 
 ful; the proud and haughty love of the intellectual and the 
 beautiful and fortunate ones of earth. Emerson, taking up 
 the Platonic or Socratic idea of daimons, — i. e., ministering 
 spirits or guardian angels, holding a place intermediate 
 between gods and men,— attributes to them the origin of the 
 intellectual love. In plain prose and terms of psychology, the 
 daimon realm means simply the ratiocinative or cerebral 
 function. He gives us a hint of this: 
 
 " Close, close to men. 
 Like undulating layer of air. 
 Right above their heads 
 The potent plain of Daemons spreads." 
 
 " But God said, I will have a purer gift," a celestial love, based 
 on a trance-vision of the realm of pure being, the realm of 
 Brahm. Those possessing this illuminating love know each 
 other's thought without speech ; they live to universal ends, 
 and are never daunted by the vicissitudes of time. 
 
 Ptolemaic Imagery. 
 In this poem the sublime passage beginning, 
 "Deep, deep are loving eyes," 
 and going on with 
 
 " Higher far into the pure realm," 
 contains the whole Hindoo and Ptolemaic cosmogonies in a 
 nutshell. 
 
 * Mr. Geo. H. Browne, in his Emerson primer, has shown how many passages in Emerson's 
 poetry can be paralleled by corresponding passages in the prose. Sometimes the poet simply 
 ifts a line from his prose into his verse. For example, the closing words of the address on, 
 " Man the Reformer" are "to sow the sun and moon lor seeds." In "The Poet" occurs the hae 
 "He sowed the sun and moon for seeds." 
 
6 
 
 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 Speaking of the vision of the spiritual eyes, he says: 
 
 " Their reach shall yet be more profound, 
 And a vision without bound; 
 The axis of those eyes sun-clear 
 Be the axis of the sphere: 
 So shall the lights ye pour amain 
 Go, without check or intervals, 
 Through from the empyrean walls 
 Unto the same again." 
 
 He is speaking here in terms of the Ptolemaic astronomy; and 
 in intimating that those who perceive the vast love that hold 
 the universe together shall have eyes that pierce, light-swift, 
 from one side to the other of the empyrean, he more directly 
 follows Dante and Milton, who place outside of and ensphering 
 all of the conglobed crystalline shells of the Ptolemaic astron- 
 omers the empyreal heaven of luminous flame, where the 
 invisible God dwells. Emerson, in the lines above cited, calls 
 it, indeed, " the " sphere, so vast and all-inclusive is it. Dante 
 describes it in the " Convito," and in the last cantos of the 
 " Paradise," which picture the Celestial Rose of the redeemed 
 bathed in refulgent light. Milton says that under the burn- 
 ing wheels of the Son of God 
 
 " The steadfast Empyrean shook throughout." 
 
 Now, every sphere or globe is imagined to have an " axis," or 
 line running from circumference to circumference through 
 the centre, about which it revolves; and Emerson imagines 
 the vision as co-extensive with the empyreal sphere and fill- 
 ing it, so that the axis of the sphere and the axis of the vision 
 may be considered as identical. The supplanting of the 
 Ptolemaic theory of the universe by the Copernican and New- 
 tonian is quite recent. When Emerson was born, the theory 
 of universal gravitation had been established only one hun- 
 dred and eighteen years; and the literature read by a man 
 like him, who took all knowledge for his province, is full of 
 the old imagery. It is in nearly all our great poets, — Chaucer, 
 
THB AMBRICAN AUTHOR 
 
 Shakespeare, Milton.* Tennyson is the first eminent poet in 
 whose work no trace of the old Ptolemaic terminology ap- 
 pears. But not to go too far afield, we have here only to note 
 that in Ptolemy's scheme the eight planets of his day (we now 
 count between three and four hundred) each swiftly revolved 
 in a rigid transparent sphere, or crystalline shell, in which it 
 was immovably set, and that through each shell of the con- 
 centric whole the motions of the other planets set in the 
 other shells could be discerned. These huge hyaline domes 
 revolving above our heads were as invisible as air, of course; 
 no one had seen them. The fixed stars were thickly im- 
 bedded in the ninth shell, or sphere. Over all was the tenth 
 sphere, or primuin mobile, which, firmly attached to the 
 others, formed a kind of driving-wheel for the whole globular 
 Chinese puzzle, carrying it around once in twenty-four hours. 
 The number of spheres differed with different scholars. 
 Dante's was a nine-sphere system, and his primuni mobile Vf&s 
 the ninth sphere instead of the tenth. 
 
 The Wheel or Being. 
 Returning to Emerson's " Celestial Love," and reading on, — 
 
 " Higher far into the pure realm 
 Over sun and star, 
 Over the flickering Daemon film 
 Thou must mount for love," — 
 
 you discover that you have left behind and far down the sev- 
 eral spheres, and are in what corresponds to the primum 
 mobile of the Ptolemaists or the empyrean of Dante, and are 
 
 " In a region where the wheel 
 On which all beings ride 
 Visibly revolves; 
 Where the starred eternal worm 
 Girds the world with bound and term, 
 Where unlike things are like," etc. 
 
 Is this " wheel " ^& primum mobile on which you may be sup- 
 posed to be looking down from the always immovable em- 
 
 • See a study by me of Shakespeare's astronomy in Pott-hre magazine for July, igoi. 
 
8 THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 pyrean ? We might think so if, knowing Emerson's Oriental 
 studies, we had not our eyes sharpened for Hindoo imagery 
 in his lyric oracles. The whirling of the stars athwart the 
 sky of night early suggested to the Hindoos the wheel-symbol 
 of the universe, their fire-wheel myth. I think I have put my 
 finger on the very passage in the Rig Veda which Emerson 
 had in mind,— «. e., the lines which speak of " the triple-naved 
 everlasting Wheel that nothing can arrest, on which repose all 
 beings" ("Night of the Gods," ii. 597). I find, also, in the 
 Smetaswatara Upanishad, that the Universal Soul is spoken 
 of as a wheel. Indeed, it is a frequently used symbol in 
 Brahminical literature, and especially common in Buddhistic 
 books. It was also a symbol of metempsychosis, or the con- 
 tinuous birth of individual souls, and recalls in that aspect 
 of it a curious passage of Walt Whitman's " Song of Myself," 
 which appears only in the first quarto of nearly half a cen- 
 tury ago: 
 
 " Eternity lies in bottomless reservoirs ; its buckets are 
 rising forever and ever. 
 They pour and they pour and they exhale away." 
 
 The " Starred Eternal Worm." 
 The two lines of Emerson quoted above — 
 
 " Where the starred eternal worm 
 Girds the world with bound and term " — 
 
 are unquestionably the most difficult in the whole body of 
 his poetry. In the first place, let us define one or two terms. 
 By "worm" he, of course, means serpent. No reader of 
 Chaucerian or Elizabethan literature needs to be told that 
 " worm " is time and again used as a synonym for " serpent " 
 by writers of those epochs. As for " world," it is probably 
 used in its old sense of "universe," a meaning which sur- 
 vives the time when the Ptolemaic theory was prevalent, 
 and the earth was spoken of as "this center" (as so often 
 in Shakespeare), and " world " and " universe " were synony- 
 mous terms, the stars revolving about the earth, and being 
 subordinate to it. But what is " the starred eternal worm " ? 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 Not, apparently, the Midgard Serpent of Norse mythology, 
 which lay at the bottom of the sea, coiled about the Midgard, 
 or earth ; and not the constellation of " Ophiucus huge," the 
 serpent of the northern sky ; nor Milky Way coiled about the 
 earth. It is in the stupendous serpent-god Sesha of the Hin- 
 doos that I find a more probable clew. Sesha is described 
 in H. H. Wilson's translation of the Vishnu Purana (pp. 204- 
 206), which we know Emerson used for his poem " Hama- 
 treya," as a thousand-headed serpent floating on the fathom- 
 less sea of immensity ; on these heads of Sesha, Vishnu 
 sleeps in the intervals of his creative activity. " Sesha," says 
 the Purana, " bears the entire world, like a diadem, upon his 
 head, and he is the foundation on which the seven Patalas 
 [under regions] rest. His power, his glory, his form, his na- 
 ture, cannot be described, cannot be comprehended, by the 
 gods themselves." This divinity taught astronomy to the 
 sage Garga. " The thousand jewels in his crests give light 
 to all the regions"; "he shines like the white mountains 
 topped with flame." Coiled about the universe, his head 
 blazing with innumerable lights, this serpent is clearly the 
 " starred eternal worm " Emerson vaguely limns. 
 
 As disembodied spirits, then, swift-winged as light, we are 
 sweeping on through the sunny .^on ; far down, the little 
 glow-worm lamp of earth recedes with its insect hum about 
 good and evil. We are in a region 
 
 " Where good and ill, 
 And joy and moan. 
 Melt into one. 
 
 Their Past, Present, Future shoot 
 Triple blossoms from one root ; 
 Substances at base divided 
 In their summits are united." 
 
 In the fourth and fifth of these lines we have, curiously, 
 the exact converse of the Norse idea. In Scandinavian my- 
 thology the ash Ygdrasil (the tree of existence) rises from 
 three fountain-nourished roots which symbolize what was 
 done, what is done, and what will be done ; while in Emer- 
 
10 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 son there is one root to the tree of existence and its three 
 blossoming branches skooi downward, so to speak, from the 
 empyrean. So in the Katha Upanishad (from which, as we shall 
 see, Emerson quarried his " Brahma " poem) the sixth " Valli " 
 begins, " It [the world] is like an eternal holy fig-tree, whose 
 root is upwards and whose branches go downward " (Bibli- 
 otheca Indicd). But in the last two lines above quoted 
 Emerson reverses his image, and then it tallies the Norse 
 idea. All four lines simply mean, of course, that to the 
 Absolute Being there is no past, no present, no future, no good, 
 no evil. A little farther on in the poem we have an allusion to 
 Plato's world of perfect types, and a hint that the " gods " 
 have no real existence apart from the Supreme. 
 
 This mystic dithyramb closes with two lines which are ob- 
 scure only to those unread in Emerson's prose : 
 "The circles of that sea are laws 
 Which publish and which hide the cause." 
 
 A law is an abstract idea or generalization to express the 
 regular succession of any set of phenomena. "Circles," in 
 the Emersonian terlninology, mean the eternal laws of pro- 
 gression, the growth of thought and action outward and on- 
 ward in ever-widening sweep. In the realm of the absolute 
 (he says in the lines we are considering) the methods of de- 
 velopment, the mode of manifestation, of the hidden Cause 
 are laws which announce that a cause is there, yet also serve 
 as an Isis veil drawn forever over the Unrevealable. 
 
 Brahma. 
 
 In 1886 I discovered in a volume of the Bibliotheca Indica 
 (Calcutta, 1852) the particular translation of the Katha 
 Upanishad used by Emerson in writing his " Brahma. " This 
 poem saw the light in the first issue of the A tlantic Monthly 
 in 1857. In Vol. XV. No. 41 of the Bibliotheca may be 
 read : — 
 
 " If the slayer thinks I slay, if the slain thinks I am slain, 
 then both of them do not know well. It [the soul] does not 
 slay nor is it slain." 
 
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR ^^ 
 
 Emerson's stanza reads, — 
 
 " If the red slayer think he slays, 
 Or if the slain think he is slain, 
 They know not well the subtle ways 
 I keep and pass, and turn again." 
 
 In other Upanishads — e. g., the Isa — in the same volume, you 
 will find other sentiments expressed in " Brahma," and in al- 
 most the identical words. Dr. William T. Harris finds the 
 source of " Brahma " in the second chapter of the Bhagavad- 
 gita. This work is a dialogue between Krishna and the 
 warrior Arjuna, which embodies, it is true, the doctrines of 
 the Vedic Upanishads written two thousand years previous, 
 and which virtually quotes the passage above given from the 
 Katha Upanishad. But the English translation quoted by 
 Dr. Harris contains few or no words used by Emerson in his 
 poem. It reads : " He who believes that this spirit can kill, 
 and he who thinks that it can be killed, both of these are 
 wrong in judgment." Nor in any other citations does Dr. 
 Harris show much, if any, closer identity between Emerson's 
 poem and the Bhagavadgita selections than a general re- 
 semblance in thought. But listen to what the Calcutta trans- 
 lation says of Self : " It is far beyond what is far and near 
 here." Emerson: "Far or forgot to me is near." The 
 Upanishad says : " If Brahma is known to be the nature of 
 every thought, he is comprehended." Emerson : " I am the 
 doubter and the doubt." The Upanishad says : " Sitting, it 
 f the soul] goes afar; sleeping, it goes everywhere." Emer- 
 son (in the " Song of Nature ") : 
 
 " I rest on the pitch of the torrent, 
 In slumber I am strong." 
 
 Dr. Harris reminds us, in the volume published by the 
 Concord School of Philosophy, that " the red slayer " is a 
 member of the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste of India ; that 
 "the strong gods" of the poem are Indra, Agni, and Yama ; 
 and " the sacred seven " are the seven Maharshis, or highest 
 saints. 
 
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 Nothing could better show how mystified the practical 
 New England business man was (and is) by the metaphysics 
 of " Brahma " than the incident told by Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol 
 (in the Critic, 1888) to the effect that, when Emerson's pub- 
 lishers were about to issue his Selected Poems in 1876, they 
 asked him to omit "Brahma," because it had excited such 
 ridicule ! He firmly insisted that it must be retained, what- 
 ever else went by the board. To the Hindoo, of the reader 
 of Hindoo scriptures, " Brahma " is only an elementary primer 
 of metaphysics. 
 
 The Sphinx. 
 
 Emerson's " Sphinx " was published -first in the Dial in 
 1 841. His winged Sphinx of course stands for Nature, and 
 her prototype is not one of the Egyptian sphinxes 
 (which were never winged and were merely symbolical 
 creatures), but the riddle-propounding Sphinx, the winged 
 lion with the face and intelligence of a woman, sent by 
 Hera to ravage the territory of the Thebans. She exists 
 in sculpture to this day, with her thick sensual lips 
 ("The old Sphinx bit her thick lip," says Emerson). That 
 he had in mind as the basis of his metaphor a sculptured 
 form of the Theban Sphinx is shown in a line of the 
 poem, — "And crouched no more in stone," — unless, indeed, 
 we infer that he for a moment forgot, and confused 
 the Theban Sphinx with the famous thick-lipped colossus 
 near the Pyramid of Gizeh. But then this is an andro- 
 sphinx, or male, while his is female. This cruel mythical 
 monster was wont, it will be remembered, to sit on a hill by 
 the roadside in Theban territory, and as often as the Greeks 
 failed in their attempts to answer her riddle she carried off 
 one of their number and devoured him. The riddle " What 
 animal is at once four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed, 
 and is weakest when it has most feet ? " was answered by 
 CEdipus, who replied that it was man, who creeps upon all- 
 fours when an infant and carries a cane when old. When her 
 secret was discovered, the Sphinx flung herself headlong 
 from the hill and perished. This story applies very well to 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 13 
 
 Nature, who devours her children one by one, — only Aer rid- 
 dle is forever unanswered. In the poem the drowsy old dame, 
 who has nodded and nodded through the centuries, calls for 
 some one to tell her secret. A poet takes up her challenge, 
 and, setting the slug-horn to his lips, peals a jubilant reply, — 
 that Love working at the centre of things and underneath all 
 is the key. In the dual of wits between the Sphinx and the 
 Poet we are scarcely left in doubt as to which is victorious, 
 for the Sphinx sarcastically remarks that no one has yet told 
 one of her meanings. (" Her secret is untold. Many and 
 many an CEdipus arrives; he has the whole mystery teeming 
 in his brain. Alas ! ... no syllable can he shape on his 
 lips," says Emerson, in " Nature."). Having thus delivered 
 herself, she kicks up her heels, and departs with a grin of 
 malicious humor on her face. As she goes, the poet turns his 
 magic tube of Prince Ahmed and sees her metamorphosed 
 into star, cloud, mountain, and wave. We are left to infer 
 that, like her prototype, she gobbled the poet sooner or later. 
 For she had reminded him that instead of answering the 
 question-riddle with his reply of Love at the centre he was not 
 competent to reply at all, since he was but a part of her (Na- 
 ture) and so a part of the riddle-question or mystery itself. 
 If he could only see and really know his physical eye, know 
 that it only belonged to the phenomenal, or illusory, world, 
 he would know that a solution obtained by means of its re- 
 ports could not be of absolute value. She then gives utter- 
 ance to what is probably the profoundest expression of pure 
 Kantian idealism ever made in poetry: — 
 
 " So take thy quest through nature. 
 It through thousand natures ply; 
 Ask on, thou clothed eternity; 
 Time is the false reply." 
 
 The lines sum up all the philosophies: The maya of the Hin- 
 doos is here, the Berkeleyan idealism, the Fichtean egoism, 
 and the Spencerian agnosticism. Because that fragment of 
 the Infinite Soul is swathed about with maya, or nature, it 
 cannot understand the Noumenon, the real. Only the Bound- 
 
14 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 less, the Causeless, can comprehend itself ; the clothed, or 
 embodied, fragments of it cannot do so. Except this bit of 
 philosophical idealism and a statement of the polarity of 
 atoms, there is really nothing obscure, even to a mere tyro in 
 philosophy; a Freshman can see through the tropes that an- 
 nounce that matter and spirit, the objective and the subjec- 
 tive, are one. 
 
 " Ever the Rock of Ages melts 
 Into the mineral air, 
 To be the quarry whence to build 
 Thought and its mansions fair." 
 
 Two or three stanzas of " The Sphinx " were amended after 
 the first publication. The line " Rue, myrrh, and cummin for 
 the Sphinx," was originally " Hemlock and vitriol for the 
 Sphinx," her muddy eyes to clear. This was a little too 
 rough on the poor old cummer. The words substituted are 
 all carefully chosen, and are names of tonic or stimulating 
 preparations. In the last verse-group but one, for the lines 
 
 " She melted into purple cloud, 
 She silvered in the moon," 
 
 one is astonished and amused to read in the form the verse 
 has in the Dial the following: — 
 
 " She hopped into the baby's eyes, 
 She hopped into the moon " ! 
 
 This was one of those quaint caprices and audacious half 
 s^oriivejeux d' esprit with which Emerson as lecturer and poet 
 was wont to startle people. But it had a bathetic effect, and 
 he removed it. The line "To insight profounder" at first 
 read " Profounder, profounder." 
 
 Merlin. 
 
 At the close of the second part of " Merlin " are some won- 
 derful lines, which years ago I tried to interpret. I now see 
 that my interpretation was wrong. The lines are these : — 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 15 
 
 " Subtle rhymes with ruin rife 
 Murmur in the house of life, 
 Sung by the Sisters as they spin ; 
 In perfect time and measure they 
 Build and unbuild our echoing clay, 
 As the two twilights of the day 
 Fold us music-drunken in." 
 
 The " house of life " is not the world, or Nature, as I hastily 
 concluded, but man's body. Compare this stanza from W. R. 
 Alger's Specimens of Oriental Poetry: — 
 
 "A pilgrim through eternity 
 In countless births have I been born, 
 And toiled the Architect to see 
 Who builds my soul's live house in scorn. " 
 
 In the first part of " Merlin," Emerson had drawn a picture 
 of the kingly bard who does not give his time chiefly to the 
 petty counting of feet and the jingling of rhymes ; " he shall 
 aye climb for his rhyme." In the second part he shows how, 
 nevertheless, rhyme runs through Nature : everything is 
 paired, leaf with leaf, hand with hand, thought with thought, 
 and, 
 
 " Perfect-paired as eagle's wings. 
 Justice is the rhyme of things." 
 
 Then, finally, he adds that, even in our bodies, the waste and 
 repair of the tissues, the building and unbuilding of the clay 
 by the Parcae, or Fates, goes on in a kind of measure and 
 rhyme, a music so rhythmic that you fancy you hear the 
 " echoing " of the atoms as they dance, " Rhyme the pipe, and 
 Time the warder." In the preceding portion of Part II he 
 has already passed in review the macrocosm and shown the 
 universality of rhyme. Then he closes by looking into the 
 microcosm — man— and finds the same music there. As in 
 Prospero's island, earth and air and our very bodies are full 
 of music, and " the two twilights of the day," dawn and dusk, 
 " Fold us music-drunken in." 
 
16 THB AMBRICAN AUTHOR 
 
 If any one, by the way, wonder why Merlin is chosen as 
 the type of a poet by Emerson, he must remember that 
 Merlin (or Myrdhinn) figures both as the enchanter of the 
 Arthurian romances and as a Welsh, bard. Mr. Emerson's 
 son tells us that his father read the existing fragments of old 
 Myrdhinn, the bard, and enjoyed them. 
 
 The Nun's Aspiration. 
 
 I am almost ashamed to say that, until my friend William 
 Rounseville Alger called my attention to Emerson's " Nun's 
 Aspiration," I had wholly missed the marvelous Uranian 
 imagery, the subtle mysticism, of the latter half of that poem, 
 owing, I suppose, to the extreme and deceptive simplicity of 
 the diction and the condensation of thought. (Mr. Alger 
 showed me in MS. three or four quarto pages of an attempted 
 interpretation by a well-known speculative philosopher which 
 I thought a mere darkening of counsel). "The Nun, tired of 
 the conditioned life, apostrophizes Time, saluting him as she 
 passes out at the close of mortal life into infinite space,^ 
 
 " Which mocks thy aeons to embrace ; 
 ^ons which tardily unfold 
 Realm beyond realm, — extent untold ; 
 No early mom, no evening late, — 
 Realms self -upheld, disdaining Fate, 
 Whose shining sons, too great for fame, 
 Never heard thy weary name ; 
 Nor lives the tragic bard to say 
 How drear the part I held in one, 
 How lame the other limped away." 
 
 What a marvelous attempt is this to picture Eternity ! The 
 pied wings of Time droop wearily as they beat the infinite 
 void of space and never reach its bounds. The only obscur- 
 ity is in the last two lines, where the second person is dropped, — 
 as if the lines were an after thought, almost. But the idea is 
 clear to me. The last line refers to time, the next to the 
 last to space ; that is all. 
 
THE AMBRICAN AUTHOR 17 
 
 Experience. 
 
 There are some cryptic thoughts in Emerson's lines on 
 Experience which emerge from their obscurity when we pass 
 into them certain Rontgen rays from the prose essay to which 
 they were originally prefixed. In my own well-worn pocket 
 edition of the poems I have written over these Delphic verses 
 the key-words, " Mind is King." 
 
 " The lords of life, the lords of life,— 
 I saw them pass. 
 In their own guise, 
 Like and unlike, 
 Portly and grim, — 
 Use and Surprise, 
 Surface and Dream, 
 Succession swift and Spectral Wrong, 
 Temperament without a tongue. 
 And the inventor of the game 
 Omnipresent without name; — 
 Some to see, some to be guessed. 
 They marched from east to west: 
 Little man, least of all. 
 Among the legs of his gftardians tall, 
 Walked about with puzzled look; 
 Him by the hand dear Nature took, 
 Dearest Nature, strong and kind, 
 Whispered, ' Darling, never mind ! 
 To-morrow they will wear another face, 
 The founder thou; these are thy race ! ' " 
 
 Emerson, from his tripod, gives us here a kind of masque 
 to shadow forth the underlying thought of his knotty and 
 incoherent essay with the same title, — that mind, the soul, is 
 the only real existence, the world of experience only phantas- 
 magorial, illusory; as we look at it through the colored lenses 
 of our moods, we paint it with our own hues; Nature likes to 
 mystify us; we walk as in a dream, souls never getting into 
 
18 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 actual contact with their objects. At the close of the essay 
 he sums up as follows: "Illusion, Temperament, Succession, 
 Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are the threads on the loom 
 of time, these are the lords of life." But, although these 
 grave-faced giants lord it over little man, yet by virtue of his 
 soul-identity with the All-soul, and speaking in its name, he 
 can proudly claim to be their creator. Wrong is called " spec- 
 tral " in the poem because, in Emerson's opinion, evil is only 
 apparent, eventuates in good. "Temperament" is tongue- 
 less; it cannot describe itself in words or be described; it 
 colors your life and makes you what you are, gives you your 
 individuality; you inherit it and it gives the fatal limit to 
 your powers. But as in the essay he escapes at the close into 
 moral freedom through the door of the will opening into the 
 Infinite Will, so in the poem he closes with the thought that 
 the Soul may be deemed to be the master even of Tempera- 
 ment, since Temperament is its creature. The idea in the 
 phrase "The inventor of the game Omnipresent without 
 name " is rather obscure, but not unintelligible. The game 
 is, I suppose, the game of life, the game of ghosts, or rather 
 of the one Ghost in multitudinous forms, — the omnipresent 
 Will executing itself in time and space. Tennyson cries, " Do 
 we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a 
 game?" Emerson sees and says that we and that which 
 moves us are one organically connected power. In this very 
 essay on Experience he affirms, " I would allow the most to 
 the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this 
 chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, 
 than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal." 
 But at any rate the inventor and the game are nameless. The 
 living Universe, in its Deianeira-robe of flame, whirls on and 
 on through immensity, the atoms of its body bright a maze 
 of flashing wheels and orbs, " boundless inward in the atom, 
 boundless outward in the whole," self-moving, and on the 
 surface of its cooled atom-globes now masquerading for a 
 million years for sport in fantastic sauroids and ferns, and 
 now flinging its essence into the brain of a Shakespeare or a 
 Plato and weaving on silent loom a bunch of lilies or a sun- 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 19 
 
 set sky. But what the end, the motive of it all is (and there 
 seems to be one), we know not at all. We call it the game of 
 life. Yet that explains nothing. 
 
 The dread " Inventor " of the game is classed by Emerson 
 with the other lords of life, or related to them, in this way, I 
 think : The word " Subjectiveness," in the essay-summary 
 quoted above, seems plainlyto tally the word "inventor" in the 
 poem. By subjectivity, in the essay, he means first the seeing 
 things, not as they are in themselves, but as they seem when 
 filtered through our moods. Then he personifies this subjective- 
 ness as one of the lords of life, and in the poem sinks the plum- 
 met still deeper, and, identifying the subjective in man with the 
 All-soul and with " Reality," speaks of it as the inventor of 
 the game of life. Considered as a mere terrestrial entity, 
 may this Osiris upstaring in all eyes, this soul, this " Ideal 
 journeying always with us," be regarded as coordinate with 
 the other lords of life, — Use and Surprise, Surface and 
 Dream ? Or rather is it not regarded as the " founder " and 
 master of these ? Emerson certainly seems in the last line 
 of his verses to coordinate it with the rest. His veiled 
 phantom, the Inventor, appears in the procession with the 
 other powers of nature, and seems in truth to be the Absolute 
 Soul in masque, the Soul in one of its demiurgic manifesta- 
 tions. If so, then the soul of man by virtue of its vital 
 psychic union with tke whole of the Absolute Soul is lord of 
 this dread Inventor also, as well as of the other powers of 
 life. (Compare the close of the mystic oracle in "Initial 
 Daemonic, and Celestial Love," beginning "Higher far into 
 the pure realm.") 
 
 In making his guardians tall move from east to west, 
 Emerson hints, I suppose, at the fact that the march of 
 intellect has steadily been from Orient to Occident. It is 
 only in our own day that the great trek has ended, and we 
 now stand, with hand over eyes, gazing far over the blue 
 Pacific to the ancestral home whence ages ago we set out. 
 
 The phantasmal lords of life of this poem " Experience " 
 were presumably suggested to Emerson by the following 
 lines from Tennyson's "Mystic," published in 1830 (Emerson 
 
20 THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 imported these early volumets of young Tennyson, and never 
 tired of praising them to his friends) : — 
 
 " Always there stood before him, night and day. 
 Of wayward vary-colored circumstance 
 The imperishable presences serene. 
 Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound, 
 Dim shadows but unwaning presences 
 Four-facSd to four corners of the sky." 
 
 The "silent congregated hours," "daughters of time, 
 divinely tall," with " severe and youthful brows," in this same 
 poem of Tennyson gave Emerson his "daughters of Time, 
 the hypocritic Days," congregated in procession. Tennyson's 
 mystic, who hears " time flowing in the middle of the night,'' 
 recalls Emerson's "Two Rivers," in which the living All, 
 the Infinite Soul, is figured as a stream flowing through 
 eternity : — 
 
 " I hear the spending of the stream. 
 Through years, through men, through nature fleet, 
 Through love and thought, through power and dream." 
 
 Wealth. 
 
 At the close of the poem " Wealth " there is a bit of scien- 
 tific nature-ethics which is a little obscure. The greater part 
 of the poem is a series of graphic pictures, detailing the 
 process of world-development through the geologic ages 
 down to the advent of man. Suddenly, at the end, — ^just as 
 at the end of the prose essay on the same subject, — he remem- 
 bers his manners and makes his bow to the august Soul, kin- 
 dles a light in the Geissler tube of nature, sets it aglow inte- 
 riorly with spiritual law: — 
 
 " But, though light-headed man forget. 
 Remembering Matter pays her debt: 
 Still, through her motes and masses, draw 
 Electric thrills and ties of Law, 
 Which bind the strength of Nature wild 
 To the conscience of a child." 
 
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 21 
 
 The logical link connecting this part with the rest has 
 dropped out in the poem, but is clear enough in the essay. 
 The lines naean simply this : that, though man may forget to 
 obey the laws of the universe, Nature never forgets her debt 
 of obedience; she bites and stings the transgressor and caresses 
 and soothes him who obeys. In her own submission to law 
 she has that artlessness and quasi-moral sense that afRnes 
 her to the moral nature of a child. The " awful victors " and 
 " Eternal Rights " of " Voluntaries ' are only " remembering 
 Matter" in another mask: with all their innocent obedience 
 they are themselves terrible executors: — 
 
 " They reach no term, they never sleep, 
 In equal strength through space abide; 
 Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep, 
 The strong they slay, the swift outstride." 
 
 God is All. 
 In the following high pantheistic strain the seer chants 
 the old rune that God is all:— 
 
 " The living Heaven thy prayers respect. 
 House at once and architect, 
 Quarrying man's rejected hours, 
 Builds therewith eternal towers; 
 Sole and self-commanded works, 
 Fears not undermining days, 
 Grows by decays. 
 
 And, by the famous might that lurks 
 In reaction and recoil, 
 Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil; 
 Forging, through swart arms of Offence, 
 The silver seat of Innocence." 
 
 Spiritual Laws. 
 
 When the Living Universe builds a house, it builds it out 
 of its own soul substance; while man sleeps and loiters, the 
 Unconscious ceaselessly toils. In the phrase "grows by 
 decays," Emerson embodies, I believe, the law of the conser- 
 vation of energy. The magazine of divine power is exhaust- 
 
22 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 less; does energy sink out of sight here, it is only to reappear 
 yonder; the tree decays, but out of its fertilizing substance 
 new plants may spring up; the coal under the steam boiler of 
 the locomotive is consumed, but the swart goblin has lost no 
 wit of his might: he just slips darkling up into the stream, 
 makes the driving-rods his swift-shuttling arms, and, grasping 
 with his steel fingers the felloes of the wheel, whirls you half 
 a thousand miles over the green bulge of the earth ere set of 
 sun. The mystic Power grows by decays; and also, by " the 
 famous might that lurks in reaction and recoil," reconciles 
 apparent antinomies and opposites, and is the agent that 
 visits evil upon the head of the evil doer and mercy upon the 
 merciful. If a heavy body be rolled up an inclined plane, it 
 acquires potential and kinetic energy just equal to the force 
 expended in getting it there, and in reaction develops such a 
 famous might that, if massive enough, it will knock you 
 down if you stand in its way. If you lift the big pendulum of 
 the clock in the corner, you also confer latent, or reactionary, 
 energy upon it. Only it is of course hyperbolical for the poet 
 to say that reaction is potent enough to actually freeze flame 
 and make ice boil your kettle. That is only one of Emerson's 
 rhetorical Chinese crackers, his startling thaumaturgic way of 
 illustrating his thesis. 
 
 The key-thought of the essay " Spiritual Laws," to which 
 the occult lines we are considering were prefixed, is. Be 
 noble ; for, if you are not, your face and life will, by the law 
 of reaction and return, publish your lapse. Punishment and 
 reward are fruits that ripen unsuspected in the deeds of 
 men. 
 
 Merops. 
 
 The pertinency and application of many of Emerson's 
 titles are not at once apparent. I am indebted to a private 
 note from Prof. Charles Eliot Norton for the cue to Emer- 
 son's " Merops." I had (I believe, erroneously) been trying 
 to connect it with the mythological personage Merops, the 
 putative father of Phaethon. But it evidently is used in its 
 significance as a common noun, its meaning in Greek being 
 " speaking," " articulate." 
 
THB AMBRICAN AUTHOR 
 
 23 
 
 Alphonso of Castile. 
 " Alphonso of Castile " is a dramatic monologue containing 
 a whimsical suggestion for compounding a Man out of ordinary 
 weak-timbered manikins by killing nine in ten of them and 
 " stuffing nine brains in one hat." It is put into the 
 mouth of Alphonso, King of Castile, born in 1221, called .£/ 
 Sabio, " The Wise." He was a man who suffered much in his 
 life. He wrote a famous code of laws, and first made the 
 Castilian a national language by causing the Bible to be 
 translated into it. Emerson chooses him as the vehicle of his 
 own whimsey about the condensed homun cuius chiefly on ac- 
 count of one famous sentence attributed to him : " Had I 
 been present at the creation, I could have given some useful 
 hints for the better ordering of the universe." Emerson, in 
 his rhymed soliloquy, put into Alphonso's mouth, sar- 
 castically twits Nature with her depleted stocks, her run out- 
 strains of lemons, figs, roses, and men. The remedy pro- 
 posed in the case of man, and outlined above, has the true 
 Emerson-Swift bouquet or race, is colored and veined with a 
 right Shakespearian scorn of the mob. 
 
 MiTHRIDATES. 
 
 " Mithridates " is a monologue put into the mouth of 
 Mithridates the Great, King of Pontus, who is said to have 
 discovered an antidote for poisons which made him poison, 
 proof against his many enemies: 
 
 " I cannot spare water or wine. 
 Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose; 
 From the earth-poles to the line. 
 
 All between that works or grows, 
 Everything is kin of mine. 
 
 Give me agates for my meat; 
 Give me cantharids to eat; 
 From air and ocean bring me foods, 
 From all zones and altitudes." 
 
 As late as 1787 " mithridate " was the name for an anti- 
 dote against poison included in the London pharmacopoeia. 
 
24 
 
 THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 In Jonson's " Every Man in his Humour," Kitely, thinking he 
 is poisoned, calls for mithridate and oil. It was composed of 
 many ingredients and given in the form of electuaries. In 
 our modern pharmacopoeias we have plenty of antidotes 
 against virulent poisons ; e. g., atropine for the deadly ama- 
 nita mushroom. And counter-poisons are often used, as the 
 tincture of foxglove for aconite, atropine for morphia, or 
 morphia for belladonna. According to the tradition, Mithri- 
 dates gradually inured his system to counter-poisons, and be- 
 came poison-proof. At any rate, Emerson uses him for his 
 metaphor, which, in untropical speech, is this : " I am tired 
 of the namby-pamby and goody-goody ; give me things 
 strong and rank ; give me evil for a change and a spur." 
 
 " Too long shut in strait and few, 
 Thinly dieted on dew, 
 I will use the world, and sift it. 
 To a thousand humors shift it, 
 As you spin a cherry. 
 O doleful ghosts and goblins merry ! 
 O all you virtues, methods, mights. 
 Means, appliances, delights. 
 
 Reputed wrongs and braggart rights, 
 Smug routine, and things allowed, 
 Minorities, things under cloud ! 
 Hither ! take rre, use me, fill me, 
 Vein and artery, though ye kill me ! " 
 
 In brief, " I have run the gauntlet of experience, sounded all 
 the depths of passion, joy, woe, evil. I am dipped in Styx, 
 more invulnerable than Siegfried, and strong now to use the 
 world and be used by it." The mood of the poem is the wild 
 longing that sometimes comes over the good man to break 
 loose and have his fling, come what may, cry, Vive la baga- 
 telle I or run amuck and tilt at all he meets. It is needless 
 to say that the staid Emerson never carried this mood farther 
 than to smoke a cigar now and then, or take an Adirondack 
 outing. His contemporary, the untrammelled Whitman, 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 25 
 
 could both preach and practise (within the bounds of reason) 
 the Mithridatic doctrine ; and he was a more richly experi- 
 enced and symmetrical man in consequence. 
 
 The last two lines of " Mithridates," as printed from the 
 autograph copy, were, — 
 
 " God ! I will not be an owl. 
 But sun me in the Capitol." 
 These lines Emerson wisely dropped. 
 
 Forerunners. 
 " Forerunners " (" Long I followed happy guides ") mean 
 one's brave hopes and ideals of good to come, our dreams 
 and aspirations. The lines 
 
 " No speed of mine avails 
 To hunt upon their shining trails " 
 Thoreau evidently utilized as text for his well-known fable 
 in Walden of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove. 
 
 Hermione. 
 The portrait of Hermione, the patient-sweet wife of Leontes 
 in " The Winter's Tale " of Shakespeare, serves Emerson, in 
 his poem " Hermione," as the model of a perfect wife, and a 
 more acceptable one to this age than Chaucer's abject Gri- 
 selda. Such a lady as Shakespeare's Hermione, beautiful in 
 person and of rare self-control and virtue, is an adumbration 
 or epitome of the universal beauty. Looking at nature, the 
 American poet finds the features of his Hermione there : 
 " mountains and the misty plains. Her colossal portraiture." 
 I suppose that this sketch, tender and delicately toned as if 
 with a silver point, is autobiographical, and is a shadowing 
 forth of the character of Emerson's first wife, the ethereal- 
 souled Ellen Tucker, who died of consumption after only a 
 year and a half of married life. When her " meteor glances 
 came," he says, he was " hermit vowed to books and gloom," 
 and dwelling alone. In the lines 
 " The chains of kind 
 The distant bind ; 
 Deed thou doest she must do," 
 
26 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 he anticipates (does he not?) the telepathy of our days, — 
 kindred minds seeking similar places and thinking like 
 thoughts, although in this case, to be sure, the kindred soul is 
 thought of as merged with the inorganic world, — the winds 
 and waterfalls and twilight nooks. 
 
 The Persian Tinge in Emerson. 
 Search the whole world through, you shall find no prede- 
 cessor of Emerson the poet. The only verse resembling his 
 in general style is that of the enigmatic " Phoenix and the 
 Turtle," attributed to Shakespeare, and much admired by 
 Emerson : — 
 
 " Let the bird of loudest lay. 
 On the sole Arabian tree. 
 Herald sad and trumpet be. 
 To whose sound chaste wings obey." 
 Emerson's verses have also a slight Persian tinge now and 
 then, caught from his studies of Saadi and Hafiz. In his fine 
 lyric cry " Bacchus," in which he calls for a wine of life, a 
 cup of divine soma or amrita, that shall sinew his brain and 
 exalt all his powers of thought and action to a godlike pitch, — 
 " Bring me wine, but wine which never grew 
 In the belly of the grape. 
 
 That I intoxicated. 
 
 And by the draught assimilated. 
 
 May float at pleasure through all natures; 
 
 Quickened so, will I unlock 
 
 Every crypt of every rock," — 
 he unconsciously gave his lines, I think, the outward form of 
 some verses by Hafiz, in which that singer intimates that, 
 give him the right kind of wine, and he can perform wonders 
 as if with Solomon's ring or Jemschid's, wine-cup mirror. 
 Emerson himself in one of his early editions gives a spirited 
 verse translation of Hafiz's poem. Mr. William R. Alger 
 (Specimens of Oriental Poetry, Boston, 18^6) translates Hafiz 
 thus : — 
 
THB AMERICAN AUTHOR ^7 
 
 " Bring me wine! By my puissant arm 
 The thick net of deceit and of harm 
 Which the priests have spread over the world 
 Shall be rent and in laughter be hurled. 
 Bring me wine! I the earth will subdue. 
 Bring me wine! I the heaven will storm through. 
 Bring me wine, bring it quick, make no halt! 
 To the throne of both worlds will I vault. 
 All is in the red streamlet divine. 
 Bring me wine! O my host, bring me wine! " 
 
 Etienne de la Boece. 
 
 " Etienne de la Bo^ce" gets its title (with Emersonian vari- 
 ations) from the name of one of Montaigne's most intimate 
 friends, — Estienne de la Boetie. Montaigne tells us about 
 him in chapter xxvii of his Essays, affirming that he would 
 have accomplished miracles, had he lived. He died when 
 only thirty-three at Bordeaux (1563). His scholarship was 
 solid, his translations from the Greek excellent. He was so 
 eager to read Greek that he copied whole volumes with his 
 own hand. A French critic says, " Les quality que brillaient 
 en lui imprimaient a toutes a personne un cachet distingu6 et 
 un charme severe." Yet he seems to have been something of 
 an imitator of his great friend; and it is in this aspect of his 
 life that Emerson regards him, using him, perhaps somewhat 
 unjustly to his powers and developing genius, as the type of 
 a too imitative disciple: — 
 
 " I serve you not, if you I follow. 
 Shadowlike, o'er hill and hollow; 
 
 Vainly valiant, you have missed 
 
 The manhood that should yours resist." 
 
 Guy. 
 
 Probably most Americans, if asked to explain the rele- 
 vancy of the title of Emerson's poem " Guy," would be un- 
 able to answer ofiEhand. The verses celebrate the lucky 
 man: — 
 
28 
 
 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 " The common waters fell 
 As costly wine into his well. 
 The zephyr in his garden rolled 
 From plum-trees vegetable gold. 
 Stream could not so perversely wind 
 But corn of Guy's was there to grind." 
 
 The reference, of course, is to a man well known in England, 
 —Thomas Guy (d. 1724), founder of Guy's Hospital in Lon- 
 don. He was the George Peabody of his day. Beginning life 
 as a bookseller, he made a good deal of money in printing 
 Bibles, but acquired most of his enormous fortune by finan- 
 cial speculations. He was extremely economical; for ex- 
 ample, always ate his dinner on his shop counter, first spread- 
 ing out a newspaper to catch the crumbs. His charities were 
 boundless. To his hospital he gave $1,000,000; and at his 
 death his will was found to contain an enormous number of 
 special benefactions, including bequests to over ninety 
 cousins. Emerson in his poem compares Guy to Polycrates, 
 who was King of Samos some five hundred years before 
 Christ. He says that Polycrates " chained the sunshine and 
 the breeze"; that is, the very elements seemed to be in his 
 pay. This run of luck was without a break up to his death; 
 his fleet of a hundred ships was the largest then known; he 
 conquered all his enemies, and amassed great treasure. His 
 ally, Amasis, King of Egypt, was so alarmed at his prosperity, 
 fearing the envy of the gods, that he advised him to make 
 some noteworthy sacrifice. The story goes that Polycrates 
 accordingly threw his emerald signet-ring into the sea, but it 
 came back to his kitchens in the belly of a large fish, 
 as in the Arabian Nights story. The fears of Amasis were 
 finally justified; for the Persian satrap Orcetes enticed 
 Polycrates to the mainland, and crucified him. 
 
 Xenophanes. 
 
 "Xenophanes" embodies poetically the doctrine of the 
 
 earnest old Greek agnostic and monist of that name, that 
 
 God, or the All, is uncreated, immovable, and one, — ^not 
 
 immovable in its parts, but as a whole, and just because it is 
 
THE AM URIC AN AUTHOR 29 
 
 all. Xenophanes saw the grandeur and incomprehensibility 
 of the universe, he violently opposed what seemed to him the 
 disgraceful polytheism of Homer, and anticipated the modem 
 atomic theory and the doctrine of the unity of life as revealed 
 by the spectroscope and the discovery of the conservation 
 and mutual convertibility of forces. Or, as Emerson puts it 
 in his haunting numbers, — 
 
 " By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave 
 One scent to hyson and to wall-flower. 
 One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls, 
 One aspect to the desert and the lake. 
 It was her stern necessity." 
 Hamatreya. 
 The title of the poem " Hamatreya " seems at first to baffle 
 a perfect and indubitable explanation. The word can be 
 found in no English or foreign dictionary that the largest 
 libraries afford. We are indebted, however, to Col. T. W. 
 Higginson (the Critic, Feb. i8, 1888) for not only giving us a 
 clew to the title, but for pointing out the portion of the 
 Vishnu Purana (Wilson's translation, 1840) on which Emerson 
 based his " Earth Song " in " Hamatreya," and, in fact, got the 
 hint for the whole poem ; namely, at the close of Book IV. 
 Maitreya is a disciple of Parasara, who relates to Maitreya 
 the Vishnu Purana. Among other things he tells Maitreya 
 of a chant of the Earth, who said, " When I hear a king send- 
 ing word to another by his ambassador, 'This earth is mine: 
 immediately resign your pretensions to it,' I am moved to 
 violent laughter at first; but it soon subsides in pity for the 
 infatuated fool." Again, the Purana says, "Earth laughs, 
 as if smiling with autumnal flowers, to behold her kings un- 
 able to effect the subjugation of themselves," which is Emer 
 son's 
 
 " Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys 
 Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs." 
 And again: "These were the verses, Maitreya, which 
 Earth recited, and by listening to which ambition fades away, 
 like snow before the sun." Here are Emerson's lines:— 
 
30 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 " When I heard the Earth-song, 
 I was no longer brave; 
 My avarice cooled 
 Like lust in the chill of the grave." 
 Colonel Higginson suggests that Emerson may also have 
 had in mind, in writing •' Hamatreya," Psalm xlix. ii. As he 
 rightly says, the title evidently is meant to give a hint of the 
 Hindoo source of the argument of the poem. It is in line 
 with the uniform custom of Emerson in giving historical 
 catch-words, especially proper names, as his titles. After an 
 exhaustive search through all the Hindoo scriptures, I have 
 reached a conviction which approaches absolute certainty 
 that Hamatreya is Emerson's imperfect recollection of Mai- 
 treya or that he purposely coined the word. Emerson, it is 
 nearly certain, read the Vishnu Purana, translated by H. H. 
 Wilson (a large and costly work), by the copy then in the 
 Harvard Library or the Boston Athenaeum, perhaps taking 
 brief notes, but omitting to write down " Maitreya." In his 
 exhaustive index of proper names, appended to the Vishnu 
 Purana, Wilson has no such word as Hamatreya, nor does it 
 occur anywhere in the book. To clench the argument, Prof. 
 Charles R. Lanman, the well-known Sanskrit scholar of Har- 
 vard University, writes me that " Hamatreya is not a San- 
 skrit word." " The Atreyas," he says, " were the descendants 
 of Atri." " It is an easy mistake to make Hamatreya out of 
 Maitreya. I really think you will have to assume a simple 
 slip here."* 
 
 Casella. 
 Emerson is not wilfully obscure. But he comes danger 
 ously near to being so in the demand he often makes upon his 
 readers for out-of-the-way knowledge. " Casella " is the title 
 of an Emersonian quatrain,— 
 
 " Test of the poet is knowledge of love. 
 For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove. 
 Never was poet, of late or of yore, 
 Who was not tremulous with love-lore." 
 
 *Prof. Charles Eliot Norton sends me an expression of his gratitude for my solution of 
 the Hamatreya mystery, which he says always puzzled him. 
 
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR 31 
 
 The reference is to Dante's friend Casella ("Casella mio"), 
 whom he meets in Purgatory, and who sweetly sings (as of 
 yore on earth he was wont) a canzone by Dante himself, — 
 "Amor, eke nella mente mi ragiona." Emerson's favorite poet, 
 Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, alludes, as Mr. Norton 
 points out, to this friendship: — 
 
 " Dante shall give fame leave to set thee higher 
 Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing 
 Met in the milder shades of Purgatory." 
 
 Adakrun Nemontai Aiona. 
 The title dSdnpuv vsfiovrai aiwva is from Pindar, I be- 
 lieve. Emerson took it from the Dial, where (July, '43) it 
 appears as the motto to a poem by Charles A. Dana on " Man- 
 hood." It means, literally, " They pass a tearless life"; or, 
 very freely rendered, " They live a life of smiles," — a senti- 
 ment explained by the first lines, — 
 
 " A new commandment, said the smiling Muse, 
 I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach." 
 
 Rhea. 
 Even in so slight a matter as choosing a name for his 
 verses " To Rhea," Emerson's philosophical belief is glimpsed; 
 for Rhea was the mother of gods, and such he believed all 
 women to be. The thought of this remarkable poem, which 
 its author feigns to have received from the thousand chatter- 
 ing tongues of the poplar-tree, is extremely subtle and some- 
 what difficult to formulate. The analysis is this. If you, a 
 wife, have lost your supremacy in your husband's affections, 
 take a strange and noble revenge, not by hating, but, in a 
 kind of calm altruistic despair, endowing him with all the 
 gifts and blessings at your command. The poem is headed 
 " To Rhea " (Rhea being the wife of the cruel Saturn, who 
 devoured his own children) as to a wife whose husband had 
 merely " drank of Cupid's nectar cup," married her from sex- 
 instinct alone, and then, the "bandages of purple light" 
 fallen from " his eyes," treated her with indifference. But 
 she continues to love him; and, more, the poet gives her the 
 
32 THB AMERICAN AUTHOR 
 
 advice just noted, illustrating by the supposed case of a god 
 loving a mortal maid, and warily knowing that she, with her 
 inferior ideals, can never adequately requite his love, yet 
 nobly endowing her with all gifts and graces, which are the 
 hostages he pawns for freedom from " his thrall." He does 
 this in an altruistic spirit, in order by her to " model newer 
 races" and "carry man to new degrees of power and come- 
 liness." But what thrall ? We must walk warily here. In 
 order not to seem to give his verses an autobiographical cast 
 (although the god, the "wise Immortal," of them is really 
 such a type as the seer Emerson himself), he withdraws into 
 dim recesses and speaks in subtlest metaphors. The thrall, I 
 think, is the bondage a lover or husband is in to his beloved, 
 in whom the solecisms and disenchantments of possession 
 have supplanted the poetic illusions of romantic love. The 
 man of supreme wisdom, by the magic of self-sacrifice and 
 boundless profusion of gifts, turns the trap or prison in which 
 nature has caught him into a bower of Eden. By the road of 
 generosity he escapes. He cunningly builds up in her mind 
 gratitude and friendship in place of the lost romanticism. 
 There is in this treatment of love a touch of the cold-blooded 
 philosophy of the Emersonian critique of friendship. But if 
 it is not a marriage of ideal kind which he celebrates, such as 
 that of the Brownings, he at least embodies in his verse 
 the shrewd love-philosophy of the practical-poetical English- 
 man, united to the average woman for the furtherance of the 
 ends of the species. 
 
 Mr. George Browne, in his Emerson primer, thinks that the 
 key-thought of " Rhea " is in these lines from " The World- 
 Soul " about the gods: — 
 
 " To him who scorns their charities 
 Their arms fly open wide." 
 
 But the parallelism somewhat halts. For mark: In the one 
 case Napoleon's maxim is embodied, that God is on the side 
 of the strongest battalions. The one who scorns the favorit- 
 isms and alms of Heaven, and yet, will he nill he, receives its 
 aid, is really the strong God himself in mask, the noble and 
 
THE AMERICAN A UTHOR 33 
 
 resolute man executing his will in time and space. But in 
 the case supposed in " Rhea," of husband and wife, the ones 
 who scorn love are those not deserving of gifts at all (although 
 Nature finds her account in them), but persons who receive 
 gifts in charity from one altruistically nobler than them- 
 selves. It is just this idea of sublime self-sacrifice that gives 
 to "Rhea" its strange subtlety and its uniqueness among 
 poems on love. There is a consolatory under-thought in the 
 palimpsest, too. By his illustration of the god and the mortal 
 maid the poet wishes Rhea to divine that, if wives make moan 
 over husbands' lost love, husbands no less often have reason 
 to lament the cooled affection of wives. 
 
 Uriel. 
 .The central idea in " Uriel " is that there is no such thing 
 as evil. This thesis is put into the mouth of Uriel, one of the 
 seven archangels, because he was the " interpreter " of God's 
 will. So Milton says, in the locus classicus on Uriel in Book 
 III of " Paradise Lost." He also says he was 
 
 " The sharpest-sighted spirit of all in heav'n." 
 
 His station was in the all-viewing sun. Uriel, in Milton, tells 
 how, when the universe was yet chaos, 
 
 " Or ever the wild Time coined itself 
 Into calendar months and days," 
 
 he saw the worlds a-forming, — earth, sun, and stars. Emer- 
 son (or " Sayd ") takes Milton at his word, and leads us back 
 into that dark backward and abysm of time, and lets us over- 
 hear a conversation between Uriel and the other seraphs. 
 At his speech " the gods shook," because if there is no sin, 
 if all comes round to good, even a lie, then good-bye gods, 
 hells and heavens, and their punishments. But note that, 
 though the All turns your wrong to good in the end, yet you, 
 an individual, suffer for your wrong-doing. 
 
 In a paper in the Andover Review for March, 1887, the late 
 Dr. C. C. Everett says that Dr. Hedge suggested to him that 
 " Uriel " probably took its origin in the discussions of the 
 Boston Association of Ministers on the theme (then rife), 
 
3^ THE AMERICAN A UTHOR 
 
 "There is no line in nature": all is circular, and by the law 
 of reaction every deed returns upon the doer. At any rate, 
 it was written in 1838, soon after his Divinity School Address. 
 {Emerson in Concord, by Edward Emerson.) 
 
 Terminus. 
 
 The god of boundaries in ancient Rome — Terminus — gives 
 his name to the cheeriest of monodies or anchoring songs sung 
 by the gayest of old sailors on the sea of eternity, and at last 
 approaching port. Terminus, like Hermes the Greek god of 
 bounds, was shown in his statues without hands or feet, to 
 indicate that he never moved. Was Emerson a little rusty 
 in his classical lore, or did he boldly and knowingly defy 
 classical verities when he says the divinity came to him " in 
 his fatal rounds " ? He seems to have attributed to Terminus 
 patrolling functions like those of his own New England 
 village fence-viewers. Or, rather, speaking in noble and 
 more adequate terms, has he not added to the world's 
 mythologies a new and poetical deity, — the god of the 
 bounds of human life, a kind of avant-courier or Death's 
 dragoman to announce to men their approaching end? 
 " Terminus" was written about 1866, when Emerson wasin 
 or near his sixty-third year, and sixteen years before his 
 death. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I have in my portfolio a few miscellaneous notes on Emerson's poems, 
 which readers of his may find interesting. 
 
 "The Nun's Aspiration " is in form a dramatic monologue ; yet the 
 mask is ill adjusted, and the nun has plainly a masculine, Emersonian 
 trick of speech. No nun's religion ever rose into such cold regions of 
 abstract philosophy, nor (needless to say) did a nun ever have a dream of 
 taking the arm of a comet and gliding off through space, as Emerson's 
 transcendental nun does, into the supersolar regions. Tennyson, in his 
 similar poem, " St. Agnes," gives us the real thing in lines of marvelous 
 beauty : his nun breathes pure religfion; Emerson's abstraction utters 
 piore transcendental philosophy. 
 
 I find that the following poems were first printed in the Dial: " The 
 Sphinx" (1840), " To Rhea," " Saadi " (1842), " The Snow-storm " (Jan., 
 1841), " Ode to Beauty" (Oct., 1843). " Woodnotes" (1840). 
 
THE AMERICAN A UTHOR 35 
 
 The famous " Humblebee " lyric, as first printed in James Freeman 
 Clarke's Western Literary Messenger, began with the weak line, " Fine 
 humblebee ! fine humblebee !" for which, later, " Burly, dozing humble- 
 bee !" was substituted. The following also originally came after the first 
 verse-group : 
 
 " Flower-bells, 
 Honied cells. 
 These the tents 
 Which he frequents." 
 
 These were dropped; and elsewhere were added the four lines on flowers, 
 beginning " Grass with green flag half-mast high." It is just as well to 
 admit that Emerson, like Shakespeare and all other poets, nodded occa- 
 sionally. Shakespeare mispronounces Stephano, Romeo, Andronicus, 
 Desdemona, etc. He and his contemporaries pronounce "Epicurean" 
 wrongly, as does Emerson, whose pronunciation " Epicu'rean " in this 
 poem may be matched by cotyl'edon in his " Merlin," Part II, 11. ii and 
 12 : 
 
 " Leaf answers leaf upon the bough, 
 And match the paired cotyledons," 
 
 The Greek is KorvXjjSaov (Kot-u-lay'-don) and there never has been, 
 nor could be, in the nature of things, any lexicographical authority for 
 cotyl'edon. 
 
 " The Rhodora," as published in 1839 in the Western Literary Mes- 
 senger, is minus the following two choice lines that add the couleur de 
 rose tint to the " purple petals " and " black water " of the poet's palette: 
 
 " Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, 
 And court the flower that cheapens his array.'' 
 
 In place of this felicitous word-picture (which Shakespeare never sur- 
 passed), Emerson first printed the following much weaker lines : 
 
 " Young Raphael might covet such a school ; 
 The lively show begfuiled me from my way." 
 
 The newspaper version also has "waters" for "water," "marsh" for 
 " earth," and " Dear, tell them," for " Tell them, dear," in 11. 6, 10, and 
 II respectively. 
 
 In midsummer of 1858 a party of ten members of the Adirondack Club 
 of Boston put on red or blue flannel shirts, packed up some natural-history 
 tools and material, and with guns and rods in hand traveled up into the 
 Adirondack mountains and camped, each man with a guide, in the virgin 
 forest of everg^reens and hard wood : 
 
 " Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft 
 In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed." 
 
36 
 
 THE AMERICAN A UTHOR 
 
 To celebrate this "philosophers' camp," as it has been called, Emerson 
 wrote his journal poem, " The Adirondacks." The club was an offshoot 
 of the Boston Saturday Club, of which Emerson was one of the founders 
 and chief lights. The ten campers were : Dr. Jeffries Wyman (Presi- 
 dent of the Boston Natural History Society and professor at the Agassiz 
 Museum) and Dr. Estes Howe, of Cambridge, as tall of his hands as 
 any man in lUyria (these were the "two doctors "); the benevolent Judge 
 E. Rockwood Hoar, of Concord ; James Russell Lowell, the youngest 
 and the leader of the party, with his wallet full of bans mots ; Louis 
 Agassiz, of the genial face and twinkling eye and French bewraying 
 tongue ; the witty and lovable John Holmes, who had a younger brother, 
 Oliver Wendell, not a bit better than he ; the artist, W. J. Stillman ; 
 A. Binney ; and Ralph "Waldo Emerson, — wit-crackers, scientists, poets, 
 good fellows all, and justifying their poet's eulogium : 
 " Wise and polite — and if I drew 
 
 Their several portraits you would know 
 
 Chaucer had no such worthy crew. 
 
 Nor Boccace in Decameron." 
 Some lists include Samuel G. Howe, the philhellene, and Horatio Wood- 
 man, of unfortunate memory. But Mr. F. B. Sanborn, Howe's biog- 
 rapher, writes me that Howe at least was not with them, his health not 
 permitting such an experience. Mr. Emerson modestly calls his poem a 
 " journal " ; but it is in form and contents a pastoral idyl, like Tenny- 
 son's English pastorals. The campers made their hut with their own 
 hands and roofed it with spruce bark, and they slept in their blankets 
 on beds of evergreen twigs. Jules Marcou, in his excellent Life of 
 Agassiz, relates that the gentle Longfellow was invited to go, but re- 
 fused very emphatically, because Emerson had taken a rifle, and he 
 averred that somebody would get shot ! After much solicitation, one 
 morning Agassiz (says his old friend Marcou) was persuaded to fire one 
 shot at a mark; he hit the white and was loudly complimented, but could 
 not be induced to fire again. In fact this was the first and only shot of 
 his life, says Marcou. For this trip Emerson bought a rifle, learned how 
 to shoot, and taught his son, too, but is not known to have hit, or even 
 shot at, any living thing. The chief incident of the jaunt was the news 
 that came to them in the wilds of the successful laying of the first 
 Atlantic cable, — news received with vigorous cheers by these brainy New 
 Englanders. 
 
 Emerson's " Voluntaries " is an elegy partly written to stimulate en- 
 listment during the war and partly in memory of Colonel Robert G. Shaw, 
 the brave young martyr who fell on the red ramparts of Port Wagner. 
 Apart from duty, it was worth so dying to be immortalized by such a poet 
 as Emerson and such a sculptor as St. Gaudens. The title " Voluntaries," 
 says Mrs. Annie Fields, was suggested to Emerson by James T. Fields, 
 
THE AMERICAN A UTHOR 37 
 
 to whom, in 1863, he read the poem, in a chamber of the Parker House in 
 Boston. 
 
 Apropos of the tender and pathetic " Threnody," Louisa Alcott tells 
 of going as a girl of eight to Emerson's home to inquire about the 
 health of little Waldo, and how the father answered her knock, his face 
 so worn by watching and changed by grief as to startle her, and said, 
 " Child, he is dead !" and closed the door. Those few words, she said, 
 had in them more pathos for her than the g^ief of the " Threnody." 
 
 The ring^ing Tyrtean lines of the " Boston Hymn," " God said, I am 
 tired of kings," "My thunderbolt has eyes to see his way home to the 
 mark," etc. , were read at a mass meeting in Music Hall on New Year's 
 Day, 1863, after the reading to an enthusiastic cheering audience of Lin- 
 coln's Emancipation Proclamation. Emerson, as often happened, got his 
 manuscript fumbled and the leaves fell amid the crowd, disconcerting 
 him a good deal; yet one who was present speaks of " the thrill of empha- 
 sis he gave to those stem and vivid words as they rang out to the eager 
 crowd: " 
 
 " Pay ransom to the owner 
 
 And fill the bag to the brim. 
 
 Who is the owner? The slave is owner. 
 
 And ever was. Pay him." 
 
 At first he had been in favor of paying the masters, as Great Britain 
 did, but was brought over to the free emancipation idea as on the whole 
 a just and inevitable war measure. 
 
 In " My Garden," the stanza, 
 
 " Waters that wash my garden side 
 Play not in Nature's lawful web; 
 They heed not moon or solar tide — 
 Five years elapse from flood to ebb," 
 
 refers to the curious facts connected with the ebb and flow of the waters 
 of Walden Pond, on the high land of which, on the shore opposite to 
 Thoreau's hut, Emerson owned land which he called his "garden." 
 Thoreau gives, in his Walden, the facts about the ebb and flow, how 
 the water is often at the highest in a dry summer and at its lowest when 
 neighboring ponds and streams are full. 
 
 The poem " Forbearance " (" Hast thou named all the birds without a 
 gun ") is a tribute to Emerson's friend, the late J. Elliot Cabot, a man of 
 gentle and retiring life, of sweet nature and scholarly tastes. He was, 
 as is known, Emerson's literary executor. 
 
 Emerson's "Good-bye, Proud World," was written, not in Newton, 
 Mass. , as has been stated, but under the pines in Canterbury Lane, — ^now 
 Walnut Ave., near Blue Hill Ave., — Roxbury, Mass., in 1823, when Emer- 
 son was a young man acting as usher (t. e., assistant) in his elder brother 
 
38 THE AMERICAN A UTHOR 
 
 William's school for girls (see Dr. Holmes's Emerson, p. 130). The 
 school was kept in their mother's house. Canterbury village was at that 
 time "a picturesque wilderness of savin, barberry bushes, cat-brier and 
 sumach." Ralph Waldo was then eighteen years old, and the lines don't 
 express (say his friends) any cynical dissatisfaction with life, but merely 
 the pleasure felt by a poetical lover of Nature in her peaceful solitudes. 
 But Emerson's readers, by a kind of blind instinct, — not so far wrong after 
 all, it seems to me, — have persisted in assigning this poem to the period 
 of his retirement from the ministry and making it the expression of his 
 feeling at that time. 
 
__ Cornell University Library 
 
 PS 1638.K36 
 
 Clews to Emerson's mystic verse / 
 
 3 1924 021 980 549 
 
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