D. a. 19. Barbadoes. In the British West Indies. Slavery was abolished there in 1834. . b. 1. Foolish face of praise. Quoted from Pope's satire on Addison in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. . a. 9. Joseph. The story may be found in Genesis XXXIX. . b. 13. That popular fable. For Shakespeare's use of the story, see the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew. b. 35. Alfred, etc. Alfred the Great, King of England from 871 to 901; Scanderbeg (George Castriota) (1403-1468), an Albanian patriot; Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden from 1611 to 1632. a. 12. The word made flesh. See John I, 14. b. 4. The god Audate. An unimportant blunder. The Celtic deity to whom Emerson refers was the goddess Andate (or Andraste), and the quotation from Bonduca actually begins "Her hidden meaning." b. 49. Locke, etc. John Locke (16321704), English philosopher, and author of the Essay Concerning the Human Understanding; Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), a famous French chemist; Charles Hutton (1737-1823), English mathematician (Emerson may have referred to James Hutton [1726 17971, Scottish geologist); Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher and economist. a. 6. Phocion, etc. An Athenian statesman; Socrates, Anaxagoras, and Diogenes, Emerson uses as types of Greek philosophers. a. 16. Hudson. The older navigators, Henry Hudson and Vitus Behring, are contrasted with Sir William Edward Parry and Sir John Franklin, both of whom were still living when Emerson wrote. COMPENSATION This essay is the third in the collection entitled Essays, First Series (1841), coming between Self-Reliance and Spiritual Laws. a. 48. Become a byword and a hissing. Emerson was himself hissed on two occasions; at one of his attempts to address an Anti-Slavery Society the mob "roared and hissed" until he was forced to withdraw. 7. 52. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Translated in the preceding sentence. π. 18. Οἱ κύβοι Διὸς ἀεὶ εὐπίπτουσι Transated in the following sentence. a. 48. Prometheus knows one secret. See the Prometheus of Eschylus and he Prometheus Unbound of Shelley. b. 11. Tithonus. Compare Tennyson's poem Tithonus. 477. a. 10. Phidias. The most famous sculptor of ancient Greece, who flourished in the fifth century B. C. 478. a. 29. The emerald of Polycrates. Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, was so prosperous that, fearing the jealousy of the gods, he threw a valuable ring into the sea. It was found in a fish and returned to him; shortly afterwards he was enticed to the mainland and murdered. The story is told by Herodotus. 479. b. 18. The royal armies sent against Napoleon. The incident referred to took place early in 1815, shortly after Napolean's escape from Elba. 480. a. 25. Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. With the ideas expressed in the whole essay, and of this sentence in particular, the student may compare parts of Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra. 481. b. 21. St. Bernard. A French monk (1091-1153), famous for founding a monastery at Clairvaux, and for preaching the Second Crusade. A 482. b. 34. The banian of the forest. wide-spreading tropical tree; usually spelled banyan. NATURE From Essays, Second Series (1844). In this essay Emerson summarizes and restates some of the ideas concerning Nature which had appeared throughout his earlier works, and which had received more extensive but perhaps not more lucid treatment in the 1836 booklet, Nature. This earlier publication-somewhat revised-was reprinted in 1849 in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, and the student who finds himself seriously interested in Emerson's ideas will consult that longer work. The essay here printed, however, is sufficient to show the main trend of Emerson's thinking, when that thinking was directed towards the phenomena of the natural world. 484. b. 7. Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Places famous for wealth and luxury in France, Cyprus, and Turkey respectively. b. 54. Makes Edens and Tempes. Tempe, a beautiful valley of Thessaly, so famous that the name is often used, as here, for any valley of great beauty. 485. a. 54. They fall into euphuism. Used here to mean "ornate style"; literally, the particular style popularized Elizabethan literature by John Lyly's Euphues. in 487. a. 51. Dalton, Davy, and Black. John Dalton (1766-1844), an English chemist and natural philosopher; Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), an English chemist; Joseph Black (1728-1799), a Scottish chemist and anatomist. 488., b. 20. Jacob Behmen and George Fox. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a German mystic and visionary, whose writings influenced Emerson, and whose name he habitually spells Behmen, following the regular English tradition. George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers). b. 23. James Naylor. A fanatical English Quaker (?1617-1660), who was mercilessly punished by Parliament for "blasphemy." 490. b. 7. An Edipus arrives. According to Greek tradition it was Edipus who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. 492. It was a favorite idea of Emerson's that "nothing is fair or good alone." "I remember when I was a boy going upon the beach and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells. I picked up many and put them in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I had gathered-nothing but some dry, ugly, mussel and snail shells. Thence I learned that Composition was more important than the beauty of individual forms." Journals, May 16, 1834. THE PROBLEM Emerson here sets forth what had been his own problem-whether to be a clergyman, when that way of life was in many ways repugnant to him. The poem was written in November, 1839. A little more than a year before he had made this entry in his Journal (Aug. 28, 1838): "It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman Cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English church and hear the liturgy read, yet nothing would induce me to be an English priest." 493. 10. Phidias. Greatest of Greek sculptors (fl. 480 B. C.). 65. Chrysostom. John of Antioch (?347-407), Bishop of Constantinople. Augustine. Saint Augustine (354-430), most eminent of the Church Fathers, and author of the Confessions (397). 68. Taylor. Jeremy Taylor (16131667), an English churchman, best known as the author of Holy Living and Holy Dying. THE SPHINX The idea of relating one thing to another, applied to the phenomena of Nature in Each and All, is here extended. In his 1859 Note-Book (quoted in the Centenary Edition of his poems) Emerson said: "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 the 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." In this prose comment Emerson is stating what is virtually the central theme in his philosophy, the doctrine of Identity in Difference. Compare The Over-Soul, in Essays, First Series, for a more extended development of the same theme. HAMATREYA 495. "This poem is a free rendering of a passage in the Vishnu Parana, Book IV, an everlasting theme which, by changing the imagery to that which surrounded them, Mr. Emerson made striking to his Concord neighbors." (Centenary Edition of the Poems, p. 416.) 1. Bulkeley, Hunt, etc. Early Concord settlers. Peter Bulkeley was one of Emerson's own forbears. WOODNOTES 496. First published in 1840, in The Dial, and subsequently much revised. 31. A forest seer. The following description has often been considered Emerson's portrait of his friend and neighbor Thoreau. He said, however, that he had written this part of the poem before he knew Thoreau intimately. FORBEARANCE 498. First published in 1842. It is quite possible that Emerson had Thoreau in mind as he wrote. See the Centenary Edition of the Poems, p. 430. 500. "Of CONCORD HYMN all Emerson's poems," wrote Holmes (Emerson, p. 332), "the Concord Hymn, is the most nearly complete and faultness,-but it is not distinctively Emersonian. . . . Its one conspicuous line, And fired the shot heard round the world, must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little poem, a model of all its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn, musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom and her martyrs." and as we sat by the fire he read me two or three of his poems among them Terminus. It almost startled me. No thought of his ageing had ever come to me, and there he sat, with no apparent abatement of bodily vigor, and young in spirit, recognizing with serene acquiescence his failing power; I think he smiled as he read. He recognized, as none of us did, that his working days were nearly done." HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) When Thoreau died, on May 2, 1862, his Concord neighbors honored him with a public funeral, and selected Emerson to make the address. There was no other person who could have performed the task so well. For over twenty years Thoreau's relations to Emerson had been those of intimate companion and disciple; Emerson knew at first hand all Thoreau's peculiarities and substantial virtues, and was in a position to do more than pronounce a formal eulogy on his dead friend. The resulting essay-for the address soon appeared in print-is perhaps as good a starting point as the average reader can find for a study of one of America's most unusual men of letters. In his sympathetic but never uncritical estimate Emerson records the more important facts of Thoreau's life. Born in Concord in 1817, educated at the village school, graduated from Harvard in 1837, he taught school for a year or two, found the profession irksome, and soon settled down to the quiet, local existence which readers of his books can reconstruct at will. His somewhat cryptic statement, "I have travelled a good deal, in Concord," seems to imply that he rarely wandered far from his native village, and also suggests the more important consideration that his mental journeyings were constant and extensive. Thoreau shared with Blake the power to Hold the world in a grain of sand, His mind was never hedged in by the boundaries of Concord township. His characteristic attitude towards society as a whole became apparent early in life. A rebel against the existing order of things, he decided not to go to, church, not to pay taxes to a government which permitted slavery, not to become involved in any formal association with a social organization of which he disapproved, and especially not to concern himself unnecessarily over the problem of earning a living. On this last matter he had formed a definite opinion even during his college years, and had suggested, in his commencement speech, that "the order of things should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul -in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature." Curiously enough, Thoreau did more than preach his gospel of simplification, of a passive, contemplative life-he lived it. A skillful surveyor and mathematician, a good farmer, an adept in his father's trade of pencil-making, Thoreau was qualified to “get on in the world" had he cared to. "I have as many trades as I have fingers," he wrote in Walden. But happiness would never have come to him as a result of any sort of worldly "success." Instead of using his very real abilities as most people would have expected him to use them, he made it his practice to limit his labor to just enough to support him in virtually monastic simplicity, and to save the best part of each year free for what seemed to him of vastly more importance than making money: walking in the woods, studying the wild life around Concord River and Walden Pond, reading the classics, writing for the Dial, recording his observations and ideas in a voluminous journal, and sitting quiet in that condition of "wise passiveness" in which he found the mystic's intense satisfaction. The books which he wrote from time to time are all of a piece, though only one has proved its claim to be considered an American classic. Of the entire list four may be mentioned here. A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849) is ostensibly an account of a trip in a flat boat. The narrative element, however, is slight; there is much Transcendentalism in the volume, much sermonizing, not a little mediocre poetry, and much preaching of Thoreau's anti-social individualism. It is over the passages of description that the reader lingers gladly, descriptions that attest Thoreau's accurate observation of the life of the river, and his rare skill in reproducing what he had seen. Walden, or Life in the Woods, came out in 1854, and made its author known throughout the English-speaking world. It is because of Walden that Thoreau still lives, and will live. The book is an account of Thoreau's two years' life in his cabin by the shore of Walden Pond. Here, in a one-roomed hut which he had built himself, Thoreau lived from the spring of 1841 to that of 1843, and tried his great experiment of reducing existence to its simplest terms. At the end of the two years he was satisfied with his accomplishments, and returned to his more normal life in Concord village. The detailed record of this adventure, written ten years afterwards, has the fascination of such romantic tales as Robinson Crusoe or Two Years before the Mast, albeit the events chronicled are the minutiae of a circumscribed existence, and the volume itself is somewhat overburdened with the social diatribes and philosophizing characteristic of all Thoreau's prose. Such passages as are reproduced in this book are fair samples of the whole, and show not only that Thoreau possessed a vigorous and charming style, but also that he might easily have made himself a renowned naturalist. The Maine Woods (1864) and Cape Cod (1865) appeared after the author's death. Neither added anything to the fame that Walden had brought him, though both are welcome additions to any library of the out-of-doors. As Emerson's essay indicates, Thoreau's friends early recognized him as an able, interesting, but abnormally queer person,—a crank, whose habit of uncompromising truthtelling made him somewhat feared, but who might be extremely useful-if he were so inclined at the moment-when houses were to be "cleaned," gardens weeded, or fields surveyed. They respected his sincerity, though they felt bound to lodge him in the Concord lock-up for persistently refusing to pay his poll-tax. They regretted-some of themthat a man of his ability should have been content to live the insulated and restricted life that he chose for himself. "Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party," said Emerson. At the same time they were generous in praise of his kindliness and sincerity, and his uncompromising opposition to whatever he considered unlovely. The student who turns the pages of Thoreau's books today, seventy years after his death, will delight in the whimsical but powerful personality which those pages reveal, will enjoy the romance of the Walden experiment, will be amused and not infrequently disquieted by his observations on society, and will realize that Thoreau's name belongs in the relatively short list of American masters of prose. BIBLIOGRAPHY EDITIONS. The best readily available editions of Thoreau's collected works are the Riverside, Boston, 1894, 11 vols., and the Walden, Boston, 1906, 20 vols. The latter contains Thoreau's Journal, edited by Bradford Torrey. Walden is available in a score of inexpensive reprints. BIOGRAPHIES. William E. Channing's Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, is hopelessly inaccuate in some ways, but is interesting because it is the work of one of Thoreau's intimate friends. It is best read in F. B. Sanborn's revision, Boston, 1902. The best formal biography is also Sanborn's: Thoreau, Boston, 1897 (A. M. L. series), which in most ways is more useful than the same author's later study, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, Boston, 1917. Léon Bazalgette's Henry Thoreau, Bachelor of Nature, translated by Van Wyck Brooks, N. Y. 1924, is the most stimulating single avenue of approach to the many fascinating problems presented by Thoreau's life and character. CRITICAL ARTICLES. At least three critical articles may well be read by any student: John Burroughs's Henry Thoreau, Century Magazine, July, 1882; Emerson's remarks at Thoreau's funeral, published in the Atlantic for August, 1862; Lowell's rather unsympathetic essay, first published in 1865, and now included as Thoreau, in vol. 1 of the Riverside Edition of Lowell's prose works. Two more recent studies, the chapter on Thoreau in Norman Foerster's Nature in American Literature, and P. E. More's Thoreau's Journal, in Shelburne Essays, Fifth Series, are well worthy of attention by the serious student. NOTES SYMPATHY 501. First published 1840, in The Dial. SIC VITA 502. First published 1841, in The Dial. WALDEN Thoreau did not believe that a life of solitude was of any particular advantage from the standpoint of economics. He did believe that the independence of solitude was valuable enough to justify the inconvenience involved, and was eager to prove that the economic difficulties were Hence not insuperable. the experiment of which all the world is aware, and which is described, in part, in the selections here reprinted. 503. a. 3. What I have heard of Brahmins, etc. Thoreau here lists various types of self-inflicted penance of which he had read in one place or another. 504. a. 18. Walden Pond. Near Concord, Mass. 508. b. 28. Arthur Young. An English writer on agriculture (1741-1820). 512. b. 31. An Austerlitz or Dresden. Two of Napoleon's most famous battles are generally known by these names. b. 31. Concord Fight. The skirmish at Concord Bridge, April 18, 1775. The persons mentioned were American participators, Davis and Hosmer being killed. 513. a. 27. Hôtel des Invalides. The famous old soldiers' home in Paris. WALKING First published in the Atlantic Monthly, 514. b. 27. Ambulator nascitur, etc. The walker is born, not made. WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT William Hickling Prescott was born in Salem, May 4, 1796, of an old and honorable New England family. In due time he entered Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1814, handicapped for life by the fact that he had been almost blinded by the carelessness of a fellow student. Unable to study law, as he had hoped to do, and forced to guard most scrupulously what eyesight remained to him, he gradually took up the serious study of history, and decided upon the career of a man of letters. Accordingly he devoted a year to improving his own style by a study of the English classicsincluding Johnson's Dictionary and Hugh Blair's Rhetoric. His progress was, happily, accelerated by his comfortable financial situation, which enabled him to employ readers and secretaries to assist him. Still undecided as to the precise field of his future labors, he slowly mastered, year by year, the literature of Europe; and in the case of French, Italian, and Spanish, acquired a thorough knowledge of the languages. Not until 1825, eleven years after his graduation, did he decide to focus his attention on Spanish history at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. And not until eleven years later did his first important work appearA History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. So great was the success of this undertaking that Prescott, definitely established as a historian of international fame, devoted the remaining years of his life to further research and writing. As a result, he gave the world three other great works: The Conquest of Mexico (1843), The Conquest of Peru (1846), and Philip II (1859). With the publication of these four works, Prescott's notable contribution to history and literature came to a close. His last work, Philip II, was incomplete when in February, 1858, he suffered a slight apoplectic stroke. Characteristically, he kept at his task with what energy was left to him; but his death in January, 1859, found the work still unfinished. It is doubtless true that Prescott's historical writing is open to the charge of inaccuracy in details. Though no one ever wrote with a more scrupulous regard for truth than he, the sources on which he depended for information were at best unreliable, and at worst hopelessly mendacious. In all large ways, however, Prescott's work is reliable. He misrepresented nothing of serious moment. And he wrote so well, with such a feeling for the dramatic value of the incidents he was portraying, with such a sure sense of proportion, that his work has the rare merit of being of literary as well as historical significance. He had a sense of values which enabled him to disregard minutiæ and fix the reader's attention on what is at once |