Select Essays and Poems

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES. The one thing attempted in the editorial portions of this little book is to make these parts of service to the pupils who will read it. It has, therefore, seemed better to suggest a search, perhaps even too close, for the poet's literal meaning, rather than to risk leaving an impression of something beautiful, but vague. For facts concerning Emerson's life and for quotations from his journal, the editor is under obligations ? as every student of Emerson must be ? to E. W. Emerson's Emerson in Concord, J. E. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, and O. W. Holmes's Ralph Waldo Emerson. COMPENSATION.' 11. A by-word and a hissing: Emerson was once hissed at a political meeting in Cambridgeport. A friend who was present said one could think of nothing but dogs baying at the moon. He was serene as moonlight itself. 12. Res . . . administrari: translated in the preceding sentence. Primeval despots of Egypt: the Hyksos, or shepherd kings. The journey of Abraham to Egypt (Genesis xii. 10) is assigned to the early part of their reign, and that of Joseph (Genesis xxxvii. 28) to the closing period of their power. 15. It is in the world, etc.: cf. John i. 10. Ol . . . cvirhrrovtri: translated in the following sentence. 17. The ingenuity of man, etc.: cf. the address to the backstairs in Kingsley's Water-Babies, Chapter VIII. 19. Drive out nature with a fork: this saying is at least two thousand years old. See Horace's Epistolce, I. 10. 24, Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurfet. The irreverent modern American illustration of the thought is the story of Mrs. Partington's trying to sweep back the Atlantic with her broom. 20. How secret art thou. etc.: Confessions of St. Augustine (fourth century), Book I. 18. 21. Prometheus: the secret was how to avert the...