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How misty, how windy, how full of diffused, only half-meaning
words! How curious a study! (Don't fall into Ossianic, _by any_
<u>chance</u>).

The Bucolics and Georgics are finely expressed—they are first-rate.

The Paradise Lost is, to us, nonsense, anyhow, because it takes
themes entirely out of human cognizance and treats them as Homer
treats his siege and opposing armies and their disputes? The Iliad
stands perfectly well and very beautiful for what it is, and appro-
priate blooming of the poet and what he had received and what he
believed and what to him was so in a certain sense. The Para-
dise Lost is offensive to modern science and intelligence--
it is a poetical fanaticism with a few great strong features but
not a great poem.

Milton's mind seems to have had the grandest sort of
muscle and much of the other stuff that poetry wants. The des-
criptions are large and definite. He has nothing little or nice
about him--but he was _in_ too much with sectarian theology
and with the disputes between puritans and churchmen. For in-
stance what nations in Asia or Africa, not Christian, would see
any great point in his poem if read to them?

-5-

Keat's poetry is ornamental, elaborated, rich in wrought imagery, it is imbued with the sentiment, at second-hand, of the gods and goddesses of twenty-five hundred years ago. Its feeling is the feeling of a gentlemanly person lately at college, accepting what was commanded him there, who moves and would only move in elegant society, reading classical books in libraries. Of life in the nineteenth century it has none any more than the statues have. It does not come home at all to the direct wants of the bodies and souls of the century.

[RICHTER:]

I should say that he was unnatural and lurid, judged by the calm and wholesome models. He is full of love and appears to be the originator of much of the soft and sentimental ways of the swarms of tale-writers of the last thirty years, in Britain and America.

To the little court of Weimar, to the poetical world, to the learned and literary worlds, Goethe has a deserved greatness. To the genius of America he is neither dear nor the reverse of dear. He passes with the general crowd upon whom the American glance descends with indifference. Our road is our own.

There is one point of the Goethean philosophy, which, without appeal and forever incapacitates it from suiting America and the forthcoming years. It is the cardinal Goethean doctrine too, that the artist or poet is to live in art or poetry alone apart from affairs, politics, facts, vulgar life, persons and things--seeking his "high ideal."

See how these fellows always take a handsome man for their God.

Coarse, wild, sensual and strong was this young man's nature, for coarse, wild and strong had been his life. He has large and ugly qualities enough, but he is self-complete, and his very grossness and dishonesty are noble from their candor. The castrated goodness of schools and churches he knew nothing of.

(written probably in 40's or early 50's.)

Peter---- ----, large, strong boned young fellow, driver. Should weigh 180. Free and candid to me the very first time he saw me. Man of strong self-will, powerful coarse feelings and appetites. Had a quarrel, borrowed $300, left his father's somewhere in the interior of the State, fell in with a couple of gamblers, hadn't been home or written there in seven years. I liked his refreshing wickedness, as it would be called by the orthodox. He seemed to feel a perfect independence, dashed with

-7-

ance, friendship, fortitude. None has given more beautiful accounts of truth and justice. His words shed light to the best souls; they do not admit of argument. As a sprig from the pine tree or a glimpse anywhere into the daylight belittles all artificial flower work and all the painted scenery of theatres, so are live words in a book compared to cunningly composed words. A few among men (soon perhaps to become many) will enter easily into Emerson's meanings; by those he will be well-beloved. The flip-pant writer, the orthodox critic, the numbers of good or indifferent imitators, will not comprehend him; to them he will indeed be a transcendentalist, a writer of sunbeams and moonbeams, a strange and unapproachable person.

[written as note to a magazine article, date May '47. To judge by paper and writing goes back to early fifties.--W. (it would seem) knew Emerson pretty well in those early days.]

There is something in vast erudition melancholy and fruitless as an Arctic sea. With most men it is a slow dream, dreamed in a moving fog. So complacent! So much body and muscle; fine legs to walk--large supple hands--but the eyes are owl's eyes, and the heart is a mackerel's heart.

-----:-----

One having attained those insights and contents which the
universe gives to men capable of comprehending it, would publish
the same and persuade other men and women to the same. The con-
ditions are simple, spiritual, physical, close at hand......they

-8-

are long and arduous and require faith, they exist altogether
with the taught and not with the teaching or teacher.

-------:------

processions of races, swiftly marching and counter-
marching over the fields of the Earth--the sublime creeds of dif-
ferent eras, some left glimmering yet, others quite faded out --the
religions, the new ones rising out of the old ones, each filling
its time and land yet helplessly withdrawing in due time, giving
place to the more needed one that must succeed it. For all re-
ligions, all divine, are but temporary journeys subordinate to the
eternal soul of the woman, the man supreme the decider of all.
What are they...to the ineffable, eternal traveler through
them all [to] man, before whom all religions, the divinest idols,
the gods, these of ours with the rest, sink into the []
corners?