Poetry is something more philosophical and excellent than history."

ARISTOTLE, Poetica, ch. 10.

When you throw a stone, the way to hit the mark is to look at the mark and not consider how you swing your arm. When you speak extempore, you must carry your thought to the person opposite and never think of the manner.

TO MISS EMERSON

December 25.

What from the woods, the hills, and the enveloping heaven? What from the interior creation, if what is within be not the creator? How many changes men ring on these two words in and out. It is all our philosophy. Take them away, and what were Wordsworth or Swedenborg? The rough and tumble old fellows, Bacons, Miltons, and Burkes, don't wire-draw. That's why I like Montaigne. No effeminate parlour workman is he, on an idea got at an evening lecture or a young men's debate, but roundly tells what he saw, or what he thought of when he was riding horse-back or entertaining a troop at his chateau. A gross, semisavage indecency debases his book, and ought doubtless to turn it out of

1831]

MONTAIGNE

441

doors; but the robustness of his sentiments, the generosity of his judgments, the downright truth without fear or favour, I do embrace with both arms. It is wild and savoury as sweet fern. Henry VIII. loved to see a man, and it is exhilarating, once in a while, to come across a genuine Saxon stump, a wild, virtuous man who knows books, but gives them their right place in his mind, lower than his reason. Books are apt to turn reason out of doors. You find men talking everywhere from their memories, instead of from their understanding. If I stole this thought from Montaigne, as is very likely, I don't care. I should have said the same myself.

BOSTON, December 28, 1831.

The year hastens to its close. What is it to me? What I am, that is all that affects me. That I am 28, or 8, or 58 years old is as nothing. Should I mourn that the spring flowers are gone, that the summer fruit has ripened, that the harvest is reaped, that the snow has fallen? Should I mourn because so much addition has been made to the capital of human comfort?

In my study my faith is perfect. It breaks, scatters, becomes compounded, in converse with

men. Hume doubted in his study, and believed in the world.

Mr. Robert Haskins quoted a significant proverb, That a woman could throw out with a spoon faster than a man could throw in with a shovel.

"Always be sticking a tree, Jock, it will be growing when ye are sleeping," was the thrifty Scotchman's dying advice. Always be setting a good action to grow, is the advice of a divine thrift. It is bearing you fruit all the time, knitting you to men's hearts, and to men's good and to God, and beyond this it is benefitting others by remembrance, by emulation, by love. The progress of moral nature is geometrical. Celestial economy !

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNALS OF 1831

Homer, Iliad; Anaxagoras; Socrates; Plato, Republic; Aristotle, Poetica;

Cicero, De Senectute; Horace; Plutarch; Plotinus; Porphyry; Thomas à Kempis; Luther; Montaigne; Calvin; Shakspeare, Sonnets; Bacon; Burton; Sir Thomas Browne; Milton; Jeremy

READING

443

1831] Taylor; Herbert; Lovelace; Swammerdam; Newton; Scougal; Fénelon; Young; Swedenborg;

Abraham Tucker (Edward Search); Samuel Johnson; Adam Smith; Burke; Schlegel, Guesses at Truth; Schiller; Wordsworth, Dion, Rob Roy, Laodamia, Happy Warrior; Mrs. Barbauld, The Brook; Dugald Stewart; Burns, To the Deil; Kirby; De Staël; Schelling; Scott; Byron; Campbell, Pleasures of Hope; Coleridge; Landor, Imaginary Conversations; Müller (Karl Otfried, or Wilhelm ?); Webster; Everett.

JOURNAL XXIII

1832

From (Blotting Book III) ↓ and Q

THE GOOD EAR

(From N)

BOSTON, January 4, 1832.

MORE is understood than is expressed in the most diffuse discourse. It is the unsaid

part of every lecture that does the most good. If my poor Tuesday evening lectures (borresco referens) were to any auditor the total of his exposition of Christianity, what a beggarly faith were it.

Death," said you? We die daily. "Death," - the soul never dies.

Theory of agreeable and disagreeable people, alluded to by George Bradford,' that reflecting

1 George Partridge Bradford of Duxbury was, like his sister Sarah Alden, wife of Rev. Samuel Ripley of Waltham, through life a close friend of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Bradford was affectionate, refined, a born scholar and a lover of flowers. He prepared himself for the ministry, but was so modest and sensitive that he found himself unfitted for its public offices. He