ment of the paragraph or chapter. He may yet obtain gleams and glimpses of a more excellent illumination from their genius, outvaluing the most distinct information he owes to other books. For I hold that the grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground." 1 And yet such reading is not like the reading in the books he describes by the term Vocabularies, such as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. In such a book he occasionally found a fine sentence but "no high method, no inspiring efflux." 2 And so in characterizing his manner of reading in the Platonists it must not be forgotten that he read sympathetically enough to catch the spirit of Platonism, even though he never mastered his sources as a professed student would have done. It was also Emerson's habit to index his books and to mark the places which held his attention. Of course these indices are not exhaustive, for they were intended for his own personal reference. But they are very valuable in indicating the exact passages in his 1 Ibid., VII., 409. 2 Ibid., VII., 211. sources in which he found his "lustres." Along with the marginal markings they show how curious his reading was, for they lead one into footnotes, introductions, and appendices, from all of which he gathered material for some of his most distinctive work. An examination of the marked passages alone would indicate a lively interest on his part in the matters they discuss, but when they are studied in the light of his critical attitude toward Platonism they appear as veritable sources of his thought. Emerson is specific, too, in explaining the peculiar influence which the Platonists exerted upon him. They were an intellectual tonic. At the close of his essay, Intellect, he pays the following tribute to these writers: "I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over these abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great spiritual lords who have walked in the world-these of the old religion-dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and popular; for 'persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect.' This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of things for its illustration." 1 Emerson also found a stimulant to the imagination in reading these writers. "The imaginative scholar," he writes in his essay, Books, "will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and dæmons and dæmoniacal men, of the 'azonic' and the 'aquatic gods,' dæmons with fulgid eyes, and all the 1 Complete Works, II., 345, 346. rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and with such pictorial details, as if they had been bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader of these books makes new acquaintance with his own mind; new regions of thought are opened." 1 2 Plato does not seem to have dazzled Emerson in the way in which his brilliant friends, the Neo-Platonists did. "Plato is a gownsman," he writes; "his garment, though of purple, and almost sky-woven, is an academic robe and hinders action with its voluminous folds." " Again he says of Plato, "He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures. And yet the reading of Plato was at times a most solemn event in Emerson's life. He told one friend that it was a great day in a man's life when he first read the Symposium. Again, he explains that "the scholar must look long for the right hour for " 3 1 Ibid., VII., 203. Plato's Timæus. At last the elect morning arrives, the early dawn-a few lights conspicuous in the heaven, as of a world just created and still becoming-and in its wide leisures we dare open that book." Carlyle he writes: "I had it fully in And to my heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer, or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse." 2 Plato, then, though not so dazzling a power over his mind and imagination as the Neo-Platonists, was still a great inspiration. The qualifying language which he uses in speaking of him is due to the fact that as contrasted with the Platonists, Plato lacks the ecstasy in which Neo-Platonism as a system of mysticism lives and moves and has its being. More evidence of like nature to that already adduced can be found in Emerson's utterances but sufficient has been given to justify the belief in the importance of Platonism as a molding power in Emerson's thinking. By approaching his work and his Platonic sources in the spirit in which he himself came to the task one is able to come to a fair notion 1 Ibid., VII., 169–170. 2 The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, II., 2. |
