ABSTRACT
He quotes lines 29-32 of Donne's verse letter 'To Mr R.W.' ('If, as mine is, thy life a slumber be') ascribing them to 'Donne p. 154'. Then he quotes a few lines of Cowley, and at once returns to Donne with a series of quotations:
The next entry in this notebook, written nearly three weeks later, also concerns Donne:
Did I read somewhere lately that the sum of Virtue was to know and dare? The analogy is always perfect between Virtue and genius. One is ethical the other intellectual creation. Whoever creates is God, and whatever talents are, if the man create not, the pure efflux of Deity is not his. I read these Donnes and Cowleys and Marvells with the most modernjoy;-with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time fro111 their verses. What pleases most, is what is next to my Soul; what I also had well nigh thought and said. . . . Here are things just hinted which not one reader in a hundred would take, but which lie so near to the favorite walks of my imagination
30 4
1840, Journal F2. In successive entries he quotes lines 25-6 of Elegie x, 'The Dreame', and lines 1-2 of Elegie ix, 'The Autumnall' (JMN, vii, p. 501). 1846,Journal O. He quotes, without ascribing it to Donne, a version of line 33 of the verse letter 'To the Countesse of Bedford' (' Honour is so sublime perfection'). Then he immediately COlllments: Bardic sentences how few! Literature warps away from life though at first it seems to bind it. If now I should count the English Poets who have contributed aught to the bible of existing England and America sentences of guidance and consolation which are still glowing and effective-how few! Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, Burns, Young, Cowper, Wordsworth-(what disparity in the names! Yet these are the authors) and Herbert,Jonson, Donne (JMN, ix, ed. R. H. Orth and A. R. Ferguson, 1961, p. 367). (iii) In his essay 'Love' Emerson quotes lines 202-3 of Donne's epithalamion Eclogue. 1613. December 26 in describing the effects of love upon lovers. A little later he quotes lines 244b-46 of The second Anniversary to show how passion beholds its object as embodied soul and ensouled body (Essays: by R. W. Emerson, of Concord, Massachusetts. With a Preface by Thomas Carlyle, 1841, pp. 176 and 185). (iv) Chapter XIV of Emerson's English Traits, 1856, deals with literature. Emerson repeatedly includes Donne when he wants examples of the best English writers in this manner or that. Thus Donne is one of the English authors who have 'A taste for plain strong speech', some of the others being Alfred, Latimer, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Swift, and Defoe (p. 131).
