Emer

“ Emerson grew more absorbed in his profession as cases multiplied on his hands, and Irene, interested in her circle of bright-minded, independent-thoughted women, found the days and weeks gliding on pleasantly enough. ”

“ A little later men came and took Captain James Scoland away.
Like a far-flung, radiant ray of dazzling sunshine, one fact penetrated through all the horror of the moment to the heart of Rose Emer. Polaris, her Polaris, was alive! Alive, and living, might be saved—must be saved! ”

“ And in speaking of the great spiritual awakening that is so rapidly coming all over the world, the beginnings of which we are so clearly seeing during the closing years of this, and whose ever increasing proportions we are to witness during the early years of the coming century, I said, "How beautiful if Emerson, the illumined one so far in advance of his time, who labored so faithfully and so fearlessly to bring about these very conditions, how beautiful if he were with us today to witness it all! ”

“ His appeal to Emerson at this hour was, as he elsewhere then puts it, to the "invisible" man in the matter, who affected him as somewhere behind the more or less immediately visible, the beautifully but mystifyingly audible, the Emerson of honeyed lectures and addresses, suggestive and inspiring as that one might be, and who might, as we say to-day, have something, something more at least, for him. ”

“ Often of an evening, in the sober hour of twilight, hearing you comment upon a page of Plato or a line of Goethe, or explain to me with unfailing geniality and marvellous lucidity the troubles of the present day, I have gained a fuller understanding of the magnificent radiance of the French genius; and always, on leaving you, I have found pleasure in repeating the thought of Emerson, of the Emerson whom you love, concerning the utility of great men: "They make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious." ”

“ In Emerson, a soul inheriting centuries of Catholic and Puritan training, until obedience was its instinct and purity its native atmosphere,—a soul endowed with genius,—spread its wings and flew with the suddenness and joy of a young bird's first flight. He saw good everywhere, beauty everywhere, and was glad with the gladness of a seer and savior. He is one of those of whom he speaks, as belonging to a better world which is yet to come, and who touch us with a sense of a heaven on which we are just beginning to enter. ”

“ Emerson, for good reason of his own, dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious and hidden sources, but he writes many a page of vigorous corrective. It is wholesome, he says, to man to look not at Fate, but the other way ”

“ With eyes anointed, in his upward flight
He quick discerned what was divine in men,
Reading the humblest spirit’s tongue aright.
O Prophet, Poet, Leader! in thy light
How many saw beyond their natural ken,
Who follow now the star that led thee then!
Emerson’s writings call for thought in the reader. They demand that one should stop and ask questions, should translate what one has read into one’s own ordinary speech, and inquire again if it is true. ”

“ The now well-known Emersonian plea for a noble individuality is made in terms the most inspiring. He bewails the helplessness of mankind.164 ‘All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret.’ Emerson would drive out the spirit which prompts a man to content himself with being ‘an easy secondary to some Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man.’ He would have men follow no one leader, however distinguished or gifted, but seek truth at first hand, know God face to face. ”

“ Cúchulainn, however, bade Fand have no fear, and addressing Emer he told her how the goddess was more worthy of his love. Emer reproached him, and when she added, "If only I could find favour in thy sight," Cúchulainn's love for her returned: "Thou shalt find favour so long as I am in life."
Then began a noble contest between Fand and Emer as to which of them should sacrifice herself for the other, and Fand sang a beautiful lament. At this moment Manannan became aware of Fand's predicament and arrived to rescue her, unseen by all save her and Loeg. ”

“ I would rather stay with Cuchulainn than live in the sunny home of the gods.
“O Emer, he is yours, and you are worthy of him! What my hand cannot have, my heart may yet wish well to.
“A sorrowful thing it is to love without return. Better to renounce than not to receive a love equal to one’s own.
“It was not well of you, O fair-haired Emer, to come to kill Fand in her misery.”
188It was while the goddess and the human woman were contending with one another in self-sacrifice that Manannán, Son of the Sea, heard of Fand’s trouble, and was sorry that he had forsaken her. ”

“ It is purely from ignorance that you fail to appreciate the valuable social organon I want to teach you. Of course you have heard your guardian quote Emerson? He is a favourite author with some who frequent the classic halls of the 'Century;' but perhaps you do not know that he has investigated 'Courage,' and thrown new light upon that ancient and rare attribute of noble souls? Now, my dear, in dealing with Erle Palma, if you desire to trim the lion's claws, and crimp his mane, adopt the courage of silence. ”

“ Fields and conducted, to Emerson’s large material advantage, by her husband, appear to-day as highly characteristic of their time,—the sixties and seventies,—and the light thrown upon them by her journal illuminates not only him and her, but the whole society of “superior persons” in which Emerson was so dominating a figure. ”

“ Then he returned to Ireland, and went in a scythed chariot to Forgall’s palace. He leaped over its triple walls, and slew everyone who came near him. Forgall met his death in trying to escape Cuchulainn’s rage. He found Emer, and placed her in his chariot, and drove away; and, every time that Forgall’s warriors came up to them, he turned, and slew a hundred, and put the rest to flight. He reached Emain Macha in safety, and he and Emer were married there. ”

“ One glance Rose Emer had of his ghastly, disfigured countenance, and averted her eyes with a shudder. His punishment had been swift and horrible, more so than she knew. It was not alone the flesh that Marcus had marred. The brain had given way also.
Commanding his laboring breath, Scoland shook his uninjured hand at the shrinking girl.
"Curse you!" he cried, his voice rising into an unnatural screech. "Curse you and your devil-brute! May your heart rot in loneliness, waiting for your wild man. He'll never find his way back from where I left him. He'll die hard, for he is strong. ”

“ Comes Forgall's daughter; changed is her face.
"Have no fear," said Cuchulain, "no foe shalt thou meet;
Enter thou my strong car, with its sunny bright seat:
I will set thee before me, will guard thee from harm
Against women, from Ulster's four quarters that swarm:
Though the daughter of Forgall the war with thee vows,
Though her dear foster-sisters against thee she rouse,
No deed of destruction bold Emer will dare,
Though she rageth against thee, for I will be there."
Moreover to Emer he said:
I avoid thee, O lady, as heroes
Avoid to meet friends in a strife ”

“ The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with institutions, creeds, usages, conventionalisms,—each man believing because his neighbors do, or his father did,—that it was necessary to take a new observation. What says the heart of man at its highest? For this Emerson is singled out; for him an ancestry is trained through generations ”

“ Polaris muttered. He turned and gathered Rose Emer in his arms. She clung to him, sobbing softly.
"Be brave, dear heart," he whispered. "It isn't hard to die, and wherever we are going, we shall go together."
Around them rose the waves.
Held fast in the swirl of the sinking ship, every soul on the Minnetonka went down with her. From Everson, kneeling on his deck, to the lowliest coal-passer in the depths of the cruiser, there was no man but bowed his face to the waters. ”

“ Even where the love-story passes wholly among mortals, the woman's rôle is more accentuated than in the Teutonic sagas. She is no mere lay-figure upon a fire-bound rock like Brunhild or Menglad, ready, when the destined hero appears, to fall straightway into his arms. Emer, the one maiden of Erinn whom Cuchullain condescends to woo, is eager to show herself in all things worthy of him; she tests his wit as well as his courage, she makes him accept her conditions. ”

“ When that father died the young man started to break his way to civilization.
In his wild adventurings northward he had found Rose Emer, an American heiress, lost in the snows. Where they made their camp an ice floe broke up, and they were whirled down the coast to the south again on an enormous berg. Inland, they had found the kingdom of Sardanes—Sardanes, the mystical volcanic valley, set like an emerald in the white fastnesses of the Antarctic, blooming with tropical verdure, and peopled with a fragment of the ancient Greek nation, the Hellenes, whose victories Bard Homer sang. ”

“ Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in [pg 032] things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. ”

“ They came to rest in the shelter of one of the thousands of hummocks, and Polaris realized, with a chill at his stout heart, that their march had advanced them a bare score of miles from their last stopping place, when they should have covered at least twice that distance.
From her nestling place beneath the heap of furs on the sledge he gently aroused Rose Emer. The girl rode most of the weary miles in light and fitful slumbers, drowsy with the cold, and her brain at times benumbed by the prospect, now nearer and nearer, of almost certain disaster—a contingency which the man would not admit. ”

“ Everywhere in the valley was the sound of life. Birds flashed back and forth among the foliage; goats leaped among the rocks; small ponies grazed in the meadows; men tilled the fields. From the distance up the valley came the hum and splashing of a small waterfall. A couple of miles away, at the right of the river, was a large square of buildings that gleamed white in the sunlight, where many people were moving about.
"Behold, Sardanes!" said Kard the Smith, advancing to the edge of the rock.
Rose Emer caught the word Sardanes and echoed it. ”

“ Cúchulainn sucked out the sling-stone and with it some blood; and for this reason also he could not wed her, for he had drunk her blood—a mythical version of the rite of blood brotherhood. He now carried off Emer despite Forgall's opposition, and she became his wife, though not before Conchobar exercised his royal prerogative on her.18 The feats which Cúchulainn learned from Scáthach are no longer intelligible and are probably exaggerated or imaginary warrior exploits. ”

“ His wife, the fair-haired Emer, daughter of Forgall Monach, the sixth best woman that Erin contained, said that he should go and speak with his guardian Conchobar.
"Harnessed are the horses, and yoked is the chariot," said Loeg; "wait not for the evil hour, that thou mayest not be hindered of thy valor. Jump into it when thou likest."
Cu Chulainn took his warlike apparel around him; and he leaped into his chariot, and proceeded on by the most direct road, and shortest way to Emain Macha. And Sencha mac Ailill came to bid welcome to Cu Chulainn on the green of Emain Macha. ”

“ 'There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,
Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr—— No, 'tis not even prose; ”

“ At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspere. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd—Waller's "Go, lovely rose," or Lovelace's lines "to Lucusta"—the quaint conceits of the old French bards, and the like. ”

“ Surprise was written large on the features of all of the party as they came into the open space before the throne, and they halted. The two nobles stared frankly. The faces of the twin princes expressed a kindly curiosity, not unmixed with the general awe in which the Sardanians held the strangers. In the face of Helicon was a similar expression, but with less of awe and more of grave dignity.
His eyes roved over the pack of dogs, to him the most unusual figures of the group; hesitated in admiration at the splendid form of Polaris, and passed to Rose Emer. ”

“ Long before the Renaissance had run its course in Italy, its influences had begun to pass the Alps. But there is one man who, above all others, must be regarded as the herald of humanism in the North. It is the distinction of Erasmus that by the peculiar qualities of his genius, and by the unique popularity of his writings, he prepared the advent of the New Learning, not in his native Holland alone, but throughout Europe. ”

“ Erasmus is almost completely transformed into an Englishman, with such distinguished consideration am I treated by very many others, but especially by my incomparable (unicus) Mæcenas, the archbishop of Canterbury,—patron not of me alone, but of all learned men, among whom I hold the lowest place, if indeed I hold any place at all. Eternal God! how happy, how productive, how ready is the talent of that man! What skill in unravelling the most weighty matters of business! what uncommon learning! ”

“ Erasmus, while eating and drinking enough for four, was entirely unconscious that he had become the object of general curiosity; when an aged man came up to him, took him by the hand, led him before the glass, and said to him—"Sir, you have no reflection; you are the devil or one of his people!" ”