the Bibles of the world. It is thus a collection of books which reflects his own reading and his appreciation of the worth of the Platonists in the world of literature.

The writings of Plato and the Platonists, then, were the feeding ground for Emerson's mind. Just as the landscape artist keeps in constant touch with the play of light and shade, with the form, the color and the minutest detail that awakens his sense of beauty that his canvas may give back the freshness of the scene he surveys; so Emerson, by repeated and reverent readings in the old philosophers, toned his mind in unison with their speculation that his work might have something of its calm, grand air of intellectual sovereignty. These books were to him a piece of nature and fate. And he attended only to the utterances that had a message for him. It is as if a lone, wandering astral body had swept through the old systems of thought, wrested away a fragment here, a fragment there, and so violently drawn them to itself that their impact fired the central mass with burning energy. What the attractive power of Emerson's mind is, is discernible when these fragments of thought are examined. It is a mind that is tyrannized

over by a unifying instinct, that delights in a sense of ceaseless movement or flux, that has an affinity for beauty, that finds its highest endeavor realized either in a consciousness of the moral value of the world or in a mystical union with the moral reality itself, and that insists above all else on its own independence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BACON, FRANCIS. The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. by Basil Montagu. 16 vols. London, 1825-1836. BOSANQUET, BERNARD. A History of Esthetic. London, 1892.

BUTCHER, S. H. Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Second edition. London, 1898.

CABOT, JAMES ELLIOT. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols. Boston and New York, 1895. COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. by Professor Shedd. 7 vols. New York, 1868.

Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, The. 2 vols. Library edition. Ed. by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston and New York, 1894. COUSIN, VICTOR. Introduction to the History of Philosophy, translated from the French by Henning Gotfried Linberg. Boston, 1832.

CUDWORTH, RALPH. The True Intellectual System of the Universe, to which are added the Notes and Dissertations of Dr. J. L. Mosheim, translated by John Harrison, M.A. 3 vols. London, 1845.

DE GERANDO, M. Histoire Comparée des Systèmes de Philosophie. 4 vols. Paris, 1822.

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. The Complete Works of
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary edition. Ed. by

Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston and
New York, 1903.

FIELDS, A. Mr. Emerson in the Lecture Room. In the
Atlantic Monthly, June, 1883.

HARRIS, W. T. Emerson's Orientalism, in Genius and Character of Emerson. Ed. by F. B. Sanborn. Boston, 1885.

IAMBLICHUS, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. Second edition. London, 1895. Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. London, 1818.

L'ESTRANGE, ROGER. Seneca's Morals by way of Abstract. London, 1746.

OCELLUS LUCANUS. On the Nature of the Universe, translated from the original by Thomas Taylor. London, 1831.

PAULSEN, FRIEDRICH. Immanuel Kant: 'His Life and Doctrine, translated from the revised German edition by J. E. Creighton and Albert Lefevre. New York,

1902.

PLATO. The Works of Plato, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. 5 vols. London, 1804.