“was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him.  Many of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on the English poets.  The book has no worthless selections, almost everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth.  Yet Emerson’s personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections.  With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional poems which have attracted devout souls.—­His poetical sympathies are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the seventeenth century.  Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him.  The names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently appear.  Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make up the list of favorites.  Many little known pieces are included, and some whose merit is other than poetical.—­This selection of poems is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes.  I not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general reader.  The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of the poems and poets appearing in these selections.”

I will only add to Mr. Cooke’s criticism these two remarks:  First, that I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies at least, there was no paged index where each author’s pieces were collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss of time and patience, under various heads, “imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris.”  The other remark is that each one of Emerson’s American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen fit to indulge us.

In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector.  He received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was elected.  He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:—­

“I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my too partial advocate.”

Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to “Letters and Social Aims,” that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken.  Sentences, even whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what even he would have tolerated:—­