On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to appear before the public as a lecturer.  His first subjects, “Water,” and the “Relation of Man to the Globe,” were hardly such as we should have expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical and physiological science.  They were probably chosen as of a popular character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating.  These lectures are not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so far as I know.  He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating the experiences of his recent tour in Europe.  Having made himself at home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics.  In 1834 he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund Burke.  The first two of these lectures, though not included in his collected works, may be found in the “North American Review” for 1837 and 1838.  The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in prose and verse may be found in these Essays.

The Cosmos of the Ancient Greeks, the piu nel’ uno, “The Many in One,” appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his “Nature.”  The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little poem entitled “Each and All.”  The “Rhodora,” another brief poem, finds itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, “What is Beauty?” and its answer, “This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace.  Beauty may be felt.  It may be produced.  But it cannot be defined.”  And throughout this Essay the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment. Noscitur a sociis applies as well to a man’s dead as to his living companions.  A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on Plato.  When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution, long remembered, “When you strike at a King, you must kill him.”  He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own intelligence.  What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character chiefly interested him.  He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble.  Like his “Humble Bee,” the “yellow-breeched philosopher,” whom he speaks of as

  “Wiser far than human seer,”

and says of him,

  “Aught unsavory or unclean
  Hath my insect never seen,”

he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is repulsive to dwell upon,

  “Seeing only what is fair,
  Sipping only what is sweet.”

Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as printed in the Essay.