[Footnote 521:  Operose.  Laborious.]

[Footnote 522:  Outskirt and far-off reflection, etc.  Compare with this passage Emerson’s poem, The Forerunners.]

[Footnote 523:  Oedipus.  In Greek mythology, the King of Thebes who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a fabled monster.]

[Footnote 524:  Prunella.  A widely scattered plant, called self-heal, because a decoction of its leaves and stems was, and to some extent is, valued as an application to wounds.  An editor comments on the fact that during the last years of Emerson’s life “the little blue self-heal crept into the grass before his study window.”]

SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET

[Footnote 525:  Shakespeare; or the Poet is one of seven essays on great men in various walks of life, published in 1850 under the title of Representative Men.  These essays were first delivered as lectures in Boston in the winter of 1845, and were repeated two years later before English audiences.  They must have been especially interesting to those Englishmen who had, seven years before, heard Emerson’s friend, Carlyle, deliver his six lectures on great men whom he selected as representative ones.  These lectures were published under the title of Heroes and Hero-Worship.  You should read the latter part of Carlyle’s lecture on The Hero as Poet and compare what he says about Shakespeare with Emerson’s words.  Both Emerson and Carlyle reverenced the great English poet as “the master of mankind.”  Even in serious New England, the plays of Shakespeare were found upon the bookshelf beside religious tracts and doctrinal treatises.  There the boy Emerson found them and learned to love them, and the man Emerson loved them but the more.  It was as a record of personal experiences that he wrote in his journal:  “Shakespeare fills us with wonder the first time we approach him.  We go away, and work and think, for years, and come again,—­he astonishes us anew.  Then, having drank deeply and saturated us with his genius, we lose sight of him for another period of years.  By and by we return, and there he stands immeasurable as at first.  We have grown wiser, but only that we should see him wiser than ever.  He resembles a high mountain which the traveler sees in the morning and thinks he shall quickly near it and pass it and leave it behind.  But he journeys all day till noon, till night.  There still is the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings since the morning light.”]

[Footnote 526:  Genius.  Here instead of speaking as in Friendship, see note 286, of the genius or spirit supposed to preside over each man’s life, Emerson mentions the guardian spirit of human kind.]

[Footnote 527:  Shakespeare’s youth, etc.  It is impossible to appreciate or enjoy this essay without having some clear general information about the condition of the English people and English literature in the glorious Elizabethan age in which Shakespeare lived.  Consult, for this information, some brief history of England and a comprehensive English literature.]