ature." The
"Sketch-Book" gives the lines thus:--

"Sweet day, so pure, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky."

In other versions the fourth word is _cool_ instead of _pure_,
and _cool_ is, I believe, the correct reading. The day when we
visited Bemerton was, according to A----'s diary, "perfect." I was
struck with the calm beauty of the scene around us, the fresh greenness
of all growing things, and the stillness of the river which mirrored the
heavens above it. It must have been this reflection which the poet was
thinking of when he spoke of the bridal of the earth and sky. The river
is the Wiltshire Avon; not Shakespeare's Avon, but the southern stream
of the same name, which empties into the British Channel.

So much of George Herbert's intellectual and moral character repeat
themselves in Emerson that if I believed in metempsychosis I should
think that the English saint had reappeared in the American philosopher.
Their features have a certain resemblance, but the type, though an
exceptional and fine one, is not so very rare. I found a portrait in the
National Gallery which was a good specimen of it; the bust of a near
friend of his, more intimate with him than almost any other person, is
often taken for that of Emerson. I see something of it in the portrait
of Sir Philip Sidney, and I doubt not that traces of a similar mental
resemblance ran through the whole group, with individual characteristics
which were in some respects quite different. I will take a single verse
of Herbert's from Emerson's "Nature,"--one of the five which he
quotes:--

"Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star:
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh because that they
Find their acquaintance there."

Emerson himself fully recognizes his obligations to "the beautiful
psalmist of the seventeenth century," as he calls George Herbert. There
are many passages in his writings which sound as if they were
paraphrases from the elder poet. From him it is that Emerson gets a word
he is fond of, and of which his imitators are too fond:--

"Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
Makes that and the action _fine_."

The little chapel in which Herbert officiated is perhaps half as long
again as the room in which I am writing, but it is four or five feet
narrower,--and I do not live in a palace. Here this humble ser