er 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:--

"There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his
full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and
arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely
to the matter."

This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just
enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is
that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than
the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these
it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;"
"Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;"
"Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with
which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this
Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his
leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh
in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score o