cores of other related subjects
every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new
images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were
always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He
renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less
to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the
feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth
under his feet.

The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a
_melange_ they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from
intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer
neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary
or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings
after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked
by what he says that Macaulay did not possess--elevation of mind--and
an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.

Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled
and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception
of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine
humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."

Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here
is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no
more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader
will remember, begins in this wise:

"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hilltop looking down."

In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful
alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above
referred to this becomes:

"All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone."

In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers,"
written in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the
music of the rain; but sweeter rivers s