Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:15:21.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Emerson and Merlin's “Dungeon Made of Air”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

B. J. Whiting*
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Comment and Criticism
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Emerson borrowed the work from the Boston Athenaeum in 1860, taking out Volume i on August 25th and Volume ii on September 7th; he returned both volumes on January 7, 1861; see Kenneth W. Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading (Raleigh, N. C, 1941), pp. 32,89.

2 Complete Works of Emerson (Boston, 1904), viii, 60–63.

3 Emerson, vin, 60–61. It should be observed that while Emerson gives no reference to Southey, he does inclose the passage in quotation marks.

4 viii, 60. He had entered the same sentiment in his journal in 1869: “Thus, in Morte d'Arthur, I remember nothing so well as Merlin's cry from his invisible inaccessible prison” —Journals, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Boston, 1909–14), x, 276. All he forgot was that the account was not in the Morte d'Arthur, and that was because he had not noted the fact. For another example of Emerson's free use of earlier scholarship, see “Emerson, Chaucer, and Thomas Warton”, American Literature, xvii (1945), 75–78.