The importance of the organic metaphor in Emerson's thinking and writing has been increasingly recognized in recent years. The formerly prevalent notion that Emerson was a great writer in spite of obvious faults and in the absence of most of the familiar virtues, that as a thinker he was rescued from his own contradictions only by some unexplainable, perhaps mystical, consistency in his character, has been forced into the background, though it still persists in many people's minds and in some published criticism. It has been progressively corrected by such investigations as those of Henry D. Gray, Norman Foerster, Joseph Warren Beach, F. O. Matthiessen, Robert E. Spiller, Vivian C. Hopkins, and Sherman Paul, in which the romantic origins of Emerson's thought and art are explored, and in which organic theories are increasingly used to explain his meanings and to evaluate his aesthetic achievements. I should like to carry this line of inquiry a little further, because I believe that Emerson should be placed more wholly in the romantic tradition than he has yet been, and that his importance depends on a more fundamental, consistent, and logical use than he has yet been shown to have made of the organic principle, which is one of the central concepts of romantic philosophy.

Browning's critics and biographers never tire of recounting the original reception of Sordello. We are told again and again Tennyson's remark that only the first and last lines are intelligible and they are both false, or Mrs. Carlyle's comment that after reading the poem through she had still not discovered whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. But even more discouraging to the modern reader who wishes to take Sordello seriously is the tendency of later critics, including those otherwise friendly to Browning, to ignore the poem or pass it by with brief praise for what are sometimes called its “incidental beauties.” Sir Henry Jones, writing on Browning in the Cambridge History of English Literature, passes it by without an attempt at interpretation. Chesterton does the same in the English Men of Letters Series biography, while Phelps, conceding that “in its inmost citadel is some precious secret,” adds “but not only has no one found it, no one knows what it is.” The few studies since 1920 listed in the CBEL all deal with sources and composition, and the yearly bibliographies in PMLA since the publication of the CBEL (1941) list only one interpretive paper. DeVane, in his valuable Browning Handbook (1935), continues the study of sources and methods of composition, showing the evolution of the poem through three successive plans over a period of seven years. As might be expected, DeVane does not find the poem unified. It is, he concludes, “a bewildering potpourri of poetry, psychology, love, romance, humanitarianism, philosophy, fiction, and history.”

Of all the commonplace antitheses of literary history none seems more solidly justified than that which opposes Descartes to Pascal. Critics, depending upon their prejudices, have taken sides with either Pascal or Descartes, with either religion or reason. Pascal, whose total view seems more comprehensive, has received the lion's share of favorable comment. To many, his wider awareness, allowing for reason and more-than-reason, makes Descartes appear insufficient and incomplete. The little religion in Descartes is seen chiefly as an excrescence, or a strategic back-tracking: Descartes, seeing the dangerous implications of his rationalism, attempts the always unhappy marriage of Faith and Reason, one he regards as at best a mariage de convenance. Pascal, on the other hand, with his divorce of Faith and Reason, is on “le véritable chemin.” In short, Descartes pays the lip-service to Religion which Pascal pays to Reason.

“All literary history,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “demonstrates that for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets.” The term “plagiarism” may be variously defined in connection with a work of literary art, the crime ranging in degree from servile reproduction to such creative use of sources as one finds in Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, the term is all too often used without any apparent recognition of the fact that an idea—or a phrase—may occur independently to two different minds. To Edgar Poe, harried, beset, frustrated, the thing became an obsession and for him the term gained the widest applicability—particularly as he saw, or fancied he saw, others poaching on his own preserves. Yet ironically the question arises as to whether the author of “Al Aaraaf” might not, by his own definition, be indicted for plagiarizing John Milton; whether, indeed, his reply to Outis —“Can any man doubt that between the Iliad and the Paradise Lost there might be established even a thousand idiosyncratic identities?—And yet is any man fool enough to maintain that the Iliad is the only original of Paradise Lost?”—represents to some degree a defensive attitude? In view of Poe's several footnotes indicating Milton as his source, additional annotation by his editors, and a considerable number of references to the blind bard in his essays and critical pieces, it would seem of considerable importance to determine just how familiar the poet was with his great predecessor.

On 5 june 1824 Thomas Carlyle, aged twenty-nine, sailed from Leith, Edinburgh, to London on a visit that was to last until March 1825. Within an hour of leaving he had sent his family copies of his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, published in Edinburgh at the end of May; then he was off to the metropolis to visit his friend the Reverend Edward Irving and to resume his tutoring of young Charles Buller. “The expedition was an epoch in Carlyle's life,” writes Froude. “There was, perhaps, no one of his age in Scotland or England, who knew so much and had seen so little.” He had read enormously in history, poetry, philosophy—the whole range of modern literature in French, German, and English—yet he had seen no town larger than Glasgow and little cultivated society. He had no illusions of winning immediate recognition, but doubtless expected the kind of benefits he had foreseen for Jane Welsh had her hoped-for visit to London come to pass: “You will see new forms of life, you will converse with cultivated men, you may gather insight into character and manners, and what is equally desirable, into the nature and extent of your own powers and the best mode of turning them to use.”

Because none of Wordsworth's later poems has been so neglected as his sonnet cycle The River Duddon, the pleasant task remains of doing it critical justice. O. J. Campbell has used it as an illustration of Wordsworth's later symbolic art, and the geographical features of the landscape through which the Duddon flows have been adequately described. Furthermore, the English river is a happier symbol than the deer in The While Doe of Rylstone and has simpler, more natural virtues than the mystic Holy River which is the life-stream of pure religion in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Most of the Duddon poems, it is true, fall less sublimely upon the ear and have less nobility and perfection than the finest he composed before 1806. Even so, their level is consistently high, part of their attractiveness being a sometimes bleak austerity. In several ways too, as Wordsworth generously says in his “Postscript,” the sequence is related to Coleridge's project, The Brook, outlined in Biographia Literaria. More important, however, is the final development of an extended theme based upon water imagery, for after 1797 Wordsworth's profoundest insights are often associated with it. We have also Robert Arnold Aubin's comment that “the greatest river-poem of all is Wordsworth's River Duddon (1820)… . With its use of apostrophe, local pride, historical reflection, catalogue, moralizing, genre scenes, episode, early memories, prospect, ruin-piece, and Muse-driving ( On, loitering muse—the swift stream chides us—on!'), it is not wonderful that a reviewer perceived that the work belonged in the main stream of topographical poetry.”

There is a well-known note in A. C. Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (pp. 139-141) which defines Wordsworth's “sense or consciousness of ‘immortality’” as “at once a consciousness that he … is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’.” Bradley quotes (very incorrectly) three passages from the Excursion as evidence that we “remain entirely outside Wordsworth's mind” if we read ‘immortality’ without extending the conception to mean infinity, and quotes again from the Prelude a passage to illustrate “the mind's infinity or immortality,” as if the concepts are not merely related but synonymous.

Der aufstieg zum hohen Stil in deutscher Sprache war die Aufgabe, vor die das 17. Jahrhundert sich gestellt sah. Opitz war der erste, der einen klaren Begriff davon besass. Er trat auf als der grosse Ordner, und in dieser Hinsicht vielleicht kann man ihm vorklassischen Rang zugestehen. Wo vor ihm Tasten und Ungefähr herrschte, schuf er klare Regeln. Mit dem ihm eigenen Sinn für das Richtige und Durchführbare beschränkte er sich auf Weniges, auf das was sauber unterschied und trennte. Er gestaltete ein Sprachbild, dem der Naturlaut fehlte, aber dem verständiger Ausdruck möglich war. Seine Aufgabe war der der Plejade in Frankreich ähnlich, aber insofern verschieden, als er strenger sich gegen die Dialekte absondern musste. Alle Lieblichkeit, Innigkeit und Süsse des Volkslieds schwand dahin, die neuen Formen haben etwas Ausgesägtes, aber die Zacken passen ineinander, und die Geschichte hat Opitz bestätigt: nach ihm entstand eine der höchsten, reichsten und wendigsten Dichtersprachen.

In 1915 Gilbert Chinard concluded his study of Chateaubriand en Amérique with the words: “Si inconnu qu'il fût à cette date, Chateaubriand a pu laisser des traces de son passage; on le trouvera peut-être un jour mentionné dans quelque correspondance d'émigré, dans un journal de colon conservé dans les archives d'une société historique de quelque petite ville de la Nouvelle-Angleterre ou du Canada. D'ici là, il sera sage de se garder à la fois des affirmations trop hardies et des hypothèses trop séduisantes.” Such an investigation as the eminent américanisant suggested seemed an excellent exercise for young scholars established close to Chateaubriand's line of march. Thus, in the autumn of 1952 I imposed on a graduate seminar the task of examining all the known records of the year 1791 in New York State. All the local historical societies were questioned; manuscript collections and newspaper files were consulted; the aid of specialists in the period was invoked.

The english history play belongs distinctly to the sixteenth century. Although it has its roots deep in the medieval drama, it reached its full development only in the last decades of the reign of Elizabeth, and when John Ford wrote his Perkin Warbeck in 1634, it was already with the awareness that he was reviving a dramatic type which had been dead for some decades. It is significant that later attempts to revive the history play have always been with an eye towards the Elizabethan era. Nicholas Rowe turned to his Jane Shore fresh from his edition of Shakespeare and full of the inspiration of Shakespeare's histories. In our own time Maxwell Anderson, in such plays as Elizabeth the Queen and Anne of the Thousand Days, has been clearly anachronistic in his attempts to recreate Elizabethan verse drama, and it is significant that he has chosen his subjects from the very age he has sought to emulate.

We cannot be sure that Blake knew Thomas Taylor personally, but we can be sure that he knew by reputation the then famous translator. Even a cursory examination, moreover, of the works of the two writers will show that Blake undoubtedly was thoroughly indoctrinated in the dogmas of Taylor's writings. The great difference in symbolism and philosophical content between Blake's early poetry and the Prophetic Books may be attributed in no small degree to Taylor's translations and his interpretations of Neo-Platonic doctrines. One of the most interesting of these to both Blake and Taylor was the concept of time and eternity.

The concept of “Dramatic Illusion” is never thought of today in conjunction with Charles Lamb. Rather it is chiefly associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for two good reasons. Coleridge's position on this difficult topic is, in the final analysis, a middle of the road one, between the extremes, say, of Castelvetro on the one hand and Dr. Johnson on the other. Second, his formula, “the willing suspension of disbelief,” whether adequate or not, is so effectively put that it has been granted a degree of acceptance which a less vivid phrase might never have received.

Major manuscript anthologies of Middle English secular lyrics are rare; apart from the very early Harley MS. 2253 and the Charles d'Orleans translations, there are not more than three large collections: the early-sixteenth-century Bodleian MS. Rawlinson C. 813 (S. C. 12653), the Newton holograph, and the present manuscript, Ff. 1. 6 of the Cambridge University Library, which contains many well-known longer secular poems as well as a large group of short lyric poems.