[140] Optimism and Pessimism. The meanings of these two opposites are readily made out from the Latin words from which they come.
[141] St. Bernard de Clairvaux (1091-1153), French ecclesiastic.
[142] Jesus. Holmes writes of Emerson: "Jesus was for him a divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as he was willing to be called a Platonist.... If he did not worship the 'man Christ Jesus' as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of him as more like Christ than any man he had known."
[143] The first his refers to Jesus, the second to Shakespeare.
[144] Banyan. What is the characteristic of this tree that makes it appropriate for this figure? SELF-RELIANCE
[145] Ne te, etc. "Do not seek for anything outside of thyself." From Persius, Sat. I. 7. Compare Macrobius, Com. in Somn. Scip., I. ix. 3, and Boethius, De Consol. Phil., IV. 4.
[146] Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.
[147] These lines appear in Emerson's Quatrains under the title Power.
[148] Genius. See the paragraph on genius in Emerson's lecture on The Method of Nature, one sentence of which runs: "Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator."
[149] "The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."—Emerson, Behavior.
[150] Plato (429-347 b.c.), (See note 36.)
[151] Milton (1608-1674), the great English epic poet, author of Paradise Lost. "O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages."Tennyson.
[152] "The great poet makes feel our own wealth."—Emerson, The Over-Soul.
[153] Then most when, most at the time when.
[154] "The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity."—Emerson, Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge.
[155] "For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within." Tennyson, In Memoriam, V. I.
[156] Trust thyself. This is the theme of the present essay, and is a lesson which Emerson is never tired of teaching. In The American Scholar he says: