"Too long shut in strait and few, Thinly dieted on dew, I will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it, As you spin a cherry. O doleful ghosts and goblins merry! O all you virtues, methods, mights, Means, appliances, delights, Reputed wrongs and braggart rights, Smug routine, and things allowed, Minorities, things under cloud! Hither! take me, use me, fill me, Vein and artery, though ye kill me!" In brief, "I have run the gauntlet of experience, sounded all the depths of passion, joy, woe, evil. I am dipped in Styx, more invulnerable than Siegfried, and strong now to use the world and be used by it." The mood of the poem is the wild longing that sometimes comes over the good man to break loose and have his fling, come what may, cry, _Vive la bagatelle!_ or run amuck and tilt at all he meets. It is needless to say that the staid Emerson never carried this mood farther than to smoke a cigar now and then, or take an Adirondack outing. His contemporary, the untrammelled Whitman, could both preach and practise (within the bounds of reason) the Mithridatic doctrine; and he was a more many-sided and symmetrical man in consequence. The last two lines of 'Mithridates,' as printed from the autograph copy, were,-- "God! I will not be an owl, But sun me in the Capitol." These lines Emerson wisely dropped. 'Forerunners' ("Long I followed happy guides)" mean one's brave hopes and ideals of good to come, our dreams and aspirations. The lines "No speed of mine avails To hunt upon their shining trails" Thoreau evidently utilized as text for his well-known fable in 'Walden' of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove. The portrait of Hermione, the patient-sweet wife of Leontes in 'The Winter's Tale' of Shakespeare, serves Emerson, in his poem 'Hermione,' as the model of a perfect wife, and a more acceptable one to this age than Chaucer's abject Griselda. Such a lady as Shakespeare's Hermione, beautiful in person and of rare self-control and virtue, is an adumbration or epitome of the universal beauty. Looking at nature, the American poet finds the features of his Hermione there: "mountains and the misty plains, Her colossal portraiture." I suppose that this sketch, tender and delicately toned as if with a silver point, is autobiographical, and is a shadowing forth of the character of Emerson's first wife, the ethereal souled Ellen Tucker, who died of consumption after only a year and a half of married life. When her "meteor glances came," he says, he was "hermit vowed to books and gloom," and dwelling alone. In the lines "The chains of kind The distant bind; Deed thou doest she must do,"