Emerson himself), he withdraws into dim recesses and speaks in subtlest metaphors. The thrall, I think, is the bondage a lover or husband is in to his beloved, in whom the solecisms and disenchantments of possession have supplanted the poetic illusions of romantic love. The man of supreme wisdom, by the magic of self-sacrifice and boundless profusion of gifts turns the trap or prison in which nature has caught him into a bower of Eden. By the road of generosity he escapes. He cunningly builds up in her mind gratitude and friendship in place of the lost romanticism. There is in this treatment of love a touch of the coldblooded philosophy of the Emersonian critique of friendship. But if it is not a marriage of ideal kind, such as that of the Brownings, which he celebrates, he at least embodies in his verse the shrewd love-philosophy of the practical-poetical Englishman, united to the average woman for the furtherance of the ends of the species. Mr. George Brown, in his Emerson primer, thinks that the key-thought of 'Rhea' is in these lines from 'The World-Soul' about the gods:-- "To him who scorns their charities Their arms fly open wide." But the parallelism somewhat halts. For mark: In the one case Napoleon's maxim is embodied, that God is on the side of the strongest battalions. The one who scorns the favoritisms and alms of Heaven, and yet, will he nill he, receives its aid, is really the strong God himself in mask, the noble and resolute man executing his will in time and space. But in the case supposed in 'Rhea,' of husband and wife, the ones who scorn love are those not deserving of gifts at all (although Nature finds her account in them), but persons who receive gifts in charity from one altruistically nobler than themselves. It is just this idea of sublime self-sacrifice that gives to 'Rhea' its strange subtlety and its uniqueness among poems on love. There is a consolatory under-thought in the palimpsest, too. By his illustration of the god and the mortal maid the poet wishes Rhea to divine that, if wives make moan over husbands' lost love, husbands no less often have reason to lament the cooled affection of wives. The central idea in 'Uriel' is that there is no such thing as evil. This thesis is put into the mouth of Uriel, one of the seven archangels, because he was the "interpreter" of God's will. So Milton says, in the _locus classicus_ on Uriel in Book III of 'Paradise Lost.' He also says he was "The sharpest-sighted spirit of all in heav'n." His station was in the all-viewing sun. Uriel, in Milton, tells how, when the universe was yet chaos, "Or ever the wild Time coined itself Into calendar months and days,"