Misfortune to have lived not knowing thee! ’Twere not high living, nor to noblest end, Who, dwelling near, learned not sincerity, Rich friendship’s ornament that still doth lend To life its consequence and propriety. Thy fellowship was my culture, noble friend! By the hand thou took’st me, and did’st condescend To bring me straightway into thy fair guild; And life-long hath it been high compliment By that to have been known, and thy friend styled, Given to rare thought and to good learning bent; Whilst in my straits an angel on me smiled. Permit me then, thus honored, still to be A scholar in thy university. [Illustration: EMERSON’S HOUSE.] ESSAY. The ancients entertained noble notions of the poet. He was an enthusiast and a rhapsodist. His work was done in surprise and delight. And all good epic poets were thought to compose, not by choice, but by inspiration; and so, too, the good lyric poets drew, they tell us, “from fountains flowing with nectar, and gathered flowers from the gardens and glades of the Muses; they, like bees, being ever on the wing. For the poet was a thing light-winged and sacred, unable to compose until he became inspired, and the imagination was no longer under his control. For as long as he was in complete possession of it, he was unable to compose verses or to speak oracularly.” And hence all noble numbers were credited by them, not to the poet whom they knew, but to the Power working in and through him, and making him the most delighted of auditors whenever he chanted his verses, because he did not conceive them to be his. He was the Voice, the favored of the Nine. Hence the value they set upon discipline as the means of poetic divination. The poet, they conceived, must be most virtuous. It was essential to his accomplishment that he be chaste, that he be gentle, that he be noble in his generation, that his endowment be older than himself; that he descend from a race of pure souls,—bring centuries of culture in his descent among men, ideas of ages in his brain,—enabling him to conceive by instinct, and speak his experiences unconsciously, as a child opens his lips, in his most rapturous accents. Therefore, any pretence of ownership in the gift was esteemed an impiety. For a prayer, a song, a tender tone, a glance of the eye, all those magnetic attractions known to friendship, had a like ancestry; were ours personally, primarily, as we became worthy of being their organs.