POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not any too soon. If it only
were practicable to kill him in real life! A story--to be called The
Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a decree condemning to death
every long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of rank,
and is himself instantly arrested and decapitated. The man who suspects
his own tediousness is yet to be born.

WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find myself turning automatically
to his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in mediocre
verse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of our
poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its texture can
bear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginative
quality and austere richness of diction what other verse of our period
approaches it? The day Emerson wrote Bacchus he had in him, as Michael
Drayton said of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things that the first
poets had."


IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one
man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine
him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and
hearing a ring at the door-bell!

No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself
in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work about
it. In spite of his candid purpose he omits necessary touches and adds
superfluous ones. At times he cannot help draping his thought, and the
least shred of drapery becomes a disguise. It is only the diarist who
accomplishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, without any such end