My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:--
"The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart, longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,--
"'The pulses of her iron heart Go beating through the storm.'"
I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The Steamboat:"
"The beating of her restless heart Still sounding through the storm."
It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that
'tis better to be quoted wrong Than to be quoted not at all.
This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:--
"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods themselves."--
"'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility."--
Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the North Star.