and thus conjecture that the gods send forth from their right hands what to us is on the left hand." Thoreau takes the passage from the old version of Dryden's day, since edited by Professor Goodwin, with an Introduction by Emerson. The citation shows with what thoroughness the young philosopher read Plutarch. Indeed, the style is colored by his Greek studies.
Note 4.
Greece was much in Thoreau' s thoughts at this period. In some verses of about this date he said of it,
I thank the gods for Greece,
That permanent realm of peace;
For as the rising moon, far in the night,
Chequers the shade with her forerunning light,
So in my darkest hour my senses seem
To catch from her Acropolis a gleam.
Note 5.
This also is apparently taken from the old version of Plutarch's "Morals."
Note 6.
From Milton's lament on his blindness in "Paradise Lost." Milton, be it remarked, was Thoreau's favorite poet of the English cycle.
Note 7.
From which of the splendidly rhetorical writers of the Stuart period is this quotation? Possibly from Jeremy Taylor, but more likely from Sir Thomas Browne, of whom Thoreau had so high an opinion that he told me in his last illness that he
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