[657] A pilgrim's progress. As described by John Bunyan, the English writer, in his famous Pilgrim's Progress.
[658] Doleful histories of Adam's fall, etc. The subject of Paradise Lost, the great poem by John Milton.
[659] With doomsdays and purgatorial, etc. As described by Dante in his Divine Commedia, an epic about hell, purgatory, and paradise.
PRUDENCE
[660] The essay on Prudence was given as a lecture in the course on Human Culture, in the winter of 1837-8. It was published in the first series of Essays, which appeared in 1841.
[661] Lubricity. The word means literally the state or quality of being slippery; Emerson uses it several times, in its derived sense of "instability."
[662] Love and Friendship. The subjects of the two essays preceding Prudence, in the volume of 1841.
[663] The world is filled with the proverbs, etc. Compare with this passage Emerson's words in Compensation on "the flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies."
[664] A good wheel or pin. That is, a part of a machine.
[665] The law of polarity. Having two opposite poles, the properties of the one of which are the opposite of the other.