Stream could not so perversely wind
But corn of Guy's was there to grind."
The reference, of course, is to a man well known in England,--Thomas Guy (d. 1724), founder of Guy's Hospital in London. He was the George Peabody of his day. Beginning life as a bookseller, he made a good deal of money in printing Bibles, but acquired most of his enormous fortune by financial speculations. He was extremely economical; for example, always ate his dinner on his shop counter, first spreading out a newspaper to catch the crumbs. His charities were boundless. To his hospital he gave $1,000,000; and at his death his will was found to contain an enormous number of special benefactions, including bequests to over ninety cousins. Emerson in his poem compares Guy to Polycrates, who was King of Samos some five hundred years before Christ. He says that Polycrates "chained the sunshine and the breeze"; that is, the very elements seemed to be in his pay. This run of luck was without a break up to his death; his fleet of a hundred ships was the largest then known; he conquered all his enemies, and amassed great treasure. His ally, Amasis, King of Egypt, was so alarmed at his prosperity, fearing the envy of the gods, that he advised him to make some noteworthy sacrifice. The story goes that Polycrates accordingly threw his emerald signet-ring into the sea, but it came back to his kitchens in the belly of a large fish, as in the Arabian Nights story. The fears of Amasis were finally justified; for the Persian satrap Orœtes enticed Polycrates to the mainland, and crucified him.
'Xenophanes' embodies poetically the doctrine of the earnest old Greek agnostic and monist of that name, that God, or the All, is uncreated, immovable, and one,--not immovable in its parts, but as a whole, and just because it is all. Xenophanes saw the grandeur and incomprehensibility of the universe, he violently opposed what seemed to him the disgraceful polytheism of Homer, and anticipated the modern atomic theory and the doctrine of the unity of life as revealed by the spectroscope and the discovery of the conservation and mutual convertibility of forces. Or, as Emerson puts it in his haunting numbers,--
"By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave
One scent to hyson and to wall-flower,
One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls,
One aspect to the desert and the lake.
It was her stern necessity."
The title of the poem 'Hamatreya' seemed at first to baffle a perfect and indubitable explanation. The word can be found in no English or foreign dictionary that the largest libraries afford. We are indebted, however, to Col. T. W. Higginson (The Critic, Feb. 18, 1888) for not only giving us a clew to the title, but for pointing out the portion of the Vishnu Purana (Wilson's translation, 1840) on which Emerson based his 'Earth Song' in 'Hamatreya,' and, in fact, got the hint for the whole poem; namely, at the close of Book IV. Maitreya is a disciple of Parasara, who relates to Maitreya the Vishnu Purana. Among other things he tells Maitreya of a chant of the Earth, who said, "When I hear a king sending word to another by his ambassador, 'This earth is mine: immediately resign your pretensions to it,' I am moved to violent laughter at first; but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool." Again, the Purana says, "Earth laughs, as if smiling with autumnal flowers, to behold her kings unable to effect the subjugation of themselves"; which is Emerson's