Mr. George Brown, in his Emerson primer, thinks that the key-thought of 'Rhea' is in these lines from 'The World-Soul' about the gods:--
"To him who scorns their charities
Their arms fly open wide."
But the parallelism somewhat halts. For mark: In the one case Napoleon's maxim is embodied, that God is on the side of the strongest battalions. The one who scorns the favoritisms and alms of Heaven, and yet, will he nill he, receives its aid, is really the strong God himself in mask, the noble and resolute man executing his will in time and space. But in the case supposed in 'Rhea,' of husband and wife, the ones who scorn love are those not deserving of gifts at all (although Nature finds her account in them), but persons who receive gifts in charity from one altruistically nobler than themselves. It is just this idea of sublime self-sacrifice that gives to 'Rhea' its strange subtlety and its uniqueness among poems on love. There is a consolatory under-thought in the palimpsest, too. By his illustration of the god and the mortal maid the poet wishes Rhea to divine that, if wives make moan over husbands' lost love, husbands no less often have reason to lament the cooled affection of wives.
The central idea in 'Uriel' is that there is no such thing as evil. This thesis is put into the mouth of Uriel, one of the seven archangels, because he was the "interpreter" of God's will. So Milton says, in the locus classicus on Uriel in Book III of 'Paradise Lost.' He also says he was
"The sharpest-sighted spirit of all in heav'n."
His station was in the all-viewing sun. Uriel, in Milton, tells how, when the universe was yet chaos,
"Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days,"
he saw the worlds a-forming,--earth, sun, and stars. Emerson (or "Sayd") takes Milton at his word, and leads us back into that dark backward and abysm of time, and lets us overhear a conversation between Uriel and the other seraphs. At his speech "the gods shook," because if there is no sin, if all comes round to good, even a lie, then good-bye gods, hells and heavens, and their punishments. But note that, though the All turns your wrong to good in the end, yet you, an individual, suffer for your wrongdoing.
In a genial paper in the Andover Review for March, 1887, Dr. C. C. Everett says that Dr. Hedge suggested to him that 'Uriel' probably took its origin in the discussions of the Boston Association of Ministers on the theme (then rife), "There is no line in nature": all is circular, and by the law of reaction every deed returns upon the doer. At any rate, it was written in 1838, soon after his Divinity School Address. ('Emerson in Concord,' by Edward Emerson.)
The god of boundaries in ancient Rome--Terminus--gives his name to the cheeriest of monodies or anchoring songs sung by the gayest of old sailors on the sea of eternity, and at last approaching port. Terminus, like Hermes, the Greek god of bounds, was shown in his statues without hands or feet, to indicate that he never moved. Was Emerson a little rusty in his classical lore, or did he boldly and knowingly defy classical verities when he says the divinity came to him "in his fatal rounds"? He seems to have attributed to Terminus patrolling functions like those of his own New England village fence-viewers. Or, rather, speaking in noble and more adequate terms, has he not added to the world's mythologies a new and poetical deity,--the god of the bounds of human life, a kind of avant-courier or Death's dragoman to announce to men their approaching end? 'Terminus' was written about 1866, when Emerson was in or near his sixty-third year, and sixteen years before his death. William Sloane Kennedy.