Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Guide to Emerson (1923).djvu/51

 48 not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with the intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar.

"As the traveler who has lost his. way throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into Nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration."

"The poets," decides Emerson, become—for a time, at least—"liberating gods."

"The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, 'Those who are free throughout the world.' They are free, and they make free; … nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the drunkeness lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence."

And yet with all his dreams, or his drunkeness, Emerson loves,the poets—loves Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Raphael—and exclaims: "O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the