Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

True hospitality is in these terms expressed,
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

To which the following couplet from “Woodnotes” seems almost like a continuation:

Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,--his hall the azure dome;

The wise man carries rest and contentment in his own mental life, and is equally himself at the Corona d'italia and on a western ranch; while the weakling runs back to earlier associations like a colt to its stable. But Homer is also Emersonian at times. What could be more so than Achilles's memorable saying, which is repeated by Ulysses in the Odyssey: “More hateful to me than the gates of death is he who thinks one thing and speaks another;” or this exclamation of old Laertes in the last book of the Odyssey: “What a day is this when I see my son and grandson contending in excellence!”

It seems a long way from Dante to Emerson, and yet there are Dantean passages in “Woodnotes” and “Voluntaries.” They are not in Dante's matchless measure, but they have much