... him a freshness and vigor of feeling that most people lose with their youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. A mystery play was enacted in him,—each sonnet is a scene. There is the whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. They do not seem so much like poems as like microcosms. They are elementally complete. The soul of man could be evolved again from them ... — Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
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