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282 BCE
282 BCE: Construction of the Colossus of Rhodes, an act of worship aimed at obtaining the favor of mighty Helios the sun god, had required 12 years. ASTRONOMY
The commission for the project had been awarded to the Rhodian sculptor Chares of Lindos. To build the statue, his workers had fabricated the outer skin parts as bronze castings. The base was of white marble, to which the feet and ankles of the statue had initially been fixed. The structure had then been erected section by section, with the bronze exterior being stabilized by an iron and stone framework within. It was necessary to put up a temporary earth ramp, to haul the higher parts of the Colossus into position. In this year, the statue was completed: To you, O Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of liberty. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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It towered to about 110 feet (this would be an inspiration to Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, whom we know for his Statue of Liberty in the harbor of New York City, towering 151 feet from the toes to the tip of the torch).
For 56 years this colossal Colossus would stand at or near their Mandraki harbor entrance,1 until the island would be hit by a strong earthquake in about 226 BCE. Rhodes would be badly damaged, and its famous giant statue would snap off at the weakest point — the knee. “But,” Pliny the Elder would comment, “even lying on the ground, it is a marvel.” Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame, “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 1. To clear up a misconception, the Colossus did not bestride the entrance to the Mandraki harbor:
We know how tall the figure was and we know how wide the entrance was: no structure could have stood with such a straddle, nor would sailing vessels have been able to get their masts through without repeatedly striking such a figure in its crotch. Also, when the statue fell, its ruins did not block the harbor mouth. Probably it stood on the eastern promontory of the Mandraki harbor, if not farther inland.
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I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” — Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (1883) Inscription on the Statue of Liberty, officially inaugurated in 1886
1849
July 22, Sunday: Emma Lazarus was born as the fourth of Esther Nathan Lazarus’s and Moses Lazarus’s seven children. She would grow up in New-York and in Newport, Rhode Island, and would be educated by private tutors with whom she would study mythology, music, American poetry, European literature, German, French, and Italian. Her father, a sugar merchant, would support her writing financially as well as emotionally.
1866
Henry Thoreau had left his surveying equipment with his sister Sophia E. Thoreau. In this year she had Sam Staples auction his surveying compass and tripod, which were purchased by Sampson Douglass Mason (he would present them to the Concord Free Public Library in 1913/1914 — and you may view them in the library research room in the basement).
Emma Lazarus’s father had her poems and translations to date printed up “for private circulation” as POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS: WRITTEN BETWEEN THE AGES OF FOURTEEN AND SIXTEEN. (This volume would of course be dedicated “To My Father.”) Soon after this appeared, the young poet would be introduced to Waldo Emerson, and eventually she would be presented with one of Thoreau’s compasses — not merely a similar one, but one he had actually used.
View Thoreau’s surveys at the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/Thoreau_surveys.htm
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1869
May: Emma Lazarus’s poem “Reality.”
Celestial hopes and dreams, And lofty purposes, and long rich days, With fragrance filled of blameless deeds and ways, And visionary gleams, — These things alone endure; “They are the solid facts,” that we may grasp, Leading us on and upward if we clasp And hold them firm and sure. In a wise fable old, A hero sought a god who could at will Assume all figures, and the hero still Loosed not his steadfast hold, For image foul or fair, For soft-eyed nymph, who wept with pain and shame, For threatening fiend or loathesome beast or flame, For menace or for prayer. Until the god, outbraved, Took his own shape divine; not wrathfully, But wondering, to the hero gave reply, The knowledge that he craved. We seize the god in youth; All forms conspire to make us loose our grasp, — Ambition, folly, gain, — till we unclasp From the embrace of truth. We grow more wise, we say, And work for worldly ends and mock our dream, Alas! while all life’s glory and its gleam, With that have fled away.
If thereto we had clung Through change and peril, fire and night and storm, till it assume its proper, godlike form, We might as last have wrung An answer to our cries, — A brave response to our most valiant hope. Unto the light of day this word might ope
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A million mysteries. O’er each man’s brow I see The bright star of his genius shining clear; It seeks to guide him to a nobler sphere, Above earth’s vanity. Up to pure height of snow, Its beckoning ray still leads him on and on; To those who follow, lo, itself comes down And crowns at length their brow. The nimbus still doth gleam On these the heroes, sages of the earth, The few who found, in life of any worth, Only their loftiest dream.
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1871
When her ADMETUS AND OTHER POEMS appeared (NY, Cambridge: Hurd & Houghton; Riverside Press), Emma Lazarus dedicated its title poem “To My Friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.” This volume also included “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” and “How Long,” as well as translations of Goethe and Heinrich Heine.
In this volume the poet used a Henry Thoreau quote, from WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS, as the epigraph when republishing her May 1869 poem “Reality”:
“Hold fast to your most indefinite waking dream. Dreams are the solidest facts that we know.”
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Here is the poem itself: Celestial hopes and dreams, And lofty purposes, and long rich days, With fragrance filled of blameless deeds and ways, And visionary gleams, — These things alone endure; “They are the solid facts,” that we may grasp, Leading us on and upward if we clasp And hold them firm and sure. In a wise fable old, A hero sought a god who could at will Assume all figures, and the hero still Loosed not his steadfast hold, For image foul or fair, For soft-eyed nymph, who wept with pain and shame, For threatening fiend or loathesome beast or flame, For menace or for prayer. Until the god, outbraved, Took his own shape divine; not wrathfully, But wondering, to the hero gave reply, The knowledge that he craved. We seize the god in youth; All forms conspire to make us loose our grasp, — Ambition, folly, gain, — till we unclasp From the embrace of truth. We grow more wise, we say, And work for worldly ends and mock our dream, Alas! while all life’s glory and its gleam, With that have fled away. If thereto we had clung Through change and peril, fire and night and storm, till it assume its proper, godlike form, We might as last have wrung An answer to our cries, — A brave response to our most valiant hope. Unto the light of day this word might ope A million mysteries. O’er each man’s brow I see The bright star of his genius shining clear; It seeks to guide him to a nobler sphere, Above earth’s vanity. Up to pure height of snow, Its beckoning ray still leads him on and on; To those who follow, lo, itself comes down And crowns at length their brow. The nimbus still doth gleam On these the heroes, sages of the earth, The few who found, in life of any worth, Only their loftiest dream.
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Summer: John Muir invited Waldo Emerson on a 2-week excursion in Yosemite Valley.2
Upon his return from this excursion, according to Muir’s friend John Swett, Emerson commented about Muir: “He is more wonderful than Thoreau.”
Emerson, Muir, James Thayer, and others rode 25 miles on horseback to Mariposa to view a grove of giant sequoias. Thayer would Emerson as having been “always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant and showing respectful interest in those with whom he talked.” When they reached the grove, Emerson strolled around quoting from Genesis. Muir would describe their departure: “Emerson lingered in the rear ... and when he reached the top of the ridge, after all the rest of the party were over and out of sight, he turned his horse, took off his hat and waved me a last good-bye.” That evening Muir would sit alone by his campfire, musing that, as he would record later, “Emerson was with me in spirit, though I never again saw him in the flesh.”
Emerson subsidized publication of THE WANDERER, A COLLOQUIAL POEM, a blank-verse pastoral poem written by Ellery Channing and edited by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn with a preface by Emerson. Henry Thoreau was a character in this poem in which “still he heard that drumming in his dreams, / And schemed
2. Refer to:
Thayer, James Bradley. A WESTERN JOURNEY WITH MR. EMERSON. Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1884 McAleer, John. RALPH WALDO EMERSON: DAYS OF ENCOUNTER. Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1984, pages 601-08 Muir, John. “The Forests of Yosemite Park,” in OUR NATIONAL PARKS. Boston MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901, pages 131-36 Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. SON OF THE WILDERNESS: THE LIFE OF JOHN MUIR. NY: Knopf, 1945, pages 145-51
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reforms to agitate the earth / With penny wisdom, and insure the peace.” The book sold well until the remaining copies were consumed by fire — probably the great Boston fire of 1872.
How vain to praise our literature, when its really superior minds are quite omitted, & utterly unknown to the public.... Thoreau quite unappreciated, though his books have been opened & superficially read.
Another poet of the period, Emma Lazarus, did not find Ellery Channing quite so inspiring. She would describe him as “a pathetic, impossible creature, whose cranks and oddities were submitted to on account of an innate nobility of character.”
Emerson to his journal:
[T]he splendors of this age outshine all other recorded ages. In my lifetime have been wrought five miracles, — namely, • 1, the Steamboat; • 2, the railroad; • 3, the Electric telegraph; • 4, the application of the Spectroscope to astronomy; • 5, the Photograph; — five miracles which have altered the relations of nations to each other.
At the end of the journal entries for this year, Emerson listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Iamblichus; Max Müller.”
1872
Emma Lazarus’s poem “Outside the Church” appeared in Index, an American magazine.
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1874
Edward Waldo Emerson finished his training as a physician and returned to America, marrying Annie Shepard Keyes of Concord. Late in the year Edith Emerson Forbes helped her father bring out, under his name, an anthology PARNASSUS of the poetry which the Emerson family most favored for parlor reading. There were no poems by Waldo himself, or by Channing or by Poe or by Whitman, although Thoreau was represented. Included were such poets as John Quincy Adams, Calidasa, Waldo’s brother Edward, Jean Ingelow, Lucy Larcom, Sarah H. Palfrey, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Julia C.R. Dorr, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Simonides, and Jones Very.
Emma Lazarus’s novel ALIDE: AN EPISODE OF GOETHE’S LIFE focused on the young Goethe and a country woman. These lovers are made to part so the great poet can fulfill his “sacred office.”
(Lazarus would see that her friend Emerson had neglected to include any of her stuff in PARNASSUS, and post him an indignant letter.)
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1876
EMERSON: NEUE ESSAYS was published in Leipzig, in a translation by Julian Schmidt which would be read by Professor Friedrich Nietzsche.
Emma Lazarus visited the Emersons in Concord. In this year she was privately publishing THE SPAGNOLETTO, a tragic verse drama, and her poem “Phantasmagoria” would appear in Lippincott’s, an American magazine.
August 31: The US Copyright Office issued registration number 9939-G to a “Statue of American Independence.”
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1877
Emma Lazarus’s poem “The Christmas Tree” appeared in Lippincott’s, an American magazine.
1878
Emma Lazarus’s story “The Eleventh Hour” appeared in Scribner’s Magazine.
Emma Lazarus’s poem “The Taming of the Falcon” appeared in Century, an American magazine.
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1881
Emma Lazarus’s poem “Progress and Poverty” appeared in the New-York Times. Her essay “American Literature” appeared in Critic, an American magazine. During this year she also was issuing a volume of translations, POEMS AND BALLADS OF HEINRICH HEINE.
1882
Emma Lazarus’s SONGS OF A SEMITE: THE DANCE TO DEATH AND OTHER POEMS, in which “The Dance to Death” was a poetic dramatization of Richard Reinhard’s 1877 prose narrative DER TANZ ZUM TODE, celebrating the courage and faith of Jews who had been condemned to die in Nordhausen in Germany in 1349 for allegedly being the cause of a plague.
Her “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” appeared in American Hebrew, an American magazine, and the eulogy “Emerson’s Personality” appeared in the Century, an American magazine.
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1883
In Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” the “Mother of Exiles” was made to declaim: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and people have been presuming that this poem was solicited to be inscribed on the pedestal of a new statue having to do with immigration, on a repurposed island in New York harbor, to be known as the Statue of Liberty. In fact, that statue had not been created in celebration of immigration but was an expression of internal French politics, but was being repurposed at a later date to bear this somewhat more innocuous and homegrown message, and this poem had not been solicited to be inscribed at its base, but merely to raise funds for the construction of a pedestal. In fact, the poem was a little known one, a little regarded one, that had been re-discovered in a basement book sale, in a remaindered copy of the CATALOGUE OF THE PEDESTAL FUND ART LOAN EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN, and so it also was being more or less repurposed in its coming to be inscribed at the base of such a statue!
February: In “The Jewish Problem,” Emma Lazarus advocated the founding of a state by Jews for Jews, in Palestine.
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1884
Emma Lazarus’s poem “To R.W.E.” appeared in Critic, an American magazine.
1887
November 19, day: Emma Lazarus died, probably of cancer. Her obituary would appear on page 16, column 2 in the New York Times on the 20th. Her sisters Mary and Annie would in the following year be putting out Volumes I and II of THE POEMS OF EMMA LAZARUS.
1888
THE POEMS OF EMMA LAZARUS. Volume I contained a biographical sketch by Emma Lazarus’s sister Josephine, and Volume II presented some translations of the mediaeval Spanish Jewish poets Solomon Ben Judah Gabirol, Abul Hassan Judah Ben Ha-Levi, and Moses Ben Esra, along with her final work, which had previously appeared in the Century, BY THE WATERS IN BABYLON, LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: June 2, 2013
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
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