For whatever reason, the editors of Great Conversations I omitted the Latin saying and the two pieces of poetry that preface Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" in other editions. I offer them below. Whoever can give us a translation of the Latin at our meeting on Monday gets a prize.
"Ne te quaesiveris extra."
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
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