Quite a reading list.......................

      Emerson still read with the contented nonchalance of one who never knows from what direction inspiration will appear but who knows that it will appear.  He read more in Hafez and Kurroglou;  he read Swedenborg's Animal Kingdom with the same half-fascinated, half-repelled attentions that marked his other encounters with the Swedish scientist-mystic.  He read the Heimskrigla and the prose Edda.  He read Boeckh's Public Economy of Athens, Alfieri's Autobiography and Aristophanes.  He read Machiavelli"s The Florentine Histories and complained that "the Florentine factions are as tiresome as the history of the Philadelphia Fire Companies."

-Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson:  The Mind on Fire