Emerson is using a metaphor. He is figuratively speaking of all the bards and sages, that is, all the poets and philosophers, as if they are stars lighting up the entire sky like our Milky Way galaxy. Emerson is not the first writer to speak of great men of the past as if they had been transformed into eternal stars. In Shelley's famous poem Adonais he speaks of the soul of dead poet John Keats as having been transformed into a star. But...
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