Poems / Ralph Waldo Emerson [electronic text]

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POEMS

POEMS

GOOD-BYE * 1.1

GOOD-BYE, proud world! I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine, Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; But now, proud world! I'm going home.

Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face; To Grandeur with his wise grimace; To upstart Wealth's averted eye; To supple Office, low and high; To crowded halls, to court and street; To frozen hearts and hasting feet; To those who go, and those who come; Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home.

I am going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone,— A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green, the livelong day, Echo the blackbird's roundelay,

And vulgar feet have never trod A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

EACH AND ALL * 1.2

LITTLE thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown Of thee from the hill-top looking down; The heifer that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; * 1.3 Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone. I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,

Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home, in his nest, at even; He sings the song, but it cheers not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky;— He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye. * 1.4 The delicate shells lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh. pearls to their enamel gave, And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. The lover watched his graceful maid, As'mid the virgin train she strayed, Nor knew her beauty's best attire Was woven still by the snow-whitsaid, 'Ie choir. At last she came to his hermitage, Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;— The gay enchantment was undone, A gentle wife, but fairy none. Then I said,'I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth:'— As I spoke, beneath my feet The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, Running over the club-moss burrs;

I inhaled the violet's breath; Around me stood the oaks and firs; Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of deity; Again I saw, again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird;— Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

THE PROBLEM * 1.5

I LIKE a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowled churchman be.

Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?

Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought; * 1.6 Never from lips of cunning fell The thrilling Delphic oracle; Out from the heart of nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old; The litanies of nations came, Like the volcano's tongue of flame, Up from the burning core below,— The canticles of love and woe: The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew,— The conscious stone to beauty grew. * 1.7

Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest Of leaves, and feathers from her breast? Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, Painting with morn each annual cell? Or how the sacred pine-tree adds To her old leaves new myriads? Such and so grew these holy piles, Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, As the best gem upon her zone, And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, As on its friends, with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air; And Nature gladly gave them place,

Adopted them into her race, And granted them an equal date With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass; Art might obey, but not surpass. The passive Master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned; And the same power that reared the shrine Bestrode the tribes that knelt within. Ever the fiery Pentecost Girds with one flame the countless host, Trances the heart through chanting choirs, And through the priest the mind inspires. The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tables yet unbroken; The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak, or lanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind. One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world hath never lost. I know what say the fathers wise,— The Book itself before me lies, Old Chrysostom, best Augustine, * 1.8 And he who blent both in his line, The younger Golden Lips or mines, Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines. His words are music in my ear,

I see his cowlèd portrait dear; And yet, for all his faith could see, I would not the good bishop be.

TO RHEA * 1.9

THEE, dear friend, a brother soothes, Not with flatteries, but truths, Which tarnish not, but purify To light which dims the morning's eye. I have come from the spring-woods, From the fragrant solitudes;— Listen what the poplar-tree And murmuring waters counselled me.

If with love thy heart has burned; If thy love is unreturned; Hide thy grief within thy breast, Though it tear thee unexpressed; For when love has once departed From the eyes of the false-hearted, And one by one has torn off quite The bandages of purple light; Though thou wert the loveliest Form the soul had ever dressed, Thou shalt seem, in each reply, A vixen to his altered eye;

Thy softest pleadings seem too bold, Thy praying lute will seem to scold; Though thou kept the straightest road, Yet thou errest far and broad.

But thou shalt do as do the gods In their cloudless periods; For of this lore be thou sure,— Though thou forget, the gods, secure, Forget never their command, But make the statute of this land. As they lead, so follow all, Ever have done, ever shall. Warning to the blind and deaf, 'T is written on the iron leaf, Who drinks of Cupid's nectar cup Loveth downward, and not up; He who loves, of gods or men, Shall not by the same be loved again; His sweetheart's idolatry Falls, in turn, a new degree. When a god is once beguiled By beauty of a mortal child And by her radiant youth delighted, He is not fooled, but warily knoweth His love shall never be requited. And thus the wise Immortal doeth,— 'T is his study and delight To bless that creature day and night;

From all evils to defend her; In her lap to pour all splendor; To ransack earth for riches rare, And fetch her stars to deck her hair: He mixes music with her thoughts, And saddens her with heavenly doubts: All grace, all good his great heart knows, Profuse in love, the king bestows, Saying, 'Hearken! Earth, Sea, Air! This monument of my despair Build I to the All-Good, All-Fair. Not for a private good, But I, from my beatitude, Albeit scorned as none was scorned, Adorn her as was none adorned. I make this maiden an ensample To Nature, through her kingdoms ample, Whereby to model newer races, Statelier forms and fairer faces; To carry man to new degrees Of power and of comeliness. These presents be the hostages Which I pawn for my release. See to thyself, O Universe! Thou art better, and not worse.'— And the god, having given all, Is freed forever from his thrall.

THE VISIT * 1.10

ASKEST, 'How long thou shalt stay?' Devastator of the day! Know, each substance and relation, Thorough nature's operation, Hath its unit, bound and metre; And every new compound Is some product and repeater,— Product of the earlier found. But the unit of the visit, The encounter of the wise,— Say, what other metre is it Than the meeting of the eyes? Nature poureth into nature Through the channels of that feature, Riding on the ray of sight, Fleeter far than whirlwinds go, Or for service, or delight, Hearts to hearts their meaning show, Sum their long experience, And import intelligence. Single look has drained the breast; Single moment years confessed. The duration of a glance Is the term of covenance,

And, though thy rede be church or state, Frugal multiples of that. Speeding Saturn cannot halt; Linger,—thou shalt rue the fault: If Love his moment overstay, Hatred's swift repulsions play.

URIEL * 1.11

IT fell in the ancient periods Which the brooding soul surveys, Or ever the wild Time coined itself Into calendar months and days.

This was the lapse of Uriel, Which in Paradise befell. Once, among the Pleiads walking, Seyd overheard the young gods talking; And the treason, too long pent, To his ears was evident. The young deities discussed Laws of form, and metre just, Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams, What subsisteth, and what seems. One, with low tones that decide, And doubt and reverend use defied, With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere, Gave his sentiment divine Against the being of a line. 'Line in nature is not found; Unit' and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn.' As Uriel spoke with piercing eye, A shudder ran around the sky; The stern old war-gods shook their heads, The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds; Seemed to the holy festival The rash word boded ill to all; The balance-beam of Fate was bent; The bounds of good and ill were rent; Strong Hades could not keep his own, But all slid to confusion. * 1.12

A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell On the beauty of Uriel; In heaven once eminent, the god Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud; Whether doomed to long gyration In the sea of generation, Or by knowledge grown too bright To hit the nerve of feebler sight. * 1.13 Straightway, a forgetting wind Stole over the celestial kind, And their lips the secret kept,

If in ashes the fire-seed slept. But now and then, truth-speaking things Shamed the angels' veiling wings; And, shrilling from the solar course, Or from fruit of chemic force, Procession of a soul in matter, * 1.14 Or the speeding change of water, Or out of the good of evil born, Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn, And a blush tinged the upper sky, And the gods shook, they knew not why.

THE WORLD-SOUL * 1.15

THANKS to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free; Thanks to each man of courage, To the maids of holy mind, To the boy with his games undaunted Who never looks behind? * 1.16

Cities of proud hotels, Houses of rich and great, Vice nestles in your chambers, Beneath your roofs of slate.

It cannot conquer folly,— Time-and-space-conquering steam,— And the light-outspeeding telegraph Bears nothing on its beam.

The politics are base; The letters do not cheer; And 't is far in the deeps of history, The voice that speaketh clear. Trade and the streets ensnare us, Our bodies are weak and worn; We plot and corrupt each other, And we despoil the unborn.

Yet there in the parlor sits Some figure of noble guise,— Our angel, in a stranger's form, Or woman's pleading eyes; Or only a flashing sunbeam In at the window-pane; Or Music pours on mortals Its beautiful disdain. * 1.17

The inevitable morning Finds them who in cellars be; And be sure the all-loving Nature Will smile in a factory. Yon ridge of purple landscape, Yon sky between the walls,

Hold all the hidden wonders In scanty intervals.

Alas! the Sprite that haunts us Deceives our rash desire; It whispers of the glorious gods, And leaves us in the mire. We cannot learn the cipher That's writ upon our cell; Stars taunt us by a mystery Which we could never spell. * 1.18

If but one hero knew it, The world would blush in flame; The sage, till he hit the secret, Would hang his head for-shame. Our brothers have not read it, Not one has found the key; And henceforth we are comforted,— We are but such as they. * 1.19

Still, still the secret presses; The nearing clouds draw down; The crimson morning flames into The fopperies of the town. Within, without the idle earth, Stars weave eternal rings; The sun himself shines heartily, And shares the joy he brings.

And what if Trade sow cities Like shells along the shore, And thatch with towns the prairie broad With railways ironed o'er?— They are but sailing foam-bells Along Thought's causing stream, And take their shape and sun-color From him that sends the dream.

For Destiny never swerves Nor yields to men the helm; He shoots his thought, by hidden nerves, Throughout the solid realm. The patient Dæmon sits, With roses and a shroud; He has his way, and deals his gifts,— But ours is not allowed. * 1.20

He is no churl nor trifler, And his viceroy is none,— Love-without-weakness,— Of Genius sire and son. And his will is not thwarted; The seeds of land and sea Are the atoms of his body bright, And his behest obey.

He serveth the servant, The brave he loves amain;

He kills the cripple and the sick, And straight begins again; For gods delight in gods, And thrust the weak aside; To him who scorns their charities Their arms fly open wide.

When the old world is sterile And the ages are effete, He will from wrecks and sediment The fairer world complete. He forbids to despair; His cheeks mantle with mirth; And the unimagined good of men Is yeaning at the birth.

Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told; Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old; Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snow-drift The warm rosebuds below.

THE SPHINX * 1.21

THE Sphinx is drowsy, Her wings are furled: Her ear is heavy, She broods on the world. "Who'll tell me my secret, The ages have kept?— I awaited the seer While they slumbered and slept:—

"The fate of the man-child, The meaning of man; Known fruit of the unknown; Dædalian plan; Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep; Life death overtaking; Deep underneath deep?

"Erect as a sunbeam, Upspringeth the palm; The elephant browses, Undaunted and calm; In beautiful motion The thrush plies his wings;

Kind leaves of his covert, Your silence he sings.

"The waves, unashamèd, In difference sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, By their animate poles.

"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence, Plant, quadruped, bird, By one music enchanted, One deity stirred,— Each the other adorning, Accompany still; Night veileth the morning, The vapor the hill.

"The babe by its mother Lies bathèd in joy; Glide its hours uncounted,— The sun is its toy; Shines the peace of all being, Without cloud, in its eyes; And the sum of the world In soft miniature lies.

"But man crouches and blushes, Absconds and conceals; He creepeth and peepeth, He palters and steals; Infirm, melancholy, Jealous glancing around, An oaf, an accomplice, He poisons the ground. * 1.22

"Out spoke the great mother, Beholding his fear; — At the sound of her accents Cold shuddered the sphere:— 'Who has drugged my boy's cup? Who has mixed my boy's bread? Who, with sadness and madness, Has turned my child's head?'" * 1.23

I heard a poet answer Aloud and cheerfully, "Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges Are pleasant songs to me. Deep love lieth under These pictures of time; They fade in the light of Their meaning sublime.

"The fiend that man harries Is love of the Best;

Yawns the pit of the Dragon, Lit by rays from the Blest. The Lethe of Nature Can't trance him again, Whose soul sees the perfect, Which his eyes seek in vain.

"To vision profounder, Man's spirit must dive; His aye-rolling orb At no goal will arrive; The heavens that now draw him With sweetness untold, Once found,—for new heavens He spurneth the old.

"Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores; Lurks the joy that is sweetest In stings of remorse. Have I a lover Who is noble and free?— I would he were nobler Than to love me.

"Eterne alternation Now follows, now flies; And under pain, pleasure,— Under pleasure, pain lies.

Love works at the centre, Heart-heaving alway; Forth speed the strong pulses To the borders of day.

"Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits; Thy sight is growing blear; Rue, myrrh and cummin for the Sphinx, Her muddy eyes to clear!" The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,— Said, "Who taught thee me to name? I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow; Of thine eye I am eyebeam.

"Thou art the unanswered question; * 1.24 Couldst see thy proper eye, Alway it asketh, asketh; And each answer is a lie. So take thy quest through nature, It through thousand natures ply; Ask on, thou clothed eternity; Time is the false reply."

Uprose the merry Sphinx, And crouched no more in stone; She melted into purple cloud, She silvered in the moon; She spired into a yellow flame; She flowered in blossoms red;

She flowed into a foaming wave: She stood Monadnoc's head.

Thorough a thousand voices Spoke the universal dame; "Who telleth one of my meanings Is master of all I am." * 1.25

ALPHONSO OF CASTILE * 1.26

I, ALPHONSO, live and learn, Seeing Nature go astern. Things deteriorate in kind; Lemons run to leaves and rind; Meagre crop of figs and limes; Shorter days and harder times. Flowering April cools and dies In the insufficient skies. Imps, at high midsummer, blot Half the sun's disk with a spot; 'T will not now avail to tan Orange cheek or skin of man. Roses bleach, the goats are dry, Lisbon quakes, the people cry. Yon pale, scrawny fisher fools, Gaunt as bitterns in the pools, Are no brothers of my blood;—

They discredit Adamhood. Eyes of gods! ye must have seen, O'er your ramparts as ye lean, The general debility; * 1.27 Of genius the sterility; Mighty projects countermanded; Rash ambition, brokenhanded; Puny man and scentless rose Tormenting Pan to double the dose. Rebuild or ruin: either fill Of vital force the wasted rill, Or tumble all again in heap To weltering Chaos and to sleep. * 1.28

Say, Seigniors, are the old Niles dry, Which fed the veins of earth and sky, That mortals miss the loyal heats, Which drove them erst to social feats; Now, to a savage selfness grown, Think nature barely serves for one; With science poorly mask their hurt; And vex the gods with question pert, Immensely curious whether you Still are rulers, or Mildew?

Masters, I'm in pain with you; Masters, I'll be plain with you; In my palace of Castile, I, a king, for kings can feel.

There my thoughts the matter roll, And solve and oft resolve the whole. And, for I'm styled Alphonse the Wise, Ye shall not fail for sound advice. Before ye want a drop of rain, Hear the sentiment of Spain.

You have tried famine: no more try it; Ply us now with a full diet; Teach your pupils now with plenty, For one sun supply us twenty. I have thought it thoroughly over,— State of hermit, state of lover; We must have society, We cannot spare variety. Hear you, then, celestial fellows! Fits not to be overzealous; Steads not to work on the clean jump, Nor wine nor brains perpetual pump. Men and gods are too extense; Could you slacken and condense? Your rank overgrowths reduce Till your kinds abound with juice? Earth, crowded, cries,'Too many men!' My counsel is, kill nine in ten, And bestow the shares of all On the remnant decimal. Add their nine lives to this cat; Stuff their nine brains in one hat;

Make his frame and forces square With the labors he must dare; Thatch his flesh, and even his years With the marble which he rears. There, growing slowly old at ease No faster than his planted trees, He may, by warrant of his age, In schemes of broader scope engage. So shall ye have a man of the sphere Fit to grace the solar year.

MITHRIDATES * 1.29

I CANNOT spare water or wine, Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose; From the earth-poles to the Line, All between that works or grows, Every thing is kin of mine.

Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes;—

From all natures, sharp and slimy, Salt and basalt, wild and tame: Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion, Bird, and reptile, be my game.

Ivy for my fillet band; Blinding dog-wood in my hand; Hemlock for my sherbet cull me, And the prussic juice to lull me; Swing me in the upas boughs, Vampyre-fanned, when I carouse.

Too long shut in strait and few, Thinly dieted on dew, I will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it, As you spin a cherry. O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry! O all you virtues, methods, mights, Means, appliances, delights, Reputed wrongs and braggart rights, Smug routine, and things allowed, Minorities, things under cloud! Hither! take me, use me, fill me, Vein and artery, though ye kill me! * 1.30

TO J. W. * 1.31

SET not thy foot on graves; Hear what wine and roses say; The mountain chase, the summer waves, The crowded town, thy feet may well delay.

Set not thy foot on graves; Nor seek to unwind the shroud Which charitable Time And Nature have allowed To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.

Set not thy foot on graves; Care not to strip the dead Of his sad ornament, His myrrh, and wine, and rings,

His sheet of lead, And trophies burièd: Go, get them where he earned them when alive; As resolutely dig or dive.

Life is too short to waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'T will soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

DESTINY * 1.32

THAT you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous; You must add the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose. There's a melody born of melody, Which melts the World into a sea. Toil could never compass it; Art its height could never hit; It came never out of wit; But a music music-born Well may Jove and Juno scorn. Thy beauty, if it lack the fire Which drives me mad with sweet desire, What boots it? What the soldier's mail, Unless he conquer and prevail? What all the goods thy pride which lift, If thou pine for another's gift? Alas! that one is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight: When thou lookest on his face, Thy heart saith,'Brother, go thy ways! None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest, Or listen when thou repliest,

Or remember where thou liest, Or how thy supper is sodden;' And another is born To make the sun forgotten. * 1.33 Surely he carries a talisman Under his tongue; Broad his shoulders are and strong; And his eye is scornful, Threatening and young. I hold it of little matter Whether your jewel be of pure water, A rose diamond or a white, But whether it dazzle me with light. I care not how you are dressed, In coarsest weeds or in the best; Nor whether your name is base or brave: Nor for the fashion of your behavior; But whether you charm me, Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me And dress up Nature in your favor. * 1.34. One thing is forever good; That one thing is Success,— Dear to the Eumenides, And to all the heavenly brood. Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles, and masters the sword. * 1.35

GUY * 1.36

MORTAL mixed of middle clay, Attempered to the night and day, Interchangeable with things, Needs no amulets nor rings. Guy possessed the talisman That all things from him began; And as, of old, Polycrates * 1.37 Chained the sunshine and the breeze, So did Guy betimes discover Fortune was his guard and lover; In strange junctures, felt, with awe, His own symmetry with law; That no mixture could withstand The virtue of his lucky hand. He gold or jewel could not lose, Nor not receive his ample dues. Fearless Guy had never foes, He did their weapons decompose. Aimed at him, the blushing blade Healed as fast the wounds it made. If on the foeman fell his gaze, Him it would straightway blind or craze, In the street, if he turned round, His eye the eye' t was seeking found.

It seemed his Genius discreet Worked on the Maker's own receipt, And made each tide and element Stewards of stipend and of rent; So that the common waters fell As costly wine into his well. He had so sped his wise affairs That he caught Nature in his snares. Early or late, the falling rain Arrived in time to swell his grain; Stream could not so perversely wind But corn of Guy's was there to grind: The siroc found it on its way, To speed his sails, to dry his hay; And the world's sun seemed to rise To drudge all day for Guy the wise. In his rich nurseries, timely skill Strong crab with nobler blood did fill; The zephyr in his garden rolled From plum-trees vegetable gold; And all the hours of the year With their own harvest honored were. There was no frost but welcome came, Nor freshet, nor midsummer flame. Belonged to wind and world the toil And venture, and to Guy the oil.

HAMATREYA * 1.38

BULKELEY, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint, Possessed the land which rendered to their toil Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood. * 1.39 Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying,''T is mine, my children's and my name's. How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees! How graceful climb those shadows on my hill! I fancy these pure waters and the flags Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize; And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.'

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave. They added ridge to valley, brook to pond, And sighed for all that bounded their domain; 'This suits me for a pasture; that's my park; We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge, And misty lowland, where to go for peat. The land is well,—lies fairly to the south. 'T is good, when you have crossed the sea and back,

To find the sitfast acres where you left them.' Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds Him to his land, a lump of mould the more. Hear what the Earth says:—

EARTH-SONG

' Mine and yours; Mine, not yours. Earth endures; Stars abide— Shine down in the old sea; Old are the shores; But where are old men? I who have seen much, Such have I never seen.

'The lawyer's deed Ran sure, In tail, To them, and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail, Forevermore.

' Here is the land, Shaggy with wood, With its old valley, Mound and flood. But the heritors? —

Fled like the flood's foam. The lawyer, and the laws, And the kingdom, Clean swept herefrom.

They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?'

When I heard the Earth-song I was no longer brave; My avarice cooled Like lust in the chill of the grave.

THE RHODORA: * 1.40

ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?

IN May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: * 1.41 Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never thought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance, suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

THE HUMBLE-BEE * 1.42

BURLY, dozing humble-bee, Where thou art is clime for me. Let them sail for Porto Rique, Far-off heats through seas to seek; I will follow thee alone, Thou animated torrid-zone! Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer, Let me chase thy waving lines; Keep me nearer, me thy hearer, Singing over shrubs and vines.

Insect lover of the sun, Joy of thy dominion!

Sailor of the atmosphere; Swimmer through the waves of air; Voyager of light and noon; Epicurean of June; Wait, I prithee, till I come Within earshot of thy hum,— All without is martyrdom.

When the south winds in May days, With a net of shining haze Silvers the horizon wall, And with softness touching all, Tints the human countenance With a color of romance, And infusing subtle heats, Turns the sod to violets, Thou, in sunny solitudes, Rover of the underwoods, The green silence dost displace With thy mellow, breezy bass.

Hot midsummer's petted crone, Sweet to me thy drowsy tone Tells of countless sunny hours, Long days, and solid banks of flowers; Of gulfs of sweetness without bound In Indian wildernesses found; Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure, Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.

Aught unsavory or unclean Hath my insect never seen; But violets and bilberry bells, Maple-sap and daffodels, Grass with green flag half-mast high, Succory to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue And brier-roses, dwelt among; All beside was unknown waste, All was picture as he passed.

Wiser far than human seer; Yellow-breeched philosopher! Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care, Leave the chaff, and take the wheat. * 1.43 When the fierce northwestern blast Cools sea and land so far and fast, Thou already slumberest deep; Woe and want thou canst outsleep; Want and woe, which torture us, Thy sleep makes ridiculous.

BERRYING * 1.44

'MAY be true what I had heard,— Earth's a howling wilderness, Truculent with fraud and force,' Said I, strolling through the pastures, And along the river-side. Caught among the blackberry vines, Feeding on the Ethiops sweet, Pleasant fancies overtook me. I said,'What influence me preferred, Elect, to dreams thus beautiful?' The vines replied,'And didst thou deem No wisdom from our berries went?' * 1.45

THE SNOW-STORM * 1.46

ANNOUNCED by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Pariah wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.

WOODNOTES

I * 1.47

1

WHEN the pine tosses its cones To the song of its waterfall tones, Who speeds to the woodland walks? To birds and trees who talks? Cæsar of his leafy Rome, There the poet is at home. He goes to the river-side,— Not hook nor line hath he; He stands in the meadows wide,— Nor gun nor scythe to see. * 1.48 Sure some god his eye enchants: What he knows nobody wants. In the wood he travels glad, Without better fortune had, Melancholy without bad. Knowledge this man prizes best Seems fantastic to the rest: Pondering shadows, colors, clouds, Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds, Boughs on which the wild bees settle, Tints that spot the violet's petal, Why Nature loves the number five,

And why the star-form she repeats: * 1.49 Lover of all things alive, Wonderer at all he meets, Wonderer chiefly at himself, Who can tell him what he is? Or how meet in human elf Coming and past eternities?

2

And such I knew, a forest seer, A minstrel of the natural year, Foreteller of the vernal ides, Wise harbinger of spheres and tides, A lover true, who knew by heart Each joy the mountain dales impart; It seemed that Nature could not raise A plant in any secret place, In quaking bog, on snowy hill, Beneath the grass that shades the rill, Under the snow, between the rocks, In damp fields known to bird and fox. But he would come in the very hour It opened in its virgin bower, As if a sunbeam showed the place, And tell its long-descended race. It seemed as if the breezes brought him, It seemed as if the sparrows taught him; As if by secret sight he knew Where, in far fields, the orchis grew.

Many haps fall in the field Seldom seen by wishful eyes, But all her shows did Nature yield, To please and win this pilgrim wise. He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes' broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket's gloom, Was shown to this philosopher, And at his bidding seemed to come. * 1.50

3

In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang; He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone; Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads, And blessed the monument of the man of flowers, Which breathes his sweet fame'through the northern bowers. He heard, when in the grove, at intervals, With sudden roar the aged pine-tree fallS,— One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree, Declares the close of its green century.

Low lies the plant to whose creation went Sweet influence from every element; Whose living towers the years conspired to build, Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild. Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed, He roamed, content alike with man and beast. Where darkness found him he lay glad at night; There the red morning touched him with its light. Three moons his great heart him a hermit made, So long he roved at will the boundless shade. The timid it concerns to ask their way, And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray, To make no step until the event is known, And ills to come as evils past bemoan. Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps To spy what danger on his pathway creeps; Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth,—his hall the azure dome; Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.

4

'T was one of the charmèd days When the genius of God doth flow; The wind may alter twenty ways, A tempest cannot blow; It may blow north, it still is warm; Or south, it still is clear; Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;

Or west, no thunder fear. * 1.51 The musing peasant, lowly great, Beside the forest water sate; The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown Composed the network of his throne; The wide lake, edged with sand and grass, Was burnished to a floor of glass, Painted with shadows green and proud Of the tree and of the cloud. * 1.52 He was the heart of all the scene; On him the sun looked more serene; To hill and cloud his face was known,— It seemed the likeness of their own; They knew by secret sympathy The public child of earth and sky. 'You ask,' he said,'what guide Me through trackless thickets led, Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. I found the water's bed. The watercourses were my guide; I travelled grateful by their side, Or through their channel dry; They led me through the thicket damp, Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp, Through beds of granite cut my road, And their resistless friendship showed. The falling waters led me, The foodful waters fed me, And brought me to the lowest land

Unerring to the ocean sand. The moss upon the forest bark Was pole-star when the night was dark; The purple berries in the wood Supplied me necessary food; For Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness. When the forest shall mislead me, When the night and morning lie, When sea and land refuse to feed me, 'T will be time enough to die; Then will yet my mother yield A pillow in her greenest field, Nor the June flowers scorn to cover The clay of their departed lover.'

WOODNOTES

II * 1.53

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

'Whether is better, the gift or the donor? Come to me,' Quoth the pine-tree, 'I am the giver of honor.

My garden is the cloven rock, And my manure the snow; And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock, In summer's scorching glow. * 1.54 He is great who can live by me: The rough and bearded forester Is better than the lord; God fills the scrip and canister, Sin piles the loaded board. The lord is the peasant that was, The peasant the lord that shall be; The lord is hay, the peasant grass, One dry, and one the living tree. * 1.55 Who liveth by the ragged pine Foundeth a heroic line; Who liveth in the palace hall Waneth fast and spendeth all. He goes to my savage haunts, With his chariot and his care; My twilight realm he disenchants, And finds his prison there.

'What prizes the town and the tower? Only what the pine-tree yields; Sinew that subdued the fields; The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods Chants his hymn to hills and floods, Whom the city's poisoning spleen Made not pale, or fat, or lean;

Whom the rain and the wind purgeth, Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth, In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth, In whose feet the lion rusheth, Iron arms, and iron mould, That know not fear, fatigue, or cold. I give my rafters to his boat, My billets to his boiler's throat, And I will swim the ancient sea To float my child to victory, And grant to dwellers with the pine Dominion o'er the palm and vine. Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end. Cut a bough from my parent stem, And dip it in thy porcelain vase; A little while each russet gem Will swell and rise with wonted grace; But when it seeks enlarged supplies, The orphan of the forest dies. Whoso walks in solitude And inhabiteth the wood, Choosing light, wave, rock and bird, Before the money-loving herd, Into that forester shall pass, From these companions, power and grace. * 1.56 Clean shall he be, without, within, From the old adhering sin, All ill dissolving in the light

Of his triumphant piercing sight: Not vain, sour, nor frivolous; Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous; Grave, chaste, contented, though retired, And of all other men desired. On him the light of star and moon Shall fall with purer radiance down; All constellations of the sky Shed their virtue through his eye. Him Nature giveth for defence His formidable innocence; The mounting sap, the shells, the sea, All spheres, all stones, his helpers be; He shall meet the speeding year, Without wailing, without fear; He shall be happy in his love, Like to like shall joyful prove; He shall be happy whilst he wooes, Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse. But if with gold she bind her hair, And deck her breast with diamond, Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear, Though thou lie alone on the ground.

' Heed the old oracles, Ponder my spells; Song wakes in my pinnacles When the wind swells. Soundeth the prophetic wind,

The shadows shake on the rock behind, And the countless leaves of the pine are strings Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. Hearken! Hearken! If thou wouldst know the mystic song Chanted when the sphere was young. Aloft, abroad, the pæan swells; O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells? O wise man! hear'st thou the least part? 'T is the chronicle of art. To the open ear it sings Sweet the genesis of things, * 1.57 Of tendency through endless ages, Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages, Of rounded worlds, of space and time, Of the old flood's subsiding slime, Of chemic matter, force and form, Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm: The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream. * 1.58 O, listen to the undersong, The ever old, the ever young; And, far within those cadent pauses, The chorus of the ancient Causes! Delights the dreadful Destiny To fling his voice into the tree, And shock thy weak ear with a note

Breathed from the everlasting throat. In music he repeats the pang Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang. O mortal! thy ears are stones; These echoes are laden with tones Which only the pure can hear; Thou canst not catch what they recite Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right, Of man to come, of human life, Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife.'

Once again the pine-tree sung:— ' Speak not thy speech my boughs among: Put off thy years, wash in the breeze; My hours are peaceful centuries. Talk no more with feeble tongue; No more the fool of space and time, Come weave with mine a nobler rhyme. Only thy Americans Can read thy line, can meet thy glance, But the runes that I rehearse Understands the universe; The least breath my boughs which tossed Brings again the Pentecost; To every soul resounding clear In a voice of solemn cheer,— "Am I not thine? Are not these thine?" And they reply, "Forever mine!" My branches speak Italian,

English, German, Basque, Castilian, Mountain speech to Highlanders, Ocean tongues to islanders, To Fin and Lap and swart Malay, To each his bosom-secret say.

'Come learn with me the fatal song Which knits the world in music strong, Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes, Of things with things, of times with times, Primal chimes of sun and shade, Of sound and echo, man and maid, The land reflected in the flood, Body with shadow still pursued. * 1.59 For Nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. * 1.60 The wood is wiser far than thou; The wood and wave each other know Not unrelated, unaffied, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect Nature's every part, Rooted in the mighty Heart. But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,

Whence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed, Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded? Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded? Who thee divorced, deceived and left? Thee of thy faith who hath bereft, And torn the ensigns from thy brow, And sunk the immortal eye so low? Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender, Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender For royal man;—they thee confess An exile from the wilderness,— The hills where health with health agrees, And the wise soul expels disease. Hark! in thy ear I will tell the sign By which thy hurt thou may'st divine. 'When thou shalt climb the mountain cliff, Or see the wide shore from thy skiff, To thee the horizon shall express But emptiness on emptiness; There lives no man of Nature's worth In the circle of the earth; And to thine eye the vast skies fall, Dire and satirical, On clucking hens and prating fools, On thieves, on drudges and on dolls. And thou shalt say to the Most High, "Godhead! all this astronomy, And fate and practice and invention, Strong art and beautiful pretension,

This radiant pomp of sun and star, Throes that were, and worlds that are, Behold! were in vain and in vain;— * 1.61 It cannot be,—I will look again. Surely now will the curtain rise, And earth's fit tenant me surprise;— But the curtain doth not rise, And Nature has miscarried wholly Into failure, into folly."

'Alas! thine is the bankruptcy, Blessed Nature so to see. Come, lay thee in my soothing shade, And heal the hurts which sin has made. I see thee in the crowd alone; I will be thy companion. Quit thy friends as the dead in doom, And build to them a final tomb; Let the starred shade that nightly falls Still celebrate their funerals, And the bell of beetle and of bee Knell their melodious memory. Behind thee leave thy merchandise, Thy churches and thy charities; And leave thy peacock wit behind; Enough for thee the primal mind That flows in streams, that breathes in wind: Leave all thy pedant lore apart; God hid the whole world in thy heart.

Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns, Gives all to them who all renounce. The rain comes when the wind calls; The river knows the way to the sea; Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity; The sea tosses and foams to find Its way up to the cloud and wind; The shadow sits close to the flying ball; The date fails not on the palm-tree tall; And thou,—go burn thy wormy pages,— Shalt outsee seers, and outwit sages. Oft didst thou thread the woods in vain To find what bird had piped the strain:— Seek not, and the little eremite Flies gayly forth and sings in sight.

'Hearken once more! I will tell thee the mundane lore. Older am I than thy numbers wot, Change I may, but I pass not. Hitherto all things fast abide, And anchored in the tempest ride. Trenchant time behoves to hurry All to yean and all to bury: All the forms are fugitive, But the substances survive. Ever fresh the broad creation, A divine improvisation,

From the heart of God proceeds, A single will, a million deeds. Once slept the world an egg of stone, And pulse, and sound, and light was none; And God said, "Throb!" and there was motion And the vast mass became vast ocean. Onward and on, the eternal Pan, Who layeth the world's incessant plan, Halteth never in one shape, But forever doth escape, Like wave or flame, into new forms Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms. I, that to-day am a pine, Yesterday was a bundle of grass. He is free and libertine, Pouring of his power the wine To every age, to every race;. Unto every race and age He emptieth the beverage; Unto each, and unto all, Maker and original. The world is the ring of his spells, And the play of his miracles. As he giveth to all to drink, Thus or thus they are and think. With one drop sheds form and feature; With the next a special nature; The third adds heat's indulgent spark; The fourth gives light which eats the dark;

Into the fifth himself he flings, And conscious Law is King of kings. * 1.62 As the bee through the garden ranges, From world to world the godhead changes; As the sheep go feeding in the waste, From form to form He maketh haste; This vault which glows immense with light Is the inn where he lodges for a night. What reeks such Traveller if the bowers Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers A bunch of fragrant lilies be, Or the stars of eternity? Alike to him the better, the worse,— The glowing angel, the outcast corse. Thou metest him by centuries, And lo! he passes like the breeze; Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy, He hides in pure transparency; Thou askest in fountains and in fires, He is the essence that inquires. He is the axis of the star; He is the sparkle of the spar; He is the heart of every creature; He is the meaning of each feature; And his mind is the sky. Than all it holds more deep, more high.'

MONADNOC * 1.63

THOUSAND minstrels woke within me, 'Our music's in the hills;'— Gayest pictures rose to win me, Leopard-colored rills. Up!—If thou knew'st who calls To twilight parks of beech and pine, High over the river intervals, Above the ploughman's highest line, Over the owner's farthest walls! Up! where the airy citadel O'erlooks the surging landscape's swell! Let not unto the stones the Day Her lily and rose, her sea and land display. Read the celestial sign! Lo! the south answers to the north; Bookworm, break this sloth urbane; A greater spirit bids thee forth Than the gray dreams which thee detain. Mark how the climbing Oreads Beckon thee to their arcades; Youth, for a moment free as they, Teach thy feet to feel the ground, Ere yet arrives the wintry day When Time thy feet has bound.

Take the bounty of thy birth, Taste the lordship of the earth.'

I heard, and I obeyed,— Assured that he who made the claim, Well known, but loving not a name, Was not to be gainsaid. Ere yet the summoning voice was still, I turned to Cheshire's haughty hill. From the fixed cone the cloud-rack flowed Like ample banner flung abroad To all the dwellers in the plains Round about, a hundred miles, With salutation to the sea and to the bordering isles. In his own loom's garment dressed, By his proper bounty blessed, Fast abides this constant giver, Pouring many a cheerful river; To far eyes, an aerial isle Unploughed, which finer spirits pile, Which morn and crimson evening paint For bard, for lover and for saint; An eyemark and the country's core, Inspirer, prophet evermore; Pillar which God aloft had set So that men might it not forget; It should be their life's ornament, And mix itself with each event;

Gauge and calendar and dial, Weatherglass and chemic phial, Garden of berries, perch of birds, Pasture of pool-haunting herds, Graced by each change of sum untold, Earth-baking heat, stone-cleaving cold.

The Titan heeds his sky-affairs, Rich rents and wide alliance shares; Mysteries of color daily laid By morn and eve in light and shade; And sweet varieties of chance, And the mystic seasons' dance; And thief-like step of liberal hours Thawing snow-drift into flowers. O, wondrous craft of plant and stone By eldest science wrought and shown!

'Happy,' I said,'whose home is here! Fair fortunes to the mountaineer! Boon Nature to his poorest shed Has royal pleasure-grounds outspread.' Intent, I searched the region round, And in low hut the dweller found: Woe is me for my hope's downfall! Is yonder squalid peasant all That this proud nursery could breed For God's vicegerency and stead? Time out of mind, this forge of ores;

Quarry of spars in mountain pores; Old cradle, hunting-ground and bier Of wolf and otter, bear and deer; Well-built abode of many a race; Tower of observance searching space; Factory of river and of rain; Link in the Alps' globe-girding chain; By million changes skilled to tell What in the Eternal standeth well, And what obedient Nature can;— Is this colossal talisman Kindly to plant and blood and kind, But speechless to the master's mind? I thought to find the patriots In whom the stock of freedom roots; To myself I oft recount Tales of many a famous mount,— Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary's dells: Bards, Roys, Scanderbegs and Tells; And think how Nature in these towers Uplifted shall condense her powers, And lifting man to the blue deep Where stars their perfect courses keep, Like wise preceptor, lure his eye To sound the science of the sky, And carry learning to its height Of untried power and sane delight: The Indian cheer, the frosty skies, Rear purer wits, inventive eyes,—

Eyes that frame cities where none be, And hands that stablish what these see: And by the moral of his place Hint summits of heroic grace; Man in these crags a fastness find To fight pollution of the mind; In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong, Adhere like this foundation strong, The insanity of towns to stem With simpleness for stratagem. But if the brave old mould is broke, And end in churls the mountain folk In tavern cheer and tavern joke, Sink, O mountain, in the swamp! Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp! Perish like leaves, the highland breed No sire survive, no son succeed!

Soft! let not the offended muse Toil's hard hap with scorn accuse. Many hamlets sought I then, Many farms of mountain men. Rallying round a parish steeple Nestle warm the highland people, Coarse and boisterous, yet mild, Strong as giant, slow as child. Sweat and season are their arts, Their talismans are ploughs and carts; And well the youngest can command

Honey from the frozen land; With cloverheads the swamp adorn, Change the running sand to corn; For wolf and fox, bring lowing herds, And for cold mosses, cream and curds: Weave wood to canisters and mats; Drain sweet maple juice in vats. No bird is safe that cuts the air From their rifle or their snare; No fish, in river or in lake, But their long hands it thence will take; Whilst the country's flinty face, Like wax, their fashioning skill betrays, To fill the hollows, sink the hills, Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills, And fit the bleak and howling waste For homes of virtue, sense and taste. * 1.64 The World-soul knows his own affair, Forelooking, when he would prepare For the next ages, men of mould Well embodied, well ensouled, He cools the present's fiery glow, Sets the life-pulse strong but slow: Bitter winds and fasts austere His quarantines and grottoes, where He slowly cures decrepit flesh, And brings it infantile and fresh. Toil and tempest are the toys And games to breathe his stalwart boys:

They bide their time, and well can prove, If need were, their line from Jove; Of the same stuff, and so allayed, As that whereof the sun is made, And of the fibre, quick and strong, Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.

Now in sordid weeds they sleep, In dulness now their secret keep; Yet, will you learn our ancient speech, These the masters who can teach. Fourscore or a hundred words All their vocal muse affords; But they turn them in a fashion Past clerks' or statesmen's art or passion. I can spare the college bell, And the learned lecture, well; Spare the clergy and libraries, Institutes and dictionaries, For that hardy English root Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot. Rude poets of the tavern hearth, Squandering your unquoted mirth, Which keeps the ground and never soars, While Jake retorts and Reuben roars; Scoff of yeoman strong and stark, Goes like bullet to its mark;

While the solid curse and jeer Never balk the waiting ear. * 1.65

On the summit as I stood, O'er the floor of plain and flood Seemed to me, the towering hill Was not altogether still, But a quiet sense conveyed: If I err not, thus it said:—

'Many feet in summer seek, Oft, my far-appearing peak; In the dreaded winter time, None save dappling shadows climb, Under clouds, my lonely head, Old as the sun, old almost as the shade; And comest thou To see strange forests and new snow, And tread uplifted land? And leavest thou thy lowland race, Here amid clouds to stand? And wouldst be my companion Where I gaze, and still shall gaze, Through tempering nights and flashing days, When forests fall, and man is gone, Over tribes and over times, At the burning Lyre, Nearing me,

With its stars of northern fire, In many a thousand years?

'Gentle pilgrim, if thou know The gamut old of Pan, And how the hills began, The frank blessings of the hill Fall on thee, as fall they will.

'Let him heed who can and will; Enchantment fixed me here To stand the hurts of time, until In mightier chant I disappear. If thou trowest How the chemic eddies play, Pole to pole, and what they say; And that these gray crags Not on crags are hung, But beads are of a rosary On prayer and music strung; And, credulous, through the granite seeming, Seest the smile of Reason beaming;— Can thy style-discerning eye The hidden-working Builder spy, Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din, With hammer soft as snowflake's flight;— Knowest thou this? O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!

Already my rocks lie light, And soon my cone will spin. * 1.66

'For the world was built in order, And the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them and the moon. Orb and atom forth they prance, When they hear from far the rune; None so backward in the troop, When the music and the dance Reach his place and circumstance, But knows the sun-creating sound, And, though a pyramid, will bound.

'Monadnoc is a mountain strong, Tall and good my kind among; But well I know, no mountain can, Zion or Meru, measure with man. For it is on zodiacs writ, Adamant is soft to wit: And when the greater comes again With my secret in his brain, I shall pass, as glides my shadow Daily over hill and meadow.

'Through all time, in light, in gloom Well I hear the approaching feet

On the flinty pathway beat Of him that cometh, and shall come; Of him who shall as lightly bear My daily load of woods and streams, As doth this round sky-cleaving boat Which never strains its rocky beams; Whose timbers, as they silent float, Alps and Caucasus uprear, And the long Alleghanies here, And all town-sprinkled lands that be, Sailing through stars with all their history.

'Every morn I lift my head, See New England underspread, South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound, From Katskill east to the sea-bound. Anchored fast for many an age, I await the bard and sage, Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed, Shall string Monadnoc like a bead. Comes that cheerful troubadour, This mound shall throb his face before, As when, with inward fires and pain, It rose a bubble from the plain. When he cometh, I shall shed, From this wellspring in my head, Fountain-drop of spicier worth Than all vintage of the earth. There's fruit upon my barren soil

Costlier far than wine or oil. There's a berry blue and gold,— Autumn-ripe, its juices hold Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart, Asia's rancor, Athens' art, Slowsure Britain's secular might, And the German's inward sight. I will give my son to eat Best of Pan's immortal meat, Bread to eat, and juice to drain; So the coinage of his brain Shall not be forms of stars, but stars, Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars. * 1.67 He comes, but not of that race bred Who daily climb my specular head. Oft as morning wreathes my scarf, Fled the last plumule of the Dark, Pants up hither the spruce clerk, From South Cove and City Wharf. I take him up my rugged sides, Half-repentant, scant of breath,— Bead-eyes my granite chaos show, And my midsummer snow: Open the daunting map beneath,— All his county, sea and land, Dwarfed to measure of his hand; His day's ride is a furlong space, His city-tops a glimmering haze. I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;

"See there the grim gray rounding Of the bullet of the earth Whereon ye sail, Tumbling steep In the uncontinented deep." He looks on that, and he turns pale. 'T is even so, this treacherous kite, Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere, Thoughtless of its anxious freight, Plunges eyeless on forever; And he, poor parasite, Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,— Who is the captain he knows not, Port or pilot trows not,— Risk or ruin he must share. * 1.68 I scowl on him with my cloud, With my north wind chill his blood; I lame him, clattering down the rocks; And to live he is in fear. Then, at last, I let him down Once more into his dapper town, To chatter, frightened, to his clan And forget me if he can.'

As in the old poetic fame The gods are blind and lame, And the simular despite Betrays the more abounding might, So call not waste that barren cone

Above the floral zone, Where forests starve: It is pure use;— What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days, Thou grand affirmer of the present tense, * 1.69 And type of permanence! Firm ensign of the fatal Being, Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief, That will not bide the seeing!

Hither we bring Our insect miseries to thy rocks; And the whole flight, with folded wing, Vanish, and end their murmuring,— Vanish beside these dedicated blocks, Which who can tell what mason laid? Spoils of a front none need restore, Replacing frieze and architrave;— Where flowers each stone rosette and metope brave; Still is the haughty pile erect Of the old building Intellect. * 1.70

Complement of human kind, Holding us at vantage still,

Our sumptuous indigence, O barren mound, thy plenties fill! We fool and prate; Thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one sense The constant mountain doth dispense; Shedding on all its snows and leaves, One joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, O watchman tall, Our towns and races grow and fall, And imagest the stable good For which we all our lifetime grope, In shifting form the formless mind, And though the substance us elude, We in thee the shadow find. Thou, in our astronomy An opaker star, Seen haply from afar, Above the horizon's hoop, A moment, by the railway troop, As o'er some bolder height they speed,— By circumspect ambition, By errant gain, By feasters and the frivolous,— Recallest us, And makest sane. Mute orator! well skilled to plead, And send conviction without phrase, Thou dost succor and remede

The shortness of our days, And promise, on thy Founder's truth, Long morrow to this mortal youth. * 1.71

FABLE * 1.72

THE mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter'Little Prig;' Bun replied, 'You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry. I'll not deny you make A very pretty squirrel track; Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.'

ODE * 1.73

INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING

THOUGH loath to grieve The evil time's sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest's cant, Or statesman's rant.

If I refuse My study for their politique, Which at the best is trick, The angry Muse Puts confusion in my brain.

But who is he that prates Of the culture of mankind, Of better arts and life? Go, blindworm, go, Behold the famous States Harrying Mexico With rifle and with knife!

Or who, with accent bolder, Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?

I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook! And in thy valleys, Agiochook! The jackals of the negro-holder.

The God who made New Hampshire Taunted the lofty land With little men;— Small bat and wren House in the oak:— If earth-fire cleave The upheaved land, and bury the folk, The southern crocodile would grieve. Virtue palters; Right is hence; Freedom praised, but hid; Funeral eloquence Rattles the coffin-lid. * 1.74

What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, That would indignant rend The northland from the south? Wherefore? to what good end? Boston Bay and Bunker Hill Would serve things still;— Things are of the snake.

The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat,

The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,— Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking.

'T is fit the forest fall, The steep be graded, The mountain tunnelled, The sand shaded, The orchard planted, The glebe tilled, The prairie granted, The steamer built.

Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love, For truth's and harmony's behoof; The state may follow how it can, As Olympus follows Jove.

Yet do not I implore The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods, Nor bid the unwilling senator Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes. Every one to his chosen work;— Foolish hands may mix and mar; Wise and sure the issues are. Round they roll till dark is light, Sex to sex, and even to odd;— The over-god Who marries Right to Might, Who peoples, unpeoples,— He who exterminates Races by stronger races, Black by white faces,— Knows to bring honey Out of the lion; Grafts gentlest scion On pirate and Turk.

The Cossack eats Poland, Like stolen fruit; Her last noble is ruined, Her last poet mute: Straight, into double band The victors divide; Half for freedom strike and stand;— The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.

ASTRÆA * 1.75

EACH the herald is who wrote His rank, and quartered his own coat. There is no king nor sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate; Each to all is venerable, Cap-a-pie invulnerable, Until he write, where all eyes rest, Slave or master on his breast. I saw men go up and down, In the country and the town, With this tablet on their neck, * 1.76 Judgment and a judge we seek.' Not to monarchs they repair, Nor to learned jurist's chair; But they hurry to their peers, To their kinsfolk and their dears; Louder than with speech they pray,— What am I? companion, say.' And the friend not hesitates To assign just place and mates; Answers not in word or letter, Yet is understood the better; Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects his figure that doth pass.

Every wayfarer he meets What himself declared repeats, What himself confessed records, Sentences him in his words; The form is his own corporal form, And his thought the penal worm. Yet shine forever virgin minds, Loved by stars and purest winds, Which, o'er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their.state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering to a curious eye The durance of a granite ledge. To those who gaze from the sea's edge It is there for benefit; It is there for purging light; There for purifying storms; And its depths reflect all forms; * 1.77 It cannot parley with the mean,— Pure by impure is not seen. For there's no sequestered grot, Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, But Justice, journeying in the sphere, Daily stoops to harbor there.

ETIENNE DE LA BOECE * 1.78

I SERVE you not, if you I follow, Shadowlike, o'er hill and hollow; And bend my fancy to your leading, All too nimble for my treading. When the pilgrimage is done, And we're the landscape overrun, I am bitter, vacant, thwarted, And your heart is unsupported. Vainly valiant, you have missed The manhood that should yours resist,— Its complement; but if I could, In severe or cordial mood, Lead you rightly to my altar, Where the wisest Muses falter, And worship that world-warming spark Which dazzles me in midnight dark, Equalizing small and large, While the soul it doth surcharge, Till the poor is wealthy grown, And the hermit never alone,— The traveller and the road seem one With the errand to be done,— That were a man's and lover's part, That were Freedom's whitest chart.

COMPENSATION * 1.79

WHY should I keep holiday When other men have none? Why but because, when these are gay, I sit and mourn alone?

And why, when mirth unseals all tongues, Should mine alone be dumb? Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs, And now their hour is come.

FORBEARANCE * 1.80

HAST thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk? At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse? Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust? And loved so well a high behavior, In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained, Nobility more nobly to repay? O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

THE PARK * 1.81

THE prosperous and beautiful To me seem not to wear The yoke of conscience masterful, Which galls me everywhere.

I cannot shake off the god; On my neck he makes his seat; I look at my face in the glass,— My eyes his eyeballs meet.

Enchanters! Enchantresses! Your gold makes you seem wise; The morning mist within your grounds More proudly rolls, more softly lies.

Yet spake yon purple mountain, Yet said yon ancient wood, That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, Leads all souls to the Good.

FORERUNNERS * 1.82

LONG I followed happy guides, I could never reach their sides; Their step is forth, and, ere the day Breaks up their leaguer, and away. Keen my sense, my heart was young, Right good-will my sinews strung, But no speed of mine avails To hunt upon their shining trails. On and away, their hasting feet Make the morning proud and sweet; Flowers they strew,—I catch the scent; Or tone of silver instrument Leaves on the wind melodious trace; Yet I could never see their face. On eastern hills I see their smokes, Mixed with mist by distant lochs. I met many travellers Who the road had surely kept; They saw not my fine revellers,— These had crossed them while they slept. Some had heard their fair report, In the country or the court. Fleetest couriers alive Never yet could once arrive,

As they went or they returned, At the house where these sojourned. Sometimes their strong speed they slacken, Though they are not overtaken; In sleep their jubilant troop is near,— I tuneful voices overhear; It may be in wood or waste,— At unawares 't is come and past. Their near camp my spirit knows By signs gracious as rainbows. I thenceforward and long after Listen for their harp-like laughter, And carry in my heart, for days, Peace that hallows rudest ways.

SURSUM CORDA * 1.83

SEEK not the spirit, if it hide Inexorable to thy zeal: Trembler, do not whine and chide: Art thou not also real? Stoop not then to poor excuse; Turn on the accuser roundly; say, 'Here am I, here will I abide Forever to myself soothfast; Go thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure stay!' Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast, For only it can absolutely deal.

ODE TO BEAUTY * 1.84

WHO gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old? Or what was the service For which I was sold? When first my eyes saw thee, I found me thy thrall, By magical drawings, Sweet tyrant of all! I drank at thy fountain False waters of thirst; Thou intimate stranger, Thou latest and first! Thy dangerous glances Make women of men; New-born, we are melting Into nature again. * 1.85

Lavish, lavish promiser, Nigh persuading gods to err! Guest of million painted forms,

Which in turn thy glory warms! The frailest leaf, the mossy bark, The acorn's cup, the raindrop's arc, The swinging spider's silver line, The ruby of the drop of wine, The shining pebble of the pond, Thou inscribest with a bond, In thy momentary play, Would bankrupt nature to repay.

Ah, what avails it To hide or to shun Whom the Infinite One Hath granted his throne? The heaven high over Is the deep's lover; The sun and sea, Informed by thee, Before me run And draw me on, Yet fly me still, As Fate refuses To me the heart Fate for me chooses. Is it that my opulent soul Was mingled from the generous whole; Sea-valleys and the deep of skies Furnished several supplies; And the sands whereof I'm made Draw me to them, self-betrayed?

I turn the proud portfolio Which holds the grand designs Of Salvator, of Guercino, And Piranesi's lines. * 1.86 I hear the lofty paeans Of the masters of the shell, Who heard the starry music And recount the numbers well; Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so. * 1.87 Oft, in streets or humblest places, I detect far-wandered graces, Which, from Eden wide astray, In lowly homes have lost their way.

Thee gliding through the sea of form, Like the lightning through the storm, Somewhat not to be possessed, Somewhat not to be caressed, No feet so fleet could ever find, No perfect form could ever bind. * 1.88 Thou eternal fugitive, Hovering over all that live, Quick and skilful to inspire Sweet, extravagant desire, Starry space and lily-bell Filling with thy roseate smell, * 1.89

Wilt not give the lips to taste Of the nectar which thou hast.

All that's good and great with thee Works in close conspiracy; Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely To report thy features only, And the cold and purple morning Itself with thoughts of thee adorning; The leafy dell, the city mart, Equal trophies of thine art; E'en the flowing azure air Thou hast touched for my despair; And, if I languish into dreams, Again I meet the ardent beams. Queen of things! I dare not die In Being's deeps past ear and eye; Lest there I find the same deceiver And be the sport of Fate forever. Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be, Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me! * 1.90

GIVE ALL TO LOVE* 1.91

GIVE all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days,

Estate, good-fame, Plans, credit and the Muse,— Nothing refuse.

'T is a brave master; Let it have scope: Follow it utterly, Hope beyond hope: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent; But it is a god, Knows its own path And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean; It requireth courage stout. Souls above doubt, Valor unbending, It will reward,— They shall return More than they were, And ever ascending.

Leave all for love; Yet, hear me, yet, One word more thy heart behoved, One pulse more of firm endeavor,—

Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, forever, Free as an Arab Of thy beloved. * 1.92

Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise Flits across her bosom young, Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture's hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go, * 1.93 The gods arrive.

TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH * 1.94

THE green grass is bowing, The morning wind is in it; 'T is a tune worth thy knowing, Though it change every minute.

'T is a tune of the Spring; Every year plays it over To the robin on the wing, And to the pausing lover.

O'er ten thousand, thousand acres, Goes light the nimble zephyr; The Flowers—tiny sect of Shakers— Worship him ever.

Hark to the winning sound! They summon thee, dearest,— Saying,'We have dressed for thee the ground, Nor yet thou appearest.

'O hasten;' 't is our time, Ere yet the red Summer Scorch our delicate prime, Loved of bee,—the tawny hummer.

'O pride of thy race! Sad, in sooth, it were to ours, If our brief tribe miss thy face, We poor New England flowers.

'Fairest, choose the fairest members Of our lithe society; June's glories and September's Show our love and piety.

'Thou shalt command us all,— April's cowslip, summer's clover, To the gentian in the fall, Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover.

'O come, then, quickly come! We are budding, we are blowing; And the wind that we perfume Sings a tune that's worth the knowing.'

TO ELLEN * 1.95

AND Ellen, when the graybeard years Have brought us to life's evening hour, And all the crowded Past appears A tiny scene of sun and shower,

Then, if I read the page aright Where Hope, the soothsayer, reads our lot, Thyself shalt own the page was bright, Well that we loved, woe had we not.

When Mirth is dumb and Flattery's fled, And mute thy music's dearest tone, When all but Love itself is dead And all but deathless Reason gone.

TO EVA * 1.96

O FAIR and stately maid, whose eyes Were kindled in the upper skies At the same torch that lighted mine; For so I must interpret still Thy sweet dominion o'er my will, A sympathy divine.

Ah! let me blameless gaze upon Features that seem at heart my own; Nor fear those watchful sentinels, Who charm the more their glance forbids, Chaste-glowing, underneath their lids, With fire that draws while it repels.

LINES * 1.97

WRITTEN BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER SHORTLY BEFORE HER MARRIAGE TO MR. EMERSON

LOVE scatters oil On Life's dark sea, Sweetens its toil— Our helmsman he.

Around him hover Odorous clouds; Under this cover His arrows he shrouds.

The cloud was around me, I knew not why Such sweetness crowned me, While Time shot by.

No pain was within, But calm delight, Like a world without sin, Or a day without night.

The shafts of the god Were tipped with down,

For they drew no blood, And they knit no frown.

I knew of them not Until Cupid laughed loud, And saying "You're caught!" Flew off in the cloud.

O then I awoke, And I lived but to sigh, Till a clear voice spoke,— And my tears are dry.

THE VIOLET * 1.98

BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER

WHY lingerst thou, pale violet, to see the dying year; Are Autumn's blasts fit music for thee, fragile one, to hear; Will thy clear blue eye, upward bent, still keep its chastened glow, Still tearless lift its slender form above the wintry snow?

Why wilt thou live when none around reflects thy pensive ray? Thou bloomest here a lonely thing in the clear autumn day.

The tall green trees, that shelter thee, their last gay dress put on; There will be nought to shelter thee when their sweet leaves are gone.

O Violet, like thee, how blest could I lie down and die, When summer light is fading, and autumn breezes sigh; When Winter reigned I'd close my eye, but wake with bursting Spring, And live with living nature, a pure rejoicing thing.

I had a sister once who seemed just like a violet; Her morning sun shone bright and calmly purely set; When the violets were in their shrouds, and Summer in its pride, She laid her hopes at rest, and in the year's rich beauty died.

THE AMULET * 1.99

YOUR picture smiles as first it smiled; The ring you gave is still the same; Your letter tells, O changing child! No tidings since it came.

Give me an amulet That keeps intelligence with you,— Red when you love, and rosier red, And when you love not, pale and blue.

Alas! that neither bonds nor vows Can certify possession; Torments me still the fear that love Died in its last expression.

THINE EYES STILL SHINED * 1.100

THINE eyes still shined for me, though far I lonely roved the land or sea: As I behold yon evening star, Which yet beholds not me. * 1.101

This morn I climbed the misty hill And roamed the pastures through; How danced thy form before my path Amidst the deep-eyed dew!

When the redbird spread his sable wing, And showed his side of flame; When the rosebud ripened to the rose, In both I read thy name. * 1.102

EROS * 1.103

THE sense of the world is short,— Long and various the report,— To love and be beloved; Men and gods have not outlearned it; And, how oft soe'er they're turned it, Not to be improved.

HERMIONE * 1.104

ON a mound an Arab lay, And sung his sweet regrets And told his amulets: The summer bird His sorrow heard, And, when he heaved a sigh profound, The sympathetic swallow swept the ground.

'If it be, as they said, she was not fair, Beauty's not beautiful to me, But sceptred genius, aye inorbed, Culminating in her sphere. This Hermione absorbed The lustre of the land and ocean,

Hills and islands, cloud and tree, In her form and motion.

'I ask no bauble miniature, Nor ringlets dead Shorn from her comely head, Now that morning not disdains Mountains and the misty plains Her colossal portraiture; They her heralds be, Steeped in her quality, And singers of her fame Who is their Muse and dame.

'Higher, dear swallows! mind not what I say. Ah! heedless how the weak are strong, Say, was it just, In thee to frame, in me to trust, Thou to the Syrian couldst belong?

'I am of a lineage That each for each doth fast engage; In old Bassora's schools, I seemed Hermit vowed to books and gloom,— Ill-bestead for gay bridegroom. I was by thy touch redeemed; When thy meteor glances came, We talked at large of worldly fate, And drew truly every trait.

'Once I dwelt apart, Now I live with all; As shepherd's lamp on far hill-side Seems, by the traveller espied, A door into the mountain heart, So didst thou quarry and unlock Highways for me through the rock.

'Now, deceived, thou wanderest In strange lands unblest; And my kindred come to soothe me. Southwind is my next of blood; He is come through fragrant wood, Drugged with spice from climates warm, And in every twinkling glade, And twilight nook, Unveils thy form. Out of the forest way Forth paced it yesterday; And when I sat by the watercourse, Watching the daylight fade, It throbbed up from the brook.

'River and rose and crag and bird, Frost and sun and eldest night, To me their aid preferred, To me their comfort plight;— "Courage! we are thine allies, And with this hint be wise,—

The chains of kind The distant bind; Deed thou doest she must do, Above her will, be true; And, in her strict resort To winds and waterfalls And autumn's sunlit festivals, To music, and to music's thought, Inextricably bound, She shall find thee, and be found. Follow not her flying feet; Come to us herself to meet."'

INITIAL, DÆMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE * 1.105

I

THE INITIAL LOVE

VENUS, when her son was lost, Cried him up and down the coast, In hamlets, palaces and parks, And told the truant by his marks,— Golden curls, and quiver and bow. This befell how long ago! Time and tide are strangely changed, Men and manners much deranged:

None will now find Cupid latent By this foolish antique patent. He came late along the waste, Shod like a traveller for haste; With malice dared me to proclaim him, That the maids and boys might name him.

Boy no more, he wears all coats, Frocks and blouses, capes, capotes; He bears no bow, or quiver, or wand, Nor chaplet on his head or hand. Leave his weeds and heed his eyes,— All the rest he can disguise. In the pit of his eye's a spark Would bring back day if it were dark; And, if I tell you all my thought, Though I comprehend it not, In those unfathomable orbs Every function he absorbs; Doth eat, and drink, and fish, and shoot, And write, and reason, and compute, And ride, and run, and have, and hold, And whine, and flatter, and regret, And kiss, and couple, and beget, By those roving eyeballs bold.

Undaunted are their courages, Right Cossacks in their forages; Fleeter they than any creature,—

They are his steeds, and not his feature; Inquisitive, and fierce, and fasting, Restless, predatory, hasting; And they pounce on other eyes As lions on their prey; * 1.106 And round their circles is writ, Plainer than the day, Underneath, within, above,— Love—love—love—love. He lives in his eyes; There doth digest, and work, and spin, And buy, and sell, and lose, and win; He rolls them with delighted motion, Joy-tides swell their mimic ocean. Yet holds he them with tautest rein, That they may seize and entertain The glance that to their glance opposes, Like fiery honey sucked from roses. He palmistry can understand, Imbibing virtue by his hand As if it were a living root; The pulse of hands will make him mute; With all his force he gathers balms Into those wise, thrilling palms.

Cupid is a casuist, A mystic and a cabalist,— Can your lurking thought surprise, And interpret your device.

He is versed in occult science, In magic and in clairvoyance, Oft he keeps his fine ear strained, And Reason on her tiptoe pained For aëry intelligence, And for strange coincidence. But it touches his quick heart When Fate by omens takes his part, And chance-dropped hints from Nature's sphere Deeply soothe his anxious ear.

Heralds high before him run; He has ushers many a one; He spreads his welcome where he goes, And touches all things with his rose. All things wait for and divine him,— How shall I dare to malign him, Or accuse the god of sport? I must end my true report, Painting him from head to foot, In as far as I took note, Trusting well the matchless power Of this young-eyed emperor Will clear his fame from every cloud With the bards and with the crowd.

He is wilful, mutable, Shy, untamed, inscrutable, Swifter-fashioned than the fairies,

Substance mixed of pure contraries; His vice some elder virtue's token, And his good is evil-spoken. Failing sometimes of his own, He is headstrong and alone; He affects the wood and wild, Like a flower-hunting child; Buries himself in summer waves, In trees, with beasts, in mines and caves, Loves nature like a hornèd cow, Bird, or deer, or caribou.

Shun him, nymphs, on the fleet horses! He has a total world of wit; O how wise are his discourses! But he is the arch-hypocrite, And, through all science and all art, Seeks alone his counterpart. He is a Pundit of the East, He is an augur and a priest, And his soul will melt in prayer, But word and wisdom is a snare; Corrupted by the present toy He follows joy, and only joy. There is no mask but he will wear; He invented oaths to swear; He paints, he carves, he chants, he prays, And holds all stars in his embrace. * 1.107 He takes a sovran privilege

Not allowed to any liege; For Cupid goes behind all law, And right into himself does draw; For he is sovereignly allied,— Heaven's oldest blood flows in his side,— And interchangeably at one With every king on every throne, That no god dare say him nay, Or see the fault, or seen betray: He has the Muses by the heart, And the stern Parcæ on his part.

His many signs cannot be told; He has not one mode, but manifold, Many fashions and addresses, Piques, reproaches, hurts, caresses. * 1.108 He will preach like a friar, And jump like Harlequin; He will read like a crier, And fight like a Paladin. Boundless is his memory; Plans immense his term prolong; He is not of counted age, Meaning always to be young. And his wish is intimacy, Intimater intimacy, And a stricter privacy; The impossible shall yet be done, And, being two, shall still be one.

As the wave breaks to foam on shelves, Then runs into a wave again, So lovers melt their sundered selves, Yet melted would be twain.

II

THE DÆMONIC LOVE

MAN was made of social earth, Child and brother from his birth, Tethered by a liquid cord Of blood through veins of kindred poured. Next his heart the fireside band Of mother, father, sister; stand; Names from awful childhood heard * 1.109 Throbs of a wild religion stirred;— Virtue, to love, to hate them, vice; Till dangerous Beauty came, at last, Till Beauty came to snap all ties; The maid, abolishing the past, With lotus wine obliterates Dear memory's stone-incarved traits, And, by herself, supplants alone Friends year by year more inly known. When her calm eyes opened bright, All else grew foreign in their light. It was ever the self-same tale,

The first experience will not fail; Only two in the garden walked, And with snake and seraph talked. * 1.110

Close, close to men, Like undulating layer of air, Right above their heads, The potent plain of Dæmons spreads. * 1.111 Stands to each human soul its own, For watch and ward and furtherance, In the snares of Nature's dance; And the lustre and the grace To fascinate each youthful heart, Beaming from its counterpart, Translucent through the mortal covers, Is the Dæmon's form and face. To and fro the Genius hies,— A gleam which plays and hovers Over the maiden's head, And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes. * 1.112 Unknown, albeit lying near, To men, the path to the Dæmon sphere; And they that swiftly come and go Leave no track on the heavenly snow. Sometimes the airy synod bends, And the mighty choir descends, And the brains of men thenceforth, In crowded and in still resorts, Teem with unwonted thoughts:

As, when a shower of meteors Cross the orbit of the earth, And, lit by fringent air, Blaze near and far, Mortals deem the planets bright Have slipped their sacred bars, And the lone seaman all the night Sails, astonished, amid stars.

Beauty of a richer vein, Graces of a subtler strain, Unto men these moonmen lend, And our shrinking sky extend. So is man's narrow path By strength and terror skirted; Also (from the song the wrath Of the Genii be averted! The Muse the truth uncolored speaking) The Daemons are self-seeking: Their fierce and limitary will Draws men to their likeness still. The erring painter made Love blind,— Highest Love who shines on all; Him, radiant, sharpest-sighted god, None can bewilder; Whose eyes pierce The universe, Path-finder, road-builder, Mediator, royal giver;

Rightly seeing, rightly seen, Of joyful and transparent mien. 'T is a sparkle passing From each to each, from thee to me, To and fro perpetually; Sharing all, daring all, Levelling, displacing Each obstruction, it unites Equals remote, and seeming opposites. And ever and forever Love Delights to build a road: Unheeded Danger near him strides, Love laughs, and on a lion rides. But Cupid wears another face, Born into Dæmons less divine: His roses bleach apace, His nectar smacks of wine. The Dæmon ever builds a wall, Himself encloses and includes, Solitude in solitudes: In like sort his love doth fall. * 1.113 He doth elect The beautiful and fortunate, And the sons of intellect, And the souls of ample fate, Who the Future's gates unbar,— Minions of the Morning Star. In his prowess he exults, And the multitude insults.

His impatient looks devour Oft the humble and the poor; And, seeing his eye glare, They drop their few pale flowers, Gathered with hope to please, Along the mountain towers,— Lose courage, and despair. He will never be gainsaid,— Pitiless, will not be stayed; His hot tyranny Burns up every other tie. Therefore comes an hour from Jove Which his ruthless will defies, And the dogs of Fate unties. Shiver the palaces of glass; Shrivel the rainbow-colored walls, Where in bright Art each god and sibyl dwelt Secure as in the zodiac's belt; And the galleries and halls, Wherein every siren sung, Like a meteor pass. For this fortune wanted root In the core of God's abysm,— Was a weed of self and schism; And ever the Dæmonic Love Is the ancestor of wars And the parent of remorse.

III

THE CELESTIAL LOVE

BUT God said, 'I will have a purer gift; There is smoke in the flame; New flowerets bring, new prayers uplift, And love without a name. Fond children, ye desire To please each other well; Another round, a higher, Ye shall climb on the heavenly stair, And selfish preference forbear; And in right deserving, And without a swerving Each from your proper state, Weave roses for your mate.

'Deep, deep are loving eyes, Flowed with naphtha fiery sweet; And the point is paradise, Where their glances meet: Their reach shall yet be more profound, And a vision without bound: The axis of those eyes sun-clear Be the axis of the sphere:

So shall the lights ye pour amain Go, without check or intervals, Through from the empyrean walls Unto the same again.'

Higher far into the pure realm, Over sun and star, Over the flickering Dæmon film, Thou must mount for love; Into vision where all form In one only form dissolves; In a region where the wheel On which all beings ride Visibly revolves; Where the starred, eternal worm Girds the world with bound and term; Where unlike things are like; Where good and ill, And joy and moan, Melt into one.

There Past, Present, Future, shoot Triple blossoms from one root; Substances at base divided, In their summits are united; There the holy essence rolls, One through separated souls; And the sunny Æon sleeps Folding Nature in its deeps,

And every fair and every good, Known in part, or known impure, To men below, In their archetypes endure. The race of gods, Or those we erring own, Are shadows flitting up and down In the still abodes. The circles of that sea are laws Which publish and which hide the cause.

Pray for a beam Out of that sphere, Thee to guide and to redeem. O, what a load Of care and toil, By lying use bestowed, From his shoulders falls who sees The true astronomy, The period of peace. Counsel which the ages kept Shall the well-born soul accept. As the overhanging trees Fill the lake with images,— As garment draws the garment's hem, Men their fortunes bring with them. By right or wrong, Lands and goods go to the strong. Property will brutely draw

Still to the proprietor; Silver to silver creep and wind, And kind to kind.

Nor less the eternal poles Of tendency distribute souls. There need no vows to bind Whom not each other seek, but find. * 1.114 They give and take no pledge or oath,— Nature is the bond of both: No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns,— Their noble meanings are their pawns. Plain and cold is their address, * 1.115 Power have they for tenderness; And, so thoroughly is known Each other's counsel by h,s own, They can parley without meeting; Need is none of forms of greeting; They can well communicate In their innermost estate; When each the other shall avoid, Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

Not with scarfs or perfumed gloves Do these celebrate their loves: Not by jewels, feasts and savors, Not by ribbons or by favors, But by the sun-spark on the sea, And the cloud-shadow on the lea,

The soothing lapse of morn to mirk, And the cheerful round of work. Their cords of love so public are, They intertwine the farthest star: The throbbing sea, the quaking earth, Yield sympathy and signs of mirth; Is none so high, so mean is none, But feels and seals this union; Even the fell Furies are appeased, The good applaud, the lost are eased.

Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond, Bound for the just, but not beyond; Not glad, as the low-loving herd, Of self in other still preferred, But they have heartily designed The benefit of broad mankind. And they serve men austerely, After their own genius, clearly, * 1.116 Without a false humility; For this is Love's nobility,— Not to scatter bread and gold, Goods and raiment bought and sold; But to hold fast his simple sense, And speak the speech of innocence, And with hand and body and blood, To make his bosom-counsel good. He that feeds men serveth few; He serves all who dares be true. * 1.117

THE APOLOGY * 1.118

THINK me not unkind and rude That I walk alone in grove and glen; I go to the god of the wood To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I Fold my arms beside the brook; Each cloud that floated in the sky Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band, For the idle flowers I brought; Every aster in my hand Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery But't is figured in the flowers; Was never secret history But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field Homeward brought the oxen strong; A second crop thine acres yield, Which I gather in a song.

MERLIN

I * 1.119

THY trivial harp will never please Or fill my craving ear; Its chords should ring as blows the breeze, Free, peremptory, clear. No jingling serenader's art, Nor tinkle of piano strings, Can make the wild blood start In its mystic springs. The kingly bard Must smite the chords rudely and hard, As with hammer or with mace; That they may render back Artful thunder, which conveys Secrets of the solar track, Sparks of the supersolar blaze. * 1.120 Merlin's blows are strokes of fate, Chiming with the forest tone, When boughs buffet boughs in the wood; Chiming with the gasp and moan Of the ice-imprisoned flood; With the pulse of manly hearts; With the voice of orators; With the din of city arts;

With the cannonade of wars; With the marches of the brave; And prayers of might from martyrs' cave.

Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number; But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. 'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say, 'In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise.' * 1.121

Blameless master of the games, King of sport that never shames, He shall daily joy dispense Hid in song's sweet influence. Forms more cheerly live and go, What time the subtle mind Sings aloud the tune whereto Their pulses beat, And march their feet, And their members are combined.

By Sybarites beguiled, He shall no task decline;

Merlin's mighty line Extremes of nature reconciled,— Bereaved a tyrant of his will, And made the lion mild. Songs can the tempest still, Scattered on the stormy air, Mould the year to fair increase, And bring in poetic peace.

He shall not seek to weave, In weak, unhappy times, Efficacious rhymes; Wait his returning strength. Bird that from the nadir's floor To the zenith's top can soar,— The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that journey's length. Nor profane affect to hit Or compass that, by meddling wit, Which only the propitious mind Publishes when 't is inclined. There are open hours When the God's will sallies free, And the dull idiot might see The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;— Sudden, at unawares, Self-moved, fly-to the doors, Nor sword of angels could reveal What they conceal.

II

THE rhyme of the poet Modulates the king's affairs; Balance-loving Nature Made all things in pairs. To every foot its antipode; Each color with its counter glowed; To every tone beat answering tones, Higher or graver; Flavor gladly blends with flavor; Leaf answers leaf upon the bough; And match the paired cotyledons. Hands to hands, and feet to feet, In one body grooms and brides; Eldest rite, two married sides In every mortal meet. * 1.122 Light's far furnace shines, Smelting balls and bars, Forging double stars, Glittering twins and trines. The animals are sick with love, Lovesick with rhyme; Each with all propitious Time Into chorus wove.

Like the dancers' ordered band, Thoughts come also hand in hand;

In equal couples mated, Or else alternated; Adding by their mutual gage, One to other, health and age. * 1.123 Solitary fancies go Short-lived wandering to and fro, Most like to bachelors, Or an ungiven maid, Not ancestors, With no posterity to make the lie afraid, Or keep truth undecayed. * 1.124 Perfect-paired as eagle's wings, Justice is the rhyme of things; Trade and counting use The self-same tuneful muse; And Nemesis, Who with even matches odd, Who athwart space redresses The partial wrong, Fills the just period, And finishes the song.

Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife, Murmur in the house of life, Sung by the Sisters as they spin; In perfect time and measure they Build and unbuild our echoing clay. As the two twilights of the day Fold us music-drunken in. * 1.125

BACCHUS * 1.126

BRING me wine, but wine which never grew In the belly of the grape, Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through Under the Andes to the Cape, Suffer no savor of the earth to scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute From a nocturnal root, Which feels the acrid juice Of Styx and Erebus; And turns the woe of Night, By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread; We buy diluted wine; Give me of the true,— Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled Among the silver hills of heaven Draw everlasting dew; Wine of wine, Blood of the world, Form of forms, and mould of statures, That I intoxicated, And by the draught assimilated, May float at pleasure through all natures;

The bird-language rightly spell, And that which roses say so well.

Wine that is shed Like the torrents of the sun Up the horizon walls, Or like the Atlantic streams, which run When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread, Food which needs no transmuting, Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting, Wine which is already man, Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is,— Music and wine are one,— That I, drinking this, Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; Kings unborn shall walk with me; And the poor grass shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man. * 1.127 Quickened so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock.

I thank the joyful juice For all I know;— Winds of remembering Of the ancient being blow,

And seeming-solid walls of use Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine; Retrieve the loss of me and mine! Vine for vine be antidote, And the grape requite the lote! Haste to cure the old despair,— Reason in Nature's lotus drenched, The memory of ages quenched; Give them again to shine; Let wine repair what this undid; And where the infection slid, A dazzling memory revive; Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures with the pen Which on the first day drew, Upon the tablets blue, The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

MEROPS * 1.128

WHAT care I, so they stand the same,— Things of the heavenly mind,— How long the power to give them name Tarries yet behind?

Thus far to-day your favors reach, O fair, appeasing presences! Ye taught my lips a single speech, And a thousand silences.

Space grants beyond his fated road No inch to the god of day; And copious language still bestowed One word, no more, to say.

THE HOUSE * 1.129

THERE iS no architect Can build as the Muse can; She is skilful to select Materials for her plan;

Slow and warily to choose Rafters of immortal pine, Or cedar incorruptible, Worthy her design,

She threads dark Alpine forests Or valleys by the sea, In many lands, with painful steps, Ere she can find a tree.

She ransacks mines and ledges And quarries every rock, To hew the famous adamant For each eternal block—

She lays her beams in music, In music every one, To the cadence of the whirling world Which dances round the sun—

That so they shall not be displaced By lapses or by wars, But for the love of happy souls Outlive the newest stars.

SAADI * 1.130

TREES in groves, Kine in droves, In ocean sport the scaly herds, Wedge-like cleave the air the birds, To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks, Browse the mountain sheep in flocks, Men consort in camp and town, But the poet dwells alone.

God, who gave to him the lyre, Of all mortals the desire,

For all breathing men's behoof, Straitly charged him,'Sit aloof;' Annexed a warning, poets say, To the bright premium,— Ever, when twain together play, Shall the harp be dumb.

Many may come, But one shall sing; Two touch the string, The harp is dumb. Though there come a million, Wise Saadi dwells alone.

Yet Saadi loved the race of men,— No churl, immured in cave or den; In bower and hall He wants them all, Nor can dispense With Persia for his audience; They must give ear, Grow red with joy and white with fear; But he has no companion; Come ten, or come a million, Good Saadi dwells alone.

Be thou ware where Saadi dwells; Wisdom of the gods is he,— Entertain it reverently.

Gladly round that golden lamp Sylvan deities encamp, And simple maids and noble youth Are welcome to the man of truth. Most welcome they who need him most, They feed the spring which they exhaust; For greater need Draws better deed: But, critic, spare thy vanity, Nor show thy pompous parts, To vex with odious subtlety The cheerer of men's hearts.

Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say Endless dirges to decay, Never in the blaze of light Lose the shudder of midnight; Pale at overflowing noon Hear wolves barking at the moon; In the bower of dalliance sweet Hear the far Avenger's feet: And shake before those awful Powers, Who in their pride forgive not ours. Thus the sad-eyed Fakirs preach: Bard, when thee would Allah teach, And lift thee to his holy mount, He sends thee from his bitter fount Wormwood,—saying, "Go thy ways; Drink not the Malaga of praise, * 1.131

But do the deed thy fellows hate, And compromise thy peaceful state; Smite the white breasts which thee fed, Stuff sharp thorns beneath the head Of them thou shouldst have comforted; For out of woe and out of crime Draws the heart a lore sublime."' And yet it seemeth not to me That the high gods love tragedy; For Saadi sat in the sun, And thanks was his contrition; For haircloth and for bloody whips, Had active hands and smiling lips; And yet his runes he rightly read, And to his folk his message sped. Sunshine in his heart transferred Lighted each transparent word, And well could honoring Persia learn What Saadi wished to say; For Saadi's nightly stars did burn Brighter than Jami's day.

Whispered the Muse in Saadi's cot: 'O gentle Saadi, listen not, Tempted by thy praise of wit, Or by thirst and appetite For the talents not thine own, To sons of contradiction. Never, son of eastern morning,

Follow falsehood, follow scorning. Denounce who will, who will deny, And pile the hills to scale the sky; Let theist, atheist, pantheist, Define and wrangle how they list, Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,— But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer, Unknowing war, unknowing crime, Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme; Heed not what the brawlers say, Heed thou only Saadi's lay. * 1.132

'Let the great world bustle on With war and trade, with camp and town; A thousand men shall dig and eat; At forge and furnace thousands sweat; And thousands sail the purple sea, And give or take the stroke of war, Or crowd the market and bazaar; Oft shall war end, and peace return, And cities rise where cities burn, Ere one man my hill shall climb, Who can turn the golden rhyme. Let them manage how they may, Heed thou only Saadi's lay. Seek the living among the dead,— Man in man is imprisonèd; Barefooted Dervish is not poor, If fate unlock his bosom's door,

So that what his eye hath seen His tongue can paint as bright, as keen; And what his tender heart hath felt With equal fire thy heart shall melt. For, whom the Muses smile upon, And touch with soft persuasion, His words like a storm-wind can bring Terror and beauty on their wing; In his every syllable Lurketh Nature veritable; And though he speak in midnight dark,—. In heaven no star, on earth no spark,— Yet before the listener's eye Swims the world in ecstasy, The forest waves, the morning breaks, The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes, Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be, And life pulsates in rock or tree. Saadi, so far thy words shall reach: Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech!'

And thus to Saadi said the Muse: ' Eat thou the bread which men refuse; Flee from the goods which from thee flee; Seek nothing,—Fortune seeketh thee. Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep The midway of the eternal deep. Wish not to fill the isles with eyes To itch thee birds of paradise:

On thine orchard's edge belong All the brags of plume and song; Wise Ali's sunbright sayings pass For proverbs in the market-place: Through mountains bored by regal art, Toil whistles as he drives his cart. Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind, A poet or a friend to find: Behold, he watches at the door! Behold his shadow on the floor! * 1.133 Open innumerable doors The heaven where unveiled Allah pours The flood of truth, the flood of good, The Seraph's and the Cherub's food. Those doors are men: the Pariah hind Admits thee to the perfect Mind. Seek not beyond thy cottage wall Redeemers that can yield thee all: While thou sittest at thy door On the desert's yellow floor, Listening to the gray-haired crones, Foolish gossips, ancient drones, Saadi, see! they rise in stature To the height of mighty Nature, And the secret stands revealed Fraudulent Time in vain concealed,— That blessed gods in servile masks Plied for thee thy household tasks.' * 1.134

HOLIDAYS * 1.135

FROM fall to spring, the russet acorn, Fruit beloved of maid and boy, Lent itself beneath the forest, To be the children's toy.

Pluck it now! In vain,—thou canst not; Its root has pierced yon shady mound; Toy no longer—it has duties; It is anchored in the ground.

Year by year the rose-lipped maiden, Playfellow of young and old, Was frolic sunshine, dear to all men, More dear to one than mines of gold.

Whither went the lovely hoyden? Disappeared in blessed wife; Servant to a wooden cradle, Living in a baby's life.

Still thou playest;—short vacation Fate grants each to stand aside; Now must thou be man and artist,— 'T is the turning of the tide.

XENOPHANES * 1.136

BY fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity: all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one. Beheld far off, they part As God and devil; bring them to the mind, They dull its edge with their monotony. To know one element, explore another, And in the second reappears the first. The specious panorama of a year But multiplies the image of a day,— A belt of mirrors round a taper's flame; And universal Nature, through her vast And crowded whole, an infinite paroquet, Repeats one note. * 1.137

THE DAY'S RATION * 1.138

WHEN I was born, From all the seas of strength Fate filled a chalice, Saying,'This be thy portion, child; this chalice, Less than a lily's, thou shalt daily draw From my great arteries,—nor less, nor more.' All substances the cunning chemist Time Melts down into that liquor of my life,— Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty and disgust. And whether I am angry or content, Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt, All he distils into sidereal wine And brims my little cup; heedless, alas! Of all he sheds how little it will hold, How much runs over on the desert sands. If a new Muse draw me with splendid ray, And I uplift myself into its heaven, The needs of the first sight absorb my blood, And all the following hours of the day Drag a ridiculous age. To-day, when friends approach, and every hour Brings book, or starbright scroll of genius, The little cup will hold not a bead more, And all the costly liquor runs to waste; Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond drop

So to be husbanded for poorer days. Why need I volumes, if one word suffice? Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught After the master's sketch fills and o'erfills My apprehension? Why seek Italy, Who cannot circumnavigate the sea Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn The nearest matters for a thousand days?

BLIGHT * 1.139

GIVE me truths; For I am weary of the surfaces, And die of inanition. If I knew Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony, Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras, Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew, And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods Draw untold juices from the common earth, Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,— O, that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun

And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions. * 1.140 But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. The old men studied magic in the flowers, And human fortunes in astronomy, And an omnipotence in chemistry, Preferring things to names, for these were men, Were unitarians of the united world, And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, They caught the footsteps of the SAME. * 1.141 Our eyes Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars, And strangers to the mystic beast and bird, And strangers to the plant and to the mine. The injured elements say,'Not in us;' And night and day, ocean and continent, Fire, plant and mineral say,'Not in us;' And haughtily return us stare for stare. * 1.142 For we invade them impiously for gain; We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due; But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,

The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld; And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves And pirates of the universe, shut out Daily to a more thin and outward rind, Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes, The stunted trees look sick, the summer short, Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay, And nothing thrives to reach its natural term; And life, shorn of its venerable length, Even at its greatest space is a defeat, And dies in anger that it was a dupe; And, in its highest noon and wantonness, Is early frugal, like a beggar's child; Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims And prizes of ambition, checks its hand, Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped, Chilled with a miserly comparison Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.

MUSKETAQUID * 1.143

BECAUSE I was content with these poor fields, Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams, And found a home in haunts which others scorned, The partial wood-gods overpaid my love, And granted me the freedom of their state, And in their secret senate have prevailed

With the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life, * 1.144 Made moon and planets parties to their bond, And through my rock-like, solitary wont Shot million rays of thought and tenderness. For me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the Spring Visits the valley;—break away the clouds,— I bathe in the morn's soft and silvered air, And loiter willing by yon loitering stream. Sparrows far off, and nearer, April's bird, Blue-coated,—flying before from tree to tree, Courageous sing a delicate overture To lead the tardy concert of the year. Onward and nearer rides the sun of May; And wide around, the marriage of the plants Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain The surge of summer's beauty; dell and crag, Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade, Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.

Beneath low hills, in the broad interval Through which at will our Indian rivulet Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw, Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies, Here in pine houses built of new-fallen trees, Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell. Traveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road, Or, it may be, a picture; to these men, The landscape is an armory of powers,

Which, one by one, they know to draw and use. They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work; They prove the virtues of each bed of rock, And, like the chemist 'mid his loaded jars, Draw from each stratum its adapted use To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal. They turn the frost upon their chemic heap, They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain, They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime, And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow, Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods O'er meadows bottomless. So, year by year, They fight the elements with elements (That one would say, meadow and forest walked, Transmuted in these men to rule their like), And by the order in the field disclose The order regnant in the yeoman's brain.

What these strong masters wrote at large in miles, I followed in small copy in my acres For there's no rood has not a star above it; * 1.145 The cordial quality of pear or plum Ascends as gladly in a single tree As in broad orchards resonant with bees; And every atom poises for itself, And for the whole. The gentle deities Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds, The innumerable tenements of beauty, The miracle of generative force,

Far-reaching concords of astronomy * 1.146 Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds; Better, the linked purpose of the whole, And, cheifest prize, found I true liberty In the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave. The polite found me impolite; the great Would mortify me, but in vain; for still I am a willow of the wilderness, Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk, A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush, A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine, Salve my worst wounds. For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear: 'Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie? Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like Nature pass Into the winter night's extinguished mood? Canst thou shine now, then darkle, And being latent, feel thyself no less? As, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye, The river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure, Yet envies none, none are unenviable.'

DIRGE * 1.147

CONCORD, 1838

I REACHED the middle of the mount Up which the incarnate soul must climb, And paused for them, and looked around, With me who walked through space and time.

Five rosy boys with morning light Had leaped from one fair mother's arms, Fronted the sun with hope as bright, And greeted God with childhood's psalms.

Knows he who tills this lonely field To reap its scanty corn, What mystic fruit his acres yield At midnight and at morn?

In the long sunny afternoon The plain was full of ghosts; I wandered up, I wandered down, Beset by pensive hosts.

The winding Concord gleamed below, Pouring as wide a flood As when my brothers, long ago, Came with me to the wood.

But they are gone,—the holy ones Who trod with me this lovely vale; The strong, star-bright companions Are silent, low and pale.

My good, my noble, in their prime, Who made this world the feast it was, Who learned with me the lore of time, Who loved this dwelling-place!

They took this valley for their toy, They played with it in every mood; A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,— They treated Nature as they would.

They colored the horizon round; Stars flamed and faded as they bade, All echoes hearkened for their sound,— They made the woodlands glad or mad.

I touch this flower of silken leaf, Which once our childhood knew; Its soft leaves wound me with a grief Whose balsam never grew. * 1.148

Hearken to yon pine-warbler Singing aloft in the tree! Hearest thou, O traveller, What he singeth to me?

Not unless God made sharp thine ear With sorrow such as mine, Out of that delicate lay could'st thou Its heavy tale divine.

'Go, lonely man,' it saith; 'They loved thee from their birth; Their hands were pure, and pure their faith,— There are no such hearts on earth.

'Ye drew one mother's milk, One chamber held ye all; A very tender history Did in your childhood fall.

'You cannot unlock your heart, The key is gone with them; The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem.'

THRENODY * 1.149

THE South-wind brings Life, sunshine and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire; But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return.

I see my empty house, I see my trees repair their boughs; And he, the wondrous child, Whose silver warble wild Outvalued every pulsing sound Within the air's cerulean round,— The hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom, The gracious boy, who did adorn The world whereinto he was born, And by his countenance repay The favor of the loving Day,— Has disappeared from the Day's eye; Far and wide she cannot find him; My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.

Returned this day, the South-wind searches, And finds young pines and budding birches; But finds not the budding man; Nature, who lost, cannot remake him; Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him; Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

And whither now, my truant wise and sweet, O, whither tend thy feet? I had the right, few days ago, Thy steps to watch, thy place to know: How have I forfeited the right? Hast thou forgot me in a new delight? I hearken for thy household cheer, O eloquent child! Whose voice, an equal messenger, Conveyed thy meaning mild. What though the pains and joys Whereof it spoke were toys Fitting his age and ken, Yet fairest dames and bearded men, Who heard the sweet request, So gentle, wise and grave, Bended with joy to his behest And let the world's affairs go by, A while to share his cordial game, Or mend his wicker wagon-frame, Still plotting how their hungry ear That winsome voice again might hear;

For his lips could well pronounce Words that were persuasions. * 1.150

Gentlest guardians marked serene His early hope, his liberal mien; Took counsel from his guiding eyes To make this wisdom earthly wise. Ah, vainly do these eyes recall The school-march, each day's festival, When every morn my bosom glowed To watch the convoy on the road; The babe in willow wagon closed, With rolling eyes and face composed; With children forward and behind, Like Cupids studiously inclined; And he the chieftain paced beside, The centre of the troop allied, With sunny face of sweet repose, To guard the babe from fancied foes. The little captain innocent Took the eye with him as he went; Each village senior paused to scan And speak the lovely caravan. From the window I look out To mark thy beautiful parade, Stately marching in cap and coat To some tune by fairies played; mdash; A music heard by thee alone To works as noble led thee on.

Now Love and Pride, alas! in vain, Up and down their glances strain. The painted sled stands where it stood; The kennel by the corded wood; His gathered sticks to stanch the wall Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall; The ominous hole he dug in the sand, And childhood's castles built or planned; His daily haunts I well discern,— The poultry-yard, the shed, the barn,— And every inch of garden ground Paced by the blessed feet around, From the roadside to the brook Whereinto he loved to look. Step the meek fowls where erst they ranged; The wintry garden lies unchanged; The brook into the stream runs on; But the deep-eyed boy is gone. * 1.151

On that shaded day, Dark with more clouds than tempests are, When thou didst yield thy innocent breath In birdlike hearings unto death, Night came, and Nature had not thee; I said,'We are mates in misery.' The morrow dawned with needless glow; Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow; Each tramper started; but the feet Of the most beautiful and sweet

Of human youth had left the hill And garden,—they were bound and still. There's not a sparrow or a wren, There's not a blade of autumn grain, Which the four seasons do not tend And tides of life and increase lend; And every chick of every bird, And weed and rock-moss is preferred. O ostrich-like forgetfulness! O loss of larger in the less! Was there no star that could be sent, No watcher in the firmament, No angel from the countless host That loiters round the crystal coast, Could stoop to heal that only child, Nature's sweet marvel undefiled, And keep the blossom of the earth, Which alI her harvests were not worth? Not mine,—I never called thee mine, But Nature's heir,—if I repine, And seeing rashly torn and moved Not what I made, but what I loved, Grow early old with grief that thou Must to the wastes of Nature go,— 'T is because a general hope Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope. For flattering planets seemed to say This child should ills of ages stay, By wondrous tongue, and guided pen,

Bring the flown Muses back to men. Perchance not he but Nature ailed, The world and not the infant failed. It was not ripe yet to sustain A genius of so fine a strain, Who gazed upon the sun and moon As if he came unto his own, And, pregnant with his grander thought, Brought the old order into doubt. His beauty once their beauty tried; They could not feed him, and he died, And wandered backward as in scorn, To wait an æon to be born. Ill day which made this beauty waste, Plight broken, this high face defaced! Some went and came about the dead; And some in books of solace read; Some to their friends the tidings say; Some went to write, some went to pray; One tarried here, there hurried one; But their heart abode with none. Covetous death bereaved us all, To aggrandize one funeral. The eager fate which carried thee Took the largest part of me: For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's down-lying, This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world resigning.

O child of paradise, Boy who made dear his father's home, In whose deep eyes Men read the welfare of the times to come, I am too much bereft. The world dishonored thou hast left. O truth's and nature's costly lie! O trusted broken prophecy! O richest fortune sourly crossed! Born for the future, to the future lost!

The deep Heart answered,'Weepest thou? Worthier cause for passion wild If I had not taken the child. And deemest thou as those who pore, With aged eyes, short way before,— Think'st Beauty vanished from the coast Of matter, and thy darling lost? Taught he not thee—the man of eld, Whose eyes within his eyes beheld Heaven's numerous hierarchy span The mystic gulf from God to man? To be alone wilt thou begin When worlds of lovers hem thee in? To-morrow, when the masks shall fall That dizen Nature's carnival, The pure shall see by their own will, Which overflowing Love shall fill,

'T is not within the force of fate The fate-conjoined to separate. But thou, my votary, weepest thou? I gave thee sight—where is it now? I taught thy heart beyond the reach Of ritual, bible, or of speech; Wrote in thy mind's transparent table, As far as the incommunicable; Taught thee each private sign to raise Lit by the supersolar blaze, Past utterance, and past belief, And past the blasphemy of grief, The mysteries of Nature's heart; And though no Muse can these impart, Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast, And all is clear from east to west.

'I came to thee as to a friend; Dearest, to thee I did not send Tutors, but a joyful eye, Innocence that matched the sky, Lovely locks, a form of wonder, Laughter rich as woodland thunder, That thou might'st entertain apart The richest flowering of all art: And, as the great all-loving Day Through smallest chambers takes its way, That thou might'st break thy daily bread

With prophet, savior and head; That thou might'st cherish for thine own The riches of sweet Mary's Son, Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon. And thoughtest thou such guest Would in thy hall take up his rest? Would rushing life forget her laws, Fate's glowing revolution pause? High omens ask diviner guess; Not to be conned to tediousness And know my higher gifts unbind The zone that girds the incarnate mind. When the scanty shores are full With Thought's perilous, whirling pool; When frail Nature can no more, Then the Spirit strikes the hour: My servant Death, with solving rite, Pours finite into infinite. Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, Whose streams through Nature circling go? Nail the wild star to its track On the half-climbed zodiac? Light is light which radiates, Blood is blood which circulates, Life is life which generates, And many-seeming life is one,— Wilt thou transfix and make it none? Its onward force too starkly pent In figure, bone and lineament?

Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate, Talker! the unreplying Fate? Nor see the genius of the whole Ascendant in the private soul, Beckon it when to go and come, Self-announced its hour of doom? Fair the soul's recess and shrine, Magic-built to last a season; Masterpiece of love benign, Fairer that expansive reason Whose omen 't is, and sign. Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know What rainbows teach, and sunsets show? Verdict which accumulates From lengthening scroll of human fates, Voice of earth to earth returned, Prayers of saints that inly burned,— Saying, What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again. Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye Up to his style, and manners of the sky. Not of adamant and gold Built he heaven stark and cold; No, but a nest of bending reeds, Flowering grass and scented weeds; Or like a traveller's fleeing tent, Or bow above the tempest bent;

Built of tears and sacred flames, And virtue reaching to its aims; Built of furtherance and pursuing, Not of spent deeds, but of doing. Silent rushes the swift Lord Through ruined systems still restored, Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless, Plants with worlds the wilderness; * 1.152 Waters with tears of ancient sorrow Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. House and tenant go to ground, Lost in God, in Godhead found.'

CONCORD HYMN

SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT, JULY 4, 1837 * 1.153

BY the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Notes

• * 1.1

  GOOD-BYE, Page 3. Not without serious consideration has the editor removed the poem, which his father put at the beginning of his first volume of verse, to a later place. But he has always shared the feeling of regret that Dr. Holmes expressed in his book, that

  "Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians by placing the Sphinx at the entrance of his temple of song."

  In the mythology the Sphinx let no man pass who could not solve her riddle; and Emerson's Sphinx has no doubt cut off, in the very portal, readers who would have found good and joyful words for themselves, had not her fiddle been beyond their powers.

  There is some reason, from a list in the manuscript book in which are found most of the early poems, to think that the author once planned to put "Good-bye" first. It is the earliest of the poems published by him.

  Mr. Emerson sent these verses in February, 1839, to his friend Rev. James Freeman Clarke, at his request, to print in The Western Messenger. Mr. Clarke then lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. Emerson wrote:

  "They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses, that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe I have in April or May an annual poetic conatus rather than afflatus, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days."

  Mr. Emerson did not include "Good-bye" in the Selected Poems, published in 1876, but it has won its way with readers, and while this boyish utterance does not refer to his retirement to the country twelve years later, to study God in Nature, it seems a prophecy, though written in a different mood. The shy youth of nineteen, assistant in his brother William's school for young ladies in Boston, when the day's lessons were over thankfully fled to the beautiful wilderness in Roxbury (now the "Schoolmaster's Field" in Franklin Park), for his mother established the home in that region for a time.
• * 1.2

  EACH AND ALL. Page 4. The germ of this poem, perhaps, is found in this entry in Mr. Emerson's journal: —

  "May 16th, 1834. I remember when I was a boy going upon the beach and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells. I picked up many and put them in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I gathered— nothing but some dry, ugly mussel and snail shells. Thence I learned that Composition was more important than the beauty of individual forms to Effect. On the shore they lay wet and social, by the sea and under the sky."

  This passage he introduced into a lecture called "The Naturalist" given in that month before the Boston Natural History Society. The poem, like, "Good-bye," was published in The Western Messenger in 1839.
• * 1.3

  Page 4, note 1. Journal, 1844.

  "Buonaparte was sensible to the music of bells. Hearing the bell of a parish church, he would pause, and his voice faltered as he said,' Ah! that reminds me of the first years I spent at Brienne; I was then happy.'"
• * 1.4

  Page 5, note 1. Mr. Emerson said,

  "I think sometimes that my lack of musical ear is made good to me through my eyes: that which others hear I see."
• * 1.5

  THE PROBLEM. Page 6. This poem, one of the few that bear a date,—10 November, 1839,—is better known and more often quoted than any other which Mr. Emerson wrote. I: is also remarkable in this, that it would almost seem, like Athene, to have sprung matured and perfect from its author's brain. No fragments, no trials remain; much fewer verbal changes than is usual appear in the manuscript book of poetry, and not one since the poem saw light in the first number of the Dial in July, 1840. Mr. Emerson at first called it "The Priest." Here is the thought as recorded in the journal: —

  "AUGUST 28, 1838. "It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman Cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English Church and hear the liturgy read, yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest.

  "I find an unpleasant dilemma in this, nearer home. I dislike to be a clergyman and refuse to be one. Yet how rich a music would be to me a holy clergyman in my town. It seems to me he cannot be a man, quite and whole; yet how plain is the need of one, and how high, yes, highest is the function. Here is division of labor that I like not: a man must sacrifice his manhood for the social good. Something is wrong; I see not what."
• * 1.6

  Page 6, note 1. The same thought occurs in the essay on Compensation ( Essays, First Series, p. 108), and this poem is another chapter on the Over-Soul.
• * 1.7

  Page 7, note 1. Journal, Florence, 1833.

  "It is in the soul that architecture exists, and Santa Croce and the Duomo /are poor, far-behind imitations."

  In the essays on Art ( Essays, First Series, and Society and Solitude) the inspiration, in its fullest sense, of the best works of man in Art and Architecture is taught.
• * 1.8

  Page 8, note 1. The gentle, serious and humane priest John of Antioch (347-407) was raised to the bishopric of Constantinople. Because of his Homilies (said to be the best in Christian literature) the name Chrysostom (Golden Mouth) was given him by the Ecumenical Council two hundred years after his death.

  In sending to a friend the Confessions of Saint Augustine,

  "translated two hundred years ago, in the golden time when all translations seemed to have the fire of original works,"

  Mr. Emerson said,

  "I push this little antiquity toward you merely out of gratitude to some golden words I read in it last summer."

  Of Taylor (1613-1667), the author of Holy Living and Holy Dying, Mr. Emerson said in an early journal: —

  "'T is pity Jeremy Taylor could not always remember 'rien n'est beau que le vrai.' I have been reading the 'Contemplations of the State of Man.' An immense progress in natural and religious knowledge has been made since his death. Even his genius cannot quicken all that stark nonsense about the blessed and the damned. Yet in the' Life of Christ' I have thought him a Christian Plato; so rich and great was his philosophy. is it possible the intellect should be so inconsistent with itself? It is singular also that the bishop's morality should sometimes trip, as in his explanation of false witness."
• * 1.9

  TO RHEA. Page 9. This poem, probably written in 1843, appeared in the Dial in July of that year. It is not to be regarded as personal, but general, —even then as an aspect, from the cold heights of pure intellect, the same that is presented in connection with the discussion of Swedenborg's Conjugal Love, in Representative Men. But Mr. Emerson recognized the danger of individual detachment. The supremacy of the human, the moral element is recognized in all his thought. Even in the fragmentary essay on the Natural History of Intellect, in the volume thus entitled, he warns of the dangers of pure intellect and gives the other aspect:

  "Affection blends, intellect disjoins;"

  and elsewhere he gives this counsel,

  "The Heart knoweth."
• * 1.10

  THE VISIT. Page 12. These verses were published in the Dial in April, 1844. Great as was Mr. Emerson's hospitality, it was so often overtaxed that he felt that a word of general counsel was due on the subject of visits. For a call he used to say that fifteen minutes was the limit, except in very unusual circumstances.

  Journal, 1842.

  "'My evening visitors,' said that excellent Professor Fortinbras, 'if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face. As soon as it is nine, I begin to curse them with internal execrations that are minute-guns. And yet,' he added,' the devil take half hospitalities, this self-protecting civility whose invitations to dinner are determined exclusions from the heart of the inviter, as if he said, "I invite you to eat because I will not converse with you.'' If he dared only say it, that exclusion would be hospitality of angels, an admission to the thought of his heart.'"
• * 1.11

  URIEL. Page 13. From its strange presentation in a celestial parable of the story of a crisis in its author's life, this poem demands especial comment. In his essay on Circles, which sheds light upon it, Emerson said,

  "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."

  His letters and journals, even while he was a clergyman, show his belief that religion owed to Copernicus a great emancipation. In a later essay he speaks of the great astronomer's destroying the

  "pagan fictions of the Church by showing mankind that the earth on which we live was not the centre of the Universe,... and thus fitted to be the platform on which the Drama of the Divine Judgment was played before the assembled Angels of Heaven, ... but a little scrap of a planet, rushing round the sun in our system, which in turn was too minute to be seen at the distance of many stars which we behold."

  Lectures and Biographical Sketches The lapses and perturbations of the planets, as seen from the eccentric earth, which troubled the astrologers under the Ptolemaic system, gave way to the beautiful ordered dance of the heavenly bodies, including the comets, around the sun. From boyhood Emerson was familiar with Paradise Lost, and Uriel, the bright Archangel of the Sun, would best see the vast orbits, the returns and compensations, the harmony and utter order of the Universe, —God in all. This did away with Original Sin, a separate principle of Evil, hopeless Condemnation, Mediation,—for Emerson saw in Nature a symbol. The Law was alike in matter and spirit. He had shaken off dogma and tradition and found that the Word

  Still floats upon the morning wind,Still whispers to the willing mind.

  The earnest young men on the eve of entering the ministry asked him to speak to them. After serious thought he went to Cambridge (July 15, 1838) to give them the good and emancipating words which had been given to him in solitude, well aware, however, that he must shock or pain the older clergy who were present. The poem, when read with the history of the Divinity School Address, and its consequences, in mind, is seen to be an account of that event generalized and sublimed, — the announcement of an advance in truth, won not without pain and struggle, to hearers not yet ready, resulting in banishment to the prophet; yet the spoken word sticks like a barbed arrow, or works like a leaven.
• * 1.12

  Page 14, note 1. While the "young deities" (divines) discuss the Universe, Identity, Illumination, Being and Seeming, one startles them with the doctrine, doing away with arbitrary bound, of Eternal Return, involving Good out of Evil. They only see the Circle, not the Spiral which is Advance combined with Return, adding the element of Progress. They only see in it Revolution, not Evolution. Perhaps Uriel is not yet quite clear. In Mr. Henry Walker's fine painting of Emerson's Uriel in the Congressional Library at Washington, clouds of doubt still hang on the Archangel's brow.

  Plotinus said,

  "The Intellect sees because it is turned back to its origin, the One; its movement is circular."

  Professor Andrews Norton, representing

  "the stern old war gods,"

  said of the Address,

  "Theories which would overturn society and resolve the world into chaos."

  Rev. Henry Ware, honored and loved by Mr. Emerson, who had been associated with him as junior pastor, was one of the frowning seraphs, for he could not quite follow his young friend in his new departure. Another honored friend of Mr. Emerson, the Rev. Nathaniel L. Frothingham, soon after, in a sermon to which the Address gave rise, used as a text,

  "Some said it thundered, others that an angel spake.''
• * 1.13

  Page 14, note 2. The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of the soul.

  "Every partial soul must make periods of ascent from and descent into generation, and this forever and ever."

  (Proclus.) The next two lines suggest a sentence of Plutarch in the Morals:

  "The Sun is the cause why all men are ignorant of Apollo, by sense withdrawing the rational intellect from that which is to that which appears."
• * 1.14

  Page 15, note 1. Dr. William T. Harris, in the Memoir of Bronson Alcott, apropos of this poem, quotes Plotinus thus:—

  "There are two kinds of souls that descend into the world of matter, the higher order, like so many kings, associating with the governor of all things, become his colleagues in the general administration of the world. They descend for the sake of causing the perfection of the universe. The second class of souls descend because they are condemned to suffer punishment."

  —IV. Ennead, book VIII., chapters 4, 5.
• * 1.15

  THE WORLD-SOUL. Page 15. This poem presents with the freshness of a June morning in New England a doctrine from the ancient East. I quote from Mr. George Willis Cooke's excellent Life of Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philosophy. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1881. the following passage:—

  "Around Plotinus...there grew up a distinct school of thought, teaching the philosophic doctrine of the identity of subject and object, mind and matter, and making intuition the method of knowing. One of his disciples was Porphyry, who distinctly taught that matter emanates from... the soul. Amelius departed so far from Plotinus as to teach the unity of all souls in the World-Soul, a favorite doctrine of Emerson's."
• * 1.16

  Page 15, note 2.

  "But why should you keep your head over your shoulder?... It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

  —

  "Self-Reliance."
• * 1.17

  Page 16, note 1. This suggests his words on the effect on the fancy of a horn blown among echoing mountains,

  "Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful?"

  — "Nature," Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.18

  Page 17, note 1. In the first few pages of the essay ("Nature") quoted in the note above, are passages on the effect of

  "these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,... eloquent of secret promises."
• * 1.19

  Page 17, note 2. Journal, 1851.

  "There is something— our brothers over the sea do not know it or own it —... which is setting them all aside, and the whole world also, and planting itself forever and ever."
• * 1.20

  Page 18, note 1. September 15, 1842.

  "I suppose there are secret bands that tie each man to his mark with a mighty force; first, of course, his Dæman, a beautiful immortal figure, whom the ancients said, though never visible to himself, sometimes to appear shining before him to others."

  — From Letters of Emerson to a Friend.
• * 1.21

  THE SPHINX. Page 20. This poem was published in the Dial of January, 1841. The only important change it has undergone was the substitution by Mr. Emerson, when he published his Poems, of two more pleasing lines for grotesque ones in its first form. The fable is used as an illustration in Nature, Addresses and Lectures (p. 34) and in "History," in Essays, First Series.

  Mr. Emerson wrote in his note-book in 1859:

  "I have often been asked the meaning of the 'Sphinx.' It is this, — The perception of identity unites all things and explains one by another, and the most rare and strange is equally facile as the most common. But if the mind live only in particulars, and see only differences (wanting the power to see the whole — all in each), then the world addresses to this mind a question it cannot answer, and each new fact tears it in pieces, and it is vanquished by the distracting variety."

  Journal, September 3, 1838.

  "The Egyptian Sphinxes are observed to have all a countenance expressive of complacency and tranquillity: an expression of health. There is much history in that fact."
• * 1.22

  Page 22, note 1.

  "Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him.... Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose."

  —"Self-Reliance," Essays, First Series.
• * 1.23

  Page 22, note 2.

  "Has turned the man-child's head."

  — Dial.
• * 1.24

  Page 24, note 1.

  "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put."

  — Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 4.
• * 1.25

  Page 25, note 1.

  I am the doubter and the doubt.

  "Brahma."

  In the latter pan of "Nominalist and Realist," in Essays, Second Series, this thought is more fully expressed.
• * 1.26

  ALPHONSO OF CASTILE. Page 25. This poem was written in the summer of 1847.

  Alfonso X. of Castile (1252-84), surnamed the Wise, was a monarch of extraordinary gifts and beneficent activity. I quote the following estimate of him from the History of Spain, by Ulick Ralph Burke, M. A.:

  "If his Royal Highness the present heir apparent to the crown of England were a senior wrangler and a double first-class man at our English universities, if he were called upon to fill the place of astronomer royal of England.... if he had written a more brilliant history than Macaulay, and a finer poem than Tennyson, if he were fit to teach Wagner music and Cayley mathematics, and if in the intervals of his studies he had found time to codify the entire laws of England into a digest which might endure for six hundred years to come—then and only then could the practical preëminence of his intellectual attainments in modern England represent the practical preëminence of the sabidura of Alfonso X. in mediæval Spain."

  Alfonso is reported (some say maliciously) to have said,

  "Had God consulted me in the making of the world, he would have made it differently."

  Mr. Emerson alludes to King Alfonso in "Nominalist and Realist," in Essays, Second Series, p. 238.
• * 1.27

  Page 26, note 1.

  "The cosmical debility"

  in some of the MS. verses.
• * 1.28

  Page 26, note 2.

  "To weltering Chaos and old Sleep."

  — MS.
• * 1.29

  MITHRIDATES. Page 28. Mithridates Eupator, king of Pontus, who gave the Romans so much trouble by his wiles in the first century B.C., was a man of extraordinary and varied learning. Familiar with the lore of other nations, a botanist and skilled in physic, he studied antidotes, and is reputed to have fed on poisons until he rendered himself immune from their noxious effects. Thus his name stands here as symbolic of the wise man who can find virtue in all things and escape the harm.

  The poem was written in 1846.
• * 1.30

  Page 29, note 1. In the first edition the poem ended with these lines:—

  God! I will not be an owl,But sun me in the Capitol.
• * 1.31

  To J. W. Page 29. The person addressed was Rev. John Weiss, a young clergyman and an able writer, who had seemed to Mr. Emerson to dwell overmuch on Goethe's failings.
• * 1.32

  DESTINY. Page 31. This poem, under the name of "Fate," appeared in the Dial, in October, 1841.
• * 1.33

  Page 32, note 1. Dr. Holmes, in his chapter on Emerson's Poems, says of the passage beginning—

  Alas! that one is born in blight,—

  "If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the tenui-rostrals. His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines."
• * 1.34

  Page 32, note 2.

  "The astronomers are very eager to know whether the moon has an atmosphere: I am only concerned that every man have one."

  —"Aristocracy," Lectures and Biographical Sketches.
• * 1.35

  Page 32, note 3. In Mr. Emerson's essays or poems a-higher note is almost always struck at the end, and here in the last two lines is a good word reserved, if he can but find it, for the

  "victim of perpetual slight."
• * 1.36

  GUY. Page 33. The balanced soul in harmony with Nature is here described. In one of the earlier verse-books, on the same page with an imperfect form of the six lines beginning

  "Fearless Guy had never foes,"

  are the following lines, apparently destined for this poem:—

  Fine presentiments controlled him,As one who knew a day was greatAnd freighted with a friendly fate,Ere whispered news or courier told him.When first at morn he read the faceOf Nature from his rising place,The coming day inspired his speech,And in his bearing and his gaitCalm expectancy did wait.
• * 1.37

  Page 33, note 1. The story of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, is told by Herodotus. Fortune so constantly smiled on him that Amasis, king of Egypt, bade his friend make some great sacrifice to avert the disaster that must come to balance unbroken prosperity. Polycrates flung his wonderful emerald into the sea. It returned to him in a fish on his table next day. Amasis at once broke off his alliance, and soon overthrow and cruel death befel Polycrates.
• * 1.38

  HAMATREYA. Page 35. This poem is a free rendering of a passage in the Vishnu Purana, book IV., an everlasting theme which, by changing the imagery to that which surrounded them, Mr. Emerson made striking to his Concord neighbors. The title Hamatreya is evidently some other version of Maitreya, which occurs in this passage copied from the journal of 1845:—

  "I have now given you a summary account of the sovereigns of the earth. — These and other kings who with perishable frames have possessed this ever-during world, and who, blinded with deceptive notions of individual occupation, have indulged the feeling that suggests' This earth is mine, —it is my son's, — it belongs to my dynasty,'—have all passed away. So, many who reigned before them, many who succeeded them, and many who are yet to come, have ceased or will cease to be. Earth laughs, as if smiling with autumnal flowers to behold her kings unable to effect the subjugation of themselves. I will repeat to you, Maitreya, the stanzas that were chanted by Earth, and which the Muni Asita communicated to Janaka, whose banner was virtue.

  "'How great is the folly of princes who are endowed with the faculty of reason, to cherish the confidence of ambition when they themselves are but foam upon the wave. Before they have subdued themselves, they seek to reduce their ministers, their servants, their subjects, under their authority; they then endeavor to overcome their foes. "Thus," say they, "will we conquer the ocean-circled Earth;" and intent upon their project, behold not death, which is not far off. But what mighty matter is the subjugation of the sea-girt Earth, to one who can subdue himself? Emancipation from existence is the fruit of self-control. It is through infatuation that kings desire to possess me, whom their predecessors have been forced to leave, whom their fathers have not retained. Beguiled by the selfish love of sway, fathers contend with their sons, and brothers with brothers, for my possession. Foolishness has been the character of every king who has boasted, "All this earth is mine — everything is mine — it will be in my house forever; "—for he is dead. How is it possible that such vain desires should survive in the hearts of his descendants, who have seen their progenitor, absorbed by the thirst of dominion, compelled to relinquish me whom he called his own, and tread the path of dissolution? When I hear a king sending word to another by his ambassador, "This earth is mine; resign your pretensions to it," — I am at first moved to violent laughter; but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool.'

  "These were the verses, Maitreya, which Earth recited and by listening to which ambition fades away like snow before the sun.''
• * 1.39

  Page 35, note 1. Peter Bulkeley, a minister of Odell in Bedfordshire, a man of learning, piety and substance, was silenced by Archbishop Laud for non-conformity, and with many of his flock moved to New England. In company with Simon Willard, of Kent, a man of experience in trade and in military affairs, he made the first inland settlement on land purchased of the Indians, and called it Concord. One of Mr. Emerson's ancestors married his daughter. The other names in the first line are those of some of the first settlers.
• * 1.40

  THE RHODORA. Page 37. "The Rhodora" was written in 1834 at Newton, where Mr. Emerson was visiting his uncle, Mr. Ladd. Rev. James Freeman Clarke obtained it for publication in his Western Messenger in 1839.
• * 1.41

  Page 38, note 1.

  "This element [Beauty] I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe."

  — Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 24.
• * 1.42

  THE HUMBLE-BEE. Page 38. This entry occurs in Mr. Emerson's journal for 1837:

  "May 9. Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine humble-bee with rhymes and fancies fine."

  On the next page he wrote,

  "The humble-bee and pine-warbler seem to me the proper objects of attention in these disastrous times."
• * 1.43

  Page 40, note 1. M. René de Poyen Belleisle, in a lecture called A French View of Emerson, given before the School of Philosophy in Concord in the summer of 1888, made use of an image drawn from honey-making (which Mr. Emerson borrowed from Montaigne in "Poetry and Imagination," Letters and Social Aims, p. 16) to illustrate his method in philosophy:

  "Comment Emerson se sert-il des ses idées; ou, en autres termes, quelle est sa méthode? Je prononce là un mot qui sonne étrangement quand on parle d'Emerson.... La méthode d'Emerson est toute poétique. Il y a une phrase de Montaigne, que du reste Emerson s'est appropriée, et qui exprime admirablement ce que j'ai dans la pensée. 'Les abeilles,' dit Montaigne, 'qui pillottent de ci, de là, font le miel qui est tout leur; ce n'est plus ni thym ni marjolaine.' Le poëte est cette abeille: tout dans l'homme et dons la Nature l'attire et le miel qu'il en destille est sa pensée.''
• * 1.44

  BERRYING. Page 41. Although Mr. Emerson did not give these verses a place among the Selected Poems, they are kept here as giving a pleasant picture of him strolling through the remote pastures on an August afternoon.
• * 1.45

  Page 41, note 1. In some manuscript copies, the last line has

  "to our berries went,"

  in others

  "from,"

  which seems to have been preferred.
• * 1.46

  THE SNOW-STORM. Page 41. "The Snow-Storm "first appeared in the Dial for January, 1841.

  Journal, November 27, 1832:

  "Instead of lectures on Architecture, I will make a lecture on God's architecture, one of his beautiful works, a Day. I will draw a sketch of a winter's day. I will trace as I can a rude outline of the far-assembled influences, the contribution of the universe wherein this magical structure rises like an exhalation, the wonder and charm of the immeasurable deep."
• * 1.47

  WOODNOTES, I. Page 43. Mr. Emerson contributed the first part of the "Woodnotes," in October, 1840, to the second number of the Dial. He pruned it to its advantage in the Poems, but some of the omitted lines are given, as they may interest readers. It began thus:—

  For this present hardIs the fortune of the bardBorn out of time;All his accomplishment From Nature's utmost treasure spentBooteth not him.
• * 1.48

  Page 43, note 1. The passage which followed in the Dial was fuller by several lines, with recurrence of the idea:—

  With none has he to do,And none seek him,Nor men below,Nor spirits dim.Sure some god his eye enchants:—What he knows nobody wants:In the wood he travels gladWithout better fortune had,Melancholy without bad.Planter of celestial plants,What he knows nobody wants;What he knows he hides, not vaunts.
• * 1.49

  Page 44, note 1. Journal, 1835.

  "Trifles move us more than laws. Why am I more curious to know the reason why the star-form is so oft repeated in botany, or why the number five is such a favorite with Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the formation of buds?"
• * 1.50

  Page 45, note 1. The passages about the forest seer fit Thoreau so well that the general belief that Mr. Emerson had him in mind may be accepted, but one member of the family recalls his saying that a part of this picture was drawn before he knew Thoreau's gifts and experiences.
• * 1.51

  Page 47, note 1. The opening pages of "Nature," in Essays, Second Series, describe the "charmed days" and in fluinfluences that the author found in the woods.
• * 1.52

  Page 47, note 2. Omitted lines, from the verse-book:—

  Hid in adjoining bowers, the birdsSang their old speech, older than words.
• * 1.53

  WOODNOTES, II. Page 48. The second portion of this poem appeared first in the Dial for October, 1841.

  The stately white pine of New England was Emerson's favorite tree; hence the graceful drawing by Mrs. Alice Stone which adorns the title-page of these volumes. This poem records the actual fact; nearly every day, summer or winter, when at home, he went to listen to its song. The pine grove by Walden, still standing, though injured by time and fire, was one of his most valued possessions. He questioned whether he should not name his book Forest Essays, for, he said,

  "I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved."

  The great pine on the ridge over Sleepy Hollow was chosen by him as his monument. When a youth, in Newton, he had written,

  "Here sit Mother and I under the pine-trees, still almost as we shah lie by and by under them."
• * 1.54

  Page 49, note 1. Here followed, in the original form, these lines:—

  Ancient or curious,Who knoweth aught of us?Old as Jove,Old as Love,Who of meTells the pedigree?Only the mountains old,Only the waters cold,Only moon and starMy coævals are.Ere the first fowl sungMy relenting boughs among;Ere Adam wived,Ere Adam lived, Ere the duck dived,Ere the bees hired,Ere the lion roared,Ere the eagle soared,Light and heat, land and seaSpoke unto the oldest tree.Glad in the sweet and secret aidWhich matter unto matter paid,The water flowed, the breezes fanned,The tree confined the roving sand,The sunbeam gave me to the sight,The tree adorned the formless light;And once againO'er the grave of menWe shall talk to each other againOf the old age behind,Of the time out of mind,Which shall come again.
• * 1.55

  Page 49, note 2.

  "The city would have died out, rotted and exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday that is city and court to-day."

  —" Manners," Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.56

  Page 50, note 1.

  "Those that live in solitary places are the saviours of themselves, so far as respects human causes."

  — Plotinus.
• * 1.57

  Page 52, note 1. Mr. Emerson's delight in the nebularhypothesis, and evolution, as far as it had then been surmised, appears again and again in his poems. Poetry and the philosophy of the ancient writers had prepared him for the latter belief, and the living Nature in his daily walks confirmed it.

  Tyndall spoke of Emerson as

  "a profoundly religious man who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, present, past or prospective; one by whom scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world."
• * 1.58

  Page 52, note 2. The fable of Proteus, Heracleitus's doctrine of the Flowing, and the modern teaching of the correlation and conservation of force, Mr. Emerson saw as versions of Identity in Multiplicity. Among many places where he expresses this thought may be mentioned the first pages of "Circles," and in the Poems the end of "Threnody," the lines in the "Ode to Beauty," "Thee gliding through the sea of form," etc., and passages on "The Poet" in the Appendix.
• * 1.59

  Page 54, note 1. Compare "Merlin," II., celebrating the correspondences and rhymes in Nature.
• * 1.60

  Page 54, note 2. Journal, 1846.

  "'As for beauty, I need not look beyond an oar's length for my fill of it.' I do not know whether he [William Ellery Channing] used the expression with design or no, but my eye rested on the charming play of light on the water which he was striking with his paddle. I fancied I had never seen such color, such transparency, such eddies; it was the hue of Rhine wines, it was jasper and verd-antique, topaz and chalcedony, it was gold and green and chestnut and hazel in bewitching succession and relief, without cloud or confusion."

  See also "Nature," in Essays, Second Series, pp. 172, 173.
• * 1.61

  Page 56, note 1. Journal, May, 1832.

  "What has the imagination created to compare with the science of Astronomy? What is there in Paradise Lost to elevate and astonish like Herschell or Somerville? The contrast between the magnitude and duration of the things, and the animalcule observer. ... I hope the time will come when there will be a telescope in every street."
• * 1.62

  Page 59, note 1.

  "The man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow,... shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet."

  — "New England Reformers," Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.63

  MONADNOC. Page 60. In the verse-book of the period between 1833 and 1846 is the half-erased pencilling of an improvisation, the beginning of this poem, very likely written by Mr. Emerson as he sat above the forest waiting for sunrise on the great courses of dark rock, worn by the old glacier; for above the verses is written

  "1845, 3 May, 4 hours, 10 m., A.M."

  It is as follows, the introductory passage of the poem evidently having been written later:—

  I standUpon this uplifted landHugely massed to draw the clouds,Like a banner unrolledTo all the dwellers in the plainsRound about a hundred miles.In his own loom's garment dressed,By his own bounty blessed,Thus constant giver,Yielding many a cheerful river;Appearing an aërial isle,A cheerful and majestic pile,Which morn and crimson eve shall paintFor bard, for lover and for saint;The country's core,Inspirer, prophet evermore; That which God aloft had setSo that men might it not forget;It should be their lives' ornament,And mix itself with each event;Their almanac and dial,Painter's palette, sorcerer's phial,Mysteries of color duly laidBy the great painter, light and shade;And sweet varieties of timeAnd chanceAnd the mystic seasons' dance;The soft succession of the hoursThawed the snow-drift into flowers.By million changes skilled to tellWhat in the Eternal standeth well.
• * 1.64

  Page 65, note 1. In the essay in Conduct of Life, called "Considerations by the Way," is a passage similar to this.
• * 1.65

  Page 67, note 1. Mr. Emerson said that the street must be one of the orator's schools.

  "The speech of the man in the street is invariably strong, nor can you mend it by making it what you call parliamentary. You say, 'If he could only express himself;' but he does already, better than any one can for him,—can always get the ear of an audience to the exclusion of everybody else." —"Eloquence," Letters and Social Aims.
• * 1.66

  Page 69, note 1.

  "A profound thought will lift Olympus.... Go and talk with a man of genius, and the first word he utters sets all your so-called knowledge afloat and at large."

  — "Literary Ethics," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.
• * 1.67

  Page 71, note 1. To hazard a guess on this riddle, the answer might be, that the berry is the material Universe (whose colors are,—the woods and fields, seen from a mountain, blue and pale yellow, and the heavens, day and night, blue and gold), a symbol of divinity in which all have a share— the Over-Soul. "The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs."—" The Poet," Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.68

  Page 72, note 1. Here is a note in verse to the same purpose, apparently taken at Monadnoc:—

  Our eyeless bark sails free,Though with boom and sparAndes, Alp, or Himmalee,Strikes never moon or star.
• * 1.69

  Page 73, note 1.

  "All good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank to-days."

  —"The Times," Nature, Addresses and Lectures.
• * 1.70

  Page 73, note 2. Dr. Holmes, in his Life of his friend, thus speaks of this poem:—

  "How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates undertook to 'hew Mount Athos to the shape of man' in the likeness of Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes 'Cheshire's haughty hill' stand before us an impersonation of kingly humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked."
• * 1.71

  Page 75, note 1. The concluding lines of the poem area shorter essay on Immortality.

  Before leaving the subject of Monadnoc, the poems of Mr. Emerson's friends and neighbors should be remembered; Thoreau's fine poem, called "Mountains," on the blue eminences on Concord's western horizon, and the part of Mr. Channing's long poem, "The Wanderer," called "The Mountain." This poem, though of most unequal merit, has lines and passages of great beauty and singular descriptive felicity.

  There is also a poem by the late Mr. James Nesmith of Lowell, describing with strength and beauty, through all the lights and phases of the changing year, Monadnoc, where it stands

  "Like a huge arrowhead in stone."

  Unhappily this poem was only privately printed during the author's life, but it is to be hoped an edition may be published. It seems as if Mr. Nesmith had Mr. Emerson in mind, for he uses for the motto of his "Monadnoc" Shakspeare's line,—

  "Seeing a better spirit doth use thy name."
• * 1.72

  FABLE. Page 75. This little poem was probably written in 1845. Mr. Emerson liked it well enough to include it in the Selected Poems.
• * 1.73

  ODE, INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING. Page 76. The circumstance which gave rise to this poem, though not known, can easily be inferred. Rev. William Henry Channing, nephew of the great Unitarian divine, a man most tender in his sympathies, with an apostles zeal for right, had, no doubt, been urging his friend to join the brave band of men who were dedicating their lives to the destruction of human slavery in the United States. To these men Mr. Emerson gave honor and sympathy and active aid by word and presence on important occasions. He showed his colors from the first, and spoke fearlessly on the subject in his lectures, but his method was the reverse of theirs, affirmative not negative; he knew his office and followed his genius. He said,

  "I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts."

  But after the defection of Daniel Webster from the cause of Freedom, when the strife became more earnest, and Slavery more aggressive, he did important service as a free-lance against it. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, he spoke of it in public to his hearers as

  "a law which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion; a law which no man can abet or obey without forfeiting the name of a gentleman."
• * 1.74

  Page 77, note 1. He was impatient when men false to the cause of Liberty in their own day praised, in Fourth of July orations, the Fathers of the Republic for their sacrifices on her behalf. He wrote in his journal:

  "The Americans by means of this lust of extending their territory, and through this nefarious means of compromising with Slavery, enlarge the land but dwarf the men."

  But when the evil was brought to his own door and by the law of the land any householder who gave help or furtherance to the poor fugitive was a felon, Mr. Emerson felt that men of honor could not leave remedy for this wrong and disgrace to geologic time, but that active help was due from them.
• * 1.75

  ASTRÆA. Page 80. Mr. Emerson's verse-books show that at first he thought of giving this poem for a title ΓΝΩΘΙΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ, the Greek maxim signifying Know thyself; but considering that this would be intelligible only to the few, he gave it the name Astræa.
• * 1.76

  Page 80, note 1.

  "With this prayer on their neck."

  —First Edition.
• * 1.77

  Page 81, note 1.

  "And its lakes reflect all forms."

  —First Edition.
• * 1.78

  ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉCE. Page 82. The friendship of Montaigne, as related by himself, with Étienne de la Boéce (or Boetie) has, like that of David and Jonathan, become proverbial. Both were educated for the law at Bordeaux, and they later found themselves in the same parliament or court. When they first met, they ran into each other's arms, as if long acquainted. Étienne was a man who seemed made for whatever he undertook.

  "The happy strength of his genius rejoiced in difficulties."

  In troublous times he wrote a purely philosophic work, Discours de la servitude volontaire, a brave protest against the tyranny of kings. It was widely read, but brought him disfavor at court. He also wrote graceful, imaginative poems. He died in 1563, at the age of thirty-three.

  Mr. Emerson used this name to stand for the perfect friend, utterly loyal, yet austere. In this poem is the spirit of the fourth verse of "Give All to Love." Its thought may be found in "Friendship" (Essays, First Series, p. 208) and in "New England Reformers" ( Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 273).

  It seems probable that the poem was written in 1833. In the journal of that year, opposite the account of his coming on Montaigne's Essays when a boy, Mr. Emerson writes of friends,

  "Echo them, and you will see fast enough that you have nothing for them. They came to you for somewhat new. A man loves a man."
• * 1.79

  COMPENSATION. Page 83. This poetical word on a favorite theme bears the date "New York, 1834."
• * 1.80

  FORBEARANCE. Page 83. In writing this poem it is possible that Mr. Emerson had in mind his friend—later his helper and biographer—James Elliot Cabot. It would even better have fitted his friend Henry Thoreau. The date of its printing in the Dial (January, 1842) makes this more likely.
• * 1.81

  THE PARK. Page 84. "The Park" appeared in the same number of the Dial with the preceding poem.

  The poem describes the bewilderment which the youth with traditions and manners inbred from generations of Puritan ancestors feels when he first meets charming and gracious friends of a wider experience and culture. Yet the beauty of their behavior seems to warrant the quality of its hidden foundations.

  Emerson wrote to such a friend in March, 1841:—

  "I find myself, maugre all my philosophy, a devout student and admirer of persons. I cannot get used to them: they daunt and dazzle me still. I have just now been at the old wonder again. I see persons whom I think the world would be richer for losing; and I see persons whose existence makes the world rich. But blessed be the Eternal Power for those whom fancy even cannot strip of beauty, and who never for a moment seem to me profane.''
• * 1.82

  FORERUNNERS. Page 85. As in the case of, "The Problem," almost no trace of work on this poem in honor of the fair Ideals remains. In the book which contains most of the poems included in Mr. Emerson's first collection it appears in but one form, under the name "Guides," with only one word altered and one erased. There is no date, but Mr. Emerson said that it came to him as he walked home from Wachusett.

  There is a passage about the promises, never quite fulfilled, by which Nature leads us, in the Essay of that name in the Second Series (p. 192).
• * 1.83

  SURSUM CORDA. Page 86. Mr. Emerson had reference in this title to the chanting by the priest, in the introduction to the celebration of the Mass, of the words Sursum Corda! (Up, hearts!) to the worshippers.

  The thought of this piece—the exaltation that comes with utter humility—did not find quite satisfactory utterance in the poem as printed in early editions, but in its present form he included it in Selected Poems.
• * 1.84

  ODE TO BEAUTY. Page 87. The Ode was printed in the Dial in October, 1843. In the first stanza, as there printed, the third and fourth line read:—

  To thee who betrayed meTo be ruined or blest?

  and the thirteenth and fourteenth,—

  Love drinks at thy banquetRemediless thirst.
• * 1.85

  Page 87, note 1. The last four lines of this stanza were a later addition. Mr. Emerson sent the Dial to his young friend Henry Thoreau (then teaching Mr. William Emerson's boys in Staten Island), who had contributed "A Winter Walk" to that number. Mr. Thoreau in a letter of just comment on the magazine wrote,

  "I have a good deal of fault to find with your 'Ode to Beauty.' The tune is altogether unworthy of the thoughts. You slope too quickly to the rhyme, as if that trick should be performed as soon as possible, or as if you stood over the line with a hatchet and chopped off the verses as they came out, some short and some long. But give us a long reel and we'll chop it off to suit ourselves. It sounds like parody. 'Thee knew I of old, ''Remediless thirst' are some of those stereotyped lines.... Yet I love your poetry as I do little else that is near and recent, especially when you get fairly round the end of the line, and are not thrown back upon the rocks."
• * 1.86

  Page 89, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in October, 1839, to a friend who had lent him a portfolio of engravings, then rare in this country, of the works of the Italian masters:—

  "I have your portfolio in my study, and am learning to read in that book too. But there are fewer painters than poets. Ten men can awaken me by words to new hope and fruitful musing, for one that can achieve the miracle by forms. Besides, I think the pleasure of the poem lasts me longer.... But the eye is a speedier student than the ear; by a grand or a lovely form it is astonished or delighted once for all, whilst the sense of a verse steals slowly on the mind and suggests a hundred fine fancies before its precise import is finally settled."

  Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend

  Margaret Fuller seems also to have sent him a portfolio of reproductions of the drawings of Guercino and Salvator Rosa.
• * 1.87

  Page 89, note 2. These four lines were used by Mr. Emerson as the motto for "The Poet," in Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.88

  Page 89, note 3.

  "Nature is a sea of forms....What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony,—is Beauty."

  — Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 23.

  Mr. Emerson quotes Proclus as saying that Beauty swims on the light of farms.
• * 1.89

  Page 89, note 4.

  Hollow space and lily-bell is the expression in the verse-book.
• * 1.90

  Page 90, note 1. The following scraps from lecture-sheets seem to be appropriate here:—

  "Beauty has rightful privilege: may do what none else can, and it shall be blameless. Indeed, all privilege is that of Beauty—of flee, of form, of manner, of brain or method."

  "How else is a man or woman fascinating to us but because the abode of mystery and meanings never told and that cannot be exhausted? 'T is the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great."
• * 1.91

  GIVE ALL TO LOVE. Page 90 For this poem, as for the essays on Love and Friendship and the poems "To Rhea" and "The Initial, Dæmonic and Celestial Love," what Mr. Joel Benton says of Mr. Emerson's verses seems true:—

  "Let us admit at the outset, if you will, that the fortitude of his strain—as Matthew Arnold says of the verses of Epictetus—'is for the strong, for the few; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and gray'—and that

  'The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, But to the stars and the cold lunar beams; Alone the sun arises, and alone Spring the great streams.'"

  Emerson as a Poet
• * 1.92

  Page 92, note 1. This thought appears in the image at the end of" The Initial Love":—

  As the wave breaks to foam on shelves,Then runs into a wave again,So lovers melt their sundered selves,Yet melted would be twain.
• * 1.93

  Page 92, note 2. The last two lines of the poem are used by Kipling in a remarkable manner in his beautiful allegory "The Children of the Zodiac," for which they possibly suggested the theme. Mr. Emerson presents the same idea often in his prose writings, best perhaps in the essay on Compensation:—

  "The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.''

  He quotes Hafiz in the journals to this purpose:

  "Here is the sum, that when one door opens another shuts."
• * 1.94

  To ELLEN AT THE SOUTH. Page 93. In December, 1827, Mr. Emerson first saw Ellen Tucker, while preaching at Concord, New Hampshire. Just a year later they were engaged to one another. She was very young, but a person of great beauty and refinement. A month after their betrothal, signs of consumption appeared, and her family carried her southward in the spring. Mr. Emerson wrote above this poem,

  "To E. T. E. at Philadelphia, April, 1829,"

  although they were not married until September of that year. So the initials should have been E. L.T. In spite of her delicate health they had great happiness in the year and a half of life together that was granted them.

  Mr. Emerson printed this poem in the Dial for January, 1843, under the title, "To Eva at the South," but in the first edition of his Poems he restored the name of Ellen.
• * 1.95

  TO ELLEN. Page 94. These verses, never before printed, only bear the date "December;" probably the year was 1829.
• * 1.96

  To EVA. Page 95. This poem, also to Ellen, was printed by Mr. Emerson in the Dial, July, 1843.
• * 1.97

  LINES. Page 96. Besides the preceding poem, Mr. Emerson contributed to the first number of the Dial two poems which had sad and tender memories for him. These were his brilliant and loved brother Edward's "Last Farewell" to home and friends when he sailed for Porto Rico, where he died in 1831, and Ellen Tucker's poem written during her engagement. In the Dial it bore simply the heading, "Lines."
• * 1.98

  THE VIOLET. Page 97. One other poem by Ellen Tucker, printed by Mr. Emerson in the Dial in January, 1841, seems a fitting and a pleasant addition to this group.
• * 1.99

  THE AMULET. Page 98. This poem, with the same subject and date as the two others by Mr. Emerson which precede it, was published by him in the Dial in July, 1842.
• * 1.100

  THINE EYES STILL SHINED. Page 99. This poem also was probably written during Mrs. Emerson's absence in the South, either in the Spring before or following her marriage.
• * 1.101

  Page 99, note 1. Two pleasing verses follow here which Mr. Emerson did not print:—

  With thy high form my sleep is filled,Thy blazing eye greets me at morn,Thou dost these days with beauty gild,Which else were trivial and forlorn.

  What arts are thine, dear maiden,O tell me what arts are thine,To teach thy name to the rippling waveAnd to the singing pine?
• * 1.102

  Page 99, note 2. The poem in the manuscript has this ending:—

  Why should I sing of thee?The morning sings of thee;Why should I go to seek thy face?No rice but thine I see.
• * 1.103

  EROS. Page 100. This poem was printed in the Dial for January, 1844.
• * 1.104

  HERMIONE. Page 100. The history of this poem does not appear. It was written at a time when Mr. Emerson was taking pleasure in the study of the poets of Persia and Arabia. The theme may have been one drawn from them, or it may have been his endeavor, for the consolation of some friend,

  "to reduce the calamity within the sphere"

  of the common human experience of disappointment in love. It is the drawing of a great circle around a small one. The poem presents in brief many of the thoughts in the essays on Love and Friendship, and in the poem which serves as motto for the latter.
• * 1.105

  INITIAL, DÆMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE. Page 103. In all the editions until Mr. Emerson's revision called Selected Poems was published in 1876, the second division had the title "The Dæmonic and Celestial Love," and their treatment was a little confused,—passages really belonging to the "Celestial Love" coming in the second division; the third had no title. The poem as here printed is Mr. Emerson's final arrangement, but the matter, with a few omissions and corrections, is the same as in the first, the ethical confusion having been removed by taking the passage of twenty-six lines, beginning

  "But God said,"

  from the "Dæmonic Love," as an introduction of the "Celestial Love."

  This poem on the loves on ascending planes carries farther the theme of "Hermione," expounded in full in the essay on Love. The imagery is from the Banquet of Plato, of which Mr. Emerson says ( Representative Men, p. 70) that it

  "is a teaching... that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek.... Body cannot teach wisdom;—God only."

  There Plato tells of a plane of Dæmonic life between those of the mortal and celestial. In the chapter on Swedenborg, in Representative Men, Mr. Emerson says,

  "In Nature is no end, but everything at the end of one use is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into dæmonic and celestial natures."
• * 1.106

  Page 105, note 1. Mr. Emerson in several copies of the Poems corrected this line to

  Like leaping lions on their prey,

  but did not make the change in Selected Poems.
• * 1.107

  Page 107, note 1. The sentence in the early form was thus finished:—

  God-like,—but 't is for his fine pelf,The social quintessence of self.Well said I he is hypocrite,And folly the end of his subtle wit.
• * 1.108

  Page 108, note 1. Two lines in the first poem are here omitted:—

  Arguments, love, poetry,Action, service, badinage.
• * 1.109

  Page 109, note 1. A much stronger line than the one for which it was substituted,—

  These like strong amulets preferred.
• * 1.110

  Page 110, note 1. Here followed in the original the passage later rightly placed by Mr. Emerson at the beginning of "The Celestial Love":—

  But God saidThere is smoke in the flame, etc.
• * 1.111

  Page 110, note 2. In the note to the tenth stanza of "The World-Soul," is a reference by Mr. Emerson, quoted from a letter, to the ancient doctrine of Dæmons.

  In the passage on the Neo-platonists, in the essay on Books ( Society and Solitude, p. 203), he said,

  "The imaginative scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and dæmons and dæmoniacal men, of the 'azonic' and the 'aquatic gods,' dæmons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes."
• * 1.112

  Page 110, note 3. The four lines thus ending appear separately in one of Mr. Emerson's verse-books, where they are thus continued:—

  Of her faults I take no note,Fault and folly are not mine;Comes the genius,—all's forgot,Replunged again into that upper sphereWhich scatters wide and wild its lustres here.
• * 1.113

  Page 112, note 1. These four lines here followed in the original,—

  He is an oligarch;He prizes number, fame and mark;He loveth crowns,He scorneth drones.
• * 1.114

  Page 117, note 1. The doctrine of the blessed fatality of friendship which is found in the essay on the Over-Soul ( Essays, First Series, p. 294). See also the last lines of the motto of "Compensation."
• * 1.115

  Page 117, note 2. This was so true of his friend Thoreau, who yet had ever tenderness concealed under a stoic exterior, that Mr. Emerson said of him,

  "One would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree as Henry's."
• * 1.116

  Page 118, note 1.

  "Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations."

  — "Friendship," Essays, First Series.
• * 1.117

  Page 118, note 2.

  "We owe to man higher success than food and fire. We owe to man, man."

  —"Domestic Life," Society and Solitude.
• * 1.118

  THE APOLOGY. Page 119. This poem belongs to the early period of its author's Concord life. "May-Day" and the other poems of the later period, notably "Two Rivers," "Rubies" and "Waldeinsamkeit," show the gain in musical ear, the lack of which in early days he admitted.
• * 1.119

  MERLIN. I. Page 120. Mr. Emerson, in his recoil from academic and imitative versifying, found the rude Norse Sagas, and the no less strong but finer and more imaginative songs of the Welsh Bards, tonic and inspiring. As a boy he had delighted in Ossian. Merlin, in the old English metrical romance, but especially in the Morte d'Arthur, stirred his imagination. Then he read the fragmentary poems, not labored or polished, but struck out white-hot with enthusiasm or love or grief, that are attributed to Taliessin, Llewarch Hen and the other great Cymrian bards. Here and in other later poems (the "Song of Merlin" and the motto to "Considerations by the Way," in Conduct of Life) he uses Merlin to typify the haughty, free and liberating poet, working the magic of thought through the charm of Art.

  Among notes on English poetry in 1853 he wrote:—

  "I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the Vast, in the Welsh and Bardic fragments of Taliessin and his school, than in a good many volumes of British classics."

  "Merlin" was finished in the summer of 1846, but in the journal of the year before are its beginnings, which may interest the reader as showing that the finished poem expressed the author's aspiration:—

  I go discontented thro' the worldBecause I cannot strikeThe harp to please my tyrannous ear:Gentle touches are not wanted,These the yielding gods had granted.It shall not tinkle a guitar,But strokes of fateChiming with the ample winds,With the pulse of human blood,With the voice of mighty men,With the din of city arts,With the cannonade of war,With the footsteps of the braveAnd the sayings of the wise,Chiming with the forest's toneWhen they buffet boughs in the windy wood,Chiming with the gasp and moanOf the ice-imprisoned flood.I will not read a pretty taleTo pretty people in a nice saloonBorrowed from their expectation,But I will sing aloud and freeFrom the heart of the world.
• * 1.120

  Page 120, note 1 In his notes for a course of lectures in the winter of 1835-36, among the sentences on

  "Ideas that predominated in the old English,"

  is this:

  "Their poet is not a Pope, but a Talliefer, who, whilst he sings, tosses his sword into the air and catches it as it falls." Alluding, of course, to the warrior-minstrel who rode out before the Conqueror's array at Hastings, singing the Chanson de Roland and challenging the Saxons.
• * 1.121

  Page 121, note 1. On a stray lecture-sheet these words occur:

  "Do not the great always live extempore, mounting to heaven by the stairs of surprise?"

  The second part of "Merlin" was omitted by Mr. Emerson in his Selected Poems, which is surprising, for it well expressed his favorite idea of correspondence, universal rhyme and harmony in Nature, and compensation in life.
• * 1.122

  Page 123, note 1. With this passage may be compared that in the "Woodnotes," II., beginning

  Come learn with me the fatal songWhich knits the world in music strong.
• * 1.123

  Page 124, note 1. The same thought is to be found in "Clubs," Society and Solitude, p. 230.
• * 1.124

  Page 124, note 2.

  "All the facts in natural history, taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life,"

  etc. — Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 28.

  Pythagoras taught that

  "The world subsists by the rhythmical order of its elements. Everywhere in Nature appear the two elements of the finite and the infinite which give rise to the elementary opposites of the universe, the odd and even, one and many, right and left, male and female, fixed and moved, straight and curved, light and darkness, square and oblong, good and bad."
• * 1.125

  Page 124, note 3. Journal, August, 1838.

  "As they said that men heard the music of the spheres always and never, so are we drunk with beauty of the whole, and notice no particular."

  The building power of music is a very ancient thought; the walls of Thebes rose to the music of Amphion's harp. Tennyson makes Merlin tell Gareth at the gates of Camelot,

  "A Fairy KingAnd Fairy Queen have built the city, son;They came from out a sacred mountain cleftTowards the sunrise, each with harp in hand,And built it to the music of their harps."

  The idea is used by Mr. Emerson in his poem, "The House.''
• * 1.126

  BACCHUS. Page 125. In July, 1846, Mr. Emerson wrote from Philadelphia to Miss Elizabeth Hoar, whom he always considered as a sister, of several poems which he has been writing and is impatient to show her,

  "especially some verses called Bacchus — not, however, translated from Hafiz."

  Mr. Emerson wrote in his own copy of the Poems this motto, taken from Plato, to "Bacchus," which sheds light:

  "The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry."

  The chapter on Idealism in Mr. Emerson's first published work Nature (see Nature, Addresses and Lectures, p. 47), gives a key to this poem on the inspiration which Nature gives, when seen as not final, but a symbol of the Universal Mind.

  The poem has affinities with both "Alphonso of Castile" and "Mithridates," which were written about the same time.

  The influence of Hafiz is apparent in the poem, though it is no translation, and the wine is more surely symbolic than his.

  In a somewhat later verse-book than that which contains "Bacchus" are the beginnings of another poem of the same name, of which a portion is here given:—

  Pour the wine! pour the wine!As it changes to foamSo DemiourgosRushing abroad,New and unlooked for,In farthest and smallest,Comes royally home;In spider wiseWill again geometrize;Will in bee and gnat keep timeWith the annual solar chime;Aphides, like emperors,Sprawl and creep their pair of hours.Strong Lyæus' rosy giftLightly can the mountain lift;It can knitWhat is doneAnd what's begun;It can cancel bulk and time;Crowds and condensesInto a drop a tun,So to repeatNo word or feat;The hour an altar is of ages,Love, the Socrates of Sages.On a brown grape-stoneThe wheels of Nature turn,Out of it the fury comesWherewith the spondyls burn,And because a drop of the Vine Is Creation's heart,Wash with wine those eyes of thine.Nothing is hid, nor whole nor part.Wine is translated wit,Wine is the day of day,Wine from the veilèd secretTears the veil away.

  In a lecture on Poetry and Imagination Mr. Emerson said:

  "The poet is a better logician than the anatomist.... He sees the fact as an inevitable step in the path of the Creator. ... Never did any science originate but by a poetic perception.... For a wise surrender to the current of Nature, a noble passion which will not let us halt, but hurries us into the stream of things, makes us truly know. Passion is logical, and I note that the vine, symbol of Bacchus, which intoxicates the world, is the most geometrical of all plants."
• * 1.127

  Page 126, note 1.

  "Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground."—"Nature,"

  Essays, Second Series, p. 181.
• * 1.128

  MEROPS. Page 127. The first rhapsody for this poem, from the verse-book (in which a more advanced form bears the title "Rhyme"), shows the writer's longing to express himself in verse, and how patiently he bore the check that his taste, which grew with this desire, put upon it.

  What care I, so the things abide,The heavenly-minded,The rich and enriching presences,How long the power to give them form Stays behind?If they remain to me,I can spare that,I can wailTill the stammering fit of life is past,Till the soul its weed has cast,And led by desire of these heavenly guidesI have come into the free elementAnd won a better instrument.They taught me a new speechAnd a thousand silences;For, as there is but one path for the sun,So is there ever but one word for me to say.

  Merops, in the mythology, was king of Cos, and wedded one of the Oceanides, and hence, but only after his death, was granted a place as a soaring eagle among the constellations. Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. William Sloane Kennedy says, suggested to him as a reason for the title that Merops in Greek means "articulate speech." This gives further appropriateness to the name of the poem.
• * 1.129

  THE HOUSE. Page 128. "The House," though not restored to the Poems by Mr. Cabot in the Riverside Edition, among others that had that fortune, is restored by the present editor for the charm of its last two verses, although it was not included by Mr. Emerson among the Selected Poems.
• * 1.130

  SAADI. Page 129. This poem was first published in the

  Dial for October, 1842.

  It does not appear in what year Mr. Emerson first read in translation the poems of Saadi, but although in later years he seems to have been strangely stimulated by Hafiz, whom he names

  "the prince of Persian poets,"

  yet Saadi was his first love; indeed, he adopted his name, in its various modifications, for the ideal poet, and under it describes his own longings and his most intimate experiences.

  Saadi, guarding himself from entangling alliances, living apart and simply and in the great sunny Present, recognizing living and pervading Deity, affirming only, and giving freedom and joy to human souls, might be Emerson in Oriental mask.

  In whatever form he first came on Saadi's verse, Mr. Emerson's letters show that he did not know the Gulistan until 1848, and in that year he wrote in his journal:

  "In Saadi's Gulistan I find many traits which comport with the portrait I drew,"

  evidently referring to this poem, which was first printed in the Dial for October, 1842. It pleased him to find that the real Saadi approached his type of what the poet should be. In 1865 Mr. Emerson wrote the preface to the American edition of Gladwin's translation of the Gulistan, published by Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, in Boston. This explains the omission of an account of Saadi and his poems in the lecture written soon after on "Persian Poetry," now included in Letters and Social Aims.

  This paragraph concerning him is from Mr. Emerson's journal of 1843:—

  "Saadi was long a Sacayi, or water-drawer, in the Holy Land, 'till found worthy of an introduction to the prophet Khizr (Elias, or the Syrian and Greek Hermes), who moistened his mouth with the water of immortality.' Somebody doubted this, and saw in a dream a host of angels descending with salvers of glory in their hands. On asking one of them for whom those were intended, he answered, 'for Shaikh Saadi of Shiraz, who has written a stanza of poetry that has met the approbation of God Almighty.' Khosraw of Delhi asked Khizr for a mouthful of this inspiring beverage; but he told him that Saadi had got the last of it.

  "'It was on the coming of Friday in the month Showal, of the Arabian year 690, that the eagle of the immaterial soul of Shaikh Saadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.'"
• * 1.131

  Page 131, note 1. This reference to the sweet wine of Malaga is a youthful reminiscence. In Mr. Emerson's obituary notice of his townsman and classmate, John Cheney, he says,

  "I remember the Malaga from Warland's"

  (the Cambridge grocer), which was the Falernian of the Pythologian club, of which he was the Horace,

  "as more delicious than any wine I have tasted since."
• * 1.132

  Page 133, note 1.

  "Life is a bubble and a skepticism.... Grant it, and as much more as they will, but thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism."

  — Essays, Second Series, p. 65.

  Mr. George W. Cooke, in his biography, says that Emerson's Divinity School Address

  "became the subject of frequent sermons, and the air was full of pamphlets and newspaper articles. The Unitarian ministers debated whether Emerson was a Christian; some said he was not; some that he was an atheist; while others earnestly defended him. By some of the 'Friends of Progress'... he was pronounced a pantheist."
• * 1.133

  Page 135, note 1. Compare the passage in "The Over-Soul," Essays, First Series, p. 293.
• * 1.134

  Page. 135, note 2. The image is much like that in the poem "Days."
• * 1.135

  HOLIDAYS. Page 136. This little poem was printed in the Dial for July, 1842.
• * 1.136

  XENOPHANES. Page 137. This poem bears the date "Concord, 1834." It is a less agreeable presentation of the ancient doctrine which is happily presented in "Each and All." It represents the sadder mood of Xenophanes of Elea, the rhapsodist and philosopher ( 570-480 B.C.), who taught the Unity of God and Nature. His doctrine, &Erggr;ν κα&igragr; π&acirgr;ν, the One and the All, constantly recurs in Mr. Emerson's writings, and the poem in his verse-book bears the Greek title.

  Xenophanes said,

  "There is one God, the greatest among gods and men, comparable to mortals neither in form nor thought."

  Mr. Arthur K. Rogers, in his Student's History of Philosophy, says that what Xenophanes taught was

  "that what we name God is the One immutable and comprehensive material universe, which holds within it and determines all those minor phenomena to which an enlightened philosophy will reduce the many deifies of the popular faith. The conception is not unlike that of Spinoza in later times."

  It is a remarkable fact that after Mr. Emerson's return from Europe, in 1834, his first lectures were upon Natural History. In a lecture called "The Naturalist," given in May, 1834, is a passage similar to the first four lines of this poem.
• * 1.137

  Page 137, note 1.

  "So poor is Nature that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff,—but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety."

  —"Nature," Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.138

  THE DAY'S RATION. Page 138. Among the few entries in Mr. Emerson's autobiographical note-book several relate to his limited strength and, especially, animal spirits, yet the poem expresses but a mood; his days were full and happy. He had only the right proportion of divine discontent. The thought of this poem is also expressed in Representative Men, p. 184.
• * 1.139

  BLIGHT. Page 139. This poem was written in midsummer of 1843. Under the name of "The Times" it was printed in the Dial for January of the next year. The latter portion of the poem suggests "Alphonso of Castile."
• * 1.140

  Page 140, note 1.

  "The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs."

  —"The Poet," Essays, Second Series.
• * 1.141

  Page 140, note 2. The teaching of Xenophanes and the Eleatic School.
• * 1.142

  Page 140, note 3. A similar passage is found in the "Lecture on the Times," Nature, Addresses and Lectures, pp.287, 288.
• * 1.143

  MUSKETAQUID. Page 141. Though born in Boston, Mr.Emerson loved the ancestral village on the Musketaquid. The dear associations of childhood and youth with it are shown in a poem which I have called "At the Old Manse," written when he was twenty-four years old, now for the first time printed, in the Appendix. There also are found the homesick verses written at Naples in 1834. In a letter to his Aunt Mary soon after he settled in Concord, he wrote,

  "As men say that the apple never falls fir from the stem, I shall hope that another year will draw your eyes and steps to this old, dear odious haunt of the race."
• * 1.144

  Page 142, note 1. A passage in the essay on Experience( Essays, Second Series, pp. 82, 83), and also the poem of that name, printed in this volume, which served as its motto, name "The Lords of Life."
• * 1.145

  Page 143, note 1. Two passages from the journal of 1840 are suggested by these three lines:—

  "Cyrus Stow wanted his bog-meadow brought into grass. He offered Antony Colombe, Sol Wetherbee, and whomsoever else seed and manure and team and the whole crop, which they accepted and went to work, and reduced the tough roots, the tussocks of grass, the uneven surface, and gave the whole field a good rotting and breaking and sunning, and now he finds no longer any difficulty in getting good English grass from the smooth and friable land. What Stow does with his field, what the Creator does with his planet, the Yankees are now doing with America. It will be friable, arable, habitable to men and angels yet!"

  "Over every chimney is a star; in every field is an oaken garland or a wreath of parsley, laurel or wheat-ears. Nature waits to decorate every child."
• * 1.146

  Page 144, note 1. Were it not for the passage in his chapter on Swedenborg ( Representative Men, pp. 113, 114), it would seem unlikely that in this line Mr. Emerson played on the word "concords;" but because of his interest at that time in Swedenborg's Animal World, with its doctrine of Microcosm and Macrocosm, the possibility may be recognized.
• * 1.147

  DIRGE. Page 145. The explanation of the first two introductory lines, which have a suggestion of Dante about them, is that they were written about the time of Mr. Emerson's thirty-fifth birthday anniversary —when he had completed half of the journey of life allotted to man in Scripture.

  Madam Emerson, as she was called in her later years, had six sons: John Clark, William, Ralph Waldo, Edward Bliss, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy; and also two daughters, who died in infancy. But John died too early for his brother Waldo to have any clear remembrance of him. William thus became, on graduating from Harvard at the age of seventeen, his mother's main dependence for aid in supporting the family, though all but Bulkeley (who remained childish through life) helped in turn. William, after teaching school successfully, studied theology in Germany, but was obliged by conscientious doubts to abandon divinity for the law, of which he became a successful and respected practitioner in New York. Waldo, Edward and Charles were drawn together by close ties of taste and sympathy, and circumstances allowed them to remain longer together. They eagerly embraced every chance to visit their grandmother, widow of the Rev. William Emerson of Concord, and later wife of Dr. Ezra Ripley, at the Old Manse. This poem and another version of it, printed in the Appendix under the title of "Peter's Field," recall the happy and sad associations with the Great Meadows and Cæsar's Woods. Edward died in 1834, and Charles two years later. Dr. Holmes and Mr. Cabot in their biographies paid a tribute to these brilliant youths, dying before their prime.
• * 1.148

  Page 146, note 1. "The flower of silken leaf" was the humble lespedeza, which, in after years, Mr. Emerson seldom passed without a tender word for it to his children.
• * 1.149

  THRENODY. Page 148. This "Ode of Tears" was not all written at one time. Little Waldo, the first-born of his parents, died in January, 1842, and the first part of the poem is the expression of his father's great sorrow. The latter portion, beginning

  The deep Heart answered, 'Weepest thou?'

  was not written until Time and Thought had brought their healing.

  A month after the child's death, his father, in writing to his childless friend, Carlyle, said,

  "My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, has ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all.... From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain."

  Of the poem Dr. Holmes said, "It has the dignity of Lycidas without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture."

  Two days after Waldo's death his father wrote in his journal:—

  "30 Jan. What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday I awoke at three o'clock, and every cock in every barn-yard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star and the evening cloud,—how much more all the particulars of daily economy.... A boy of early wisdom, of a grave and even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness... He gave up his little innocent breath like a bird."
• * 1.150

  Page 150, note 1.

  "The boy had his full swing in this world. Never, I think, did a child enjoy more. He had been thoroughly respected by his parents and those around him, and not interfered with; and he had been the most fortunate in respect to the influences near him, for his Aunt Elizabeth [Hoar] had adopted him from his infancy, and treated him ever with that plain, wise love which belongs to her.... Then Henry Thoreau had been one of the family for the last year and charmed Waldo by the variety of toys, whistles, boats, pop-guns and all kinds of instruments which he could make and mend; and possessed his love and respect by the gentle firmness with which he always treated him. Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis had also marked the boy, and caressed and conversed with him whenever they were here."
• * 1.151

  Page 151, note 1. Journal.

  "The chrysalis which he brought in with care and tenderness and gave to his mother to keep is still alive, and he, most beautiful of the children of men, is not here."
• * 1.152

  Page 158, note 1. The idea of Deity rushing into distribution is treated at length in the first part of the Timæus of Plato.
• * 1.153

  CONCORD HYMN. Page 158, note 2. From a copy of this hymn as first printed on slips for distribution among the Concord people at the celebration of the completion of the monument on the battle-ground, I note the differences from the poem here given as finally revised by Mr. Emerson in the Selected Poems. In the early editions of the Poems the date is given as 1836. This is a mistake. The Middlesex Yeoman gives the account of this celebration in 1837, and on the original slip in my possession some one sending it to a friend at that time, has written

  "Sung by the people on battle-ground at the completion of the monument, 4th of July, 1837."

  The first two verses retain exactly their original form. In the third, the third line, as sung, was

  We place with joy a votive stone.

  The last verse originally began

  O Thou, who made those heroes dareTo die or leave their children free.