The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9 (Poems)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9 (Poems) [1909]

Edition used:

The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. Fireside Edition (Boston and New York, 1909).

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vol. 9 of the 12 volume Fireside edition of the works of Emerson.

Copyright:

The text is in the public domain.

Table of Contents

PREFATORY NOTE.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

CONTENTS.

i.: poems.

poems.

the sphinx.

each and all.

the problem.

to rhea.

the visit.

uriel.

the world-soul.

alphonso of castile.

mithridates.

to j. w.

destiny.

guy.

hamatreya.

earth-song.

good-bye.

the rhodora: on being asked, whence is the flower?

the humble-bee.

berrying.

the snow-storm.

woodnotes.

i.

woodnotes.

ii.

monadnoc.

fable.

ode. inscribed to w. h. channing.

astræ

étienne de la boéce.

compensation.

forbearance.

the park.

forerunners.

sursum corda.

ode to beauty.

give all to love.

to ellen at the south.

to eva.

the amulet.

thine eyes still shined.

eros.

hermione.

initial, dæmonic, and celestial love

i.: the initial love.

ii.: the dæmonic love.

iii.: the celestial love.

the apology.

merlin.

i.

merlin.

ii.

bacchus.

merops.

saadi.

holidays.

xenophanes.

the day's ration.

blight.

musketaquid.

dirge. concord, 1838.

threnody.

concord hymn: sung at the completion of the battle monument, april 19, 1836.

ii.: may-day and other pieces.

may-day.

the adirondacs. a journal.

brahma.

fate.

freedom.

ode. sung in the town hall, concord, july 4, 1857.

boston hymn. read in music hall, january 1, 1863.

voluntaries

i.

ii.

iii.

iv.

v.

boston. sicut patribus, sit deus nobib. [Read in Faneuil Hall, on December 16, 1873, the Centennial Anniverary at the Destruction of the Tea in Roston Harbor.]

letters.

rubies.

the test. (Musa loquitur.)

solution.

hymn sung at the second church, boston, at the ordination of rev. chandler robbins.

nature.

i.

nature.

ii.

the romany girl.

days.

the chartist's complaint.

my garden.

the titmouse.

the harp.

sea-shore.

song of nature.

two rivers.

waldeinsamkeit.

terminus.

the nun's aspiration.

april.

maiden speech of the æolian harp.

cupido.

the past.

the last farewell. lines written by the author's brother, edward bliss emerson, whilst sailing out of boston harbor, bound for the island of porto rico, in 1832.

in memoriam. edward bliss emerson.

experience.

compensation.

politics.

heroism.

character.1

culture.

friendship.

beauty.

manners.

art.

spiritual laws.

unity.

worship.

quatrains.

translations.

iii.: appendix.

the poet.1

i.

ii.

fragments on the poet and the poetic gift.1

i.

ii.

iii.

iv.

v.

fragments on nature and life.

nature.

life.

the bohemian hymn.

prayer.

grace.

eros.

written in naples, march 1833.

written at rome, 1833.

peter's field.1

the walk.

may morning.

the miracle.

the waterfall.

walden.1

pan.

monadnoc from afar.

the south wind.

fame.

webster. from the phi beta kappa poem, 1834.

written in a volume of goethe.

the enchanter.

philosopher.

limits.

inscription for a well in memory of the martyrs of the war.

the exile. (after taliessin.)

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Minute-man

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THE WORKS OF
Ralph Waldo Emerson

POEMS

Fireside Edition

boston and new york

mdccccix

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Copyright, 1867 and 1876,
By ralph waldo emerson,

Copyright, 1883, 1895, and 1904,
By edword w. emerson.

All right reserved.

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PREFATORY NOTE.

This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the Poems and May-Day of former editions. In 1876, Mr. Emerson published a selection from his Poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many.1 Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also, some pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix; on various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Mr. Emerson's approval, but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been admitted as characteristic or as expressing in poetic form thoughts found in the Essays.

In coming to a decision in these cases it seemed ok Edition: orig; Page: [vi] the whole preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of Time.

As was stated in the preface to the first volume of this edition of Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the Selected Poems have not always been followed here, but in some cases preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.

A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of “May-Day,” in the part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature.

J. E. CABOT.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

The Emersons first appeared in the north of England, but Thomas, who landed in Massachusetts in 1638, came from Hertfordshire. He built soon after a house, sometimes called the Saint's Rest, which still stands in Ipswich on the slope of Heart-break Hill, close by Labour-in-vain Creek. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the sixth in descent from him. He was born in Boston, in Summer Street, May 25, 1803. He was the third son of William Emerson, the minister of the First Church in Boston, whose father, William Emerson, had been the patriotic minister of Concord at the outbreak of the Revolution, and died a chaplain in the army. Ruth Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was left a widow in 1811, with a family of five little boys. The taste of these boys was scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard College, and graduated there. Their mother was a person of great sweetness, dignity, and piety, bringing up her sons wisely and well in very straitened circumstances, and loved by them. Her husband's stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly invited the boys to the Old Manse, so Edition: orig; Page: [viii] that the woods and fields along the Concord River were first a playground and then the background of the dreams of their awakening imaginations.

Born in the city, Emerson's young mind first found delight in poems and classic prose, to which his instincts led him as naturally as another boy's would to go fishing, but his vacations in the country supplemented these by giving him great and increasing love of nature. In his early poems classic imagery is woren into pictures of New England woodlands. Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse, stimulated by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure in declaiming to each other in barns and attics. He was so full of thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen instinctively, to jot them down.

At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for essays and declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical studies, and enjoying the classics rather in a literary than grammatical way. And yet it is doubtful whether any man in his class used his time to better purpose with reference to his after life, for young Emerson's instinct led him to wide reading of works, outside the curriculum, that spoke directly to him. He had already formed the habit of writing in a journal, not the facts but the thoughts and inspirations of the day; often, also, good stories or poetical quotations, and scraps of his own verse.

On graduation from Harvard in the class of 1821, following the traditions of his family, Emerson resolved to study to be a minister, and meantime helped his Edition: orig; Page: [ix] older brother William in the support of the family by teaching in a school for young ladies in Boston, that the former had successfully established. The principal was twenty-one and the assistant nineteen years of age. For school-teaching on the usual lines Emerson was not fitted, and his youth and shyness prevented him from imparting his beat gifts to his scholars. Years later, when, in his age, his old scholars assembled to greet him, he regretted that no hint had been brought into the school of what at that very time “I was writing every night in my chamber, my first thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws of compensation, and of individual genius, which to. observe and illustrate have given sweetness to many years of my life.” Yet many scholars remembered his presence and teaching with pleasure and gratitude, not only in Boston, but in Chelmsford and Roxbury, for while his younger brothers were in college it was necessary that he should help. In these years, as through all his youth, he was loved, spurred on in his intellectual life, and keenly criticised by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, an eager and wide reader, inspired by religious zeal, high-minded, but eccentric.

The health of the young teacher suffered from too ascetic a life, and unmistakable danger-signals began to appear, fortunately heeded in time, but disappointment and delay resulted, borne, however, with sense and courage. His course at the Divinity School in Cambridge was much broken; nevertheless, in October, 1826, he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. A winter at the North at Edition: orig; Page: [x] this time threatened to prove fatal, so he was sent South by his helpful kinsman, Rev. Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit, working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed his studies at Cambridge.

In 1829, Emerson was called by the Second or Old North Church in Boston to become the associate pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, and soon after, because of his senior's delicate health, was called on to assume the full duty. Theological dogmas, such as the Unitarian Church of Channing's day accepted, did not appeal to Emerson, nor did the supernatural in religion in its ordinary acceptation interest him. The omnipresence of spirit, the dignity of man, the daily miracle of the universe, were what he taught, and while the older members of the congregation may have been disquieted that he did not dwell on revealed religion, his words reached the young people, stirred thought, and awakened aspiration. At this time he lived with his mother and his young wife (Ellen Tucker) in Chardon Street. For three years he ministered to his people in Boston. Then having felt the shock of being obliged to conform to church usage, as stated prayer when the spirit did not move, and especially the administration of the Communion, he honestly laid his troubles before his people, and proposed to them some modification of this rite. While they considered his proposition, Emerson went into the White Mountains to weigh his conflicting duties to his church and conscience. He came down, bravely to meet the refusal of the church to change the rite, and in a sermon preached in September, 1832, explained Edition: orig; Page: [xi] his objections to it, and, because he could not honestly administer it, resigned.

He parted from his people in all kindness, but the wrench was felt. His wife had recently died, he was ill himself, his life seemed to others broken up. But meantime voices from far away had reached him. He sailed for Europe, landed in Italy, saw cities, and art, and men, but would not stay long. Of the dead, Michael Angelo appealed chiefly to him there; Landor among the living. He soon passed northward, making little stay in Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called him home.

He landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing.

In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr. Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road, on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the autumn, he brought his wife, Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was their home during the rest of their lives.

The new life to which he had been called opened Edition: orig; Page: [xii] pleasantly and increased in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements, for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother. Emerson had left traditional religion, the. city, the Old World, behind, and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book, “Natnre,” which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here, and published in 1836. His practice during all his life in Concord was to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to give voice. Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held that the light was universal

“Ever the words of the Gods resound,

But the porches of man's ear

Seldom in this low life's round

Are unsealed that he may hear.”

But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him. Men, too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and office where he came. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from the youngest and least educated visitor. The thoughts combined with the flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang up in New England in these years in every town, Edition: orig; Page: [xiii] and spread westward to the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were spent in study and writing. These lectures were later severely pruned and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays under different names between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston, which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially obliged to dissent.

Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what they were worth to him and others Buffering from the generous discontent of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, “My strength and my doom is to be solitary;” but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and valued.

In 1837 Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Cambridge, The American Scholar, which increased his growing reputation, but the following year his Address to the Senior Class at the Divinity School brought out, even from the friendly Unitarians, severe strictures Edition: orig; Page: [xiv] and warnings against its dangerous doctrines. Of thie heresy Emerson said: “I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much. He really strove to elevate the idea of God. Yet those who were pained or shocked by his teachings respected Emerson. His lectures were still in demand; he was often asked to speak by literary societies at orthodox colleges. He preached regularly at East Lexington until 1838, but thereafter withdrew from the ministerial office. At this time the progressive and spiritually minded young people used to meet for discussion and help in Boston, among them George Ripley, Cyrus Bartol, James Freeman Clarke, Alcott, Dr. Hedge, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended, came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came to dwell there. Henry Thoreau, a Concord youth, greatly interested Emerson; indeed, became for a year or two a valued inmate of his home, and helped and instructed him in the labors of the garden and little farm, which gradually grew to ten acres, the chief interest of which for the owner was his trees, which he loved and tended. Emerson helped introduce his countrymen to the teachings of Carlyle, and edited his works here, where they found more readers than at home.

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In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and remained abroad a year, visiting France also in her troublous times. English Traits was a result. Just before this journey he had collected and published his poems. A later volume, called May Day, followed in 1867. He had written verses from childhood, and to the purified expression of poetry he, through life, eagerly aspired. He said, “I like my poems best because it is not I who write them.” In 1866 the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred on him by Harvard University, and he was chosen an Overseer. In 1867 he again gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and in 1870 and 1871 gave courses in Philosophy in the University Lectures at Cambridge.

Emerson was not merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, and were kindly received. They were often disappointed that they could not harness him to their partial and transient scheme. He said, My reforms include theirs: I must go my way; help people by my strength, not by my weakness. But if a storm threatened, he felt bound to appear and show his colors. Against the crying evils of his time he worked bravely in his own way. He wrote to President Van Buren against the wrong done to the Cherokees, dared speak against the idolized Webster, when he deserted the cause of Freedom, constantly spoke of the iniquity of slavery, aided with speech and money the Free State Edition: orig; Page: [xvi] cause in Kansas, was at Phillips's side at the antislavery meeting in 1861 broken up by the Boston mob, urged emancipation daring the war

He enjoyed his Concord home and neighbors, served on the school committee for years, did much for the Lyceum, and spoke on the town's great occasions. He went to all town-meetings, oftener to listen and admire than to speak, and always, took pleasure and pride in the people. In return he was respected and loved by them.

Emerson's house was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the incident exposure and fatigue did him harm. His many friends insisted on rebuilding his house and sending him abroad to get well. He went up the Nile, and revisited England, finding old and new friends, and, on his return, was welcomed and escorted home by the people of Concord. After this time he was unable to write. His old age was quiet and happy among his family and friends. He died in April, 1882.

Edwaed W. Emerson.

January, 1899.

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CONTENTS.

Prefatory Note v

i.
poems

The Sphinx 9

Each and All 14

The Problem 15

To Rhea 18

The Visit 20

Uriel 21

The World-Soul 23

Alphonso of Castile 27

Mithridates 30

To J. W. 31

Destiny 32

Guy 33

Hamatreya 35

Earth-Song 36

Good-Bye 37

The Rhodora 39

The Humble-Bee 39

Berrying 41

The Snow-Storm 42

Edition: orig; Page: [2]Woodnotes, I. 43

Woodnotes, II. 48

Monadnoc 58

Fable 71

Ode 71

Astræ 75

étienne de La Boéce 76

Compensation 77

Forbearance 78

The Park 78

Forerunners 79

Sursum Corda 80

Ode to Beauty 81

Give All to Love 84

To Ellen 86

To Eva 87

The Amulet 88

Thine Eyes Still Shined 88

Eros 89

Hermione 89

Initial, Dæmonic, and Celestial Love

I. The Initial Love 92

II. The Demonic Love 97

III. The Celestial Love 101

The Apology 105

Merlin, I. 106

Merlin, II. 109

Bacchus 111

Merops 113

Saadi 114

Holidays 119

Xenophanes 120

Edition: orig; Page: [3]The Day's Ration 121

Blight 122

Musketaquid 124

Dirge 127

Threnody 130

Concord Hymn, Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, April 19, 1836 139

ii. may-day and other pieces

May-Day 143

The Adirondacs 159

Occassional and Miscellaneous Pieces

Brahma 170

Fate 171

Freedom 172

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857 173

Boston Hymn 174

Voluntaries 178

Boston 182

Letters 188

Rubies 188

The Test 189

Solution 189

Hymn 192

Nature and Life.

Nature, I. 193

Nature, II. 194

The Romany Girl 195

Days 196

The Chartist's Complaint 197

Edition: orig; Page: [4]My Garden 197

The Titmouse 200

The Harp 203

Sea-Shore 207

Song of Nature 209

Two Rivers. 213

Waldeinsamkeit 214

Terminus 216

The Nun's Aspiration 217

April 219

Maiden Speech of the Æolian Harp 220

Cupido 221

The Past 221

The Last Farewell 222

In Memoriam 224

Elements.

Experience 228

Compensation 229

Politics 230

Heroism 231

Character 231

Culture 232

Friendship 232

Beauty 233

Manners 234

Art 235

Spiritual Laws 236

Unity 236

Worship 237

Quatrains 238

Translations 244

Edition: orig; Page: [5]iii. appendix.

The Poet 253

Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift 263

Fragments on Nature and Life 278

The Bohemian Hymn 298

Prayer 299

Grace 299

Eros 300

Lines Written in Naples, 1833 300

Lines Written in Rome, 1833 301

Peter's Field 302

The Walk 304

May Morning 304

The Miracle 305

The Waterfall 307

Walden 307

Pan 309

Monadnoc from Afar 310

The South Wind 310

Fame 311

Webster 312

Lines Written in a Volume of Goethe 313

The Enchanter 313

Philosopher 314

Limits 314

Inscription for a Well in Memory of the Martyrs of the War 315

The Exile 315

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i.: poems.

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poems.

the sphinx.

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;

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In beautiful motion

The thrush plies his wings;

Kind leaves of his covert,

Your silence he sings.

“The waves, unashamed,

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 bathed 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

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He creepeth and peepeth,

He palters and steals;

Intirm, melaneholy,

Jealous glancing around,

An oaf, an accomplice,

He poisons the ground.

“Out spoke the great mother,

Beholding his tear;—

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?’”

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,

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“To vision prof bunder

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?

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I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,

Of thine eye I am eyebeam.

“Thou art the unanswered question;

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.”

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each and all.

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked down

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;

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.

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

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Was woven still by the snow-white 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.

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 cowlèd churchman be.

Why should the vest on him allure,

Which I could not on me endure?

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Not from a vain or shallow thought

His awful Jove young Phidias brought;

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.

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 tales.

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;

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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 fanes 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,

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [18]

to rhea.

Thee, dear friend, a brother soothes,

Not with flatteries, bat 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,

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Forget never their command,

Bat make the statute of this land.

As they lead, so follow all,

Elver 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 deligh

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.

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Albeit scorned as none was scorned,

Adorn her as was none adorned.

I make this maiden an ensample

To Nature, through her kingdoms

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.

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,

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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 convenance,

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.

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 jusi,

Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,

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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,

Grave 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.

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.

Straightway, a forgetting wind

Stole over the celestial kind,

And their lips the secret kept,

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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,

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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;

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Stars taunt us by a mystery

Which we could never spell.

If but one hero knew it,

The world would blush in flame;

The sage, till he bit 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.

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.

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The patient Dæmon sits,

With roses and a shroud;

He has his way, and deals his gifts,—

But ours is not allowed.

He is no churl nor trifler,

And his viceroy is none,—

Love-without-weakness,—

Of Genius sire and son.

And bis 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;

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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 snowdrift,

The warm rosebuds below.

alphonso of castile.

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;

Of genius the sterility;

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Mighty projects countermanded;

Rash ambition, brokenhanded;

Pony 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.

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 aelfness 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;

Fly us now with a full diet;

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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.

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mithridates.

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 cantharida 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,

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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!

to j. w.

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 buried;

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,

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Quarrel or reprimand:

'T will soon be dark;

Up! mind thine own aim, and

God speed the mark!

destiny.

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 lieat,

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Or how thy supper is sodden;’

And another is born

To make the sun forgotten.

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.

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.

guy.

Mortal mixed of middle clay,

Attempered to the night and day,

Interchangeable with things,

Needs no amulets nor rings,

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Guy possessed the talisman

That all things from him began;

And as, of old, Polycrates

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;

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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 aephyr 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.

Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,

Possessed the land which rendered to their toil

Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.

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.

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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,

Edition: orig; Page: [37]

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.

good-bye.

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.

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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?

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the rhodora: 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:

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.

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;

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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 wind, 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.

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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.

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.

May be true what I had heard,—

Earth's a howling wilderness,

Truculent with fraud and force

Said I, strolling through the pastures,

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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?’

the snow-storm.

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 Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn:

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,

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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.

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.

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,

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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:

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

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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.

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

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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.

'Twas one of the charmed 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.

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.

He was the heart of all the scene;

On him the sun looked more serene;

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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.'

Edition: orig; Page: [48]

woodnotes.

ii.

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.

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.

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;

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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,

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Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,

Before the money-loving herd,

Into that forester shall pass.

From these companions, power and grace.

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;

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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,

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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, —

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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; —

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 bankruptey,

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,

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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 sitsc 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,

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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.

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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.

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 recks 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.’

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monadnoc.

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 ard 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.

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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;

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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;

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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,

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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 eloverheads 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.

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 anstere

His quarantines and grottoes, where

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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.

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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.

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‘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 erags

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.

‘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.

Edition: orig; Page: [66]

‘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.

Edition: orig; Page: [67]

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.

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,—

Edition: orig; Page: [68]

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.

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [69]

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,

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.

Complement of human kind,

Holding us at vantage still,

Our sumptuous indigence,

O barren mound, thy plenties fill!

We fool and prate;

Edition: orig; Page: [70]

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 circumspeet 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.

Edition: orig; Page: [71]

fable.

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'im 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. 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.

Edition: orig; Page: [72]

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [73]

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

Edition: orig; Page: [74]

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [75]

astræ

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,—

‘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.

Edition: orig; Page: [76]

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;

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.

étienne de la boéce.

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've the landscape overrun,

I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,

And your heart is unsupported.

Vainly valiant, you have missed

The manhood that should yours resist,—

Edition: orig; Page: [77]

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [78]

forbearance.

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [79]

forerunners.

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [80]

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [81]

ode to beauty.

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.

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [82]

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.

I hear the lofty pæans

Of the masters of the shell,

Who heard the starry music

And recount the numbers well;

Olympian bards who sung

Divine Ideas below,

Edition: orig; Page: [83]

Which always find us young

And always keep us so.

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.

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,

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [84]

Queen of things! I dare not die

In Being's deeps past ear and eye;

Lest there I find the same deceive,

And be the sport of Fate forever.

Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,

Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!

give all to love.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [85]

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.

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,

The gods arrive.

Edition: orig; Page: [86]

to ellen at the south.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [87]

‘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 eva.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [88]

the amulet.

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.

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.

This morn I climbed the misty hill

And roamed the pastures through;

How danced thy form before my path

Amidst the deep-eyed dew!

Edition: orig; Page: [89]

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.

eros.

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've turned it,

Not to be improved.

hermione.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [90]

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 apar,

Now I live with all;

Edition: orig; Page: [91]

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

Edition: orig; Page: [92]

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

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [93]

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 courage,

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;

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 tortest rein,

That they may seize and entertain

Edition: orig; Page: [94]

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [95]

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 horned 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.

Edition: orig; Page: [96]

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.

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [97]

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

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [98]

Close, close to men,

Like undulating layer of air,

Right above their heads,

The potent plain of Dæmons spreads.

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [99]

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 Dæmons 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.

Edition: orig; Page: [100]

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.

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [101]

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [102]

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

Edition: orig; Page: [103]

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [104]

Nor less the eternal poles

Of tendency distribute souls.

There need no vows to bind

Whom not each other seek, but find.

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,

Power have they for tenderness;

And, so thoroughly is known

Each other's counsel by his 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;

Edition: orig; Page: [105]

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,

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.

the apology.

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [106]

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [107]

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.

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.’

Blameless master of the games,

King of sport that never shames,

He shall daily joy dispense

Hid in song's sweet influence.

Edition: orig; Page: [108]

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

Edition: orig; Page: [109]

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.

merlin.

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 on 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.

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [110]

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.

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [111]

bacchus.

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [112]

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.

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [113]

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.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [114]

saadi.

Trees in groves,

Kane 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;

Edition: orig; Page: [115]

They must give ear,

Grow red with joy and white with fear;

Bat 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.

Edition: orig; Page: [116]

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,

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 Dschami'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 falshood, follow scorning.

Edition: orig; Page: [117]

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 eonserver, 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.

‘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 imprisoned;

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 shalt melt.

For, whom the Muses smile upon,

Edition: orig; Page: [118]

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 fetch 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!

Edition: orig; Page: [119]

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.’

holidays.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [120]

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 thon playest;—short vacation

Fate grants each to stand aside;

Now must thou be man and

'T is the turning of the tide.

xenophanes.

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

Edition: orig; Page: [121]

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.

the day's ration.

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [122]

The little cap 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.

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

Edition: orig; Page: [123]

And planted world, and full executor

Of their imperfect functions.

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. 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.

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [124]

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 wantonnes;

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.

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,

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [125]

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, hill-side 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

Edition: orig; Page: [126]

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 acre;

For there's no rood has not a star above it;

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

Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;

Better, the linked purpose of the whole,

And, chiefest 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?

Edition: orig; Page: [127]

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. 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;

Edition: orig; Page: [128]

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [129]

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,’

Edition: orig; Page: [130]

threnody.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [131]

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.

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [132]

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;—

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [133]

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.

On that shaded day,

Dark with more clouds than tempests are,

When thou didst yield thy innocent breath

In birdlike heavings 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 all her harvests were not worth?

Edition: orig; Page: [134]

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [135]

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,

Edition: orig; Page: [136]

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [137]

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;

Edition: orig; Page: [138]

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;

Waters with tears of ancient sorrow

Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.

House and tenant go to ground,

Lost in God, in Godhead found.'

Edition: orig; Page: [139]

concord hymn: sung at the completion of the battle monument, april 19, 1836.

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.

Edition: orig; Page: [[140]] Edition: orig; Page: [[141]]

ii.: may-day and other pieces.

Edition: orig; Page: [[142]] Edition: orig; Page: [[143]]

may-day.

Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,

With sudden passion languishing,

Teaching barren moors to smile,

Painting pictures mile on mile,

Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,

Whence a smokeless incense breathes.

The air is full of whistlings bland;

What was that I heard

Out of the hazy land?

Harp of the wind, or song of bird,

Or vagrant booming of the air,

Voice of a meteor lost in day?

Such tidings of the starry sphere

Can this elastic air convey.

Or haply 't was the cannonade

Of the pent and darkened lake,

Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade,

Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,

Afflicted moan, and latest hold

Even into May the iceberg cold.

Was it a squirrel's pettish bark,

Or clarionet of jay? or hark

Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,

Steering north with raucous cry

Through tracts and provinces of sky,

Every night alighting down

Edition: orig; Page: [144]

In new landscapes of romance,

Where darkling feed the clamorous elana

By lonely lakes to men unknown.

Come the tumult whence it will,

Voice of sport, or rush of wings,

It is a sound, it is a token

That the marble sleep is broken,

And a change has passed on things.

When late I walked, in earlier days,

All was stiff and stark;

Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,

In the sky no spark;

Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,

Struggling through the drifted roads;

The whited desert knew me not,

Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;

The summer dells, by genius haunted,

One arctic moon had disenchanted.

All the sweet secrets therein hid

By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.

Eldest mason, Frost, had piled

Swift cathedrals in the wild;

The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts

In the star-lit minster aisled.

I found no joy: the icy wind

Might rule the forest to his mind.

Who would freeze on frozen lakes?

Back to books and sheltered home,

And wood-fire flickering on the walls,

To hear, when, ‘mid our talk and games,

Without the baffled north-wind calls.

But soft! a sultry morning breaks;

Edition: orig; Page: [145]

The ground-pines wash their rusty green,

The maple-tops their crimson tint,

On the soft path each track is seen,

The girl's foot leaves its neater print.

The pebble loosened from the frost Asks of the urchin to be tost.

In flint and marble beats a heart,

The kind Earth takes her children's part,

The green lane is the school-boy's friend,

Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,

The fresh ground loves his top and ball,

The air rings jocund to his call,

The brimming brook invites a leap,

He dives the hollow, climbs the steep.

The eaged linnet in the spring

Hearkens for the choral glee,

When his fellows on the wing

Migrate from the Southern Sea;

When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,

And the new-born tendrils twine,

The old wine darkling in the cask

Feels the bloom on the living vine,

And bursts the hoops at hint of spring;

And so, perchance, in Adam's race,

Of Eden's bower some dream-like trace

Survived the Flight and swam the Flood,

And wakes the wish in youngest blood

To tread the forfeit Paradise,

And feed once more the exile's eyes;

And ever when the happy child

In May beholds the blooming wild,

Edition: orig; Page: [146]

And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,

“Onward,” he cries, “your baskets bring,—

In the next field is air more mild,

And o'er you hazy crest is Eden's balmier spring.”

Not for a regiment's parade,

Nor evil laws or rulers made,

Blue Walden rolls its cannonade,

But for a lofty sign

Which the Zodiac threw,

That the bondage-days are told,

And waters free as winds shall flow.

Lo! how all the tribes combine

To rout the flying foe.

See, every patriot oak-leaf throws

His elfin length upon the snows,

Not idle, since the leaf all day

Draws to the spot the solar ray,

Ere sunset quarrying inches down,

And half-way to the mosses brown;

While the grass beneath the rime

Has hints of the propitious time,

And upward pries and perforates

Through the cold slab a thousand gates,

Till green lances peering through

Bend happy in the welkin blue.

As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,

So Spring will not her time forerun,

Mix polar night with tropic glow,

Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,

Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,

But she has the temperance

Edition: orig; Page: [147]

Of the gods, whereof she is one,—

Masks her treasury of heat

Under east-winds crossed with sleet.

Plants and birds and humble creatures

Well accept her rule austere;

Titan-born, to hardy natures

Cold is genial and dear.

As Southern wrath to Northern right

Is but straw to anthracite;

As in the day of sacrifice,

When heroes piled the pyre,

The dismal Massachusetts ice

Burned more than others’ fire,

So Spring guards with surface cold

The garnered heat of ages old.

Hers to sow the seed of bread,

That man and all the kinds be fed;

And, when the sunlight fills the hours,

Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.

Beneath the calm, within the light,

A hid unruly appetite

Of swifter life, a surer hope,

Strains every sense to larger scope,

Impatient to anticipate

The halting steps of aged Fate.

Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:

When Nature falters, fain would zeal

Grasp the felloes of her wheel,

And grasping give the orbs another whirl.

Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!

And sun this frozen side.

Bring hither back the robin's call,

Bring back the tulip's pride.

Edition: orig; Page: [148]

Why chidest thou the tardy Spring?

The hardy bunting does not chide;

The blackbirds make the maples ring

With social cheer and jubilee;

The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,

The robins know the melting snow;

The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,

Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,

Secure the osier yet will hide

Her callow brood in mantling leaves,—

And thou, by science all undone,

Why only must thy reason fail

To see the southing of the sun?

The world rolls round,—mistrust it not,—

Befalls again what once befell;

All things return, both sphere and mote,

And I shall hear my bluebird's note,

And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

April cold with dropping rain

Willows and lilacs brings again,

The whistle of returning birds,

And trumpet-lowing of the herds.

The scarlet maple-keys betray

What potent blood hath modest May,

What fiery force the earth renews,

The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;

What joy in rosy waves outpoured

Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.

Hither rolls the storm of heat;

I feel its finer billows beat

Edition: orig; Page: [149]

Like a sea which me infolds;

Heat with viewless fingers moulds,

Swells, and mellows, and matures,

Paints, and flavors, and allures,

Bird and brier inly warms,

Still enriches and transforms,

Gives the reed and lily length,

Adds to oak and oxen strength,

Transforming what it doth infold,

Life out of death, new out of old,

Painting fawns' and leopards' fells,

Seethes the gulf-encrimsoning shells,

Fires gardens with a joyful blaze

Of tulips, in the morning's rays.

The dead log touched bursts into leaf,

The wheat-blade whispers of the sheaf.

What god is this imperial Heat,

Earth's prime secret, sculpture's seat?

Doth it bear hidden in its heart

Water-line patterns of all art?

Is it Dædalus? is it Love?

Or walks in mask almighty Jove,

And drops from Power's redundant horn

All seeds of beauty to be born?

Where shall we keep the holiday,

And duly greet the entering May?

Too strait and low our cottage doors,

And all unmeet our carpet floors;

Nor spacious court, nor monarch's hall,

Suffice to hold the festival

Up and away! where haughty woods

Front the liberated floods:

Edition: orig; Page: [150]

We will climb the broad-backed hills,

Hear the uproar of their joy;

We will mark the leaps and gleams

Of the new-delivered streams,

And the murmuring rivers of sap

Mount in the pipes of the trees,

Giddy with day, to the topmost spire,

Which for a spike of tender green

Bartered its powdery cap;

And the colors of joy in the bird,

And the love in its carol heard,

Frog and lizard in holiday coats,

And turtle brave in his golden spots;

While cheerful cries of crag and plain

Reply to the thunder of river and main.

As poured the flood of the ancient sea

Spilling over mountain chains,

Bending forests as bends the sedge,

Faster flowing o'er the plains,—

A world-wide wave with a foaming edga

That rims the running silver sheet,—

So pours the deluge of the heat

Broad northward o'er the land,

Fainting artless paradises,

Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,

Fanning secret fires which glow

In columbine and clover-blow,

Climbing the northern zones,

Where a thousand pallid towns

Lie like cockles by the main,

Or tented armies on a plain.

The million-handed sculptor moulds

Quaintest bud and blossom folds,

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The million-handed painter pours

Opal hues and purple dye;

Azaleas flush the island floors,

And the tints of heaven reply.

Wreaths for the May! for happy Spring

To-day shall all her dowry bring,

The love of kind, the joy, the grace,

Hymen of element and race,

Knowing well to celebrate

With song and hue and star and state,

With tender light and youthful cheer,

The spousals of the new-born year.

Spring is strong and virtuous,

Broad-sowing, cheerful, plenteous,

Quickening underneath the mould

Grains beyond the price of gold.

So deep and large her bounties are,

That one broad, long midsummer day

Shall to the planet overpay

The ravage of a year of war.

Drug the cup, thou butler sweet,

And send the nectar round;

The feet that slid so long on sleet

Are glad to feel the ground.

Fill and saturate each kind

With good according to its mind,

Fill each kind and saturate

With good agreeing with its fate,

And soft perfection of its plan—

Willow and violet, maiden and man,

Edition: orig; Page: [152]

The bitter-sweet, the haunting air

Creepeth, bloweth everywhere;

It preys on all, all prey on it,

Blooms in beauty, thinks in wit,

Stings the strong with enterprise,

Hakes travellers long for Indian skies,

And where it comes this courier fleet

Fans in all hearts expectance sweet,

As if to-morrow should redeem

The vanished rose of evening's dream.

By houses lies a fresher green,

On men and maids a ruddier mien,

As if time brought a new relay

Of shining virgins every May,

And Summer came to ripen maids

To a beauty that not fades.

I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,

Stepping daily onward north

To greet staid ancient cavaliers

Filing single in stately train.

And who, and who are the travellers?

They were Night and Day, and Day and Night,

Pilgrims wight with step forthright.

I saw the Days deformed and low,

Short and bent by cold and snow;

The merry Spring threw wreaths on them,

Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell;

Many a flower and many a gem,

They were refreshed by the smell,

They shook the snow from hats and shoon,

They put their April raiment on;

And those eternal forms,

Unhurt by a thousand storms,

Edition: orig; Page: [153]

Shot up to the height of the sky again,

And danced as merrily as young men.

I saw them mask their awful glance

Sidewise meek in gossamer lids;

And to speak my thought if none forbids

It was as if the eternal gods,

Tired of their starry periods,

Hid their majesty in cloth

Woven of tulips and painted moth.

On carpets green the maskers march

Below May's well-appointed arch,

Each star, each god, each grace amain,

Every joy and virtue speed,

Marching duly in her train,

And fainting Nature at her need

Is made whole again.

'T was the vintage-day of field and wood,

When magic wine for bards is brewed;

Every tree and stem and chink

Gushed with syrup to the brink.

The air stole into the streets of towns,

Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns,

And betrayed the fund of joy

To the high-school and medalled boy:

On from hall to chamber ran,

From youth to maid, from boy to man,

To babes, and to old eyes as well.

‘Once more,’ the old man cried, ‘ye clouds,

Airy turrets purple-piled,

Which once my infancy beguiled,

Beguile me with the wonted spell.

I know ye skillful to convoy

The total freight of hope and joy

Edition: orig; Page: [154]

Into rude and homely nooks,

Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books,

On farmer's byre, on pasture rude,

And stony pathway to the wood.

I care not if the pomps you show

Be what they soothfast appear,

Or if yon realms in sunset glow

Be bubbles of the atmosphere.

And if it be to you allowed

To fool me with a shining cloud,

So only new griefs are consoled

By new delights, as old by old,

Frankly I will be your guest,

Count your change and cheer the best.

The world hath overmuch of pain,—

If Nature give me joy again,

Of such deceit I'll not complain.’

Ah! well I mind the calendar,

Faithful through a thousand years,

Of the painted race of flowers,

Exact to days, exact to hours,

Counted on the spacious dial

Yon broidered zodiac girds.

I know the trusty almanac

Of the punctual coming-back,

On their due days, of the birds.

I marked them yestermorn,

A flock of finches darting

Beneath the crystal arch,

Piping, as they flew, a march,—

Belike the one they used in parting

Last year from yon oak or larch;

Edition: orig; Page: [155]

Dusky sparrows in a crowd,

Diving, darting northward free,

Suddenly betook them all,

Every one to his hole in the wall,

Or to his niche in the apple-tree.

I greet with joy the choral trains

Fresh from palms and Cuba's canes.

Best gems of Nature's cabinet,

With dews of tropic morning wet,

Beloved of children, bards and Spring,

O birds, your perfect virtues bring,

Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,

Your manners for the heart's delight,

Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof,

Here weave your chamber weather-proof,

Forgive our harms, and condescend

To man, as to a lubber friend,

And, generous, teach his awkward race

Courage and probity and grace!

Poets praise that hidden wine

Hid in milk we drew

At the barrier of Time,

When our life was new.

We had eaten fairy fruit,

We were quick from head to foot,

All the forms we looked on shone

As with diamond dews thereon.

What cared we for costly joys,

The Museum's far-fetched toys?

Gleam of sunshine on the wall

Poured a deeper cheer than all

The revels of the Carnival.

Edition: orig; Page: [156]

We a pine-grove did prefer

To a marble theatre,

Could with gods on mallows dine,

Nor cared for spices or for wine.

Wreaths of mist and rainbow spanned,

Arch on arch, the grimmest land;

Whistle of a woodland bird

Made the pulses dance,

Note of horn in valleys heard

Filled the region with romance.

None can tell how sweet,

How virtuous, the morning air;

Every accent vibrates well;

Not alone the wood-bird's call,

Or shouting boys that chase their ball,

Pass the height of minstrel skill,

But the ploughman's thoughtless cry,

Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat,

And the joiner's hammer-beat,

Softened are above their will,

Take tones from groves they wandered through

Or flutes which passing angels blew.

All grating discords melt,

No dissonant note is dealt,

And though thy voice be shrill

Like rasping file on steel,

Such is the temper of the air,

Echo waits with art and care,

And will the faults of song repair.

So by remote Superior Lake,

And by resounding Mackinac,

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When northern storms the forest shake,

And billows on the long beach break,

The artful Air will separate

Note by note all sounds that grate,

Smothering in her ample breast

All but godlike words,

Reporting to the happy ear

Only purified accords.

Strangely wrought from barking waves,

Soft music daunts the Indian braves,—

Convent-chanting which the child

Hears pealing from the panther's cave

And the impenetrable wild.

Soft on the south-wind sleeps the haze:

So on thy broad mystic van

Lie the opal-colored days,

And waft the miracle to man.

Soothsayer of the eldest gods,

Repairer of what harms betide,

Revealer of the inmost powers

Prometheus proffered, Jove denied;

Disclosing treasures more than true,

Or in what far to-morrow due;

Speaking by the tongues of flowers,

By the ten-tongued laurel speaking,

Singing by the oriole songs,

Heart of bird the man's heart seeking;

Whispering hints of treasure hid

Under Morn's unlifted lid,

Islands looming just beyond

The dim horizon's utmost bound;—

Who can, like thee, our rags upbraid,

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Or taunt us with our hope decayed?

Or who like thee persuade,

Making the splendor of the air,

The morn and sparkling dew, a snare?

Or who resent

Thy genius, wiles and blandishment?

There is no orator prevails

To beckon or persuade

Like thee the youth or maid;

Thy birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,

Thy blooms, thy kinds,

Thy echoes in the wilderness,

Soothe pain, and age, and love's distress,

Fire fainting will, and build heroic minds.

For thou, O Spring! canst renovate

All that high God did first create.

Be still his arm and architect,

Rebuild the ruin, mend defect;

Chemist to vamp old worlds with new,

Coat sea and sky with heavenlier blue,

New tint the plumage of the birds,

And slough decay from grazing herds,

Sweep ruins from the scarped mountain,

Cleanse the torrent at the fountain,

Purge alpine air by towns defiled,

Bring to fair mother fairer child,

Not less renew the heart and brain,

Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,

Make the aged eye sun-clear,

To parting soul bring grandeur near.

Under gentle types, my Spring

Masks the might of Nature's king,

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An energy that searches thorough

From Chaos to the dawning morrow;

Into all our human plight,

The soul's pilgrimage and flight;

In city or in solitude,

Step by step, lifts bad to good,

Without halting, without rest,

Lifting Better up to Best;

Planting seeds of knowledge pure,

Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

the adirondacs. a journal.

dedicated to my fellow-travellers in august, 1858.

Wise and polite,—and if I drew

Their several portraits, you would own

Chancer had no such worthy crew,

Nor Boccace in Decameron.

We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends.

Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks

Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach

The Adirondac lakes. At Martin's Beach

We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,—

Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.

Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,

With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,

Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,

Taháwus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,

Edition: orig; Page: [160]

And other Titans without muse or name.

Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,

Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.

We made our distance wider, boat from boat,

As each would hear the oracle alone.

By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid

Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,

Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,

Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,

Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,

On through the Upper Saranac, and up

Père Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass

Winding through grassy shallows in and out,

Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,

To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.

Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,

Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge

Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.

A pause and council: then, where near the head

Due east a bay makes inward to the land

Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank,

And in the twilight of the forest noon

Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard.

We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,

Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,

Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.

The wood was sovran with centennial trees,—

Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,

Linden and spruce. In strict society

Three conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,

Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby.

Edition: orig; Page: [161]

Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,

The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

‘Welcome!’ the wood-god murmured through the leaves,—

‘Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.’

Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,

Which o'erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.

Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,

Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.

Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft

In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,

Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,

And greet unanimous the joyful change.

So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,

Though late returning to her pristine ways.

Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;

And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,

Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.

Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air

That circled freshly in their forest dress

Made them to boys again. Happier that they

Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,

At the first mounting of the giant stairs.

No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,

No door-bell heralded a visitor,

No courier waits, no letter came or went,

Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;

The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,

The falling rain will spoil no holiday.

We were made freemen of the forest laws,

Edition: orig; Page: [162]

All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,

Essaying nothing she cannot perform.

In Adirondac lakes,

At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:

Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make

His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,

He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:

A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,

And in the left, a gun, his needful arms.

By turns we praised the stature of our guides,

Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill

To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,

To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs

Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:

Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,

And wit to trap or take him in his lair.

Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,

In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;

Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired

Three times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.

Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!

No city airs or arts pass current here.

Tour rank is all reversed; let men of cloth

Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls:

They are the doctors of the wilderness,

And we the low-prized laymen.

In sooth, red flannel is a saucy test

Which few can put on with impunity.

What make you, master, fumbling at the oar?

Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.

The sallow knows the basket-maker's thumb;

Edition: orig; Page: [163]

The oar, the guide's. Dare you accept the tasks

He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,

Tell the sun's time, determine the true north,

Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods

To thread by night the nearest way to camp?

Ask you, how went the hours?

All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,

North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,

Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;

Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;

Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;

Or listening to the laughter of the loon;

Or, in the evening twilight's latest red,

Beholding the procession of the pines;

Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,

In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunter

Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds

Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.

Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods

Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck

Who stands astonished at the meteor light,

Then turns to bound away,—is it too late?

Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,

Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;

Sometimes their wits at sally and retort,

With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;

Or parties scaled the near acclivities

Competing seekers of a rumored lake,

Whose unauthenticated waves we named

Lake Probability,—our carbuncle,

Long sought, not found.

Edition: orig; Page: [164]

Two Doctors in the cam,

Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brai.

Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,

Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;

Insatiate skill in water or in air

Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;.

The while, one leaden pot of alcohol

Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.

Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,

Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,

Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride,

Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,

Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.

Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,

The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker

Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.

As water poured through hollows of the hills

To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,

So Nature shed all beauty lavishly

From her redundant horn.

Lords of this realm,

Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day

Rounded by hours where each outdid the last

In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,

As if associates of the sylvan gods.

We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,

So pure the Alpine element we breathed,

So light, so lofty pictures came and went.

We trode on air, contemned the distant town,

Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned

That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge

And how we should come hither with our sons,

Hereafter,—willing they, and more adroit.

Edition: orig; Page: [165]

Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery,—

The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito

Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:

But, on the second day, we heed them not,

Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,

Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.

For who defends our leafy tabernacle

From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,—

Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,

Which past endurance sting the tender cit,

But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,

Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

Our foaming ale we drank from hunters' pans,

Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave

Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;

All ate like abbots, and, if any missed

Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss

With hunters' appetite and peals of mirth.

And Stillman, our guides' guide, and Commodore,

Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Æneas, said aloud,

“Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating

Food indigestible”:—then murmured some,

Others applauded him who spoke the truth.

Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought

Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday

‘Mid all the hints and glories of the home.

For who can tell what sudden privacies

Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry

Of scholars furloughed from their tasks and let

Into this Oreads’ fended. Paradise,

As chapels in the city's thoroughfares,

Edition: orig; Page: [166]

Whither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his brow

And meditate a moment on Heaven's rest.

Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke

To each apart, lifting her lovely shows

To spiritual lessons pointed home,

And as through dreams in watches of the night,

So through all creatures in their form and ways

Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,

Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense

Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.

Hark to that petulant chirp! what aus the warbler?

Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.

Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,

Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,

Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?

And presently the sky is changed; O world!

What pictures and what harmonies are thine!

The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,

So like the soul of me, what if 't were me?

A melancholy better than all mirth.

Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,

Or at the foresight of obscurer years?

Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory.

Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty

Superior to all its gaudy skirts.

And, that no day of life may lack romance,

The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down

A private beam into each several heart.

Daily the bending skies solicit man,

The seasons chariot him from this exile,

The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,

The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,

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Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights

Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

With a vermilion pencil mark the day

When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs

Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falla

Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront

Two of our mates returning with swift oars.

One held a printed journal waving high Caught from a late-arriving traveller,

Big with great news, and shouted the report

For which the world had waited, now firm fact,

Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,

And landed on our coast, and pulsating

With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries

From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,

Greet the glad miracle. Thought's new-found path

Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,

Match God's equator with a zone of art,

And lift man's public action to a height

Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,

When linkæd hemispheres attest his deed.

We have few moments in the longest life

Of such delight and wonder as there grew,—

Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:

A burst of joy, as if we told the fact

To ears intelligent; as if gray rock

And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know

This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;

As if we men were talking in a vein

Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,

And a prime end of the most subtle element

Were fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!

Edition: orig; Page: [168]

Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,

Let them hear well! 't is theirs as much as ours.

A spasm throbbing through the pedestals

Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,

Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill

To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.

The lightning has run masterless too long;

He must to school and learn his verb and noun

And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,

Spelling with guided tongue man's messages

Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.

And yet I marked, even in the manly joy

Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat

(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;

Or was it for mankind a generous shame,

As of a luck not quite legitimate,

Since fortune snatched from wit the lion's part?

Was it a college pique of town and gown,

As one within whose memory it burned

That not academicians, but some lout,

Found ten years since the Californian gold?

And now, again, a hungry company

Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,

Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools

Of science, not from the philosophers,

Had won the brightest laurel of all time.

'T was always thus, and will be; hand and head

Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift,

The other slow,—this the Prometheus,

And that the Jove,—yet, howsoever hid,

It was from Jove the other stole his fire,

And, without Jove, the good had never been,

Edition: orig; Page: [169]

It is not Iroquois or cannibals,

But ever the free race with front sublime,

And these instructed by their wisest too,

Who do the feat, and lift humanity.

Let not him mourn who best entitled was,

Nay, mourn not one: let him exult,

Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,

And water it with wine, nor watch askance

Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:

Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.

We flee away from cities, but we bring

The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,

Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts,

We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:

But will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore

Of books and arts and trained experiment,

Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?

O no, not we! Witness the shout that shook

Wild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hail

The joyful traveller gives, when on the verge

Of craggy Indian wilderness he hears

From a log-cabin stream Beethoven's notes

On the piano, played with master's hand.

‘Well done!’ he cries; ‘the bear is kept at bay,

The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;

All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,

This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,

This wild plantation will suffice to chase.

Now speed the gay celerities of art,

What in the desert was impossible

Within four walls is possible again,—

Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill,

Edition: orig; Page: [170]

Traditioned fame of masters, eager strife

Of keen competing youths, joined or alone

To outdo each other and extort applause.

Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.

Twirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,

On for a thousand years of genius more.’

The holidays were fruitful, but must end;

One August evening had a cooler breath;

Into each mind intruding duties crept;

Under the cinders burned the fires of home;

Nay, letters found us in our paradise:

So in the gladness of the new event

We struck our camp and left the happy hills.

The fortunate star that rose on us sank not;

The prodigal sunshine rested on the land,

The rivers gambolled onward to the sea,

And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,

Permitted on her infinite repose

Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,

As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

brahma.

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

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The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

fate.

Deep in the man sits fast his fate

To mould his fortunes mean or great;

Unknown to Cromwell as to me

Was Cromwell's measure or degree;

Unknown to him as to his horse,

If he than his groom be better or worse.

He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs,

With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares,

Till late he learned, through doubt and fear,

Broad England harbored not his peer:

Obeying Time, the last to own

The Genius from its cloudy throne.

For the prevision is allied

Unto the thing so signified;

Or say, the foresight that awaits

Is the same Genius that creates.

Edition: orig; Page: [172]

freedom.

Once I wished I might rehearse

Freedom's pæan in my verse,

That the slave who caught the strain

Should throb until he snapped his chain,

But the Spirit said, ‘Not so;

Speak it not, or speak it low;

Name not lightly to be said,

Gift too precious to be prayed,

Passion not to be expressed

But by heaving of the breast:

Yet,—wouldst thou the mountain find

Where this deity is shrined,

Who gives to seas and sunset skies

Their unspent beauty of surprise,

And, when it lists him, waken can

Brute or savage into man;

Or, if in thy heart he shine,

Blends the starry fates with thine,

Draws angels nigh to dwell with thee.

And makes thy thoughts archangels be;

Freedom's secret wilt thou know?—

Counsel not with flesh and blood;

Loiter not for cloak or food;

Right thou feelest, rush to do.’

Edition: orig; Page: [173]

ode. sung in the town hall, concord, july 4, 1857.

O tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire;

One morn is in the mighty heaven,

And one in our desire.

The cannon booms from town to town,

Our pulses beat not less,

The joy-bells chime their tidings down,

Which children's voices bless.

For He that flung the broad blue fold

O'er-mantling land and sea,

One third part of the sky unrolled

For the banner of the free.

The men are ripe of Saxon kind

To build an equal state,—

To take the statute from the mind

And make of duty fate.

United States! the ages plead,—

Present and Past in under-song,—

Go put your creed into your deed,

Nor speak with double tongue.

For sea and land don't understand,

Nor skies without a frown

See rights for which the one hand fights

By the other cloven down.

Edition: orig; Page: [174]

Be just at home; then write your scroll

Of honor o'er the sea,

And bid the broad Atlantic roll,

A ferry of the free.

And henceforth there shall be no chain,

Save underneath the sea

The wires shall murmur through the main

Sweet songs of liberty.

The conscious stars accord above,

The waters wild below,

And under, through the cable wove,

Her fiery errands go.

For He that worketh high and wise,

Nor pauses in his plan,

Will take the sun out of the skies

Ere freedom out of man.

boston hymn. read in music hall, january 1, 1863.

The word of the Lord by night

To the watching Pilgrims came,

As they sat by the seaside,

And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings,

I suffer them no more;

Up to my ear the morning brings

The ontrage of the poor.

Edition: orig; Page: [175]

Think ye I made this ball

A field of havoc and war,

Where tyrants great and tyrants small

Might harry the weak and poor?

My angel,—his name is Freedom,—

Choose him to be your king;

He shall cut pathways east and west

And fend you with his wing.

Lo! I uncover the land

Which I hid of old time in the West,

As the sculptor uncovers the statue

When he has wrought his best;

I show Columbia, of the rocks

Which dip their foot in the seas

And soar to the air-borne flocks

Of clouds and the boreal fleece.

I will divide my goods;

Call in the wretch and slave:

None shall rule but the humble,

And none but Toil shall have.

I will have never a noble,

No lineage counted great;

Fishers and choppers and ploughmen

Shall constitute a state.

Go, cut down trees in the forest

And trim the straightest boughs;

Cut down trees in the forest

And build me a wooden house.

Edition: orig; Page: [176]

Call the people together,

The young men and the sires,

The digger in the harvest field,

Hireling and him that hires;

And here in a pine state-house

They shall choose men to rule

In every needful faculty,

In church and state and school.

Lo, now! if these poor men

Can govern the land and sea

And make just laws below the sun,

As planets faithful be.

And ye shall succor men;

'T is nobleness to serve;

Help them who cannot help again:

Beware from right to swerve.

I break your bonds and masterships,

And I unchain the slave:

Free be his heart and hand henceforth

As wind and wandering wave.

I cause from every creature

His proper good to flow:

As much as he is and doeth,

So much he shall bestow.

But, laying hands on another

To coin his labor and sweat,

He goes in pawn to his victim

For eternal years in debt.

Edition: orig; Page: [177]

To-day unbind the captive,

So only are ye unbound;

Lift up a people from the dust,

Trump of their rescue, sound!

Pay ransom to the owner

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.

O North! give him beauty for rags,

And honor, O South! for his shame;

Nevada! coin thy golden crags

With Freedom's image and name.

Up! and the dusky race

That sat in darkness long,—

Be swift their feet as antelopes,

And as behemoth strong.

Come, East and West and North,

By races, as snow-flakes,

And carry my purpose forth,

Which neither halts nor shakes.

My will fulfilled shall be,

For, in daylight or in dark,

My thunderbolt has eyes to see

His way home to the mark.

Edition: orig; Page: [178]

voluntaries

i.

Low and mournful be the strain,

Haughty thought be far from me;

Tones of penitence and pain,

Meanings of the tropic sea;

Low and tender in the cell

Where a captive sits in chains,

Crooning ditties treasured well

From his Afric's torrid plains.

Sole estate his sire bequeathed,—

Hapless sire to hapless son,—

Was the wailing song he breathed,

And his chain when life was done.

What his fault, or what his crime?

Or what ill planet crossed his prime?

Heart too soft and will too weak

To front the fate that crouches near,—

Dove beneath the vulture's beak;—

Will song dissuade the thirsty spear?

Dragged from his mother's arms and breast,

Displaced, disfurnished here,

His wistful toil to do his best

Chilled by a ribald jeer.

Great men in the Senate sate,

Sage and hero, side by side,

Building for their sons the State,

Which they shall rule with pride.

They forbore to break the chain

Edition: orig; Page: [179]

Which bound the dusky tribe,

Checked by the owners' fierce disdain,

Lured by “Union” as the bribe.

Destiny sat by, and said,

‘Pang for pang your seed shall pay,

Hide in false peace your coward head,

I bring round the harvest day.’

ii.

Freedom all winged expands,

Nor perches in a narrow place;

Her broad van seeks unplanted lands;

She loves a poor and virtuous race.

Clinging to a colder zone

Whose dark sky sheds the snow-flake down,

The snow-flake is her banner's star,

Her stripes the boreal streamers are.

Long she loved the Northman well;

Now the iron age is done,

She will not refuse to dwell

With the offspring of the Sun;

Foundling of the desert far,

Where palms plume, siroccos blaze,

He roves unhurt the burning ways

In climates of the summer star.

He has avenues to God

Hid from men of Northern brain,

Far beholding, without cloud.

What these with slowest steps attain.

If once the generous chief arrive

To lead him willing to be led,

For freedom he will strike and strive,

And drain his heart till he be dead.

Edition: orig; Page: [180]

iii.

In an age of fops and toys,

Wanting wisdom, void of right,

Who shall nerve heroic boys

To hazard all in Freedom's fight,—

Break sharply off their jolly games,

Forsake their comrades gay

And quit proud homes and youthful dames

For famine, toil and fray?

Yet on the nimble air benign

Speed nimbler messages,

That waft the breath of grace divine

To hearts in sloth and ease.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

The youth replies, I can.

iv.

O, well for the fortunate soul

Which Music's wings infold,

Stealing away the memory

Of sorrows new and old!

Yet happier he whose inward sight,

Stayed on his subtile thought,

Shuts his sense on toys of time,

To vacant bosoms brought.

But best befriended of the God

He who, in evil times,

Warned by an inward voice,

Heeds not the darkness and the dread,

Biding by his rule and choice,

Feeling only the fiery thread

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Leading over heroic ground,

Walled with mortal terror round,

To the aim which him allures,

And the sweet heaven his deed secures.

Peril around, all else appalling,

Cannon in front and leaden rain

Him duty through the clarion calling

To the van called not in vain.

Stainless soldier on the walls,

Knowing this,—and knows no more,—

Whoever fights, whoever falls,

Justice conquers evermore,

Justice after as before,—

And he who battles on her side,

God, though he were ten times slain,

Crowns him victor glorified,

Victor over death and pain.

v.

Blooms the laurel which belongs

To the valiant chief who fights;

I see the wreath, I hear the songs

Lauding the Eternal Rights,

Victors over daily wrongs:

Awful victors, they misguide

Whom they will destroy,

And their coming triumph hide

In our downfall, or our joy:

They reach no term, they never sleep,

In equal strength through space abide;

Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,

The strong they slay, the swift outstride:

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Fate's grass grows rank in valley elods,

And rankly on the castled steep,—

Speak it firmly, these are gods,

All are ghosts beside.

boston. sicut patribus, sit deus nobib.
[Read in Faneuil Hall, on December 16, 1873, the Centennial Anniverary at the Destruction of the Tea in Roston Harbor.]

The rocky nook with hill-tops three

Looked eastward from the farms,

And twice each day the flowing sea

Took Boston in its arms;

The men of yore were stout and poor,

And sailed for bread to every shore.

And where they went on trade intent

They did what freemen can,

Their dauntless ways did all men praise,

The merchant was a man.

The world was made for honest trade,—

To plant and eat be none afraid.

The waves that rocked them on the deep

To them their secret told;

Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep,

“Like us be free and bold!”

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The honest waves refused to slaves

The empire of the ocean caves.

Old Europe groans with palaces,

Has lords enough and more;—

We plant and build by foaming seas

A city of the poor;—

For day by day could Boston Bay

Their honest labor overpay.

We grant no dukedoms to the few,

We hold like rights, and shall;—

Equal on Sunday in the pew,

On Monday in the mall,

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The noble craftsman we promote,

Disown the knave and fool;

Each honest man shall have his vote,

Each child shall have his school.

A union then of honest men,

Or union never more again.

The wild rose and the barberry thorn

Hung out their summer pride,

Where now on heated pavements worn

The feet of millions stride.

Fair rose the planted hills behind

The good town on the bay,

And where the western hills declined

The prairie stretched away.

Edition: orig; Page: [184]

What care though rival cities soar

Along the stormy coast,

Penn's town, New York and Baltimore,

If Boston knew the most!

They laughed to know the world so wide;

The mountains said, “Good-day!

We greet you well, you Saxon men,

Up with your towns and stay!”

The world was made for honest trade,—

To plant and eat be none afraid.

“For you,” they said, “no barriers be,

For you no sluggard rest;

Each street leads downward to the sea,

Or landward to the west.”

O happy town beside the sea,

Whose roads lead everywhere to all;

Than thine no deeper moat can be,

No stouter fence, no steeper wall!

Bad news from George on the English throne;

“You are thriving well,” said he;

“Now by these presents be it known

You shall pay us a tax on tea;

'T is very small,—no load at all,—

Honor enough that we send the call.”

“Not so,” said Boston, “good my lord,

We pay your governors here

Abundant for their bed and board,

Six thousand pounds a year.

Edition: orig; Page: [185]

(Your Highness knows our homely word,)

Millions for self-government,

But for tribute never a cent.”

The cargo came! and who could blame

If Indians seized the tea,

And, chest by chest, let down the same,

Into the laughing sea?

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The townsmen braved the English king,

Found friendship in the French,

And honor joined the patriot ring

Low on their wooden bench.

O bounteous seas that never fail!

O day remembered yet!

O happy port that spied the sail

Which wafted Lafayette!

Pole-star of light in Europe's night,

That never faltered from the right.

Kings shook with fear, old empires crave

The secret force to find

Which fired the little State to save

The rights of all mankind.

But right is might through all the world;

Province to province faithful clung,

Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled,

Till Freedom cheered and joy-bells rung.

Edition: orig; Page: [186]

The sea returning day by day

Restores the world-wide mart;

So let each dweller on the Bay

Fold Boston in his heart,

Till these echoes be choked with snows,

Or over the town blue ocean flows.

Let the blood of her hundred thousands

Throb in each manly vein;

And the wits of all her wisest,

Make sunshine in her brain.

For you can teach the lightning speech,

And round the globe your voices reach.

And each shall care for other,

And each to each shall bend,

To the poor a noble brother,

To the good an equal friend.

A blessing through the ages thus

Shield all thy roofs and towers!

God with the fathers, so with us,

Thou darling town of ours!

This poem was begun several years before the War, but was not finished until the occasion of its delivery in 1873, the anniversary festival, when the piece was entirely remodelled.

Some of the suppressed stanzas are here given.

The poem began thus:—

The land that has no song

Shall have a song to-day

The granite ledge is dumb too long,

The vales have much to say:

For you can teach the lightning speech,

And round the globe your voices reach.

Edition: orig; Page: [187]

After the lines on Lafayette followed these stanzas:—

O pity that I pause!

The song disdaining shuns

To name the noble sires, because

Of the unworthy sons

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

But there was chaff within the flour,

And one was false in ten,

And reckless clerks in lust of power

Forgot the rights of men;

Cruel and blind did file their mind,

And sell the blood of human kind.

Your town is full of gentle names,

By patriots once were watchwords made;

Those war-cry names are muffled shames

On recreant sons mislaid.

What slave shall dare a name to wear

Once Freedom's passport everywhere?

O welaway' if this be so,

And man cannot afford the right,

And if the wage of love be woe,

And honest dealing yield despite.

For what avail or plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Hie to the woods, sleek citizen,

Back to the sea, go, landsman, down,

Clumb the White Hills, fat alderman,

And vacant leave the town,

Ere these echoes be choked with snows,

Or over the roofs blue Ocean flows.

Edition: orig; Page: [188]

letters.

Every day brings a ship,

Every ship brings a word;

Well for those who have no fear,

Looking seaward well assured

That the word the vessel brings

Is the word they wish to hear.

rubies.

They brought me rubies from the mine,

And held them to the sun;

I said, they are drops of frozen wine

From Eden's vats that run.

I looked again,—I thought them hearts

Of friends to friends unknown;

Tides that should warm each neighboring life

Are locked in sparkling stone.

But fire to thaw that ruddy snow,

To break enchanted ice,

And give love's scarlet tides to flow,—

When shall that sun arise?

Edition: orig; Page: [189]

the test. (Musa loquitur.)

I hung my verses in the wind,

Time and tide their faults may find.

All were winnowed through and through,

Five lines lasted sound and true;

Five were smelted in a pot

Than the South more fierce and hot;

These the siroc could not melt,

Fire their fiercer flaming felt,

And the meaning was more white

Than July's meridian light.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,

Nor time unmake what poets know.

Have you eyes to find the five

Which five hundred did survive?

solution.

I am the Muse who sung alway

By Jove, at dawn of the first day.

Star-crowned, sole-sitting, long I wrought

To fire the stagnant earth with thought:

On spawning slime my song prevails,

Wolves shed their fangs, and dragons scales;

Flushed in the sky the sweet May-morn,

Earth smiled with flowers, and man was born.

Then Asia yeaned her shepherd race,

And Nile substructs her granite base,—

Edition: orig; Page: [190]

Tented Tartary, columned Nile,—

And, under vines, on rocky isle,

Or on wind-blown sea-marge bleak,

Forward stepped the perfect Greek:

That wit and joy might find a tongue,

And earth grow civil, Homer sung.

Flown to Italy from Greece,

I brooded long and held my peace,

For I am wont to sing uncalled,

And in days of evil plight

Unlock doors of new delight;

And sometimes mankind I appalled

With a bitter horoscope,

With spasms of terror for balm of hope.

Then by better thought I lead

Bards to speak what nations need;

So I folded me in fears,

And Dante searched the triple spheres,

Moulding nature at his will,

So shaped, so colored, swift or still,

And, sculptor-like, his large design

Etched on Alp and Apennine.

Seethed in mists of Penmanmaur,

Taught by Plinlimmon's Druid power,

England's genius filled all measure

Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,

Gave to the mind its emperor,

And life was larger than before:

Nor sequent centuries could hit

Orbit and sum of Shakspeare's wit.

The men who lived with him became

Poets, for the air was fame.

Edition: orig; Page: [191]

Far in the North, where polar night

Holds in check the frolic light,

In trance upborne past mortal goal

The Swede Emanuel leads the soul.

Through snows above, mines underground,

The inks of Erebus he found;

Rehearsed to men the damned wails

On which the seraph music sails.

In spirit-worlds he trod alone,

But walked the earth unmarked, unknown.

The near by-stander caught no sound,—

Yet they who listened far aloof

Heard readings of the skyey roof,

And felt, beneath, the quaking ground;

And his air-sown, unheeded words,

In the next age, are flaming swords.

In newer days of war and trade,

Romance forgot, and faith decayed,

When Science armed and guided war,

And clerks the Janus-gates unbar,

When France, where poet never grew,

Halved and dealt the globe anew,

Goethe, raised o'er joy and strife,

Drew the firm lines of Fate and Life

And brought Olympian wisdom down

To court and mart, To gown and town

Stooping, his finger wrote in clay

The open secret of to-day.

So bloom the unfading petals five,

And verses that all verse outlive.

Edition: orig; Page: [192]

hymn sung at the second church, boston, at the ordination of rev. chandler robbins.

We love the venerahle house

Our fathers built to God;—

In heaven are kept their grateful vows,

Their dust endears the sod.

Here holy thoughts a light have shed

From many a radiant face,

And prayers of humble virtue made

The perfume of the place.

And anxious hearts have pondered here

The mystery of life,

And prayed the eternal Light to clear

Their doubts, and aid their strife.

From humble tenements around

Came up the pensive train,

And in the church a blessing found

That filled their homes again;

For faith and peace and mighty love

That from the Godhead flow,

Showed them the life of Heaven above

Springs from the life below.

They live with God; their homes are dust;

Yet here their children pray,

Edition: orig; Page: [193]

And in this fleeting lifetime trust

To find the narrow way.

On him who by the altar stands,

On him thy blessing fall,

Speak through his lips thy pure commands,

Thou heart that lovest all.

nature.

i.

Winters know

Easily to shed the snow,

And the untaught Spring is wise

In cowslips and anemonies.

Nature, hating art and pains,

Baulks and baffles plotting brains;

Casualty and Surprise

Are the apples of her eyes;

But she dearly loves the poor,

And, by marvel of her own,

Strikes the loud pretender down.

For Nature listens in the rose

And hearkens in the berry's bell

To help her friends, to plague her foes,

And like wise God she judges well.

Yet doth much her love excel

To the souls that never fell,

To swains that live in happiness

And do well because they please,

Who walk in ways that are unfamed,

And feats achieve before they're named.

Edition: orig; Page: [194]

nature.

ii.

She is gamesome and good,

But of mutable mood,—

No dreary repeater now and again,

She will be all things to all men.

She who is old, but nowise feeble,

Pours her power into the people,

Merry and manifold without bar,

Makes and moulds them what they are,

And what they call their city way

Is not their way, but hers,

And what they say they made to-day,

They learned of the oaks and firs.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh,

Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh;

She drugs her water and her wheat

With the flavors she finds meet,

And gives them what to drink and eat;

And having thus their bread and growth,

They do her bidding, nothing loath.

What's most theirs is not their own,

But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone,

And in their vaunted works of Art

The master-stroke is still her part.

Edition: orig; Page: [195]

the romany girl.

The sun goes down, and with him takes

The coarseness of my poor attire;

The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame

Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher.

Pale Northern girls! you scorn our race;

You captives of your air-tight halls,

Wear out in-doors your sickly days,

But leave us the horizon walls.

And if I take you, dames, to task,

And say it frankly without guile,

Then you are Gypsies in a mask,

And I the lady all the while.

If on the heath, below the moon,

I court and play with paler blood,

Me false to mine dare whisper none,—

One sallow horseman knows me good.

Go, keep your cheek's rose from the rain,

For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;

My swarthy tint is in the grain,

The rocks and forest know it real.

The wild air bloweth in our lungs,

The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,

The birds gave us our wily tongues,

The panther in our dances flies.

Edition: orig; Page: [196]

Ton doubt we read the stars on high,

Nathless we read your fortunes true;

The stars may hide in the upper sky,

But without glass we fathom you.

days.

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,

And marching single in an endless file,

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

To each they offer gifts after his will,

Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day

Turned and departed silent I, too late,

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Edition: orig; Page: [197]

the chartist's complaint.

Day! hast thou two faces,

Making one place two places?

One, by humble farmer seen,

Chill and wet, unlighted, mean,

Useful only, triste and damp,

Serving for a laborer's lamp?

Have the same mists another side,

To be the appanage of pride,

Gracing the rich man's wood and lake,

His park where amber mornings break,

And treacherously bright to show

His planted isle where roses glow?

O Day! and is your mightiness

A sycophant to smug success?

Will the sweet sky and ocean broad

Be fine accomplices to fraud?

O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray:

Back, back to chaos, harlot Day!

my garden.

If I could put my woods in song

And tell what's there enjoyed,

All men would to my gardens throng,

And leave the cities void.

In my plot no tulips blow,—

Snow-loving pines and oaks instead;

Edition: orig; Page: [198]

And rank the savage maples grow

From Spring's faint flush to Autumn red.

My garden is a forest ledge

Which older forests bound;

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,

Then plunge to depths profound.

Here once the Deluge ploughed,

Laid the terraces, one by one;

Ebbing later whence it flowed,

They bleach and dry in the sun.

The sowers made haste to depart,—

The wind and the birds which sowed it;

Not for fame, nor by rules of art,

Planted these, and tempests flowed it.

Waters that wash my garden side

Play not in Nature's lawful web,

They heed not moon or solar tide,—

Five years elapse from flood to ebb.

Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,

And every god,—none did refuse;

And be sure at last came Love,

And after Love, the Muse.

Keen ears can catch a syllable,

As if one spake to another,

In the hemlocks tall, untamable,

And what the whispering grasses smother.

Edition: orig; Page: [199]

Æolian harps in the pine

Ring with the song of the Fates;

Infant Bacchus in the vine,—

Far distant yet his chorus waits.

Canst thou copy in verse one chime

Of the wood-bell's peal and cry,

Write in a book the morning's prime,

Or match with words that tender sky

Wonderful verse.of the gods,

Of one import, of varied tone;

They chant the bliss of their abodes

To man imprisoned in his own.

Ever the words of the gods resound;

But the porches of man's ear

Seldom in this low life's round

Are unsealed, that he may hear

Wandering voices in the air

And murmurs in the wold

Speak what I cannot declare,

Yet cannot all withhold.

When the shadow fell on the lake,

The whirlwind in ripples wrote

Air-bells of fortune that shine and break,

And omens above thought.

But the meanings cleave to the lake,

Cannot be carried in book or urn;

Go thy ways now, come later back,

On waves and hedges still they burn.

Edition: orig; Page: [200]

These the fates of men forecast,

Of better men than live to-day;

If who can read them comes at last

He will spell in the sculpture, ‘Stay.’

the titmouse.

You shall not be overbold

When you deal with arctic cold,

As late I found my lukewarm blood

Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.

How should I fight? my foeman fine

Has million arms to one of mine:

East, west, for aid I looked in vain,

East, west, north, south, are his domain.

Miles off, three dangerous miles, is home;

Must borrow his winds who there would coma

Up and away for life! be fleet!—

The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,

Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,

Curdles the blood to the marble bones,

Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,

And hems in life with narrowing fence.

Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,—

The punctual stars will vigil keep,—

Embalmed by purifying cold;

The winds shall sing their dead-march old,

The snow is no ignoble shroud,

The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

Edition: orig; Page: [201]

Softly,—but this way fate was pointing,

T was coming fast to such anointing,

When piped a tiny voice hard by,

Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,

Chic-chicadeedee! saucy note

Out of sound heart and merry throat,

As if it said, ‘Good day, good sir!

Fine afternoon, old passenger!

Happy to meet you in these places,

Where January brings few faces.’

This poet, though he live apart,

Moved by his hospitable heart,

Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,

To do the honors of his court,

As fits a feathered lord of land,

Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,

Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,

Prints his small impress on the snow,

Shows feats of his gymnastic play,

Head downward, clinging to the spray.

Here was this atom in full breath,

Hurling defiance at vast death;

This scrap of valor just for play

Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,

As if to shame my weak behavior;

I greeted loud my little savior,

‘You pet! what dost here? and what for?

In these woods, thy small Labrador,

At this pinch, wee San Salvador!

What fire burns in that little chest

So frolic, stout and self-possest?

Edition: orig; Page: [202]

Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;

Ashes and jet all hues outshine.

Why are not diamonds black and gray,

To ape thy dare-devil array?

And I affirm, the spacious North

Exists to draw thy virtue forth.

I think no virtue goes with size;

The reason of all cowardice

Is, that men are overgrown,

And, to be valiant, must come down

To the titmouse dimension,’

'T is good-will makes intelligence,

And I began to catch the sense

Of my bird's song: ‘Live out of doors

In the great woods, on prairie floors.

I dine in the sun; when he sinks in the sea,

I too have a hole in a hollow tree;

And I like less when Summer beats

With stifling beams on these retreats,

Than noontide twilights which snow makes

With tempest of the blinding flakes.

For well the soul, if stout within,

Can arm impregnably the skin;

And polar frost my frame defied,

Made of the air that blows outside.’

With glad remembrance of my debt,

I homeward turn; farewell, my pet!

When here again thy pilgrim comes,

He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs.

Doubt not, so long as earth has bread,

Thou first and foremost shalt be fed;

Edition: orig; Page: [203]

The Providence that is most large

Takes hearts like thine in special charge,

Helps who for their own need are strong,

And the sky doats on cheerful song.

Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant

O'er all that mass and minster vaunt;

For men mis-hear thy call in Spring,

As't would accost some frivolous wing,

Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be!

And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee!

I think old Cæsar must have heard

In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,

And, echoed in some frosty wold,

Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.

And I will write our annals new,

And thank thee for a better clew,

I, who dreamed not when I came here

To find the antidote of fear,

Now hear thee say in Roman key,

pœan! Veni, vidi, vici.

the harp.

One musician is sure,

His wisdom will not fail,

He has not tasted wine impure,

Nor bent to passion frail.

Age cannot cloud his memory,

Nor grief untune his voice,

Ranging down the ruled scale

From tone of joy to inward wail,

Edition: orig; Page: [204]

Tempering the pitch of all

In his windy cave.

He all the fables knows,

And in their causes tells,—

Knows Nature's rarest moods,

Ever on her secret broods.

The Muse of men is coy,

Oft courted will not come;

In palaces and market squares

Entreated, she is dumb;

But my minstrel knows and tells.

The counsel of the gods,

Knows of Holy Book the spells,

Knows the law of Night and Day,

And the heart of girl and boy,

The tragic and the gay,

And what is writ on Table Round

Of Arthur and his peers;

What sea and land discoursing say

In sidereal years.

He renders all his lore

In numbers wild as dreams,

Modulating all extremes,—

What the spangled meadow saith

To the children who have faith;

Only to children children sing,

Only to youth will spring be spring.

Who is the Bard thus magnified?

When did he sing? and where abide?

Chief of song where poets feast

Is the wind-harp which thou seest

In the casement at my side.

Edition: orig; Page: [205]

Æolian harp,

How strangely wise thy strain!

Gay for youth, gay for youth,

(Sweet is art, but sweeter truth,)

In the hall at summer eve

Fate and Beauty skilled to weave

From the eager opening strings

Rung loud and bold the song.

Who but loved the wind-harp's note?

How should not the poet doat

On its mystic tongue,

With its primeval memory,

Reporting what old minstrels told

Of Merlin locked the harp within,—

Merlin paying the pain of sin,

Pent in a dungeon made of air,—

And some attain his voice to hear,

Words of pain and cries of fear,

But pillowed all on melody,

As fits the griefs of bards to be.

And what if that all-echoing shell,

Which thus the buried Past can tell,

Should rive the Future, and reveal

What his dread folds would fain conceal?

It shares the secret of the earth,

And of the kinds that owe her birth.

Speaks not of self that mystic tone,

But of the Overgods alone:

It trembles to the cosmic breath,—

As it heareth, so it saith;

Obeying meek the primal Cause,

It is the tongue of mundane laws.

And this, at least, I dare affirm,

Since genius too has bound and term,

Edition: orig; Page: [206]

There is no bard in all the choir,

Not Homer's self, the poet sire,

Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,

Or Shakspeare, whom no mind can measure,

Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,

Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,

Scott, the delight of generous boys,

Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,—

Not one of all can put in verse,

Or to this presence could rehearse

The sights and voices ravishing

The boy knew on the hills in spring,

When pacing through the oaks he heard

Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,

The heavy grouse's sudden whir,

The rattle of the kingfisher;

Saw bonfires of the harlot flies

In the lowland, when day dies;

Or marked, benighted and forlorn,

The first far signal-fire of morn.

These syllables that Nature spoke,

And the thoughts that in him woke,

Can adequately utter none

Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.

Therein I hear the Pace reel

The threads of man at their humming wheel,

The threads of life and power and pain,

So sweet and mournful falls the strain.

And best can teach its Delphian chord

How Nature to the soul is moored,

If once again that silent string,

As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.

Edition: orig; Page: [207]

Not long ago at eventide,

It seemed, so listening, at my sid

A window rose, and, to say sooth,

I looked forth on the fields of youth:

I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,

I knew their forms in fancy weeds,

Long, long concealed by sundering fates,

Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates,

Stronger and bolder far than I,

With grace, with genius, well attired

And then as now from far admired,

Followed with love

They knew not of,

With passion cold and shy.

O joy, for what recoveries rare!

Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,

See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom,—

Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!

Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoil

Of life resurgent from the soil

Wherein was dropped the mortal spoil.

sea-shore.

I heard or seemed to hear the chiding Sea

Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come?

Am I not always here, thy summer home?

Is not my voice thy music, morn and eve?

My breath thy healthful climate in the heats.

My touch thy antidote, my bay thy bath?

Edition: orig; Page: [208]

Was ever building like my terraces?

Was ever conch magnificent as mine?

Lie on the warm rock-ledges, and there learn

A little hut suffices like a town.

I make your sculptured architecture vain,

Vain beside mine. I drive my wedges home,

And carve the coastwise mountain into caves

Lo! here is Rome and Nineveh and Thebes,

Karnak and Pyramid and Giant's Stairs

Half piled or prostrate; and my newest slab

Older than all thy race.

Behold the Sea,

The opaline, the plentiful and strong,

Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,

Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;

Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,

Purger of earth, and medicine of men;

Creating a sweet climate by my breath,

Washing out harms and griefs from memory,

And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,

Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Rich are the sea-gods:—who gives gifts but they?

They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls:

They pluck Force thence, and give it to the wise.

For every wave is wealth to Dædalus,

Wealth to the cunning artist who can work

This matchless strength. Where shall he find, O waves!

A load your Atlas shoulders cannot lift?

I with my hammer pounding evermore

The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust

Edition: orig; Page: [209]

Strewing my bed, and, in another age,

Rebuild a continent of better men.

Then I unbar the doors: my paths lead out

The exodus of nations: I disperse

Men to all shores that front the hoary main.

I too have arts and sorceries;

Illusion dwells forever with the wave.

I know what spells are laid. Leave me to deal

With credulous and imaginative man;

For, though he scoop my water in his palm,

A few rods off he deems it gems and clouds.

Planting strange fruits and sunshine on the shore,

I make some coast alluring, some lone isle,

To distant men, who must go there, or die.

song of nature.

Mine are the night and morning,

The pits of air, the gulf of space,

The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,

The innumerable days.

I hide in the solar glory,

I am dumb in the pealing song,

I rest on the pitch of the torrent,

In slumber I am strong.

No numbers have counted my tallies,

No tribes my house can fill,

Edition: orig; Page: [210]

I sit by the shining Fount of Life

And pour the deluge still;

And ever by delicate powers

Gathering along the centuries

From race on race the rarest flowers,

My wreath shall nothing miss.

And many a thousand summers

My gardens ripened well,

And light from meliorating stars

With firmer glory fell.

I wrote the past in characters

Of rock and fire the scroll,

The building in the coral sea,

The planting of the coal.

And thefts from satellites and rings

And broken stars I drew,

And out of spent and aged things

I formed the world anew;

What time the gods kept carnival,

Tricked out in star and flower,

And in cramp elf and saurian forms

They swathed their too much power.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,

They laid their courses well,

They boiled the sea, and piled the layers

Of granite, marl and shell.

Edition: orig; Page: [211]

But he, the man-child glorious,—

Where tarries he the while?

The rainbow shines his harbinger,

The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,

Forthright my planets roll,

And still the man-child is not born,

The summit of the whole.

Must time and tide forever run?

Will never my winds go sleep in the west?

Will never my wheels which whirl the sun

And satellites have rest?

Too much of donning and doffing,

Too slow the rainbow fades,

I weary of my robe of snow,

My leaves and my cascades;

I tire of globes and races,

Too long the game is played;

What without him is summer's pomp,

Or winter's frozen shade?

I travail in pain for him,

My creatures travail and wait;

His couriers come by squadrons,

He comes not to the gate.

Twice I have moulded an image,

And thrice outstretched my hand,

Edition: orig; Page: [212]

Made one of day and one of night

And one of the salt sea-sand.

One in a Judæan manger,

And one by Avon stream,

One over against the mouths of Nile,

And one in the Academe.

I moulded kings and saviors,

And bards o'er kings to rule;—

But fell the starry influence short,

The cup was never full.

Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,

And mix the bowl again;

Seethe, Fate! the ancient elements,

Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.

Let war and trade and creeds and song

Blend, ripen race on race,

The sunburnt world a man shall breed

Of all the zones and countless days.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,

My oldest force is good as new,

And the fresh rose on yonder thorn

Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

Edition: orig; Page: [213]

two rivers.

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,

Repeats the music of the rain;

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit

Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:

The stream I love unbounded goes

Through flood and sea and firmament;

Through light, through life, it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet.

I hear the spending of the stream

Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,

Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;

They lose their grief who hear his song,

And where he winds is the day of day.

So forth and brighter fares my stream,—

Who drink it shall not thirst again;

No darkness stains its equal gleam,

And ages drop in it like rain.

Edition: orig; Page: [214]

waldeinsamkeit.

I do not count the hours I spend

In wandering by the sea:

The forest is my loyal friend,

Like God it useth me.

In plains that room for shadows make

Of skirting hills to lie,

Bound in by streams which give and take

Their colors from the sky;

Or on the mountain-crest sublime,

Or down the oaken glade,

O what have I to do with time?

For this the day was made.

Cities of mortals woe-begone

Fantastic care derides,

But in the serious landscape lone

Stern benefit abides.

Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy,

And merry is only a mask of sad,

But, sober on a fund of joy,

The woods at heart are glad.

There the great Planter plants

Of fruitful worlds the grain,

And with a million spells enchants

The souls that walk in pain.

Edition: orig; Page: [215]

Still on the seeds of all he made

The rose of beauty burns;

Through times that wear and forms that fade,

Immortal youth returns.

The black ducks mouuting from the lake,

The pigeon in the pines,

The bittern's boom, a desert make

Which no false art refines.

Down in yon watery nook,

Where bearded mists divide,

The gray old gods whom Chaos knew,

The sires of Nature, hide.

Aloft, in secret veins of air,

Blows the sweet breath of song,

O, few to scale those uplands dare,

Though they to all belong!

See thou bring not to field or stone

The fancies found in books;

Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own,

To brave the landscape's looks.

Oblivion here thy wisdom is,

Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;

For a proud idleness like this

Crowns all thy mean affairs.

Edition: orig; Page: [216]

terminus.

It is time to be old,

To take in sail:—

The god of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: ‘No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There's not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Timely wise accept the terms,

Soften the fall with wary foot;

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And,—fault of novel germs,—

Mature the unfallen fruit.

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,

Bad husbands of their fires,

Who, when they gave thee breath,

Failed to bequeath

The needful sinew stark as once,

The Baresark marrow to thy bones,

But left a legacy of ebbing veins,

Inconstant beat and nerveless reins,—

Edition: orig; Page: [217]

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.’

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

And every wave is charmed.’

the nun's aspiration.

The yesterday doth never smile,

The day goes drudging through the while,

Yet, in the name of Godhead, I

The morrow front, and can defy;

Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,

Cannot withhold his conquering aid.

Ah me! it was my childhood's thought,

If He should make my web a blot

On life's fair picture of delight,

My heart's content would find it right.

But O, these waves and leaves,—

When happy stoic Nature grieves,

No human speech so beautiful

As their murmurs mine to lull.

On this altar God hath built

I lay my vanity and guilt;

Edition: orig; Page: [218]

Nor me can Hope or Passion urge

Hearing as now the lofty dirge

Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,

Nature's funeral high and dim,—

Sable pageantry of clouds,

Mourning summer laid in shrouds.

Many a day shall dawn and die,

Many an angel wander by,

And passing, light my sunken turf

Moist perhaps by ocean surf,

Forgotten amid splendid tombs,

Yet wreathed and hid by summer blooms.

On earth I dream;—I die to be:

Time, shake not thy bald head at me.

I challenge thee to hurry past

Or for my turn to fly too fast.

Think me not numbed or halt with age,

Or cares that earth to earth engage,

Caught with love's cord of twisted beams,

Or mired by climate's gross extremes.

I tire of shams, I rush to be:

I pass with yonder comet free,—

Pass with the comet into space

Which mocks thy æons to embrace;

Æons which tardily unfold

Realm beyond realm,—extent untold;

No early morn, no evening late,—

Realms self-upheld, disdaining Fate,

Whose shining sons, too great for fame,

Never heard thy weary name;

Nor lives the tragic bard to say

How drear the part I held in one,

How lame the other limped away.

Edition: orig; Page: [219]

april.

The April winds are magical

And thrill our tuneful frames;

The garden walks are passional

To bachelors and dames.

The hedge is gemmed with diamonds,

The air with Cupids full.

The cobweb clues of Rosamond

Guide lovers to the pool.

Each dimple in the water,

Each leaf that shades the rock

Can cozen, pique and flatter,

Can parley and provoke.

Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,

Know more than any book.

Down with your doleful problems,

And court the sunny brook.

The south-winds are quick-witted,

The schools are sad and slow,

The masters quite omitted

The lore we care to know.

Edition: orig; Page: [220]

maiden speech of the æolian harp.

Soft and softlier hold me, friends!

Thanks if your genial care

Unbind and give me to the air.

Keep your lips or finger-tips

For flute or spinet's dancing chips;

I await a tenderer touch,

I ask more or not so much:

Give me to the atmosphere,—

Where is the wind, my brother,—where?

Lift the sash, lay me within,

Lend me your ears, and I begin.

For gentle harp to gentle hearts

The secret of the world imparts;

And not to-day and not to-morrow

Can drain its wealth of hope and sorrow;

But day by day, to loving ear

Unlocks new sense and loftier cheer.

I've come to live with you, sweet friends,

This home my minstrel-journeyings ends.

Many and subtle are my lays,

The latest better than the first,

For I can mend the happiest days

And charm the anguish of the worst.

Edition: orig; Page: [221]

cupido.

The solid, solid universe

Is pervious to Love;

With bandaged eyes he never errs,

Around, below, above.

His blinding light

He flingeth white

On God's and Satan's brood,

And reconciles

By mystic wiles

The evil and the good.

the past.

The debt is paid,

The verdict said,

The Furies laid,

The plague is stayed,

All fortunes made;

Turn the key and bolt the door,

Sweet is death forevermore.

Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,

Nor murdering hate, can enter in.

All is now secure and fast;

Not the gods can shake the Past;

Flies-to the adamantine door

Bolted down forevermore.

None can re-enter there,—

Edition: orig; Page: [222]

No thief so politic,

No Satan with a royal trick

Steal in by window, chink, or hole,

To bind or unbind, add what lacked,

Insert a leaf, or forge a name,

New-face or finish what is packed,

Alter or mend eternal Fact.

the last farewell. lines written by the author's brother, edward bliss emerson, whilst sailing out of boston harbor, bound for the island of porto rico, in 1832.

Farewell, ye lofty spires

That cheered the holy light!

Farewell, domestic fires

That broke the gloom of night!

Too soon those spires are lost,

Too fast we leave the bay,

Too soon by ocean tost

From hearth and home away,

Far away, far away.

Farewell the busy town,

The wealthy and the wise,

Kind smile and honest frown

From bright, familiar eyes.

All these are fading now;

Our brig hastes on her way,

Edition: orig; Page: [223]

Her unremembering prow

Is leaping o'er the sea,

Far away, far away.

Farewell, my mother fond,

Too kind, too good to me;

Nor pearl nor diamond

Would pay my debt to thee.

But even thy kiss denies

Upon my cheek to stay;

The winged vessel flies,

And billows round her play,

Far away, far away.

Farewell, my brothers true,

My betters, yet my peers;

How desert without you

My few and evil years!

But though aye one in heart,

Together sad or gay,

Rude ocean doth us part;

We separate to-day,

Far away, far away.

Farewell I breathe again

To dim New England's shore;

My heart shall beat not when

I pant for thee no more.

In yon green palmy isle,

Beneath the tropic ray,

I murmur never while

For thee and thine I pray;

Far away, far away.

Edition: orig; Page: [224]

in memoriam. edward bliss emerson.

I mourn upon this battle-field,

But not for those who perished here.

Behold the river-bank

Whither the angry farmers came,

In sloven dress and broken rank,

Nor thought of fame.

Their deed of blood

All mankind praise;

Even the serene Reason says,

It was well done.

The wise and simple have one glance

To greet yon stern head-stone,

Which more of pride than pity gave

To mark the Briton's friendless grave.

Yet it is a stately tomb;

The grand return

Of eve and morn,

The year's fresh bloom,

The silver cloud,

Might grace the dust that is most proud.

Yet not of these I muse

In this ancestral place,

But of a kindred face

That never joy or hope shall here diffuse.

Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star:

What hast thou to do with these

Edition: orig; Page: [225]

Haunting this bank's historic trees?

Thou born for noblest life,

For action's field, for victor's car,

Thon living champion of the right?

To these their penalty belonged:

I grudge not these their bed of death,

But thine to thee, who never wronged

The poorest that drew breath.

All inborn power that could

Consist with homage to the good

Flamed from his martial eye;

He who seemed a soldier born,

He should have the helmet worn,

All friends to fend, all foes defy,

Fronting foes of God and man,

Frowning down the evil-doer,

Battling for the weak and poor.

His from youth the leader's look

Gave the law which others took,

And never poor beseeching glance

Shamed that sculptured countenance.

There is no record left on earth,

Save in tablets of the heart,

Of the rich inherent worth,

Of the grace that on him shone,

Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit:

He could not frame a word unfit,

An act unworthy to be done;

Honor prompted every glance,

Honor came and sat beside him,

In lowly cot or painful road,

Edition: orig; Page: [226]

And evermore the cruel god.

Cried, “Onward!” and the palm-crown showed.

Born for success he seemed,

With grace to win, with heart to hold,

With shining gifts that took all eyes,

With budding power in college-halls,

As pledged in coming days to forge

Weapons to guard the State, or scourge

Tyrants despite their guards or walls.

On his young promise Beauty smiled,

Drew his free homage unbeguiled,

And prosperous Age held out his hand,

And richly his large future planned,

And troops of friends enjoyed the tide,—

All, all was given, and only health denied.

I see him with superior smile

Hunted by Sorrow's grisly train

In lands remote, in toil and pain,

With angel patience labor on,

With the high port he wore erewhile,

When, foremost of the youthful band,

The prizes in all lists he won;

Nor bate one jot of heart or hope,

And, least of all, the loyal tie

Which holds to home ‘neath every sky,

The joy and pride the pilgrim feels

In hearts which round the hearth at home

Keep pulse for pulse with those who roam.

What generous beliefs console

The brave whom Fate denies the goal!

If others reach it, is content;

To Heaven's high will his will is bent.

Edition: orig; Page: [227]

Firm on his heart relied,

What lot soe'er betide,

Work of his hand

He nor repents nor grieves,

Pleads for itself the fact,

As unrepenting Nature leaves

Her every act.

Fell the bolt on the branching oak;

The rainbow of his hope was broke;

No craven cry, no secret tear,—

He told no pang, he knew no fear;

Its peace sublime his aspect kept,

His purpose woke, his features slept;

And yet between the spasms of pain

His genius beamed with joy again.

O'er thy rich dust the endless smile

Of Nature in thy Spanish isle

Hints never loss or cruel break

And sacrifice for love's dear sake,

Nor mourn the unalterable Days

That Genius goes and Folly stays.

What matters how, or from what ground,

The freed soul its Creator found?

Alike thy memory embalms

That orange-grove, that isle of palms,

And these loved banks, whose oak-boughs bold

Root in the blood of heroes old.

Edition: orig; Page: [228]

experience.

The lords of life, the lords of life,—

I saw them pass

In their own guise,

Like and unlike,

Portly and grim,—

Use and Surprise,

Surface and Dream,

Succession swift and spectral Wrong,

Temperament without a tongue,

And the inventor of the game

Omnipresent without name;—

Some to see, some to be guessed,

They marched from east to west:

Little man, least of all,

Among the legs of his guardians tall,

Walked about with puzzled look.

Him by the hand dear Nature took,

Dearest Nature, strong and kind,

Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind!

To-morrow they will wear another face,

The founder thou; these are thy race!

Edition: orig; Page: [229]

compensation.

The wings of Time are black and white,

Pied with morning and with night.

Mountain tall and ocean deep

Trembling balance duly keep.

In changing moon and tidal wave

Glows the feud of Want and Have.

Gauge of more and less through space,

Electric star or pencil plays,

The lonely Earth amid the balls

That hurry through the eternal halls,

A makeweight flying to the void,

Supplemental asteroid,

Or compensatory spark,

Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine;

Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:

Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,

None from its stock that vine can reave.

Fear not, then, thou child infirm,

There's no god dare wrong a worm;

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,

And power to him who power exerts.

Hast not thy share? On winged feet,

Lo! it rushes thee to meet;

And all that Nature made thy own,

Floating in air or pent in stone,

Will rive the hills and swim the sea,

And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

Edition: orig; Page: [230]

politics.

Gold and iron are good

To buy iron and gold;

All earth's fleece and food

For their like are sold.

Boded Merlin wise,

Proved Napoleon great,

Nor kind nor coinage buys

Aught above its rate.

Fear, Craft and Avarice

Cannot rear a State.

Out of dust to build

What is more than dust,—

Walls Amphion piled

Phoæbus stablish must.

When the Muses nine

With the Virtues meet,

Find to their design

An Atlantic seat,

By green orchard boughs

Fended from the heat,

Where the statesman ploughs

Furrow for the wheat,—

When the Church is social worth,

When the state-house is the hearth,

Then the perfect State is come,

The republican at home.

Edition: orig; Page: [231]

heroism.

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,

Sugar spends to fatten slaves,

Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;

Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons,

Drooping oft in wreaths of dread,

Lightning-knotted round his head;

The hero is not fed on sweets,

Daily his own heart he eats;

Chambers of the great are jails,

And head-winds right for royal sails.

character.1

The sun set, but set not his hope:

Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:

Fixed on the enormous galaxy,

Deeper and older seemed his eye;

And matched his sufferance sublime

The taciturnity of time.

He spoke, and words more soft than rain

Brought the Age of Gold again:

His action won such reverence sweet

As hid all measure of the feat.

Edition: orig; Page: [232]

culture.

Can rules or tutors educate

The semigod whom we await?

He must be musical,

Tremulous, impressional,

Alive to gentle influence

Of landscape and of sky,

And tender to the spirit-touch

Of man's or maiden's eye:

But, to his native centre fast,

Shall into Future fuse the Past,

And the world's flowing fates in his own mould recast.

friendship.

A ruddy drop of manly blood

The surging sea outweighs,

The world uncertain comes and goes;

The lover rooted stays.

I fancied he was fled,—

And, after many a year,

Glowed unexhausted kindliness,

Like daily sunrise there.

My careful heart was free again,

O friend, my bosom said,

Through thee alone the sky is arched,

Through thee the rose is red;

All things through thee take nobler form,

Edition: orig; Page: [233]

And look beyond the earth,

The mill-round of our fate appears

A sun-path in thy worth.

Me too thy nobleness has taught

To master my despair;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendship fair.

beauty.

Was never form and never face

So sweet to Seyd as only grace

Which did not slumber like a stone,

But hovered gleaming and was gone.

Beauty chased he everywhere,

In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.

He smote the lake to feed his eye

With the beryl beam of the broken wave;

He flung in pebbles well to hear

The moment's music which they gave.

Oft pealed for him a lofty tone

From nodding pole and belting zone.

He heard a voice none else could hear

From centred and from errant sphere.

The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,

Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.

In dens of passion, and pits of woe,

He saw strong Eros struggling through,

To sun the dark and solve the curse,

And beam to the bounds of the universe.

Edition: orig; Page: [234]

While thus to love he gave his days

In loyal worship, scorning praise,

How spread their lures for him in vain

Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!

He thought it happier to be dead,

To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

manners.

Grace, Beauty and Caprice

Build this golden portal;

Graceful women, chosen men,

Dazzle every mortal.

Their sweet and lofty countenance

His enchanted food;

He need not go to them, their forms

Beset his solitude.

He looketh seldom in their face,

His eyes explore the ground,—

The green grass is a looking-glass

Whereon their traits are found.

Little and less he says to them,

So dances his heart in his breast:

Their tranquil mien bereaveth him

Of wit, of words, of rest.

Too weak to win, too fond to shun

The tyrants of his doom,

The much deceived Endymion

Slips behind a tomb.

Edition: orig; Page: [235]

art.

Give to barrows, trays and pans

Grace and glimmer of romance;

Bring the moonlight into noon

Hid in gleaming piles of stone;

On the city's paved street

Plant gardens lined with lilacs sweet;

Let spouting fountains cool the air,

Singing in the sun-baked square;

Let statue, picture, park and hall,

Ballad, flag and festival,

The past restore, the day adorn,

And make to-morrow a new morn.

So shall the drudge in dusty frock

Spy behind the city clock

Retinues of airy kings.

Skirts of angels, starry wings,

His fathers shining in bright fables,

His children fed at heavenly tables.

'T is the privilege of Art

Thus to play its cheerful part,

Man on earth to acclimate

And bend the exile to his fate,

And, moulded of one element

With the days and firmament,

Teach him on these as stairs to climb.

And live on even terms with Time;

Whilst upper life the slender rill

Of human sense doth overfill.

Edition: orig; Page: [236]

spiritual laws.

The living Heaven thy prayers respect,

House at once and architect,

Quarrying man's rejected hours,

Builds therewith eternal towers;

Sole and self-commanded works,

Fears not undermining days,

Grows by decays,

And, by the famous might that lurks

In reaction and recoil,

Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;

Forging, through swart arms of Offence,

The silver seat of Innocence.

unity.

Space is ample, east and west,

But two cannot go abreast,

Cannot travel in it two:

Yonder masterful cuckoo

Crowds every egg out of the nest,

Quick or dead, except its own;

A spell is laid on sod and stone,

Night and Day were tampered with,

Every quality and pith

Surcharged and sultry with a power

That works its will on age and hour.

Edition: orig; Page: [237]

worship.

This is he, who, felled by foes,

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:

He to captivity was sold,

But him no prison-bars would hold:

Though they sealed him in a rock,

Mountain chains he can unlock:

Thrown to lions for their meat,

The crouching lion kissed his feet;

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,

But arched o'er him an honoring vault.

This is he men miscall Fate,

Threading dark ways, arriving late,

But ever coming in time to crown

The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.

He is the oldest, and best known,

More near than aught thou call'st thy own,

Yet, greeted in another's eyes,

Disconcerts with glad surprise.

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,

Floods with blessings unawares.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line

Severing rightly his from thine,

Which is human, which divine.

Edition: orig; Page: [238]

quatrains.

a. h.

High was her heart, and yet was well inclined,

Her manners made of bounty well refined;

Far capitals and marble courts, her eye still seemed to see,

Minstrels and kings and high-born dames, and of the best that be.

“suum cuique.”

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?

Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.

hush!

Every thought is public,

Every nook is wide;

Thy gossips spread each whisper,

And the gods from side to side.

orator.

He who has no hands

Perforce must use his tongue;

Foxes are so cunning

Because they are not strong.

Edition: orig; Page: [239]

artist.

Qutt the hut, frequent the palace,

Reck not what the people say;

For still, where'er the trees grow biggest,

Huntsmen find the easiest way.

poet.

Ever the Poet from the land

Steers his bark and trims his sail;

Bight out to sea his courses stand,

New worlds to find in pinnace frail.

poet.

To clothe the fiery thought

In simple words succeeds,

For still the craft of genius is

To mask a king in weeds.

botanist.

Go thou to thy learned task,

I stay with the flowers of spring;

Do thou of the ages ask

What me the hours will bring.

gardener.

True Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,

Expound the Vedas of the violet,

Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,

See the plum redden, and the beurræ stoop.

Edition: orig; Page: [240]

forester.

He took the color of his vest

From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast;

For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,

So walks the woodman, unespied.

northman.

The gale that wrecked you on the sand.

It helped my rowers to row;

The storm is my best galley hand

And drives me where I go.

from alcuin.

The sea is the road of the bold,

Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,

The pit wherein the streams are rolled

And fountain of the rains.

excelsior.

Over his head were the maple buds,

And over the tree was the moon,

And over the moon were the starry studs

That drop from the angels’ shoon.

s. h.

With beams December planets dart

His cold eye truth and conduct scanned,

July was in his sunny heart,

October in his liberal hand.

Edition: orig; Page: [241]

borrowing. from the french.

Some of your hurts you have cured,

And the sharpest you still have survived,

But what torments of grief you endured

From evils which never arrived!

nature.

Boon Nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold,

And trains us on to slight the new, as if it were the old:

But blest is he, who, playing deep, yet haply asks not why,

Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

fate.

Her planted eye to-day controls,

Is in the morrow most at home,

And sternly calls to being souls

That corse her when they come.

horoscope.

Ere he was born, the stars of fate

Plotted to make him rich and great:

When from the womb the babe was loosed,

The gate of gifts behind him closed.

Edition: orig; Page: [242]

power.

Cast the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,

Wintered with the hawk and fox,

Power and speed be hands and feet.

climacteric.

I am not wiser for my age,

Nor skilful by my grief;

Life loiters at the book's first page,—

Ah! could we turn the leaf.

heri, cras, hodie.

Shines the last age, the next with hope is seen,

To-day slinks poorly off unmarked between:

Future or Past no richer secret folds,

O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds.

memory.

Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall

Shadows of the thoughts of day,

And thy fortunes, as they fall,

The bias of the will betray.

love.

Love on his errand bound to go

Can swim the flood and wade through snow,

Where way is none, 't will creep and wind

And eat through Alps its home to find.

Edition: orig; Page: [243]

sacrifice.

Though love repine, and reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply,—

“T is man's perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die.'

pericles.

Well and wisely said the Greek,

Be thou faithful, but not fond;

To the altar's foot thy fellow seek,—

The Furies wait beyond.

casella.

Test of the poet is knowledge of love,

For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;

Never was poet, of late or of yore,

Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

shakspeare.

I See all human wits

Are measured hut a few;

Unmeasured still my Shakspeare sits,

Lone as the blessed Jew.

hafiz.

Her passions the shy violet

From Hafiz never hides;

Love-longings of the raptured bird

The bird to him confides.

Edition: orig; Page: [244]

nature in leasts.

As sings the pine-tree in the wind,

So sings in the wind a sprig of the pine;

Her strength and soul has laughing France

Shed in each drop of wine.

ΑΔΑΚΡΥΝ ΝΕΜΟΝΤΑΙ ΑΙΩΝΑ.

A New commandment,' said the smiling Muse,

‘I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach’;—

Lather, Fox, Behmen, Swedenborg, grew pale,

And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore

Hafiz and Shakspeare with their shining choirs.

translations.

sonnet of michael angelo buonarotti.

Never did sculptor's dream unfold

A form which marble doth not hold

In its white block; yet it therein shall find

Only the hand secure and bold

Which still obeys the mind.

So hide in thee, thou heavenly dame,

The ill I shun, the good I claim;

I alas! not well alive,

Miss the aim whereto I strive.

Edition: orig; Page: [245]

Not love, nor beauty's pride,

Nor Fortune, nor thy coldness, can I chide,

If, whilst within thy heart abide

Both death and pity, my unequal skill

Fails of the life, but draws the death and ill.

the exile. from the persian of kermani.

In Farsistan the violet spreads

Its leaves to the rival sky;

I ask how far is the Tigris flood,

And the vine that grows thereby?

Except the amber morning wind,

Not one salutes me here;

There is no lover in all Bagdat

To offer the exile cheer.

I know that thou, O morning wind!

O'er Kernan's meadow blowest,

And thou, heart-warming nightingale!

My father's orchard knowest.

The merchant hath stuffs of price,

And gems from the sea-washed strand,

And princes offer me grace

To stay in the Syrian land;

But what is gold for, but for gifts?

And dark, without love, is the day;

Edition: orig; Page: [246]

And all that I see in Bagdat

Is the Tigris to float me away.

from hafiz.

I said to heaven that glowed above,

O hide yon sun-filled zone,

Hide all the stars you boast;

For, in the world of love

And estimation true,

The heaped-up harvest of the moon

Is worth one barley-corn at most,

The Pleiads' sheaf but two.

If my darling should depart,

And search the skies for pronder friends,

God forbid my angry heart

In other love should seek amends.

When the blue horizon's hoop

Me a little pinches here,

Instant to my grave I stoop,

And go find thee in the sphere.

epitaph.

Bethink, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest.

Mad Destiny this tender stripling played;

For a warm breast of maiden to his breast,

She laid a slab of marble on his head.

Edition: orig; Page: [247]

They say, through patience, chalk

Becomes a ruby stone;

Ah, yes! but by the true heart's blood

The chalk is crimson grown.

friendship.

Thou foolish Hafiz! Say, do churls

Know the worth of Oman's pearls?

Give the gem which dims the moon

To the noblest, or to none.

Dearest, where thy shadow falls,

Beauty sits and Music calls;

Where thy form and favor come,

All good creatures have their home.

On prince or bride no diamond stone

Half so gracious ever shone,

As the light of enterprise

Beaming from a young man's eyes.

from omar khayyam.

Each spot where tulips prank their stats

Has drunk the life-blood of the great;

The violets yon field which stain

Are moles of beauties Time hath slain.

Edition: orig; Page: [248]

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,

And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

On two days it steads not to run from thy grave,

The appointed, and the unappointed day;

On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,

Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.

from ibn jemin.

Two things thou shalt not long for, if thou love a mind serene;—

A woman to thy wife, though she were a crowned queen;

And the second, borrowed money,—though the smiling lender say

That he will not demand the debt until the Judgment Day.

the flute. from hilali.

Hark what, now loud, now low, the pining flute complains,

Without tongue, yellow-cheeked, full of winds that wail and sigh;

Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,—

If I am I; thou, thou; or thou art I?

Edition: orig; Page: [249]

to the shah. from hafiz.

Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down,

Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear.

to the shah. from enweri.

Not in their houses stand the stars,

But o'er the pinnacles of thine!

to the shah. from enweri.

From thy worth and weight the stars gravitate,

And the equipoise of heaven is thy house's equipoise.

song of seyd nimtollah of kuhistan. [Among the religious customs of the dervishes is an astronomical dance, in which the dervish imitates the movements of the heavenly bodies, by spinning on his own axis, whilst at the same time he revolves round the Sheikh in the centre, representing the sun; and, a he spins, he sings the Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan]

Spin the ball! I reel, I burn,

Nor head from foot can I discern,

Nor my heart from love of mine,

Nor the wine-cup from the wine.

Edition: orig; Page: [250]

All my doing, all my leaving,

Beaches not to my perceiving;

Lost in whirling spheres I rove,

And know only that I love.

I am seeker of the stone,

Living gem of Solomon;

From the shore of souls arrived,

In the sea of sense I dived;

But what is land, or what is wave,

To me who only jewels crave?

Love is the air-fed fire intense,

And my heart the frankincense;

As the rich aloes flames, I glow,

Yet the censer cannot know.

I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing;

Stand not, pause not, in my going.

Ask not me, as Muftis can,

To recite the Alcoran;

Well I love the meaning sweet,—

I tread the book beneath my feet.

Lo! the God's love blazes higher,

Till all difference expire.

What are Moslems? what are Giaours?

All are Love's, and all are ours.

I embrace the true believers,

But I reck not of deceivers.

Firm to Heaven my bosom clings,

Heedless of inferior things;

Down on earth there, underfoot,

What men chatter know I not.

Edition: orig; Page: [[251]]

iii.: appendix.

Edition: orig; Page: [[252]] Edition: orig; Page: [[253]]

the poet.1

i.

Right upward on the road of fame

With sounding steps the poet came;

Born and nourished in miracles,

His feet were shod with golden bells,

Or where he stepped the soil did peal

As if the dust were glass and steel.

The gallant child where'er he came

Threw to each fact a tuneful name.

The things whereon he cast his eyes

Could not the nations rebaptize,

Nor Time's snows hide the names he set,

Nor last posterity forget.

Yet every scroll whereon he wrote

In latent fire his secret thought,

Fell unregarded to the ground,

Unseen by such as stood around.

The pious wind took it away,

The reverent darkness hid the lay.

Methought like water-haunting birds

Divers or dippers were his words,

And idle clowns beside the mere

At the new vision gape and jeer.

Edition: orig; Page: [254]

But when the noisy scorn was past,

Emerge the wingèd words in haste.

New-bathed, new-trimmed, on healthy wing,

Right to the heaven they steer and sing.

A Brother of the world, his song

Sounded like a tempest strong

Which tore from oaks their branches broad,

And stars from the ecliptic road.

Times wore he as his clothing-weeds,

He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.

As melts the iceberg in the seas,

As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,

As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,

The solid kingdoms like a dream

Resist in vain his motive strain,

They totter now and float amain.

For the Muse gave special charge

His learning should be deep and large,

And his training should not scant

The deepest lore of wealth or want:

His flesh should feel, his eyes should read

Every maxim of dreadful Need;

In its fulness he should taste

Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;

Full fed, but not intoxicated;

He should be loved; he should be hated

A blooming child to children dear,

His heart should palpitate with fear.

And well he loved to quit his home

And, Calmuck, in his wagon roam

To read new landscapes and old skies;—

Edition: orig; Page: [255]

But oh, to see his solar eyes

Like meteors which chose their way

And rived the dark like a new day!

Not lazy grazing on all they saw,

Each chimney-pot and cottage door,

Farm-gear and village picket-fence,

But, feeding on magnificence,

They bounded to the horizon's edge

And searched with the sun's privilege.

Landward they reached the mountains old

Where pastoral tribes their flocks infold,

Saw rivers run seaward by cities high

And the seas wash the low-hung sky;

Saw the endless rack of the firmament

And the sailing moon where the cloud was rent,

And through man and woman and sea and star

Saw the dance of Nature forward and far,

Through worlds and races and terms and times

Saw musical order and pairing rhymes.

ii.

The gods talk in the breath of the woods,

They talk in the shaken pine,

And fill the long reach of the old seashore

With dialogue divine;

And the poet who overhears

Some random word they say

Is the fated man of men

Whom the ages must obey:

One who having nectar drank

Into blissful orgies sank;

He takes no mark of night or day,

He cannot go, he cannot stay,

Edition: orig; Page: [256]

He would, yet would not, counsel keep,

But, like a walker in his sleep

With staring eye that seeth none,

Ridiculously up and down

Seeks how he may fitly tell

The heart-o'erlading miracle.

Not yet, not yet,

Impatient friend,—

A little while attend;

Not yet I sing: but I must wait,

My hand upon the silent string,

Fully until the end.

I see the coming light,

I see the scattered gleams,

Aloft, beneath, on left and right

The stars' own ether beams;

These are but seeds of days,

Not yet a steadfast morn,

An intermittent blaze,

An embryo god unborn.

How all things sparkle,

The dust is alive,

To the birth they arrive:

I snuff the breath of my morning afar,

I see the pale lustres condense to a star

The fading colors fix,

The vanishing are seen,

And the world that shall be

Twins the world that has been.

I know the appointed hour,

I greet my office well,

Never faster, never slower

Revolves the fatal wheel!

Edition: orig; Page: [257]

The Fairest enchants me,

The Mighty commands me,

Saying, ‘Stand in thy place;

Up and eastward turn thy face;

As mountains for the morning wait,

Coming early, coming late,

So thou attend the enriching Fate

Which none can stay, and none accelerate.

I am neither faint nor weary,

Fill thy will, O faultless heart!

Here from youth to age I tarry,—

Count it flight of bird or dart.

My heart at the heart of things

Heeds no longer lapse of time,

Rushing ages moult their wings,

Bathing in thy day sublime.

The sun set, but set not his hope:—

Stars rose, his faith was earlier up:

Fixed on the enormous galaxy,

Deeper and older seemed his eye,

And matched his sufferance sublime

The taciturnity of Time.

Beside his hut and shading oak,

Thus to himself the poet spoke,

‘I have supped to-night with gods,

I will not go under a wooden roof:

As I walked among the hills

In the love which nature fills,

The great stars did not shine aloof,

They hurried down from their deep abodes

And hemmed me in their glittering troop.

Edition: orig; Page: [258]

‘Divine Inviters! I accept

The courtesy ye have shown and kept

From ancient ages for the bard,

To modalate

With finer fate

A fortune harsh and hard.

With aim like yours

I watch your course,

Who never break your lawful dance

By error or intemperance.

O birds of ether without wings!

O heavenly ships without a sail!

O fire of fire! O best of things!

O mariners who never fail!

Sail swiftly through your amber vault,

An animated law, a presence to exalt.’

Ah, happy if a sun or star

Could chain the wheel of Fortune's car,

And give to hold an even state,

Neither dejected nor elate,

That haply man upraised might keep

The height of Fancy's far-eyed steep.

In vain: the stars are glowing wheels,

Giddy with motion Nature reels,

Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream,

The mountains flow, the solids seem,

Change acts, reacts; back, forward hurled,

And pause were palsy to the world.—

The morn is come: the starry crowds

Are hid behind the thrice-piled clouds;

The new day lowers, and equal odds

Have changed not less the guest of gods;

Edition: orig; Page: [259]

Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn,

The child of genius sits forlorn:

Between two sleeps a short day's stealth,

‘Mid many ails a brittle health,

A cripple of God, half true, half formed,

And by great sparks Promethean warmed,

Constrained by impotence to adjourn

To infinite time his eager turn,

His lot of action at the urn.

He by false usage pinned about

No breath therein, no passage out,

Cast wishful glances at the stars

And wishful saw the Ocean stream:—

Merge me in the brute universe,

Or lift to a diviner dream!’

Beside him sat enduring love,

Upon him noble eyes did rest,

Which, for the Genius that there strove,

The follies bore that it invest.

They spoke not, for their earnest sense

Outran the craft of eloquence.

He whom God had thus preferred,—

To whom sweet angels ministered,

Saluted him each morn as brother,

And bragged his virtues to each other,—

Alas! how were they so beguiled,

And they so pure? He, foolish child,

A facile, reckless, wandering will,

Eager for good, not hating ill,

Thanked Nature for each stroke she dealt;

On his tense chords all strokes were felt,

Edition: orig; Page: [260]

The good, the bad with equal zeal,

He asked, he only asked, to feel.

Timid, self-pleasing, sensitive,

With Gods, with fools, content to live.

Bended to fops who bent to him;

Surface with surfaces did swim.

‘Sorrow, sorrow!’ the angels cried,

‘Is this dear Nature's manly pride.’

Call hither thy mortal enemy,

Make him glad thy fall to see!

Yon waterflag, yon sighing osier,

A drop can shake, a breath can fan;

Maidens laugh and weep; Composure

Is the pudency of man.'

Again by night the poet went

From the lighted halls

Beneath the darkling firmament

To the seashore, to the old seawalls,

Forth paced a star beneath the cloud,

The constellation glittered soon,—

‘You have no lapse; so have ye glowed

But once in your dominion.

And yet, dear stars, I know ye shine

Only by needs and loves of mine,

Light-loving, light-asking life in me

Feeds those eternal lamps I see.

And I to whom your light has spoken.

I, pining to be one of you,

I fall, my faith is broken,

Ye scorn me from your deeps of blue.

Or if perchance, ye orbs of Fate.

Edition: orig; Page: [261]

Your ne'er averted glance

Beams with a will compassionate

On sons of time and chance,

Then clothe these hands with power

In just proportion.

Nor plant immense designs

Where equal means are none.’

chorus of spirits.

Means, dear brother, ask them not;

Soul's desire is means enow,

Pure content is angel's lot.

Thine own theatre art thou.

Gentler far than falls the snow

In the woodwalks still and low

Fell the lesson on his heart

And woke the fear lest angels part.

poet.

I see your forms with deep content,

I know that ye are excellent,

But will ye stay?

I hear the rustle of wings,

Ye meditate what to say

Ere ye go to quit me for ever and aye.

spirits.

Brother, we are no phantom band;

Brother, accept this fatal hand.

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Aches thine unbelieving heart

With the fear that we must part?

See, all we are rooted here

By one thought to one same sphere;

From thyself thou canst not flee,—

From thyself no more can we.

poet.

Suns and stars their courses keep,

But not angels of the deep:

Day and night their turn observe,

But the day of day may swerve.

Is there warrant that the waves

Of thought in their mysterious caves

Will heap in me their highest tide,

In me therewith beatified?

Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,

The moon comes back,—the Spirit not.

spirits.

Brother, sweeter is the Law

Than all the grace Love ever saw;

We are its suppliants. By it, we

Draw the breath of Eternity;

Serve thou it not for daily bread,—

Serve it for pain and fear and need.

Love it, though it hide its light;

By love behold the sun at night.

If the Law should thee forget,

More enamoured serve it yet;

Though it hate thee, suffer long;

Put the Spirit in the wrong;

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Brother, no decrepitude

Chills the limbs of Time;

As fleet his feet, his hands as good,

His vision as sublime:

On Nature's wheels there is no rust;

Nor less on man's enchanted dust

Beauty and Force alight.

fragments on the poet and the poetic gift.1

i.

There are beggars in Iran and Araby,

Said was hungrier than all;

Hafiz said he was a fly

That came to every festival.

He came a pilgrim to the Mosque

On trail of camel and caravan,

Knew every temple and kiosk

Out from Mecca to Ispahan;

Northward he went to the snowy hills,

At court he sat in the grave Divan.

His music was the south-wind's sigh,

His lamp, the maiden's downcast eye,

And ever the spell of beauty came

And turned the drowsy world to flame.

By lake and stream and gleaming hall

And modest copse and the forest tall,

Edition: orig; Page: [264]

Where'er he went, the magic guide

Kept its place by the poet's side.

Said melted the days like cups of pearl,

Served high and low, the lord and the churl,

Loved harebells nodding on a rock,

A cabin hung with curling smoke,

Ring of axe or hum of wheel

Or gleam which use can paint on steel,

And huts and tents; nor loved he less

Stately lords in palaces,

Princely women hard to please,

Fenced by form and ceremony,

Decked by courtly rites and dress

And etiquette of gentilesse.

But when the mate of the snow and wind,

He left each civil scale behind:

Him wood-gods fed with honey wild

And of his memory beguiled.

He loved to watch and wake

When the wing of the south-wind whipt the lake

And the glassy surface in ripples brake

And fled in pretty frowns away

Like the flitting boreal lights,

Rippling roses in northern nights,

Or like the thrill of Æolian strings

In which the sudden wind-god rings.

In caves and hollow trees he crept

And near the wolf and panther slept.

He came to the green ocean's brim

And saw the wheeling sea-birds skim.

Summer and winter, o'er the wave.

Like creatures of a skiey mould,

Impassible to heat or cold.

Edition: orig; Page: [265]

He stood before the tumbling main

With joy too tense for sober brain;

He shared the life of the element,

The tie of blood and home was rent:

As if in him the welkin walked,

The winds took flesh, the mountains talked,

And he the bard, a crystal soul

Sphered and concentric with the whole.

ii.

The Dervish whined to Said,

“Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.”

But Saadi answered,

“Once with manlike love and fear

I gave thee for an hour my ear,

I kept the sun and stars at bay,

And love, for words thy tongue could say.

I cannot sell my heaven again

For all that rattles in thy brain.”

iii.

Said Saadi, “When I stood before

Hassan the camel-driver's door,

I scorned the fame of Timour brave;

Timour, to Hassan, was a slave.

In every glance of Hassan's eye

I read great years of victory,

And I, who cower mean and small

In the frequent interval

When wisdom not with me resides,

Worship Toil's wisdom that abides.

Edition: orig; Page: [266]

I shunned his eyes, that faithful man's,

I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance.”

iv.

The civil world will much forgive

To bards who from its maxims live,

But if, grown bold, the poet dare

Bend his practice to his prayer

And following his mighty heart

Shame the times and live apart,—

Vœ soils! I found this,

That of goods I could not miss

If I fell within the line,

Once a member, all was mine,

Houses, banquets, gardens, fountains,

Fortune's delectable mountains;

But if I would walk alone,

Was neither cloak nor crumb my own.

And thus the high Muse treated me,

Directly never greeted me,

But when she spread her dearest spells,

Feigned to speak to some one else.

I was free to overhear,

Or I might at will forbear;

Yet mark me well, that idle word

Thus at random overheard

Was the symphony of spheres,

And proverb of a thousand years,

The light wherewith all planets shone,

The livery all events put on,

It fell in rain, it grew in grain,

It put on flesh in friendly form,

Frowned in my foe and growled in storm,

Edition: orig; Page: [267]

It spoke in Tullius Cicero,

In Milton and in Angelo:

I travelled and found it at Rome;

Eastward it filled all Heathendom

And it lay on my hearth when I came home.

v.

Mask thy wisdom with delight,

Toy with the bow, yet hit the white,

As Jelaleddin old and gray;

He seemed to bask, to dream and play

Without remoter hope or fear

Than still to entertain his ear

And pass the burning summer-time

In the palm-grove with a rhyme;

Heedless that each cunning word

Tribes and ages overheard:

Those idle catches told the laws

Holding Nature to her cause.

God only knew how Saadi dined;

Roses he ate, and drank the wind;

He freelier breathed beside the pine,

In cities he was low and mean;

The mountain waters washed him clean

And by the sea-waves he was strong;

He heard their medicinal song,

Asked no physician but the wave,

No palace but his sea-beat cave.

Saadi held the Muse in awe,

She was his mistress and his law;

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A twelvemonth he could silence hold,

Nor ran to speak till she him told;

He felt the flame, the fanning wings,

Nor offered words till they were things,

Glad when the solid mountain swims

In music and uplifting hymns.

Charmed from fagot and from steel,

Harvests grew upon his tongue,

Past and future must reveal

All their heart when Saadi sung;

Sun and moon must fall amain

Like sower's seeds into his brain,

There quickened to be born again.

The free winds told him what they knew,

Discoursed of fortune as they blew;

Omens and signs that filled the air

To him authentic witness bare;

The birds brought auguries on their wings,

And carolled undeceiving things

Him to beckon, him to warn;

Well might then the poet scorn

To learn of scribe or courier

Things writ in vaster character;

And on his mind at dawn of day

Soft shadows of the evening lay.

Pale genius roves alone,

No scout can track his way,

Edition: orig; Page: [269]

None credits him till he have shown

His diamonds to the day.

Not his the feaster's wine,

Nor land, nor gold, nor power,

By want and pain God screeneth him

Till his elected hour.

Go, speed the stars of thought

On to their shining goals:—

The sower scatters broad his seed,

The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

A dull uncertain brain,

But gifted yet to know

That God has cherubim who go

Singing an immortal strain,

Immortal here below.

I know the mighty bards,

I listen when they sing,

And now I know

The secret store

Which these explore

When they with torch of genius pierce

The tenfold clouds that cover

The riches of the universe

From God's adoring lover.

And if to me it is not given

To fetch one ingot thence

Of that unfading gold of Heaven

His merchants may dispense,

Edition: orig; Page: [270]

Yet well I know the royal mine,

And know the sparkle of its ore,

Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,—

Explored they teach us to explore.

1831.

I grieve that better souls than mine

Docile read my measured line:

High destined youths and holy maids

Hallow these my orchard shades;

Environ me and me baptize

With light that streams from gracious eyes.

I dare not be beloved and known,

I ungrateful, I alone.

Ever find me dim regards,

Love of ladies, love of bards,

Marked forbearance, compliments,

Tokens of benevolence.

What then, can I love myself?

Fame is profitless as pelf,

A good in Nature not allowed

They love me, as I love a cloud

Sailing falsely in the sphere,

Hated mist if it come near.

For thought, and not praise;

Thought is the wages

For which I sell days,

Will gladly sell ages

Edition: orig; Page: [271]

And willing grow old

Deaf and dumb and blind and cold,

Melting matter into dreams,

Panoramas which I saw

And whatever glows or seems

Into substance, into Law.

Try the might the Muse affords

And the balm of thoughtful words

Bring music to the desolate;

Hang roses on the stony fate.

For Fancy's gift

Can mountains lift;

The Muse can knit

What is past, what is done,

With the web that's just begun;

Making free with time and size,

Dwindles here, there magnifies,

Swells a rain-drop to a tun;

So to repeat

No word or feat

Crowds in a day the sum of ages,

And blushing Love outwits the sages

But over all his crowning grace,

Wherefor thanks God his daily praise.

Edition: orig; Page: [272]

Is the purging of his eye

To see the people of the sky:

From blue mount and headland dim

Friendly hands stretch forth to him,

Him they beckon, him advise

Of heavenlier prosperities

And a more excelling grace

And a truer bosom-glow

Than the wine-fed feasters know.

They turn his heart from lovely maids,

And make the darlings of the earth

Swainish, coarse and nothing worth:

Teach him gladly to postpone

Pleasures to another stage

Beyond the scope of human age,

Freely as task at eve undone

Waits unblamed to-morrow's sun.

Let me go where'er I will

I hear a sky-born music still:

It sounds from all things old,

It sounds from all things young,

From all that's fair, from all that's foul,

Peals out a cheerful song.

It is not only in the rose,

It is not only in the bird,

Not only where the rainbow glows,

Nor in the song of woman heard,

But in the darkest, meanest things

There alway, alway something sings.

Edition: orig; Page: [273]

'T is not in the high stars alone,

Nor in the cups of budding flowers,

Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,

Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,

But in the mud and scum of things

There alway, alway something sings.

By thoughts I lead

Bards to say what nations need;

What imports, what irks and what behooves.

Framed afar as Fates and Loves.

Those who lived with him became

Poets, for the air was fame.

Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift,

Sit still and Truth is near:

Suddenly it will uplift

Your eyelids to the sphere:

Wait a little, you shall see

The portraiture of things to be.

The rules to men made evident

By Him who built the day,

The columns of the firmament

Not firmer based than they.

Edition: orig; Page: [274]

I framed his tongue to music,

I armed his hand with skill,

I moulded his face to beauty

And his heart the throne of Will.

For every God

Obeys the hymn, obeys the ode.

For art, for music over-thrilled,

The wine-cup shakes, the wine is spilled.

Hold of the Maker, not the Made;

Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

That book is good

Which puts me in a working mood.

Unless to Thought is added Will,

Apollo is an imbecile.

What parts, what gems, what colors shine,—

Ah, but I miss the grand design.

Edition: orig; Page: [275]

Like vaulters in a circus round

Who leap from horse to horse, but never touch the ground.

For Genius made his cabin wide,

And Love led Gods therein to bide.

The atom displaces all atoms beside,

And Genius unspheres all souls that abide.

To transmute crime to wisdom, so to stem

The vice of Japhet by the thought of Shem.

Forbore the ant-hill, shunned to tread,

In mercy, on one little head.

I have no brothers and no peers,

And the dearest interferes:

When I would spend a lonely day,

Sun and moon are in my way.

Edition: orig; Page: [276]

The brook sings on, but sings in vain

Wanting the echo in my brain.

On bravely through the sunshine and the showers!

Time hath his work to do and we have ours.

He planted where the deluge ploughed,

His hired hands were wind and cloud;

His eyes detect the Gods concealed

In the hummock of the field.

For what need I of book or priest,

Or sibyl from the mummied East,

When every star is Bethlehem star?

I count as many as there are

Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,

So many saints and saviours,

So many high behaviors

Salute the bard who is alive

And only sees what he doth give.

Thou shalt not try

To plant thy shrivelled pedantry

On the shoulders of the sky.

Edition: orig; Page: [277]

Ah, not to me those dreams belong!

A better voice peals through my song.

Teach me your mood, O patient stars!

Who climb each night the ancient sky.

Leaving on space no shade, no scars,

No trace of age, no fear to die.

The Muse's hill by Fear is guarded,

A bolder foot is still rewarded.

His instant thought a poet spoke,

And filled the age his fame;

An inch of ground the lightning strook

Bat lit the sky with flame.

If bright the sun, he tarries,

All day his song is heard;

And when he goes he carries

No more baggage than a bird.

The Asmodean feat is mine,

To spin my sand-heap into swine.

Edition: orig; Page: [278]

Slighted Minerva's learnèd tongue,

But leaped with joy when on the wind

The shell of Clio rung.

Best boon of life is presence of a Muse

That does not wish to wander, comes by stealth,

Divulging to the heart she sets on flame

No popular tale or toy, no cheap renown.

When the wings grow that draw the gazing eye

Ofttimes poor Genius fluttering near the earth

Is wrecked upon the turrets of the town;

But lifted till he meets the steadfast gales

Calm blowing from the everlasting West.

fragments on nature and life.

nature.

Daily the bending skies solicit man,

The seasons chariot him from this exile,

The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,

The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,

Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights

Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

Edition: orig; Page: [279]

For Nature, true and like in every place,

Will hint her secret in a garden patch,

Or in lone corners of a doleful heath,

As in the Andes watched by fleets at sea,

Or the sky-piercing horns of Himmaleh;

And, when I would recall the scenes I dreamed

On Adirondac steeps, I know

Small need have I of Turner or Daguerre,

Assured to find the token once again

In silver lakes that unexhausted gleam

And peaceful woods beside my cottage door.

The patient Pan,

Drunken with nectar,

Sleeps or feigns slumber

Drowsily humming

Music to the march of time.

This poor tooting, creaking cricket,

Pan, half asleep, rolling over

His great body in the grass,

Tooting, creaking,

Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;

'T is his manner,

Well he knows his own affair,

Piling mountain chains of phlegm

On the nervous brain of man,

As he holds down central fires

Under Alps and Andes cold;

Edition: orig; Page: [280]

Haply else we could not live,

Life would be too wild an ode.

What all the books of ages paint, I have.

What prayers and dreams of youthful genius feign,

I daily dwell in, and am not so blind

But I can see the elastic tent of day

Belike has wider hospitality

Than my few needs exhaust, and bids me read

The quaint devices on its mornings gay.

Yet Nature will not be in full possessed,

And they who truliest love her, heralds are

And harbingers of a majestic race,

Who, having more absorbed, more largely field,

And walk on earth as the sun walks in the sphere.

But never yet the man was found

Who could the mystery expound,

Though Adam, born when oaks were young,

Endured, the Bible says, as long;

But when at last the patriarch died

The Gordian noose was still untied.

He left, though goodly centuries old,

Meek Nature's secret still untold.

Atom from atom yawns as far

As moon from earth, or star from star.

Edition: orig; Page: [281]

The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin

To use my land to put his rainbows in.

For joy and beauty planted it,

With faerie gardens cheered,

And boding Fancy haunted it

With men and women weird.

What central flowing forces, say,

Make up thy splendor, matchless day?

Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more;

In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door,

A door to something grander,—loftier walls, and vaster floor.

Samson stark at Dagon's knee,

Gropes for columns strong as he;

When his ringlets grew and curled,

Groped for axle of the world.

Edition: orig; Page: [282]

She paints with white and red the moors

To draw the nations out of doors.

A score of airy miles will smooth

Rough Monadnoc to a gem.

The mountain utters the same sense

Unchanged in its intelligence,

For ages sheds its walnut leaves,

One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.

the earth.

Our eyeless bark sails free

Though with boom and spar

Andes, Alp or Himmalee,

Strikes never moon or star.

See yonder leafless trees against the sky,

How they diffuse themselves into the air,

And, ever subdividing, separate

Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,

As if they loved the element, and hasted

To dissipate their being into it.

Edition: orig; Page: [283]

Parks and ponds are good by day;

I do not delight

In black acres of the night,

Nor my unseasoned step disturbs

The sleeps of trees or dreams of herbs.

The low December vault in June be lifted high,

And largest clouds be flakes of down in that enormous sky.

Solar insect on the wing

In the garden murmuring,

Soothing with thy summer horn

Swains by winter pinched and worn.

birds.

Darlings of children and of bard,

Perfect kinds by vice unmarred,

All of worth and beauty set

Gems in Nature's cabinet;

These the fables she esteems

Reality most like to dreams.

Welcome back, you little nations,

Far-travelled in the south plantations,

Bring your music and rhythmic flight,

Your colors for our eyes' delight:

Edition: orig; Page: [284]

Freely nestle in our roof,

Weave your chamber weatherproof;

And your enchanting manners bring

And your autumnal gathering.

Exchange in conclave general

Greetings kind to each and all,

Conscious each of duty done

And unstainèd as the sun.

water.

The water understands

Civilization well;

It wets my foot, but prettily

It chills my life, but wittily,

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy:

Ill used, it will destroy,

In perfect time and measure

With a face of golden pleasure

Elegantly destroy.

All day the waves assailed the rock,

I heard no church-bell chime,

The sea-beat scorns the minster clock

And breaks the glass of Time.

Edition: orig; Page: [285]

sunrise.

Would you know what joy is hid

In our green Musketaquid,

And for travelled eyes what charms

Draw us to these meadow farms,

Come and I will show you all

Makes each day a festival.

Stand upon this pasture hill,

Face the eastern star until

The slow eye of heaven shall show

The world above, the world below.

Behold the miracle!

Thou sawst but now the twilight sad

And stood beneath the firmament,

A watchman in a dark gray tent,

Waiting till God create the earth,—

Behold the new majestic birth!

The mottled clouds, like scraps of woof,

Steeped in the light are beautiful.

What majestic stillness broods

Over these colored solitudes.

Sleeps the vast East in pleasèd peace,

Up the far mountain walls the streams increase

Inundating the heaven

With spouting streams and waves of light

Which round the floating isles unite:—

See the world below

Baptized with the pure element,

Edition: orig; Page: [286]

A clear and glorious firmament

Touched with life by every beam.

I share the good with every flower,

I drink the necter of the hour:—

This is not the ancient earth

Whereof old chronicles relate

The tragic tales of crime and fate;

But rather, like its beads of dew

And dew-bent violets, fresh and new,

An exhalation of the time.

He lives not who can refuse me;

All my force saith, Come and use me

A gleam of sun, a little rain,

And all is green again.

Seems, though the soft sheen all enchants,

Cheers the rough crag and mournful dell,

As if on such stern forms and haunts

A wintry storm more fitly fell.

Illusions like the tints of pearl,

Or changing colors of the sky,

Or ribbons of a dancing girl

That mend her beauty to the eye

Edition: orig; Page: [287]

The cold gray down upon the quinces lieth

And the poor spinners weave their webs thereon

To share the sunshine that so spicy is.

Put in, drive home the sightless wedges

And split to flakes the crystal ledges.

circles.

Nature centres into balls,

And her proud ephemerals,

Fast to surface and outside,

Scan the profile of the sphere;

Knew they what that signified,

A new genesis were here.

But Nature whistled with all her winds,

Did as she pleased and went her way.

life.

A train of gay and clouded days

Dappled with joy and grief and praise,

Beauty to fire us, saints to save,

Escort us to a little grave.

Edition: orig; Page: [288]

No fate, save by the victim's fault, is low,

For God hath writ all dooms magnificent,

So guilt not traverses his tender will.

Around the man who seeks a noble end,

Not angels bat divinities attend.

From high to higher forces

The scale of power uprears,

The heroes on their horses,

The gods upon their spheres.

This passing moment is an edifice

Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild.

Roomy Eternity

Casts her schemes rarely,

And an æon allows

For each quality and part

Of the multitudinous

And many-chambered heart.

Edition: orig; Page: [289]

The beggar begs by God's command,

And gifts awake when givers sleep,

Swords cannot cut the giving hand

Nor stab the love that orphans keep.

Easy to match what others do,

Perform the feat as well as they;

Hard to out-do the brave, the true,

And find a loftier way:

The school decays, the learning spoils

Because of the sons of wine;

How snatch the stripling from their toils?—

Yet can one ray of truth divine

The blaze of reveller's feasts outshine.

In the chamber, on the stais,

Lurking dumb,

Go and come

Lemurs and Lars.

Of all wit's uses the main one

Is to live well with who has none.

Edition: orig; Page: [290]

The tongue is prone to lose the way,

Not so the pen, for in a letter

We have not better things to say,

But surely say them better.

She walked in flowers around my field

As June herself around the sphere.

Such another peerless queen

Only could her mirror show.

I bear in youth the sad infirmities

That use to undo the limb and sense of age;

It hath pleased Heaven to break the dream of bliss

Which lit my onward way with bright presage,

And my unserviceable limbs forego

The sweet delight I found in fields and farms,

On windy hills, whose tops with morning glow,

And lakes, smooth mirrors of Aurora's charms.

Yet I think on them in the silent night,

Still breaks that morn, though dim, to Memory's eye,

And the firm soul does the pale train defy

Of grim Disease, that would her peace affright.

Edition: orig; Page: [291]

Please God, I'll wrap me in mine innocence

And bid each awful Muse drive the damned harpies hence.

Cambridge,

1827.

Be of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly

Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for know,

God hath a select family of sons

Now scattered wide thro' earth, and each alone,

Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one

By constant service to that inward law,

Is weaving the sublime proportions

Of a true monarch's soul. Beauty and strength,

The riches of a spotless memory,

The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got

By searching of a clear and loving eye

That seeth as God seeth. These are their gifts,

And Time, who keeps God's word, brings on the day

To seal the marriage of these minds with thine,

Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be

The salt of all the elements, world of the world.

Friends to me are frozen wine;

I wait the sun on them should shine.

Day by day returns

The everlasting sun,

Edition: orig; Page: [292]

Replenishing material urns

With God's unspared donation;

But the day of day,

The orb within the mind,

Creating fair and good alway,

Shines not as once it shined.

Vast the realm of Being is,

In the waste one nook is his;

Whatsoever hap befalls

In his vision's narrow walls

He is here to testify.

1831.

Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,

Trembling for the body's sake:

Come, Love! who dost the spirit raise

Because for others thou dost wake.

O it is beautiful in death

To hide the shame of human nature's end

In sweet and wary serving of a friend.

Love is true glory's field where the last breath

Expires in troops of honorable cares.

The wound of Fate the hero cannot feel

Smit with the heavenlier smart of social zeal.

It draws immortal day

In soot and ashes of our clay,

It is the virtue that enchants it,

It is the face of God that haunts it.

1831.

Edition: orig; Page: [293]

Has God on thee conferred

A bodily presence mean as Paul's,

Yet made thee hearer of a word

Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?

O noble heart, accept

With equal thanks the talent and disgrace;

The marble town unwept

Nourish thy virtue in a private place.

Think not that unattended

By heavenly powers thou steal'st to Solitude,

Nor yet on earth all unbefriended.

1831.

You shall not love me for what daily spends;

You shall not know me in the noisy street,

Where I, as others, follow petty ends;

Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;

Nor when I'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean.

But love me then and only, when you know

Me for the channel of the rivers of God

From deep ideal fontal heavens that flow.

To and fro the Genius flies,

A light which plays and hovers

Over the maiden's head

And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes.

Edition: orig; Page: [294]

Of her faults I take no note,

Fault and folly are not mine;

Comes the Genius,—all's forgot,

Replunged again into that upper sphere

He scatters wide and wild its lustres here.

Love

Asks nought his brother cannot give;

Asks nothing, but does all receive.

Love calls not to his aid events;

He to his wants can well suffice:

Asks not of others soft consents,

Nor kind occasion without eyes;

Nor plots to ope or bolt a gate,

Nor heeds Condition's iron walls,—

Where he goes, goes before him Fate;

Whom he uniteth, God installs;

Instant and perfect his access

To the dear object of his thought,

Though foes and land and seas between

Himself and his love intervene.

Go if thou wilt, ambrosial flower,

Go match thee with thy seeming peers;

I will wait Heaven's perfect hour

Through the innumerable years.

Tell men what they knew before;

Paint the prospect from their door.

Edition: orig; Page: [295]

Him strong Genius urged to roam,

Stronger Custom brought him home.

Thou shalt make thy house

The temple of a nation's vows.

Spirits of a higher strain

Who sought thee once shall seek again.

I detected many a god

Forth already on the road,

Ancestors of beauty come

In thy breast to make a home.

As the drop feeds its fated flower,

As finds its Alp the snowy shower,

Child of the omnific Need,

Hurled into life to do a deed,

Man drinks the water, drinks the light.

Ever the Rock of Ages melts

Into the mineral air,

To be the quarry whence to build

Thought and its mansions fair.

Edition: orig; Page: [296]

Yes, sometimes to the sorrow-stricken

Shall his own sorrow seem impertinent,

A thing that takes no more root in the world

Than doth the traveller's shadow on the rock.

The archangel Hope

Looks to the azure cope,

Waits through dark ages for the morn,

Defeated day by day, but unto victory born.

But if thou do thy best,

Without remission, without rest,

And invite the sun-beam,

And abhor to feign or seem

Even to those who thee should love

And thy behavior approve;

If thou go in thine own likeness,

Be it health, or be it sickness;

If thou go as thy father's son,

If thou wear no mask or lie,

Dealing purely and nakedly,—

From the stores of eldest matter,

The deep-eyed flame, obedient water,

Edition: orig; Page: [297]

Transparent air, all-feeding earth,

He took the flower of all their worth,

And, best with best in sweet consent,

Combined a new temperament.

Ascending thorough just degrees

To a consummate holiness,

As angel blind to trespass done,

And bleaching all souls like the sun.

The bard and mystic held me for their own,

I filled the dream of sad, poetic maids,

I took the friendly noble by the hand,

I was the trustee of the hand-cart man,

The brother of the fisher, porter, swain,

And these from the crowd's edge well pleased beheld

The service done to me as done to them.

With the key of the secret he marches faster,

From strength to strength, and for night brings day!

While classes or tribes, too weak to master

The flowing conditions of life, give way.

Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship

Of minds that each can stand against the world

By its own meek and incorruptible will?

Edition: orig; Page: [298]

That each should in his house abide,

Therefore was the world so wide.

If curses be the wage of love,

Hide in thy skies, thou fruitless Jove,

Not to be named:

It is clear Why the gods will not appear;

They are ashamed.

When wrath and terror changed Jove's regal port,

And the rash-leaping thunderbolt fell short.

the bohemian hymn.

In many forms we try

To utter God's infinity,

But the boundless hath no form,

And the Universal Friend

Doth as far transcend

An angel as a worm.

The great Idea baffles wit,

Language falters under it,

Edition: orig; Page: [299]

It leaves the learned in the lurch;

Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find

The measure of the eternal Mind,

Nor hymn, nor prayer, nor church.

prayer.

When success exalts thy lot

God for thy virtue lays a plot.

And all thy life is for thy own,

Then for mankind's instruction shown;

And though thy knees were never bent,

To Heaven thy hourly prayers are sent,

And whether formed for good or ill

Are registered and answered still.

grace.

How much, preventing God, how much I owe

To the defences thou hast round me set;

Example, custom, fear, occasion slow,—

These scorned bondmen were my parapet.

I dare not peep over this parapet

To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,

The depths of sin to which I had descended,

Had not these me against myself defended.

Edition: orig; Page: [300]

eros.

They put their finger on their lip,

The Powers above:

The seas their islands clip,

The moons in ocean dip,

They love, but name not love.

written in naples, march 1833.

We are what we are made; each following day

Is the Creator of our human mould

Not less than was the first; the all-wise God

Gilds a few points in every several life,

And as each flower upon the fresh hill-side,

And every colored petal of each flower,

Is sketched and dyed each with a new design,

Its spot of purple, and its streak of brown,

So each man's life shall have its proper lights,

And a few joys, a few peculiar charms,

For him round—in the melancholy hours

And reconcile him to the common days.

Not many men see beauty in the fogs

Of close low pine-woods in a river town;

Yet unto me not morn's magnificence,

Nor the red rainbow of a summer eve,

Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls

Of rich men blazing hospitable light,

Nor wit, nor eloquence,—no, nor even the song

Edition: orig; Page: [301]

Of any woman that is now alive,—

Hath such a soul, such divine influence,

Such resurrection of the happy past,

As is to me when I behold the morn

Ope in such low moist road-side, and beneath

Peep the blue violets out of the black loam,

Pathetic silent poets that sing to me

Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife.

written at rome, 1833.

Alone in Rome. Why, Rome is lonely too;—

Besides, you need not be alone; the soul

Shall have society of its own rank.

Be great, be true, and all the Scipios,

The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome

Shall flock to you and tarry by your side,

And comfort you with their high company.

Virtue alone is sweet society,

It keeps the key to all heroic hearts,

And opens you a welcome in them all.

You must be like them if you desire them,

Scorn trifles and embrace a better aim

Than wine or sleep or praise;

Hunt knowledge as the lover wooes a maid,

And ever in the strife of your own thoughts

Obey the nobler impulse; that is Rome:

That shall command a senate to your side;

For there is no might in the universe

That can contend with love. It reigns forever.

Edition: orig; Page: [302]

Wait then, sad friend, wait in majestic peace

The hour of heaven. Generously trust

Thy fortune's web to the beneficent hand

That until now has put his world in fee

To thee. He watches for thee still. His love

Broods over thee, and as God lives in heaven,

However long thou walkest solitary,

The hour of heaven shall come, the man appear.

peter's field.1

[Knows he who tills this lonely field

To reap its scanty corn

What mystic fruit his acres yield

At midnight and at morn?]

That field by spirits bad and good,

By Hell and Heaven is haunted,

And every rood in the hemlock wood

I know is ground enchanted.

[In the long sunny afternoon

The plain was full of ghosts,

I wandered up, I wandered down

Beset by pensive hosts.]

Edition: orig; Page: [303]

For in those lonely grounds the sun

Shines not as on the town,

In nearer arcs his journeys run,

And nearer stoops the moon.

There in a moment I have seen

The buried Past arise;

The fields of Thessaly grew green,

Old gods forsook the skies.

I cannot publish in my rhyme

What pranks the greenwood played;

It was the Carnival of time,

And Ages went or stayed.

To me that spectral nook appeared

The mustering Day of Doom,

And round me swarmed in shadowy troop

Things past and things to come.

The darkness haunteth me elsewhere;

There I am full of light;

In every whispering leaf I hear

More sense than sages write.

Underwoods were full of pleasance,

All to each in kindness bend,

And every flower made obeisance

As a man unto his friend.

Far seen the river glides below

Tossing one sparkle to the eyes.

I catch tny meaning, wizard wave;

The River of my Life replies.

Edition: orig; Page: [304]

the walk.

A queen rejoices in her peers,

And wary Nature knows her own

By court and city, dale and down,

And like a lover volunteers,

And to her son will treasures more

And more to purpose freely pour

In one wood walk, than learned men

Can find with glass in ten times ten

may morning.

Who saw the hid beginnings

When Chaos and Order strove,

Or who can date the morning

The purple flaming of love?

I saw the hid beginnings

When Chaos and Order strove,

And I can date the morning prime

And purple flame of love.

Song breathed from all the forest,

The total air was fame;

It seemed the world was all torches

That suddenly caught the flame.

Edition: orig; Page: [305]

Is there never a retroscope mirror

In the realms and corners of space

That can give us a glimpse of the battle

And the soldiers face to face?

Sit here on the basalt ranges

Where twisted hills betray

The seat of the world-old Forces

Who wrestled here on a day.

When the purple flame shoots up,

And Love ascends his throne,

I cannot hear your songs, O birds,

For the witchery of my own.

And every human heart

Still keeps that golden day

And rings the bells of jubilee

On its own First of May.

the miracle.

I have trod this path a hundred times

With idle footsteps, crooning rhymes.

I know each nest and web-worm's tent,

The fox-hole which the woodchucks rent,

Maple and oak, the old Divan

Self-planted twice, like the banian.

Edition: orig; Page: [306]

I know not why I came again

Unless to learn it ten times ten.

To read the sense the woods impart

You must bring the throbbing heart.

Love is aye the counterforce,—

Terror and Hope and wild Remorse,

Newest knowledge, fiery thought,

Or Duty to grand purpose wrought.

Wandering yester morn the brake,

I reached this heath beside the lake,

And oh, the wonder of the power,

The deeper secret of the hour!

Nature, the supplement of man,

His hidden sense interpret can;—

What friend to friend cannot convey

Shall the dumb bird instructed say.

Passing yonder oak, I heard

Sharp accents of my woodland bird;

I watched the singer with delight,—

But mark what changed my joy to fright,—

When that bird sang, I gave the theme,

That wood-bird sang my last night's dream,

A brown wren was the Daniel

That pierced my trance its drift to tell,

Knew my quarrel, how and why,

Published it to lake and sky,

Told every word and syllable

In his flippant chirping babble,

All my wrath and all my shames,

Nay, God is witness, gave the names.

Edition: orig; Page: [307]

the waterfall.

A patch of meadow upland

Reached by a mile of road,

Soothed by the voice of waters,

With birds and flowers bestowed.

Hither I come for strength

Which well it can supply,

For Love draws might from terrene force

And potencies of sky.

The tremulous battery Earth

Responds to the touch of man;

It thrills to the antipodes,

From Boston to Japan.

walden.1

In my garden three ways meet,

Thrice the spot is blest;

Hermit thrush comes there to build,

Carrier doves to nest.

There broad-armed oaks, the copses' maze,

The cold sea-wind detain;

Edition: orig; Page: [308]

Here sultry Summer over-stays

When Autumn chills the plain.

Self-sown my stately garden grows;

The winds and wind-blown seed,

Cold April rain and colder snows

My hedges plant and feed.

From mountains far and valleys near

The harvests sown to-day

Thrive in all weathers without fear,—

Wild planters, plant away!

In cities high the careful crowds

Of woe-worn mortals darkling go,

But in these sunny solitudes

My quiet roses blow.

Methought the sky looked scornful down

On all was base in man,

And airy tongues did taunt the town,

“Achieve our peace who can!”

What need I holier dew

Than Walden's haunted wave,

Distilled from heaven's alembic blue,

Steeped in each forest cave?

If Thought unlock her mysteries,

If Friendship on me smile,

I walk in marble galleries,

I talk with kings the while.

Edition: orig; Page: [309]

And chiefest thou, whom Genius loved,

Daughter of sounding seas,

Whom Nature pampered in these groves

And lavished all to please,—

What wealth of mornings in her year,

What planets in her sky!

She chose her best thy heart to cheer,

Thy beauty to supply.

Now younger pilgrims find the stream,

The willows and the vine,

But aye to me the happiest seem

To draw the dregs of wine.

pan.

O what are heroes, prophets, men,

But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow

A momentary music. Being's tide

Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms

Live, robed with beauty, painted by the sun;

Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God,

Throbs with an overmastering energy

Knowing and doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie

White hollow shells upon the desert shore.

But not the less the eternal wave rolls on

To animate new millions, and exhale

Races and planets, its enchanted foam.

Edition: orig; Page: [310]

monadnoc from afar.

Dark flower of Cheshire garden,

Red evening duly dyes

Thy sombre head with rosy hues

To fix far-gazing eyes.

Well the Planter knew how strongly

Works thy form on human thought;

I muse what secret purpose had he

To draw all fancies to this spot.

the south wind.

Sudden gusts came full of meaning,

All too much to him they said,

Oh, south winds have long memories,

Of that be none afraid.

I cannot tell rode listeners

Half the tell-tale south wind said,—

'T would bring the blushes of yon maples

To a man and to a maid.

Edition: orig; Page: [311]

fame.

Ah Fate, cannot a man

Be wise without a beard?

East, West, from Beer to Dan,

Say, was it never heard

That wisdom might in youth be gotten,

Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?

He pays too high a price

For knowledge and for fame

Who sells his sinews to be wise,

His teeth and bones to buy a name,

And crawls through life a paralytic

To earn the praise of bard and critic.

Were it not better done,

To dine and sleep through forty years;

Be loved by few; be feared by none;

Laugh life away; have wine for tears;

And take the mortal leap undaunted,

Content that all we asked was granted?

But Fate will not permit

The seed of gods to die,

Nor suffer sense to win from wit

Its guerdon in the sky,

Nor let us hide, whate'er our pleasure,

The world's light underneath a measure.

Go then, sad youth, and shine;

Go, sacrifice to Fame;

Edition: orig; Page: [312]

Put youth, joy, health, upon the shrine,

And life to fan the flame;

Being for Seeming bravely barter,

And die to Fame a happy martyr.

1824

webster. from the phi beta kappa poem, 1834.

Ill fits the abstemious Muse a crown to weave

For living brows; ill fits them to receive:

And yet, if virtue abrogate the law,

One portrait,—fact or fancy—we may draw;

A form which Nature cast in the heroic mould

Of them who rescued liberty of old;

He, when the rising storm of party roared,

Brought his great forehead to the council board,

There, while hot heads perplexed with fears the state,

Calm as the morn the manly patriot sate;

Seemed, when at last his clarion accents broke,

As if the conscience of the country spoke.

Not on its base Monadnoc surer stood,

Than he to common sense and common good:

No mimic; from his breast his counsel drew,

Believed the eloquent was aye the true;

He bridged the gulf from th' alway good and wise

To that within the vision of small eyes.

Self-centred; when he launched the genuine word

It shook or captivated all who heard,

Ran from his mouth to mountains and the sea,

And burned in noble hearts proverb and prophecy.

Edition: orig; Page: [313]

written in a volume of goethe.

Six thankful weeks,—and let it be

A meter of prosperity,—

In my coat I bore this book,

And seldom therein could I look,

For I had too much to think,

Heaven and earth to eat and drink.

Is he hapless who can spare

In his plenty things so rare?

the enchanter.

In the deep heart of man a poet dwells

Who all the day of life his summer story tells:

Scatters on every eye dust of his spells,

Scent, form and color: to the flowers and shells

Wins the believing child with wondrous tales;

Touches a cheek with colors of romance,

And crowds a history into a glance;

Gives beauty to the lake and fountain,

Spies over-sea the fires of the mountain;

When thrushes ope their throat, 't is he that sings,

And he that paints the oriole's fiery wings.

The little Shakspeare in the maiden's heart

Makes Romeo of a plough-boy on his cart;

Opens the eye to Virtue's starlike meed

And gives persuasion to a gentle deed.

Edition: orig; Page: [314]

philosopher.

Philosophers are lined with eyes within,

And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.

In love, he cannot therefore cease his trade;

Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,

He feels it, introverts his learned eye

To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.

His mother died,—the only friend he had,—

Some tears escaped, but his philosophy

Couched like a cat sat watching close behind

And throttled all his passion. Is't not like

That devil-spider that devours her mate

Scarce freed from her embraces?

limits.

Who knows this or that?

Hark in the wall to the rat:

Since the world was, he has gnawed;

Of his wisdom, of his fraud

What dost thou know?

In the wretched little beast

Is life and heart,

Child and parent,

Not without relation

To fruitful field and sun and moon.

What art thou? His wicked eye

Is cruel to thy cruelty.

Edition: orig; Page: [315]

inscription for a well in memory of the martyrs of the war.

Fall, stream, from Heaven to bless; return as well;

So did our sons; Heaven met them as they fell.

the exile. (after taliessin.)

The heavy blue chain

Of the boundless main

Didst thou, just man, endure.

I have an arrow that will find its mark,

A mastiff that will bite without a bark.

Edition: orig; Page: [[316]] Edition: orig; Page: [[317]] Edition: orig; Page: [[322]] Edition: orig; Page: [[323]]

1.

Selected Poems: Little Classic Edition.

1.

A part of this motto was taken from The Poet, an early poem ever published by Mr. Emerson. See Appendix.

1.

This poem was begun as early as 1831, probably earlier, and received additions for more than twenty years, but was never completed. In its early form, it was entitled, The Discontented Poet, A Masque.

1.

The poem “Beauty,” the motto for the Essay bearing that name, was originally part of this poem.

1.

This poem on the memories and associations of the field by the Concord River where Mr. Emerson and his brothers walked in their youth, is probably of earlier date than The Dirge, with which it has two verses in common.

1.

This poem represents the early form of My Garden, which, in years, grew from this beginning.

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