Transcendentalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about Transcendentalism in nineteenth-century America. For other
uses, see transcendence.
Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and
philosophy that emerged in the New England region of the United States of America in
the early-to mid-19th century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to
distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental.
Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society
at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of
the Unitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among their core
beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only
realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of
established religions or governments.
Prominent Transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
Margaret Fuller, as well as Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing,
Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, George Putnam, and Sophia Peabody, the wife
of Nathaniel Hawthorne. For a time, Peabody and Hawthorne lived at the Brook Farm
Transcendentalist utopian commune. Later Hawthorne became an anti-trascendentalist.
Contents
[hide]
 1 History
 2 Origins
 3 Other meanings of transcendentalism
o 3.1 Transcendental idealism
o 3.2 Transcendental theology
 4 See also

 5 External links

[edit] History
The publication of Emerson's 1836 essay "Nature" is usually taken to be the
watershed moment at which Transcendentalism became a major cultural movement.
Emerson wrote in his essay "The American Scholar": "We will walk on our own feet; we
will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds ... A nation of men will for
the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also
inspires all men." Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in human
consciousness to emerge from the new idealist philosophy:
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless
inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by
yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As
fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great
proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.
In the same year, Transcendentalism became a coherent movement with the founding
of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 8, 1836, by
prominent New England intellectuals including George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
and Frederick Henry Hedge. From 1840, the group published frequently in their journal
The Dial, along with other venues.
The practical aims of the Transcendentalists were varied; some among the group
linked it with utopian social change (and, in the case of Brownson, it joined explicitly with
early socialism), while others found it an exclusively individual and idealist project.
Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist", Emerson
suggested that the goal of a purely Transcendental outlook on life was impossible to
attain in practice:
You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a Transcendental party; that
there is no pure Transcendentalist; that we know of no one but prophets and heralds of
such a philosophy; that all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual
side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers and
forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean, we
have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food; who,
trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal
aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew
not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. ... Shall we say, then, that
Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith
proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders
the satisfaction of his wish.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, satirizing the
movement, and based it on his experiences at Brook Farm, a short-lived utopian
community founded on Transcendental principles.

[edit] Origins
Transcendentalism was rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant
(and of German Idealism more generally), which the New England intellectuals of the
early 19th century embraced as an alternative to the Lockean "sensualism" of their
fathers and of the Unitarian church, finding this alternative in Vedic thought, German
idealism, and English Romanticism.
The Transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in
transcendental principles: principles not based on, or falsifiable by, sensuous experience,
but deriving from the inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human. Kant had called "all
knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of
knowing objects." The Transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German
philosophy in the original, and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de Staël, and other English and French
commentators for their knowledge of it. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with
the English Romantics, and the Transcendental movement may be partially described as a
slightly later, American outgrowth of Romanticism. Another major influence was the
mystical spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Thoreau in Walden spoke of the debt to the Vedic thought directly, as did other
members of the movement:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of
the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in
comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and
I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so
remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well
for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and
Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or
dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to
 draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well.
The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

[edit] Other meanings of transcendentalism

[edit] Transcendental idealism
The term transcendentalism sometimes serves as shorthand for "transcendental
idealism," which is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later Kantian and German
Idealist philosophers.

[edit] Transcendental theology

Further information: Transcendence (religion)
Another alternative meaning for transcendentalism is the classical philosophy that
God transcends the manifest world. As John Scotus Erigena put it to Frankish king
Charles the Bald in the year 840 A.D., "We do not know what God is. God himself doesn't
know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends
being."

The 19th Century Evolution of Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) is today the most readily recognized propagator and champion of 19th
century Transcendentalist thought. Emerson gave German philosopher Immanuel Kant the credit for making
"Transcendentalism" a familiar term. Contrary to Locke’s theory, that before any concept could be intellectualized
it must first be experienced by the senses, Kant said there were experiences that could be acquired through
"intuitions of the mind;" he referred to the "native spontaneity of the human mind." In Nature, Emerson explains
how every idea has its source in natural phenomena, and that the attentive person can "see" those ideas in nature.
Intuition allowed the transcendentalist to disregard external authority and to rely, instead, on direct experience.
In his essay "The Transcendentalist," Emerson explains that transcendentalism is "Idealism as it appears in
1842." He links it with "the very oldest thoughts" such as Buddhism. Transcendentalism in the 19th Century was
more than a trend in American literature. It was a philosophical movement, but it owed its development as much
to democracy as to European philosophers. Transcendentalism centered on the divinity of each individual, but
this divinity could be discovered only if the person had the independence of mind to do so. American thought lent
itself to this concept of independence. If one can judge by the voter participation in presidential elections (in
Emerson’s time, and through the turn of the century, at least 70% of those registered to vote did so), Americans
certainly thought their individual voices were of value.
Gertrude Reif Hughes calls Emerson a "vitalist." Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), best known for Walden
and "Civil Disobedience," Emerson's friend and a fellow Transcendentalist, might better appreciate this term; it
has a robust ring more suitable to Thoreau's pragmatism than Emerson's ethereal idealism. Hughes quotes The
Harper Dictionary of Modern Thoughton vitalism: "a miscellany of beliefs united by the contention that living
processes are not to be explained in terms of the material composition and physico-chemical performances of
living bodies" (162). Such a definition recalls Kant's rejection of Locke's theory, that the infant human mind
presented to the world a tabula rasa, and all knowledge is filtered through sensation. If, as Kant says, there are
some things humans know intuitively, and direct experience is not required to "write" upon the "blank slate"
because it is not blank after all, then it must be that some unexplained "living process" has already placed the
information.
It seems that to be a transcendentalist, one must first be a vitalist, although critics of transcendentalism would
say "miscellany" is a too mild term for its rather fluid tenets. (Charles Dickens said, "I was given to understand
that whatever was unintelligible would certainly be Transcendental"). But take "vitalism" one step further:
animation is a vital principle in its own right, yes – but if the "material composition," etc., are the symbols of that
lively spirit – then Emerson’s vision of Transcendentalism is clarified. The universe is one great entity,
"composed of Nature and the Soul;" Nature is the symbol of the spirit (Nature).
Transcendentalism earned a reputation as a "collection of miscellany" because such variety of thought is built
into the definition. Emerson and Thoreau both admonish their audiences to go their own way rather than emulate
the authors. Emerson declared he wanted no followers; it would disappoint him if his ideas created hangers-on
rather than "independence;" he would then doubt his own theories and fear he was guilty of some "impurity of
insight." Discipleship automatically thwarts prime tenets of Transcendentalism: if individualism stems from
listening to one’s "inner voice," and one’s life is guided by intuition, then conformation, whether to societal
convention or individual creed, is not necessary or desirable.
Emerson, and others, believed in what he called the Oversoul (Walt Whitman called it the "float"). The divine
"spark" within, and connecting, all facets of nature, including humankind, makes up the Oversoul. One's own
"spark," and connection, can be discovered not through logical reasoning but only through intuition: the creative
insight and interpretation of one's own inner voice. The 19th century Transcendentalists called for an
independence from organized religion; they saw no need for any intercession in the relationship between God and
the individual man. Divinity is self-contained, internalized in all beings. Transcendentalism gives credence to the
unlimited potential of human ability to connect with both the natural and spiritual world. The chief aim is to
become fully aware not only of what our senses record, but also to allow our inner voice—our intuition—to wisely
and correctly interpret the sensory input.
Transcendentalists were idealistic and optimistic because they believed they could find answers to whatever
they were seeking. As Emerson says, when they learn to translate, through intuition, the external symbols of
nature, they can read the underlying spiritual facts:
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever
curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those
inquiries he would put. He acts is as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing
its own design.
Transcendentalism declared meaning in everything, and all meaning was good, part of and connected by
divine plan. Emerson refuted evil, insisting it was not an entity in itself, but simply the absence of good. If good is
introduced, evil dissipates. One ray of light penetrates darkness. According to the Transcendentalists, everyone
has the power to "transcend" the apparent confusion and chaos of the world and see order in nature's design. All
on earth have the divine "spark" within and thus all are part of the whole. This philosophy led to an optimistic
emphasis on individualism and the value of the individual over society. To "transcend" society one must first be
able to look past and beyond it. One must follow intuition and not conform to contrary social decree. Society
encourages, even demands conformity and dependence. In the aptly titled "Self-Reliance," Emerson urges his
reader to "trust thyself."
Anti-transcendentalists rejected such an outlook on humanity. They declared such optimism naïve and
unrealistic. The anti-transcendentalists reflected a more pessimistic attitude, focusing on man's uncertainty and
limited potential in the universe: Nature is vast and incomprehensible, a reflection of the struggle between good
and evil. Humans are innately depraved and must struggle toward goodness. In fact, goodness is actually
attainable only for a few, but evil is a huge morass into which any can slip. Sin is an active force, not merely the
absence of good; they do believe, on some level, that the devil exists. Finally, because nature is the creation and
possession of God, humans cannot interpret or understand any symbolism it may contain. Intercession between
the common man and higher authority is required in heaven and on earth.
Anti-transcendentalists feared that people who desired complete individualism would give in to the worst
aspects of man's nature. Without external constraint, such as societal mores, people are free to wreak havoc,
motivated by immediate need and the desire for sensory gratification. However, such free-wheeling chaos can
arise only if Transcendentalism ignores the ultimate point of the philosophy: the call to rise above--transcend--
"animalistic" impulses in the journey from the arena of rational but flawed human thought to the perfection of the
spiritual realm.

Biography
Henry David Thoreau was a complex man of many talents who worked hard to shape his craft and his life,
seeing little difference between them. Born in 1817, one of his first memories was of staying awake at night
"looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them." One might say he never stopped looking into
nature for ultimate Truth.
Henry grew up very close to his older brother John, who taught school to help pay for Henry's tuition at
Harvard. While there, Henry read a small book by his Concord neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, and in a
sense he never finished exploring its ideas -- although always definitely on his own terms, just as he explored
everything! He and his brother taught school for a while but in 1842, John cut himself while shaving and died of
lockjaw in his brother's arms, an untimely death which traumatized the 25 year old Henry. He worked for several
years as a surveyor and making pencils with his father, but at the age of 28 in 1845, wanting to write his first
book, he went to Walden pond and built his cabin on land owned by Emerson
While at Walden, Thoreau did an incredible amount of reading and writing, yet he also spent much time
"sauntering" in nature. He gave a lecture and was imprisoned briefly for not paying his poll tax, but mostly he
wrote a book as a memorial to a river trip he had taken with his brother, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers .
After two years (and two months), Thoreau returned to Concord -- a bare two miles away which he had visited
frequently during his stay at the pond, having completed his experiment in living and his book. Unfortunately, few
people were interested in purchasing his book, so he spent the next nine years, surveying and making pencils at
times but primarily writing and rewriting (creating seven full drafts) Walden before trying to publish it.
He supported himself by surveying and making a few lectures, often on his experience at Walden pond.
Many readers mistake Henry's tone in Walden and other works, thinking he was a cranky hermit. That was far
from the case, as one of his young neighbors and Edward Emerson attest. He found greater joy in his daily life
than most people ever would.
He traveled often, to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod several times, and was particularly interested in the
frontier and Indians. He opposed the government for waging the Mexican war (to extend slavery) eloquently in
Resistance to Civil Government, based on his brief experience in jail; he lectured against slavery in an abolitionist
lecture, Slavery in Massachusetts. He even supported John Brown's efforts to end slavery after meeting him in
Concord, as in A Plea for Captain John Brown.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, at the age of 44. His last words were said to be "Moose" and "Indian."
Not only did he leave his two books and numerous essays, but he also left a huge Journal , published later in 20
volumes, which may have been his major work-in-progress. Many memorials were penned by his friends,
including Emerson's eulogy and Louisa May Alcott's poem, "Thoreau's Flute."
Over the years, Thoreau's reputation has been strong, although he is often cast into roles -- the hermit in the
wilderness, the prophet of passive resistance (so dear to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) -- that he
would have surely seen as somewhat alien. His work is so rich, and so full of the complex contradictions that he
explored, that his readers keep reshaping his image to fit their own needs. Perhaps he would have appreciated
that, for he seems to have wanted most to use words to force his readers to rethink their own lives creatively,
different though they may be, even as he spent his life rethinking his, always asking questions, always looking to
nature for greater intensity and meaning for his life.
Ann Woodlief

Student Notes on the Transcendentalist Perspective of Nature

Man learns that Nature is awe-inspiring, all-powerful and full of dangerous beauty. Man is limited by nature's
fences; there are some places in Nature that man is incapable of traversing—-be it too daunting emotionally, as it
was for Thoreau in Ktaadn, or simply a physical impossibility. Thoreau in "Walking" observes, "For my part I feel
that with regard to Nature I live sort of a border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and
transient forays only. . . ." Man is so insignificant in the face of nature, our existence is untenable: Thoreau's
"House-Warming" . . . ."Nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed.
It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold
Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the
globe."
As treacherous and cruel that Nature's justice can be, Mother Nature simultaneously rejuvenates the soul, and
both Emerson and Thoreau believed that emotional and spiritual rebirth was an important tool of Nature's glory.
In his journal, Emerson writes (in absolutely beautiful prose reminiscent of Whitman): "In the instant you leave
far behind all human relations, wife, mother and child, and live only with the savages—-water, air, light, carbon,
lime, and granite. Nature grows over me. Frogs pipe; waters far off tinkle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends and rustles,
and I have died out of the human world and come to feel a strange, cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal
sympathy and existence. I sow the sun and moon for seeds." Similarly in "Walking", Thoreau writes, "If you are
ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them
again, --if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you
are ready for a walk." Dying in nature is automatic rebirth, a recycling. "Walking": "So we saunter toward the Holy
Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds
and hearts. And light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a
bankside in autumn."
Recaptured innocence is another aspect of man's relationship with nature, which coincides with truth.
Emerson's "The Method of Nature", states:
"Shall we not quit our companions, and betake. . . .some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail our
innocency and recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more sacred idea."
He continues: "Let us worship the mighty and transcendent Soul. . . . Truth is always holy, holiness is wise. . . .
Tenderly, tenderly they woo and court us from every object in nature, from every fact in life, from every thought in
the mind. The one condition coupled to the gift of truth is its use. . . .Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it was
opened to him, that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but did it not, at death shall lose their knowledge."
Emerson and Thoreau realized that Nature is elusive, an infinite circle that man would never really quite
grasp. But for both of these men, there was thrill in the chase—-a stimulating enigma and mind-bending chase for
answers that remained just outside of the periphery. In Thoreau's "Where I Lived and what I Lived For": "Men
esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man.
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime."
Emerson in "Circles" : "There is no end in nature, but every ending is a beginning; that there is always another
dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact
of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet. . . ." To Emerson, the
fluidness of his surroundings meant Nature is a continuous expression of the spirit. Thoreau continues the same
idea in "The Pond in Winter": "After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been
put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But there
was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face,
and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question to nature and daylight." The answer was there is no
answer--just open your eyes to see what Nature reveals to you day after day! He continues this idea of not really
wanting to know all of nature's laws: "Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances
we detect; but the harmony results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws,
which we have not detected, is still more wonderful."
Shannon Riley

Insofar as American thought is concerned, there seem to be two distinct lines of thought concerning Nature.
One, which had among its proponents the bulk of colonial Americans, is that Nature—-the wilderness, more
accurately—-is a foreign, rather fearful entity that must be dealt with by taming it. It is not uncommon for the
wilderness to be referred to as a "desert" in early American writing. We must remember the writers were most
often speaking of the lush green wildness of the mid-Atlantic and New England states when they used this term!
Nature was unpredictable, irrational, and vaguely feminine and bad. According to this view, the main purpose of
Nature is how it may serve mankind; it has little value in itself if left in a "natural" state. Evolving from this fearful
outlook is the attitude contained in the word "frontier," which translates as opportunity; the frontier is a tabula
rasa commodity, a blank slate available to anyone with the guts, willpower, and means to inscribe his name.
Again, it has little or no value in itself but only in its potential offering to the prospective owner. Once owned, it is
of course no longer "frontier" but merely "property."
The second line of thought—-which most Americans espouse today in theory, at least, if not in actual practice
—-is that Nature is a good entity and valuable on its own unique terms, as itself, without regard to the purposes of
mankind. However, it's very difficult to escape our Puritan/Yankee heritage. (Yankee is used in a pre-Civil War
sense here). We still ask of Nature: what good is it? Even that we want left strictly alone in its pristine wild beauty
is unmolested because we've already taken what we wanted: the idea of a place still with clean air, water, animals.
This desire was the driving force behind the creation of the National Parks: we want to preserve not Nature,
exactly, but the loveliness of it. While one surely cannot argue with the positive result of such a desire, nonetheless
it goes right back to "What good is it?" To value Nature strictly as itself without any regard to profit, financial,
spiritual, or otherwise, seems an impossible task.

Meg Brulatour

What strikes me the most in each of the readings, not only in Emerson's Nature is the intense connection
made between spirituality and nature. It is certainly present in Thoreau's texts; Walden and "Walking" are
probably the best examples. The entirety of "Walking" seems to be an extended metaphor for pushing forward, not
only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. Without nature, we wouldn't survive in any manner:
physically, emotionally, mentally or most of all spiritually. Thoreau seems to endorse a constant communion with
nature. Obviously, he devotes his life to it, in what we learn from Walden.
Emerson, while endorsing a similar type of philosophy of nature, seems more stringent in his ideas of nature
and less stringent in his actual communion with nature. Of course, this could be false. It might be his writing style
and authoritative tone that seem to preach more than practice. Emerson gives few personal examples, so readers
really don't know if he lives in the way that he suggests readers or listeners live. Emerson seems to focus a great
deal on the ties between nature and the spirit. He tells readers what the connections are. Thoreau, on the other
hand, often shows us the connections, but leaves it up to us to make them in our own minds.

Ellen Moore

Transcendental Ideas: Religion

Transcendentalism for the New Age

Jane E. Rosecrans, Ph.D.

A Sermon delivered at Unitarian Universalist Community Church

Glen Allen, Virginia
February 6, 2005
Over the past twenty years, Unitarian Universalism has undergone a shift in consciousness. Many UU
churches over much of the twentieth century have served as havens for the religiously displaced, those who
emerged from the rigid dogmatism of mostly Christian churches that preached uncomfortable messages of sin and
damnation. These religious fugitives sought a more rational and intellectual religious environment and our
churches and its ministers have complied. But many of the people who have found a home in our churches over
the past two decades have grown up in churches that did not offer the opportunity for expanded religious inquiry
or they grew up in no church at all. Many UUs over these past two decades have craved greater spirituality in their
churches and the opportunity to develop individual spiritual practices.
In our own contemporary search for spiritual renewal, Unitarian Universalists have explored a variety of
religious paths - Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Wicca and other earth-based spiritualities - but not our own
religious heritage. In 1989, UU and Emerson scholar David Robinson observed, "Like a pauper who searches for
the next meal, never knowing of the relatives whose will would make him rich, American Unitarians lament their
vague religious identity, standing upon the richest theological legacy of any American denomination. Possessed of
a deep and sustaining history of spiritual achievement and philosophical speculation, religious liberals have been,
ironically, dispossessed of that heritage."
The heritage to which Robinson refers is that left to us by that group we call the American Transcendentalists
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and dozens of others, mostly
young Unitarian ministers. Most UUs know vaguely of the Transcendentalists, their alleged pantheism, their love
of Nature, their intellectual and literary power. But what is the "spiritual achievement" the Transcendentalists
have bequeathed to us?
American Transcendentalism curiously found itself in a similar situation to our own. Theodore Parker
described the Transcendentalists' desire for spiritual growth when he wrote in his journal, "I felt early that the
liberal ministers did not do justice to simple religious feeling:…all their preaching seemed to relate too much to
outward things, not enough to the inward pious life…. Most powerfully preaching to the Understanding, the
Conscience, and the Will, the cry was ever, 'Duty, Duty!' 'Work, Work!' They failed to address with equal power the
Soul, and did not also shout, 'Joy, Joy!' 'Delight, Delight!'"
As a result, the Transcendentalists developed what we might identify as a set of behaviors that I believe offer
us a unique opportunity to share - across the religious paths we follow as individuals - a uniquely Unitarian
Universalist spiritual practice. That spiritual practice begins with what Robinson calls a "theology of self-culture."
Self-culture is a term the Transcendentalists used to convey an overarching philosophy of the spirit. The word
"self" was a religious word that meant "soul." When Emerson coined the term "self-reliance," for example, he did
not mean it as we do today to refer to rugged individualism, but as an inner reliance on our own divinity as
opposed to what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls "God-reliance."
The word "culture," in addition, did not carry the anthropological or social associations of today, but grew out
of the horticultural associations of germination and development, associations that connected nature with spirit.
In his journal, Emerson writes, "I behold with awe &)delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see
my being imbedded in it. As a plant in the earth so I grow in God."
Self-culture, then, referred to the cultivation of the soul in individuals. In his address on self-culture, William
Ellery Channing defined it by writing, "To cultivate any thing, be it a plant, an animal, a mind, is to make it grow.
Growth, expansion is the end. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers of capacities,
especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-
culture."
The Transcendentalists believed in a process of lifelong spiritual growth. In her Memoirs, Margaret Fuller
acknowledged this process when she wrote, "Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow. I was often
false to this knowledge, in idolatries of particular objects, or impatient longings for happiness, but I have never
lost sight of it, have always been controlled by it, and this first gift of love has never been superceded by a later
love."
How can this Transcendentalist theology of self-culture serve as the foundation for a contemporary Unitarian
Universalist spiritual practice? The practices I will outline will not be new to many of you. My interest in bringing
these practices to you is to encourage you to see them as a unified approach to spirituality that is part of our UU
heritage. In addition, individual UUs follow many religious paths; this Transcendentalist approach to spirituality
is a method that can be practiced by Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, Witches, and Religious Humanists alike, so it
unifies us a Unitarian Universalists, even as we travel our own religious paths.
What are these spiritual practices? Barry M. Andrews, in his book Emerson as Spiritual Guide, outlines these
practices and it is as a result of reading and using this book, which I used last summer when I taught "The
Transcendentalist Celebration of Nature" at the Southeastern Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute (SUUSI),
that I was first inspired to explore Transcendentalism as a spiritual practice for UUs. Andrews identifies six
spiritual practices: writing, contemplation, the appreciation of nature, reading, observing the Sabbath, and
conversation. I have reconfigured these practices as follows:
1. Nature
2. Contemplation/Prayer/Meditation
3. Reading/Sacred Texts
4. Writing/Journal-Keeping
5. Conversation
6. Sacred Space/Sacred Time
7. Creative Expression
The Transcendentalists believed that each of these practices involved the direct experience of God, the
nurturing of the soul, and spiritual growth. By engaging in these spiritual practices, we may cultivate our own
intuitive grasp of spiritual knowledge.
Nature
Nature served as the dominant trope in Transcendentalist discourse. In nature, the Transcendentalists saw
the presence of the divine. In his journal, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "My profession is always to be on the alert
to find God in nature, to know his lurking places, to attend all the oratories, the operas in nature…. To watch for,
describe, all the divine features which I detect in Nature." Margaret Fuller considered nature a temple erected to
its god.
In his essay Nature, Emerson depicts nature in this way: "The greatest delight which the fields and woods
minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and
unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It
takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming
over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right."
For the Transcendentalists, the appreciation of nature meant being in and being with nature. As a spiritual
practice, this relationship, this interactivity between human beings and nature may take many forms and it helps
to be creative at a time in history when it is more difficult to enjoy nature the way the Transcendentalists did. It
may mean spending time in natural environments, outside of and separate from our life at work, or appreciating
the plants, animals, and all sentient beings that surround us, even in a bustling city. In his essay "Walking,"
Thoreau suggests the purpose of time spent walking in nature as this: "I am alarmed when it happens that I have
walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit." As a spiritual practice, then, nature is
something we experience.
Contemplation/Prayer/Meditation
Contemplation, for the Transcendentalists, was a vehicle for mindfully and thoughtfully experiencing our own
divinity. I incorporate contemplation with a series of related activities -- prayer, meditation, and reflection. In his
first sermon, based on I Thessalonians 5:17 ("Pray without ceasing."), Emerson preached on prayer: "It is not only
when we audibly and in form, address our petitions to the Deity, that we pray. We pray without ceasing. Every
secret wish is a prayer. Every desire of the human mind is a prayer uttered to God and registered in heaven." For
Emerson, "true prayers are the daily, hourly, momentary desires, that come without impediment, without fear,
into the soul."
For Emerson, prayer was something we felt in our core being, unfettered by the obstacles that often prevent
from knowing ourselves. Many UUs already practice meditation in various forms, but I believe it is equally
important to consider what it means to contemplate, to reflect, to consider ourselves and those around us
thoughtfully and carefully and genuinely.
Reading/Sacred Texts
Books and reading were also very important for the Transcendentalists. Emerson believed books should be
read, not for the information they contained, but for inspiration, or what he called "lustres." For Thoreau, books
exist to "explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may fine somewhere
uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise
men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life."
The Transcendentalists were especially interested in what they called "ethical scriptures" and they read widely
among the world's religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufi poetry. Thoreau produced the first English
translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and James Freeman Clarke wrote one of the earliest works in comparative
religions, Ten Great Religions. Making time for reading religious and sacred texts is a challenge in our own time.
We don't easily turn to sacred texts and their study, and when we do, we often find ourselves confused because
these texts seem mysterious and from a different time. We can locate sacred texts from all of the world's religions,
but also from contemporaries whose commentary on the sacred is often easier for us to access. In addition, the
Transcendentalists were not limited in the books they chose to read, and neither should we be. Their reading was
eclectic and included poetry, philosophy, mythology, history, science and biography.
Writing/Journal-Keeping
Most of the Transcendentalists kept a journal and the journals produced by them are among their most
important works. For Emerson, the importance of keeping a journal was this: "It is not for what is recorded,
though that may be the agreeable entertainment of later years, and the pleasant remembrances of what we were,
but for the habit of rendering account to yourself of yourself in some more rigorous manner and at more certain
intervals than mere conversation or casual reverie of solitude require." For Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May,
his journals were a mirror to himself.
Journal keeping has re-emerged in recent years and local bookstores often provide a wide variety of books for
the purpose of writing. How do we write in them? What do we write? What is the purpose of journal writing? It
helps to think about journal keeping as a way of getting to know ourselves. As a college teacher, I often use
journal-writing as a way to help students understand what they read or what they think because writing
incorporates both motor and cognitive skills that cause ideas and emotions to surface that would have remained
buried had they not been practiced together.
Conversation
The Transcendentalists organized "conversations" through the Transcendental Club and other means. Alcott
had this to say about the importance of verbal communication: "My theory of Conversation as the natural organ of
communicating, mind with mind, appears more and more beautiful to me. It is the method of human culture. By it
I come nearer the hearts of those whom I shall address than by any other means."
Margaret Fuller held a series of Conversations for women at the bookshop owned by Elizabeth Peabody, which
also carried homeopathic supplies and art supplies. Influenced by similar conversations established by Bronson
Alcott, the purpose of these events was "designed to encourage women in self-expression and independent
thinking," a radical practice for women in the mid-nineteenth century.
Emerson had this to say about the spiritual role of conversation:
And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high Questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in
all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a
temple, this unity of thought, in which every heart beats with a nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are
conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all.
 Today, book discussions, discussion groups, and community circles are familiar to most UUs. The reading,
contemplation, and writing activities that make up the other spiritual practices embodied in self-culture can be
easily enlisted as the substance of such conversations as the ones practiced by the Transcendentalists.
Sacred Time/Sacred Space
In his essay "Life without Principle," Thoreau wrote: "This world is a place of business. What an infinite
bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no
sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work." The
Transcendentalists were not merely interested in observing the Sabbath as an obligation, but believed it was
important to take time away from the regularity of our daily lives.
In addition, in his lecture on "Human Culture," Emerson encouraged his listeners to organize sacred space in
their homes: "In your arrangements for your residence see that you have a chamber to yourself, though you sell
your coat and wear a blanket." It was important for the Transcendentalists to consecrate time and space and it is
important for UUs to do the same, because this practice preserves for us a place and day for the mindful practice
of spirituality.
Creative Expression
Although not as well known, many of the Transcendentalists were music and art lovers. Sophia Peabody's
bookshop carried art supplies. The Transcendentalists were also interested in aesthetics; according to Ellen
Moore, the Transcendentalists "believed that function was just as important, if not more so, as form, and that art
lies in the process, or the experience, and not so much in the product." For Emerson, art was "the spirit creative."
In his article "Thoughts on Art" for The Dial in 1841, Emerson wrote, "Art is the spirit's voluntary use and
combination of things to serve its end."
Christopher Pearse Cranch, considered by some to be the most eclectic in his interests, was interested in art,
music, and theatre. He was a painter influenced by the Hudson River School, and an avid music lover, especially
of the music of Beethoven. The Transcendentalist community at Brook Farm, moreover, engaged in music,
dramatic readings, and plays. Performances of Shakespeare and signing were common, as were visitors such as
Cranch who provided musical entertainment. Many UUs are involved in music, art and theatre, but the
Transcendentalists remind us that this appreciation also serves the spirit.
All of the spiritual practices outlined here are best practiced together. Reading sacred texts, for example, may
then be discussed through formal conversations or used as prompts for meditation. The Transcendentalists did
not have television, the Internet, films and other pastimes to compete with reading, writing, and contemplation,
so it is sometimes a challenge for us today to find the time to engage our spirit as the Transcendentalists did.
These spiritual practices are part of the interwoven fabric of self-culture. Think of this process as a series of
concentric circles beginning with our own individual, spiritual awareness as the innermost circle. Out of that circle
our spiritual growth is nurtured. Out of that circle we integrate our spiritual and material lives. Out of that circle
we gain wisdom through experience and reflection. And finally, out of that circle we put these insights into
practice in our communities and our world. In his article "The Roots of Unitarian Universalist Spirituality in New
England Transcendentalist," Barry Andrews argues that "The Transcendentalists believed that spirituality
required an outward manifestation of inward aspirations. In other words, the moral and the spiritual are
necessarily interrelated. Accordingly, the Transcendentalists sought to achieve a congruence between spiritual
insights and ethical actions in all areas of their lives."
I believe this theology of self-culture has the power to transform us and to transform our churches. It is a
celebration of our religious heritage, and it reconnects us to our church community.

Jan Hokeš
Člověk nemá helmu, zato kormidlo

Čtenář, který sahá po knize esejů Ralpha Walda Emersona Sebedůvěra, sebejistota,
nezávislost, jsa nalákán jménem myslitelské autority devatenáctého věku, bude po otevření
knihy zklamán, ten poučenější dokonce rozhořčen. To, co vydává nakladatelství Pragma za
překlad Emersona, nemá totiž se skutečným Emersonem mnoho společného.

Americký spisovatel, básník, kazatel a myslitel Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) položil v
první polovině devatenáctého století základy tamějšího transcendentalistického hnutí, jehož
byl sám ústřední postavou. Základní myšlenky a hodnoty hnutí vyložil v jednom ze svých
nejvýznamnějších textů nazvaném Příroda (Nature), poprvé publikovaném v roce 1836, a v
první sérii svých esejů o pět let později. Druhá série následovala v roce 1844. Význam
Emersonových děl bývá občas zhuštěn do známých citátů o výstřelu, „který slyšel celý svět“,
nebo o tom, že „za peníze platíme často příliš velkou cenu“, ale jejich skutečný dopad nejen
na americkou společnost a způsob uvažování je mnohem větší a širší. Stačí vzít v potaz už jen
Emersonovo vnímání zkušenosti jakožto záležitosti osobní a vnitřní (nikoliv tedy veřejné a
vnější), která myšlenky nejen ověřuje, ale stejně tak je vytváří. Důležitý byl také jeho důraz
na jedince a jeho samostatnost a nezávislost, čemuž je věnována celý esej Sebedůvěra (Self-
Reliance).

Zdroj: Archív LtN

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) by se asi divil, kdyby se mu do rukou dostal poslední
český překlad jeho esejů.

Že by idealistický esoterik?
A právě podle tohoto eseje je pojmenována kniha, kterou v roce 1991 uspořádal editor
Richard Whelan a loni ji pod názvem Sebedůvěra, sebejistota, nezávislost vydalo
nakladatelství Pragma v českém překladu Pavlíny Dunovské. Whelan se tímto svým
editorským počinem pokusil zpřístupnit Emersonovy myšlenky dnešnímu čtenáři. Kromě již
zmíněné Přírody a eseje Transcendentalista vybral dalších čtrnáct Emersonových textů z obou
sérií. Z nich navíc, na základě vlastní četby, vyňal pouze ty pasáže, které sám považoval za
nejdůležitější. Spoustu vět, odstavců i celých stránek shledal nadbytečnými a texty tak zkrátil
na jejich pouhé zlomky. Tím se z Emersonových děl staly leckdy nepříliš propojené a z
kontextu vytržené pasáže. Ponechme stranou Whelanovu schopnost skutečně vybrat pouze
„jádro“ esejů a také to, zda by si takové dílo nezasloužilo spíše nezkrácené vydání s
komentáři. Ve svém úvodu ke knize se však Whelan až příliš zaměřuje na vše božské a
duchovní, prakticky opomíjí Emersonův vliv na transcendentalistické hnutí i celou společnost
a z autora činí jakéhosi idealistického esoterika.

Tomu odpovídá i zařazení knihy do sekce Esoterika na internetových stránkách Pragmy, kde
jsou v její anotaci uvedena přinejmenším diskutabilní „fakta“. Podtitul zní Moudrost jako
inspirace pro každodenní život. Ano, i tak lze určitě některé části Emersonových textů chápat,
ovšem po přečtení prvních pár stránek jakékoliv zde uvedeného eseje se čtenář neubrání
pocitu, že autor musel být ne esoterik a idealista, ale přinejmenším blázen píšící neskutečné
bláboly, z nichž si jen těžko něco vezmeme do každodenního života. Po srovnání s anglickými
originály si můžete ulehčeně vydechnout – v angličtině dávají Emersonovy myšlenky smysl.
Ne tak v naprosto děsivém a méně než amatérském překladu Pavlíny Dunovské, která nejenže
nechápe struktury anglických vět, ale navíc ani příliš nepracuje – nebo neumí pracovat – se
slovníkem a nijak se nezatěžuje tím, že tvoří nesmysly.

Přečtěte si Bibli
Podívejme se na několik mimořádně křiklavých příkladů: „Lidé, kteří dosáhli vynikajících
úspěchů, ve svých upřímných chvílích vždycky prozpěvovali: ,Ne z nás, ne z nás.‘“ (str. 44,
Duchovní zákony) Pomineme-li styl a stavbu této věty, zůstává tu ještě otázka, co že si to ti
lidé prozpěvovali. Nedá moc práce zjistit, že Emerson použil část citátu z Bible, konkrétně z
žalmu 115:1: „Ne nám, pane, ne nám“, který dále pokračuje slovy: „(...) ale svému jménu dej
slávu.“ V eseji Absolutno (str. 60) se zase čtenář dozví, že „Srdce, které opouští samo sebe pro
nejvyšší mysl, se nalézá spojeno se vší svou prací ...“ V originále se však nepíše o žádném
opouštění, ale o srdci, které se „oddá Nejvyšší mysli“.

Máte-li trpělivost propracovat se až na stranu 72 (Sebedůvěra), zůstane vám rozum stát po

přečtení pasáže: „Člověk by se měl naučit, že třpyt světla, jenž probleskuje napříč jeho myslí,
je větší než... Propouští záblesky, aniž by si všiml svojí mysli, protože ona je jím.“ Rozumný
překlad druhé věty by mohl znít zhruba takto: „Aniž by si toho byl vědom, nebere v potaz své
myšlenky, protože jsou jeho.“ Překladatelka si zde nejen nevěděla rady s gramatickou
strukturou, ale navíc si zjevně plete anglická přivlastňovací zájmena a předmětné tvary
zájmen osobních.

Poslední příklad může vypadat jako špatný vtip Pavlíny Dunovské. Vzhledem k tomu, nakolik
činí z Emersonových děl nesmyslné paskvily, působí ovšem spíše smutně: „Klíčem ke
každému člověku je jeho myšlenka. Ať vypadá sebesilněji, má přilbu, kterou poslouchá.“
Jestli tohle dávalo překladatelce smysl, pak si zaslouží hluboký obdiv. Emerson nepíše o
žádné přilbě, byť slovo „helm“ se tak může Čechovi jevit. Jedná se ale o výraz pro
„kormidlo“ – stačí nahlédnout do slovníku. Člověk tedy nemá „přilbu“, ale kormidlo, kterým
se řídí.

Čtenářům se zájmem o eseje Ralpha Walda Emersona tedy nezbývá než se spokojit s hodně
starými českými verzemi, Sebedůvěrou vydanou česky před jedenácti lety, či s vydáním osmi
esejů ve slovenštině z roku 1991, a doufat, že se dočkají ucelené publikace s kvalitním
českým překladem a odbornými komentáři. Jinou možností je přečíst si Emersona v originále,
a pokud nemáte potřebné znalosti jazyka, vyplatí se určitě raději investovat do kurzu
angličtiny, než do nového vydání knihy Sebedůvěra, sebejistota, nezávislost. Devalvace
překladem je bohužel značná.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Sebedůvěra, sebejistota, nezávislost. Moudrost jako inspirace

pro každodenní život. Přeložila Pavlína Dunovská. Pragma, Praha 2005, 208 stran.
 Jan Hokeš se zabývá dílem H. D. Thoreaua od svých studií na katedře anglistiky a
amerikanistiky Univerzity Pardubice v letech 1995–2001. V současné době působí
jako pedagog a překladatel.
 Text vyšel v Literárních novinách 2006-44 na straně 10.
 Publikováno online 1.11.2006

Poselství Waldenu

Prozaik F. Scott Fitzgerald si roku 1938 v dopise své dceři posteskl, že si až po četbě
Thoreaua uvědomil, co minul v životě, když z něj vynechal přírodu. Tato slova, domnívám
se, znamenají více než pouhou lítost věhlasného autora příběhů z uspěchaného
metropolitního života v jazzovém věku, když mu došlo, jak málo času strávil v lesích, na
horách či na divoké vodě; v jeho slovech zaznívá i zklamání nad životem, který sám žil a
o němž psal, nad hierarchií hodnot, kterou se řídil svět kolem něj i svět jeho literárních
hrdinů. I Fitzgeraldův Gatsby mohl dojít k Thoreauovu závěru, že „na to, co potřebuje
duše, není třeba peněz“, ale pokud tomu tak bylo, přišlo jeho poznání už příliš pozdě.

Henry David Thoreau o století dříve právě z přírody a ze života v její blízkosti či přímo
v jejím lůně vyčetl mnohé, co nabídl svým současníkům jako poznatek, radu či varování a
co z dnešního pohledu získalo mnohdy navíc rozměr prorocký. Tento bytostný ekolog již
dlouho před vznikem ekologie šířil svou víru, že příroda je bližším přítelem lidské duše
než společnost, že člověk je ve své podstatě tvorem více přírodním než společenským.
Neznamenalo to, že Thoreau vyzýval současníky, aby žili jako přírodní národy či aby
následovali jeho vlastního příkladu a uchylovali se do lesní samoty; šlo mu o to, aby
příslušníci naši civilizace nezapomínali, odkud vývojově vyšli a kam svou podstatou
nadále patří. „Necháme-li se vést jemným magnetismem existujícím v přírodě, půjdeme
správným směrem,“ napsal v eseji Chození (Walking, 1862), který vyšel v roce autorovy
smrti a je možno jej i proto považovat za jakýsi ideový testament; právě v něm
nacházíme též pregnantně formulované memento směřující k příštím generacím a
důrazně připomínající, že „v divokosti je záchrana světa“.

Thoreau ovšem nebyl romantický snílek, nýbrž člověk spíše praktický; nebyl to
divošský primitiv, ale vzdělaný intelektuál. Už v rodině, která sídlila v novoanglickém
Concordu, kde se David Henry 12. července 1817 narodil, byla pevně zakotvena tradice
zájmu o přírodu a vzdělání. Je vlastně symbolicky výmluvné, že se Thoreauovi zabývali a
živili zemědělstvím a výrobou tužek, protože právě psaní o přírodě a inspiraci přírodou se
mělo stát životním posláním Henryho Davida (k prohození pořadí jmen se sám rozhodl ve
dvaceti letech). Jako zdroje poznání kombinoval Thoreau po celý život přímé pozorování
přírody se studiem přírodovědných knih. Touha psát o tom, co viděl a žil a o čem
přemýšlel, však vycházela nejen z osobních zkušeností s přírodou, ale též s literaturou. V
letech harvardského studia jej hluboce zaujali klasičtí autoři řečtí a římští, a to jako
umělci i myslitelé. Jako absolvent mohl po návratu do Concordu číst v originále nejen díla
jejich, ale i literaturu prakticky všech moderních evropských národů. Henry David
Thoreau se vlastně nadevše cítil být a pro nás především zůstává literátem – psaní pro
něj bylo tím nejvyšším konáním, formou potvrzení a povznesení žité skutečnosti. Jeho
dílo představuje přibližně třicet svazků, z nichž první řádky a stránky zápisků si začal vést
už jako student. Psal i několik hodin denně, jako by se potřeboval propsat k
sebeuvědomění, k poznání a pochopení světa a vesmíru.

Pohled na rukopis Waldenu naznačuje, že difinitivní verzi předchází sedm pokusů; její
výrazová dokonalost však není jen výsledkem formálního, ale i logického, myšlenkového
tříbení. Thoreauův styl je diktován především hledáním „nejpřímější cesty k pravdě“.
Autor jazykově vychází většinou z konkrétního, mnohdy přímo osobního prožitku či
postřehu, takže ani abstraktní pasáže neztrácejí na přehlednosti a přesvědčivosti; čerpá
sílu z idiomu přirozené novoanglické řeči i ze zálibného zvládnutí rétoriky antických
mistrů, z biblických rytmů a formulací a z obrazné argumentace východních myslitelů.
Navíc má Walden jako celek promyšlenou a procítěnou kompozici, jíž je podpořeno
dynamické vnímáni knihy jako rezonance mýtického procesu individuálního probouzení v
rámci ročního cyklu, který se odvíjí od starého léta k novému jaru. Právě z onoho
důvodu, aby dosáhl smysluplné sevřenosti, stáhl autor v knize zážitky svých skutečných
dvou let u Waldenského rybníka do roku jediného. Symbolická jistě měla být a byla volba
4. července, tedy Dne národní nezávislosti, jako momentu, kdy se autor rozhoduje
osvobodit se od concordské a vůbec americké společnosti, kterou stále citelněji
poznamenávalo „prokletí trhu“. Zvolil jako „druha nejdružnějšího“ samotu, aby mohl „žít
chlapsky a spartánsky“ a aby „dokázal odmrštit všechno, co není životem“.

Dnes víme, že kniha, která vyšla pod názvem Walden aneb Život v lesích (Walden, or
Life in the Woods) roku 1854, tedy celých sedm let po Thoreauově návratu z osamělé
chatky u rybníka, není ani zdaleka pouhým záznamem autorovy zkušenosti; je zajímavou
duchovní biografií a kontemplací nad vztahem člověka a přírody, nad smyslem života a
existence. Moderní americký kritik Alfred Kazin nazval toto dílo „pečlivě vybudovaným
oltářem“, čímž ocenil nejen jeho estetickou působivost, ale i rituálovou funkčnost. Čtenáři
pragmatičtí čtou Walden jinak než filozofové, k ekologům může promlouvat jinak než k
ekonomům, ale o jeho aktuálnosti mluví stále nová a nová vydání v angličtině i v
překladech po celém světě. (Český překlad Zdeňka Franty z roku 1902 byl časově
předstižen snad jen v Německu, ale i verze Miloše Seiferta z roku 1924 patřila ještě k
ranější překladové vlně.)

Thoreau sám nazval Walden svým „zakokrháním světu“. Už v jeho době měla být
kniha varováním před rostoucími materiálními zájmy lidí, před honbou za penězi, před
ochuzováním ducha, před nebezpečím, že shánění životních prostředků bude zaměněno
za životní cíl a že zdání mohou lidé mylně považovat za skutečnost. Autor vyzýval k
přirozenosti a prostotě, protože věřil, že „nadbytečné bohatství může si koupit jen věci
nadbytečné“. Marnost Thoreauova volání bolí svět dnes možná více, než tomu mohlo být
v polovině předminulého století. Zdá se, že zvláště naléhavého posouzení si vyžadují jeho
myšlenky týkající se volného času, který na rozdíl od svých současníků nepovažoval za
zahálku, nýbrž za skutečné naplnění lidského života. Je přirozené, že ve společnosti
řízené principem protestantské pracovní morálky, jako byla ta jeho, či ve společnosti,
která je hnána touhou po materiálních statcích, jako je ta naše, neměla podobná
myšlenka moc naděje na obecné pochopení či přijetí.

Bylo Thoreauovou přirozeností, že nepochopení a nezájem komentoval mnohdy

povýšeně. Jeho výrazný individualismus mu někdy bránil plně pochopit problémy
společenského života i cesty, které jiní navrhovali k jejich řešení. A tak se nelze divit, že
se mu v Concordu nikdy nedostalo ocenění. Obec jej většinou považovala za podivína. Už
jako chlapec na concordské střední škole se natolik lišil od ostatních, že mu spolužáci dali
přezdívku „soudce“. Když se po studiích vrátil domů, měl učit v místní škole, ale po
několika dnech z ní odešel, jelikož nebyl ochoten děti fyzicky trestat, jak se tehdy
vyžadovalo. Pracoval nějaký čas v otcově tužkařské dílně, zavedl do výroby efektivní
zlepšovací návrh, ale brzy ztratil o tuto podnikatelskou činnost zájem. Úspěšný, ale
krátkodobý byl jeho pokus o založení soukromé školy; celý projekt skončil s
onemocněním bratra Johna, který mu pomáhal s vyučováním. Život v Concordu byl pro
Thoreaua nelehký, ovšem život mimo rodnou obec byl pro něj prakticky nemožný.
Nejlépe se cítil na svých pochůzkách po okolních polích a lesích, kde znal každou stezku,
každý kout. Věděl, že na rozdíl od lidí jej ptáci a květiny mezi sebe přijali; novoanglická
příroda pro něj byla nádherným domovem, laboratoří, studovnou i chrámem. Nikdy se
neoženil a neměl mnoho blízkých přátel, ale ani pro ty, kteří mu blízcí byli, nebylo
jednoduché vzájemný vztah udržovat. Je zřejmé, že způsob Thoreauova života by nebyl
receptem pro každého, což ovšem neznamená, že by s ním sám Thoreau nebyl spokojen
a že by si z něj skoro každý nemohl něco pro sebe vzít.

Jediná skupina lidí, která byla pro Thoreaua kromě jeho vlastní rodiny zajímavá, byli
členové Transcendentálního klubu v Concordu, v jehož čele stál uznávaný kritik, esejista
a básník Ralph Waldo Emerson, který je obecně považován též za Thoreauova mentora.
Myšlenky transcendentalismu vzešly ze střetnutí idejí novoanglického puritanismu a
evropského romantismu a znamenaly vlastně první vědomý pokus o kulturní sebeurčení
Američanů jako národa; klíčovou úlohu v tomto procesu mělo mít chápání přírody jako
výrazu duchovna, jako prostředí, v němž je možno realizovat rozhovor s Bohem i vlastní
duší, kde je možno poznat i sama sebe. Emersonova knížečka Příroda, která vyšla v roce
1836, byla prvním impulsem novému kulturnímu hnutí a Thoreau v ní našel potvrzení
toho, co sám cítil, ale nedovedl zatím formulovat. Emerson, vyzývající Ameriku i každého
jedince k myšlenkové svébytnosti, měl u Thoreaua absolutní úspěch. Žák, inspirovaný
svým o čtrnáct let starším učitelem, vykročil naznačeným směrem a brzy zcela
samostatně zásady transcendentalismu prakticky realizoval. Své první verše a přírodní
eseje uveřejnil ve skupinovém časopise Sluneční hodiny (Dial), na popud Emersonův
začal psát svůj celoživotní deník. Roku 1839 sjel Thoreau se svým bratrem Johnem dvě
novoanglické řeky na člunu, který sami vyrobili, a poznámky z této cesty použil Henry za
pozdějšího pobytu u Waldenu k napsání své první knihy Týden na řekách Concordu a
Merrimacku (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849); vyšla až čtyři roky po
dopsání, a to v nákladu jednoho tisíce výtisků, z nichž více než dvě třetiny poslal
nakladatel za čtyři další roky autorovi domů jako neprodejné, a ten tehdy s trpkým
humorem konstatoval, že je majitelem knihovny o devíti stovkách svazků, z nichž sedm
set napsal sám. Stejně jako ostatní významní transcendentalisté, včetně Nathaniela
Hawthorna a Hermana Melvilla, stál Thoreau v průběhu své autorské kariéry nejednou
před dilematem, jak se vyhnout populárnějšímu způsobu psaní a přitom se nevzdat touhy
oslovit a ovlivnit pokud možno co největší publikum. Být romanticky svůj a současně chtít
být společensky či dokonce komerčně úspěšný nebylo zdaleka snadné, a to ani v době
Thoreauově.

Emerson proto svému mladšímu příteli poskytoval nejen duchovní inspiraci, ale v době
materiální nouze také pracovní příležitosti a střechu nad hlavou. Thoreau se staral o
domácnost a dělal společnost též paní domu, o níž mluvil jako o starší sestře. U dětí
Emersonova bratra na Staten Islandu měl Thoreau dělat učitele, ale v New Yorku se
necítil dobře a brzy se vrátil opět do Concordu. Emersonovi patřila také lesní parcela u
Waldenského rybníka, kde si Thoreau postavil srub, v němž prožil ony nejpamátnější dva
roky svého života (4. 7. 1845–6. 9. 1847). U Emersonů měl možnost setkat se s řadou
osobností tehdejšího literárního a kulturního života, mezi nimiž byl kromě Hawthorna
také liberální duchovní (zakladatel unitářské církve) a abolicionista William Ellery
Channing, údajně Thoreauův nejbližší přítel, který jej doprovázel na některých dlouhých
pěších túrách. O všech si Thoreau vedl podrobné zápisy, ale po Waldenu mu už žádná z
knih do jeho smrti nevyšla. Zemřel na tuberkulózu 6. května 1862 a jeho poslední slova
byla „los“ a „Indián“. Právě o původních obyvatelích Ameriky chtěl Thoreau napsat velkou
knihu, ale i když materiál k ní sbíral po mnoho let, nikdy ji nedokončil. Péčí autorových
přátel byly publikovány tituly Lesy v Mainu (The Maine Woods, 1864), Výlety (Excursions,
1863), Mys tresky (Cape Cod, 1865), Yankee v Kanadě (Yankee in Canada, 1866) a
později ještě řada dalších.

Ti, kdo se zabývají historií přírodního eseje jako moderního žánru, se shodují v tom,
že jeho počátek je nerozlučně spojen se jménem Thoreauovým. Už jeho první esej
Přírodní dějiny Massachusetts (A Natural History of Massachusetts), otištěný v časopise
Sluneční hodiny roku 1842, ukázal na možnosti, jaké tato forma má, když staví na
pravdivě zobrazeném vědeckém faktu a osobně viděném a cítěném poznatku či prožitku
jako východiscích k filozofickému uchopení lidské zkušenosti. Skutečnost, že Thoreau ve
svých přírodních prózách překonal tehdy stále ještě existující puritánské vidění přírody a
civilizace jako dvou antagonistických pojmů a rozehnal představy divočiny jako něčeho
temného a zlovolného, protože nepoznaného, otevřela nové pohledy na přírodu a
zvýraznila význam její celistvosti, která zahrnuje i člověka a jeho společnost. Thoreau
spolu s Johnem Muirem, Johnem Burroughsem a dalšími přírodními esejisty
devatenáctého století silně ovlivnili americké smýšlení o přírodě a zcela jistě pomohli
formulovat i konkrétní postoje a chování k ní. Byl to ostatně Thoreau, kdo spolu s
věhlasným malířem amerických Indiánů Georgem Catlinem, přišel roku 1858 s ideou
vybraná přírodní teritoria chránit a zachovat jako národní rezervace. Jak se posunovalo
„civilizační pomezí“ směrem na Západ, došlo jistě na území Spojených států i
k necitlivému a přímo nelítostnému drancování přírody, současně je však třeba si
připomenout, že historicky vůbec první národní parky byly ty americké. Yellowstonský byl
založen již v roce 1872.

Je přirozené, že se přírodní esejistika od Thoreauových dob už v mnohém proměnila;

narůstají požadavky na vědeckou erudici či alespoň odbornou přípravu autorů, zaměření
textů se vyvíjí k větší specifičnosti a změny v obecné situaci ovlivňují i výslednou
atmosféru. Tak třeba Joseph Wood Krutch, který sám napsal roku 1948 zajímavou
Thoreauovu biografii, byl ve svých vlastních textech o mnoho pesimističtější než autor
Waldenu. Jiní autoři, jako Rachel Carsonová, Wendell Berry nebo Ralph Nader, nasadili
tak ostrý kritický tón vůči silám nepřátelským přírodě a člověku (např. užívání pesticid),
že jejich knihy přecházejí do kategorie politických polemik. Barry Lopez, autor
renomovaných Arktických snů (Arctic Dreams) z roku 1986, je přesvědčen, že ekologicky
zaměřená literatura má velkou příležitost získat na významu nejen jako literatura, nýbrž i
jako myšlenková síla schopná ovlivnit a formovat politické myšlení Američanů. A tak
nepřekvapuje, že jeden současný, ekologicky uvažující politik dochází k názoru, že
opravdová demokracie musí dávat hlasovací právo nejen všem občanům, ale i stromům,
ptákům, broukům a červům, prostě všemu živému. A není pochyb, že by měl Thoreauovu
plnou podporu.

Kalifornský básník a esejista Gary Snyder thoreauovskou myšlenku o síle naděje, již je
možno vkládat do přírodní „divoké mysli“, obohacuje o dimenze etické a estetické. Z jeho
představ o „nové přírodní poetice“ vychází báseň jako „ekologický návod k zachování
života“. Snyder ke svému chápání poezie a ke svým varováním a doporučením
adresovaným naší civilizaci došel studiem filozofií Orientu a „primitivních“ kultur
původních obyvatel amerického kontinentu. Stejně jako Thoreau posílil své meditace
dělným životem v divočině. A tak se nelze divit, když recenzenti jeho esejistické soubory
Praxe divočiny (The Practice of the Wild, 1992) a Místo v prostoru (A Place in Space,
1995) vítali i jako novodobé reflexe Waldenu.

Ovšem Thoreauův odkaz žil a žije i v ryze společensko-politickém kontextu, a to

zásluhou pamfletu Občanská neposlušnost (Civil Disobedience, 1849). Jak víme z
Waldenu, občan Thoreau byl v červenci 1846 na jednu noc vsazen do concordského
vězení, protože odmítl platit daně na protest proti tomu, že jeho vláda vedla válku v
Mexiku a dále podporovala šíření otrokářského systému na americkém Jihu. Myšlenka, že
lidské svědomí je instituce nad zákon či rozhodnutí státní moci, nebyla jen základem
autorova morálně motivovaného nekonformismu, ale putovala jako jasný plamínek s jeho
pamfletem do všech koutů světa. Radikálové v Anglii i jinde, a jak se naše století
probouzelo, i v samotných Spojených státech, považovali Thoreaua za jednoho ze svých
vzorů a hrdinů. Britský reformista Henry Salt napsal již roku 1890 jeho biografii a po celé
zemi se zakládaly waldenské kluby; Občanská neposlušnost se četla mezi fabiány i
ranými členy Labour Party. Thoreaua si přivlastňovali též anarchisté od Kropotkina přes
Goldmanovou k Proudhonovi, i když on sám by jistě byl pln podezření k jejich programu,
a to už proto, že byl skeptický vlastně ke každé organizované politické platformě či
organizaci. Nemluvě o tom, že by stěží souhlasil s užitím násilí; v tom udělal snad jedinou
výjimku, když vystoupil na obranu Johna Browna po jeho neúspěšné revoltě proti otroctví
a neúspěšném útoku na Harpers Ferry.

Právě Thoreauovy ideje nenásilného, ale rezolutního protestu zdůvodněného

mravními, tedy vyššími než politickými a společenskými motivy, zapůsobily na řadu
osbností i hnutí ve světě. Indický národní vůdce Mahátmá Gándhí a americký černý
aktivista a bojovník za lidská a občanská práva Martin Luther King se v minulém století
sami prohlásili za Thoreauovy následovníky, i když on sám by v sobě asi stěží našel vůli a
ochotu ztotožnit se či spojit svůj osud a protest s osudem a protestem velkých
společenských skupin nebo dokonce celých národů. Bránil by mu v tom jeho
individualismus i jeho neochota příliš rozlišovat mezi vládou a společností; a byl tu ještě
fakt, na nějž upozornil kromě jiných i Theodore Dreiser, že Thoreau vlastně „člověka za
společenský organismus ani za část společenského organismu nepovažoval“.

Lidé si brali a zřejmě budou brát ze Thoreauových slov, co sami potřebují; hledají v
jeho próze, krásně vyjádřeno, co se v nich samých teprve nejasně formuje. Jistě si nikdy
nemohl uvědomit, za kolik lidí promlouvá, když mluvil za sebe a k sobě. Na hnutí
mladých Američanů v šedesátých letech našeho století zapůsobil svým životním stylem a
slovy o právu každého jedince kráčet v tomto světě podle rytmu vlastního „bubeníka“. My
bychom měli zvláště po zkušenostech z porevoluční transformace Thoreauovi naslouchat,
když říká, že jen reformy vnitřní jsou opravdové a že skutečné a hluboké změny ve
vztazích mezi lidmi mohou vyplynout jen ze změn v lidech samých. Nejužitečnější
zásadou při četbě Thoreaua ovšem bude řídit se jeho vlastní radou, že „knihy je nutno
číst se stejným rozmyslem a odstupem, jak byly psány“. Ale hlavně, že je třeba takové
knihy nepřestat číst.

Jan Hokeš

Umění Chůze
Umíte si představit den, ve kterém byste neprochodili nejméně čtyři hodiny?
Autor Waldenu a Občanské neposlušnosti, pacifista, odpůrce daní a kritik
modernity Henry David Thoreau, si takový představit nedovedl. Nad jeho pozdní
esejí Chůze se zamýšlí pedagog a překladatel Jan Hokeš.
„Procházet se s ním bylo potěšením a poctou. Krajinu znal jako liška nebo pták
a stejně jako oni jí procházel volně svými vlastními stezkami... Takovému průvodci se
musel člověk poslušně podřídit a odměna za to byla obrovská.“ Tato slova napsal
o Henrym Davidu Thoreauovi jeho přítel a mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson ve své pohřební
řeči vydané později pod názvem Thoreau.
Thoreau byl skutečně náruživým chodcem a podle svých vlastních slov si nedokázal
představit den, kdy by nestrávil nejméně čtyři hodiny chůzí. Na svých výletech se často
setkával s různými formami divokosti, ať už se jednalo o indiány (a o ně měl velký zájem
a stýkal se s nimi), divoká jablka, trávy, ondatry, sviště nebo jiné rostlinné či živočišné
formy divočiny, jak sám říkal. Jak je patrné z jeho deníků z konce roku 1850 a začátku
roku 1851, ona divočina ho fascinovala. Tato fascinace pak logicky vyústila v přednášku
Divočina (později Divočina aneb Chůze), kterou poprvé uvedl v dubnu 1851. V průběhu
následujících let se z ní vyvinula esej Chůze (angl. Walking), dokončená v květnu 1862 —
tedy jen krátce před jeho smrtí.
Rytířský řád Chodců
Je-li Walden považován za Thoreauovu ústřední knihu, pak Chůzi lze pokládat za
jednu z jeho ústředních esejí. Hned v jejím úvodu se dočteme, že Thoreau nepovažuje
člověka ani tak za tvora společenského, za člena společnosti, jako spíše za součást
přírody. Vysvětluje, co pro něj znamená být chodcem a porozumět „umění Chůze“. Ta pro
něho není pouhým pohybem nebo tělesným cvičením, ale spíše druhem psychické
činnosti. Pokud si s sebou do lesů a luk odnášíte své starosti a závazky z města, pak
nejste pro chůzi patřičně vybaveni a nemůžete se jí plně oddat, a vstoupit tak do
nejstaršího rytířského řádu Chodců, který je jakýmsi „čtvrtým stavem mimo církev, stát
a lid“. Kapitálem v tomto umění je volný čas, svoboda a nezávislost, které vám nemůže
zajistit žádné bohatství. „Chodcem se člověk rodí, ne stává,“ uvádí Thoreau, a vytváří tak
dojem určité výlučnosti, která z řádu dělá spíše cosi jako kastu. Pravděpodobně nemá na
mysli skutečnou předurčenost, ale chce ještě více zdůraznit, že svobodu potřebnou
k tomuto povolání nelze získat sezením v obchodech a kancelářích, k němuž je
odsouzena spousta jeho spoluobčanů.
Bohatství sice může člověku zajistit prostředky k vlastnictví krajiny, v níž se lze
procházet podle libosti, ale přesně to vidí Thoreau jako chybu: „Těšit se z nějaké věci
výlučně obvykle znamená připravit sám sebe o skutečné potěšení z ní.“ Pochvaluje si, že
v jeho okolí se vyskytuje stále dostatek krajiny, která není v soukromých rukou, a tudíž
může být volně užívána k chůzi. Zároveň se však dívá do budoucnosti a předpovídá den,
kdy bude tato země rozdělena na kousky, z nichž budou mít radost jen jejich majitelé. Ti
zesílí své ploty a vyvinou ochranné prostředky, které chodce donutí omezit se na veřejné
cesty, a chození po zemi bude znamenat neoprávněné vniknutí na cizí pozemek. Ti, kdo
se snaží vytyčit hranice svých pozemků, se podle Thoreaua propadají do močálů řeky
Styx a jejich zeměměřičem není nikdo jiný než Satan.
Dejte mi divokost
Chodec musí často činit nelehké rozhodnutí, kam a kterou cestou se vydat. „Věřím, že
v Přírodě je nepatrný magnetismus, který nás, pokud se mu mimovolně podřídíme,
navede tím správným směrem,“ míní Thoreau a dodává, že stezka, kterou kráčíme, je
symbolem cesty, po níž se rádi procházíme ve svém vnitřním světě. Což je myšlenka
odvozená od Emersonovy základní transcendentalistické teze, že „určité přírodní
skutečnosti jsou symboly určitých duševních skutečností“. Jehlu Thoreauova kompasu
s mírnými odchylkami přitahoval jeden směr — západ. Na opačnou světovou stranu se
vydával jen kvůli tomu, aby studoval umění, literaturu a filozofii, ale na západě viděl
naději a budoucnost. Západ, který měl na mysli, byl totiž synonymem pro již zmíněnou
divočinu.
A zde autor přivádí čtenáře na myšlenku, že „v divokosti je záchrana světa“.
Požaduje: „Dejte mi divokost, jejíž letmý pohled nevydrží žádná civilizace.“ Tento způsob
uvažování byl důležitý pro pozdější ochranářské hnutí v USA, jehož otec zakladatel John
Muir z Thoreaua čerpal. „Jak blízké dobrému je to, co je divoké!“ parafrázuje Thoreau
alžbětinského básníka a dramatika Bena Jonsona a pokračuje prohlášením, že
budoucnost nevidí ve městech, pěstěných trávnících a kultivovaných polích, ale
v nepřístupných bažinách: „Kdyby mi někdo nabídl, abych bydlel vedle nejkrásnější
zahrady, jakou kdy vytvořila lidská zručnost, nebo vedle bezútěšné bažiny, rozhodně bych
si vybral tu bažinu.“ Na všechna lidská vylepšování nahlíží jako na deformace krajiny
snažící se o její zkrocení.
 Podobně se dívá i na krocení a ochočování zvířat. Raduje se z hravosti a dovádění
dobytka a z toho, že koně a voli musí být nejprve zlomeni, než začnou sloužit člověku.
I v člověku zůstávají podle Thoreaua zbytky divokosti, díky nimž se nestává poddajným
členem společnosti tak snadno. To, že většina lidí, stejně jako mnohé zvířecí druhy,
podléhá civilizaci, neznamená, že i ostatní by se měli snížit na stejnou úroveň. Zde se
projevuje Thoreauův smysl pro paradox — za vyšší úroveň považuje člověka divokého,
nikoliv všeobecně vyzdvihovaného člověka zušlechtěného civilizací. A v zápětí volá po
zachování divokosti ostatních živočišných druhů, u nichž si dokáže představit jejich lepší
využití než stahování a vydělávání jejich kůží na výrobu bot. Tehdy byl ovšem pojem
práva zvířat, stejně jako environmentalismus, zcela neznámý.
Americká obloha vyšší evropské
Překvapivě se Thoreau v Chůzi projevuje jako patriot. Nepěl samozřejmě ódy na
politickou elitu země. Naopak se těšil z toho, jak málo místa v krajině zaujímají záležitosti
církve, státu, obchodu a politiky, která pro něj neznamená nic víc než kouř z doutníku,
tedy něco mizivého. Jeho patriotismus se vztahuje na rostliny a zvířata, s nimiž se na
svých toulkách setkává, a ohrazuje se proti povýšenému postoji přírodovědce Buffona
vůči americké přírodě. Věří, že v Americe se obloha jeví vyšší nežli v Evropě a že těchto
výšin jednou dosáhne i filozofie, náboženství a literatura jejích obyvatel.
Co se posledně jmenovaného týče, Thoreau si stěžuje, že neví o žádné poezii, která
by dostatečně vyjádřila „touhu po Divočině“ a nechala mluvit přírodu. Těžko říci, zda tyto
snahy neviděl ve Stéblech trávy svého vrstevníka Walta Whitmana, s nímž se osobně
setkal. V předmluvě ke své sbírce z roku 1855 Whitman píše: „Země a moře, zvířata,
ryby a ptáci, nebeská klenba a její útvary nejsou malými náměty ...“ Knihy o jednadvacet
let mladšího Johna Muira si Thoreau bohužel už přečíst nemohl a básníci divočiny, jako
Gary Snyder (pozn. red.: viz SG 1/2005 věnovaná divočině) a Nanao Sakaki či český
poutník karpatskou přírodou Miloslav Nevrlý, přišli na scénu o nějakých sto let později.
Thoreau touto esejí každopádně nasadil vysokou laťku zejména pro budoucí autory
hledající hlubší vztahy člověka a přírody — všichni z něj alespoň částečně vycházejí.
Výrazně a v jistém smyslu radikálně vyzdvihl dílo divoké přírody nad dílo lidských rukou
a poukázal na nesmírnou hodnotu divočiny i pro civilizovaného člověka. Toto poselství
platí o to více v dnešní době, kdy skutečné divočiny příliš nezbývá a jen málo divokého
zůstává nezkroceno.
Henry David Thoreau: Walking. Bedford, Massachusetts: Applewood Books 1992;
české vydání Chůze. Brno: Zvláštní vydání 1995.

--- Waldenský rybník dnes ---

I když i v Thoreauově době měl Walden daleko ke skutečné divočině, dnes by se asi
slavný rodák z Concordu ve státě Massachusetts nestačil divit. Většina návštěvníků sem
přijíždí samozřejmě automobily, jimž je vyhrazeno zhruba tisíc míst. Celý rybník, který
byl vyhlášen za státní rezervaci a národní historickou památku, je obehnán plotem.
Koupání je povoleno pouze na oficiálních plážích na opačné straně, než stávala
Thoreauova chatka. Její základy objevil v roce 1945 archeolog Roland Robbins a jsou
označeny jakýmisi patníky s řetězy, vedle nichž je hromada kamenů od poutníků z celého
světa. Na základě kresby Thoreauovy sestry pak byla postavena replika chaty — ovšem
jinde, než původně stál originál. Kromě koupání, rybaření či ježdění na loďkách zde
můžete absolvovat například vzdělávací procházku s průvodcem. O současné popularitě
Thoreaua a jeho příbytku svědčí i internetová stránka:
http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/buildings/new-england/thoreau/cabin.htm.
 Margaret
Fuller*
What is Transcendentalism?
Readers have asked this question often. Here's my answer:
When I first learned about Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau in high school English class, I admit: I couldn't
figure out what the term "Transcendentalism" meant. I couldn't figure out
what the central idea was that held all those authors and poets and
philosophers together so that they deserved this categorical name,
Transcendentalists. And so, if you're at this page because you're having
difficulty: you're not alone. Here's what I've learned since high school about
this subject.
The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by their context --
by what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation
and therefore as what they were trying to be different from.
Theodore
One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of
Parker* well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War
and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. These
people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were attempting to
create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already decades since the
Americans had won independence from England. Now, these people
Harriet
believed, it was time for literary independence. And so they deliberately Martineau*
went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and
other writing that were clearly different from anything from England,
France, Germany, or any other European nation.
Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a
generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion (our
words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new
understandings their age made available.
The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had been looking at the Christian and
Jewish scriptures through the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for some about
the old assumptions of religion.
James The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the
Martineau* natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. The
pendulum was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational,
more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those
new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer
enough.
German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights into the
religious and philosophical thinking about reason and religion.
This new generation looked at the previous
Thomas
generation's rebellions of the early 19th century Wentworth
Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Higginson*
Trinitarianism and against Calvinist
predestinationarianism. This new generation decided
that the revolutions had not gone far enough, and had
stayed too much in the rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the
previous generation of rational religion.
The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new evangelical
Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers in New England and around
Boston, to an intuitive, experiential, passionate, more-than-just-rational
perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the
gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift?
Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered in
the West, translated, and published so that they were more widely available.
The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist
scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective,
a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures,
too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.
 And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we
will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist,
because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires
all men."
Yes, men, but women too.
Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform
movements, especially anti-slavery and women's rights. (Abolitionism was the
word used for the more radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism
was a word that was invented deliberately in France some decades later and
was not, to my knowledge, found in the time of the Transcendentalists.) Why
social reform, and why these issues in particular?
The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining
Ralph Waldo Emily
Emerson*
Euro-chauvinism in thinking that people with British Dickinson*
and German backgrounds were more suited for
freedom than others (see some of Theodore Parker's writings, for instance, for
this sentiment), also believed that at the level of the human soul, all people had
access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and knowledge and
truth.
Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast differences in the
ability to be educated, to be self-directed, were institutions to be reformed.
Women and African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved more
ability to become educated, to fulfill their human potential (in a twentieth-
century phrase), to be fully human.
Men like Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson who
identified themselves as Transcendentalists, also worked for freedom of the
slaves and for women's freedom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803-April 27, 1882) began his career as a Unitarian
minister but went on, as an independent man of letters, to become the preeminent
lecturer, essayist and philosopher of 19th century America. Emerson was a key figure
in the "New England Renaissance," as an author and also through association with
the Transcendental Club, the Dial and the many writers—notably Henry David Thoreau,
Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller—who gathered around him at his home in Concord,
Massachusetts. Late in life his home was a kind of shrine students and aspiring writers visited,
as on a pilgrimage. He and other Transcendentalists did much to open Unitarians and the
liberally religious to science, Eastern religions and a naturalistic mysticism.
Waldo was born May 25, 1803, the fourth of eight children. His family—descendants of
a number of noteworthy New England ministers—prized education, learning and culture.
His father, William Emerson, distinguished minister of First Church, Boston, had drawn his
congregation with him into Unitarianism. The family was intimate with the Boston
intellectuals of the era, among them William Ellery Channing, George Buckminster, Henry
Ware, Sr. and Edward Everett.
His father died when Waldo was eight, leaving the family without financial support. His
mother Ruth sold her husband's library (which became the Boston Athenaeum), took in
boarders and worked as a maid. They often had not enough to eat. Waldo and his brother
Charles had only one overcoat between them. Taunting schoolfellows asked, "Whose turn
is it to wear the great-coat today?"
Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, his father's unmarried sister, was the dominant influence
of Emerson's childhood and youth. Without formal education, she was possessed of a
richly fertile mind. She read widely and knew well the thinkers of the day. A moderate
"Channing Unitarian," steeped in the piety of New England and the history of its churches
and theology, she taught Waldo many of the aphorisms he in turn taught his own
children: "Lift your aims." "Always do what you are afraid to do." "Despise trifles." "Turn
up your nose at glory, honor and money." And "Oh, blessed, blessed poverty." She first
introduced Emerson to Hindu scriptures and Neoplatonism. She anticipated, especially in
her openess to natural religion, the Transcendentalist sensibility. Emerson's distinctive
views first began to emerge in his letters to "Tnamurya," an anagram of "Aunt Mary,"
during the 1820s.
Poor as they were, their family history and social position assured that the Emerson
boys would be well educated. Waldo entered Harvard at 14. He began then to keep a
journal, a practice he continued for the rest of his life, later calling its volumes—all long
since published—his "savings bank." He considered various professions, most involving
oratory or rhetoric in one way or another. From Harvard he once wrote Aunt Mary, "In my
daydreams I do often hunger and thirst to be a painter." His early journals, poems, and
other writings were lavishly illustrated with his drawings. He also painted with water
colors. His early writings contain much poetry, but he knew he could not earn a living as
a poet. One aspiration never left him. He told Prof. James B. Thayer in 1873 that there
never was a time that he would not have accepted a professorship of rhetoric at Harvard.
After graduation from the College in 1821, at the age of 18, Emerson taught school
for his uncle, the Rev. Samuel Ripley, in Waltham and later opened a finishing school for
girls, but he did not enjoy school teaching. His older brother William had studied for the
ministry, but abandoned it to study law. Aunt Mary stressed that there always had been,
and always must be, a Reverend Mr. Emerson in Boston. Though he questioned his
calling, Emerson closed his school after four years to enter Harvard Divinity School.
In October, 1826, Emerson was licensed to preach by the Middlesex Association of
Ministers. He became dangerously ill that fall, probably suffering early symptoms of
tuberculosis from which his brother William died. In late November he traveled south to
Charleston, South Carolina and St. Augustine, Florida, in hope that rest in a warmer
climate would help him recover. Having returned to New England the next spring in
much better health, he began to preach in Unitarian churches in Massachusetts and New
Hampshire.
In 1829 Emerson became associate minister to Henry Ware, Jr. at Second Church in
Boston. That year he married Ellen Louisa Tucker. Ellen died of tuberculosis less than 18
months later. Overwhelmed with grief, Emerson wrote in his journal: "Five days are
wasted since Ellen went to heaven to see, to know, to worship, to love, to intercede.
Reunite us, O thou Father of our spirits."
In 1830, after Ware joined the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, Second Church
made Emerson full minister. He never relished parish work, especially the "calling" he
was expected to do every afternoon, though he liked preaching. Ware criticized his use
of biblical texts to illustrate his sermons, as opposed to preaching from the texts.
Though his sermons were not the learned discourses typical of the pulpit in that day, his
congregation liked both them and him. He dealt with things of the spirit with a homely
elevation that charmed his hearers. The membership grew.
Yet in 1832, in a radical departure from common practice, Emerson resigned his pulpit
and never served another congregation. He is often thought to have left the ministry
because he could not in conscience serve communion, knowing the members construed
the meaning of the rite differently than he did. That issue was his ostensible reason for
resignation, though members offered to let him serve communion without taking it
himself, if he would stay. Probably, the issue was his vocation: What had God intended
for him? Uncertain what his vocation was, he decided it was not the ministry.
 His hymn, "We love the venerable house our fathers built to God"—
written for the ordination of his successor at Second Church, Chandler
Robbins—expresses his affection for the church. His "Divinity School Address" was
delivered as a sermon from a minister to graduating students for the ministry. For
many years he quietly attended annual meetings of the American Unitarian
Association. He did varying amounts of supply preaching, especially at Lexington,
until 1846. He used the title "Reverend" for a number of years. It was accorded him
by others for many years more. Among his last lectures were "The Preacher,"
"Worship," and "Religion."
In 1833 Emerson began a new career as a lecturer. He made Concord his home and
lived there for the rest of his life, leaving it only for lecture tours. At first he lectured
mostly on scientific subjects, in a poetic spirit.
In 1835 he married Lydia Jackson. Lydian, as he called her, took a keen interest in his
ideas and his work. They had four children. The loss of their first, Waldo, who died in
1842 at the age of five, was very hard. Their other children were Ellen, Edith and Edward
Waldo.
In most ways Emerson's life as a private scholar was conventional, in some regards,
even stern. He always wore a black suit, did not like loud laughter, and would not tolerate
gossip or flippant mention of love. Death could not be the subject of jest in his presence.
But, though not good at repartee, he was a man of gentle humor, especially of the self-
deprecating sort, and was much beloved, even revered, by friends and neighbors.
He experimented now and then with currently popular notions, such as vegetarianism,
which he found did him no good. He tried, as an egalitarian gesture, having the servants
sit at table with the family for meals, but they objected. He tried working in his yard and
garden on the theory that manual labor should be part of the scholar's life, but it left him
too tired to do his other work. He concluded, "The writer shall not dig." He could not be
enticed to join Brook Farm, the commune organized in 1841 by George Ripley and other
of his Transcendentalist friends.
In his Concord study Emerson read many hundreds of volumes and in several
languages, including the latest scientific publications and the newly translated sacred
texts of Eastern religions, as well as history and literature. He was much taken with the
Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant, especially as it came to him through the writings
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The influence of Hindu scriptures
and Persian poetry, which Emerson had been reading for years, were fully incorporated in
his thought and work after 1845.
In 1836 he published his first book, Nature, in an anonymous edition of 500 copies
that took six years to sell out. His growing influence came largely through his lectures,
but also through his participation in an informal group of bright and articulate younger
ministers, who began meeting in September, 1836, to discuss theology, philosophy and
related subjects. Variously called Hedge's Club (after Frederic Henry Hedge, whose idea it
was), the Symposium (in honor of Plato's dialogue of that name) and the
Transcendentalist Club, the group met off and on for about four years. Regarded by many
of the older ministers as "radicals," these young men spread their own and Emerson's
ideas in sermons, other forms of public address and published articles. Emerson was
widely seen as their leader. His stirring Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard in 1837, "The
American Scholar," was very well received. In it he challenged his audience to cease
imitating Europe and to ground their ideas in American resources, sincerity and realism.
It has been called "America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence."
By custom the seniors of Harvard Divinity School selected a speaker to address their
class and guests in the spring of their final year at the school. In 1838 the eight
graduating seniors asked Emerson to address them. He spoke in protest against a stale,
inherited Christianity and called for fresh religious inspiration. "Be a man," he said.
"Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. . . Refuse the
good models. . . Cast conformity behind you, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity."
Emerson considered his ideas consistent with the teachings of Jesus. He was taken by
surprise when his "Divinity School Address" was both acclaimed and denounced
vigorously in a storm of controversy. Theodore Parker, the newly ordained minister in
West Roxbury, thought the speech "sublime." Andrews Norton, Harvard's Dexter
Professor of Biblical Literature, labeled it the "latest form of infidelity."
The principle objection to Emerson's address was to his harsh dismissal of Biblical
miracles, long accepted by Unitarian theologians as Providential evidence attested to by
creditable witnesses. But his critics were also responding to the orthodox of New
England's Standing Order churches, who accused the Unitarians of little by little
abandoning Christianity. Emerson had denounced an over-emphasis on miracles to
highlight his own emphasis on "soul," personal and self-evident experience of the Divine.
But to an older generation of colleagues, he seemed to bring only unwelcome
confirmation of the accuracy of orthodox charges. Hence the force of their attack, which
Emerson's defenders soon answered with equal force. Emerson wrote to his brother
Charles, "They say the world is vexed with us on account of our wicked writings. I trust it
will recover its composure." He wrote to Prof. Ware, "These things look thus to me! To
you, otherwise. Let us say out our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as it
surely will, judge between us."
Beyond that Emerson refused to defend himself or carry on the debate. But the so-
called Transcendentalist controversy did not soon subside. Not for a generation was
Emerson again invited to speak at Harvard. Emerson did not like the term,
"Transcendentalism," preferring "Idealism." He once said to Octavius Brooks Frothingham
that Transcendentalism was simply a protest against formalism and dogmatism in
religion, not a philosophical but a spiritual movement looking toward a spiritual faith.
Emerson's reputation flourished, as did the demand for his addresses, as the lecture
circuit rapidly became a popular cultural institution. Acting as his own booking agent and
speaking dozens of times each year on grueling train tours across the country, Emerson
was able to support his family, his mother and a retarded brother. Six feet tall and with
erect posture and poise, he spoke with a clear, resonant voice. A reporter asked a
scrubwoman who always attended his lectures whether she understood them. "Not a
word," she replied, "but I like to go and see him stand up there and look as though he
thought everyone was as good as he is." At the Unitarian church in East Lexington, where
Emerson often preached, a parishioner said to Elizabeth Peabody, "Oh, Miss Peabody, you
know we are a plain people and can understand no one but Mr. Emerson."
Always called Mr. Emerson, even by intimates, he was once told by a friend that he
could have had more influence had he been personally warmer. He replied that he never
intended to be a substitute for the kitchen stove. In great part Emerson was a successful
orator because he ever remained a preacher. All his addresses resolve themselves into
sermons of uplift. In exchanging the pulpit of Second Church, Boston for the rostrum, he
accepted a call to a much larger audience, the country.
Emerson was reluctant to campaign directly for radical social reform, but his
involvement with the antislavery movement grew as the national crisis over slavery
escalated during the 1840s and early 1850s. He scorned the Abolitionists for the
bitterness of their agitation. Yet he spoke out strongly in defense of Elijah Lovejoy,
lynched for his anti-slavery publications, and later defended the abolitionist radical John
Brown. He delivered his first public antislavery address in 1844, a commemoration of the
British emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies. When the Fugitive Slave Act was
passed in 1850, he referred to it as "this filthy enactment" and wrote in his journal, "I will
not obey it, by God!" Speaking before the citizens of Concord, he said, "This is a law
which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion; a law which no man can obey
or abet without loss of his self-respect and forfeiture of the name of gentleman." "Do the
duty of the hour," he wrote. "Just now the supreme public duty of all thinking men is to
assert freedom. Go where it is threatened and say, 'I am for it and do not wish to live in
the world a moment longer than it exists.'"
In a series of rhetorically powerful addresses in the early 1850s, one of the most
significant of which has only recently been published, Emerson used his oratorical skills
effectively in the antislavery cause. He was also influential in making the case for the
emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War had begun. In other contexts Emerson
urged greater freedom in worship. He championed woman's educational and economic
rights. He held forth for more freedom and scope in university education and for purer
methods in politics and trade.
Emerson's fame, however, came primarily through his lectures on the Chautauqua
Circuit on broader topics and by means of his two published collections of Essays. The
great teaching for which Emerson is best remembered is self-reliance, a constant theme
of his journals and sermons. Ironically, in his essay titled "Self-Reliance," published in
1841, he said, "To be great is to be misunderstood." His principle idea was much
misunderstood. He seldom afterward used that term for it. Emerson hardly regarded the
self, as ordinarily understood, as self-sufficient. To be self-reliant, in Emersonian terms,
was to listen to and heed the still, small voice of God within. Therefore, self-reliance also
meant to him self-mastery, especially of the passions and temper. He regarded the true
self, or the ideal self, as innately capable of a natural experience of and knowledge of the
Divine, present in all creation.
If we look within and find only ourselves, he said, that is pride, the next thing to
atheism. In 1842, only a year after the appearance of "Self-Reliance," Emerson published
a poem, "Grace," in which he flatly contradicted some of his earlier assertions. There he
spoke of reliance on "example, custom, fear, occasion slow" to protect us from our
inclination to sin; they are "hedges to my soul from Satan's creeping feet."
He said in an 1854 address on anti-slavery, "Self-reliance, the height and perfection of
man, is self-reliance on God." He preached the God within, not the God of authority and
tradition. He many times indicated that we know God first and mainly through the moral
law within. He said, "It is by following other men's opinions that we are misled and
depraved." Emerson considered his most important contribution to be the essay
"Compensation," his term for the working of moral law, a subject that interested him
from his earliest years and throughout his life.
Much of Emerson's poetry has been highly esteemed. His poems display tenderness,
affection and love of nature. Of special note are "Concord Hymn," written for the
completion of the Minuteman Monument in 1837; "Threnody" which expressed his
grief at the loss of his first-born son; "Brahma," the epitome of his understanding
of the Hindu scriptures; and "May-Day," a happy lyric about walking in the Concord
woods. His own favorite was "Days," in which he depicted time as a parade of
goddesses whose gracious gifts, if not accepted, are forever withdrawn.
Emerson's health began to fail in 1871, at age 68. He lived out a long slow
decline, though he continued to lecture, sometimes from his chair, until two years
before his death. He died in his sleep, aged 79, on April 27, 1882.
During his life and for years afterwards Emerson was taken to task for putting
dangerous ideas into the heads of young men and women. Some academics
criticized his poetry as inconsistent in style and his philosophy as unsystematic.
Although the sentences of his essays were conceded to be gems, some deemed
their argument defective. The influential critic Matthew Arnold found greatness in
Emerson's work only as inspirational literature. In the twentieth century unsympathetic
critics rued Emersonian individualism they thought endemic to a selfish, exploitative and
materialistic American culture. They found Emerson's philosophy over-optimistic, lacking
any sense of irony and without a doctrine of evil.
Emerson's essays and poetry have never ceased to be popular, widely respected and
influential among students, the liberally religious and general readers. Moreover, the
closing decades of the 20th century witnessed a reevaluation of Emerson in academic
circles, showing him to be a writer of more complexity than earlier critics imagined.
Scholars now argue that Emerson did not reject his inherited Unitarian faith but, rather,
transformed it. New understanding has emerged from reading his well-known works in
the context of other documents: his sermons, letters and journals, many of which have
only recently become generally available. Understood not as dialectical argumentation,
but as a secularized form of 19th century Unitarian preaching, Emerson's essays can be
appreciated for their imaginative, paradoxical, accumulative and analogical rhetoric. His
formative influence on American poetry, his connections with the later philosophical
movement of pragmatism, and his contributions to the theory of democracy have also
been explored in detail in what is known as the "Emerson Revival" of the 1980s and
1990s.
The earlier image of Emerson as an isolated and self-sufficient figure has also been
undercut in recent years by study of his social relationships, his anti-slavery activity and
focus on his mature ethical thought. His optimism is understood as the fruit of a long and
hard personal struggle. Appreciated in context, Emerson's self-reliance is the ability, in
higher moments of faith, to affirm all creation even while coming to terms with manifest
evil.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson is often positioned as the “father” of American literature. As a poet, preacher, orator, and
essayist, he articulated the new nation’s prospects and needs and became a weighty exemplum of the American
artist. Throughout the 19th century, Emerson’s portrait gazed down from schoolhouse and library walls, where he
was enshrined as one of America’s great poets. His daughter Ellen, accompanying her father on one of his
frequent lecture tours, reported the fun of “seeing all the world burn incense to Father.” His calls for a scholar and
a poet who would exploit the untapped materials of the nation served as literary credos for subsequent
generations of writers, from Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass, to Hart Crane,
Robert Frost, and A.R. Ammons. He was known for his critique of conventional values of property and ambition,
yet his formulation of the self-reliant American was used to authorize the laissez-faire individualism of Horatio
Alger and Andrew Carnegie. He was one of the first American writers to be recognized by the British and
European literary establishments, read enthusiastically by Carlyle and Nietzche. To Matthew Arnold, he is the
“voice oracular” who challenges the “bitter knowledge” of his “monstrous, dead, unprofitable world.” To Irving
Howe, Emerson is the dominant spirit of his age, the proponent of “the American newness.” In F.O. Matthiessen’s
formulation of the “American Renaissance,” Emerson is the initiating force “on which Thoreau built, to which
Whitman gave extension, and to which Hawthorne and Melville were indebted by being forced to react against its
philosophical assumptions.” To Whitman and, subsequently, to Alfred Kazin, Emerson is the “founder” of the
“procession of American literature.”

The eminence of his public position made Emerson’s approval a valued commodity, as Whitman showed when he
printed a congratulatory letter from Emerson with the second edition of Leaves of Grass. It also made him a
formidable predecessor with whom younger writers had to contend. Writers as diverse as Thoreau, Louisa May
Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps describe their emergence onto the literary scene in relationship to Emerson, to
his influence as a teacher or writer, a speaker or austere presence. Yet even such acknowledgments as
Whitman’s famous remark—“I was simmering, simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil”—
position Emerson primarily as a precursor, important for his influence on others, rather than for his own work. As
Joel Porte has argued, “Emerson’s fate, somewhat like Shakespeare’s, was that he came to be treated as an
almost purely allegorical personage whose real character and work got submerged in his function as a touchstone
of critical opinion.” He becomes the founder of “Transcendentalism” or the spokesman for “Nature,” the “optimist”
who does not understand the world’s evil or pain. He is thus removed from the march of time, idealized as a
“primordial” figure whose vision isolates him from the political and social struggles of his age.

But Emerson was never simply a distant patriarchal figure sheltered from the material problems of his age. He
constructed his “optative” exuberance despite the early deaths of his father, two of his brothers, his beloved young
wife, and his first son, and despite his own serious bouts with lung disease and eye strain. He was a child both of
privilege and penury, of family position and dependence. As he wrote early on in his journal: “It is my own humor
to despise pedigree. I was educated to prize it.” His father, the minister William Emerson, died when he was eight,
and his mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, supported the five children (three others died young) by taking in
boarders and by periodically living with relatives in Concord. Emerson’s education vacillated between Boston
Latin school and private tutoring by his aunt Mary Moody Emerson. At Harvard, which he attended on scholarship,
Emerson struggled with the academic curriculum and with his expected future as either a teacher or minister. But
he also conducted a more satisfying private education of reading and journal-writing that would prepare him to be
a writer, an American scholar, and poet. Those aims had to wait, however, while Emerson helped support his
family by teaching school. In 1825, he entered Harvard Divinity School, following nine generations of his family
into the ministry. Yet six years after his ordination, he resigned the ministry, concerned that the “dogmatic
theology” of “formal Christianity” looked only to past traditions and the words of the dead. “My business is with the
living,” he wrote in his journal. “I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to
leave the ministry.”
These years were full of personal tumult as well. In 1829, Emerson married Ellen Tucker, only to lose her sixteen
months later to the tuberculosis that also threatened him. The pain of her death and his own sense of vulnerability
may have hastened Emerson’s decision to leave the ministry. With the substantial inheritance she left him, he had
the means to make such a change, to travel on the continent, to buy books, and to write them. The inheritance,
with the earnings he received from his lecture tours and his publications and with a lifetime of frugality and fiscal
planning, made him financially secure. He supported an extended family, caring for his retarded brother for twenty
years. In 1835, he married Lidian Jackson, and moved to Concord, where they had four children—Waldo, Ellen,
Edith, and Edward Waldo, who later edited his father’s works and journals. The death from scarlet fever of five-
year-old Waldo was a blow to Emerson’s faith in compensation. In his 1844 essay “Experience,” he wrote from
this loss, and from his urgent desire to regain the “practical power” that could persist despite personal and public
griefs. “Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy,” he argued. His subsequent career and personal life reflect a
determined affirmation to be “an active soul.” “I am Defeated all the time,” he acknowledged, “yet to Victory I am
born.” Emerson continued his work into his seventies, relying on his daughter Ellen to help organize his last
lectures and essays. He died in 1882, from pneumonia, and was buried in Concord, near Thoreau and
Hawthorne.

Emerson’s long career, and his financial and social security, allowed him to intervene decisively in the formation of
American culture and letters. Although he generally resisted the call to public advocacy, he was sought after to
support various social causes: he was urged to join the experimental commune of Brook Farm, prodded to take a
leading role in the abolitionist movement and in the lobbying for women’s rights. Emerson’s efforts on behalf of his
fellow writers were of material importance, addressing the social impediments to publication and reputation.
Through financial support, personal connections, or editorial efforts, he made possible publication of work by
Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and Jones Very. He loaned Thoreau the property at Walden Pond for
his celebrated retreat and raised money to support the impoverished Alcott family, despite his own belief that a
philosopher should earn his keep. He oversaw American printings of Carlyle’s books and wrote prefaces for
translations of Persian poets and of Plutarch. With Margaret Fuller, he edited The Dial, a short-lived but influential
periodical.

Emerson’s initial fame came from his critique of the literary, religious, and educational establishments of his day.
He was known as an experimenter who urged Americans to reject their deference to old modes and values, to
continental traditions. His chiding lectures about Harvard’s religious and literary training, and his resignation from
the clergy, made him a spokesman for reformist positions, although it also aroused harsh criticism of him as a
religious infidel, “a sort of mad dog,” and a “dangerous man.” At the first meeting of the Transcendental Club,
Emerson decried the “tame” genius of the times that did not match the grandeur of “this Titanic continent,” and he
transformed Harvard’s traditional Phi Beta Kappa oration on “The American Scholar” into a critique of the “meek
young men” and “sluggard intellect of this continent” and a call for a new age when “we will walk on our own feet;
we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”

Emerson’s work is characterized by a combination of homely metaphors and grandiose goals, by his insistence
on the present and his expectations for the future. His outpouring of “private” writings reflects a practical economy
of writing, in which journals serve as a “Savings Bank” for “deposit” of “earnings” to be reworked into lectures and
essays. They demonstrate his incredible energy and discipline (he kept 182 journals and notebooks over his
career, which he carefully reread, indexed, and cross-referenced for use in preparing his more “public” work); and
they reflect an astounding ambition, evident in the titles of his college journals, “The Wide World” and “The
Universe,” and in such notebooks as “XO” (“Inexorable; Reality and Illusion”).

Emerson’s literary practices have always been provocative. A critic of his first book, Nature, was offended by
language that is sometimes “coarse and blunt.” He also protested that “the effort of perusal is often painful, the
thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us, uncertain and obscure. The
reader feels as in a disturbed dream.” Although modern readers are unlikely to be upset by Emerson’s diction or
references to sex and madness, he remains disturbing, seen as a “difficult” writer requiring vast annotation and
philosophic glossing. Emerson was indeed an allusive writer, but his use of cultural materials provokes with a
purpose. The context he constructs is adamantly untraditional, mixing quotations from classics and British poetry
with Asian literature and Welsh bards. One metaphor will emerge from his interest in scientific or engineering
experiments, another from local politics, and yet another from what his son Waldo said that morning. The problem
in reading Emerson—as well as the pleasure—is in seeing how such eclecticism undermines conventions of
authority and reference and challenges established modes of reading.

For himself, and for the American public, he advocated “creative reading as well as creative writing,” rejecting
traditional oppositions between thinking and acting, between the scholar and the worker, between the speculative
and the practical. “Words are also actions,” he wrote, “and actions are a kind of words.” For despite the hopeful
tone of much of the writing, Emerson’s brand of self-reliance and his exuberant nationalism were an aspiration, to
be achieved only through constant work, constant critique. Emerson’s aim as a writer was less to originate a
tradition than to produce active readers, who would then refashion themselves and their culture: “Let me remind
the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I
do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none
are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.”
Jean Ferguson Carr
University of Pittsburgh

Ralph Waldo Emerson was not a practicing literary critic in the

sense that Edgar Allan Poe and William Dean Howells were, and he
was not a theorist as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling or Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher were. Yet he was for
America what Samuel Taylor Coleridge was for England, the major
spokesman for a new conception of literature. From his early
essays on English literature and his important first book, Nature
(1836), to his greatest single literary essay, "The Poet" (1844), to
his late essays on "Poetry and Imagination" and "Persian Poetry"
in 1875, Emerson developed and championed a concept of
literature as literary activity. The essence of that activity is a
symbolizing process. Both reader and writer are involved in acts of
literary expression which are representative or symbolic.
Emerson's position is an extreme one, and in A History of Modern
Criticism (1965) René Wellek has said that "the very extremity
with which he held his views makes him the outstanding
representative of romantic symbolism in the English-speaking
world." Emerson's romantic symbolism, biographical and ethical in
intent, poetic in expression, is an attitude that still stirs debate
and still can have a liberating and encouraging effect on the
modern reader. Emerson always cared more for the present than
the past, more for his reader than for the text in hand or the
author in question. Poets, he said, are "liberating gods"; and
Emerson at his best is also a liberator. "Meek young men grow up
in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which
Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that
Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when
they wrote those books."
Emerson is the chief figure in the American literary movement
called Transcendentalism, which was also a philosophical and
religious movement. Transcendentalism is complex, drawing upon
Platonic, Christian, Stoic, and Hindu thought, but its most
immediate affinity is with German Idealism as worked out from
Kant to Schelling. Indeed Emerson himself said in a lecture called
"The Transcendentalist," delivered in December 1841, "What is
popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism." He
then described it: "As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into
two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on
experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning
to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive
that the senses are not final, and say, the senses gives us
representations of things, but what are the things themselves,
they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist
on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
individual culture." Materialist criticism focuses on facts, on
literary history, on the life and mind of the author and his or her
intention, and on the text itself. Emerson's ethical and idealist
criticism concentrates almost entirely upon the reader and his or
her response to a text. Emerson is mainly concerned not with the
fact of literary history but with the uses of literature, with its
effects on the reader, and its power or lack of power to move us.
Emersonian Idealism was extremely influential in the middle
third of the nineteenth century, though it was eventually
supplanted by realism and naturalism and the rise of the realist
movement. But the reader-centered nature of Emerson's critical
stance was important to such thinkers and writers as Friedrich
Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf and is now of interest
again to postformalist and poststructuralist critics who are newly
concerned with the reader's relation to the text.
Emerson's father, William Emerson, the Unitarian minister at
Boston's First Church from 1799 until his death in 1811, was an
active, popular preacher and a staunch Federalist of very limited
means but descended from a long line of Concord, Massachusetts,
ministers. Emerson was eight when his father died. His mother,
Ruth Haskins Emerson, a quiet, devout, and undemonstrative
woman, lived till 1853, long enough to see her fourth child's fame.
Emerson had seven siblings. Three died in infancy or childhood. Of
those who lived to maturity, Edward died young, at twenty-nine, in
1834 as did Charles at twenty-eight in 1836, while Robert
Bulkeley, who lived to age fifty-two, dying in 1859, was feeble-
minded. Besides Ralph, only William lived a full and reasonably
long life, dying at sixty-seven in 1868.
Emerson went to Boston Public Latin School when he was nine,
and to Harvard College when he was fourteen. After college, he
tried teaching, then attended divinity school at Harvard. In 1829
he was ordained minister of Boston's Second Church. That same
year he married Ellen Tucker. It was very much a love match, and
Emerson was deeply shaken by her death only a year and a half
later on 8 February 1831. At the same time, he was becoming
increasingly reluctant to remain as minister to his church. In
October 1832 he resigned, the immediate reason being that he
felt he could no longer officiate at a ceremony (communion) that
had become meaningless to him. With his wife dead and his
career broken off, Emerson now sold his house and furniture and
set out for Europe. He spent nine months abroad, almost six of
them in Italy, working from Sicily to Naples to Rome, Florence,
Venice, then on to Switzerland and Paris. In Paris, at the Jardin des
Plantes, he experienced the full power and appeal of the new
botanical and zoological sciences, and he now turned decisively
from theology to science, vowing to become a naturalist. Going on
to England and Scotland, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William
Wordsworth, and, particularly, Thomas Carlyle, who became a
lifelong friend and correspondent.
Returning home in October 1833, Emerson immediately
embraced a new career, that of public lecturer. One month after
disembarking, he was invited by the Boston Natural History
Society to deliver the first of his four lectures on science. That
winter he lectured in Concord and Bedford on his Italian trip, and,
beginning in January 1835, at Boston's Masonic Temple, he
delivered his first open public lecture series, six lectures on
"Biography." The fourth lecture in the series, that on Milton, was
his first important statement about literature. The Milton lecture
was published, posthumously, in Natural History of Intellect
(1893), but the other five lectures in the "Biography" series of
1835, like the ten lectures he gave on "English Literature" later
that same year, the twelve lectures on "The Philosophy of History"
in 1836-1837, and the ten on "Human Culture" of 1837-1838,
were only published beginning in 1959 as The Early Lectures of
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many of the ideas and phrases were
incorporated by Emerson in subsequent lectures and books, which
is why he did not publish them. But the early lectures show vividly
the development of Emerson's characteristic views about
literature.
Also in 1835, Emerson moved to Concord and, in September,
married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth whom he came to call Lidian
(and, sometimes, Asia) and who he tried to get to call him
something besides Mr. E. He once told his cousin Sarah Ripley that
those "who had baptised the child Lydia had been ill-advised, for
her name was Lidian." In 1836 the so-called Transcendental Club
met for the first time, bringing together with Emerson, George
Putnam, George Ripley, and Frederic Hedge. The group expanded
in just a week and a half to include Orestes Brownson, James
Freeman Clarke, Convers Francis, and Bronson Alcott. It again
expanded to include Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth
Peabody, and Henry Thoreau. Eighteen thirty-six also saw the
publication of Emerson's first book and the birth of his first child,
Waldo.
Emerson spent the rest of his life centered in Concord, with
another trip to England in 1847-1848, one to California in 1871,
and a final trip to Egypt in 1872. Each winter he would travel
through New England and the East Coast, and as far west as there
were cities on his annual lecture tour, for which he was his own
booking agent, advertiser, and arranger. The rest of the year he
spent in Concord, which soon became one of the intellectual
centers of the country, a sort of American Weimar. The group
around Emerson, usually called the Transcendentalists, were
defined in one way by Emerson's 1838 Divinity School address,
which offended orthodox Unitarians by locating religious authority
in the religious nature of human beings, rather than in the Bible or
the person of Christ. The Dial, a new magazine founded by the
group and edited first by Margaret Fuller, showed the group's
interest in the literature of Idealism. In religion, in philosophy, and
in literature, the group around Emerson was liberal, learned,
forward-looking and reform-minded. The Emersonian "movement"
(it was Emerson who said there are always two parties in society,
the Establishment and the Movement) or "the newness" was
eventually overshadowed by the Civil War, the coming of
industrialism, and the rise of realism. But in the late 1830s, 1840s,
and into the 1850s, Emerson was at the center of much that was
new, exciting, and vital in American cultural life.
His contributions to literary criticism begin with the lecture
called "Milton," given first in February 1835. Many of what would
become Emerson's characteristic emphases are already evident in
the Milton lecture. What Emerson really values in Milton is not his
high critical reputation but his power to inspire, which is, Emerson
says, greater than that of any other writer. "We think no man can
be named, whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of
England and America with an energy comparable to that of
Milton." "Power," "energy," "inspiration": these are the qualities
Emerson looks for in a work of literature or in an author. Indeed
Emerson is always more interested in the author than the text,
and he quotes with approval Milton's comment that "he who would
aspire to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to
be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and
honorablest things." Emerson would say later that the reader
ought to think of himself as the text and books as the
commentary.
 Milton's great subject, says Emerson, is not so much the fall of
man as liberty. The English poet advocated civil, ecclesiastical,
literary, and domestic liberty. He opposed slavery, denied
predestination, argued for freedom of the press, and favored the
principle of divorce. Milton's writings are valuable not as literary
artifacts, Emerson argues, but as pathways to the man. Emerson
insists on linking the person and the writing. Milton's poems, like
his prose, reflect the "opinions, the feelings, even the incidents of
the poet's life." In general Emerson rates Milton's prose at least as
high as his poetry, and he boldly redefines Milton's prose as
poetry in an important critical statement. "Of his prose in general,
not the style alone, but the argument also, is poetic; according to
Lord Bacon's definition of poetry, following that of Aristotle,
'Poetry, not finding the actual world exactly conformed to its idea
of good and fair, seeks to accommodate the shows of things to the
desires of the mind, and to create an ideal world better than the
world of experience.'"
In August 1835 Emerson delivered a lecture to the sixth annual
meeting of the American Institute of Instruction in Boston "On the
Best Mode of Inspiring a Correct Taste in English Literature." In
strong contrast to the starchy, neoclassical title, the surviving
pages of this talk, published in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (volume one, 1959), emphasize the idea that a reader
must approach a text with sympathy, empathy, openness, and a
willingness to try out the author's point of view. It is, he says, a
major principle "that a truth or a book of truths can be received
only by the same spirit that gave it forth." This notion is very
different from learning a few rules or current ideas and then
judging works of literature by whether they conform to those rules
and ideas. Emerson also makes a distinction between types of
reading and warns us "reading must not be passive." An active
reader is one who engages fully with the text. "As we say
translations are rare because to be a good translator needs all the
talents of an original author so to be a good reader needs the high
qualities of a good writer." Above all the reader is to remember
that books and poems are not ends in themselves. They convey
truths or wisdom, they stand for and convey to us things that exist
in nature. "I should aim to show him [the young reader] that the
poem was a transcript of Nature as much as a mariner's chart is of
the coast."
In the introductory lecture for his 1835 series, "English
Literature," Emerson offers a very broad definition of literature as
"the books that are written. It is the recorded thinking of man."
Later he excludes "records of facts," but even so it is evident that
he meant the term literature to take in far more than just poems,
plays, and novels. More important, in this lecture Emerson
describes all language as "a naming of invisible and spiritual
things from visible things," and he here first gives his famous two-
part definition of language. First, words are emblematic of things;
"supercilious" means literally "the raising of an eyebrow." Second,
things are emblematic; "Light and Darkness are not in words but
in fact our best expression for knowledge and ignorance." Since
both words and things are emblematic, it follows for Emerson that
"good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories." He
concludes that "the aim and effort of literature in the largest
sense [is] nothing less than to give voice to the whole of spiritual
nature as events and ages unfold it, to record in words the whole
life of the world."
In the next lecture, on "Permanent Traits of the English National
Genius," Emerson draws heavily on Sharon Turner's History of the
Anglo Saxons (1799-1805) and emphasizes the impact of Anglo-
Saxon life and culture on modern England and the English.
Emerson was never willing, as this lecture demonstrates, to
separate literature from the general culture that produced it. In
the next lecture, "The Age of Fable," Emerson contrasts Greek
fable with Gothic fable, the former having produced classical
myth, the latter medieval romance. Emerson also praises English
literature for its instinct for what is common. "The poems of
Chaucer, Shakspear [sic], Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Raleigh betray
a continual instinctive endeavor to recover themselves from every
sally of imagination by touching the earth and earthly and
common things." Emerson devotes an entire lecture to Chaucer,
whom he values for being able to turn everything in his world to
literary account, so that his work stands not only for him but for
his era. Chaucer's numerous borrowings prompted Emerson to
articulate a concept of literary tradition that was very modern.
"The truth is all works of literature are Janus faced and look to the
future and to the past. Shakspear [sic], Pope, and Dryden borrow
from Chaucer and shine by his borrowed light. Chaucer reflects
Boccaccio and Colonna and the Troubadours: Boccaccio and
Colonna elder Greek and Roman authors, and these in their turn
others if only history would enable us to trace them. There never
was an original writer. Each is a link in an endless chain."
The two central lectures are devoted to Shakespeare, whose
works, Emerson says, represent the whole range of human mind.
Shakespeare possessed, to a greater degree than any other
writer, the power of imagination, what Emerson defines as "the
use which the Reason makes of the material world, for purposes of
expression." Put another way, this means "Shakspear [sic]
possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purpose of
expression beyond all poets." Emerson also cites with approval
Milton's definition of poetry as "thoughts that voluntary move
harmonious numbers" to describe how "the sense of [his] verse
determines its tune."
Emerson wrote several lectures on other great English authors.
He devotes an entire lecture to Francis Bacon, whom he admired
for his efforts "to expound the method by which a true History of
Nature should be formed." Bacon's achievement gave him, said
Emerson, "a new courage and confidence in the powers of man at
the sight of so great works done under such great disadvantages
by one scholar." Bacon's great aim, like Emerson's, was to "make
man's mind a match for the nature of things," and Bacon believed,
as did Emerson, that we only "command Nature by obeying her."
Another lecture was devoted to Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick,
George Herbert, and Sir Henry Wotton. Nothing Jonson's learned
and intellectual style as a complement to its era, Emerson
observes that "his writings presuppose a great intellectual activity
in the audience." Herrick's superb command of language moved
Emerson both to admire the poet and to articulate his distrust of
language considered as an end in itself. He insisted that words
stand for things and that things are what matter. "Rem tene,
verba sequntur" [Hold fast to things, words will follow], Cato had
observed. Emerson now noted "a proposition set down in words is
not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself or no propriety and no
vehemence of language will give it evidence."
Another lecture in the "English Literature" series is called
"Ethical Writers." The subject seems puzzling at first, but it is
important for a full understanding of Emerson's conception of
literature. There is a whole class of writers whose primary function
is not entertainment, he says, "who help us by addressing not our
taste but our human wants, who treat of the permanent nature of
man." Such writers include, among the classics, Plato, Plutarch,
Cicero, Marcus Aurelius. In English, the list includes Bacon,
Thomas Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, John Bunyan,
and Samuel Johnson. Emerson also includes poets and playwrights
in his list, but his emphasis is clearly on a kind of writing which is
not fiction, poetry, or drama but primarily wisdom literature or
moral literature, everything that we now place under the heading
of nonfiction prose. It is a category that includes much of the best-
and most helpful--writing ever done, a category in which Emerson
himself now holds a high place.
 Emerson's idealism is always mentioned in critical discussions
of his thought. The equally important ethical aspect of his work is
less often insisted upon. But Emerson's characteristically practical
idealism cannot be fully appreciated until one recognizes that he
evaluated all literature, all philosophy, all religion, by a simple
ethical test: how does it help me to live a better life. Matthew
Arnold has defined the moral element in literature as that which
teaches us how to live. All of Emerson's idealist conceptions also
meet this moral test, and those books which have served
successfully over time as practical guides to conduct are the
books Emerson values most highly. Samuel Johnson maintained in
the "Preface to Shakespeare" that "nothing can please many and
please long but just representations of general nature." Emerson
used a similar criterion. The best ethical writers, he says, are
those who write about "certain feelings and faculties in us which
are alike in all men and which no progress of arts and no variety of
institutions can alter," those writers, in short, who hold fast to "the
general nature of man."
Emerson closed his English literature lecture series with a final
talk on "Modern Aspects of Letters," in which he discussed Lord
Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Dugald Steward, James McIntosh, and
Coleridge. Of these his favorite is Coleridge, whom he praises
particularly as a critic. Emerson rates Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria (1817) "the best body of criticism in the English
language," and it may be added that Emerson as a literary critic is
closer to Coleridge and owes more to him than to any other single
source. Emerson singles out as especially important, in addition to
the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's The Friend (1809), especially
the third volume, and his Church and State (1830). Aids to
Reflexion (1825), "though a useful book I suppose, is the least
valuable." Of particular value to Emerson are Coleridge's
"distinction between Reason and Understanding; the distinction of
an Idea and a Conception; between Genius and Talent; between
Fancy and Imagination: of the nature and end of Poetry: of the
Idea of a State." Emerson closes his lecture with an argument that
beauty and truth "always face each other and each tends to
become the other." He insists that everyone has it in him or her to
both create and respond to literature, because literature is based
on nature and "all nature, nothing less, is totally given to each
new being."
The last of the English literature lectures was given in January
1836. In September Nature appeared. It is a major statement, a
book which, like Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, aims at nothing less
than an account of "How Things Are," an intense effort to
synthesize a first philosophy. Nature shows the warming and
shaping influence of Plutarch, Bacon, Coleridge, Plotinus (via
Thomas Taylor), Swedenborg (via Sampson Reed), and Kant (via
Carlyle, who was also a major influence by himself). Many of the
observations, especially on language, from the English literature
lectures found their way, often verbatim and at length, into
Nature. In some important respects then, key parts of Nature
came directly out of Emerson's study of English literature.
The main purpose of Nature is to recover for the present
generation the direct and immediate relationship with the world
that our ancestors had. "Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe?," Emerson asks, with emphasis on the
word "also." He goes on to inquire, "Why should not we have a
poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a
religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" He had
already discussed the poetry of tradition in his English lecture
series. Nature is an inquiry into the conditions necessary for a
modern literature of insight.
Emerson chose a line of inquiry that had been used before, by
the Stoics, among others. In order to find answers to the question
of how one should live, one should turn not to God, not to the
state, not to society or to history for a starting point, but to
nature. Man is part of nature, but by virtue of consciousness, he is
also, and at the same time, apart from nature. Consciousness is
subject: nature or world is object. They are separate, but as the
German philosopher Schelling insisted, consciousness or spirit is
subjective nature, nature is objective spirit. The opening chapters
of Nature describe the different things nature furnishes to
consciousness. Passing quickly through "Commodity," in which
nature is shown to be useful to human beings in all sorts of
material ways, Emerson comes, in chapter three, to "Beauty," in
which he argues that our aesthetics are derived from nature.
"Primary forms" such as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the
animal "give us a delight in and for themselves." Nature is a sea of
beautiful forms and the standard of beauty, our conception of
beauty in the largest sense, is, says Emerson, "the entire circuit of
natural forms,-the totality of nature." Cooperating with nature and
complementing it as the source of beauty is the human eye, which
is, says Emerson, "the best of artists." Emerson's approach to
aesthetics is intensely visual, and this visual quality is so closely
tied to his emphasis on subjectivity and his affirmation of the
importance of individual vision that a recent writer, Kenneth
Burke, equates Emerson's "I" with "eye" and "aye." Typically, too,
Emerson is careful to explain that beauty is not simply a matter of
beautiful pictures or pleasing landscapes. A higher though similar
beauty marks noble human actions. From beautiful pictures we
advance to consider beautiful (that is, virtuous) actions. Here, too,
nature is the norm. "Every natural action is graceful."
In addition to providing us with beauty, nature also provides us
with language, which Emerson treats in chapter four. In a famous-
and difficult--opening statement he summarizes his position.
"Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and
threefold degree."
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
The first point is a theory of language which makes the
distinction which the modern linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was
to make famous, in his Cours de Linguistique Général (1922), that
words are not things, but "signs" standing for things. Words are
signifiers, things are what are signified. The important distinction
is between signifier and signified. Emerson claims that even those
words which "express a mood or intellectual fact" will be found,
when traced back far enough, to have a root in some material or
physical appearance. Thus, he says, "right originally means
straight; wrong means twisted," and so on. This argument is, of
course, an etymological not a semiotic one. But Emerson is not a
positivist and could not rest with a flat distinction between words
as signs or symbols of material objects, and material objects
themselves, for this view leads inevitably to the view that the
material or physical world is more "real" than words, which are
only signs. Emerson here becomes hard to follow, claiming in
point two that "it is not words only that are emblematic, it is
things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of
some spiritual fact." (Insofar as Emerson means "idea" or
"concept" when he uses the term "spiritual fact," this is close to a
semiotic argument.)
Point two is a theory of symbolism, not just linguistic
symbolism, but natural symbolism. He illustrates by saying, "An
enraged man is a lion.... A lamb is innocence." Emerson believed,
following Swedenborg especially, that everything in nature had its
correlative in mind, that nature is the externalization of the soul. If
modern readers cannot follow Emerson this far, they can at least
recognize that Emerson's second point is a useful description of
how the writer uses not only language but nature itself as
symbols. In reading Herman Melville, for example, we are aware
first that the words Moby-Dick stand for a large albino sperm
whale and second that the whale itself stands for certain qualities,
whether divine, demonic, or natural. Writers use natural objects
and events to suggest, mirror, or symbolize inner, mental events.
In the third point, Emerson goes beyond his theories that we
use words as signs of things (point 1) and that we find symbolic
meanings in things as well as words (point 2) to ask: "Have
mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we
consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our
thoughts?" Emerson wants to say more than this. It is not just we
humans who treat the world as emblematic; the world, says
Emerson, is emblematic. "Parts of speech are metaphors because
the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind." The visible
world is, he says in a celebrated metaphor, "the dial plate of the
invisible" world. This is the full, Transcendental, Schellingian belief
that nature and the human mind are in all things related, that
mind is the subjective equivalent of the world, world the objective
version of mind. Phrased without German symmetry, this notion is
a way of affirming, as the Stoics long ago affirmed, that human
beings and nature are both creatures of one set of laws. More
recently, Alfred North Whitehead has spoken of the same concept
in referring to "the full scientific mentality, which instinctively
holds that all things great and small are conceivable as
exemplifications of general principles which reign throughout the
natural order."
Emerson's insistence on the close links between nature and
language has important practical implications. Because our verbal
language is based on nature, it will follow that after a period of
time, language will come to seem separate from nature. The
strong, natural, material roots of words will be forgotten, and
lesser writers will go on imitating and repeating words they do not
really understand. "Hundreds of writers may be found in every
long-civilized nation," says Emerson, "who for a short time believe,
and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do
not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but
who feed unconsciously upon the language created by the primary
writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on
nature." So the function of the genius, of the true poet, is to
reform such language, to "pierce this rotten diction and fasten
words again to visible things." The poet is he who can reconnect
the word supercilious with the raised eyebrow, who can make us
see again, but freshly, that the word "consider" means study the
stars [con sidere]. "The moment our discourse rises above the
ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or
exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images." Thus Emerson's
conception of language as based in nature leads him to outline
the task of the poet as the renewal of language, the reattachment
of language to nature, of words to things. So, too, the idea that
nature is itself a language (an idea that haunts the modern mind
from at least Linnaeus and the early eighteenth century on) leads
to the view that it is the writer's job to decipher what nature has
to say, the view that informs all nature writers from Thoreau to
John McPhee.
Nature is Emerson's testament to his belief that ideas, forms,
and laws (what Emerson sums up as spirit) are more important
than physical, phenomenal, material things (what Emerson calls
nature). Both exist, of course, but spirit or mind exists prior to
nature, and the natural world is, for Emerson, a product of spirit.
In the chapter on "Idealism," Emerson concludes: "It is the uniform
effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the
stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote
[nitrogen]; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a
substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem
nature as an accident and an effect," not as the final reality.
From December 1836 to March 1837 Emerson gave his first
series of independent lectures, the first that is, that he designed
himself and gave under his own auspices. It was called the
Philosophy of History, and it was a very important series for
Emerson, since out of it evolved the great essays on "History" and
"Self Reliance" that he would publish in his first volume of Essays
in 1841. There is also a lecture on "Literature" in the Philosophy of
History series, given in January 1837. The general theme of the
series is stated in the introductory lecture: "We arrive early at the
great discovery that there is one Mind common to all individual
men; that what is individual is less than what is universal; that
those properties by which you are man are more radical than
those by which you are Adam or John; than the individual, nothing
is less; than the universal, nothing is greater; that error, vice, and
disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature; that
the common nature is whole." Literature, then, is the written
record of this mind, and in one important sense literature is
always showing us only ourselves. This lecture contains Emerson's
most extreme--and least fruitful--statement of his idealist
conception of literature. He contrasts art with literature,
explaining that while "Art delights in carrying a thought into
action, Literature is the conversion of action into thought." In
other words, "Literature idealizes action." In an abstract sense this
may be so, but Emerson is generally at his best when he sees
literature moving us toward action, not away from it. In another
place this lecture has a very valuable comment on how literature
is able to reach into our unconscious. "Whoever separates for us a
truth from our unconscious reason, and makes it an object of
consciousness, ... must of course be to us a great man." And there
is also a rather uncharacteristic recognition of what Gustav
Flaubert would call le mot juste. "The laws of composition are as
strict as those of sculpture and architecture. There is always one
line that ought to be chosen, one proportion that should be kept,
and every other line or proportion is wrong.... So, in writing, there
is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong."
At the end of August, as part of the commencement ceremonies
for the Harvard class that included Henry Thoreau, Emerson
delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society an address on the
American scholar. Often hailed in Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase
as our "intellectual declaration of independence," An Oration,
Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge,
August 31, 1837 did indeed suggest that "our day of dependence,
our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
close." He insisted that "we have listened too long to the courtly
muses of Europe." But the address is not primarily, or even
strongly, nationalistic. Emerson calls for the self-reliance of the
individual, of whatever nationality. "The American Scholar," as the
Phi Beta Kappa oration is popularly known, is one of Emerson's
most successful, most effective literary statements. It sparkles
with good writing, and it leans strongly on common sense and on
the ethical and practical aspects of literary activity. He defines
"scholar" broadly to include everyone we would class as student
or intellectual, but Emerson goes further, trying to identify that
aspect of any and all persons which engages in thought. The
scholar is "Man Thinking" (as the address was retitled in 1844),
which he sharply distinguishes from the specialist, the "mere
thinker," who is no longer a whole person.
Books of course are an important part of "The American
Scholar," and Emerson gives a description of what he calls "the
theory of books." "The scholar of the first age received into him
the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement
of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him--life; it
went out from him--truth." But once the book is written, says
Emerson, there "arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which
attaches to the act of creation,--the act of thought,--is instantly
transferred to the record." The book is now regarded as perfect,
untouchable, unimprovable, and what might have been a guide
becomes a tyrant, leading the young people in libraries to read
and admire the books of others when they would be better off
writing their own. By overvaluing the finished book and
underrating the act of book writing, we become mere bookworms,
a book-learned class who value books as such. "Hence, the
restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all
degrees." "The American Scholar" makes a major protest against
what Walter Jackson Bate has called the burden of the past and
what Harold Bloom has called the anxiety of influence. Books "are
for nothing but to inspire," Emerson declares. "I had better never
see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my
own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." Books must
not be overestimated. They can too easily intimidate us and make
us forget that "the one thing in the world of value, is, the active
soul." Another way to keep the great work of past writers in proper
perspective is to read actively and not passively. "There is then
creative reading, as well as creative writing." The most valuable
part of the text may be what the reader brings to it. "When the
mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book
we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion." Emerson is set
against any suggestion that we should worship the great books of
the past. We can learn from them, of course, but "the man has
never lived that can feed us ever." The human spirit, fluid and
restless and charged with heat and energy, will always be
breaking out with new experiences, and Emerson draws on
personal observation from his Italian trip of 1833 to make a bold
metaphor of the human mind as "one central fire which flaming
now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and now
out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards
of Naples."
The essay makes one more important literary point. Emerson
takes it as a welcome sign of the times that "instead of the
sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common" was being
explored and made into poetry. "I embrace the common," he says.
"I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low .... the meal in
the firkin, the milk in the pan." Like Wordsworth's call for a
language of common men, this recognition of Emerson's went
further than his own practice could usually follow. But Emerson's
endorsement of common language had a powerful effect on the
rising generation of young American writers, first on Thoreau and
Walt Whitman, then on Emily Dickinson and others.
On 15 July 1838 Emerson delivered what has come to be known
as the "Divinity School Address" before the senior class of the
Harvard Divinity School and their guests. In this important speech,
which critic Joel Porte says Emerson was born to deliver, Emerson
flung down a major challenge to Orthodox and even Unitarian
Christianity. Emerson argues that the concept of the divinity of
Jesus and the absolute authority of the Bible are obstacles to true
religious feeling. This is not to say Emerson did not value the
Bible. He did, and very highly; and this very address has been
described as taking its form, that of the jeremiad, from a book of
the Old Testament. What Emerson wished to do was to warn of the
consequences of revering any one text as the sole fountain of
truth. To hold up the text of the Bible as infallible was to divert
attention from the creation of the text. "The idioms of his
[Jehovah's] language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped
the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles,
but on his tropes." Furthermore, if the ancient Hebrew and Greek
writings known as the Old and New Testaments respectively are
regarded as the sole legitimate revelations, then we in the present
age are contenting ourselves with this history of revelations to an
earlier generation, and we are denying the possibility of a religion
by revelation to us. "Men have come to speak of the revelation as
somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead." In order
to affirm the possibility of a living religion for the present, one
must be careful not to get caught in a system that believes no
prophet since Jesus has anything to say and no text since the
Bible has religious validity.
Emerson contends that religion is a vital principle, as alive
today as at any time in the past. It therefore follows that we can
and should have our own prophets and our own gospels. This
point is a religious one, of course, but it is also literary, since it is
essentially a question of how to interpret a text, in this case the
Bible. (It is also true for Emerson, as for Whitman, that the
function of the prophet is very close to the function of the poet.)
Emerson evolved a consistent position in clear contrast to such
later theorists as D. H. Lawrence and the New Critics. Emerson's
argument is that we should trust the teller, not the tale. Emerson
is an antiformalist in literary (as in religious) matters. In more
modern terms, his argument is that we should not privilege the
text, any text, above either the author or the reader. Emerson's
interest in the author is not so much a critical position as an
interest in the process of creativity.
A week after the epoch-making address to the Divinity School,
Emerson gave another address, called "Literary Ethics," at
Dartmouth, which, as Porte has noted, is undeservedly neglected.
As the Cambridge address called for "a religion by revelation to
us," so the Dartmouth address calls for a literature adequate to
America. So far, says Emerson, "this country has not fulfilled what
seemed the reasonable expectation of mankind." In painting,
sculpture, poetry, and fiction, American authors had evolved only
"a certain grace without grandeur," in work that was "itself not
new but derivative."
In December 1839 Emerson gave two lectures on literature as
part of a series called "The Present Age," much of the material of
which went into a paper called "Thoughts on Modern Literature,"
published in the Dial in October 1840 and reprinted in Natural
History of Intellect (1893). Here Emerson lists, in order of
importance, three classes of literature. "The highest class of books
are those which express the moral element; the next, works of
imagination; and the next, works of science." Though he calls
Shakespeare "the first literary genius of the world, the highest in
whom the moral is not the predominating element," he insists that
Shakespeare's work "leans on the Bible: his poetry supposes it."
By contrast, "the Prophets do not imply the existence of
Shakespeare or Homer." Shakespeare is secondary, the prophets
of the Bible are primary. These views compensate and balance
those in the Divinity School address. Indeed "Thoughts on Modern
Literature" seems to have been intended by Emerson as a sort of
corrective of some of his early views and various
misinterpretations of them. One of the best things in "Thoughts on
Modern Literature" is a long and very specific treatment of the
problem of subjectivity. Defending the subjectivism of the age,
Emerson is at great pains to distinguish true subjectivism (the
right of each single soul, each subject "I" to "sit in judgment on
history and literature, and to summon all facts and parties before
its tribunal") from narrow-minded insistence on one's own
personality or mere "intellectual selfishness." "A man may say I,
and never refer to himself as an individual," says Emerson in a
phrase that prefigures his concept of the representative poet.
Emerson is of most interest as a theorist of literary activity. Of
practical criticism of specific texts or reviewing of new books he
did relatively little. His most active period of practical criticism
covers the years 1840 to 1844, when he was very much involved
with the Dial, a quarterly magazine designed specifically by
Emerson and his friends to champion the new views, including
Transcendentalism. The new journal said in its manifesto that it
was interested in making new demands on literature, and it
complained that the rigors of current convention in religion and
education was "turning us to stone." But even as the new journal
was launched, Emerson showed himself well aware of the limits of
the enterprise, and of language itself. "There is somewhat in all
life untranslatable into language...." He continues, "Every thought
has a certain imprisoning as well as uplifting quality, and, in
proportion to its energy on the will, refuses to become an object of
intellectual contemplation. Thus what is great usually slips
through our fingers."
Some things did not slip through his fingers. Emerson could be
a brilliant and pungent critic on occasion. In a letter to Margaret
Fuller on 17 March 1840, he told her he had been reading "one of
Lord Brougham's superficial indigent disorderly unbuttoned penny-
a-page books called 'Times of George III,'" thereby describing a
kind of book of which too many are published in every age.
Emerson wrote for the Dial notices of Richard Henry Dana's Two
Years Before the Mast (1840), which he liked, saying "it will serve
to hasten the day of reckoning between society and the sailor." He
praised the poetry in Jones Very's Essays and Poems (1839), "as
sincere a litany as the Hebrew songs of David or Isaiah, and only
less than they, because indebted to the Hebrew muse for their
tone and genius." In a review of Tennyson, he commented, "So
large a proportion of even the good poetry of our time is either
over-ethical or over-passionate, and the stock poetry is so deeply
tainted with a sentimental egotism that this, whose chief merit lay
in its melody and picturesque power, was most refreshing."
Emerson was also an early admirer of the poetry of Henry Thoreau
and Ellery Channing. He was Carlyle's American agent, so to
speak, and through Emerson's effort Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
(1835) was published in book form in Boston before an English
publisher could be found for it. When Walt Whitman sent Emerson
a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Emerson
wrote back an excited letter, calling the poems "the most
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet
contributed." He recognized the "great power" in the work and
praised it for having "the best merits, namely, of fortifying and
encouraging."
Indeed, Emerson's practical criticism, like his numerous and
repeated offers of help to young writers, was more often
encouragement than judgment, meant to be fortifying not critical.
Not for nothing did Matthew Arnold rank Emerson with Marcus
Aurelius as "the friend and aider of those who would live in the
spirit." In October 1844 Emerson published his Essays: Second
Series, in which the lead essay, "The Poet," was his best and most
influential piece of literary criticism. It opens with a sweeping
critique of those critics and "umpires of taste" whose "knowledge
of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some
limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for
amusement or for show." We have lost, Emerson says, "the
perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul." He goes
on to say flatly, "there is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy."
"The Poet" is Emerson's response to this challenge. It is his
"doctrine of forms."
To begin with, Emerson asserts that "the poet is representative,"
standing "among partial men for the complete man," apprising us
"not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth." Instead of treating
the poet as a superior kind of person, placed by his talent above
the ordinary run of human beings, Emerson here lays down the
cornerstone of a modern democratic aesthetic. The poet is a
greater person than the ordinary, but his very greatness is his
representative nature. The poet realizes and actualizes the
humanity we all share and can realize in ourselves. This concept
of the representative poet would form the major theme of
Emerson's 1850 book, Representative Men, and it is an important
concept for the early Whitman.
Emerson's second main point is "the poet is the sayer, the
namer." That is to say Emerson here rejects the idea that the poet
is primarily a maker, a craftsman, or wordsmith. Formalist critics
from Jonson to Poe had emphasized the craft of writing, seeing the
poet as a maker. For Emerson, the poet is a seer and a sayer, a
person inspired, a transmitter of the poetry that inheres in nature
and in us. He is not just a maker of verses. Emerson's poet is the
inspired, divine, prophet-bard who has access to truth and whose
function is to declare it, as Barbara Packer shows in Emerson's Fall
(1982). From this notion it follows that poems are not "machines
made out of words," or "verbal constructs." By contrast, for
Emerson, "poetry was all written before time was." The poet's job
is to establish contact with the primal, natural world, "where the
air is music," and try to write down in words what has always
existed in nature. When Robert Frost writes that "Nature's first
green is gold," he is giving words to something that has been
going on for eons, namely the first appearance of light greenish
gold when the leaves first begin to break out of the bud in spring.
Emerson's poet is much more than a technician of meter, a
person of "poetic talents." Emerson's poet "announces that which
no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and
tells." Picking up the Miltonic definition of poetry he had endorsed
earlier, Emerson says, in a famous phrase, "for it is not metres but
a metre-making argument, that makes a poem." The essence of
the poem lies not in the words but behind the words, in "a thought
so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal,
it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new
thing."
Emerson is here talking about the concept of "organic form" as
opposed to "mechanic form." The distinction was clearly made by
Coleridge. "The form is mechanic, when on any given material we
impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the
proportions of the material--as when to a mass of wet clay we give
whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened." Thus, for
most modern poets, to use a sonnet form is to use mechanic form.
"The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it
developes, itself from within, and the fullness of its development
is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form."
Emerson's own essays grew organically, and both Thoreau's
Walden and Whitman's Leaves of Grass can be seen as examples
of the organic form here described. In Emerson's doctrine of
forms, the form should follow from the nature of the evolving
material. In Emerson's terminology, form depends on soul.
Nature had claimed that education, reflection, and self-
cultivation lead us to invert "the vulgar views of nature, and
brings the mind to call ... that real, which it use[d] to call
visionary." Now Emerson pushes one step further, poetry is "the
science of the real," which is to say that it is not concerned so
much with the material or the phenomenal as it is with underlying
laws. Emerson had made this stand clear in earlier essays, but in
"The Poet" he discusses more fully the poet's use of language. The
poet must not only use words, but he must be able to use things--
nature--as a language. "Nature offers all her creatures to him as a
picture language," Emerson says. "Things admit of being used as
symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole and in every
part." If the student asks what nature is symbolic of, the answer
is, symbolic of the human spirit. "The universe is the
externalization of the soul." This idea, too, had been said by
Emerson before, though not with such epigrammatic authority.
What really happens in poetic practice is suggested by Emerson
when he says, "the world being thus put under the mind for verb
and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it." What the poet
realizes is that not only words and things, but "we are symbols,
and inhabit symbols."
There is more in the essay on the origin of words. "The
etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant
picture," Emerson says, in a passage that was noted by Richard
Trench, the English author who first suggested the idea of the
Oxford English Dictionary. "Language is fossil poetry," Emerson
explains, saying that "Language is made up of images, or tropes,
which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us
of their poetic origin." Coleridge had linked genius to organic form,
saying genius was the mind's "power of acting creatively under
laws of its own origination." Emerson now links genius with the
revival and renewal of language. "Genius is the activity which
repairs the decays of things," he says, and the epigrammatic force
of his own language pushes back against entropy itself.
"The Poet" also suggests the true function of the critic. "And
herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the
poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which
they ought to be made to tally." Emerson, however, is still more
interested in the function of the poet than in the text, and he goes
on now to explain that so many poets flirt with intoxication
because they are really trying to tap into a realm of experience
larger than that offered by their own private lives. Whether we
think of it as the world-soul, or collective consciousness, or the
oversoul, the poet must transcend his own limited and personal
experience in order to participate in the broader experience of the
common human spirit. In an important--and difficult--passage,
Emerson says, "it is a secret which every intellectual man quickly
learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious
intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled
on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, besides
his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public
power, on which he can draw...."
It is finally the imagination, not wine, which intoxicates the true
poet, and the same quality works in us, too. "The use of symbols
has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all
men.... This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles and all
poetic forms." Consider, for example, the sense of delight with
which we are momentarily freed of the tyranny of English numbers
by the child's book which tells us, if we are tired of counting to ten
in the same old way, to try a new way, such as "ounce, dice, trice,
quartz, quince, sago, serpent, oxygen, nitrogen, denim." Of such
language, Emerson says, "We seem to be touched by a wand,
which makes us dance and run about happily like children." He
concludes, in a phrase that sums up the essay, "poets are thus
liberating gods." Themselves free, they set us free--free, for
example, to take only what we want from the books we read. "I
think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the
transcendental and extraordinary." Thus Emerson cheerfully and
knowingly dismisses all but the very best of even his own writing.
The true poet will be "the translator of nature into thought" and
will not get lost in unintelligible private symbolism, in "the mistake
of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one."
Nearing the end of the essay, Emerson notes that he looks "in
vain for the poet whom I describe.... We have yet had no genius in
America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our
incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and
materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods
whose picture he so much admires in Homer." It is a passage
which seems to predict the advent of Walt Whitman. Emerson
continues, "yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample
geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for
metres." Eleven years later, Whitman's Leaves of Grass appeared
as if in answer.
There is only one paragraph about America and American
poetry in "The Poet." Emerson specifically says he is "not wise
enough for a national criticism," and he ends the essay as he
began, with a consideration not of the American poet but of the
modern poet. The essay closes with a repetition of the idea that it
is the process of poetry, not the resulting text, that constitutes the
live essence of poetry, and he puts it in yet another of his
triumphant aphorisms. "Art is the path of the creator to his work."
True poetry is not the finished product, but the process of uttering
or writing it.
Representative Men (1850), a book made up of lectures first
given in 1845 on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare,
Napoleon, and Goethe, is the fullest account of Emerson's
biographical approach to literature. This subject is not new with
him. It goes back at least to his early lecture on Milton, but it now
has a new emphasis. Just as he had once claimed that there is
properly no history, only biography, so Representative Men comes
close to saying there is properly no literature, there are only
literary persons. "There must be a man behind the book," he says
of Goethe. "It makes a great difference to the force of any
sentence whether there be a man behind it or no." Emerson's
representative figures are his Plutarchan heroes. The book is a
pantheon of heroes, chosen not from among warriors (except for
Napoleon), but from among thinkers and writers, who are of use to
us because they represent or symbolize qualities that lie in us,
too. They are essays in symbolic literary biography. Assuming that
language is representative, that is, symbolic, Emerson says that
"Behmen and Swedenborg saw that things were representative."
Then, moving, not toward circular idealism, but toward biography,
he states: "Men also are representative: first of things, and
secondly, of ideas." Emerson identifies in each of his figures some
permanent quality of the human mind. He is also a prestructuralist
in that he believes that the world people make and inhabit is
determined partly or even largely by the structure of the human
mind. "Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism,
Mahometism are the necessary and structural action of the human
mind." It follows from this that our reading is a process of
recognizing our own thoughts, or capabilities for thought and
imagination, in the work and lives of others. Emerson sums this up
concisely. "The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of
the observer with the observed." The democratic aesthetic also
follows from this. "As to what we call the masses, and common
men,--there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and
true art is only possible on the conviction that every talent has its
apotheosis somewhere."
Emerson calls Plato's work the bible of educated people,
claiming that it is "impossible to think, on certain levels, except
through him." Swedenborg saw, and stands for, the
interconnectedness of human beings and nature. Shakespeare
and Goethe exemplify and stand for the power to express, to
convert life into life-giving words. Emerson ends each essay with a
review of the shortcomings of the subject. Plato is too literary, not
enough the prophet. Swedenborg is over-whelmed by a private
and rigid symbolism his reader cannot fully share. The effect of
these negative conclusions is to prevent the reader from idolizing
or enthroning Plato, Swedenborg, or any other great person. The
great ones are of interest to us only because each has something
to teach us, and it is the present reader, the student, and not the
great writer or teacher whom Emerson really cares about. Each
great representative figure "must be related to us, and our life
receive from him some promise of explanation." So the praise of
Goethe, whom Emerson seems to have admired above all writers,
is for such things as the creation of Mephistopheles in Faust
(1808-1832). In order to make the devil real, Goethe "stripped him
of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone
and blue-fire, and instead of looking in books and pictures, looked
for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness,
and unbelief that, in crowd or in solitude, darkens over the human
thought." Thus Goethe reimagines Mephistopheles: "He shall be
real; he shall be modern; he shall be European; he shall dress like
a gentleman." The result, says Emerson, is that Goethe "flung into
literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic figure that has
been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
Prometheus."
Emerson's final word is reserved for Goethe not Faust, the
creator not the creation, and what he says of Goethe is true of
Emerson himself. "Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence
of all times.... We too must write Bibles, to unite again the
heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no
fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high
refinement of modern life, in art, in sciences, in books, in men, to
exact good faith, reality and a purpose; and first, last, midst and
without end, to honor every truth by use." Thus, Emerson, like
most critics who get their bearings from Plato, has little to say
about fiction, about the novel. Fiction he regarded as unreal, but
poetry was for him, "the science of the real." In his later writings,
while he would comment on novels and romances occasionally, he
continued to deepen and widen his conception of poetry.
He also continued to be alert to the social and political contexts
of literature. In a speech about Robert Burns in 1859, published in
Miscellanies (1884), he noted shrewdly that Burns, "the poet of
the middle class, represents in the mind of men to-day that great
uprising of the middle class against the armed and privileged
minorities, that uprising which worked politically in the American
and French Revolutions, and which, not in governments so much
as in education and social order, has changed the face of the
world." In 1870 he included an essay called "Books" in a volume
titled Society and Solitude. The essay contains Emerson's reading
list, his recommendations about the best books to read. Coming
during the same period as Matthew Arnold's concept of
"touchstones," it is an interesting prefiguration of the premise that
underlies modern general education, namely that there is a body
of knowledge that all educated people should share. For the
Greeks, for instance, he lists Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Plato,
and Plutarch, then goes on to give some background reading in
ancient history and art. It is an eminently practical essay, as well
as a useful indication of Emerson's own broad taste.
In 1871, in a short speech on Sir Walter Scott, Emerson linked
Scott to his times, noting how Scott, "apprehended in advance the
immense enlargement of the reading public ... which his books
and Byron's inaugurated." In 1875 Emerson published an
anthology of poetry, called Parnassus, which is remarkable both
for its inclusions and its exclusions. The volume is heavily
weighted toward English poetry. In addition to the expected poets,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, there are substantial
selections from such poets as Blake and Clough. Among American
poets, there is no Poe, no Whitman, and no Emerson, but
interesting selections from--among many others--Thoreau, James
Freeman Clarke, Frederic H. Hedge, Bret Harte, and Lucy Larcom.
Emerson's range is shown in his inclusion of selections from the
Greek Simonides to the Hindu Calidasa.
Emerson had been an admirer of ancient Persian poetry since
the mid 1840s, though he only published his essay on Persian
poetry in the 1876 volume Letters and Social Aims. Quoting freely
from Firdousi, Saadi, Hafiz, Omar Chiam (Khayyám), and others,
Emerson expressed his admiration and helped create an audience
for the special qualities of Persian verse. Emerson delightedly
describes the open avidity with which the ancient Persians
approached poetry. "The excitement [the poems] produced
exceeds that of the grape." He admired Hafiz's "intellectual
liberty" and his unorthodox, unhypocritical stance. "He tells his
mistress, that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover, has in his
heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint." Emerson
admires "the erotic and bacchanalian songs" of Hafiz, and he
especially prizes the way "Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens,
boys, birds, mornings and music, to give vent to his immense
hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy." In this
interest in the great Persian poets, we glimpse the Dionysian side
of Emerson, the side that appealed so deeply, for example, to the
young Nietzsche. It is an important side, without which we run the
risk of missing the real Emerson.
The longest essay in Letters and Social Aims is "Poetry and
Imagination." It is a fully developed piece, longer in fact than the
1836 book, Nature, and important as the last major restatement
and reaffirmation of Emerson's conception of the literary process
as one of symbolizing. "A good symbol is the best argument," he
writes and explains why. "The value of a trope is that the hearer is
one; and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular
natures are tropes.... All thinking is analogising, and 'tis the use of
life to learn metonomy." If we are symbols and nature is symbol,
then what is the reality behind or sustaining the symbols?
Emerson's reply is "process." "The endless passing of one element
into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis, explains the rank
which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers.
The imagination is the reader of these [symbolic] forms. The poet
accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of
language, uses them representatively." The result is that "every
new object so seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise." "Poetry,"
Emerson concludes, "is the only verity.... As a power, it is the
perception of the symbolic character of things, and the treating
them as representative," and he quotes William Blake to the same
end.
Emerson's critical theory did not really change after Nature and
"The Poet," but it did become more practical, more carefully
thought out, and better focused. Emerson began as an American
idealist or transcendentalist, and as that position enlarged and
deepened with time, Emerson came to be seen not only as a great
modern representative of the Platonic, idealist tradition but a
major romantic symbolist. His work can also be seen as an early
prefiguring, in some ways, of modern movements toward
symbolism, structuralism, and reader-centered criticism. The
central aspect of his still-vital influence, however, is his insistence
that literature means literary activity.

IX. Emerson.

§ 12. Ideas.

15
And as his verse, so is his prose. Though in one sense, so far as he writes always with two
or three dominant ideas in his mind, he is one of the most consistent and persistent of
expositors, yet he is really himself only in those moments of inspiration when his words
strike with almost irresistible force on the heart, and awake an echoing response: “This is
true; this I have myself dimly felt.” Sometimes the memorable paragraph or sentence is
purely didactic; sometimes it is highly metaphorical, as is the case with the closing
paragraph of the Conduct of Life:
There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god
is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he
alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up
to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies
himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings
he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives
hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he
that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes,
and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an
instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him
on their thrones,–they alone with him alone.
16
There is, it need scarcely be said, a good deal in the works of Emerson—literary criticism,
characterization of men and movements, reflection on the state of society—which lies
outside of this ethical category; but even in such essays his guiding ideas are felt in the
background. Nor are these ideas hard to discover. The whole circle of them, ever revolving
upon itself, is likely to be present, explicit or implicit, in any one of his great passages, as it
is in the paragraph just cited—the clear call to self-reliance, announcing that “a man should
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within”;
the firm assurance that, through all the balanced play of circumstance, “there is a deeper
fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature”; the intuition, despite all the
mists of illusion, of the Over-Soul which is above us and still ourselves: “We live in
succession, in division, in parts, in particles; meanwhile within man is the soul of the
whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty … the eternal One.”
17
Emerson’s philosophy is thus a kind of reconciled dualism, and a man’s attitude towards it
in the end will be determined by his sense of its sufficiency or insufficiency to meet the
facts of experience. One of Emerson’s biographers has attempted to set forth this
philosophy as “a synthesis and an anticipation.” It is a synthesis because in it we fund, as
Emerson had already found in Plato and Plotinus, a reconciliation of “the many and the
one,” the everlasting flux and the motionless calm at the heart of things:
An ample and generous recognition of this transiency and slipperiness both in the nature of
things and in man’s soul seems more and more a necessary ingredient in any estimate of
the universe which shall satisfy the intellect of the coming man. But it seems equally true
that the coming man who shall resolve our will never content himself with a universe a-tilt,
a universe in cascade, so to speak; the craving for permanence in some form cannot be
jauntily evaded. Is there any known mind which foreshadows the desired combination so
clearly as Emerson’s? Who has felt profoundly the evanescence and evasiveness of things?
… Yet Emerson was quite as firm in his insistence on a single unalterable reality as in his
refusal to believe that any aspect or estimate of that reality could be final. 4

Note 4. O.W.Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p.364. [ back ]

The Over-Soul
from Essays: First Series (1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity."
Henry More
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 've been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.
ESSAY IX The Over-Soul
There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect.
Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the
argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man,
namely, the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and
yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out
that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the
universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine inuendo by which the soul makes its enormous
claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always
leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless?
The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its
experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a
stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most
exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I
am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see
not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception,
but from some alien energy the visions come.
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which
must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that
Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all
other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is
submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one
to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore
tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We
live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the
wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.
And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-
sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal,
the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that
Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding
to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man's words,
who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own
part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself
can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the
rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven
of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the
Highest Law.
If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in
surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, — the droll
disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice, — we
shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to
show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function,
like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a
faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the
background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be
possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware
that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the fasade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all
good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we
know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose
organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes
through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through
his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins, when it would be something of itself.
The weakness of the will begins, when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims,
in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It
is too subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, "God comes to see us without bell"; that is, as
there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in
the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie
open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know,
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the
moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.
The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those
limitations which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it
contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has,
in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look
real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity.
Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time, —
"Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity."
We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from the
year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the
love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that
it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a
degree from the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry, or a profound
sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume of Plato, or Shakspeare, or remind us of their
names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep, divine thought reduces
centuries, and millenniums, and makes itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less
effective now than it was when first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my
thought has nothing to do with time. And so, always, the soul's scale is one; the scale of the senses and
the understanding is another. Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink away.
In common speech, we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars to
one concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium
approaches, that a day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when we
mean, that, in the nature of things, one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the
other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one,
detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows
whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any
whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards,
creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor
specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is
clothed.
After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul's
advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line; but rather
by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from
the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the
elect individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered
inferiority, but by every throe of growth the man expands there where he works, passing, at each
pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the
visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths
that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and
Arrian, than with persons in the house.
This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by specific levity, not into a
particular virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all.
The soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is not that; requires
beneficence, but is somewhat better; so that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when
we leave speaking of moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the well-born child, all the
virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly
virtuous.
Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those
who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that
commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral
beatitude already anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent,
no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of
related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its
works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this primary
and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our remote station on the circumference
instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate
the universe, which is but a slow effect.
One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own.
I live in society; with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience
to the great instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and
these other souls, these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new
emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence comes conversation,
competition, persuasion, cities, and war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the
soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger
experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves
acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as
to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal;
is God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company
become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in
what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a
temple, this unity of thought, in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and
thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It
shines for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the
lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, and
the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it
thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs long
beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom.
Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many valuable
observations to people who are not very acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort, which
we want and have long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and
left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they
unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves,
and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial
conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove
nods to Jove from behind each of us.
Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world, for which they forsake their
native nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks, who dwell in mean houses, and affect an
external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their
interior and guarded retirements.
As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It is adult already in the infant man. In
my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing;
but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves
me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will,
and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same
soul; he reveres and loves with me.
The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and
scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to
hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from
opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel
Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's perception, — "It is no proof of a
man's understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is
true is true, and that what is false is false, this is the mark and character of intelligence." In the book I
read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad
thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We
are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the
thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of
all things and all persons stands behind us, and casts his dread omniscience through us over things.
But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the individual's experience, it also
reveals truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul's communication of truth is the highest event in
nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes
that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself.
We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term
Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an
influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges
of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and
delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great
action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications, the power to see is not
separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds
from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable.
By the necessity of our constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of that
divine presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual,
from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its rarer appearance, — to the faintest
glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and
associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always attended
the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been "blasted with excess of light." The trances
of Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of
Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this
kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in
common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a
tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of
the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; the
experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the
individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.
The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are
solutions of the soul's own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks.
The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of
fortunes. In past oracles of the soul, the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and
undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall be their
company, adding names, and dates, and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low
curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require
a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you,
and to-morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the
immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime
spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness
is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding
only the manifestations of these, never made the separation of the idea of duration from the essence of
these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to
sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and
maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance.
No inspired man ever asks this question, or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to
itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a
future which would be finite.
These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin. God has no answer
for them. No answer in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary "decree of God,"
but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us
read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the
children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the
senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of
nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself
a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.
By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the
waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can
tell the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several individuals in his circle of friends? No
man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put
no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he
might be trusted as one who had an interest in his own character. We know each other very well, —
which of us has been just to himself, and whether that which we teach or behold is only an aspiration,
or is our honest effort also.
We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The
intercourse of society, — its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels,— is one wide, judicial
investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and
accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by
which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not read them by
learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets
them judge themselves, and merely reads and records their own verdict.
By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our
imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach,
not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open,
and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character
teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither
his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together, can hinder
him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home in God, his
manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions, will
involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will
shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable
circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, — between poets like Herbert, and poets
like Pope, — between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke,
Paley, Mackintosh, and Stewart, — between men of the world, who are reckoned accomplished talkers,
and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, — is,
that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the
other class, from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence
of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus
speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe
beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance of
such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil, where the word is one with that it tells
of, let him lowly confess it.
The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call genius. Much of the wisdom
of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary
fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing
presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light, and know
not whence it comes, and call it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown
member, so that their strength is a disease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the
impression of virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a man's talents stand in the way of his
advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not
anomalous, but more like, and not less like other men. There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of
humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine
gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in
Shakspeare, in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and
phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior, but
popular writers. For they are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which
through their eyes beholds again, and blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its
knowledge; wiser than any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we
think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has
done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which
beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other
hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of
a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter
things as good from day to day, for ever. Why, then, should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if
we had not the soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?
This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It
comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes
as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprized of
new degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not
talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain and true. The
vain traveller attempts to embellish his life by quoting my lord, and the prince, and the countess, who
thus said or did to him. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons, and brooches, and rings, and
preserve their cards and compliments. The more cultivated, in their account of their own experience,
cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance, — the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the
brilliant friend they know; still further on, perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the
mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yesterday, — and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life.
But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends,
no chivalry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest
experience of the common day, — by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having become
porous to thought, and bibulous of the sea of light.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest
utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the
infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a
phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you
one of the circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain
confession, and omniscient affirmation.
Souls such as these treat you as gods would; walk as gods in the earth, accepting without any
admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, — say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they
own as their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of the gods. But what
rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery with which authors solace each other
and wound themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell, and
Christina, and Charles the Second, and James the First, and the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own
elevation, the fellows of kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world. They must
always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, without ducking or
concession, and give a high nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of
even companionship, and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like these make
us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman, as to
constrain the utmost sincerity, and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment
you can pay. Their "highest praising," said Milton, "is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of
praising."
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his
integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is
new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the
idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When
we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart
with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a
power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the
conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular
uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time, the solution of his private riddles.
He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his mind, he is
overflowed with a reliance so universal, that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable
projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things
that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but
your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find
him? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you
together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which
your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you,
that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going? O, believe, as
thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will
vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort,
shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will,
but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the
heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature,
but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is
all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.
Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the
Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is
there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must 'go into his closet and shut the
door,' as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself,
withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men's devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to
him, until he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the
appeal is made — no matter how indirectly — to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that
religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping thought to him never counts his company. When
I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with
pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?
It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on
authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the
soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of
authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is
no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself. Before the immense
possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks
away. Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of
life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking,
that we have none; that we have no history, no record of any character or mode of living, that entirely
contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain
of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on
our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives
itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly
inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees
through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that
the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I
am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow
receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be the fair
accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter
into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts, and
act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that
"its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul
worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history;
that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will
weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease
from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can
render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and
so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679783229?
tag=jjsbooksbuilding&camp=15309&creative=331469&linkCode=st1&creativeASIN=06797
83229&adid=01PP2VERKM3CVCC5PN7Y&

NATURE

Introduction
from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and
criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of
theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and
invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the
dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun
shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new
thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of
the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds,
the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he
would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its
forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so
peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of
functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to
truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound
and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true
theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are
thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking,
therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both
nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In
enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; — in its
common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is
not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences
unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the
same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so
insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of
the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

Nature
Chapter I from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not
solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at
the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he
touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the
heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and
preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every
night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
 The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all
natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never
wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by
finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the
mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his
childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the
mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which
distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape
which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this
field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a
property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.
This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly,
few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial
seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who
has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth,
becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite
of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be
glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight;
for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless
noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In
good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at
twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I
have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his
years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is
perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is
dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we
return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity,
(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent
eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to
be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained
and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or
villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds
somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation
between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.
The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not
unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed
I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a
harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not
always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as
for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of
the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a
kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less
grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Commodity
Chapter II from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all
admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and
Discipline.
Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to
nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the
soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend.
The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision
that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the
heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air
above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of
dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn
serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.
"More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of." ———
Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the
parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun
evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet,
condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless
circulations of the divine charity nourish man. The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations
by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means
of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his
boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of
men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an
eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed,
from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built
for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the
human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his
wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out
the snow, and cut a path for him.
But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the
examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that
this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed,
but that he may work.

Beauty
from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such
the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the
animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and
grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action
of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects,
of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are
mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is
the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not
make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like
space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace
diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our
endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the
wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds,
buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.
For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.
1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence of the forms and actions
in nature, is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of
commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company,
nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft
of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds
himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far
enough.
But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit.
I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise,
with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of
crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid
transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning
wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will
make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my
Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the
understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.
Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of
a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated
with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to
come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the
valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not reform for me in words? The leafless
trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of the
dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to
the mute music.
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please
myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the
genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in
the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be
seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath.
The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week.
The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which
time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The
tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has
room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed
blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in
continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala,
and boasts each month a new ornament.
But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the
dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water,
and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of
the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your
necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could
clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of
diligence.
2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high
and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with
the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic
act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that
the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his
dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and
abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion
to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which
men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said Sallust. "The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always
on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a
noble act is done, — perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three
hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once
in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the
avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not
these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of
Columbus nears the shore of America; — before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their
huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we
separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-
groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great
actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the
champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, "You never sate on so glorious a
seat." Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in
an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. "But," his
biographer says, "the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side." In private
places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its
temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be
of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines
of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope,
and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central
figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our
memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize with
Jesus. And in common life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will
have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, — the persons, the opinions, and the day,
and nature became ancillary to a man.
3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it
become s an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to
thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and
without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and
the exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something
unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in
animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to
actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the
apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing
divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not
for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love
of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek
to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an
abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the
works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar
and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape,
the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, — that
perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, — the
totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite
beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it
suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each
to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love
of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man.
Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.
The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end.
No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest
sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but
different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and
eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the
last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.

Language
Chapter IV from Nature, published in Nature; Addresses and Lectures

Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural
history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward
creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found
to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit
primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow.
We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words
borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which
this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the
same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of
things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, — so conspicuous a fact in the history
of language, — is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which
are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature
corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting
that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a
rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the
delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and
heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a
stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.
Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament,
the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is
not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the
private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason.
That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit.
Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his
language, as the FATHER.
It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are
constant, and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an
analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation
passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor
these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are
barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus'
and Buffon's volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a
plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual
philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable
manner. The seed of a plant, — to what affecting analogies in the nature of man, is that little fruit made
use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed, — "It is sown a
natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." The motion of the earth round its axis, and round the sun,
makes the day, and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent
of an analogy between man's life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from
that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a
ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little
body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps,
become sublime.
Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who
have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more
picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural
symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover
been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest
eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of
language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human
life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a
strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all men relish.
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the
simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without
loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character
and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of
pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the
power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created,
and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when
there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to
stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-
civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths,
who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the
language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque
language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth
and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with
passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his
intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind,
cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing
and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of
experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original
Cause through the instruments he has already made.
These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind, over
the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.
Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the
woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without
design and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of
politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils, — in the hour of revolution, —
these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts
which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the
pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard
them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his
hands.
3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a
language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this
profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his
municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel
that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a
volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we
cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have mountains,
and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as
emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole
of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face
to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The
axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is
equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being
compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense.
These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than
when confined to technical use.
In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of nations, consist usually of a
natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A
bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong;
Make hay while the sun shines; 'T is hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last
ounce broke the camel's back; Long-lived trees make roots first; — and the like. In their primary sense
these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What is true of
proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories.
This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of
God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate
hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not blind and deaf;
——— "Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder?"
for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it.
It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the
world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon,
of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each
prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to
manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali,
preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections,
in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the
circumference of the invisible world. "Material objects," said a French philosopher, "are necessarily
kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact
relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."
This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "garment," "scoriae," "mirror," &c., may
stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain.
"Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth," — is the fundamental law
of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to
understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of
nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and
final cause.
A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful
extent and multitude of objects; since "every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul."
That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the
domain of knowledge, — a new weapon in the magazine of power.

Discipline
Chapter V from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This
use of the world includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself.
Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us
sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and
the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding, — its solidity or resistance, its
inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures,
and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all
these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.
1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible
objects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and
seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end
of manifold forces. Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with
which its tuition is provided, — a care pretermitted in no single case. What tedious training, day after
day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of
annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices,
what reckonings of interest, — and all to form the Hand of the mind; — to instruct us that "good
thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!"
The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt,
grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; — debt,
which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so
base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it
most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow, — "if it fall level to-day, it will be
blown into drifts to-morrow," — is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face
of a clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight of the
spirit, experience in profounder laws.
The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the
culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and
therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and
individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is
good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten.
The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is
as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other
man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.
In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and
her nay, nay.
The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter,
and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are
concealed sure and useful results.
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics! What noble
emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the
privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater
that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known.
Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we
know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems
suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the
interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.
Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two.
The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event. From the child's successive
possession of his several senses up to the hour when he saith, "Thy will be done!" he is learning the
secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay the whole
series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to
serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its
kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of
working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them
wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious thought comes up with
and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will, — the double of the man.
2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are
moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is
nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical
change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle
of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function
from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the
Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the
religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This
ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was
made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal
function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served
an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a
new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind
an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a
conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross
manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in corn and meat.
It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The
moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of
every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is
a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, — it is a
sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in
the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an
experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are
radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the
grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral
influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can
estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how
much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds
forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and
providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching preacher of
self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!
Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, — the unity in variety, — which meets us
everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in
his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the
same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a
crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each
particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the
human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music," by De Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius thought an
architect should be a musician. "A Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is a petrified religion." Michael
Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential. In Haydn's oratorios, the
notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but
colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colors. The
granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat, from the river that wears it away. The
river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which traverses it with
more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is
only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law
is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So
intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays
its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in
words, implies or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is like a great circle on a
sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like
manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.
The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind.
They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is
the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all
nature. "The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the
likeness of all which is done rightly."
Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to the human form, of
which all other organizations appear to be degradations. When this appears among so many that
surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, 'From such as this, have I drawn joy and
knowledge; in such as this, have I found and beheld myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can
yield me thought already formed and alive.' In fact, the eye, — the mind, — is always accompanied by
these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably the richest informations of the power and
order that lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some
injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature
around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto
they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.
It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our education, but where would it
stop? We are associated in adolescent and adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are
coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on
that side; whom we lack power to put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze
them. We cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a
standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real
person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his
character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom, — it
is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.

Idealism
Chapter VI from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the
immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.
A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe;
and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World,
that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent
sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to
test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me
correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven,
or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the
whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve
and intermingle without number or end, — deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy,
throughout absolute space, — or, whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances
are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is
only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is
ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.
The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, if its consequences were burlesque; as
if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise
the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence
of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith
therein is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of
nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of
this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with
indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the
wheelwright, the carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.
But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute
existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to
shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to
regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem
nature as an accident and an effect.
To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute
existence of nature. In their view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and
they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought
tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and
shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees,
with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to
outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and
affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to
more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and
spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher
powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.
Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a
hint from nature herself.
Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small
alteration in our local position apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore
from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our
point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a
coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, —
talking, running, bartering, fighting, — the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the
dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as
apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite
familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight
change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of
one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside
down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you
have seen it any time these twenty years!
In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the
spectacle, — between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree
of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the world is a
spectacle, something in himself is stable.
2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as
on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we
know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea,
makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed
himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to
things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other,
as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he
invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination
may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the
power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse
tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that
is upper-most in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things
are brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material
things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his
sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved;
time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament;
The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.
His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,
That works on leases of short numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.
In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and transitory. The freshness of
youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning.
Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, — the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature.
This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet, — this
power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small, — might be illustrated by a thousand
examples from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.
ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.
Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his companions;
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.
Again;
The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now lie foul and muddy.
The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are
real,) enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world,
and to assert the predominance of the soul.
3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher
only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not
less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. "The
problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground
unconditioned and absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which
being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is
infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth,
which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly
like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to
nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this
feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised
itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory
disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a
single formula.
Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer,
rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler
on his law of arches, "This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true;" had already transferred
nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse.
4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter.
Turgot said, "He that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for
metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is,
upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade.
Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into
their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are they who were set
up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they
were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep.
Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel."
Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are accessible to few men. Yet all men
are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine
natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We
become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will
never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company, for he is transported
out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the
difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were,
for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of
matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.
5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called, — the practice of ideas, or the introduction
of ideas into life, — have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting
its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties
commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.
They are one to our present design. They both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of
religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an
affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa.
The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,———"Contemn
the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities
of religion." The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and
indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking
back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of
matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, "it is the frail and weary weed, in which God
dresses the soul, which he has called into time."
It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our
convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding
too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with
idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like
corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my
gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish
man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of
man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call
that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true,
believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this
faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.
The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in
precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both
speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the
world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It
beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as
painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture,
which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds
itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much,
to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity, than the scandals of
ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles,
and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it
finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the
appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No
man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer,
and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.

Spirit
Chapter VII from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive.
Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of
this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless
exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an
infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the
cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual
effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.
The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands
folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee
God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and
describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.
That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually,
the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the
universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.
When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not include the whole
circumference of man. We must add some related thoughts.
Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The
first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a
substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and
the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is
a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the
glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than
those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the
demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions,
to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive
being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity
in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for
that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.
Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory
hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world.
But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and
Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is
present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are;
that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it
does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves:
therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth
through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a
plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains,
and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once
inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn
that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view,
which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to
"The golden key
Which opes the palace of eternity,"
carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world
through the purification of my soul.
The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior
incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one
important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by
us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may
measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We
are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds.
The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more
than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of
which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature,
for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet
finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men.

Prospects
Chapter VIII from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures
 In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always
the truest. That which seems faintly possible — it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is
deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and,
by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation
of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and
devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and
that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but
is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He
will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility;
that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper
into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to
state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know
whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and
classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape,
it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why
all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in
details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the
_metaphysics_ of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers,
shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history,
we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and
eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been confined, in his own country, to
the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St.
Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also, — faint copies of an invisible
archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful
congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most
subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great
and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or
atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires
the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are
part of his little poem on Man.
"Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And to all the world besides.
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.

"Nothing hath got so far

But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star;
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.

"For us, the winds do blow,

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.

"The stars have us to bed:

Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind,
In their descent and being; to our mind,
In their ascent and cause.
"More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of. In every path,
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him."
The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws men to science, but the end
is lost sight of in attention to the means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of
Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." Every surmise and vaticination of the
mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which
contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer
will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered
regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.
I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet
sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard,
may be both history and prophecy.
`The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it,
therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the
universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but
the epoch of one degradation.
`We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it,
by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But
who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?
`A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the
immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these
disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is
the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to
paradise.
`Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with
his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman,
the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night,
into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no
longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but
fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He
adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon.
Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at
the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have
elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but
superior to his will. It is Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.
At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding
alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man,
and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.
His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic
use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the
human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king
should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, in the
thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, — occasional examples of the action of
man upon nature with his entire force, — with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are; the
traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the
achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-
trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers;
many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer;
eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp
of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-
streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily
figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, _vespertina
cognitio_, but that of God is a morning knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.
The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of
the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision
is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason why
the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He
cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as
perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words,
thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not
celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their
sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but
they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,
— a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning
something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and
see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest
affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.
It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of
wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer?
What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We
make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind.
But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the
real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These
wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life,
poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but
that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract
question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a
wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily
history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the
intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the
educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; `Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters,
moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is
fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and
beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon
perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can
do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a
cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for
point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own
world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great
proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will
disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are
temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the
wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks melt, and the face of the
earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and
carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm
hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man
over nature, which cometh not with observation, — a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of
God, — he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to
perfect sight.'

Plato; or, the Philosopher

from Representative Men (1850)

AMONG secular*(7) books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's*(8) fanatical compliment to the Koran,
when he said, "Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book." These sentences contain the culture
of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures. A
discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or
practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still
written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have
reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for
twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant
generation,- Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,- is some reader
of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of grander proportion
suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer.
St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors and must
say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his
thesis.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,- at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since
neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he,
and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and are tinged with his mind. How many great
men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men,- Platonists! the Alexandrians, a
constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John
Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus
and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its
philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its
texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and says, "how
English!" a German- "how Teutonic!" an Italian- "how Roman and how Greek!" As they say that Helen
of Argos had that universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New
England an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.
This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question concerning his reputed works,-
what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular that wherever we find a man higher by a whole head
than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt what are his real works. Thus Homer,
Plato, Raffaelle, Shakespeare. For these men magnetize their contemporaries, so that their
companions can do for them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does thus live
in several bodies, and write, or paint or act, by many hands; and after some time it is not easy to say
what is the authentic work of the master and what is only of his school.
Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man but one of great
affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing;
he can dispose of every thing. What is not good for virtue, is good for knowledge. Hence his
contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is
glad to forget the innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude
for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and
Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and
mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. And this grasping
inventor puts all nations under contribution.
Plato absorbed the learning of his times,- Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what
else; then his master, Socrates; and finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,- beyond all
example then or since,- he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt,
and perhaps still farther East, to import the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European
mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic,
"Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts to meet in
one man, but its different parts generally spring up in different persons." Every man who would do
anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.
Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and (though I
doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression), mainly is not a poet because he chose to use the
poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They
lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would
know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato
especially has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He
ground them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of
all his fortunes into his intellectual performances.
He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician connection in his
times and city, and is said to have had an early inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, meeting
with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit and remained for ten years his scholar, until the
death of Socrates. He then went to Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the
court of Sicily, and went thither three times, though very capriciously treated. He traveled into Italy;
then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time; some say three,- some say thirteen years. It is said he
went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons in the Academy to
those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one
years.
But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of this man in
the intellectual history of our race,- how it happens that in proportion to the culture of men they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the tabletalk and household life
of every man and woman in the European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
preoccupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every church, every poet,- making it
impossible to think, on certain levels, except through him. He stands between the truth and every
man's mind, and has almost impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and
seal. I am struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ
of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all its traits, already
discernible in the mind of Plato,- and in none before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred
histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every
work of art; since the author of it was not misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real
and abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the
problem for us to solve.
This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic man, able to honor, at the
same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a nation,
as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry, scream and stamp with fury,
unable to express their desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their want and the reason of it, they
become gentle. In adult life, whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and
superlatively, blunder and quarrel: their manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths.
As soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no longer in lumps and
masses but accurately distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence and explain their meaning in
detail. If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest. The
same weakness and want, on a higher plane, occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and
women. "Ah! you don't understand me; I have never met with any one who comprehends me": and
they sigh and weep, write verses and walk alone,- fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a
month or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to assist their
volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established, they are thenceforward good
citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.
There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the
perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that
instant, extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night,
converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the
culmination of power.
Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its early records, almost
perished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion
of crude notions of morals and of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding through the partial insight of
single teachers.
Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the beginnings of geometry,
metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists,- deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from
air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. At last comes Plato, the
distributor, who needs no barbaric point, or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia
the vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. "He shall be as a god to me, who
can rightly divide and define."
This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the
constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two: 1. Unity, or
Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving
the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,- this very perception
of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to
speak or to think without embracing both.
The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of that; and again the
cause, diving still into the profound: self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one,-
a one that shall be all. "In the midst of the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the
midst of truth is the imperishable being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and West, has the
same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which is not
one, but other or many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the self-
existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These strictly-blended elements it is the problem of
thought to separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each
so fast slides into the other that we can never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as
nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds; when we contemplate the one, the true, the good,- as in
the surfaces and extremities of matter.
In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity.
The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its
highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the
Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea,
and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it.
 The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the furrow are
of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of form are unimportant. "You are
fit" (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) "to apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I
am, thou art, and that also is this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate
distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance." "The words I and mine constitute ignorance.
What is the great end of all, you shall now learn from me. It is soul,- one in all bodies, pervading,
uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay, omnipresent, made
up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with name, species and the rest, in
time past, present and to come. The knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one's own
and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of things. As one diffusive air,
passing through the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the
Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts. When the
difference of the investing form, as that of god or the rest, is destroyed, there is no distinction." "The
whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by
the wise as not differing from, but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my
dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I." As if he had said, "All
is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is
whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy." That
which the soul seeks is resolution into being above form, out of Tartarus and out of heaven,- liberation
from nature.
If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly
backwards to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature.
Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two
principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the
other, intellect: one is necessity; the other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the
other, distribution: one, strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness; the other, definition: one,
genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the other, knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade:
one, caste; the other, culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if we dare carry these
generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one
is escape from organization,- pure science; and the end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or
use of means, or executive deity.
Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of
the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid
unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation.
To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity, of immovable
institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in
practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social
institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by
culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved
infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.
European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the sharpened understanding,
adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens,
Greece, had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the
detriment of an excess. They saw before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no
Paris or London; no pitiless subdivision of classes,- the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of the
weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste,
superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its health and prime.
Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and their perfect
works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not more difficult than the completion of
a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken
for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes
of Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the
ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.
Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all
things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and
the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe,- Plato came to join,
and, by contact, to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain.
Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia,
as the base.
In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as easy to be great as to be
small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls is because they are not in our
experience. In actual life, they are so rare as to be incredible; but primarily there is not only no
presumption against them, but the strongest presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether
voices were heard in the sky, or not; whether his mother or his father dreamed that the infant man-
child was the son of Apollo; whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not;- a man who could see
two sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the upper and the under
side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every object; its real and its
ideal power,- was now also transferred entire to the consciousness of a man.
The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the most
popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made
transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained
by orators and polite conversers; from mares and puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks
and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself
a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His argument
and his sentence are self-imposed and spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two hands, to
grasp and appropriate their own.
Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, shall I
say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of two
metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at the departure of a friend; the
experience of poetic creativeness, which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in
transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much
transitional surface as possible; this command of two elements must explain the power and the charm
of Plato. Art expresses the one or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity;
poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of
aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things added to things, as statistics,
civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns
incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the medal of Jove.
To take an example:- The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the world; the
theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a
master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be no
theories of the world but bare inventories and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the
dogma,- "Let us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the
universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all
things should be as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as
the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world, will be in the truth."*(9) "All things are for
the sake of the good, and it is the cause of every thing beautiful." This dogma animates and
impersonates his philosophy.
The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his talents. Where there is great
compass of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the living man, but in description
appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be
apprehended by an original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment
is united with the precision of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of
facts; as the birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic
elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and
strength of frame. According to the old sentence, "If Jove should descend to the earth, he would speak
in the style of Plato."
With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of his works and running through the
tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and in the Phaedo, to piety. He
has been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that
have come down from the times attest his manly interference before the people in his master's behalf,
since even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indignation towards popular
government, in many of his pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native
reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the
people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy and the high insight are from a wisdom of which
man is not master; that the gods never philosophize, but by a celestial mania these miracles are
accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh
cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain, he hears the doom of the judge, he beholds the penal
metempsychosis, the Fates, with the rock and shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.
But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had read the inscription on the gates
of Busyrane,- "Be bold"; and on the second gate,- "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold"; and then
again had paused well at the third gate,- "Be not too bold." His strength is like the momentum of a
falling planet, and his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve,- so excellent is his Greek love
of boundary and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms one is not more secure than in following
Plato in his flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are
playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking before he brings it to the reader, and he abounds in the
surprises of a literary master. He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon
he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers
than the poor,- but has that one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the
need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed no weapon in all
the armory of wit which he did not possess and use,- epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire and
irony, down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations.
Socrates' profession of obstetric art*(10) is good philosophy; and his finding that word "cookery," and
"adulatory art," for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No orator can measure in
effect with him who can give good nicknames.
What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has good-
naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the schools. "For
philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but if he is conversant with it more
than is becoming, it corrupts the man." He could well afford to be generous,- he, who from the sunlike
centrality and reach of his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he
plays with the doubt and makes the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence
that moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the perfect yes and
no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and
consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding
the honors that most men value, and looking to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as
virtuously as I can; and when I die, to die so. And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my power;
and you too I in turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here."*(11)
He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his
faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for
what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world's interpreter. He
has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,- this strong
solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the
streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however
picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never writes in ecstasy, or
catches us up into poetic raptures.
Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth and cover his eyes
whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which every
thing can be affirmed and denied: that "which is entity and nonentity." He called it super-essential. He
even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so,- that this Being exceeded the
limits of intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for
the human race, to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, "And yet
things are knowable!"- that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily honored,- the ocean of love and
power, before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed
and empowered by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns; and he cries, "Yet
things are knowable!" They are knowable, because being from one, things correspond. There is a scale;
and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As
there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of
qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,- I call it Dialectic,- which is the Intellect
discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation of identity and diversity; for to judge
is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The sciences, even the best,- mathematics and
astronomy,- are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any
use of it. Dialectic must teach the use of them. "This is of that rank that no intellectual man will enter
on any study for its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole science which
embraces all."*(12)
"The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that which in the diversity of
sensations can be comprised under a rational unity." "The soul which has never perceived the truth,
cannot pass into the human form."*(13) I announce to men the Intellect. I announce the good of being
interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can understand nature,
which it made and maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the lawgiver is before the law-
receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men! that truth is altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search
out what might be the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence
and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and
all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge;
the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own.
This also is the essence of justice,- to attend every one his own: nay, the notion of virtue is not to be
arrived at except through direct contemplation of the divine essence. Courage then for "the persuasion
that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison, better, braver and
more industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless to
search for it." He secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing
philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real being.
Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Culture. He saw the institutions of Sparta and
recognized, more genially one would say than any since, the hope of education. He delighted in every
accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance; above all in the splendors of
genius and intellectual achievement. "The whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the wise, the
measure of hearing such discourses as these." What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers
of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves! He called
the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What value he gives to the art of gymnastic in
education; what to geometry; what to music; what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal
power he celebrates! In the Timaeus he indicates the highest employment of the eyes. "By us it is
asserted that God invented and bestowed sight on us for this purpose,- that on surveying the circles of
intelligence in the heavens, we might properly employ those of our own minds, which, though
disturbed when compared with the others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and
that having thus learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by
imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and blunders." And in the
Republic,- "By each of these disciplines a certain organ of the soul is both purified and reanimated
which is blinded and buried by studies of another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten
thousand eyes, since truth is perceived by this alone."
He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the first place to
advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the
organic character and disposition is the origin of caste. "Such as were fit to govern, into their
composition the informing Deity mingled gold; into the military, silver; iron and brass for
husbandmen and artificers." The East confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on
this point of caste. "Men have their metal, as of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones
in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as you embrace it." Plato
was not less firm. "Of the five orders of things, only four can be taught to the generality of men." In the
Republic he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as first of the first.
A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue with the young Theages, who
wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares that if some have grown wise by associating
with him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with him they grew wise, not because
of him; he pretends not to know the way of it. "It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by
associating with me whom the Daemon opposes; so that it is not possible for me to live with these.
With many however he does not prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by
associating with me. Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the God, you will
make great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to be
instructed by some one of those who have power over the benefit which they impart to men, than by
me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen." As if he had said, "I have no system. I cannot be
answerable for you. You will be what you must. If there is love between us, inconceivably delicious and
profitable will our intercourse be; if not, your time is lost and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to
you stupid, and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret
affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my
business."
He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, "There is also the divine." There is no
thought in any mind but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power and organizes a huge
instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility
which come from truth itself and good itself, and attempted as if on the part of the human intellect,
once for all to do it adequate homage,- homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet homage
becoming the intellect to render. He said then, "Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us
thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and which to shut
our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend. All
things are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings."
A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has illustrated the
relation between the absolute good and true and the forms of the intelligible world, he says: "Let there
be a line cut in two unequal parts. Cut again each of these two main parts,- one representing the
visible, the other the intelligible world,- and let these two new sections represent the bright part and
the dark part of each of these worlds. You will have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images,
that is, both shadows and reflections;- for the other section, the objects of these images, that is, plants,
animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible world in like manner; the one
section will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the other section of truths."*(14) To these four
sections, the four operations of the soul correspond,- conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every
pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the
supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and
mount.
All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that beauty is the most lovely of all things,
exciting hilarity and shedding desire and confidence through the universe wherever it enters, and it
enters in some degree into all things:- but that there is another, which is as much more beautiful than
beauty as beauty is than chaos; namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach
unto, but which, could it be seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it
as the source of excellence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, in the fabrication of any work,
looks to that which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model of this kind,
expresses its idea and power in his work,- it must follow that his production should be beautiful. But
when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will be far from beautiful.
Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry and to all the
sermons of the world, that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the passion of
the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This faith in the Divinity is never out of mind,
and constitutes the ground of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;- God only. In the same mind
he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the
greatest goods are produced to us through mania and are assigned to us by a divine gift.
This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his Academy as the organ through
which every considered opinion shall be announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored
that the historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and Plato are the double star which
the most powerful instruments will not entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the
best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of
humble stem, but honest enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable
as to be a cause of wit in others:- the rather that his broad good nature and exquisite taste for a joke
invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters
copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper and
a knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to
certain defeat in any debate,- and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men are
prodigiously fond of him and invite him to their feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can drink,
too; has the strongest head in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the table, goes away as if
nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, he was what our
country-people call an old one.
He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never
willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought
every thing in Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit
and speech, affected low phrases, and illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-
spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnamable offices,- especially if he talked with any superfine person.
He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it
was no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would easily reach.
Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense talker,- the rumor ran that on one or two
occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a
troop; and there was some story that under cover of folly, he had, in the city government, when one
day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had
well-nigh ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives;
usually, in the strictest sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His
necessary expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He wore no under
garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter, and he went barefooted; and it is
said that to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most elegant
and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his shop and carve statues, good or bad, for
sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this conversation;
and that, under his hypocritical pretence of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine
speakers, all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia Minor and the
islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest and really curious to know; a man who was
willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others asserting what was
false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he thought not any evil happened
to men of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who
knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose
temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and
ignorant as to disarm the wariest and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and
confusion. But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to
terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases with their grand reputations,
as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!- Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on
virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to him; but at this moment he cannot
even tell what it is,- this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.
This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and bonhommie diverted the young
patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day,- turns out, in the
sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either insane, or at least, under cover of
this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed,
he affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment; and refusing to recant, in a
caprice of the popular government was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the
prison and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison whilst he was there.
Crito bribed the jailer; but Socrates would not go out by treachery. "Whatever inconvenience ensue,
nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes
me deaf to every thing you say." The fame of this prison, the fame of the discourses there and the
drinking of the hemlock are one of the most precious passages in the history of the world.
The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street and market
debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of
Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates by a necessity placed itself in the
foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It
was a rare fortune that this Aesop of the mob and this robed scholar should meet, to make each other
immortal in their mutual faculty. The strange synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the
synthesis in the mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he was able, in the direct way and without envy
to avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was great; and
these derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.
It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results inevitably from his
quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven,
diving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope
of the parting soul,- he is literary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit
of Plato that his writings have not,- what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work,-
the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.
I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come to a fact in the nature
of things: an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt with salt.
In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He
attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he
means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place.
He is charged with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound
as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or
botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.
The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known and
accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the
mind of Plato,- nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every relation or
quality you knew before, you shall know again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And
you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but
countries, and things of which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men,
have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this
mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition of
individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is
foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by
his own teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so
must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He
argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what
Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from
him.*(15)
These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort of Plato or of any philosopher to
dispose of nature,- which will not be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest
success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this
ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to
their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him is to compare him, not
with nature, but with other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief
structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the medieval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires all
the breath of human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest seen when seen with the most respect. His
sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, Here is a fine collection of fables; or
when we praise the style, or the common sense, or arithmetic, we speak as boys, and much of our
impatient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better.
The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile
should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and
shades after the genius of our life.

Does the world need another collection of Emerson's essays? Especially when many of them
already reside on the Web?
The answer is a resounding "Yes!" if the collection is David Robinson's 2003
collection, issued just in time for the Emerson bicentennial, The Spiritual Emerson.
Why does this book belong on your bookshelf? First, because despite the
widespread availability of Emerson's materials on the Web, there's still something to
reading Emerson the old-fashioned way -- holding a book in your hand, perhaps
underlining passages and making margin notes about your own reactions to what
Emerson is saying. (And I say this, speaking as someone who has helped to keep
many of Emerson's works available in searchable format on the Web at
http://www.emersoncentral.com.)
But why this collection? David M. Robinson, an Emerson scholar at Oregon State University, has
introduced the book with an excellent overview of Emerson's work and importance, both to American
literature and to American cultural thought. And he has chosen a selection of essays -- some better
known than others -- that tries to communicate who Emerson was and what he was trying to
accomplish, over his lifetime of thinking, speaking and writing.
Most people who have read Emerson at all, have read Emerson's Self-Reliance, and sometimes
Nature. Yet, as Robinson points out in the introduction and in making the selections he's included,
this was all "early Emerson" -- the thought that broke with tradition, yes, and thought that served as an
underpinning for much of what Emerson later espoused. But it was thought before that later
evolution.
So Robinson has included much of Emerson's later ideas, to give a sense not just of how Emerson
evolved, but the Emersonian ideas that many Americans of the 19th century would have actually heard
when Emerson spoke on the lecture circuit.
Robinson reminds us, both in the introduction and with his selection, that Emerson was known to
his contemporaries through his speaking tours and books, and not just through his early essays. Thus,
the Emerson who had such a profound effect on American culture, religion and literature, was not
simply the Emerson of Self-Reliance and Nature.
Emerson's attitudes towards and relationship with practical ethical morality and social reform
comes through in this collection, in their complexity and evolution. When Emerson called for a
"religion of pure ethics," and many in the late 19th century went looking for or tried to create such a
religion, it was this thread of Emersonian thought, often neglected in Emerson studies, that they were
responding to.
Robinson also does a great service to understanding this aspect of Emerson's spiritual quest by
showing us the essays in his early work that hint more at this later emphasis. Thus, Robinson includes
the not-so-well-known essay "Circles," originally published in the same volume as "Self-Reliance,"
which hints at the later moral emphasis.
Even the end of "Self-Reliance" addresses the issue of one's individual moral sense resonating with
the universal morality. Emerson has often been accused of promoting or even introducing moral
relativism, but this is, as these essays demonstrate thoroughly, a misunderstanding of Emerson.
Emerson taught that individuals should rely on their sense of truth and right -- but also that such an
individual truth and right were dependable precisely because they would resonate not with social
convention but with the universal law, with the spiritual law that is at the core of the universe itself.
 Robinson's Spiritual Emerson, which may end up challenging your very idea of what "spiritual"
means, doesn't belong on your bookshelf -- it belongs in your hands, on your bedside table, in your
bookbag, anywhere where you'll take it up and ponder it, as you examine your own spiritual and moral
assumptions and ideas along with Emerson's.
- Jone Johnson Lewis
The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings
Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by and with an introduction by David M. Robinson
Beacon Press, 2003

I
POEMS
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.

Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face;

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

I am going to my own hearth-stone,

Bosomed in yon green hills alone,--
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,

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

EACH AND ALL

LITTLE thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
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
Was woven still by the snow-whitsaid, 'Ie choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;--
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said,'I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

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

Why should the vest on him allure,

Which I could not on me endure?

Not from a vain or shallow thought

His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
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 tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass;

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

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

If with love thy heart has burned;

If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed;
For when love has once departed
From the eyes of the false-hearted,
And one by one has torn off quite
The bandages of purple light;
Though thou wert the loveliest
Form the soul had ever dressed,
Thou shalt seem, in each reply,
A vixen to his altered eye;
Thy softest pleadings seem too bold,
Thy praying lute will seem to scold;
Though thou kept the straightest road,
Yet thou errest far and broad.

But thou shalt do as do the gods

In their cloudless periods;
For of this lore be thou sure,--
Though thou forget, the gods, secure,
Forget never their command,
But make the statute of this land.
As they lead, so follow all,
Ever have done, ever shall.
Warning to the blind and deaf,
'T is written on the iron leaf,
Who drinks of Cupid's nectar cup
Loveth downward, and not up;
He who loves, of gods or men,
Shall not by the same be loved again;
His sweetheart's idolatry
Falls, in turn, a new degree.
When a god is once beguiled
By beauty of a mortal child
And by her radiant youth delighted,
He is not fooled, but warily knoweth
His love shall never be requited.
And thus the wise Immortal doeth,--
'T is his study and delight
To bless that creature day and night;
From all evils to defend her;
In her lap to pour all splendor;
To ransack earth for riches rare,
And fetch her stars to deck her hair:
He mixes music with her thoughts,
And saddens her with heavenly doubts:
All grace, all good his great heart knows,
Profuse in love, the king bestows,
Saying, 'Hearken! Earth, Sea, Air!
This monument of my despair
Build I to the All-Good, All-Fair.
Not for a private good,
But I, from my beatitude,
Albeit scorned as none was scorned,
Adorn her as was none adorned.
I make this maiden an ensample
To Nature, through her kingdoms ample,
Whereby to model newer races,
Statelier forms and fairer faces;
To carry man to new degrees
Of power and of comeliness.
These presents be the hostages
Which I pawn for my release.
See to thyself, O Universe!
Thou art better, and not worse.'--
And the god, having given all,
Is freed forever from his thrall.

THE VISIT
ASKEST, 'How long thou shalt stay?'
Devastator of the day!
Know, each substance and relation,
Thorough nature's operation,
Hath its unit, bound and metre;
And every new compound
Is some product and repeater,--
Product of the earlier found.
But the unit of the visit,
The encounter of the wise,--
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature,
Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go,
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show,
Sum their long experience,
And import intelligence.
Single look has drained the breast;
Single moment years confessed.
The duration of a glance
Is the term of covenance,
And, though thy rede be church or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt;
Linger,--thou shalt rue the fault:
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
URIEL
IT fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.

This was the lapse of Uriel,

Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirred the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a line.
'Line in nature is not found;
Unit' and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads,
The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.

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,
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.

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;
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 hit the secret,
Would hang his head for-shame.
Our brothers have not read it,
Not one has found the key;
And henceforth we are comforted,--
We are but such as they.

Still, still the secret presses;

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

And what if Trade sow cities

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

For Destiny never swerves

Nor yields to men the helm;
He shoots his thought, by hidden nerves,
Throughout the solid realm.
The patient Dæmon sits,
With roses and a shroud;
He has his way, and deals his gifts,--
But ours is not allowed.

He is no churl nor trifler,

And his viceroy is none,--
Love-without-weakness,--
Of Genius sire and son.
And his will is not thwarted;
The seeds of land and sea
Are the atoms of his body bright,
And his behest obey.

He serveth the servant,

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

When the old world is sterile

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

Spring still makes spring in the mind

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

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

"The fate of the man-child,

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

"Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm;
In beautiful motion
The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
Your silence he sings.

"The waves, unashamèd,

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

"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence,

Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,--
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.
"The babe by its mother
Lies bathèd in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted,--
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.

"But man crouches and blushes,

Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.

"Out spoke the great mother,

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

I heard a poet answer

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

"The fiend that man harries

Is love of the Best;

Yawns the pit of the Dragon,

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

"To vision profounder,

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

"Pride ruined the angels,

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

"Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,--
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.

"Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits;

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

"Thou art the unanswered question;

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."

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;
Mighty projects countermanded;
Rash ambition, brokenhanded;
Puny man and scentless rose
Tormenting Pan to double the dose.
Rebuild or ruin: either fill
Of vital force the wasted rill,
Or tumble all again in heap
To weltering Chaos and to sleep.

Say, Seigniors, are the old Niles dry,

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

Masters, I'm in pain with you;

Masters, I'll be plain with you;
In my palace of Castile,
I, a king, for kings can feel.
There my thoughts the matter roll,
And solve and oft resolve the whole.
And, for I'm styled Alphonse the Wise,
Ye shall not fail for sound advice.
Before ye want a drop of rain,
Hear the sentiment of Spain.

You have tried famine: no more try it;

Ply us now with a full diet;
Teach your pupils now with plenty,
For one sun supply us twenty.
I have thought it thoroughly over,--
State of hermit, state of lover;
We must have society,
We cannot spare variety.
Hear you, then, celestial fellows!
Fits not to be overzealous;
Steads not to work on the clean jump,
Nor wine nor brains perpetual pump.
Men and gods are too extense;
Could you slacken and condense?
Your rank overgrowths reduce
Till your kinds abound with juice?
Earth, crowded, cries,'Too many men!'
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.
Add their nine lives to this cat;
Stuff their nine brains in one hat;
Make his frame and forces square
With the labors he must dare;
Thatch his flesh, and even his years
With the marble which he rears.
There, growing slowly old at ease
No faster than his planted trees,
He may, by warrant of his age,
In schemes of broader scope engage.
So shall ye have a man of the sphere
Fit to grace the solar year.

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

Give me agates for my meat;

Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes;--

From all natures, sharp and slimy,

Salt and basalt, wild and tame:
Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
Bird, and reptile, be my game.

Ivy for my fillet band;

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

Too long shut in strait and few,

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

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 burièd:
Go, get them where he earned them when alive;
As resolutely dig or dive.

Life is too short to waste

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

DESTINY
THAT you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strong, or rich, or generous;
You must add the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose.
There's a melody born of melody,
Which melts the World into a sea.
Toil could never compass it;
Art its height could never hit;
It came never out of wit;
But a music music-born
Well may Jove and Juno scorn.
Thy beauty, if it lack the fire
Which drives me mad with sweet desire,
What boots it? What the soldier's mail,
Unless he conquer and prevail?
What all the goods thy pride which lift,
If thou pine for another's gift?
Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight:
When thou lookest on his face,
Thy heart saith,'Brother, go thy ways!
None shall ask thee what thou doest,
Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden;'
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten.
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.
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;
And the world's sun seemed to rise
To drudge all day for Guy the wise.
In his rich nurseries, timely skill
Strong crab with nobler blood did fill;
The zephyr in his garden rolled
From plum-trees vegetable gold;
And all the hours of the year
With their own harvest honored were.
There was no frost but welcome came,
Nor freshet, nor midsummer flame.
Belonged to wind and world the toil
And venture, and to Guy the oil.

HAMATREYA
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.
They added ridge to valley, brook to pond,
And sighed for all that bounded their domain;
'This suits me for a pasture; that's my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat.
The land is well,--lies fairly to the south.
'T is good, when you have crossed the sea and back,
To find the sitfast acres where you left them.'
Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds
Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.
Hear what the Earth says:--

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

'The lawyer's deed

Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.

' Here is the land,

Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound and flood.
But the heritors? --
Fled like the flood's foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.

They called me theirs,

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

When I heard the Earth-song

I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.

THE RHODORA:
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;
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.
Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion!
Sailor of the atmosphere;
Swimmer through the waves of air;
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June;
Wait, I prithee, till I come
Within earshot of thy hum,--
All without is martyrdom.

When the south winds in May days,

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

Hot midsummer's petted crone,

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

Aught unsavory or unclean

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

Wiser far than human seer;

Yellow-breeched philosopher!
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
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,
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 Pariah wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

WOODNOTES
I
1
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,
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
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.
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roved at will the boundless shade.
The timid it concerns to ask their way,
And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray,
To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,--his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road
By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.

4
'T was one of the charmèd days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.
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;
To hill and cloud his face was known,--
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy
The public child of earth and sky.
'You ask,' he said,'what guide
Me through trackless thickets led,
Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide.
I found the water's bed.
The watercourses were my guide;
I travelled grateful by their side,
Or through their channel dry;
They led me through the thicket damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp,
Through beds of granite cut my road,
And their resistless friendship showed.
The falling waters led me,
The foodful waters fed me,
And brought me to the lowest land
Unerring to the ocean sand.
The moss upon the forest bark
Was pole-star when the night was dark;
The purple berries in the wood
Supplied me necessary food;
For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
'T will be time enough to die;
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.'

WOODNOTES
II
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;
My twilight realm he disenchants,
And finds his prison there.

'What prizes the town and the tower?

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

Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,

Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,
In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth,
In whose feet the lion rusheth,
Iron arms, and iron mould,
That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.
I give my rafters to his boat,
My billets to his boiler's throat,
And I will swim the ancient sea
To float my child to victory,
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem
Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.
Whoso walks in solitude
And inhabiteth the wood,
Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass,
From these companions, power and grace.
Clean shall he be, without, within,
From the old adhering sin,
All ill dissolving in the light
Of his triumphant piercing sight:
Not vain, sour, nor frivolous;
Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous;
Grave, chaste, contented, though retired,
And of all other men desired.
On him the light of star and moon
Shall fall with purer radiance down;
All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;
The mounting sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones, his helpers be;
He shall meet the speeding year,
Without wailing, without fear;
He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;
He shall be happy whilst he wooes,
Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse.
But if with gold she bind her hair,
And deck her breast with diamond,
Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,
Though thou lie alone on the ground.

' Heed the old oracles,

Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.
Hearken! Hearken!
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.
Aloft, abroad, the pæan swells;
O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?
O wise man! hear'st thou the least part?
'T is the chronicle of art.
To the open ear it sings
Sweet the genesis of things,
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.
In music he repeats the pang
Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang.
O mortal! thy ears are stones;
These echoes are laden with tones
Which only the pure can hear;
Thou canst not catch what they recite
Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right,
Of man to come, of human life,
Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife.'

Once again the pine-tree sung:--

' Speak not thy speech my boughs among:
Put off thy years, wash in the breeze;
My hours are peaceful centuries.
Talk no more with feeble tongue;
No more the fool of space and time,
Come weave with mine a nobler rhyme.
Only thy Americans
Can read thy line, can meet thy glance,
But the runes that I rehearse
Understands the universe;
The least breath my boughs which tossed
Brings again the Pentecost;
To every soul resounding clear
In a voice of solemn cheer,--
"Am I not thine? Are not these thine?"
And they reply, "Forever mine!"
My branches speak Italian,
English, German, Basque, Castilian,
Mountain speech to Highlanders,
Ocean tongues to islanders,
To Fin and Lap and swart Malay,
To each his bosom-secret say.

'Come learn with me the fatal song

Which knits the world in music strong,
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid,
The land reflected in the flood,
Body with shadow still pursued.
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,--
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 bankruptcy,

Blessed Nature so to see.
Come, lay thee in my soothing shade,
And heal the hurts which sin has made.
I see thee in the crowd alone;
I will be thy companion.
Quit thy friends as the dead in doom,
And build to them a final tomb;
Let the starred shade that nightly falls
Still celebrate their funerals,
And the bell of beetle and of bee
Knell their melodious memory.
Behind thee leave thy merchandise,
Thy churches and thy charities;
And leave thy peacock wit behind;
Enough for thee the primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind:
Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns,
Gives all to them who all renounce.
The rain comes when the wind calls;
The river knows the way to the sea;
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity;
The sea tosses and foams to find
Its way up to the cloud and wind;
The shadow sits close to the flying ball;
The date fails not on the palm-tree tall;
And thou,--go burn thy wormy pages,--
Shalt outsee seers, and outwit sages.
Oft didst thou thread the woods in vain
To find what bird had piped the strain:--
Seek not, and the little eremite
Flies gayly forth and sings in sight.

'Hearken once more!

I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant time behoves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse, and sound, and light was none;
And God said, "Throb!" and there was motion
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,
But forever doth escape,
Like wave or flame, into new forms
Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms.
I, that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine,
Pouring of his power the wine
To every age, to every race;.
Unto every race and age
He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each, and unto all,
Maker and original.
The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are and think.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the next a special nature;
The third adds heat's indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light which eats the dark;
Into the fifth himself he flings,
And conscious Law is King of kings.
As the bee through the garden ranges,
From world to world the godhead changes;
As the sheep go feeding in the waste,
From form to form He maketh haste;
This vault which glows immense with light
Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What reeks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity?
Alike to him the better, the worse,--
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky.
Than all it holds more deep, more high.'

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

I heard, and I obeyed,--

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

The Titan heeds his sky-affairs,

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

'Happy,' I said,'whose home is here!

Fair fortunes to the mountaineer!
Boon Nature to his poorest shed
Has royal pleasure-grounds outspread.'
Intent, I searched the region round,
And in low hut the dweller found:
Woe is me for my hope's downfall!
Is yonder squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed
For God's vicegerency and stead?
Time out of mind, this forge of ores;
Quarry of spars in mountain pores;
Old cradle, hunting-ground and bier
Of wolf and otter, bear and deer;
Well-built abode of many a race;
Tower of observance searching space;
Factory of river and of rain;
Link in the Alps' globe-girding chain;
By million changes skilled to tell
What in the Eternal standeth well,
And what obedient Nature can;--
Is this colossal talisman
Kindly to plant and blood and kind,
But speechless to the master's mind?
I thought to find the patriots
In whom the stock of freedom roots;
To myself I oft recount
Tales of many a famous mount,--
Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary's dells:
Bards, Roys, Scanderbegs and Tells;
And think how Nature in these towers
Uplifted shall condense her powers,
And lifting man to the blue deep
Where stars their perfect courses keep,
Like wise preceptor, lure his eye
To sound the science of the sky,
And carry learning to its height
Of untried power and sane delight:
The Indian cheer, the frosty skies,
Rear purer wits, inventive eyes,--
Eyes that frame cities where none be,
And hands that stablish what these see:
And by the moral of his place
Hint summits of heroic grace;
Man in these crags a fastness find
To fight pollution of the mind;
In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,
Adhere like this foundation strong,
The insanity of towns to stem
With simpleness for stratagem.
But if the brave old mould is broke,
And end in churls the mountain folk
In tavern cheer and tavern joke,
Sink, O mountain, in the swamp!
Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp!
Perish like leaves, the highland breed
No sire survive, no son succeed!

Soft! let not the offended muse

Toil's hard hap with scorn accuse.
Many hamlets sought I then,
Many farms of mountain men.
Rallying round a parish steeple
Nestle warm the highland people,
Coarse and boisterous, yet mild,
Strong as giant, slow as child.
Sweat and season are their arts,
Their talismans are ploughs and carts;
And well the youngest can command
Honey from the frozen land;
With cloverheads the swamp adorn,
Change the running sand to corn;
For wolf and fox, bring lowing herds,
And for cold mosses, cream and curds:
Weave wood to canisters and mats;
Drain sweet maple juice in vats.
No bird is safe that cuts the air
From their rifle or their snare;
No fish, in river or in lake,
But their long hands it thence will take;
Whilst the country's flinty face,
Like wax, their fashioning skill betrays,
To fill the hollows, sink the hills,
Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,
And fit the bleak and howling waste
For homes of virtue, sense and taste.
The World-soul knows his own affair,
Forelooking, when he would prepare
For the next ages, men of mould
Well embodied, well ensouled,
He cools the present's fiery glow,
Sets the life-pulse strong but slow:
Bitter winds and fasts austere
His quarantines and grottoes, where
He slowly cures decrepit flesh,
And brings it infantile and fresh.
Toil and tempest are the toys
And games to breathe his stalwart boys:
They bide their time, and well can prove,
If need were, their line from Jove;
Of the same stuff, and so allayed,
As that whereof the sun is made,
And of the fibre, quick and strong,
Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.

Now in sordid weeds they sleep,

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

On the summit as I stood,

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

'Many feet in summer seek,

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

'Gentle pilgrim, if thou know

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

'For the world was built in order,

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

'Monadnoc is a mountain strong,

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

'Through all time, in light, in gloom

Well I hear the approaching feet
On the flinty pathway beat
Of him that cometh, and shall come;
Of him who shall as lightly bear
My daily load of woods and streams,
As doth this round sky-cleaving boat
Which never strains its rocky beams;
Whose timbers, as they silent float,
Alps and Caucasus uprear,
And the long Alleghanies here,
And all town-sprinkled lands that be,
Sailing through stars with all their history.
'Every morn I lift my head,
See New England underspread,
South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,
From Katskill east to the sea-bound.
Anchored fast for many an age,
I await the bard and sage,
Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.
Comes that cheerful troubadour,
This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,
It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil.
There's a berry blue and gold,--
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold
Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,
Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight.
I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan's immortal meat,
Bread to eat, and juice to drain;
So the coinage of his brain
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk,
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath,--
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow:
Open the daunting map beneath,--
All his county, sea and land,
Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city-tops a glimmering haze.
I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;
"See there the grim gray rounding
Of the bullet of the earth
Whereon ye sail,
Tumbling steep
In the uncontinented deep."
He looks on that, and he turns pale.
'T is even so, this treacherous kite,
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on forever;
And he, poor parasite,
Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,--
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not,--
Risk or ruin he must share.
I scowl on him with my cloud,
With my north wind chill his blood;
I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.
Then, at last, I let him down
Once more into his dapper town,
To chatter, frightened, to his clan
And forget me if he can.'

As in the old poetic fame

The gods are blind and lame,
And the simular despite
Betrays the more abounding might,
So call not waste that barren cone
Above the floral zone,
Where forests starve:
It is pure use;--
What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind
Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days,

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

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'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.
I'll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.'

ODE
INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING

THOUGH loath to grieve

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

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

But who is he that prates

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

Or who, with accent bolder,

Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?
I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook!
And in thy valleys, Agiochook!
The jackals of the negro-holder.

The God who made New Hampshire

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

What boots thy zeal,

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

The horseman serves the horse,

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

There are two laws discrete,

Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.

'T is fit the forest fall,

The steep be graded,
The mountain tunnelled,
The sand shaded,
The orchard planted,
The glebe tilled,
The prairie granted,
The steamer built.
Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth's and harmony's behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.

Yet do not I implore

The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods,
Nor bid the unwilling senator
Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes.
Every one to his chosen work;--
Foolish hands may mix and mar;
Wise and sure the issues are.
Round they roll till dark is light,
Sex to sex, and even to odd;--
The over-god
Who marries Right to Might,
Who peoples, unpeoples,--
He who exterminates
Races by stronger races,
Black by white faces,--
Knows to bring honey
Out of the lion;
Grafts gentlest scion
On pirate and Turk.

The Cossack eats Poland,

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

ASTRÆA
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 cloth pass.

Every wayfarer he meets

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

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

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

And why, when mirth unseals all tongues,

Should mine alone be dumb?
Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,
And now their hour is come.

FORBEARANCE
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.

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;
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.

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,
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 paeans

Of the masters of the shell,
Who heard the starry music
And recount the numbers well;
Olympian bards who sung
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.
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.
Queen of things! I dare not die
In Being's deeps past ear and eye;
Lest there I find the same deceiver
And be the sport of Fate forever.
Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,
Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!

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.
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.

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

'Thou shalt command us all,--

April's cowslip, summer's clover,
To the gentian in the fall,
Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover.

'O come, then, quickly come!

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

TO ELLEN
AND Ellen, when the graybeard years
Have brought us to life's evening hour,
And all the crowded Past appears
A tiny scene of sun and shower,
Then, if I read the page aright
Where Hope, the soothsayer, reads our lot,
Thyself shalt own the page was bright,
Well that we loved, woe had we not.

When Mirth is dumb and Flattery's fled,

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

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

Ah! let me blameless gaze upon

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

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

LOVE scatters oil

On Life's dark sea,
Sweetens its toil--
Our helmsman he.

Around him hover

Odorous clouds;
Under this cover
His arrows he shrouds.

The cloud was around me,

I knew not why
Such sweetness crowned me,
While Time shot by.

No pain was within,

But calm delight,
Like a world without sin,
Or a day without night.

The shafts of the god

Were tipped with down,
For they drew no blood,
And they knit no frown.

I knew of them not

Until Cupid laughed loud,
And saying "You're caught!"
Flew off in the cloud.

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

THE VIOLET
BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER

WHY lingerst thou, pale violet, to see the dying year;

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

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

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

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

I had a sister once who seemed just like a violet;

Her morning sun shone bright and calmly purely set;
When the violets were in their shrouds, and Summer in its pride,
She laid her hopes at rest, and in the year's rich beauty died.

THE AMULET
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!

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're 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.
This Hermione absorbed
The lustre of the land and ocean,

Hills and islands, cloud and tree,

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

'Higher, dear swallows! mind not what I say.

Ah! heedless how the weak are strong,
Say, was it just,
In thee to frame, in me to trust,
Thou to the Syrian couldst belong?

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

'Once I dwelt apart,

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

'Now, deceived, thou wanderest

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

'River and rose and crag and bird,

Frost and sun and eldest night,
To me their aid preferred,
To me their comfort plight;--
"Courage! we are thine allies,
And with this hint be wise,--
The chains of kind
The distant bind;
Deed thou doest she must do,
Above her will, be true;
And, in her strict resort
To winds and waterfalls
And autumn's sunlit festivals,
To music, and to music's thought,
Inextricably bound,
She shall find thee, and be found.
Follow not her flying feet;
Come to us herself to meet."'

INITIAL, DÆMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE

I
THE INITIAL LOVE
VENUS, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,--
Golden curls, and quiver and bow.
This befell how long ago!
Time and tide are strangely changed,
Men and manners much deranged:
None will now find Cupid latent
By this foolish antique patent.
He came late along the waste,
Shod like a traveller for haste;
With malice dared me to proclaim him,
That the maids and boys might name him.

Boy no more, he wears all coats,

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

Undaunted are their courages,

Right Cossacks in their forages;
Fleeter they than any creature,--

They are his steeds, and not his feature;

Inquisitive, and fierce, and fasting,
Restless, predatory, hasting;
And they pounce on other eyes
As lions on their prey;
And round their circles is writ,
Plainer than the day,
Underneath, within, above,--
Love--love--love--love.
He lives in his eyes;
There doth digest, and work, and spin,
And buy, and sell, and lose, and win;
He rolls them with delighted motion,
Joy-tides swell their mimic ocean.
Yet holds he them with tautest rein,
That they may seize and entertain
The glance that to their glance opposes,
Like fiery honey sucked from roses.
He palmistry can understand,
Imbibing virtue by his hand
As if it were a living root;
The pulse of hands will make him mute;
With all his force he gathers balms
Into those wise, thrilling palms.

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

Heralds high before him run;

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

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

Shun him, nymphs, on the fleet horses!

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

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

Rightly seeing, rightly seen,

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

His impatient looks devour

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

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

'Deep, deep are loving eyes,

Flowed with naphtha fiery sweet;
And the point is paradise,
Where their glances meet:
Their reach shall yet be more profound,
And a vision without bound:
The axis of those eyes sun-clear
Be the axis of the sphere:
So shall the lights ye pour amain
Go, without check or intervals,
Through from the empyrean walls
Unto the same again.'

Higher far into the pure realm,

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

There Past, Present, Future, shoot

Triple blossoms from one root;
Substances at base divided,
In their summits are united;
There the holy essence rolls,
One through separated souls;
And the sunny Æon sleeps
Folding Nature in its deeps,
And every fair and every good,
Known in part, or known impure,
To men below,
In their archetypes endure.
The race of gods,
Or those we erring own,
Are shadows flitting up and down
In the still abodes.
The circles of that sea are laws
Which publish and which hide the cause.

Pray for a beam

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

Nor less the eternal poles

Of tendency distribute souls.
There need no vows to bind
Whom not each other seek, but find.
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 h,s own,
They can parley without meeting;
Need is none of forms of greeting;
They can well communicate
In their innermost estate;
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

Not with scarfs or perfumed gloves

Do these celebrate their loves:
Not by jewels, feasts and savors,
Not by ribbons or by favors,
But by the sun-spark on the sea,
And the cloud-shadow on the lea,
The soothing lapse of morn to mirk,
And the cheerful round of work.
Their cords of love so public are,
They intertwine the farthest star:
The throbbing sea, the quaking earth,
Yield sympathy and signs of mirth;
Is none so high, so mean is none,
But feels and seals this union;
Even the fell Furies are appeased,
The good applaud, the lost are eased.

Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond,

Bound for the just, but not beyond;
Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred,
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind.
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly,
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;
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
THY trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader's art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
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.
Forms more cheerly live and go,
What time the subtle mind
Sings aloud the tune whereto
Their pulses beat,
And march their feet,
And their members are combined.

By Sybarites beguiled,
He shall no task decline;
Merlin's mighty line
Extremes of nature reconciled,--
Bereaved a tyrant of his will,
And made the lion mild.
Songs can the tempest still,
Scattered on the stormy air,
Mould the year to fair increase,
And bring in poetic peace.

He shall not seek to weave,

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

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

Like the dancers' ordered band,

Thoughts come also hand in hand;

In equal couples mated,

Or else alternated;
Adding by their mutual gage,
One to other, health and age.
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.

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,
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;
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.

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

Slow and warily to choose

Rafters of immortal pine,
Or cedar incorruptible,
Worthy her design,

She threads dark Alpine forests

Or valleys by the sea,
In many lands, with painful steps,
Ere she can find a tree.

She ransacks mines and ledges

And quarries every rock,
To hew the famous adamant
For each eternal block--

She lays her beams in music,

In music every one,
To the cadence of the whirling world
Which dances round the sun--

That so they shall not be displaced

By lapses or by wars,
But for the love of happy souls
Outlive the newest stars.

SAADI
TREES in groves,
Kine in droves,
In ocean sport the scaly herds,
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds,
To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks,
Browse the mountain sheep in flocks,
Men consort in camp and town,
But the poet dwells alone.
God, who gave to him the lyre,
Of all mortals the desire,
For all breathing men's behoof,
Straitly charged him,'Sit aloof;'
Annexed a warning, poets say,
To the bright premium,--
Ever, when twain together play,
Shall the harp be dumb.

Many may come,

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

Yet Saadi loved the race of men,--

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

Be thou ware where Saadi dwells;

Wisdom of the gods is he,--
Entertain it reverently.

Gladly round that golden lamp

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

Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say

Endless dirges to decay,
Never in the blaze of light
Lose the shudder of midnight;
Pale at overflowing noon
Hear wolves barking at the moon;
In the bower of dalliance sweet
Hear the far Avenger's feet:
And shake before those awful Powers,
Who in their pride forgive not ours.
Thus the sad-eyed Fakirs preach:
Bard, when thee would Allah teach,
And lift thee to his holy mount,
He sends thee from his bitter fount
Wormwood,--saying, "Go thy ways;
Drink not the Malaga of praise,
But do the deed thy fellows hate,
And compromise thy peaceful state;
Smite the white breasts which thee fed,
Stuff sharp thorns beneath the head
Of them thou shouldst have comforted;
For out of woe and out of crime
Draws the heart a lore sublime."'
And yet it seemeth not to me
That the high gods love tragedy;
For Saadi sat in the sun,
And thanks was his contrition;
For haircloth and for bloody whips,
Had active hands and smiling lips;
And yet his runes he rightly read,
And to his folk his message sped.
Sunshine in his heart transferred
Lighted each transparent word,
And well could honoring Persia learn
What Saadi wished to say;
For Saadi's nightly stars did burn
Brighter than Jami's day.

Whispered the Muse in Saadi's cot:

'O gentle Saadi, listen not,
Tempted by thy praise of wit,
Or by thirst and appetite
For the talents not thine own,
To sons of contradiction.
Never, son of eastern morning,
Follow falsehood, follow scorning.
Denounce who will, who will deny,
And pile the hills to scale the sky;
Let theist, atheist, pantheist,
Define and wrangle how they list,
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,--
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer,
Unknowing war, unknowing crime,
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme;
Heed not what the brawlers say,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.

'Let the great world bustle on

With war and trade, with camp and town;
A thousand men shall dig and eat;
At forge and furnace thousands sweat;
And thousands sail the purple sea,
And give or take the stroke of war,
Or crowd the market and bazaar;
Oft shall war end, and peace return,
And cities rise where cities burn,
Ere one man my hill shall climb,
Who can turn the golden rhyme.
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
Seek the living among the dead,--
Man in man is imprisonèd;
Barefooted Dervish is not poor,
If fate unlock his bosom's door,
So that what his eye hath seen
His tongue can paint as bright, as keen;
And what his tender heart hath felt
With equal fire thy heart shall melt.
For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh Nature veritable;
And though he speak in midnight dark,--.
In heaven no star, on earth no spark,--
Yet before the listener's eye
Swims the world in ecstasy,
The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Saadi, so far thy words shall reach:
Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech!'

And thus to Saadi said the Muse:

' Eat thou the bread which men refuse;
Flee from the goods which from thee flee;
Seek nothing,--Fortune seeketh thee.
Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep
The midway of the eternal deep.
Wish not to fill the isles with eyes
To itch thee birds of paradise:
On thine orchard's edge belong
All the brags of plume and song;
Wise Ali's sunbright sayings pass
For proverbs in the market-place:
Through mountains bored by regal art,
Toil whistles as he drives his cart.
Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find:
Behold, he watches at the door!
Behold his shadow on the floor!
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.

Year by year the rose-lipped maiden,

Playfellow of young and old,
Was frolic sunshine, dear to all men,
More dear to one than mines of gold.

Whither went the lovely hoyden?

Disappeared in blessed wife;
Servant to a wooden cradle,
Living in a baby's life.

Still thou playest;--short vacation

Fate grants each to stand aside;
Now must thou be man and artist,--
'T is the turning of the tide.

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

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,
The little cup will hold not a bead more,
And all the costly liquor runs to waste;
Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond drop
So to be husbanded for poorer days.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught
After the master's sketch fills and o'erfills
My apprehension? Why seek Italy,
Who cannot circumnavigate the sea
Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn
The nearest matters for a thousand days?

BLIGHT
GIVE me truths;
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony,
Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,--
O, that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun
And planted world, and full executor
Of their imperfect functions.
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,
Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes,
The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay,
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term;
And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe;
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal, like a beggar's child;
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison
Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.

MUSKETAQUID
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,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
Sparrows far off, and nearer, April's bird,
Blue-coated,--flying before from tree to tree,
Courageous sing a delicate overture
To lead the tardy concert of the year.
Onward and nearer rides the sun of May;
And wide around, the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain
The surge of summer's beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.
Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here in pine houses built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.
Traveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road,
Or, it may be, a picture; to these men,
The landscape is an armory of powers,
Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.
They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;
They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,
And, like the chemist 'mid his loaded jars,
Draw from each stratum its adapted use
To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.
They turn the frost upon their chemic heap,
They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,
They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,
And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow,
Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods
O'er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,
They fight the elements with elements
(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,
Transmuted in these men to rule their like),
And by the order in the field disclose
The order regnant in the yeoman's brain.

What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,

I followed in small copy in my acres
For there's no rood has not a star above it;
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, cheifest prize, found I true liberty
In the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave.
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.
For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:
'Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?
Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like Nature pass
Into the winter night's extinguished mood?
Canst thou shine now, then darkle,
And being latent, feel thyself no less?
As, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye,
The river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure,
Yet envies none, none are unenviable.'
DIRGE
CONCORD, 1838

I REACHED the middle of the mount

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

Five rosy boys with morning light

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

Knows he who tills this lonely field

To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?

In the long sunny afternoon

The plain was full of ghosts;
I wandered up, I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.

The winding Concord gleamed below,

Pouring as wide a flood
As when my brothers, long ago,
Came with me to the wood.

But they are gone,--the holy ones

Who trod with me this lovely vale;
The strong, star-bright companions
Are silent, low and pale.

My good, my noble, in their prime,

Who made this world the feast it was,
Who learned with me the lore of time,
Who loved this dwelling-place!

They took this valley for their toy,

They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,--
They treated Nature as they would.

They colored the horizon round;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade,
All echoes hearkened for their sound,--
They made the woodlands glad or mad.

I touch this flower of silken leaf,

Which once our childhood knew;
Its soft leaves wound me with a grief
Whose balsam never grew.

Hearken to yon pine-warbler

Singing aloft in the tree!
Hearest thou, O traveller,
What he singeth to me?
Not unless God made sharp thine ear
With sorrow such as mine,
Out of that delicate lay could'st thou
Its heavy tale divine.

'Go, lonely man,' it saith;

'They loved thee from their birth;
Their hands were pure, and pure their faith,--
There are no such hearts on earth.

'Ye drew one mother's milk,

One chamber held ye all;
A very tender history
Did in your childhood fall.

'You cannot unlock your heart,

The key is gone with them;
The silent organ loudest chants
The master's requiem.'

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

I see my empty house,

I see my trees repair their boughs;
And he, the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air's cerulean round,--
The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break and April bloom,
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day,--
Has disappeared from the Day's eye;
Far and wide she cannot find him;
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.
Returned this day, the South-wind searches,
And finds young pines and budding birches;
But finds not the budding man;
Nature, who lost, cannot remake him;
Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him;
Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,

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

Gentlest guardians marked serene

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

Now Love and Pride, alas! in vain,

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

On that shaded day,

Dark with more clouds than tempests are,
When thou didst yield thy innocent breath
In birdlike hearings unto death,
Night came, and Nature had not thee;
I said,'We are mates in misery.'
The morrow dawned with needless glow;
Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;
Each tramper started; but the feet
Of the most beautiful and sweet
Of human youth had left the hill
And garden,--they were bound and still.
There's not a sparrow or a wren,
There's not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend
And tides of life and increase lend;
And every chick of every bird,
And weed and rock-moss is preferred.
O ostrich-like forgetfulness!
O loss of larger in the less!
Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which alI her harvests were not worth?
Not mine,--I never called thee mine,
But Nature's heir,--if I repine,
And seeing rashly torn and moved
Not what I made, but what I loved,
Grow early old with grief that thou
Must to the wastes of Nature go,--
'T is because a general hope
Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope.
For flattering planets seemed to say
This child should ills of ages stay,
By wondrous tongue, and guided pen,
Bring the flown Muses back to men.
Perchance not he but Nature ailed,
The world and not the infant failed.
It was not ripe yet to sustain
A genius of so fine a strain,
Who gazed upon the sun and moon
As if he came unto his own,
And, pregnant with his grander thought,
Brought the old order into doubt.
His beauty once their beauty tried;
They could not feed him, and he died,
And wandered backward as in scorn,
To wait an æon to be born.
Ill day which made this beauty waste,
Plight broken, this high face defaced!
Some went and came about the dead;
And some in books of solace read;
Some to their friends the tidings say;
Some went to write, some went to pray;
One tarried here, there hurried one;
But their heart abode with none.
Covetous death bereaved us all,
To aggrandize one funeral.
The eager fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me:
For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

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

The deep Heart answered,'Weepest thou?

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

'T is not within the force of fate

The fate-conjoined to separate.
But thou, my votary, weepest thou?
I gave thee sight--where is it now?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, bible, or of speech;
Wrote in thy mind's transparent table,
As far as the incommunicable;
Taught thee each private sign to raise
Lit by the supersolar blaze,
Past utterance, and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,
The mysteries of Nature's heart;
And though no Muse can these impart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
'I came to thee as to a friend;
Dearest, to thee I did not send
Tutors, but a joyful eye,
Innocence that matched the sky,
Lovely locks, a form of wonder,
Laughter rich as woodland thunder,
That thou might'st entertain apart
The richest flowering of all art:
And, as the great all-loving Day
Through smallest chambers takes its way,
That thou might'st break thy daily bread

With prophet, savior and head;

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

Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,

Talker! the unreplying Fate?
Nor see the genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul,
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom?
Fair the soul's recess and shrine,
Magic-built to last a season;
Masterpiece of love benign,
Fairer that expansive reason
Whose omen 't is, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthening scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of saints that inly burned,--
Saying, What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
Heart's love will meet thee again.
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds;
Or like a traveller's fleeing tent,
Or bow above the tempest bent;
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.'

CONCORD HYMN
SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT, JULY 4, 1837
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.

II
MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES

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
In new landscapes of romance,
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
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;
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 youth. sees omens where he goes,
And speaks all languages the rose,
The wood-fly mocks with tiny voice
The far halloo of human voice;
The perfumed berry on the spray
Smacks of faint memories far away.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next into the farthest brings,
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

The cagèd 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,
And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,
'Onward,' he cries,'your baskets bring,--
In the next field is air more mild,
And o'er yon 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 halfway 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
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' fires
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.

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
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:
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
Battered 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 edge
That rims the running silver sheet,--
So pours the deluge of the heat
Broad northward o'er the land,
Painting 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,
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.

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,
Makes 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 smells
They shook the snow from hats and shoon,
They put their April raiment on;
And those eternal forms,
Unhurt by a thousand storms,
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 skilful to convoy
The total freight of hope and joy
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;
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.
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,
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,
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,
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
Chaucer 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,
Tahawus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,
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.
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,

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.
Your 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;
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.
Two Doctors in the camp
Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brain,
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 realms,

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.

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,
Nays 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 covenance, 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,
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 ails 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,
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 Falls
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 linkèd 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!
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.
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,
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;
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.

NEMESIS
ALREADY blushes on thy cheek
The bosom thought which thou must speak;
The bird, how far it haply roam
By cloud or isle, is flying home;
The maiden fears, and fearing runs
Into the charmed snare she shuns;
And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is never wide.

Will a woman's fan the ocean smooth?

Or prayers the stony Parcæ soothe,
Or coax the thunder from its mark?
Or tapers light the chaos dark?
In spite of Virtue and the Muse,
Nemesis will have her dues,
And all our struggles and our toils
Tighter wind the giant coils.

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.

FREEDOM
Once I wished I might rehearse
Freedom's pæen 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 suprise,
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?--
unsel not with flesh and blood;
Loiter not for cloak or food;
Right thou feelest, rush to do.'

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 on 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 statue 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.

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 outrage of the poor.

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 consititue 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.

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.

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.

VOLUNTARIES
I
Low and mournful be the strain,
Haughty thought be far from me;
Tones of penitence and pain,
Moanings 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
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 snowflake down,
The snowflake 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.

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
Leading over heroic ground,
Wailed 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:
Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,
And rankly on the castled steep,--
Speak it firmly, these are gods,
All are ghosts beside.

LOVE AND THOUGHT

Two well-assorted travellers use
The highway, Eros and the Muse.
From the twins is nothing hidden,
To the pair is nought forbidden;
Hand in hand the comrades go
Every nook of Nature through:
Each for other they were born,
Each can other best adorn;
They know one only mortal grief
Past all balsam or relief;
When, by false companions crossed,
The pilgrims have each other lost.

UNA
ROVING, roving, as it seems,
Una lights my clouded dreams;
Still for journeys she is dressed;
We wander far by east and west.

In the homestead, homely thought,

At my work I ramble not;
If from home chance draw me wide,
Half-seen Una sits beside.

In my house and garden-plot,

Though beloved, I miss her not;
But one I seek in foreign places,
One face explore in foreign faces.

At home a deeper thought may light

The inward sky with chrysolite,
And I greet from far the ray,
Aurora of a dearer day.

But if upon the seas I sail,

Or trundle on the glowing rail,
I am but a thought of hers,
Loveliest of travellers.

So the gentle poet's name

To foreign parts is blown by fame;
Seek him in his native town,
He is hidden and unknown.

BOSTON
SICUT PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS

THE rocky nook with hilltops 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!'
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.

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.
(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,
Ands 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.

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!
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 hears

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?

MERLIN'S SONG
I
Or Merlin wise I learned a song,--
Sing it low or sing it loud,
It is mightier than the strong,
And punishes the proud.
I sing it to the surging crowd,--
Good men it will calm and cheer,
Bad men it will chain and cage--
In the heart of the music peals a strain
Which only angels hear;
Whether it waken joy or rage
Hushed myriads hark in vain,
Yet they who hear it shed their age,
And take their youth again.

II
Hear what British Merlin sung,
Of keenest eye and truest tongue.
Say not, the chiefs who first arrive
Usurp the seats for which all strive;

The forefathers this land who found

Failed to plant the vantage-ground;
Ever from one who comes to-morrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
But wilt thou measure all thy road,
See thou lift the lightest load.
Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,
And thou, Cyndyllan's son! beware
Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,
To falter ere thou thy task fulfil,--
Only the light-armed climb the hill.
The richest of all lords is Use,
And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,
Drink the wild air's salubrity:
When the star Canope shines in May,
Shepherds are thankful and nations gay.
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech:
Mask thy wisdom with delight,
Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.
Of all wit's uses, the main one
Is to live well with who has none.

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,--
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.

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 damnèd wails
On which the seraph music sails.
In spirit-worlds he trod alone,
But walked the earth unmarked, unknown.
The near bystander caught no sound,--
Yet they who listened far aloof
Heard rendings 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.

HYMN
SUNG AT THE SECOND CHURCH, AT THE ORDINATION OF REV. CHANDLER ROBBINS
WE love the venerable 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,
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.

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.

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 indoors 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.

You 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.

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;
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.

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.

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 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!

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
come.
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.

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-chic-a-dee-dee! 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?
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 ray 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;
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,
Pæan! 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,
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.

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,
There is no bard in all the choir,
Not Homer's self, the poet sires
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 Parcæ 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.

Not long ago at eventide,

It seemed, so listening, at my side
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.

SEASHORE
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?
Was ever building like my terraces?
Was ever couch 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,
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 dispersed
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,
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.

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,
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.

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.

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.

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 mounting 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.

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 heat and nerveless reins,--
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;
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.

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.

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 md 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.

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 reënter there,--
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 lost
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,
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, thou fairest one,

Unplighted yet to me,
Uncertain of thine own
I gave my heart to thee.
That untold early love
I leave untold to-day,
My lips in whisper move
Farewell to...
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.

IN MEMORIAM
E.B.E.

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
Haunting this bank's historic trees?
Thou born for noblest life,
For action's field, for victor's car,
Thou 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,
And evermore the cruel god
Cried "Onward!" and the palm-crown showed,
Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with hear 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.
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.

III
ELEMENTS AND MOTTOES

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!'

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 tht shadow, follow thee.

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
Phbus 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.

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
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.

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,
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.

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.

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 woes
He saw strong Eros struggling through,
To sun the dark and solve the curse,
And beam to the bounds of the universe.
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.

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.

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.
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.

PRUDENCE
THEME no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young;
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.

NATURE
I
A SUBTLE chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

II
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows
And hints the future which it owes.

THE INFORMING SPIRIT

I
THERE iS no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

II
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

CIRCLES
NATURE centres into bails,
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.

INTELLECT
Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals;--
The sower scatters broad his seed;
The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

GIFTS
GIFTS of one who loved me,--
'T was high time they came;
When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shame.

PROMISE
IN countless upward-striving waves
The moon-drawn tide-wave strives;
In thousand far-transplanted grafts
The parent fruit survives;
So, in the new-born millions,
The perfect Adam lives.

Not less are summer mornings dear

To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.
CARITAS
IN the suburb, in the town,
On the railway, in the square,
Came a beam of goodness down
Doubling daylight everywhere:
Peace now each for malice takes,
Beauty for his sinful weeds,
For the angel Hope aye makes
Him an angel whom she leads.

POWER
HIS tongue was framed to music,
And his hand was armed with skill;
His face was the mould of beauty,
And his heart the throne of will.

WEALTH
WHO shall tell what did befall,
Far away in time, when once,
Over the lifeless ball,
Hung idle stars and suns?
What god the element obeyed?
Wings of what wind the lichen bore,
Wafting the puny seeds of power,
Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?
And well the primal pioneer
Knew the strong task to it assigned,
Patient through Heaven's enormous year
To build in matter home for mind.
From air the creeping centuries drew
The matted thicket low and wide,
This must the leaves of ages strew
The granite slab to clothe and hide,
Ere wheat can wave its golden pride.
What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled
(In dizzy æons dim and mute
The reeling brain can ill compute)
Copper and iron, lead and gold?
What oldest star the fame can save
Of races perishing to pave
The planet with a floor of lime?

Dust is their pyramid and mole:

Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed
Under the tumbling mountain's breast,
In the safe herbal of the coal?
But when the quarried means were piled,
All is waste and worthless, till
Arrives the wise selecting will,
And, out of slime and chaos, Wit
Draws the threads of fair and fit.
Then temples rose, and towns, and marts,
The shop of toil, the hall of arts;
Then flew the sail across the seas
To feed the North from tropic trees;
The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,
Where they were bid, the rivers ran;
New slaves fulfilled the poet's dream,
Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.
Then docks were built, and crops were stored,
And ingots added to the hoard.
But though light-headed man forget,
Remembering Matter pays her debt:
Still, through her motes and masses, draw
Electric thrills and ties of law,
Which bind the strengths of Nature wild
To the conscience of a child.

ILLUSIONS
FLOW, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation;
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day's toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat lightning
And fire-fly's flight.

When thou dost return

On the wave's circulation,

Behold the shimmer,

The wild dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world,--
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.
IV
QUATRAINS AND TRANSLATIONS

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.

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 tongue;
Foxes are so cunning
Because they are strong.

ARTIST
QUIT 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;
Right 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 beurré stoop.

FORESTER
HE took the color of his vest
From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast;
For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hides
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.

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 curse 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.

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 hoofs 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.

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 but 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.

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.

'A NEW commandment,' said the smiling Muse,

'I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach';--
Luther, Fox, Behmen, Swedenborg, grew pale,
And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore
Hafiz and Shakspeare with their shining choirs.

TRANSLATIONS
SONNET OF MICHEL 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.
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;
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 prouder 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.
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 state
Has drunk the life-blood of the great;
The violets yon field which stain
Are moles of beauties Time hath slain.

UNBAR the door, since thou the Opener art,

Show me the forward way, since thou art guide,
I put no faith in pilot or in chart,
Since they are transient, and thou dost abide.

FROM ALI BEN ABU TALEB

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?

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 SEUD NIMETOLLAH OF KUHISTAN

(Note: [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, as 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.
All my doing, all my leaving,
Reaches 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.

V
APPENDIX

THE POET
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.

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;
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,
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!
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.

'Divine Inviters! I accept

The courtesy ye have shown and kept
From ancient ages for the bard,
To modulate
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;
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,
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,
Out shone 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,

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 mediate 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.
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;
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

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,
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.
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.
Beware the fire that Eblis burned."
But Saadi coldly thus returned,
"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.
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,--
Væ solis! 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,
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;
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,
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.

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
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.

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.

TRY the might the Muse affords

And the balm of thoughtful words;
Bring music to the desolate;
Hang roses on the stony fate.

BUT over all his crowning grace,

Wherefor thanks God his daily praise,
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.

By thoughts I lead
Bards' to say what nations need;
What imports, what irks and what behooves,
Framed afar as Fates and Loves.

AND as the light divides the dark

Through with living swords,
So shall thou pierce the distant age
With adamantine words.
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.

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.

HE could condense cerulean ether

Into the very best sole-leather.

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.

THE brook sings on, but sings in vain

Wanting the echo in my brain.

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 saviors,
So many high behaviors
Salute the bard who is alive
And only sees what he doth give.

COIN the day-dawn into lines

In which its proper splendor shines;
Coin the moonlight into verse
Which all its marvel shall rehearse,
Chasing with words fast-flowing things; nor try
To plant thy shrivelled pedantry
On the shoulders of the sky.

AH, not to me those dreams belong!

A better voice peals through my song.

THE Muse's hill by Fear is guarded,

A bolder foot is still rewarded.

HIS instant thought a poet spokes

And filled the age his fame;
An inch of ground the lightning strook
But 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 twine.

SLIGHTED Minerva's learnèd tongue,

But leaped with joy when on the wind
The shell of Clio rung.

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE

NATURE
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;
Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.
COME search the wood for flowers,--
Wild tea and wild pea,

Grapevine and succory,

Coreopsis
And liatris,
Flaunting in their bowers;
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern and agrimony;
Forest full of essences
Fit for fairy presences,
Peppermint and sassafras,
Sweet fern, mint and vernal grass,
Panax, black birch, sugar maple,
Sweet and scent for Dian's table,
EIder-blow, sarsaparilla,
Wild rose, lily, dry vanilla,--
Spices in the plants that run
To bring their first fruits to the sun.
Earliest heats that follow frore
Nervèd leaf of hellebore,
Sweet willow, checkerberry red,
With its savory leaf for bread.
Silver birch and black
With the selfsame spice
Found in polygala root and rind,
Sassafras, fern, benzöine,
Mouse-ear, cowslip, wintergreen,
Which by aroma may compel
The frost to spare, what scents so well.

WHERE the fungus broad-and red

Lifts its head,
Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread,
Where the aster grew
With the social goldenrod,
In a chapel, which the dew
Made beautiful for God:--
O what would Nature say?
She spared no speech to-day:
The fungus and the bulrush spoke,
Answered the pine-tree and the oak,
The wizard South blew down the glen,
Filled the straits and filled the wide,
Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.
All things shine in his smoky ray,
And all we see are pictures high;
Many a high hillside,
While oaks of pride
Climb to their tops,
And boys run out upon their leafy ropes.
The maple street
In the houseless wood,
Voices followed after,
Every shrub and grape leaf
Rang with fairy laughter.
I have heard them fall
Like the strain of all
King Oberon's minstrelsy.

Would hear the everlasting

And know the only strong?
You must worship fasting,
You must listen long.
Words of the air
Which birds of the air
Carry aloft, below, around,
To the isles of the deep,
To the snow-capped steep,
To the thundercloud.

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.

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 yield,
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.

WHEN all their blooms the meadows flaunt

To deck the morning of the year,
Why tinge thy lustres jubilant
With forecast or with fear?

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 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.

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 EARTH
OUR eyeless bark sails free
Though with boom and spar
Andes, Alp or Himmalee,
Strikes never moon or star.

THE HEAVENS
WISP and meteor nightly falling,
But the Stars of God remain.

TRANSITION
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.

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.

IN Walden wood the chickadee

Runs round the pine and maple tree
Intent on insect slaughter:
O tufted entomologist!
Devour as many as you list,
Then drink in Walden water.
THE low December vault in June be lifted high,
And largest clouds be flakes of down in that enormous sky.

THE GARDEN
MANY things the garden shows,
And pleased I stray
From tree to tree
Watching the white pear-bloom,
Bee-infested quince or plum.
I could walk days, years, away
Till the slow ripening, secular tree
Had reached its fruiting-time,
Nor think it long.

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:
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.

NAHANT
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.

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 saw'st 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 wool,

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,
A clear and glorious firmament
Touched with life by every beam.
I share the good with every flower,
I drink the nectar 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.

NIGHT IN JUNE
I LEFT my dreary page and sallied forth,
Received the fair inscriptions of the night;
The moon was making amber of the world,
Glittered with silver every cottage pane,
The trees were rich, yet ominous with gloom.
The meadows broad
From ferns and grapes and from the folded flowers
Sent a nocturnal fragrance; harlot flies
Flashed their small fires in air, or held their court
In fairy groves of herds-grass.
HE lives not who can refuse me;
All my force saith, Come and use me:
A gleam of sun, a summer rain,
And all the zone 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.

PUT in, drive home the sightless wedges

And split to flakes the crystal ledges.

MAIA
ILLUSION works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable,
Her gay pictures never fail,
Crowds each on other, veil on veil,
Charmer who will be believed
By man who thirsts to be deceived.

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.

THE cold gray down upon the quinces lieth

And the poor spinners weave their webs thereon
To share the sunshine that so spicy is.

SAMSON stark, at Dagon's knee,

Gropes for columns strong as he;
When his ringlets grew and curled,
Groped for axle of the world.

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.

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 but divinities attend.

FROM high to higher forces

The scale of power uprears,
The heroes on their horses,
The gods upon their spheres.
This shining 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.

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.

IN the chamber, on the stairs,

Lurking dumb,
Go and come
Lemurs and Lars.

SUCH another peerless queen

Only could her mirror show.

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 revellers' feasts outshine.

OF all wit's uses the main one

Is to live well with who has none.

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.

FRIENDS to me are frozen wine;

I wait the sun on them should shine.

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.
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.

THE brave Empedocles, defying fools,

Pronounced the word that mortals hate to hear--
"I am divine, I am not mortal made;
I am superior to my human weeds."
Not Sense but Reason is the Judge of truth;
Reason's twofold, part human, part divine;
That human pan may be described and taught,
The other portion language cannot speak.

TELL men what they knew before;

Paint the prospect from their door.

HIM strong Genius urged to roam,

Stronger Custom brought him home.

THAT each should in his house abide,

Therefore was the world so wide.

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.

THE archangel Hope

Looks to the azure cope,
Waits through dark ages for the morn,
Defeated day by day, but unto victory born.

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.

GO if thou wilt, ambrosial flower,

Go match thee with thy seeming peers;
I will wait Heaven's perfect hour
Through the innumerable years.

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.

BUT if thou do thy best,

Without remission, without rest,
And invite the sunbeam,
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,--

ASCENDING thorough just degrees

To a consummate holiness,
As angel blind to trespass done,
And bleaching all souls like the sun.

FROM the stores of eldest matter,

The deep-eyed flame, obedient waters
Transparent air, all-feeding earth,
He took the flower of all their worth,
And, best with best in sweet consent,
Combined a new temperament.

REX
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.

SUUM CUIQUE
WILT thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

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.

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.

ON bravely through the sunshine and the showers!

Time hath his work to do and we have ours.

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,
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.

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.

INSIGHT
POWER that by obedience grows,
Knowledge which its source not knows,
Wave which severs whom it bears
From the things which he compares,
Adding wings through things to range,
To his own blood harsh and strange.

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.

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.

SEPTEMBER
IN the turbulent beauty
Of a gusty Autumn day,
Poet on a sunny headland
Sighed his soul away.

Farms the sunny landscape dappled,

Swandown clouds dappled the farms,
Cattle lowed in mellow distance
Where far oaks outstretched their arms.
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 rude listeners

Half the tell-tale South-wind said,--
'T would bring the blushes of yon maples
To a man and to a maid.

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.

OCTOBER
OCTOBER woods wherein
The boy's dream comes to pass,
And Nature squanders on the boy her pomp,
And crowns him with a more than royal crown,
And unimagined splendor waits his steps.
The gazing urchin walks through tents of gold,
Through crimson chambers, porphyry and pearl,
Pavilion on pavilion, garlanded,
Incensed and starred with lights and airs and shapes,
Color and sound, music to eye and ear,
Beyond the best conceit of pomp or power.

PETER'S FIELD
[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.]

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 thy meaning, wizard wave;
The River of my Life replies.

MUSIC
LET me go where'er I will,
I bear 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.

'T is not in the high stars alone,

Nor in the cup 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.

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.

COSMOS
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.

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 courses

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.
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.

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.

The planets' child the planet knows

And to his joy replies;
To the lark's trill unfolds the rose,
Clouds flush their gayest dyes.

When Ali prayed and loved

Where Syrian waters roll,
Upward the ninth heaven thrilled and moved
At the tread of the jubilant soul.

WALDEN
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;
Here sultry Summer overstays
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.]

How drearily in College hall

The Doctor stretched the hours,
But in each pause we heard the call
Of robins out of doors.

The air is wise, the wind thinks well,

And all through which it blows,
If plants or brain, if egg or shell,
Or bird or biped knows;

And oft at home'mid tasks I heed,

I heed how wears the day;
We must not halt while fiercely speed
The spans of life away.

What boots it here of Thebes or Rome

Or lands of Eastern day?
In forests I am still at home
And there I cannot stray.

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 oversea 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.

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?

RICHES
HAVE ye seen the caterpillar
Foully warking in his nest?
'T is the poor man getting siller,
Without cleanness, without rest.

Have ye seen the butterfly

In braw claithing drest?
'T is the poor man gotten rich,
In rings and painted vest.

The poor man crawls in web of rags

And sore bested with woes.
But when he flees on riches' wings,
He laugheth at his foes.

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?

INTELLECT
GRAVELY it broods apart on joy,
And, truth to tell, amused by pain.

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.

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
(Note: (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.

VI
POEMS OF YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD
1823-1834

THE BELL
I LOVE thy music, mellow bell,
I love thine iron chime,
To life or death, to heaven or hell,
Which calls the sons of Time.

Thy voice upon the deep

The home-bound sea-boy hails,
It charms his cares to sleep,
It cheers him as he sails.

To house of God and heavenly joys

Thy summons called our sires,
And good men thought thy sacred voice
Disarmed the thunder's fires.

And soon thy music, sad death-bell,

Shall lift its notes once more,
And mix my requiem with the wind
That sweeps my native shore.

1823

THOUGHT
I AM not poor, but I am proud,
Of one inalienable right,
Above the envy of the crowd,--
Thought's holy light.

Better it is than gems or gold,

And oh! it cannot die,
But thought will glow when the sun grows cold,
And mix with Deity.

Boston, 1823
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.

1826 [?].
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.
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.

TO-DAY
I RAKE no coffined clay, nor publish wide
The resurrection of departed pride.
Safe in their ancient crannies, dark and deep,
Let kings and conquerors, saints and soldiers sleep--
Late in the world,--too late perchance for fame,
Just late enough to reap abundant blame,--
I choose a novel theme, a bold abuse
Of critic charters, an unlaurelled Muse.

Old mouldy men and books and names and lands

Disgust my reason and defile my hands.
I had as lief respect an ancient shoe,
As love old things for age, and hate the new.
I spurn the Past, my mind disdains its nod,
Nor kneels in homage to so mean a God.

I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze,

The bald antiquity of China praise.
Youth is (whatever cynic tubs pretend)
The fault that boys and nations soonest mend.

1824
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;
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
THE SUMMONS
A STERNER errand to the silken troop
Has quenched the uneasy blush that warmed my cheek;
I am commissioned in my day of joy
To leave my woods and streams and the sweet sloth
Of prayer and song that were my dear delight,
To leave the rudeness of my woodland life,
Sweet twilight walks and midnight solitude
And kind acquaintance with the morning stars
And the glad hey-day of my household hours,
The innocent mirth which sweetens daily bread,
Railing in love to those who rail again,

By mind's industry sharpening the love of life--

Books, Muses, Study, fireside, friends and love,
I loved ye with true love, so fare ye well!

I was a boy; boyhood slid gayly by

And the impatient years that trod on it
Taught me new lessons in the lore of life.
I've learned the sum of that sad history
All woman-born do know, that hoped-for days,
Days that come dancing on fraught with delights,
Dash our blown hopes as they limp heavily by.
But I, the bantling of a country Muse,
Abandon all those toys with speed to obey
The King whose meek ambassador I go.

1826
THE RIVER
AND I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,--
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.
Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing,--and these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky:--
These are the same, but I am not the same,
But wiser than I was, and wise enough
Not to regret the changes, tho' they cost
Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;
These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. The wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road--
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of 'monishment
And grave parental love.
They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.
I feel as I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country's primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

CONCORD, June, 1827.

GOOD HOPE
THE cup of life is not so shallow
That we have drained the best,
That all the wine at once we swallow
And lees make all the rest.

Maids of as soft a bloom shall marry

As Hymen yet hath blessed,
And fairer forms are in the quarry
Than Phidias released.

1827.
LINES TO ELLEN
TELL me, maiden, dost thou use
Thyself thro' Nature to diffuse?
All the angles of the coast
Were tenanted by thy sweet ghost,
Bore thy colors every flower,
Thine each leaf and berry bore;
All wore thy badges and thy favors
In their scent or in their savors,
Every moth with painted wing,
Every bird in carolling,
The wood-boughs with thy manners waved,
The rocks uphold thy name engraved,
The sod throbbed friendly to my feet,
And the sweet air with thee was sweet.
The saffron cloud that floated warm
Studied thy motion, took thy form,
And in his airy road benign
Recalled thy skill in bold design,
Or seemed to use his privilege
To gaze o'er the horizon's edge,
To search where now thy beauty glowed,
Or made what other purlieus proud.

1829.
SECURITY
THOUGH her eye seek other forms
And a glad delight below,
Yet the love the world that warms
Bids for me her bosom glow.

She must love me till she find

Another heart as large and true.
Her soul is frank as the ocean wind,
And the world has only two.
If Nature hold another heart
That knows a purer flame than me,
I too therein could challenge part
And learn of love a new degree.

1829A 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 the unfading gold of Heaven
His merchants may dispense,
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.
A MOUNTAIN GRAVE
WHY fear to die
And let thy body lie
Under the flowers of June,
Thy body food
For the ground-worms' brood
And thy grave smiled on by the visiting moon.

Amid great Nature's halls

Girt in by mountain walls
And washed with waterfalls
It would please me to die,
Where every wind that swept my tomb
Goes loaded with a free perfume
Dealt out with a God's charity.

I should like to die in sweets,

A hill's leaves for winding-sheets,
And the searching sun to see
That I am laid with decency.
And the commissioned wind to sing
His mighty psalm from fall to spring
And annual tunes commemorate
Of Nature's child the common fate.

WILLIAMSTOWN, VERMONT, 1 June, 1831.

A LETTER
DEAR brother, would you know the life,
Please God, that I would lead?
On the first wheels that quit this weary town
Over yon western bridges I would ride
And with a cheerful benison forsake
Each street and spire and roof, incontinent.
Then would I seek where God might guide my steps,
Deep in a woodland tract, a sunny farm,
Amid the mountain counties, Hants, Franklin, Berks,
Where down the rock ravine a river roars,
Even from a brook, and where old woods
Not tamed and cleared cumber the ground
With their centennial wrecks.
Find me a slope where I can feel the sun
And mark the rising of the early stars.
There will I bring my books,--my household gods,
The reliquaries of my dead saint, and dwell
In the sweet odor of her memory.
Then in the uncouth solitude unlock
My stock of art, plant dials in the grass,
Hang in the air a bright thermometer
And aim a telescope at the inviolate sun.

CHARDON ST., BOSTON, 1831.

DAY by day returns
The everlasting sun,
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.
HYMN
THERE is in all the sons of men
A love that in the spirit dwells,
That panteth after things unseen,
And tidings of the future tells.

And God hath built his altar here

To keep this fire of faith alive,
And sent his priests in holy fear
To speak the truth--for truth to strive.

And hither come the pensive train

Of rich and poor, of young and old,
Of ardent youth untouched by pain,
Of thoughtful maids and manhood bold.

They seek a friend to speak the word

Already trembling on their tongue,
To touch with prophet's hand the chord
Which God in human hearts hath strung.
To speak the plain reproof of sin
That sounded in the soul before,
And bid you let the angels in
That knock at meek contrition's door.

A friend to lift the curtain up

That hides from man the mortal goal,
And with glad thoughts of faith and hope
Surprise the exulting soul.

Sole source of light and hope assured,

O touch thy servant's lips with power,
So shall he speak to us the word
Thyself dost give forever more.

June, 1831.
SELF-RELIANCE
HENCEFORTH, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men's opinions. I will be
Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart,
I hear continually his voice therein.

The little needle always knows the North,

The little bird remembereth his note,
And this wise Seer within me never errs.
I never taught it what it teaches me;
I only follow, when I act aright.

October 9, 1832.
AND when I am entombèd in my place,
Be it remembered of a single man,
He never, though he dearly loved his race,
For fear of human eyes swerved from his plan.

OH what is Heaven but the fellowship

Of minds that each can stand against the world
By its own meek and incorruptible will?

THE days pass over me

And I am still the same;
The aroma of my life is gone
With the flower with which it came.

1833.
WRITTEN IN NAPLES
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 hillside,
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
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 roadside, and beneath
Peep the blue violets out of the black loam,
Pathetic silent poets that sing to me
Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife.

March, 1833

WRITTEN AT ROME
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.
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.

1833

WEBSTER
1831
LET Webster's lofty face
Ever on thousands shine,
A beacon set that Freedom's race
Might gather omens from that radiant sign.

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.

1854
WHY did all manly gifts in Webster fail?
He wrote on Nature's grandest brow, For Sale.

Michael Angelo
MICHAEL ANGELO.

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.
MICHAEL ANGELO's Sonnets

Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto,

Ch'un marmo solo in se non circoscriva
Col suo soverchio, c solo a quello arriva
La man che obbedisce all' intelletto.
M. ANGELO, Sonnetto primo.

MICHAEL ANGELO 1

Few lives of eminent men are harmonious; few that furnish, in all the facts, an image corresponding
with their fame. But all things recorded of Michael Angelo Buonarotti agree together. He lived one
life ; he pursued one career. He accomplished extraordinary works ; he uttered extraordinary words;
and in this greatness was so little eccentricity, so true was he to the laws of the human mind, that
his character and his works, like Sir Isaac Newton's, seem rather a part of nature than arbitrary
productions of the human will. Especially we venerate his moral fame. Whilst his name belongs to
the highest class of genius, his life contains in it no injurious influence. Every line in his biography
might be read to the human race with wholesome effect. The means, the materials of his activity,
were coarse enough to be appreciated, being addressed for the most part to the eye ; the results,
sublime and all innocent. A purity severe and even terrible goes out from the lofty productions of
his pencil and his chisel, and again from the more perfect sculpture of his own life, which heals and
exalts. " He nothing common did, or mean," and dying at the end of near ninety years, had not yet
become old, but was engaged in executing his grand conceptions in the ineffaceable architecture of
St. Peter's.

1 Reprinted from the North American Review, June, 1837.

Above all men whose history we know, Michael Angelo presents us with the perfect image of the
artist. He is an eminent master in the four fine arts, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Poetry. In
three of them by visible means, and in poetry by words, he strove to express the Idea of Beauty.
This idea possessed him and determined all his activity. Beauty in the largest sense, beauty inward
and outward, comprehending grandeur as a part, and reaching to goodness as its soul, - this to
receive and this to impart, was his genius.

It is a happiness to find, amid the falsehood and griefs of the human race, a soul at intervals born to
behold and create only beauty. So shall not the indescribable charm of the natural world, the great
spectacle of morn and evening which shut and open the most disastrous day, want observers. The
ancient Greeks called the world kóopuos, Beauty; a name which, in our artificial state of society,
sounds fanciful and impertinent. Yet, in proportion as man rises above the servitude to wealth and a
pursuit of mean pleasures, he perceives that what is most real is most beautiful, and that, by the
contemplation of such objects, he is taught and exalted. This truth, that perfect beauty and perfect
goodness are one, was made known to Michael Angelo ; and we shall endeavor by sketches from his
life to show the direction and limitations of his search after this element.

In considering a life dedicated to the study of Beauty, it is natural to inquire, what is Beauty? Can
this charming element be so abstracted by the human mind, as to become a distinct and permanent
object? Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim of the human being. It does not
lie within the limits of the understanding. " The nature of the beautiful," - we gladly borrow the
language of Moritz, a German critic, - " consists herein, that because the understanding in the
presence of the beautiful cannot ask, ' Why is it beautiful? for that reason is it so. There is no
standard whereby the understanding can determine whether objects are beautiful or otherwise.
`What other standard of the beautiful exists, than the en-tire circuit of all harmonious proportions
of the great system of nature ? All particular beauties scattered up and down in nature are only so
far beautiful, as they suggest more or less in themselves this entire circuit of harmonious
proportions."

This great Whole, the understanding cannot em-brace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. But
it cannot be defined.
The Italian artists sanction this view of beauty by describing it as il piu nnell' uno, "the many in
one," or multitude in unity, intimating that what is truly beautiful seems related to all nature. A
beautiful person has a kind of universality, and appears to have truer conformity to all pleasing
objects in external nature than another. Every great work of art seems to take up into itself the
excellencies of all works, and to present, as it were, a miniature of nature.

In relation to this element of Beauty, the minds of men divide themselves into two classes. In the
first place, all men have an organization corresponding more or less to the entire system of nature,
and therefore a power of deriving pleasure from Beauty. This is Taste. In the second place, certain
minds, more closely harmonized with nature, possess the power of abstracting Beauty from things,
and re-producing it in new forms, on any object to which accident may determine their activity ; as
stone, canvas, song, history. This is Art.

Since Beauty is thus an abstraction of the harmony and proportion that reigns in all nature, it is
therefore studied in nature, and not in what does not exist. Hence the celebrated French maxim of
Rhetoric, Rien de beau que le vrai; "Nothing is beautiful but what is true." It has a much wider
application than to Rhetoric ; as wide, namely, as the terms of the proposition admit. In art,
Michael Angelo is himself but a document or verification of this maxim. He labored to express the
beautiful, in the entire conviction that it was only to be attained unto by knowledge of the true.
The common eye is satisfied with the surface on which it rests. The wise eye knows that it is
surface, and, if beautiful, only the result of interior harmonies, which, to him who knows them,
compose the image of higher beauty. Moreover, he knew well that only by an understanding of the
internal mechanism can the outside be faithfully delineated. The walls of houses are transparent to
the architect. The symptoms disclose the constitution to the physician ; and to the artist it belongs
by a better knowledge of anatomy, and, within anatomy, of life and thought, to acquire the power
of true drawing. " The human form," says Goethe, "cannot be comprehended through seeing its
surface. It must be stripped of the muscles, its parts separated, its joints observed, its divisions
marked, its action and counter action learned ; the hidden, the reposing, the foundation of the
apparent, must be searched, if one would really see and imitate what moves as a beautiful
inseparable whole in living waves before the eye." Michael
Angelo dedicated himself, from his childhood to his death, to a toilsome observation of nature. The
first anecdote recorded of him shows him to be al-ready on the right road. Granacci, a painter's
apprentice, having lent him, when a boy, a print of St. Antony beaten by devils, together with some
colors and pencils, he went to the fish-market to observe the form and color of fins and of the eyes
of fish. Cardinal Farnese one day found him, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and
expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins ; to which he replied, " I go yet to
school that I may continue to learn." And one of the last drawings in his portfolio is a sublime hint of
his own feeling ; for it is a sketch of an old man with a long beard, in a go-cart, with an hour-glass
before him ; and the motto, Ancora imparo, " I still learn."

In this spirit he devoted himself to the study of anatomy for twelve years ; we ought to say rather,
as long as he lived. The depth of his knowledge in anatomy has no parallel among the artists of
mod-ern times. Most of his designs, his contemporaries inform us, were made with a pen, and in the
style of an engraving on copper or wood ; a manner more expressive but not admitting of
correction. When Michael Angelo would begin a statue, he made first on paper the skeleton;
afterwards, upon another paper, the same figure clothed with muscles. The studies of the statue of
Christ in the Church of Minerva at Rome, made in this manner, were long preserved.

Those who have never given attention to the arts of design, are surprised that the artist should find
so much to study in a fabric of such limited parts and dimensions as the human body. But reflection
discloses evermore a closer analogy between the finite form and the infinite inhabitant. Man is the
highest, and indeed the only proper object of plastic art. There needs no better proof of our
instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the human figure is capable, than the
uniform tendency which the religion of every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism, or
attributing to the Deity the human form. And behold the effect of this familiar object every day !
No acquaintance with the secrets of its mechanism, no degrading views of human nature, not the
most swinish compost of mud and blood that was ever misnamed philosophy, can avail to hinder us
from doing involuntary reverence to any exhibition of majesty or surpassing beauty in human clay.

Our knowledge of its highest expression we owe to the Fine Arts. Not easily in this age will any man
acquire by himself such perceptions of the dignity or grace of the human frame, as the student of
art owes to the remains of Phidias, to the Apollo, the Jove, the paintings and statues of Michael
Angelo, and the works of Canova. There are now in Italy, both on canvas and in marble, forms and
faces which the imagination is enriched by contemplating. Goethe says that he is but half himself
who has never seen the Juno in the Rondanini pal-ace at Rome. Seeing these works true to human
nature and yet superhuman, " we feel that we are greater than we know." Seeing these works, we
appreciate the taste which led Michael Angelo, against the taste and against the admonition of his
patrons, to cover the walls of churches with unclothed figures, " improper " says his biographer, . "
for the place, but proper for the exhibition of all the pomp of his profound knowledge."

The love of beauty which never passes beyond outline and color, was too slight an object to occupy
the powers of his genius. There is a closer relation than is commonly thought between the fine arts
and the useful arts ; and it is an essential fact in the history of Michael Angelo, that his love of
beauty is made solid and perfect by his deep understanding of the mechanic arts. Architecture is
the bond that unites the elegant and the economical arts, and his skill in this is a pledge of his
capacity in both kinds. His Titanic handwriting in marble and travertine is to be found in every part
of Rome and Florence ; and even at Venice, on defective evidence, he is said to have given the plan
of the bridge of the Rialto. Nor was his a skill in ornament, or confined to the outline and designs of
towers and facades, but a thorough acquaintance with all the secrets of the art, with all the details
of economy and strength.

When the Florentines united themselves with Venice, England and France, to oppose the power of
the Emperor Charles V., Michael Angelo was appointed Military Architect and Engineer, to
superintend the erection of the necessary works. He visited Bologna to inspect its celebrated
fortifications, and, on his return, constructed a fortification on the heights of San Miniato, which
commands the city and environs of Florence. On the 24th of October, 1529, the Prince of Orange,
general of Charles V., encamped on the hills surrounding the city, and his first operation was to
throw up a ram-part to storm the bastion of San Miniato. His design was frustrated by the
providence of Michael Angelo. Michael made such good resistance, that the Prince directed the
artillery to demolish the tower. The artist hung mattresses of wool on the side exposed to the
attack, and by means of a bold projecting cornice, from which they were suspended, a considerable
space was left between them and the wall. This simple expedient was sufficient, and the Prince was
obliged to turn his siege into a blockade.

After an active and successful service to the city for six months, Michael Angelo was informed of a
treachery that was ripening within the walls. He communicated it to the government with his ad-
vice upon it ; but was mortified by receiving from the government reproaches at his credulity and
fear. He replied, " that it was useless for him to take care of the walls, if they were determined not
to take care of themselves, " and he withdrew privately from the city to Ferrara, and thence to
Venice. The news of his departure occasioned a general concern in Florence, and he was instantly
followed with apologies and importunities to return. He did so, and resumed his office. On the 21st
of March, 1530, the Prince of Orange assaulted the city by storm. Michael Angelo is represented as
having ordered his defence so vigorously, that the Prince was compelled to retire. By the treachery
however of the general of the Republic, Malatesta Baglioni, all his skill was rendered unavailing, and
the city capitulated on the 9th of August. The excellence of the works constructed by our artist has
been approved by Vauban, who visited them and took a plan of them.

In Rome, Michael Angelo was consulted by Pope Paul III. in building the fortifications of San Borgo.
He built the stairs of Ara Celi leading to the Church once the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus ; he
arranged the piazza of the Capitol, and built its porticoes. He was charged with rebuilding the Pons
Palatinus over the Tiber. He prepared, accordingly, a large quantity of blocks of travertine, and was
proceeding with the work, when, through the intervention of his rivals, this work was taken from
him and intrusted to Nanni di Bacio Bigio, who plays but a pitiful part in Michael's history. Nanni sold
the travertine, and filled up the piers with gravel at a small expense. Michael Angelo made known
his opinion, that the bridge could not resist the force of the current ; and, one day riding over it on
horseback, with his friend Vasari, he cried, " George, this bridge trembles under us ; let us ride
faster lest it fall whilst we are upon it." It fell, five years after it was built, in 1557, and is still
called the " Broken Bridge."

Versatility of talent in men of undoubted ability always awakens the liveliest interest ; and we
observe with delight, that, besides the sublimity and even extravagance of Michael Angelo, he
possessed an unexpected dexterity in minute mechanical contrivances. When the Sistine Chapel was
prepared for him that he might paint the ceiling, he found the platform on which he was to work,
suspended by ropes which passed through the ceiling. Michael demanded of San Gallo, the Pope's
architect, how these holes were to be repaired in the picture ?

San Gallo replied ; " That was for him to consider, for the platform could be constructed in no other
way." Michael removed the whole, and constructed a movable platform to rest and roll upon the
floor, which is believed to be the same simple contrivance which is used in Rome, at this day, to
repair the walls of churches. He gave this model to a carpenter, who made it so profitable as to
furnish a dowry for his two daughters. He was so nice in tools, that he made with his own hand the
wimbles, the files, the rasps, the chisels and all other irons and instruments which he needed in
sculpture ; and, in painting, he not only mixed but ground his colors himself, trusting no one.

And not only was this discoverer of Beauty, and its teacher among men, rooted and grounded in
those severe laws of practical skill, which genius can never teach, and which must be learned by
practice alone, but he was one of the most industrious men that ever lived. His diligence was so
great that it is wonderful how be endured its fatigues. The midnight battles, the forced marches,
the winter campaigns of Julius Caesar or Charles XII. do not indicate greater strength of body or of
mind. He finished the gigantic painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in twenty months, a fact
which enlarges, it has been said, the known powers of man. Indeed he toiled so assiduously at this
painful work, that, for a long time after, he was unable to see any picture but by holding it over his
head. A little bread and wine was all his nourishment ; and he told Vasari that he often slept in his
clothes, both because he was too weary to undress, and because he would rise in the night and go
immediately to work. " I have found," says his friend, " some of his designs in Florence, where,
whilst may be seen the greatness of his genius, it may also be known that when he wished to take
Minerva from the head of Jove, there needed the hammer of Vulcan." He used to make to a single
figure nine, ten, or twelve heads before he could satisfy himself, seeking that there should be in
the composition a certain universal grace such as nature makes, saying, that " he needed to have his
compasses in his eye, and not in his hand, because the hands work whilst the eye judges." He was
accustomed to say, " Those figures alone are good, from which the labor is scraped off, when the
scaffolding is taken away."

At near eighty years, he began in marble a group of four figures for a dead Christ ; because, he said,
to exercise himself with the mallet was good for his health.

And what did he accomplish ? It does not fall within our design to give an account of his works, yet
for the sake of the completeness of our sketch we will name the principal ones. Sculpture, he called
his art, and to it he regretted afterwards he had not singly given himself. The style of his paintings
is monumental ; and even his poetry partakes of that character. In sculpture, his greatest work is
the statue of Moses in the Church of Pietro in Vincolo, in Rome. It is a sitting statue of colossal size,
and is designed to embody the Hebrew Law. The lawgiver is supposed to gaze upon the worshippers
of the golden calf. The majestic wrath of the figure daunts the beholder. In the Piazza del Gran
Duca at Florence, stands, in the open air, his David, about to hurl the stone at Goliah. In the Church
called the Minerva, at Rome, is his Christ ; an object of so much devotion to the people, that the
right foot has been shod with a brazen sandal to prevent it from being kissed away. In St. Peter's, is
his Pieta, or (lead Christ in the arms of his mother. In the Mausoleum of the Medici at Florence, are
the tombs of Lorenzo and Cosmo, with the grand statues of Night and Day, and Aurora and Twilight.
Several statues of less fame, and bas-reliefs, are in Rome and Florence and Paris.

His Paintings are in the Sistine Chapel, of which he first covered the ceiling with the story of the
creation, in successive compartments, with the great series of the Prophets and Sibyls in alternate
tablets, and a series of greater and smaller fancy-pieces in the lunettes. This is his capital work
painted in fresco. Every one of these pieces, every figure, every hand and foot and finger, is a study
of anatomy and design. Slighting the secondary arts of coloring, and all the aids of graceful finish,
he aimed exclusively, as a stern designer, to ex-press the vigor and magnificence of his conceptions.
Upon the wall, over the altar, is painted the Last Judgment.

Of his designs, the most celebrated is the cartoon representing soldiers coming out of the bath and
arming themselves ; an incident of the war of Pisa. The wonderful merit of this drawing, which
contrasts the extremes of relaxation and vigor, is conspicuous even in the coarsest prints.

Of his genius for Architecture, it is sufficient to say that he built St. Peter's, an ornament of the
earth. He said he would hang the Pantheon in the air ; and he redeemed his pledge by suspending
that vast cupola, without offence to grace or to stability, over the astonished beholder. He did not
live to complete the work ; but is there not something affecting in the spectacle of an old man, on
the verge of ninety years, carrying steadily on-ward with the heat and determination of manhood,
his poetic conceptions into progressive execution, surmounting by the dignity of his purposes all
obstacks and all enmities, and only hindered by the limits of life from fulfilling his designs? Very
slowly came he, after months and years, to the dome. At last he began to model it very small in
wax. When it was finished, he had it copied larger in wood, and by this model it was built. Long
after it was completed, and often since, to this day, rumors are occasionally spread that it is giving
way, and it is said to have been injured by unskilful attempts to repair it. Benedict XIV., during one
of these panics, sent for the architect Marchese Polini, to come to Rome and examine it. Polini put
an end to all the various projects of repairs, by the satisfying sentence ; " The cupola does not start,
and if it should start, nothing can be done but to pull it down."

The impulse of his grand style was instantaneous upon his contemporaries. Every stroke of his pencil
moved the pencil in Raphael's hand. Raphael said, " I bless Cod I live in the times of Michael Angelo."
Sir Joshua Reynolds, two centuries later, declared to the British Institution, " I feel a self-
congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite."

A man of such habits and such deeds, made good his pretensions to a perception and to delineation
of external beauty. But inimitable as his works are, his whole life confessed that his hand was all
inadequate to express his thought. " He alone " he said, "is an artist whose hands can perfectly
execute what his mind has conceived ; " and such was his own mastery, that men said, " the marble
was flexible in his hands." Yet, contemplating ever with love the idea of absolute beauty, he was
still dissatisfied with his own work. The things proposed to him in his imagination were such, that,
for not being able with his hands to express so grand and terrible conceptions, he often abandoned
his work. For this reason he often only blocked his statue. A little before he died, he burned a great
number of designs, sketches, and cartoons made by him, being impatient of their defects. Grace in
living forms, except in very rare instances, did not satisfy him. He never made but one portrait (a
cartoon of Messer Tommaso di Cavalieri), because he abhorred to draw a likeness unless it were of
infinite beauty.

Such was his devotion to art. But let no man suppose that the images which his spirit worshipped
were mere transcripts of external grace, or that this profound soul was taken or holden in the
chains of superficial beauty. To him, of all men, it was transparent. Through it he beheid the eternal
spiritual beauty which ever clothes itself with grand and graceful outlines, as its appropriate form.
He called external grace "the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul which he has
called into Time." " As from the fire, heat cannot be divided, no more can beauty from the eternal."
He was conscious in his efforts of higher aims than to address the eye. He sought, through the eye,
to reach the soul. Therefore, as, in the first place, he sought to approach the Beautiful by the study
of the True, so he failed not to make the next step of progress, and to seek Beauty in its highest
form, that of Goodness. The sublimity of his art is in his life. He did not only build a di-vine temple,
and paint and carve saints and prophets. He lived out the same inspiration. There is no spot upon
his fame. The fire and sanctity of his pencil breathe in his words. When he was in-formed that Paul
IV. desired he should paint again the side of the chapel where the Last Judgment was painted,
because of the indecorous nudity of the figures, he replied, " Tell the Pope that this is easily done.
Let him reform the world and he will find the pictures will reform themselves." He saw clearly that
if the corrupt and vulgar eyes, that could see nothing but indecorum in his terrific prophets and
angels, could be purified as his own were pure, they would only find occasion for devotion in the
same figures. As he refused to undo his work, Daniel di Volterra was employed to clothe the figures;
hence ludicrously called Il Braghetone. When the Pope suggested to him that the chapel would be
enriched if the figures were ornamented with gold, Michael Angelo replied, " In those days, gold was
not worn; and the characters I have painted were neither rich nor desirous of wealth, but holy men,
with whom gold was an object of contempt."

Not until he was in the seventy-third year of his age, he undertook the building of St. Peter's. On the
death of San Gallo, the architect of the church, Paul III. first entreated, then commanded the aged
artist, to assume the charge of this great work, which though commenced forty years before, was
only commenced by Bramante, and ill continued by San Gallo. Michael Angelo, who believed in his
own ability as a sculptor, but distrusted his capacity as an architect, at first refused and then
reluctantly complied. His heroic stipulation with the Pope was worthy of the man and the work. He
required that lie should be permitted to accept this work without any fee or reward, because he
undertook it as a religious act ; and, furthermore, that he should be absolute master of the whole
de-sign, free to depart from the plans of San Gallo and to alter what had been already done.

This disinterestedness and spirit, - no fee and no interference, - reminds one of the reward named
by the ancient Persian. When importuned to claim some compensation of the empire for the
important services he had rendered it, he demanded, " that he and his should neither command nor
obey, but should be free." However, as it was undertaken, so was it performed. When the Pope,
delighted with one of his chapels, sent him one hundred crowns of gold, as one month's wages,
Michael sent them back. The Pope was angry, but the artist was immovable. Amidst endless
annoyances from the envy and interest of the office-holders and agents in the work whom he had
displaced, he steadily ripened and executed his vast ideas. The combined desire to fulfil, in
everlasting stone, the conceptions of his mind, and to complete his worthy offering to Almighty
God, sustained him through numberless vexations with unbroken spirit. In answer to the
importunate solicitations of the Duke of Tuscany that he would come to Florence, he replies that "
to leave St. Peter's in the state in which it now was, would be to ruin the structure, and thereby be
guilty of a great sin ; " that he hoped he should shortly see the execution of his plans brought to
such a point that they could no longer be interfered with, and this was the capital object of his
wishes, " if," he adds, " I do not commit a great crime, by disappointing the cormorants who are
daily hoping to get rid of me."

A natural fruit of the nobility of his spirit is his admiration of Dante, to whom two of his sonnets are
addressed. He shared Dante's " deep contempt of the vulgar, not of the simple inhabitants of lowly
streets or humble cottages, but of that sordid and abject crowd of all classes and all places who
obscure, as much as in them lies, every beam of beauty in the universe." In like manner, he
possessed an intense love of solitude. He lived alone, and never or very rarely took his meals with
any person. As will be supposed, he had a passion for the country, and in old age speaks with
extreme pleasure of his residence with the hermits in the mountains of Spoleto ; so much so that he
says he is " only half in Rome, since, truly, peace is only to be found in the woods." Traits of an
almost savage independence mark all his history. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man,
and never would receive a present from any person ; because it seemed to him that if a man gave
him anything, he was always obligated to that individual. His friend Vasari mentions one occasion on
which his scruples were overcome. It seems that Michael was accustomed to work at night with a
pasteboard cap or helmet on his head, into which he stuck a candle, that his work might be lighted
and his hands at liberty. Vasari observed that he did not use wax candles, but a better sort made of
the tallow of goats. He therefore sent him four bundles of them, containing forty pounds. His
servant brought them after night-fall, and presented them to him. Michael Angelo refused to
receive them. " Look you, Messer Michael Angelo," replied the man, " these candles have well nigh
broken my arm, and I will not carry them back; but just here, before your door, is a spot of soft
mud, and they will stand upright in it very well, and there I will light them all." Put them down,
then," returned Michael, "since you shall not make a bonfire at my gate." Meantime he was liberal to
profusion to his old domestic Urbino, to whom he gave at one time two thousand crowns, and made
him rich in his service.

Michael Angelo was of that class of men who are too superior to the multitude around them to
command a full and perfect sympathy. They stand in the attitude rather of appeal from their
contemporaries to their race. It has been the defect of some great men, that they did not duly
appreciate or did not confess the talents and virtues of others, and so lacked one of the richest
sources of happiness and one of the best elements of humanity. This apathy perhaps happens as
often from pre-occupied attention as from jealousy. It has been supposed that artists more than
others are liable to this defect. But Michael Angelo's praise on many works is to this day the stamp
of fame. Michael Angelo said of Masaccio's pictures that wnen they were first painted they must
have been alive. He said of his predecessor, the architect Bramante, that he laid the first stone of
St. Peter's, clear, insulated, luminous, with fit design for a vast structure. He often expressed his
admiration of Cellini's bust of Altoviti. He loved to express admiration of Titian, of Donatello, of
Ghiberti, of Brunelleschi. And it is said that when he left Florence to go to Rome, to build St.
Peter's, he turned his horse's head on the last bill from which the noble dome of the Cathedral
( built by Brunelleschi) is visible, and said, " Like you, I will not build ; better than you I cannot."
Indeed, as we have said, the reputation of many works of art now in Italy derives a sanction from
the tradition of his praise. It is more commendation to say, " This was Michael Angelo's favorite,"
than to say, " This was carried to Paris by Napoleon." Michael, however, had the philosophy to say, "
Only an inventor can use the inventions of others."

There is yet one more trait in Michael Angelo's history, which humanizes his character without
lessening its loftiness ; this is his platonic love. He was deeply enamored of the most accomplished
lady of the time, Vittoria Colonna, the widow of the Marquis di Pescara, who, after the death of her
husband, devoted herself to letters, and to the writing of religious poetry. She was also an admirer
of his genius, and came to Rome repeatedly to see him. To her his sonnets are addressed ; and they
all breathe a chaste and divine regard, unparalleled in any amatory poetry except that of Dante and
Petrarch. They are founded on the thought that beauty is the virtue of the body, as virtue is the
beauty of the soul ; that a beautiful person is sent into the world as an image of the divine beauty,
not to provoke but to purify the sensual into an intellectual and divine love. He enthrones his
mistress as a benignant angel, who is to refine and perfect his own character. Condivi, his friend,
has left this testimony ; " I have often heard Michael Angelo reason and discourse upon love, but
never heard him speak otherwise than upon platonic love. As for me, I am ignorant what Plato has
said upon this subject ; but this I know very well, that, in a long intimacy, I never heard from his
mouth a single word that was not perfectly decorous and having for its object to extinguish in youth
every improper desire, and that his own nature is a stranger to depravity." The poems themselves
cannot be read without awakening sentiments of virtue. An eloquent vindication of their philosophy
may be found in a paper by Signor Radici in the London " Retrospective Review," and, by the Italian
scholar, in the Discourse of Benedetto Varchi upon one sonnet of Michael Angelo, contained in the
volume of his poems published by Biagioli, from which, in substance, the views of Radici are taken.

Towards his end, there seems to have grown in him an invincible appetite of dying, for he knew that
his spirit could only enjoy contentment after death. So vehement was this desire that, he says, " my
soul can no longer be appeased by the wonted seductions of painting and sculpture." A fine
melancholy, not unrelieved by his habitual heroism, pervades his thoughts on this subject. At the
age of eighty years, he wrote to Vasari, sending him various spiritual sonnets he had written, and
tells him he " is at the end of his life, that he is careful where he bends his thoughts, that he sees it
is al-ready twenty-four o'clock, and no fancy arose in his mind but DEATH was sculptured on it." In
conversing upon this subject with one of his friends, that person remarked, that Michael might well
grieve that one who was incessant in his creative labors should have no restoration. " No," replied
Michael, " it is nothing ; for, if life pleases us, death, being a work of the same master, ought not to
displease us." But a nobler sentiment, uttered by him, is contained in his reply to a letter of Vasari,
who had informed him of the rejoicings made at the house of his nephew. Lionardo, at Florence,
over the birth of another Buonarotti. Michael admonishes him that " a man ought not to smile, when
all those around him weep ; and that we ought not to show that joy when a child is born, which
should be re-served for the death of one who has lived well."

Amidst all these witnesses to his independence, his generosity, his purity and his devotion, are we
not authorized to say that this man was penetrated with the love of the highest beauty, that is,
goodness ; that his was a soul so enamored of grace, that it could not stoop to meanness or
depravity ; that art was to him no means of livelihood or road to fame, but the end of living, as it
was the organ through which he sought to suggest lessons of an unutterable wisdom ; that here was
a man who lived to demonstrate that to the human faculties, on every hand, worlds of grandeur and
grace are opened, which no profane eye and no indolent eye can behold, but which to see and to
enjoy, demands the severest discipline of all the physical, intellectual and moral faculties of the
individual?

The city of Florence, on the river Arno, still treasures the fame of this man. There, his picture hangs
in every window ; there, the tradition of his opinions meets the traveller in every spot. " Do you see
that statue of St. George ? Michael Angelo asked it why it (lid not speak." - "Do you see this fine
church of Santa Maria Novella ? It is that which Michael Angelo called ' his bride." - " Look at these
bronze gates of the Baptistery, with their high reliefs, cast by Ghiberti five hundred years ago.
Michael Angelo said, " they were fit to be the gates of Paradise.' " - Here is the church, the palace,
the Laurentian library, he built. Here is his own house. In the church of Santa Croce are his mortal
remains. Whilst he was yet alive, he asked that he might be buried in that church, in such a spot
that the dome of the cathedral might be visible from his tomb when the doors of the church stood
open. And there and so is he laid. The innumerable pilgrims whom the genius of Italy draws to the
city, duly visit this church, which is to Florence what Westminster Abbey is to England. There, near
the tomb of Nicholas Machiavelli, the historian and philosopher; of Galileo, the great-hearted
astronomer ; of Boccaccio, and of Alfieri, stands the monument of Michael Angelo Buonarotti. Three
significant garlands are sculptured on the tomb ; they should be four, but that his countrymen
feared their own partiality. The forehead of the bust, esteemed a faithful likeness, is furrowed with
eight deep wrinkles one above another. The traveller from a distant continent, who gazes on that
marble brow, feels that he is not a stranger in the foreign church ; for the great name of Michael
Angelo sounds hospitably in his ear. He was not a citizen of any country ; he belonged to the human
race ; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledge the beauty that beams in universal
nature, and who seek by labor and sell-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.