Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,

2 Compare the chapter on Beauty, in Emerson's 'Nature: This element [Beauty] I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. . . . The ancient Greeks called the world κóσμos, Beauty.'

Compare also the 'Michael Angelo: Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim of the human being.'

Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon

Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; 1

Nor knowest thou what argument

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. 10
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

20

With the sun and the sand and the wild up

1 Buonaparte was sensible to the music of bells. Hearing the bell of a parish church, he would pause, and his voice faltered as he said, 'Ah! that reminds me of the first years I spent at Brienne; I was then happy.' (Journal, 1844.)*

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

3 Compare Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply,' and 'The Tables Turned.'

Compare also a passage in Emerson's description of Thoreau, as reported by Charles J. Woodbury:'Men of note would come to talk with him.

"I don't know," he would say; "perhaps a minute would be enough for both of us."

"But I come to walk with you when you take your exercise."

Ah, walking-that is my holy time." (WOODBURY'S Talks with Emerson, p. 80.)

4 Compare the beautiful lines in Emerson's poem, The Dirge,' 1838:

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.

1 Compare Emerson's Historical Discourse at Concord, September 12, 1835,' and his Address at the Hundredth Anniversary of the Concord Fight,' especially a passage in the first of these addresses, describing the battle and its motives: These poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their native soil, acted from the simplest instincts. They did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing,' etc.

The first quatrain of the poem is now inscribed on the Battle Monument at Concord.

Emerson's grandfather, William Emerson, was minister at Concord in 1775; in his pulpit he strongly advocated resistance to the British, and when the day of the fight came, he was among the embattled farmers.' The fight took place near his own house, later known as 'The old Manse,' and the home successively of Emerson and of Hawthorne. (See Bartlett's Concord, Historic and Literary.) Let us stand our ground,' he said to the minutemen; if we die, let us die here.'

2 Containing much of the quintessence of poetry. (LONGFELLOW.)

Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine humblebee with rhymes and fancies fine. . . . The humble-bee and pine-warbler seem to me the proper objects of attention in these disastrous times. (Journal, 1837.)

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

Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers;
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wildernesses found;

Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.

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.

1837?

URIEL1

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,

60

1839.

ΤΟ

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;

20

1 From its strange presentation in a celestial parable of the story of a crisis in its author's life, this poem demands especial comment. In his essay on 'Circles' which sheds light upon it- Emerson said, 'Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.'

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

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

3 Compare the essay on Compensation: This voice of fable has in it something divine. It came from thought above the will of the writer. . . . Phidias it is not,' etc.

Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn her 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; 5
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.6

30

40

1 See Emerson's essay on 'Michael Angelo;' and the quotation from his 'Poetry and Imagination,' in note 7 in the next column.

2 Compare Emerson's essay on 'Art:' 'The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of Eschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the plays of Shakespeare, all and each were made not for sport, but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.'

3 Compare the essay on Art:' 'The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every stone.' Compare also line 32 of the poem:

Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.

4 Compare the essay on Art: Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows.'

5 It is in the soul that architecture exists, and Santa Croce and the Duomo are poor, far-behind imitations. (Journal, Florence, 1833.)

Compare the essay on Art:' And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun. . . . We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him.'

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;7
And the same power that reared the
shrine

Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost

50

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind in-
spires.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the fathers wise,
The Book itself before me lies,
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,
Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines.
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowled portrait dear;
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.

1839.

60

70

1840.