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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.)

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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,

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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.

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;

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20

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;

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.)

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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.

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 1
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity: 2

4

21

Himself from God he could not free; 3
He builded better than he knew;-
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Know'st thou what wove yon wood bird's
nest

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
Το
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.

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40

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

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.)

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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.

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7 Compare Emerson's essay on 'Poetry and Imagination,' in Letters and Social Aims: 'Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man! ... He knows that he did not make his thought, no, his thought made him, and made the sun and stars.'

men.

8 Emerson wrote to Carlyle, in April, 1840: 'You asked me if I read German. . . . I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fiftyfive, but I have read nothing else but I have not now looked even into Goethe, for a long time.'

WOODNOTES

I

I

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: 1
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 hour
very
It opened in its virgin bower,

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1 Trifles move us more than laws. Why am I more curious to know the reason why the star-form is so oft repeated in botany, or why the number five is such a favorite with Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the formation of bud? (Journal, 1835.)

50

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; 2
He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him;8
What others did at distance hear,

And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
Was shown to this philosopher,

And at his bidding seemed to come.1

3

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2 Compare Emerson's Thoreau :' His powers of

He

observation seemed to indicate additional senses. saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.' 3 Compare the Thoreau' again: He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, - nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.'

The passages about the forest seer fit Thoreau so well that the general belief that Mr. Emerson had him in mind may be accepted, but one member of the family recalls his saying that a part of this picture was drawn before he knew Thoreau's gifts and experiences. (E. W. EMERSON, in the Centenary Edition.)

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"T was one of the charmed days When the genius of God doth flow; The wind may alter twenty ways, A tempest cannot blow;

It may blow north, it still is warm; Or south, it still is clear;

Or east, it smells like a clover-farm; Or west, no thunder fear.

100

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

1 Cf. the note on Written in Naples,' p. 60.

110

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;

120

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 2

II

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace,

130

140

1840.

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,'

2 The stately white pine of New England was Emerson's favorite tree. This poem records the actual fact; nearly every day, summer or winter, when at home, he went to listen to its song. The pine grove by Walden, still standing, though injured by time and fire, was one of his most valued possessions. He questioned whether he should not name his book Forest Essays, for, he said, 'I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved.' The great pine on the ridge over Sleepy Hollow was chosen by him as his monument. When a youth, in Newton, he had written, 'Here sit Mother and I under the pine-trees, still almost as we shall lie by and by under them.'-(E. W. EMERSON, in the Centenary Edition.)

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