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, Hot midsummer's petted crone, Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure, Aught unsavory or unclean Grass with green flag half-mast high, Wiser far than human seer, Leave the chaff, and take the wheat. 1837 ? URIEL1 It fell in the ancient periods This was the lapse of Uriel Once, among the Pleiads walking, 60 1839. Seyd overheard the young gods talking; 10 20 In vain produced, all rays return; 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.) 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 4 21 Himself from God he could not free; 3 Of leaves, and feathers from her breast? O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, 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. 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.) Girds with one flame the countless host, The word unto the prophet spoken 1839. 60 70 1840. 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 He stands in the meadows wide, - Pondering shadows, colors, clouds, 2 And such I knew, a forest seer, 10 20 30 40 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 guessed within the thicket's gloom, And at his bidding seemed to come.1 3 60 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.) "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, 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; 120 They led me through the thicket damp, And brought me to the lowest land, Was pole-star when the night was dark; For Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness. 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 '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.) |