Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit,
working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed
his studies at Cambridge.
working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed
his studies at Cambridge.
Emerson - Poems
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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Title: Poems
Household Edition
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Release Date: July 7, 2004 [EBook #12843]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland and PG Distributed Proofreaders
POEMS
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
_HOUSEHOLD EDITION_
1867, 1876, 1883, 1895, 1904 AND 1911
* * * * *
PREFACE
In Mr. Cabot's prefatory note to the Riverside Edition of the Poems,
published the year after Mr. Emerson's death, he said:--
"This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS and
MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876, Mr. Emerson published a selection
from his Poems, adding six new ones and omitting many[1]. Of those
omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the expressed
wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some pieces never
before published are here given in an Appendix; on various grounds.
Some of them appear to have had Mr. Emerson's approval, but to have
been withheld because they were unfinished. These it seemed best not to
suppress, now that they can never receive their completion. Others,
mostly of an early date, remained unpublished, doubtless because of
their personal and private nature. Some of these seem to have an
autobiographic interest sufficient to justify their publication. Others
again, often mere fragments, have been admitted as characteristic, or
as expressing in poetic form thoughts found in the Essays.
[1] _Selected Poems_: Little Classic Edition.
"In coming to a decision in these cases it seemed, on the whole,
preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
Time.
"As was stated in the preface to the first volume of this edition of
Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the Selected
Poems have not always been followed here, but in some cases preference
has been given to corrections made by him when he was in fuller
strength than at the time of the last revision.
"A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of 'May-Day,' in the part
representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature. "
In the preparation of the Riverside Edition of the _Poems_, Mr. Cabot
very considerately took the present editor into counsel (as
representing Mr. Emerson's family), who at that time in turn took
counsel with several persons of taste and mature judgment with regard
especially to the admission of poems hitherto unpublished and of
fragments that seemed interested and pleasing. Mr. Cabot and he were
entirely in accord with regard to the Riverside Edition. In the present
edition, the substance of the Riverside Edition has been preserved,
with hardly an exception, although some poems and fragments have been
added. None of the poems therein printed have been omitted. "The
House," which appeared in the first volume of _Poems_, and "Nemesis,"
"Una," "Love and Thought" and "Merlin's Songs," from the _May-Day_
volume, have been restored. To the few mottoes of the Essays, which Mr.
Emerson printed as "Elements" in _May-Day_, most of the others have
been added. Following Mr. Emerson's precedent of giving his brother
Edward's "Last Farewell" a place beside the poem in his memory, two
pleasing poems by Ellen Tucker, his first wife, which he published in
the _Dial_, have been placed with his own poems relating to her. The
publication in the last edition of some poems that Mr. Emerson had long
kept by him, but had never quite been ready to print, and of various
fragments on Poetry, Nature and Life, was not done without advice and
careful consideration, and then was felt to be perhaps a rash
experiment. The continued interest which has been shown in the author's
thought and methods and life--for these unfinished pieces contain much
autobiography--has made the present editor feel it justifiable to keep
almost all of these and to add a few. Their order has been slightly
altered.
A few poems from the verse-books sufficiently complete to have a title
are printed in the Appendix for the first time: "Insight," "September,"
"October," "Hymn" and "Riches. "
After much hesitation the editor has gathered in their order of time,
and printed at the end of the book, some twenty early pieces, a few of
them taken from the Appendix of the last edition and others never
printed before. They are for the most part journals in verse covering
the period of his school-teaching, study for the ministry and exercise
of that office, his sickness, bereavement, travel abroad and return to
the new life. This sad period of probation is illuminated by the
episode of his first love. Not for their poetical merit, except in
flashes, but for the light they throw on the growth of his thought and
character are they included.
In this volume the course of the Muse, as Emerson tells it, is pursued
with regard to his own poems.
I hang my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults will find.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
March 12, 1904.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
POEMS
GOOD-BYE
EACH AND ALL
THE PROBLEM
TO RHEA
THE VISIT
URIEL
THE WORLD-SOUL
THE SPHINX
ALPHONSO OF CASTILE
MITHRIDATES
TO J. W.
DESTINY
GUY
HAMATREYA
THE RHODORA
THE HUMBLE-BEE
BERRYING
THE SNOW-STORM
WOODNOTES I
WOODNOTES II
MONADNOC
FABLE
ODE
ASTRAEA
ETIENNE DE LA BOECE
COMPENSATION
FORBEARANCE
THE PARK
FORERUNNERS
SURSUM CORDA
ODE TO BEAUTY
GIVE ALL TO LOVE
TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH
TO ELLEN
TO EVA
LINES
THE VIOLET
THE AMULET
THINE EYES STILL SHINED
EROS
HERMIONE
INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE
I. THE INITIAL LOVE
II. THE DAEMONIC LOVE
III. THE CELESTIAL LOVE
THE APOLOGY
MERLIN I
MERLIN II
BACCHUS
MEROPS
THE HOUSE
SAADI
HOLIDAYS
XENOPHANES
THE DAY'S RATION
BLIGHT
MUSKETAQUID
DIRGE
THRENODY
CONCORD HYMN
MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES
MAY-DAY
THE ADIRONDACS
BRAHMA
NEMESIS
FATE
FREEDOM
ODE
BOSTON HYMN
VOLUNTARIES
LOVE AND THOUGHT
UNA
BOSTON
LETTERS
RUBIES
MERLIN'S SONG
THE TEST
SOLUTION
HYMN
NATURE I
NATURE II
THE ROMANY GIRL
DAYS
MY GARDEN
THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT
THE TITMOUSE
THE HARP
SEASHORE
SONG OF NATURE
TWO RIVERS
WALDEINSAMKEIT
TERMINUS
THE NUN'S ASPIRATION
APRIL
MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE AEOLIAN HARP
CUPIDO
THE PAST
THE LAST FAREWELL
IN MEMORIAM E. B. E.
ELEMENTS AND MOTTOES
EXPERIENCE
COMPENSATION
POLITICS
HEROISM
CHARACTER
CULTURE
FRIENDSHIP
SPIRITUAL LAWS
BEAUTY
MANNERS
ART
UNITY
WORSHIP
PRUDENCE
NATURE
THE INFORMING SPIRIT
CIRCLES
INTELLECT
GIFTS
PROMISE
CARITAS
POWER
WEALTH
ILLUSIONS
QUATRAINS AND TRANSLATIONS
QUATRAINS
TRANSLATIONS
APPENDIX
THE POET
FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT
FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE
NATURE
LIFE
THE BOHEMIAN HYMN
GRACE
INSIGHT
PAN
MONADNOC FROM AFAR
SEPTEMBER
EROS
OCTOBER
PETER'S FIELD
MUSIC
THE WALK
COSMOS
THE MIRACLE
THE WATERFALL
WALDEN
THE ENCHANTER
WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE
RICHES
PHILOSOPHER
INTELLECT
LIMITS
INSCRIPTION FOR A WELL IN MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE WAR
THE EXILE
POEMS OF YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD
THE BELL
THOUGHT
PRAYER
TO-DAY
FAME
THE SUMMONS
THE RIVER
GOOD HOPE
LINES TO ELLEN
SECURITY
A MOUNTAIN GRAVE
A LETTER
HYMN
SELF-RELIANCE
WRITTEN IN NAPLES
WRITTEN AT ROME
WEBSTER
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
INDEX OF TITLES
* * * * *
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The Emersons first appeared in the north of England, but Thomas, who
landed in Massachusetts in 1638, came from Hertfordshire. He built soon
after a house, sometimes railed the Saint's Rest, which still stands in
Ipswich on the slope of Heart-break Hill, close by Labour-in-vain Creek.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the sixth in descent from him. He was born in
Boston, in Summer Street, May 25, 1803. He was the third son of William
Emerson, the minister of the First Church in Boston, whose father,
William Emerson, had been the patriotic minister of Concord at the
outbreak of the Revolution, and died a chaplain in the army. Ruth
Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was left a widow in 1811,
with a family of five little boys. The taste of these boys was
scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard
College, and graduated there. Their mother was a person of great
sweetness, dignity, and piety, bringing up her sons wisely and well in
very straitened circumstances, and loved by them. Her husband's
stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly
invited the boys to the Old Manse, so that the woods and fields along
the Concord River were first a playground and then the background of the
dreams of their awakening imaginations.
Born in the city, Emerson's young mind first found delight in poems and
classic prose, to which his instincts led him as naturally as another
boy's would to go fishing, but his vacations in the country supplemented
these by giving him great and increasing love of nature. In his early
poems classic imagery is woven into pictures of New England woodlands.
Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse,
stimulated by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure
in declaiming to each other in barns and attics. He was so full of
thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen instinctively, to jot them
down.
At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for
essays and declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical
studies, and enjoying the classics rather in a literary than grammatical
way. And yet it is doubtful whether any man in his class used his time
to better purpose with reference to his after life, for young Emerson's
instinct led him to wide reading of works, outside the curriculum, that
spoke directly to him. He had already formed the habit of writing in a
journal, not the facts but the thoughts and inspirations of the day;
often, also, good stories or poetical quotations, and scraps of his own
verse.
On graduation from Harvard in the class of 1821, following the
traditions of his family, Emerson resolved to study to be a minister,
and meantime helped his older brother William in the support of the
family by teaching in a school for young ladies in Boston, that the
former had successfully established. The principal was twenty-one and
the assistant nineteen years of age. For school-teaching on the usual
lines Emerson was not fitted, and his youth and shyness prevented him
from imparting his best gifts to his scholars. Years later, when, in his
age, his old scholars assembled to greet him, he regretted that no hint
had been brought into the school of what at that very time "I was
writing every night in my chamber, my first thoughts on morals and the
beautiful laws of compensation, and of individual genius, which to
observe and illustrate have given sweetness to many years of my life. "
Yet many scholars remembered his presence and teaching with pleasure and
gratitude, not only in Boston, but in Chelmsford and Roxbury, for while
his younger brothers were in college it was necessary that he should
help. In these years, as through all his youth, he was loved, spurred on
in his intellectual life, and keenly criticised by his aunt, Mary Moody
Emerson, an eager and wide reader, inspired by religious zeal,
high-minded, but eccentric.
The health of the young teacher suffered from too ascetic a life, and
unmistakable danger-signals began to appear, fortunately heeded in time,
but disappointment and delay resulted, borne, however, with sense and
courage. His course at the Divinity School in Cambridge was much broken;
nevertheless, in October, 1826, he was "approbated to preach" by the
Middlesex Association of Ministers. A winter at the North at this time
threatened to prove fatal, so he was sent South by his helpful kinsman,
Rev. Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit,
working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed
his studies at Cambridge.
In 1829, Emerson was called by the Second or Old North Church in Boston
to become the associate pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, and soon after,
because of his senior's delicate health, was called on to assume the
full duty. Theological dogmas, such as the Unitarian Church of
Channing's day accepted, did not appeal to Emerson, nor did the
supernatural in religion in its ordinary acceptation interest him. The
omnipresence of spirit, the dignity of man, the daily miracle of the
universe, were what he taught, and while the older members of the
congregation may have been disquieted that he did not dwell on revealed
religion, his words reached the young people, stirred thought, and
awakened aspiration. At this time he lived with his mother and his young
wife (Ellen Tucker) in Chardon Street. For three years he ministered to
his people in Boston. Then having felt the shock of being obliged to
conform to church usage, as stated prayer when the spirit did not move,
and especially the administration of the Communion, he honestly laid his
troubles before his people, and proposed to them some modification of
this rite. While they considered his proposition, Emerson went into the
White Mountains to weigh his conflicting duties to his church and
conscience. He came down, bravely to meet the refusal of the church to
change the rite, and in a sermon preached in September, 1832, explained
his objections to it, and, because he could not honestly administer it,
resigned.
He parted from his people in all kindness, but the wrench was felt. His
wife had recently died, he was ill himself, his life seemed to others
broken up. But meantime voices from far away had reached him. He sailed
for Europe, landed in Italy, saw cities, and art, and men, but would not
stay long. Of the dead, Michael Angelo appealed chiefly to him there;
Landor among the living. He soon passed northward, making little stay in
Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the
lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had
great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He
also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called him home.
He landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined
his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations
to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to
succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated
for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing.
In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr.
Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road,
on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the autumn,
he brought his wife. Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was
their home during the rest of their lives.
The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased
in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements,
for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles
died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother.
Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind,
and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book,
"Nature," which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here,
and published in 1836. His practice during all his life in Concord was
to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for
hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to
give voice. Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held
that the light was universal.
"Ever the words of the Gods resound,
But the porches of man's ear
Seldom in this low life's round
Are unsealed that he may hear. "
But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the
oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him. Men,
too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always
that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and
office where he came. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from
the youngest and least educated visitor. The thoughts combined with the
flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main
occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in
courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang
up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to
the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent
in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch
the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were
spent in study and writing. These lectures were later severely pruned
and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays
under different names between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston,
which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well
attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years
or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or
written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He
found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and
unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially
obliged to dissent.
Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what
they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent
of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, "My strength and
my doom is to be solitary;" but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset
to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier
towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and
valued.
In 1837 Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Cambridge, The
American Scholar, which increased his growing reputation, but the
following year his Address to the Senior Class at the Divinity School
brought out, even from the friendly Unitarians, severe strictures and
warnings against its dangerous doctrines. Of this heresy Emerson said:
"I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much. " He
really strove to elevate the idea of God. Yet those who were pained or
shocked by his teachings respected Emerson. His lectures were still in
demand; he was often asked to speak by literary societies at orthodox
colleges. He preached regularly at East Lexington until 1838, but
thereafter withdrew from the ministerial office. At this time the
progressive and spiritually minded young people used to meet for
discussion and help in Boston, among them George Ripley, Cyrus Bartol,
James Freeman Clarke, Alcott, Dr. Hedge, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth
Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended,
came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which
were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last
Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of
these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither
after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came to dwell there.
Henry Thoreau, a Concord youth, greatly interested Emerson; indeed,
became for a year or two a valued inmate of his home, and helped and
instructed him in the labors of the garden and little farm, which
gradually grew to ten acres, the chief interest of which for the owner
was his trees, which he loved and tended. Emerson helped introduce his
countrymen to the teachings of Carlyle, and edited his works here, where
they found more readers than at home.
In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and remained
abroad a year, visiting France also in her troublous times. English
Traits was a result. Just before this journey he had collected and
published his poems. A later volume, called May Day, followed in 1867.
He had written verses from childhood, and to the purified expression of
poetry he, through life, eagerly aspired. He said, "I like my poems
best because it is not I who write them. " In 1866 the degree of Doctor
of Laws was conferred on him by Harvard University, and he was chosen an
Overseer. In 1867 he again gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and in 1870
and 1871 gave courses in Philosophy in the University Lectures at
Cambridge.
Emerson was not merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the
private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality
to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went
away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, and were
kindly received. They were often disappointed that they could not
harness him to their partial and transient scheme. He said, My reforms
include theirs: I must go my way; help people by my strength, not by my
weakness. But if a storm threatened, he felt bound to appear and show
his colors. Against the crying evils of his time he worked bravely in
his own way. He wrote to President Van Buren against the wrong done to
the Cherokees, dared speak against the idolized Webster, when he
deserted the cause of Freedom, constantly spoke of the iniquity of
slavery, aided with speech and money the Free State cause in Kansas,
was at Phillips's side at the antislavery meeting in 1861 broken up by
the Boston mob, urged emancipation during the war.
He enjoyed his Concord home and neighbors, served on the school
committee for years, did much for the Lyceum, and spoke on the town's
great occasions. He went to all town-meetings, oftener to listen and
admire than to speak, and always took pleasure and pride in the people.
In return he was respected and loved by them.
Emerson's house was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the incident exposure
and fatigue did him harm. His many friends insisted on rebuilding his
house and sending him abroad to get well. He went up the Nile, and
revisited England, finding old and new friends, and, on his return, was
welcomed and escorted home by the people of Concord. After this time he
was unable to write. His old age was quiet and happy among his family
and friends. He died in April, 1882.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
January, 1899.
* * * * *
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,--
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-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;--
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, 'I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky.
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
THE PROBLEM
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that 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.
Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit,
working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed
his studies at Cambridge.
In 1829, Emerson was called by the Second or Old North Church in Boston
to become the associate pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, and soon after,
because of his senior's delicate health, was called on to assume the
full duty. Theological dogmas, such as the Unitarian Church of
Channing's day accepted, did not appeal to Emerson, nor did the
supernatural in religion in its ordinary acceptation interest him. The
omnipresence of spirit, the dignity of man, the daily miracle of the
universe, were what he taught, and while the older members of the
congregation may have been disquieted that he did not dwell on revealed
religion, his words reached the young people, stirred thought, and
awakened aspiration. At this time he lived with his mother and his young
wife (Ellen Tucker) in Chardon Street. For three years he ministered to
his people in Boston. Then having felt the shock of being obliged to
conform to church usage, as stated prayer when the spirit did not move,
and especially the administration of the Communion, he honestly laid his
troubles before his people, and proposed to them some modification of
this rite. While they considered his proposition, Emerson went into the
White Mountains to weigh his conflicting duties to his church and
conscience. He came down, bravely to meet the refusal of the church to
change the rite, and in a sermon preached in September, 1832, explained
his objections to it, and, because he could not honestly administer it,
resigned.
He parted from his people in all kindness, but the wrench was felt. His
wife had recently died, he was ill himself, his life seemed to others
broken up. But meantime voices from far away had reached him. He sailed
for Europe, landed in Italy, saw cities, and art, and men, but would not
stay long. Of the dead, Michael Angelo appealed chiefly to him there;
Landor among the living. He soon passed northward, making little stay in
Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the
lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had
great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He
also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called him home.
He landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined
his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations
to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to
succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated
for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing.
In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr.
Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road,
on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the autumn,
he brought his wife. Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was
their home during the rest of their lives.
The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased
in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements,
for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles
died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother.
Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind,
and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book,
"Nature," which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here,
and published in 1836. His practice during all his life in Concord was
to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for
hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to
give voice. Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held
that the light was universal.
"Ever the words of the Gods resound,
But the porches of man's ear
Seldom in this low life's round
Are unsealed that he may hear. "
But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the
oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him. Men,
too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always
that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and
office where he came. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from
the youngest and least educated visitor. The thoughts combined with the
flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main
occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in
courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang
up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to
the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent
in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch
the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were
spent in study and writing. These lectures were later severely pruned
and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays
under different names between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston,
which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well
attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years
or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or
written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He
found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and
unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially
obliged to dissent.
Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what
they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent
of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, "My strength and
my doom is to be solitary;" but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset
to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier
towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and
valued.
In 1837 Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Cambridge, The
American Scholar, which increased his growing reputation, but the
following year his Address to the Senior Class at the Divinity School
brought out, even from the friendly Unitarians, severe strictures and
warnings against its dangerous doctrines. Of this heresy Emerson said:
"I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much. " He
really strove to elevate the idea of God. Yet those who were pained or
shocked by his teachings respected Emerson. His lectures were still in
demand; he was often asked to speak by literary societies at orthodox
colleges. He preached regularly at East Lexington until 1838, but
thereafter withdrew from the ministerial office. At this time the
progressive and spiritually minded young people used to meet for
discussion and help in Boston, among them George Ripley, Cyrus Bartol,
James Freeman Clarke, Alcott, Dr. Hedge, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth
Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended,
came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which
were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last
Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of
these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither
after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came to dwell there.
Henry Thoreau, a Concord youth, greatly interested Emerson; indeed,
became for a year or two a valued inmate of his home, and helped and
instructed him in the labors of the garden and little farm, which
gradually grew to ten acres, the chief interest of which for the owner
was his trees, which he loved and tended. Emerson helped introduce his
countrymen to the teachings of Carlyle, and edited his works here, where
they found more readers than at home.
In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and remained
abroad a year, visiting France also in her troublous times. English
Traits was a result. Just before this journey he had collected and
published his poems. A later volume, called May Day, followed in 1867.
He had written verses from childhood, and to the purified expression of
poetry he, through life, eagerly aspired. He said, "I like my poems
best because it is not I who write them. " In 1866 the degree of Doctor
of Laws was conferred on him by Harvard University, and he was chosen an
Overseer. In 1867 he again gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and in 1870
and 1871 gave courses in Philosophy in the University Lectures at
Cambridge.
Emerson was not merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the
private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality
to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went
away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, and were
kindly received. They were often disappointed that they could not
harness him to their partial and transient scheme. He said, My reforms
include theirs: I must go my way; help people by my strength, not by my
weakness. But if a storm threatened, he felt bound to appear and show
his colors. Against the crying evils of his time he worked bravely in
his own way. He wrote to President Van Buren against the wrong done to
the Cherokees, dared speak against the idolized Webster, when he
deserted the cause of Freedom, constantly spoke of the iniquity of
slavery, aided with speech and money the Free State cause in Kansas,
was at Phillips's side at the antislavery meeting in 1861 broken up by
the Boston mob, urged emancipation during the war.
He enjoyed his Concord home and neighbors, served on the school
committee for years, did much for the Lyceum, and spoke on the town's
great occasions. He went to all town-meetings, oftener to listen and
admire than to speak, and always took pleasure and pride in the people.
In return he was respected and loved by them.
Emerson's house was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the incident exposure
and fatigue did him harm. His many friends insisted on rebuilding his
house and sending him abroad to get well. He went up the Nile, and
revisited England, finding old and new friends, and, on his return, was
welcomed and escorted home by the people of Concord. After this time he
was unable to write. His old age was quiet and happy among his family
and friends. He died in April, 1882.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
January, 1899.
* * * * *
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,--
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-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;--
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, 'I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky.
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
THE PROBLEM
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that 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 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.
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 convenance,
And, though thy rede be church or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt;
Linger,--thou shalt rue the fault:
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
URIEL
It fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre 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 'tis 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 Daemon 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;
Daedalian 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, unashamed,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.
"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence.
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,--
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.
"The babe by its mother
Lies bathed in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted,--
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.
"But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
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.
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Title: Poems
Household Edition
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Release Date: July 7, 2004 [EBook #12843]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***
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POEMS
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
_HOUSEHOLD EDITION_
1867, 1876, 1883, 1895, 1904 AND 1911
* * * * *
PREFACE
In Mr. Cabot's prefatory note to the Riverside Edition of the Poems,
published the year after Mr. Emerson's death, he said:--
"This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS and
MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876, Mr. Emerson published a selection
from his Poems, adding six new ones and omitting many[1]. Of those
omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the expressed
wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some pieces never
before published are here given in an Appendix; on various grounds.
Some of them appear to have had Mr. Emerson's approval, but to have
been withheld because they were unfinished. These it seemed best not to
suppress, now that they can never receive their completion. Others,
mostly of an early date, remained unpublished, doubtless because of
their personal and private nature. Some of these seem to have an
autobiographic interest sufficient to justify their publication. Others
again, often mere fragments, have been admitted as characteristic, or
as expressing in poetic form thoughts found in the Essays.
[1] _Selected Poems_: Little Classic Edition.
"In coming to a decision in these cases it seemed, on the whole,
preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
Time.
"As was stated in the preface to the first volume of this edition of
Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the Selected
Poems have not always been followed here, but in some cases preference
has been given to corrections made by him when he was in fuller
strength than at the time of the last revision.
"A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of 'May-Day,' in the part
representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature. "
In the preparation of the Riverside Edition of the _Poems_, Mr. Cabot
very considerately took the present editor into counsel (as
representing Mr. Emerson's family), who at that time in turn took
counsel with several persons of taste and mature judgment with regard
especially to the admission of poems hitherto unpublished and of
fragments that seemed interested and pleasing. Mr. Cabot and he were
entirely in accord with regard to the Riverside Edition. In the present
edition, the substance of the Riverside Edition has been preserved,
with hardly an exception, although some poems and fragments have been
added. None of the poems therein printed have been omitted. "The
House," which appeared in the first volume of _Poems_, and "Nemesis,"
"Una," "Love and Thought" and "Merlin's Songs," from the _May-Day_
volume, have been restored. To the few mottoes of the Essays, which Mr.
Emerson printed as "Elements" in _May-Day_, most of the others have
been added. Following Mr. Emerson's precedent of giving his brother
Edward's "Last Farewell" a place beside the poem in his memory, two
pleasing poems by Ellen Tucker, his first wife, which he published in
the _Dial_, have been placed with his own poems relating to her. The
publication in the last edition of some poems that Mr. Emerson had long
kept by him, but had never quite been ready to print, and of various
fragments on Poetry, Nature and Life, was not done without advice and
careful consideration, and then was felt to be perhaps a rash
experiment. The continued interest which has been shown in the author's
thought and methods and life--for these unfinished pieces contain much
autobiography--has made the present editor feel it justifiable to keep
almost all of these and to add a few. Their order has been slightly
altered.
A few poems from the verse-books sufficiently complete to have a title
are printed in the Appendix for the first time: "Insight," "September,"
"October," "Hymn" and "Riches. "
After much hesitation the editor has gathered in their order of time,
and printed at the end of the book, some twenty early pieces, a few of
them taken from the Appendix of the last edition and others never
printed before. They are for the most part journals in verse covering
the period of his school-teaching, study for the ministry and exercise
of that office, his sickness, bereavement, travel abroad and return to
the new life. This sad period of probation is illuminated by the
episode of his first love. Not for their poetical merit, except in
flashes, but for the light they throw on the growth of his thought and
character are they included.
In this volume the course of the Muse, as Emerson tells it, is pursued
with regard to his own poems.
I hang my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults will find.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
March 12, 1904.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
POEMS
GOOD-BYE
EACH AND ALL
THE PROBLEM
TO RHEA
THE VISIT
URIEL
THE WORLD-SOUL
THE SPHINX
ALPHONSO OF CASTILE
MITHRIDATES
TO J. W.
DESTINY
GUY
HAMATREYA
THE RHODORA
THE HUMBLE-BEE
BERRYING
THE SNOW-STORM
WOODNOTES I
WOODNOTES II
MONADNOC
FABLE
ODE
ASTRAEA
ETIENNE DE LA BOECE
COMPENSATION
FORBEARANCE
THE PARK
FORERUNNERS
SURSUM CORDA
ODE TO BEAUTY
GIVE ALL TO LOVE
TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH
TO ELLEN
TO EVA
LINES
THE VIOLET
THE AMULET
THINE EYES STILL SHINED
EROS
HERMIONE
INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE
I. THE INITIAL LOVE
II. THE DAEMONIC LOVE
III. THE CELESTIAL LOVE
THE APOLOGY
MERLIN I
MERLIN II
BACCHUS
MEROPS
THE HOUSE
SAADI
HOLIDAYS
XENOPHANES
THE DAY'S RATION
BLIGHT
MUSKETAQUID
DIRGE
THRENODY
CONCORD HYMN
MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES
MAY-DAY
THE ADIRONDACS
BRAHMA
NEMESIS
FATE
FREEDOM
ODE
BOSTON HYMN
VOLUNTARIES
LOVE AND THOUGHT
UNA
BOSTON
LETTERS
RUBIES
MERLIN'S SONG
THE TEST
SOLUTION
HYMN
NATURE I
NATURE II
THE ROMANY GIRL
DAYS
MY GARDEN
THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT
THE TITMOUSE
THE HARP
SEASHORE
SONG OF NATURE
TWO RIVERS
WALDEINSAMKEIT
TERMINUS
THE NUN'S ASPIRATION
APRIL
MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE AEOLIAN HARP
CUPIDO
THE PAST
THE LAST FAREWELL
IN MEMORIAM E. B. E.
ELEMENTS AND MOTTOES
EXPERIENCE
COMPENSATION
POLITICS
HEROISM
CHARACTER
CULTURE
FRIENDSHIP
SPIRITUAL LAWS
BEAUTY
MANNERS
ART
UNITY
WORSHIP
PRUDENCE
NATURE
THE INFORMING SPIRIT
CIRCLES
INTELLECT
GIFTS
PROMISE
CARITAS
POWER
WEALTH
ILLUSIONS
QUATRAINS AND TRANSLATIONS
QUATRAINS
TRANSLATIONS
APPENDIX
THE POET
FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT
FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE
NATURE
LIFE
THE BOHEMIAN HYMN
GRACE
INSIGHT
PAN
MONADNOC FROM AFAR
SEPTEMBER
EROS
OCTOBER
PETER'S FIELD
MUSIC
THE WALK
COSMOS
THE MIRACLE
THE WATERFALL
WALDEN
THE ENCHANTER
WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE
RICHES
PHILOSOPHER
INTELLECT
LIMITS
INSCRIPTION FOR A WELL IN MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE WAR
THE EXILE
POEMS OF YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD
THE BELL
THOUGHT
PRAYER
TO-DAY
FAME
THE SUMMONS
THE RIVER
GOOD HOPE
LINES TO ELLEN
SECURITY
A MOUNTAIN GRAVE
A LETTER
HYMN
SELF-RELIANCE
WRITTEN IN NAPLES
WRITTEN AT ROME
WEBSTER
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
INDEX OF TITLES
* * * * *
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The Emersons first appeared in the north of England, but Thomas, who
landed in Massachusetts in 1638, came from Hertfordshire. He built soon
after a house, sometimes railed the Saint's Rest, which still stands in
Ipswich on the slope of Heart-break Hill, close by Labour-in-vain Creek.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the sixth in descent from him. He was born in
Boston, in Summer Street, May 25, 1803. He was the third son of William
Emerson, the minister of the First Church in Boston, whose father,
William Emerson, had been the patriotic minister of Concord at the
outbreak of the Revolution, and died a chaplain in the army. Ruth
Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was left a widow in 1811,
with a family of five little boys. The taste of these boys was
scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard
College, and graduated there. Their mother was a person of great
sweetness, dignity, and piety, bringing up her sons wisely and well in
very straitened circumstances, and loved by them. Her husband's
stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly
invited the boys to the Old Manse, so that the woods and fields along
the Concord River were first a playground and then the background of the
dreams of their awakening imaginations.
Born in the city, Emerson's young mind first found delight in poems and
classic prose, to which his instincts led him as naturally as another
boy's would to go fishing, but his vacations in the country supplemented
these by giving him great and increasing love of nature. In his early
poems classic imagery is woven into pictures of New England woodlands.
Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse,
stimulated by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure
in declaiming to each other in barns and attics. He was so full of
thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen instinctively, to jot them
down.
At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for
essays and declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical
studies, and enjoying the classics rather in a literary than grammatical
way. And yet it is doubtful whether any man in his class used his time
to better purpose with reference to his after life, for young Emerson's
instinct led him to wide reading of works, outside the curriculum, that
spoke directly to him. He had already formed the habit of writing in a
journal, not the facts but the thoughts and inspirations of the day;
often, also, good stories or poetical quotations, and scraps of his own
verse.
On graduation from Harvard in the class of 1821, following the
traditions of his family, Emerson resolved to study to be a minister,
and meantime helped his older brother William in the support of the
family by teaching in a school for young ladies in Boston, that the
former had successfully established. The principal was twenty-one and
the assistant nineteen years of age. For school-teaching on the usual
lines Emerson was not fitted, and his youth and shyness prevented him
from imparting his best gifts to his scholars. Years later, when, in his
age, his old scholars assembled to greet him, he regretted that no hint
had been brought into the school of what at that very time "I was
writing every night in my chamber, my first thoughts on morals and the
beautiful laws of compensation, and of individual genius, which to
observe and illustrate have given sweetness to many years of my life. "
Yet many scholars remembered his presence and teaching with pleasure and
gratitude, not only in Boston, but in Chelmsford and Roxbury, for while
his younger brothers were in college it was necessary that he should
help. In these years, as through all his youth, he was loved, spurred on
in his intellectual life, and keenly criticised by his aunt, Mary Moody
Emerson, an eager and wide reader, inspired by religious zeal,
high-minded, but eccentric.
The health of the young teacher suffered from too ascetic a life, and
unmistakable danger-signals began to appear, fortunately heeded in time,
but disappointment and delay resulted, borne, however, with sense and
courage. His course at the Divinity School in Cambridge was much broken;
nevertheless, in October, 1826, he was "approbated to preach" by the
Middlesex Association of Ministers. A winter at the North at this time
threatened to prove fatal, so he was sent South by his helpful kinsman,
Rev. Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit,
working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed
his studies at Cambridge.
In 1829, Emerson was called by the Second or Old North Church in Boston
to become the associate pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, and soon after,
because of his senior's delicate health, was called on to assume the
full duty. Theological dogmas, such as the Unitarian Church of
Channing's day accepted, did not appeal to Emerson, nor did the
supernatural in religion in its ordinary acceptation interest him. The
omnipresence of spirit, the dignity of man, the daily miracle of the
universe, were what he taught, and while the older members of the
congregation may have been disquieted that he did not dwell on revealed
religion, his words reached the young people, stirred thought, and
awakened aspiration. At this time he lived with his mother and his young
wife (Ellen Tucker) in Chardon Street. For three years he ministered to
his people in Boston. Then having felt the shock of being obliged to
conform to church usage, as stated prayer when the spirit did not move,
and especially the administration of the Communion, he honestly laid his
troubles before his people, and proposed to them some modification of
this rite. While they considered his proposition, Emerson went into the
White Mountains to weigh his conflicting duties to his church and
conscience. He came down, bravely to meet the refusal of the church to
change the rite, and in a sermon preached in September, 1832, explained
his objections to it, and, because he could not honestly administer it,
resigned.
He parted from his people in all kindness, but the wrench was felt. His
wife had recently died, he was ill himself, his life seemed to others
broken up. But meantime voices from far away had reached him. He sailed
for Europe, landed in Italy, saw cities, and art, and men, but would not
stay long. Of the dead, Michael Angelo appealed chiefly to him there;
Landor among the living. He soon passed northward, making little stay in
Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the
lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had
great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He
also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called him home.
He landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined
his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations
to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to
succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated
for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing.
In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr.
Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road,
on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the autumn,
he brought his wife. Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was
their home during the rest of their lives.
The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased
in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements,
for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles
died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother.
Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind,
and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book,
"Nature," which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here,
and published in 1836. His practice during all his life in Concord was
to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for
hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to
give voice. Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held
that the light was universal.
"Ever the words of the Gods resound,
But the porches of man's ear
Seldom in this low life's round
Are unsealed that he may hear. "
But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the
oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him. Men,
too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always
that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and
office where he came. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from
the youngest and least educated visitor. The thoughts combined with the
flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main
occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in
courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang
up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to
the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent
in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch
the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were
spent in study and writing. These lectures were later severely pruned
and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays
under different names between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston,
which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well
attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years
or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or
written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He
found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and
unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially
obliged to dissent.
Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what
they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent
of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, "My strength and
my doom is to be solitary;" but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset
to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier
towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and
valued.
In 1837 Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Cambridge, The
American Scholar, which increased his growing reputation, but the
following year his Address to the Senior Class at the Divinity School
brought out, even from the friendly Unitarians, severe strictures and
warnings against its dangerous doctrines. Of this heresy Emerson said:
"I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much. " He
really strove to elevate the idea of God. Yet those who were pained or
shocked by his teachings respected Emerson. His lectures were still in
demand; he was often asked to speak by literary societies at orthodox
colleges. He preached regularly at East Lexington until 1838, but
thereafter withdrew from the ministerial office. At this time the
progressive and spiritually minded young people used to meet for
discussion and help in Boston, among them George Ripley, Cyrus Bartol,
James Freeman Clarke, Alcott, Dr. Hedge, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth
Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended,
came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which
were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last
Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of
these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither
after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came to dwell there.
Henry Thoreau, a Concord youth, greatly interested Emerson; indeed,
became for a year or two a valued inmate of his home, and helped and
instructed him in the labors of the garden and little farm, which
gradually grew to ten acres, the chief interest of which for the owner
was his trees, which he loved and tended. Emerson helped introduce his
countrymen to the teachings of Carlyle, and edited his works here, where
they found more readers than at home.
In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and remained
abroad a year, visiting France also in her troublous times. English
Traits was a result. Just before this journey he had collected and
published his poems. A later volume, called May Day, followed in 1867.
He had written verses from childhood, and to the purified expression of
poetry he, through life, eagerly aspired. He said, "I like my poems
best because it is not I who write them. " In 1866 the degree of Doctor
of Laws was conferred on him by Harvard University, and he was chosen an
Overseer. In 1867 he again gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and in 1870
and 1871 gave courses in Philosophy in the University Lectures at
Cambridge.
Emerson was not merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the
private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality
to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went
away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, and were
kindly received. They were often disappointed that they could not
harness him to their partial and transient scheme. He said, My reforms
include theirs: I must go my way; help people by my strength, not by my
weakness. But if a storm threatened, he felt bound to appear and show
his colors. Against the crying evils of his time he worked bravely in
his own way. He wrote to President Van Buren against the wrong done to
the Cherokees, dared speak against the idolized Webster, when he
deserted the cause of Freedom, constantly spoke of the iniquity of
slavery, aided with speech and money the Free State cause in Kansas,
was at Phillips's side at the antislavery meeting in 1861 broken up by
the Boston mob, urged emancipation during the war.
He enjoyed his Concord home and neighbors, served on the school
committee for years, did much for the Lyceum, and spoke on the town's
great occasions. He went to all town-meetings, oftener to listen and
admire than to speak, and always took pleasure and pride in the people.
In return he was respected and loved by them.
Emerson's house was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the incident exposure
and fatigue did him harm. His many friends insisted on rebuilding his
house and sending him abroad to get well. He went up the Nile, and
revisited England, finding old and new friends, and, on his return, was
welcomed and escorted home by the people of Concord. After this time he
was unable to write. His old age was quiet and happy among his family
and friends. He died in April, 1882.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
January, 1899.
* * * * *
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,--
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-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;--
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, 'I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky.
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
THE PROBLEM
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that 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.
Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit,
working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed
his studies at Cambridge.
In 1829, Emerson was called by the Second or Old North Church in Boston
to become the associate pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, and soon after,
because of his senior's delicate health, was called on to assume the
full duty. Theological dogmas, such as the Unitarian Church of
Channing's day accepted, did not appeal to Emerson, nor did the
supernatural in religion in its ordinary acceptation interest him. The
omnipresence of spirit, the dignity of man, the daily miracle of the
universe, were what he taught, and while the older members of the
congregation may have been disquieted that he did not dwell on revealed
religion, his words reached the young people, stirred thought, and
awakened aspiration. At this time he lived with his mother and his young
wife (Ellen Tucker) in Chardon Street. For three years he ministered to
his people in Boston. Then having felt the shock of being obliged to
conform to church usage, as stated prayer when the spirit did not move,
and especially the administration of the Communion, he honestly laid his
troubles before his people, and proposed to them some modification of
this rite. While they considered his proposition, Emerson went into the
White Mountains to weigh his conflicting duties to his church and
conscience. He came down, bravely to meet the refusal of the church to
change the rite, and in a sermon preached in September, 1832, explained
his objections to it, and, because he could not honestly administer it,
resigned.
He parted from his people in all kindness, but the wrench was felt. His
wife had recently died, he was ill himself, his life seemed to others
broken up. But meantime voices from far away had reached him. He sailed
for Europe, landed in Italy, saw cities, and art, and men, but would not
stay long. Of the dead, Michael Angelo appealed chiefly to him there;
Landor among the living. He soon passed northward, making little stay in
Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the
lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had
great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He
also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called him home.
He landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined
his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations
to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to
succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated
for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing.
In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr.
Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road,
on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the autumn,
he brought his wife. Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was
their home during the rest of their lives.
The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased
in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements,
for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles
died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother.
Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind,
and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book,
"Nature," which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here,
and published in 1836. His practice during all his life in Concord was
to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for
hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to
give voice. Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held
that the light was universal.
"Ever the words of the Gods resound,
But the porches of man's ear
Seldom in this low life's round
Are unsealed that he may hear. "
But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the
oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him. Men,
too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always
that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and
office where he came. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from
the youngest and least educated visitor. The thoughts combined with the
flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main
occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in
courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang
up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to
the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent
in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch
the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were
spent in study and writing. These lectures were later severely pruned
and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays
under different names between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston,
which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well
attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years
or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or
written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He
found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and
unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially
obliged to dissent.
Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what
they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent
of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, "My strength and
my doom is to be solitary;" but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset
to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier
towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and
valued.
In 1837 Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Cambridge, The
American Scholar, which increased his growing reputation, but the
following year his Address to the Senior Class at the Divinity School
brought out, even from the friendly Unitarians, severe strictures and
warnings against its dangerous doctrines. Of this heresy Emerson said:
"I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much. " He
really strove to elevate the idea of God. Yet those who were pained or
shocked by his teachings respected Emerson. His lectures were still in
demand; he was often asked to speak by literary societies at orthodox
colleges. He preached regularly at East Lexington until 1838, but
thereafter withdrew from the ministerial office. At this time the
progressive and spiritually minded young people used to meet for
discussion and help in Boston, among them George Ripley, Cyrus Bartol,
James Freeman Clarke, Alcott, Dr. Hedge, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth
Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended,
came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which
were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last
Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of
these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither
after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came to dwell there.
Henry Thoreau, a Concord youth, greatly interested Emerson; indeed,
became for a year or two a valued inmate of his home, and helped and
instructed him in the labors of the garden and little farm, which
gradually grew to ten acres, the chief interest of which for the owner
was his trees, which he loved and tended. Emerson helped introduce his
countrymen to the teachings of Carlyle, and edited his works here, where
they found more readers than at home.
In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and remained
abroad a year, visiting France also in her troublous times. English
Traits was a result. Just before this journey he had collected and
published his poems. A later volume, called May Day, followed in 1867.
He had written verses from childhood, and to the purified expression of
poetry he, through life, eagerly aspired. He said, "I like my poems
best because it is not I who write them. " In 1866 the degree of Doctor
of Laws was conferred on him by Harvard University, and he was chosen an
Overseer. In 1867 he again gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and in 1870
and 1871 gave courses in Philosophy in the University Lectures at
Cambridge.
Emerson was not merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the
private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality
to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went
away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, and were
kindly received. They were often disappointed that they could not
harness him to their partial and transient scheme. He said, My reforms
include theirs: I must go my way; help people by my strength, not by my
weakness. But if a storm threatened, he felt bound to appear and show
his colors. Against the crying evils of his time he worked bravely in
his own way. He wrote to President Van Buren against the wrong done to
the Cherokees, dared speak against the idolized Webster, when he
deserted the cause of Freedom, constantly spoke of the iniquity of
slavery, aided with speech and money the Free State cause in Kansas,
was at Phillips's side at the antislavery meeting in 1861 broken up by
the Boston mob, urged emancipation during the war.
He enjoyed his Concord home and neighbors, served on the school
committee for years, did much for the Lyceum, and spoke on the town's
great occasions. He went to all town-meetings, oftener to listen and
admire than to speak, and always took pleasure and pride in the people.
In return he was respected and loved by them.
Emerson's house was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the incident exposure
and fatigue did him harm. His many friends insisted on rebuilding his
house and sending him abroad to get well. He went up the Nile, and
revisited England, finding old and new friends, and, on his return, was
welcomed and escorted home by the people of Concord. After this time he
was unable to write. His old age was quiet and happy among his family
and friends. He died in April, 1882.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
January, 1899.
* * * * *
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,--
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-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;--
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, 'I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky.
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
THE PROBLEM
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that 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 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.
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 convenance,
And, though thy rede be church or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt;
Linger,--thou shalt rue the fault:
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
URIEL
It fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre 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 'tis 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 Daemon 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;
Daedalian 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, unashamed,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.
"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence.
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,--
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.
"The babe by its mother
Lies bathed in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted,--
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.
"But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
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.
