He to his wants can well suffice:
Asks not of others soft consents,
Nor kind occasion without eyes;
Nor plots to ope or bolt a gate,
Nor heeds Condition's iron walls, -
Where he goes, goes before him Fate;
Whom he uniteth, God installs;
Instant and perfect his access

To the dear object of his thought,
Though foes and land and seas between
Himself and his love intervene.

TELL men what they knew before; Paint the prospect from their door.

HIM strong Genius urged to roam, Stronger Custom brought him home.

THAT each should in his house abide, Therefore was the world so wide.1

YES, Sometimes to the sorrow-stricken
Shall his own sorrow seem impertinent,
A thing that takes no more root in the world
Than doth the traveller's shadow on the
rock.

REX

THE bard and mystic held me for their own,
I filled the dream of sad, poetic maids,
I took the friendly noble by the hand,
I was the trustee of the hand-cart man,
The brother of the fisher, porter, swain,
And these from the crowd's edge well
pleased beheld

The service done to me as done to them.

SHUN passion, fold the hands of thrift, Sit still, and Truth is near: Suddenly it will uplift

Your eyelids to the sphere:

1 A common thought with Emerson (see 'Written in Naples,' Written at Rome,' The Day's Ration,' and the essaySelf-Reliance '), but, as here expressed, evidently meant for a direct answer to the last words of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, so often quoted by Carlyle:

To give space for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide.

Wait a little, you shall see

The portraiture of things to be.

Oн, what is Heaven but the fellowship Of minds that each can stand against the world

By its own meek and incorruptible will?

ON bravely through the sunshine and the

showers!

Time hath his work to do and we have ours. 1830-60. 1883.

FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND
THE POETIC GIFT

THE gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine;

And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey.

THE sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose, his faith was earlier up;
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye,
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of Time.2

He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:

His action won such reverence sweet
As hid all measure of the feat.

THE Dervish whined to Said,

Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.
Beware the fire that Eblis burned.'
But Saadi coldly thus returned,
'Once with manlike love and fear
I thee for an hour my ear,
gave

I kept the sun and stars at bay,
And love, for words thy tongue could say.
I cannot sell my heaven again
For all that rattles in thy brain.'

The first six lines were originally written as part of 'The Poet,' but were first printed, with the four following, as motto to the essay on Character'.

To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.2

1 Compare Emerson's Address at the Hundredth Anniversary of the Concord Fight: The thunderbolt falls on an inch of ground, but the light of it fills the horizon.'

2 Compare the essay on Beauty,' in The Conduct of Life: This art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is a proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.'

BOTANIST

Go thou to thy learned task,
I stay with the flowers of Spring:
Do thou of the Ages ask
What me the Hours will bring.

GARDENER

TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,

Expound the Vedas of the violet, Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,

See the plum redden, and the beurre stoop. &

NORTHMAN

THE gale that wrecked you on the sand,
It helped my rowers to row;

The storm is my best galley hand
And drives me where I go.

FROM ALCUIN

THE sea is the road of the bold,
Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,
The pit wherein the streams are rolled
And fountain of the rains.

EXCELSIOR

OVER his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,

And over the moon were the starry studs That drop from the angels' shoon. (May 1, 1838.)

BORROWING

(FROM THE FRENCH)

SOME of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

NATURE

BOON Nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold,

And trains us on to slight the new, as if it were the old:

Go to the forest, if God has made thee a poet, and make thy life clean and fragrant as thy office.

True Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet.
Expound the Vedas in the violet.

Thy love must be thy art... Nature also must teach thee rhetoric. She can teach thee not only to speak truth, but to speak it truly. (Journal, July, 1840.j

TEST of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

1 This quatrain was chosen by James Russell Lowell to be inscribed on the simple monument at Soldiers' Field in Cambridge, which was given as an athletic ground by Col. Henry Lee Higginson, in memory of his classmates and friends, Charles Russell Lowell, James Jackson Lowell, Robert Gould Shaw, James Savage, Jr., Edward Barry Dalton, and Stephen George Perkins, who died in the war or soon after.

Compare Emerson's two addresses referred to in the note on Voluntaries.' The best commentary, however, is Colonel Higginson's story of the lives and deaths of his comrades, in his addresses on the presentation of Soldiers' Field, 1890, and on Robert Gould Shaw, 1897 (Four Addresses, Boston, 1902.)

2 A famous singer of Florence. Dante tells of meeting him (Purgatory, Canto II, lines 76-133) and begging him to sing: If a new law take not from thee memory or practice of the song of love which was wont to quiet all my longings, may it please thee therewith somewhat to comfort my soul.' (Norton's Translation.) Casella then sings Dante's Amor che nella mente mi ragiona (Love, that within my mind discourses with me'), so sweetly, that the sweetness still within me sounds. My Master, and I, and the folk who were with

Touches a cheek with colors of romance,
And crowds a history into a glance;

1 Compare the essay on Plato:' Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth and cover his eyes whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named. . . He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate . . . that this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable.'

2 Compare Bryant's 'Flood of Years.'

3 In 1883 this poem was printed among the 'Fragments on Nature and Life,' in an Appendix. It first appears as a separate poem, with title, in the Centenary Edition of 1904.

The snow still lies even with the tops of the walls across the Walden road, and, this afternoon, I waded through the woods to my grove. A chickadee came out to greet me, flew about within reach of my hands,