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 beurré 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.
thee rhetoric.

Nature also must teach She can teach thee not only to speak truth, but to speak it truly. (Journal, July, 1840.)

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 п, 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

This poet, though he live apart, Moved by his hospitable heart, Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort, To do the honors of his court, As fits a feathered lord of land;

30

Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,

perched on the nearest bough, flew down into the snow, rested there two seconds, then up again just over my head, and busied himself on the dead bark. I whistled to him through my teeth, and (I think, in response) he began at once to whistle. I promised him crumbs, and must not go again to these woods without them. I suppose the best food to carry would be the meat of shagbarks or Castile nuts. Thoreau tells me that they are very sociable with wood-choppers, and will take crumbs from their hands. (Journal, March 3, 1862.)

Compare Holmes's characteristic comment on this poem, in his Pages from an Old Volume of Life: The moral of the poem is as heroic as the verse is exquisite; but we must not forget the non-conducting quality of fur and feathers, and remember, if we are at all delicate, to go

Wrapped in our virtue, and a good surtout, by way of additional security.'

Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,
Prints his small impress on the snow,
Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray.

Here was this atom in full breath,
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play

Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
As if to shame my weak behavior;

I greeted loud my little savior,

40

50

'You pet! what dost here? and what for?
In these woods, thy small Labrador,
At this pinch, wee San Salvador!
What fire burns in that little chest
So frolic, stout and self-possest?
Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
Why are not diamonds black and gray,
To
ape thy dare-devil array ?
And I affirm, the spacious North
Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.'

'Tis good will makes intelligence, And I began to catch the sense Of my bird's song: Live out of doors In the great woods, on prairie floors.

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I dine in the sun; when he sinks in the sea,.

For men mis-hear thy call in Spring,
As 't would accost some frivolous wing,
Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be!
And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee!
I think old Cæsar must have heard
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
And, echoed in some frosty wold,
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
And I will write our annals new,
And thank thee for a better clew,
I, who dreamed not when I came here
To find the antidote of fear,

Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paan! Veni, vidi, vici.

1862.

BOSTON HYMN

100

1862.