Leave the chaff, and take the wheat. 1837? URIEL1 It fell in the ancient periods This was the lapse of Uriel Once, among the Pleiads walking, 60 1839. 10 Seyd overheard the young gods talking; 20 1 From its strange presentation in a celestial parable of the story of a crisis in its author's life, this poem demands especial comment. In his essay on 'Circles' which sheds light upon it - Emerson said, 'Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.' The earnest young men on the eve of entering the ministry asked him to speak to them. After serious thought he went to Cambridge (July 15, 1838) to give them the good and emancipating words which had been given to him in solitude, well aware, however, that he must shock or pain the older clergy who were present. The poem, when read with the history of the Divinity School Address, and its consequences, in mind, is seen to be an account of that event generalized and sublimed, the announcement of an advance in truth, won not without pain and struggle, to hearers not yet ready, resulting in banishment to the prophet; yet the spoken word sticks like a barbed arrow, or works like a leaven. (E. W. EMERSON.) 2 It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman Cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English Church and hear the liturgy read, yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest. (Journal, August 28, 1838.) 3 Compare the essay on Compensation: This voice of fable has in it something divine. It came from thought above the will of the writer. . . . Phidias it is not,' etc. Out from the heart of nature rolled The hand that rounded Peter's dome 1 4 21 Himself from God he could not free; 3 Of leaves, and feathers from her breast? 30 40 1 See Emerson's essay on Michael Angelo;' and the quotation from his Poetry and Imagination,' in note 7 in the next column. Compare Emerson's essay on 'Art:' 'The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of Eschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the plays of Shakespeare, all and each were made not for sport, but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.' 3 Compare the essay on Art:' 'The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every stone.' Compare also line 32 of the poem: Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. Compare the essay on Art:''Our arts are happy bits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows.' It is in the soul that architecture exists, and Santa Croce and the Duomo are poor, far-behind imitations. (Journal, Florence, 1833.) Compare the essay on Art:' And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun. We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and exeouted by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him.' These temples grew as grows the grass; Bestrode the tribes that knelt within. 50 Girds with one flame the countless host, The word unto the prophet spoken 1839. 60 7C 1840. 7 Compare Emerson's essay on 'Poetry and Imagination,' in Letters and Social Aims: Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man! ... He knows that he did not make his thought, no, his thought made him, and made the sun and stars.' Emerson wrote to Carlyle, in April, 1840: 'You asked me if I read German. . . . I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fiftyfive, but I have read nothing else but I have not now looked even into Goethe, for a long time.' WOODNOTES I I WHEN the pine tosses its cones He stands in the meadows wide, - Knowledge this man prizes best 2 And such I knew, a forest seer, 10 20 30 40 1 Trifles move us more than laws. Why am I more curious to know the reason why the star-form is so oft repeated in botany, or why the number five is such a favorite with Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the formation of bud? (Journal, 1835.) 50 As if a sunbeam showed the place, And at his bidding seemed to come.1 3 60 2 Compare Emerson's Thoreau: His powers of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.' 3 Compare the Thoreau' again: He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.' The passages about the forest seer fit Thoreau so well that the general belief that Mr. Emerson had him in mind may be accepted, but one member of the family recalls his saying that a part of this picture was drawn before he knew Thoreau's gifts and experiences (E. W. EMERSON, in the Centenary Edition.) The public child of earth and sky. 'You ask,' he said, 'what guide Me through trackless thickets led, Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. I found the water's bed. The watercourses were my guide; I travelled grateful by their side, 120 They led me through the thicket damp, Was pole-star when the night was dark; For Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness. 130 140 1840. 110 The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown 1 Cf. the note on Written in Naples,' p. 60. WOODNOTES 2 II As sunbeams stream through liberal space So waved the pine-tree through my thought 'Whether is better, the gift or the donor? Come to me,' 2 The stately white pine of New England was Emerson's favorite tree. This poem records the actual fact; nearly every day, summer or winter, when at home, he went to listen to its song. The pine grove by Walden, still standing, though injured by time and fire, was one of his most valued possessions. He questioned whether he should not name his book Forest Essays, for, he said, 'I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved.' The great pine on the ridge over Sleepy Hollow was chosen by him as his monument. When a youth, in Newton, he had written, 'Here sit Mother and I under the pine-trees, still almost as we shall lie by and by under them.'-(E. W. EMERSON, in the Centenary Edition.) Quoth the pine-tree, 'I am the giver of honor. My garden is the cloven rock, And my manure the snow; And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock, In summer's scorching glow. He is great who can live by me: The rough and bearded forester The lord is the peasant that was, 30 What prizes the town and the tower? Only what the pine-tree yields; Sinew that subdued the fields; The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods Chants his hymn to hills and floods, Whom the city's poisoning spleen Made not pale, or fat, or lean; Whom the rain and the wind purgeth, Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth, In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth, In whose feet the lion rusheth Iron arms, and iron mould, That know not fear, fatigue, or cold. I give my rafters to his boat, My billets to his boiler's throat, And I will swim the ancient sea To float my child to victory, And grant to dwellers with the pine Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end. Cut a bough from my parent stem, Will swell and rise with wonted grace; 10 20 40 50 Whoso walks in solitude And inhabiteth the wood, Choosing light, wave, rock and bird, From these companions, power and grace. Clean shall he be, without, within, All ill dissolving in the light Of his triumphant piercing sight: Grave, chaste, contented, though retired, On him the light of star and moon The mountain sap, the shells, the sea, 'Heed the old oracles, Ponder my spells; Song wakes in my pinnacles When the wind swells. Soundeth the prophetic wind, The shadows shake on the rock behind, 60 70 80 90 O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells? To the open ear it sings Of tendency through endless ages,2 These lines are a sort of poetic 'Doctrine of Evolution.' Compare the 1849 motto of Emerson's 'Nature' (p. 87). It is interesting to remember Tyndall's |