Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous.

1837?

URIEL1

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,

60

1839.

10

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;

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 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 1
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity: 2

4

21

Himself from God he could not free; 3
He builded better than he knew;-
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Know'st thou what wove yon wood bird's
nest

Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn her 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;6
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.6

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;
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

50

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind in-
spires.

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.

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
To the song of its waterfall tones,
Who speeds to the woodland walks ?
To birds and trees who talks?
Cæsar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side, -
Not hook nor line hath he;

He stands in the meadows wide, -
Nor gun nor scythe to see.
Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.
In the wood he travels glad,
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.

Knowledge this man prizes best
Seems fantastic to the rest:
Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,
Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds,
Boughs on which the wild bees settle,
Tints that spot the violet's petal,
Why Nature loves the number five,
And why the star-form she repeats: 1
Lover of all things alive,
Wonderer at all he meets,
Wonderer chiefly at himself,
Who can tell him what he is?
Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities?

2

And such I knew, a forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year,
Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,
A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart;
It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks,
In damp fields known to bird and fox,
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,

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 tell its long-descended race.
It seemed as if the breezes brought him,
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him;
As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in far fields, the orchis grew.
Many haps fall in the field
Seldom seen by wishful eyes,
But all her shows did Nature yield,
To please and win this pilgrim wise.
He saw the partridge drum in the woods; 2
He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him;8
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
Was shown to this philosopher,

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,
Or through their channel dry;

120

They led me through the thicket damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp,
Through beds of granite cut my road,
And their resistless friendship showed.
The falling waters led me,
The foodful waters fed me,
And brought me to the lowest land,
Unerring to the ocean sand.
The moss upon the forest bark

Was pole-star when the night was dark;
The purple berries in the wood
Supplied me necessary food;

For Nature ever faithful is

To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
"T will be time enough to die;
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.'

130

140

1840.

110

The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown
Composed the network of his throne;
The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,
Was burnished to a floor of glass,
Painted with shadows green and proud
Of the tree and of the cloud.
He was the heart of all the scene;
On him the sun looked more serene;
To hill and cloud his face was known,
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy

1 Cf. the note on Written in Naples,' p. 60.

WOODNOTES 2

II

As sunbeams stream through liberal space
And nothing jostle or displace,

So waved the pine-tree through my thought
And fanned the dreams it never brought.

'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
Is better than the lord;
God fills the scrip and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.

The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be;
The lord is hay, the peasant, grass,
One dry, and one the living tree.
Who liveth by the ragged pine
Foundeth a heroic line;
Who liveth in the palace hall
Waneth fast and spendeth all.1
He goes to my savage haunts,
With his chariot and his care;
My twilight realm he disenchants,
And finds his prison there.

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
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,

Unnerves his strength, invites his end.

Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem

Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.

10

20

40

50

Whoso walks in solitude

And inhabiteth the wood,

Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass,

From these companions, power and grace.

Clean shall he be, without, within,
From the old adhering sin,

All ill dissolving in the light

Of his triumphant piercing sight:
Not vain, sour, nor frivolous;
Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous;

Grave, chaste, contented, though retired,
And of all other men desired.

On him the light of star and moon
Shall fall with purer radiance down;
All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;

The mountain sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones, his helpers be;
He shall meet the speeding year,
Without wailing, without fear;
He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;
He shall be happy whilst he wooes,
Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse.
But if with gold she bind her hair,
And deck her breast with diamond,
Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,
Though thou lie alone on the ground.

'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?
O wise man! hear'st thou the least part?
"T is the chronicle of art.

To the open ear it sings
Sweet the genesis of things,

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