What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,

I followed in small copy in my acre;
For there's no rood has not a star above it;1
The cordial quality of pear or plum
Ascends as gladly in a single tree

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As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
And every atom poises for itself,
And for the whole. The gentle deities
Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty,
The miracle of generative force,
Far-reaching concords of astronomy
Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linked purpose of the whole,
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty
In the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave.
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland
walk,

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2 Prefixed to Emerson's Nature,' in the second edition (1849), ten years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

3 Compare Emerson's expression in prose of the same idea in his Works and Days': The days are ever divine, as to the first Aryans. They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.' See Holmes's comparison of this passage with the poem, as typical of the essential differences between prose and poetry, in his Life of Emerson, pp. 310-314.

Lowell calls this poemas limpid and complete as a Greek epigram.' (Life of Lowell, vol. i, p. 414.)

The Journal of 1856 shows the 'Two Rivers,' perhaps the most musical of his poems, as the thought first came to him by the river-bank and was then brought into form.

Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of the rain, but sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through thee, as thou through the land.

Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air and through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and through men and women.

'I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of the stream in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it."

I see thy brimming, eddying stream
And thy enchantment.

For thou changest every rock in thy bed
Into a gem,

All is opal and agate,

And at will thou pavest with diamonds;

Take them away from the stream

And they are poor, shreds and flints.

So is it with me to-day.'

(E. W. EMERSON, Emerson in Concord, pp. 232-233)

1 This simple and condensed figurative statement of one of the commonplaces of any idealistic philosophy, whether Hindu, Platonist, Berkeleian, or Hegelian, greatly astonished the matter-of-fact Americans of 1857, and aroused more ridicule and parody than any other of Emerson's poems. J. T. Trowbridge describes its effect as follows: 'It was more talked about and puzzled over and parodied than any other poem of sixteen lines published within my recollection. "What does it mean?" was the question readers everywhere asked; and if one had the reputation of seeing a little way into the Concord philosophy, he was liable at any time to be stopped on the street by some perplexed inquirer, who would draw him into the nearest doorway, produce a crumpled newspaper clipping from the recesses of a waistcoat pocket, and, with knitted brows, exclaim, "Here! you think you understand Emerson; now tell me what all this is about, If the red slayer think he slays," and so forth.' (Quoted in Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, p. 415.)

Somewhat wiser was the little school-girl in the story vouched for by Mr. E. W. Emerson. She was bidden by her teacher to learn some verses of Emerson. Next day she recited "Brahma." The astonished teacher asked why she chose that poem. The child answered that she tried several, but could n't understand them at all, so learned this one, "for it was so easy. It just means God everywhere."

Lowell wrote to Emerson after the poem had appeared in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly, of which

Lowell was editor: You have seen, no doubt, how the Philistines have been parodying your "Brahma," and showing how they still believe in their special god Baal, and are unable to arrive at a conception of an omnipresent Deity. . . . Let me thank you in especial for one line in Brahma," which abides with me as an intimate

When me they fly, I am the wings.

You have crammed meaning there with an hydraulic press.' It is this condensation of meaning which makes the great effectiveness of the poem, and also its difficulty, if difficulty there be.

The direct source of this particular expression of Emerson's idealism seems to be Krishna's song in the Bhagavat-Gita, which in Edwin Arnold's translation is as follows:

He who shall say, Lo! I have slain a man,"
He who shall think, Lo! I am slain !' those both
Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not alain!