GOOD-BYE1

GOOD-BYE, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,

Long I've been tossed like the driven foam;
But now, proud world! I'm going home.

Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;

To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go, and those who come;
Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home.

I am going to my own hearth-stone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone,
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

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1 In sending these verses to Rev. James Freeman Clarke, in 1839, Emerson said: They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me.

This corner of Roxbury' is now a part of Franklin Park. It is called Schoolmaster's Hill,' and one of its rocks bears the inscription: Near this rock, A. D. 1823-1825, was the house of Schoolmaster Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here some of his earlier poems were written; among them that from which the following lines are taken....' There follows the last stanza of this poem.

This poem should be compared with Wordsworth's Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree,' both because the two poems are similar in thought and mood, and because each marks the same point of development in its author's thought and powers of expression. This was written when Emerson was twenty-four years old, and Wordsworth's when he was twenty-five.

1 The first collected edition of Emerson's Poems, which bears the date 1847, and is listed under that year in the bibliographies, actually appeared in 1846.

2 Remember the Sunday morning in Naples when I said, 'This moment is the truest vision, the best spectacle I have seen amid all the wonders; and this moment, this vision, I might have had in my own closet in Boston.' (EMERSON's Journal, 1834.)

Compare the essay on Self-Reliance: '

Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.'

Compare also The Day's Ration,' and Whittier's 'The Last Walk in Autumn.'

(The illustrative passages from Emerson's Journal given in these notes, and many of the parallel passages from Emerson's essays, are quoted by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his exceedingly valuable notes to the Centenary Edition' of the Poems, or in his Emerson in Concord.)

Not less than was the first; the all-wise God
Gilds a few points in every several life,
And as each flower upon the fresh hillside,
And every colored petal of each flower,
Is sketched and dyed, each with a new de-
sign,

Its spot of purple, and its streak of brown, So each man's life shall have its proper lights,

And a few joys, a few peculiar charms,
For him round-in the melancholy hours
And reconcile him to the common days.
Not many men see beauty in the fogs
Of close low pine-woods in a river town;
Yet unto me not morn's magnificence,
Nor the red rainbow of a summer eve,
Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls
Of rich men blazing hospitable light,
Nor wit, nor eloquence,

song

no, nor even the

Of any woman that is now alive,
Hath such a soul, such divine influence,
Such resurrection of the happy past,
As is to me when I behold the morn
Ope in such low moist roadside, and beneath
Peep the blue violets out of the black
loam,

Pathetic silent poets that sing to me
Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife.3

1833.

WRITTEN AT ROME1

1883.

ALONE in Rome. Why, Rome is lonely

too;

Besides, you need not be alone; the soul
Shall have society of its own rank.
Be great, be true, and all the Scipios,
The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome,
Shall flock to you and tarry by your side,
And comfort with their high company.
you
Virtue alone is sweet society,

It keeps the key to all heroic hearts,
And opens you a welcome in them all.
You must be like them if you desire them,
Scorn trifles and embrace a better aim
Than wine or sleep or praise;

Hunt knowledge as the lover wooes a maid,

3 Emerson's first wife, the 'Ellen' of the previous poems, died of consumption after they had been married only a year and a half.

Don't you see you are the Universe to yourself? You carry your fortunes in your own hand. Change of place won't mend the matter. You will weave the same web at Pernambuco as at Boston, if you have only learned how to make one texture. (Journal, Divinity Hall, Cambridge, November, 1827.)

For living brows; ill fits them to receive:
And yet, if virtue abrogate the law,
One portrait-fact or fancy-we may
draw;

A form which Nature cast in the heroic mould

Of them who rescued liberty of old;
He, when the rising storm of party roared,
Brought his great forehead to the council
board,

There, while hot heads perplexed with fears the state,

Calm as the morn the manly patriot sate; Seemed, when at last his clarion accents broke,

As if the conscience of the country spoke. Not on its base Monadnoc surer stood, Than he to common sense and common good:

No mimic; from his breast his counsel drew,

Believed the eloquent was aye the true;

1 The only passage from the Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1834 which has been preserved in Emerson's Works. After Webster's death he wrote (1854), with unintentional injustice,

Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,

2 Compare the chapter on Beauty, in Emerson's Nature: 'This element [Beauty] I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. The ancient Greeks called the world Kóσμos, Beauty.' Compare also the Michael Angelo: Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim of the human being.'

eye.

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The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild up-
roar.2

The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,

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Like the bird from the woodlands to the

cage;

The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, 'I covet truth;

Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;

I leave it behind with the games of youth:

As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;

1 Buonaparte was sensible to the music of bells. Hearing the bell of a parish church, he would pause, and his voice faltered as he said, Ah! that reminds me of the first years I spent at Brienne; I was then happy.' (Journal, 1844.)

I remember when I was a boy going upon the beach and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells. I picked up many and put them in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I gathered -nothing but some dry, ugly mussel and snail shells. Thence I learned that Composition was more important than the beauty of individual forms to Effect. On the shore they lay wet and social, by the sea and under the sky. (Journal, May 16, 1834.)

Compare also a passage in Emerson's description of Thoreau, as reported by Charles J. Woodbury: 'Men of note would come to talk with him.

"I don't know," he would say; "perhaps a minute would be enough for both of us.'

"But I come to walk with you when you take your exercise."

"Ah, walking

that is my holy time." (WoODBURY's Talks with Emerson, p. 80.)

Compare the beautiful lines in Emerson's poem, 'The Dirge,' 1838:

Knows he who tills this lonely field

To reap its scanty corn,

What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn ?

In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:

I wandered up, I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.