Worth any promise of soothsayer realms.
Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest ;

To take December by the beard

And crush the creaking snow with springy foot,
While overhead the North's dumb streamers shoot
Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared;
Then the long evening-ends
Lingered by cozy chimney-nooks,
With high companionship of books,
Or slippered talk of friends

And sweet habitual looks,

Is better than to stop the ears with dust.

Too soon the spectre comes to say, "Thou must!

2.

When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast, They comfort us with sense of rest;

They must be glad to lie forever still;

Their work is ended with their day;

445

Another fills their room; 't is the World's ancient

way,

Whether for good or ill;

But the deft spinners of the brain,

Who love each added day and find it gain,

Them overtakes the doom

450

To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom (Trophy that was to be of life-long pain), The thread no other skill can ever knit again. 'T was so with him, for he was glad to live, 455 'T was doubly so, for he left work begun; Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive

Till all the allotted flax were spun?

It matters not; for, go at night or noon,
A friend, whene'er he dies, has died too soon,

460

And, once we hear the hopeless He is dead,
So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

VI.

1.

I seem to see the black procession go:
That crawling prose of death too well I know,
The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe;
I see it wind through that unsightly grove,
Once beautiful, but long defaced

With granite permanence of cockney taste
And all those grim disfigurements we love:

465

There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly

waste

Nature rebels at: and it is not true

Of those most precious parts of him we knew:
Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,
'T were sweet to leave this shifting life of tents
Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;
Nay, to be mingled with the elements,
The fellow-servant of creative powers,
Partaker in the solemn year's events,
To share the work of busy-fingered hours,
To be night's silent almoner of dew,

To rise again in plants and breathe and grow,
To stream as tides the ocean cavern through,
Or with the rapture of great winds to blow
About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate
To leave us all-disconsolate;

Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod
Of charitable earth

470

475

480

485

466. Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, where Agassiz

lies.

That takes out all our mortal stains,

And makes us clearlier neighbors of the clod,
Methinks were better worth

Than the poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains,
The heart's insatiable ache:

But such was not his faith,

Nor mine it may be he had trod

Outside the plain old path of God thus spake,
But God to him was very God,

And not a visionary wraith

Skulking in murky corners of the mind,
And he was sure to be

Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He,
Not with His essence mystically combined,
As some high spirits long, but whole and free,

A perfected and conscious Agassiz.

And such I figure him : the wise of old
Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold,
Not truly with the guild enrolled

Of him who seeking inward guessed
Diviner riddles than the rest,

And groping in the darks of thought

490

495

500

505

Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; 510
Rather he shares the daily light,

From reason's charier fountains won,
Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite,
And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

2.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled

515

The winning tongue; the forehead's high-piled heap,

507. Plato.

513. Aristotle, so called from his birthplace, Stagira in Macedonia.

A cairn which every science helped to build,
Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:

He knows at last if Life or Death be best:
Wherever he be flown, whatever vest
The being hath put on which lately here
So many-friended was, so full of cheer
To make men feel the Seeker's noble zest,
We have not lost him all; he is not gone
To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;
The beauty of his better self lives on
In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye
He trained to Truth's exact severity;
He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him
Whose living word still stimulates the air?
In endless files shall loving scholars come
The glow of his transmitted touch to share,
And trace his features with an eye less dim
'Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb.
FLORENCE, ITALY, February, 1874.

520

525

530

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

To many readers the name of Emerson is that of a philosophical prose writer, hard to be understood; in time to come it will perhaps be wondered at that the introduction of his name in a volume of American Poems should seem to require an explanation or shadow of an apology; it is likely even that his philosophy will be read and welcomed chiefly for those elements which it has in common with his poetry. His life may be called uneventful as regards external change or adventure. It was passed mainly in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. He was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather were all ministers, and, indeed, on both his father's and mother's side he belonged to a continuous line of ministerial descent from the seventeenth century. At the time of his birth, his father, the Rev. William Emerson, was minister of the First Church congregation, but on his death a few years afterward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a boy of seven, went to live in the old manse at Concord, where his grandfather had lived when the Concord fight occurred. The old manse was afterward the home at one time of Hawthorne, who wrote there the stories which he gathered into the volumes, Mosses from an Old Manse.

Emerson was graduated at Harvard in 1821, and after teaching a year or two gave himself to the study of divinity. From 1827 to 1832 he preached in Unitarian churches, and was for four years a colleague pastor in the Second Church