LIFE

A TRAIN of gay and clouded days
Dappled with joy and grief and praise,
Beauty to fire us, saints to save,
Escort us to a little grave.

No fate, save by the victim's fault, is low, For God hath writ all dooms magnificent, So guilt not traverses his tender will.

THIS shining moment is an edifice Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild.

ROOMY Eternity

Casts her schemes rarely,
And an æon allows
For each quality and part
Of the multitudinous

And many-chambered heart.

BE of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for know,

God hath a select family of sons

Now scattered wide thro' earth, and each

alone,

Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one
By constant service to that inward law,
Is weaving the sublime proportions

Of a true monarch's soul. Beauty and strength,

The riches of a spotless memory,
The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got
By searching of a clear and loving eye
That seeth as God seeth, these are their
gifts;

And Time, who keeps God's word, brings on the day

To seal the marriage of these minds with thine,

Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be The salt of all the elements, world of the world.

LOVE

Asks nought his brother cannot give; Asks nothing, but does all receive. Love calls not to his aid events;

To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.2

1 Compare Emerson's Address at the Hundredth Anniversary of the Concord Fight: The thunderbolt falls on an inch of ground, but the light of it fills the horizon.'

2 Compare the essay on Beauty,' in The Conduct of Life: This art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is a proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.'

BOTANIST

Go thou to thy learned task,
I stay with the flowers of Spring:
Do thou of the Ages ask
What me the Hours will bring.

GARDENER

TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,

Expound the Vedas of the violet, Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,

See the plum redden, and the beurré stoop.3

NORTHMAN

THE gale that wrecked you on the sand,
It helped my rowers to row;

The storm is my best galley hand
And drives me where I go.

FROM ALCUIN

THE sea is the road of the bold,
Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,
The pit wherein the streams are rolled
And fountain of the rains.

EXCELSIOR

OVER his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,

And over the moon were the starry studs That drop from the angels' shoon. (May 1, 1838.)

BORROWING

(FROM THE FRENCH)

SOME of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

NATURE

BOON Nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold,

And trains us on to slight the new, as if it were the old:

3 Go to the forest, if God has made thee a poet, and make thy life clean and fragrant as thy office.

True Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,
Expound the Vedas in the violet.

Thy love must be thy art. . . . Nature also must teach thee rhetoric. She can teach thee not only to speak truth, but to speak it truly. (Journal, July, 1840.)

TEST of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

1 This quatrain was chosen by James Russell Lowell to be inscribed on the simple monument at Soldiers' Field in Cambridge, which was given as an athletic ground by Col. Henry Lee Higginson, in memory of his classmates and friends, Charles Russell Lowell, James Jackson Lowell, Robert Gould Shaw, James Savage, Jr., Edward Barry Dalton, and Stephen George Perkins, who died in the war or soon after.

Compare Emerson's two addresses referred to in the note on Voluntaries.' The best commentary, however, is Colonel Higginson's story of the lives and deaths of his comrades, in his addresses on the presentation of Soldiers' Field, 1890, and on Robert Gould Shaw, 1897 (Four Addresses, Boston, 1902.)

2 A famous singer of Florence. Dante tells of meeting him (Purgatory, Canto II, lines 76-133) and begging him to sing: If a new law take not from thee memory or practice of the song of love which was wont to quiet all my longings, may it please thee therewith somewhat to comfort my soul.' (Norton's Translation.) Casella then sings Dante's Amor che nella mente mi ragiona ('Love, that within my mind discourses with me'), 'so sweetly, that the sweetness still within me sounds. My Master, and I, and the folk who were with