LONG I followed happy guides, 50 60 1846. I could never reach their sides; Leaves on the wind melodious trace; Who the road had surely kept; They saw not my fine revellers, These had crossed them while they slept. In the country or the court. Never yet could once arrive, 19 1 Compare Lowell's Envoi, To the Muse,' and Whittier's The Vanishers; and also, in Emerson's essay on Nature' (Essays, Second Series), the third paragraph from the end, beginning' Quite analogous to the deceits in life.' What these strong masters wrote at large in miles, I followed in small copy in my acre; 61 As in broad orchards resonant with bees; 70 DAUGHTERS of Time, the hypocritic Days, I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, TWO RIVERS 4 THY summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain; 1857. 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 poem as limpid and complete as a Greek epigram.' (Life of Lowell, vol. i, p. 414.) 4 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). |