LONG I followed happy guides,

50

60

1846.

I could never reach their sides;
Their step is forth, and, ere the day
Breaks up their leaguer, and away.
Keen my sense, my heart was young,
Right good-will my sinews strung,
But no speed of mine avails
To hunt upon their shining trails.
On and away, their hasting feet
Make the morning proud and sweet;
Flowers they strew, I catch the scent;
Or tone of silver instrument

Leaves on the wind melodious trace;
Yet I could never see their face.
On eastern hills I see their smokes,
Mixed with mist by distant lochs.
I met many travellers

Who the road had surely kept;

They saw not my fine revellers,

These had crossed them while they slept.
Some had heard their fair report,

In the country or the court.
Fleetest couriers alive

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;
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

61

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,

70

DAUGHTERS of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds
them all.

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
1851?

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).