POEM OUTLINES

THE courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the small, the life of the fiddler-crab, 5 and the household of the marsh-hen; and, more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marshgrass, which is as if filth bred heaven: This a man seeth upon the marsh.

("Hymns of the Marshes.")

THE DYSPEPTIC

Frown, quoth my lord Stomach,
And I lowered.

Quarrel, quoth my lord Liver,

And I lashed my wife and children,
Till at the breakfast-table

Hell sat laughing on the egg-cup.

Lie awake all night, quoth my two Masters,
And I tossed, and swore, and beat the pillow,

And kicked with disgust,

And slammed every door tight that leads to sleep

and heaven.

("Credo, and Other Poems.")

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I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the 5 ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage and I said:

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"I know that thou art the word of my God, dear Violet:

And oh the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads.

Measure what space a violet stands above the ground,

'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that.”

(Written on the fly-leaf of Emerson's "Representative Men," between 1874 and 1879.)

A man does not reach any stature of manhood until like Moses he kills an Egyptian (i. e., murders some oppressive prejudice of the all-crushing Tyrant Society or Custom or Orthodoxy) and flies into the 5 desert of his own soul, where among the rocks and sands, over which at any rate the sun rises clear each day, he slowly and with great agony settles his relation with men and manners and powers outside, and begins to look with his own eyes, and first 10 knows the unspeakable joy of the outcast's kiss upon the hand of sweet naked Truth.

But let not the young man go to killing his Egyptian too soon: wait till you know all the Egyptians can teach you: wait till you are master

of the technics of the time; then grave, and resolute, 15 and aware of consequences, shape your course.

I am but a small-winged bird:
But I will conquer the big world

As the bee-martin beats the crow,
By attacking it always from Above.

The United States in two hundred years has made Emerson out of a witch-burner.

A Poet is a perpetual Adam: events pass before him, like the animals in the creation, and he names them.

Birth is but a folding of our wings.

It is always sunrise and always sunset somewhere on the earth. And so, with a silver sunrise before him and a golden sunset behind him, the Royal Sun fares through Heaven, like a king with a herald and a retinue.

Hunger and a whip: with these we tame wild beasts. So, to tame us, God continually keeps our hearts hungry for love, and continually lashes our souls with the thongs of relentless circumstances.

Our beliefs needed pruning, that they might bring forth more fruit: and so Science came.

"Father, forgive them: they know not what they

do."

-CHRIST.

THE early spring of 1861 brought to bloom, besides innumerable violets and jessamines, a strange, enormous, and terrible flower.

This was the blood-red flower of war, which grows 5 amid thunders; a flower whose freshening dews are blood and hot tears, whose shadow chills a land, whose odors strangle a people, whose giant petals droop downward, and whose roots are in hell.

It is a species of the great genus, sin-flower, 10 which is so conspicuous in the flora of all ages and all countries, and whose multifarious leafage and fruitage so far overgrow a land that the violet, or love-genus, has often small chance to show its quiet blue.

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The cultivation of this plant is an expensive business, and it is a wonder, from this fact alone, that there should be so many fanciers of it. A most profuse and perpetual manuring with human bones is

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absolutely necessary to keep it alive, and it is well to have these powdered, which can be easily done 20 by hoofs of cavalry-horses and artillery-wheels, not to speak of the usual method of mashing with cannon-balls. It will not grow, either, except in some wet place near a stream of human blood; and you must be active in collecting your widows' tears 25 and orphans' tears and mothers' tears to freshen the petals with in the mornings.

It requires assiduous working; and your laborhire will be a large item in the expense, not to speak of the amount disbursed in preserving the human 30 bones alive until such time as they may be needed, for, I forgot to mention, they must be fresh, and young, and newly-killed.

It is, however, a hardy plant, and may be grown in any climate, from snowy Moscow to hot India.

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It blooms usually in the spring, continuing to flower all summer until the winter rains set in: yet in some instances it has been known to remain in full bloom during a whole inclement winter, as was shown in a fine specimen which I saw the other 40 day, grown in North America by two wealthy landed proprietors, who combined all their resources of money, of blood, of bones, of tears, of sulphur and what not, to make this the grandest specimen of modern horticulture, and whose success 45 was evidenced by the pertinacious blossoms which the plant sent forth even amid the hostile rigors of snow and ice and furious storms. It is supposed by some that seed of this American specimen (now dead) yet remain in the land; but as for this author 50