Το many of you he may not seem a poet, for his verse is often homely and rough. It has lines and stanzas of noble music, "Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old." "Still on the seeds of all he made The rose of beauty burns. Through times that wear and forms that fade but seldom many of them in succession. "Though love repine and reason chafe, "'T is man's perdition to be safe, The first three of these lines are beyond the reach of most poets; the fourth line is prose. "I am born a poet," he wrote to his betrothed; "of a low class without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose." "He lamented his hard fate," says his biographer, Mr. Cabot, "in being only half a bard; or, as he wrote to Carlyle, 'not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, and merely serving as writer, etc, in this empty America before the arrival of the poets."" He questioned whether to print his poems, "uncertain always," he wrote, "whether I have one true spark of that fire which burns in verse;" and in a little poem, called "The Test," he says that in some five hundred of his verses, "Five lines lasted, sound and true." When he wrote prose, he thought of a sentence by itself, and not of its connection with other sentences; and when he wrote verse, he thought, it would seem, of the form of each line, without much attention to the form or the length of its neighbors, or even to its own smoothness, he whose ear for a prose sentence was trained so delicately. Yet I, for one, would give up any other poetry of America rather than Emerson's; and I am certain that one secret of his power over men and women was his belief that every human soul is poetry and a poet, and his waking of men and women to that belief. He had beyond other men a poet's heart; and if, as Carlyle says, to see deeply is to see musically, and poetry is musical thought, he is a poet of poets. "God hid the whole world in thy heart," says Emerson. "The poet," he says elsewhere, "knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men and gods." Nature he lived with; and when he wrote of her, he wrote as one who knew her as his closest friend. "My book should smell of pines," he said. "To read the sense the woods impart "Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy, And merry is only a mask of sad, The woods at heart are glad." "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? O be my friend, and teach me to be thine." "Thou" [the poet], he said, "shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee; and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble." The poet is not only a seer, he is a hearer: "Let me go where'er I will I hear a sky-born music still : From all that's fair, from all that's foul, It is not only in the rose, It is not only in the bird, Not only where the rainbow glows, Yet it was not cheerfulness that made Emerson a poet; and certainly it was not music, in the common understanding of the term: it was high thought, joined with a wonderful gift —an almost inspired sense of the right word; a gift not always his, but his so often that he has said more memorable things than any other American. You can find no higher simplicity in the fitting of word to thought: "Though love repine and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply." While I speak of the poetry in him and the love of nature, let me read what he wrote to a little girl of thirteen who looked up to him then and always: MY DEAR LUCIA: I am afraid you think me very ungrateful for the good letters which I begged for and which are so long in coming to me, or that I am 66 malicious and mean to make you wait as long for an answer; but, to tell you the truth, I have had so many composition lessons" set me lately, that I am sure that no scholar of Mr. Moore's has had less spare time. Otherwise I should have written instantly; for I have an immense curiosity for Plymouth news, and have a great regard for my young correspondent. I would gladly know what books Lucia likes to read when nobody advises her, and most of all what her thoughts are when she walks alone or sits alone. For, though I know that Lucia is the happiest of girls in having in her sister so wise and kind a guide, yet even her aid must stop when she has put the book before you: neither sister nor brother nor mother nor father can think for us: in the little private chapel of your own mind none but God and you can see the happy thoughts that follow each other, the beautiful affections that spring there, the little silent hymns that are sung there at morning and at evening. And I hope that every sun that shines, every star that rises, every wind that blows upon you will only bring you better thoughts and sweeter music. Have you found out that Nature is always talking to you, especially when you are alone, though she has not the gift of articulate speech? Have you found out what that great gray old ocean that is always in your sight says? Listen. And what the withered leaves that shiver and chatter in the cold March wind? Only listen. The Wind is the poet of the World, and sometimes he sings very pretty summer |