Partaker in the solemn year's events, 475 To share the work of busy-fingered hours, To be night's silent almoner of dew, To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, To stream as tides the ocean cavern through, Or with the rapture of great winds to blow 480 About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate To leave us all-disconsolate; 485 Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod That takes out all our mortal stains, And makes us clearlier neighbors of the clod Than the poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains, But such was not his faith, 490 Nor mine: it may be he had trod 495 Outside the plain old path of God thus spake, And not a visionary wraith Skulking in murky corners of the mind, Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, 505 He rather shares the daily light, From reason's charier fountains won, Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite, 510 And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son. 2. The shape erect is prone: forever stilled The winning tongue; the forehead's high-piled A cairn which every science helped to build, 515 He knows at last if Life or Death be best: In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye 525 He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him 509. Aristotle, so-called from his birthplace of Stagira in Macedonia. RALPH WALDO EMERSON. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. O many readers the name of Emerson is that of a philosophical prose writer, hard to be understood; in time to come it will perhaps be wondered at that the introduction of his name in a volume of American Poems should seem to require an explanation or shadow of an apology; it is likely even that his philosophy will be read and welcomed chiefly for those elements which it has in common with his poetry. His life may be called uneventful as regards external change or adventure. It was passed mainly in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. He was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, were all ministers, and, indeed, on both his father's and mother's side he belongs to a continuous line of ministerial descent from the seventeenth century. At the time of his birth, his father, the Rev. William Emerson, was minister of the First Church congregation, but on his death a few years afterward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a boy of seven, went to live in the old manse at Concord, where his grandfather had lived when the Concord fight occurred. The old manse was afterward the home at one time of Hawthorne, who wrote there the stories which he gathered into the volumes, Mosses from an Old Manse. Emerson was graduated at Harvard in 1821, and after teaching a year or two gave himself to the study of divinity. From 1827 to 1832 he preached in Unitarian churches and was for four years a colleague pastor in the Second Church in Boston. He then left the ministry and afterward devoted himself to literature. He travelled abroad in 1833, in 1847, and again in 1872, making friends among the leading thinkers during his first journey, and confirming the friendships when again in Europe; with the exception of these three journeys and occasional lecturing tours in the United States, he lived quietly at Concord until his death, April 27, 1882. He had delivered several special addresses, and in his early manhood was an important lecturer in the Lyceum courses which were so popular, especially in New England, forty years ago, but his first published book was Nature, in 1839. Subsequent prose writings were his Essays, under that title, and in several volumes with specific titles, Representative Men and English Traits, which last embodies the results of his first two visits to England. He wrote poems when in college, but his first publication was through The Dial, a magazine established in 1840, and the representative of a knot of men and women of whom Emerson was the acknowledged or unacknowledged leader. The first volume of his poems was published in 1847, and included those by which he is best known, as The Problem, The Sphinx, The Rhodora, The Humble Bee, Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument. After the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857 he contributed to it both prose and poetry, and verses published in the early numbers, mere enigmas to some, profound revelations to others, were fruitful of discussion and thought ; his second volume of poems, May Day and other Pieces, was not issued until 1867. Since then a volume of his collected poetry has appeared, containing most of those published in the two volumes, and a few in addition. We are told, however, that the published writings of Emerson bear but small proportion to the unpublished. Many lectures have been delivered, but not printed; many poems write ten, and a few read, which have never been published. The inference from this, borne out by the marks upon what has been published, is that Mr. Emerson set a high value upon literature, and was jealous of the prerogative of the poet. He is frequently called a seer, and this old word, indicating etymologically its original intention, is applied well to a poet who saw into nature and human life with a spiritual power which made him a marked man in his own time, and one destined to an unrivalled place in literature. He fulfilled Wordsworth's lines, "With an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things." |