When the pine tosses its cones
To the song of its waterfall tones,
Who speeds to the woodland walks?
To birds and trees who talks?
Cæsar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side,-
Not hook nor line hath he;

He stands in the meadows wide,-
Nor gun nor scythe to see.

Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.
In the wood he travels glad,
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.

Knowledge this man prizes best
Seems fantastic to the rest:
Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,
Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds,
Boughs on which the wild bees settle,
Tints that spot the violet's petal,
Why Nature loves the number five,
And why the star-form she repeats:
Lover of all things alive,
Wonderer at all he meets,
Wonderer chiefly at himself,
Who can tell him what he is?
Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities?

2

And such I knew, a forest seer,1
A minstrel of the natural year,
Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,

10

20

30

1 The section on the forest-seer is a close characterization of Thoreau and very like Emerson's prose tribute written after Thoreau's death in 1862.

'Twas one of the charmed days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;

It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;

Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.

The musing peasant, lowly great,
Beside the forest water sate;

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The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown
Composed the network of his throne;
The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,
Was burnished to a floor of glass,
Painted with shadows green and proud 110
Of the tree and of the cloud.

He was the heart of all the scene;
On him the sun looked more serene;
To hill and cloud his face was known,-
The public child of earth and sky.
"You ask," he said, "what guide
Me through trackless thickets led,
Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough

and wide.

I found the water's bed.

120

And fanned the dreams it never brought.

"Whether is better, the gift or the donor? Come to me,"

Quoth the pine-tree,

"I am the giver of honor.

My garden is the cloven rock,

And my manure the snow;

And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,
In summer's scorching glow.
He is great who can live by me:
The rough and bearded forester
Is better than the lord;

God fills the scrip and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.
The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be;
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry, and one the living tree.
Who liveth by the ragged pine
Foundeth a heroic line;
Who liveth in the palace hall
Waneth fast and spendeth all.

10

20

He goes to my savage haunts,
With his chariot and his care;
My twilight realm he disenchants,
And finds his prison there.

What prizes the town and the tower? 30 Only what the pine-tree yields; Sinew that subdued the fields; The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods Chants his hymn to hills and floods, Whom the city's poisoning spleen Made not pale, or fat, or lean; Whom the rain and the wind purgeth, Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth, In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth, In whose feet the lion rusheth Iron arms, and iron mould,

40

That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.
I give my rafters to his boat,
My billets to his boiler's throat,
And I will swim the ancient sea
To float my child to victory,
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine:
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end. 50
Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem

Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.
Whoso walks in solitude
And inhabiteth the wood,

Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass,

60

From these companions, power and grace.
Clean shall he be, without, within,
From the old adhering sin,

All ill dissolving in the light

Of his triumphant piercing sight:

Not vain, sour, nor frivolous;

Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous;

Grave, chaste, contented, though retired,

And of all other men desired.

70

On him the light of star and moon

Shall fall with purer radiance down;

All constellations of the sky

Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;

The mountain sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones, his helpers be;
He shall meet the speeding year,
Without wailing, without fear;
He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;

80

Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.

Hearken! Hearken!

If thou wouldst know the mystic song Chanted when the sphere was young. Aloft, abroad, the pæan swells;

100

O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?
O wise man! hear'st thou the least part?
'Tis the chronicle of art.

To the open ear it sings
Sweet the genesis of things,

Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old flood's subsiding slime,
Of chemic matter, force and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm:
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,

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Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream.

O, listen to the undersong,

The ever old, the ever young;

And, far within those cadent pauses,

The chorus of the ancient Causes!
Delights the dreadful Destiny

To fling his voice into the tree,

And shock thy weak ear with a note
Breathed from the everlasting throat.
In music he repeats the pang

120

Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang.

O mortal! thy ears are stones;

These echoes are laden with tones

Which only the pure can hear;

Thou canst not catch what they recite

Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right, 130 Of man to come, of human life,

Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife."

Once again the pine-tree sung :"Speak not thy speech my boughs among : Put off thy years, wash in the breeze; My hours are peaceful centuries. Talk no more with feeble tongue;

160

"Come learn with me the fatal song
Which knits the world in music strong,
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid,
The land reflected in the flood,
Body with shadow still pursued.
For Nature beats in perfect tune,

And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,

But it carves the bow of beauty there, 170
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
The wood is wiser far than thou;
The wood and wave each other know
Not unrelated, unaffied,

But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect Nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty Heart.

But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,
Whence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed,
Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded?
Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded?
Who thee divorced, deceived and left? 182
Thee of thy faith who hath bereft,
And torn the ensigns from thy brow,
And sunk the immortal eye so low?
Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender,
Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender
For royal man;-they thee confess
An exile from the wilderness,

To thee the horizon shall express
But emptiness on emptiness;
There lives no man of Nature's worth
In the circle of the earth;

And to thine eye the vast skies fall,
Dire and satirical,

On clucking hens and prating fools,
On thieves, on drudges and on dolls.
And thou shalt say to the Most High,
'Godhead! all this astronomy,
And fate and practice and invention,
Strong art and beautiful pretension,
This radiant pomp of sun and star,
Throes that were, and worlds that are,
Behold! were in vain and in vain;—
It cannot be,-I will look again.
Surely now will the curtain rise,
And earth's fit tenant me surprise;-
But the curtain doth not rise,
And Nature has miscarried wholly
Into failure, into folly.'

"Alas! thine is the bankruptcy, Blessed Nature so to see.

Come, lay thee in my soothing shade, And heal the hurts which sin has made. I see thee in the crowd alone;

I will be thy companion.

Quit thy friends as the dead in doom, And build to them a final tomb;

Let the starred shade that nightly falls Still celebrate their funerals,

200

210

221

240

Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns,
Give all to them who all renounce.
The rain comes when the wind calls;
The river knows the way to the sea;
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity;
The sea tosses and foams to find
Its way up to the cloud and wind;
The shadow sits close to the flying ball;
The date fails not on the palm-tree tall;
And thou,-go burn thy wormy pages,-
Shalt outsee seers, and outwit sages.
Oft didst thou thread the woods in vain
To find what bird had piped the strain:-
Seek not, and the little eremite
Flies gayly forth and sings in sight.

250

"Hearken once more!

I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant time behoves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,

A divine improvisation,

From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.

260

Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse, and sound, and light was none;
And God said, 'Throb!' and there was
motion

And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,

But forever doth escape,

Like wave or flame, into new forms

Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms.

I, that to-day am a pine,

Yesterday was a bundle of grass.

He is free and libertine,

Pouring of his power the wine

To every age, to every race;
Unto every race and age

He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each, and unto all,
Maker and original.

The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are and think.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the next a special nature;
The third adds heat's indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light which eats the
dark;

Into the fifth himself he flings,

And conscious Law is King of kings. As the bee through the garden ranges, From world to world the godhead changes;

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280

290

As the sheep go feeding in the waste, From form to form He maketh haste; This vault which glows immense with light

299

Is the inn where he lodges for a night. What recks such Traveller if the bowers Which bloom and fade like meadow

flowers

A bunch of fragrant lilies be,

Or the stars of eternity?

Alike to him the better, the worse,-
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;

He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky,

310

Than all it holds more deep, more high."

The Dial, Oct., 1841.