Poems - Household Edition | Page 2

the ministry and exercise of that
office, his sickness, bereavement, travel abroad and return to the new life. This sad period

of probation is illuminated by the episode of his first love. Not for their poetical merit,
except in flashes, but for the light they throw on the growth of his thought and character
are they included.
In this volume the course of the Muse, as Emerson tells it, is pursued with regard to his
own poems.
I hang my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults will find.
EDWARD W. EMERSON.
March 12, 1904.

CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
POEMS
GOOD-BYE
EACH AND ALL
THE PROBLEM
TO RHEA
THE VISIT

URIEL
THE WORLD-SOUL
THE SPHINX
ALPHONSO OF CASTILE

MITHRIDATES
TO J.W.
DESTINY
GUY
HAMATREYA
THE
RHODORA
THE HUMBLE-BEE
BERRYING
THE SNOW-STORM

WOODNOTES I
WOODNOTES II
MONADNOC
FABLE
ODE

ASTRAEA
ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉCE
COMPENSATION
FORBEARANCE

THE PARK
FORERUNNERS
SURSUM CORDA
ODE TO BEAUTY

GIVE ALL TO LOVE
TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH
TO ELLEN
TO EVA

LINES
THE VIOLET
THE AMULET
THINE EYES STILL SHINED

EROS

HERMIONE
INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE
I. THE
INITIAL LOVE
II. THE DAEMONIC LOVE
III. THE CELESTIAL LOVE

THE APOLOGY
MERLIN I
MERLIN II
BACCHUS
MEROPS
THE
HOUSE
SAADI
HOLIDAYS
XENOPHANES
THE DAY'S RATION

BLIGHT
MUSKETAQUID
DIRGE
THRENODY
CONCORD HYMN
MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES
MAY-DAY
THE ADIRONDACS
BRAHMA
NEMESIS
FATE
FREEDOM

ODE
BOSTON HYMN
VOLUNTARIES
LOVE AND THOUGHT
UNA

BOSTON
LETTERS
RUBIES
MERLIN'S SONG
THE TEST
SOLUTION

HYMN
NATURE I
NATURE II
THE ROMANY GIRL
DAYS
MY
GARDEN
THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT
THE TITMOUSE
THE HARP

SEASHORE
SONG OF NATURE

TWO RIVERS
WALDEINSAMKEIT

TERMINUS
THE NUN'S ASPIRATION
APRIL
MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE

AEOLIAN HARP
CUPIDO
THE PAST
THE LAST FAREWELL
IN
MEMORIAM E.B.E.
ELEMENTS AND MOTTOES
EXPERIENCE
COMPENSATION
POLITICS
HEROISM
CHARACTER

CULTURE
FRIENDSHIP
SPIRITUAL LAWS
BEAUTY
MANNERS

ART
UNITY
WORSHIP
PRUDENCE
NATURE
THE INFORMING
SPIRIT
CIRCLES
INTELLECT
GIFTS
PROMISE
CARITAS
POWER

WEALTH
ILLUSIONS
QUATRAINS AND TRANSLATIONS
QUATRAINS
TRANSLATIONS
APPENDIX
THE POET
FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE
NATURE
LIFE
THE BOHEMIAN
HYMN
GRACE
INSIGHT
PAN
MONADNOC FROM AFAR

SEPTEMBER
EROS
OCTOBER
PETER'S FIELD
MUSIC

THE WALK

COSMOS
THE MIRACLE
THE WATERFALL
WALDEN
THE
ENCHANTER
WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE
RICHES

PHILOSOPHER
INTELLECT
LIMITS
INSCRIPTION FOR A WELL IN
MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE WAR
THE EXILE
POEMS OF YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD
THE BELL
THOUGHT
PRAYER
TO-DAY
FAME
THE SUMMONS

THE RIVER
GOOD HOPE
LINES TO ELLEN
SECURITY
A MOUNTAIN
GRAVE
A LETTER
HYMN
SELF-RELIANCE
WRITTEN IN NAPLES

WRITTEN AT ROME
WEBSTER
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
INDEX OF TITLES

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The Emersons first appeared in the north of England, but Thomas, who landed in
Massachusetts in 1638, came from Hertfordshire. He built soon after a house, sometimes
railed the Saint's Rest, which still stands in Ipswich on the slope of Heart-break Hill,
close by Labour-in-vain Creek. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the sixth in descent from him.
He was born in Boston, in Summer Street, May 25, 1803. He was the third son of

William Emerson, the minister of the First Church in Boston, whose father, William
Emerson, had been the patriotic minister of Concord at the outbreak of the Revolution,
and died a chaplain in the army. Ruth Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was
left a widow in 1811, with a family of five little boys. The taste of these boys was
scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard College, and
graduated there. Their mother was a person of great sweetness, dignity, and piety,
bringing up her sons wisely and well in very straitened circumstances, and loved by them.
Her husband's stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly invited
the boys to the Old Manse, so that the woods and fields along the Concord River were
first a playground and then the background of the dreams of their awakening
imaginations.
Born in the city, Emerson's young mind first found delight in poems and classic prose, to
which his instincts led him as naturally as another boy's would to go fishing, but his
vacations in the country supplemented these by giving him great and increasing love of
nature. In his early poems classic imagery is woven into pictures of New England
woodlands. Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse, stimulated
by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure in declaiming to each other
in barns and attics. He was so full of thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen
instinctively, to jot them down.
At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for essays and
declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical studies, and enjoying the
classics rather in a literary than grammatical way. And yet it is doubtful whether any man
in his class used his time to better purpose with reference to his after life, for young
Emerson's instinct led him to wide reading of works, outside the curriculum, that spoke
directly to him. He had already formed the habit of writing in a journal, not the facts but
the thoughts and inspirations of the day; often, also, good stories or poetical quotations,
and scraps of his own verse.
On graduation from Harvard in the class of 1821, following the traditions of his family,
Emerson resolved to study to be a minister, and meantime helped his older brother
William in the support of the family by teaching in a school for young ladies in Boston,
that the former had successfully established. The principal was twenty-one and the
assistant nineteen years of age. For school-teaching on the usual lines Emerson was not
fitted, and his youth and shyness prevented him from imparting his