Part 7 — RALPH WALDO EMERSON

GIVE all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the Muse— Nothing refuse. ’Tis a brave master; Let it have scope: Follow it utterly, Hope beyond hope: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent; But it is a god, Knows its own path, And the outlets of the sky. It was never for the mean; It requireth courage stout, Souls above doubt, Valour unbending: Such ’twill reward;— They shall return More than they were, And ever ascending. Leave all for love; Yet, hear me, yet, One word more thy heart behoved, One pulse more of firm endeavour— Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, for ever, Free as an Arab Of thy beloved. Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise, Flits across her bosom young, Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay; Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go The gods arrive.

IT fell in the ancient periods Which the brooding soul surveys, Or ever the wild Time coin’d itself Into calendar months and days. This was the lapse of Uriel, Which in Paradise befell. Once, among the Pleiads walking, Sayd overheard the young gods talking; And the treason, too long pent, To his ears was evident. The young deities discuss’d Laws of form, and metre just, Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams, What subsisteth, and what seems. One, with low tones that decide, And doubt and reverend use defied, With a look that solved the sphere, And stirr’d the devils everywhere, Gave his sentiment divine Against the being of a line. ‘Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’ As Uriel spoke with piercing eye, A shudder ran around the sky; The stern old war-gods shook their heads; The seraphs frown’d from myrtle-beds; Seem’d to the holy festival The rash word boded ill to all; The balance-beam of Fate was bent; The bounds of good and ill were rent; Strong Hades could not keep his own, But all slid to confusion. A sad self-knowledge withering fell On the beauty of Uriel; In heaven once eminent, the god Withdrew that hour into his cloud; Whether doom’d to long gyration In the sea of generation, Or by knowledge grown too bright To hit the nerve of feebler sight. Straightway a forgetting wind Stole over the celestial kind, And their lips the secret kept, If in ashes the fire-seed slept. But, now and then, truth-speaking things Shamed the angels’ veiling wings; And, shrilling from the solar course, Or from fruit of chemic force, Procession of a soul in matter, Or the speeding change of water, Or out of the good of evil born, Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn, And a blush tinged the upper sky, And the gods shook, they knew not why.

BRING me wine, but wine which never grew In the belly of the grape, Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through Under the Andes to the Cape, Suffer’d no savour of the earth to ’scape. Let its grapes the morn salute From a nocturnal root, Which feels the acrid juice Of Styx and Erebus; And turns the woe of Night, By its own craft, to a more rich delight. We buy ashes for bread; We buy diluted wine; Give me of the true, Whose ample leaves and tendrils curl’d Among the silver hills of heaven Draw everlasting dew; Wine of wine, Blood of the world, Form of forms, and mould of statures, That I intoxicated, And by the draught assimilated, May float at pleasure through all natures; The bird-language rightly spell, And that which roses say so well: Wine that is shed Like the torrents of the sun Up the horizon walls, Or like the Atlantic streams, which run When the South Sea calls. Water and bread, Food which needs no transmuting, Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting, Wine which is already man, Food which teach and reason can. Wine which Music is,— Music and wine are one,— That I, drinking this, Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; Kings unborn shall walk with me; And the poor grass shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man. Quicken’d so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock. I thank the joyful juice For all I know; Winds of remembering Of the ancient being blow, And seeming-solid walls of use Open and flow. Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine; Retrieve the loss of me and mine! Vine for vine be antidote, And the grape requite the lote! Haste to cure the old despair; Reason in Nature’s lotus drench’d— The memory of ages quench’d— Give them again to shine; Let wine repair what this undid; And where the infection slid, A dazzling memory revive; Refresh the faded tints, Recut the agèd prints, And write my old adventures with the pen Which on the first day drew, Upon the tablets blue, The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

IF the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanish’d gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.