GOOD-BYE, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,

Long I've been tossed like the driven foam;
But now, proud world! I'm going home.

Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;

To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go, and those who come;
Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home.

10

20

1823.

THOUGHT

I AM not poor, but I am proud,
Of one inalienable right,
Above the envy of the crowd, -
Thought's holy light.

Better it is than gems or gold,
And oh! it cannot die,
But thought will glow when the sun
grows cold,
And mix with Deity.

THE RIVER 2

AND I behold once more

1904.

This poem should be compared with Wordsworth's 'Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree,' both because the two poems are similar in thought and mood, and because each marks the same point of development in its author's thought and powers of expression. This was written when Emerson was twenty-four years old, and Wordsworth's when he was twenty-five.

1 The first collected edition of Emerson's Poems, which bears the date 1847, and is listed under that year in the bibliographies, actually appeared in 1846.

2 Remember the Sunday morning in Naples when I said, 'This moment is the truest vision, the best spectacle I have seen amid all the wonders; and this moment, this vision, I might have had in my own closet in Boston.' (EMERSON's Journal, 1834.)

Compare the essay on Self-Reliance :'

Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.'

Compare also The Day's Ration,' and Whittier's The Last Walk in Autumn.'

(The illustrative passages from Emerson's Journal given in these notes, and many of the parallel passages from Emerson's essays, are quoted by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his exceedingly valuable notes to the Centenary Edition' of the Poems, or in his Emerson in Concord.)

Not less than was the first; the all-wise God
Gilds a few points in every several life,
And as each flower upon the fresh hillside
And every colored petal of each flower,
Is sketched and dyed, each with a new de-
sign,

Its spot of purple, and its streak of brown, So each man's life shall have its proper lights,

And a few joys, a few peculiar charms,
For him round-in the melancholy hours
And reconcile him to the common days.
Not many men see beauty in the fogs
Of close low pine-woods in a river town;
Yet unto me not morn's magnificence,
Nor the red rainbow of a summer eve,
Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls
Of rich men blazing hospitable light,
Nor wit, nor eloquence, no, nor even the
song

Of any woman that is now alive, -
Hath such a soul, such divine influence,
Such resurrection of the happy past,
As is to me when I behold the morn
Ope in such low moist roadside, and beneath
Peep the blue violets out of the black
loam,

Pathetic silent poets that sing to me
Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife.3

Besides, you need not be alone; the soul
Shall have society of its own rank.
Be great, be true, and all the Scipios,
The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome,
Shall flock to you and tarry by your side,
And comfort you with their high company.
Virtue alone is sweet society,

It keeps the key to all heroic hearts,
And opens you a welcome in them all.
You must be like them if you desire them,
Scorn trifles and embrace a better aim
Than wine or sleep or praise;

Hunt knowledge as the lover wooes a maid,

3 Emerson's first wife, the Ellen' of the previous poems, died of consumption after they had been married only a year and a half.

Don't you see you are the Universe to yourself? You carry your fortunes in your own hand. Change of place won't mend the matter. You will weave the same web at Pernambuco as at Boston, if you have only learned how to make one texture. (Journal, Divinity Hall, Cambridge, November, 1827.)

Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,

2 Compare the chapter on Beauty, in Emerson's 'Nature: 'This element [Beauty] I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe.. The ancient Greeks called the world κóσμos, Beauty.' Compare also the Michael Angelo: Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim of the human being.'

Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon

Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; 1

Nor knowest thou what argument

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. 10
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;-
He sang to my ear, they sang to my

eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore

20

1 Buonaparte was sensible to the music of bells. Hearing the bell of a parish church, he would pause, and his voice faltered as he said, Ah! that reminds me of the first years I spent at Brienne; I was then happy.' (Journal, 1844.)

I remember when I was a boy going upon the beach and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells. I picked up many and put them in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I gathered -nothing but some dry, ugly mussel and snail shells. Thence I learned that Composition was more important than the beauty of individual forms to Effect. On the shore they lay wet and social, by the sea and under the sky. (Journal, May 16, 1834.)

Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand

Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery

But 't is figured in the flowers; Was never secret history

But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field

Homeward brought the oxen strong; A second crop thine acres yield, Which I gather in a song.*

1834 ?

1846.

3 Compare Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply,' and 'The Tables Turned.'

Compare also a passage in Emerson's description of Thoreau, as reported by Charles J. Woodbury: 'Men of note would come to talk with him.

"I don't know," he would say; 66 perhaps a minute would be enough for both of us."

"But I come to walk with you when you take your exercise."

"Ah, walking - that is my holy time." (WOODBURY's Talks with Emerson, p. 80.)

Compare the beautiful lines in Emerson's poem, 'The Dirge,' 1838:

Knows he who tills this lonely field

To reap its scanty corn,

What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?

In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:

I wandered up, I wandered down.
Beset by pensive hosts.