Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands

Man was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth;
Tethered by a liquid
Of blood through veins of kindred poured,

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again
Far or forgot to me is near;

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee, from the hill-top looking down;
And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;

Sicut Patribus, sit Deus Nobis)The rocky nook with hilltops three Looked eastward from the farms,
And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms;
The men of yore were stout and poor,
And sailed for bread to every shore

Knows he who tills this lonely
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres
At midnight and at morn

"May be true what I had heard,
Earth's a howling
Truculent with fraud and force,"Said I, strolling through the pastures,
And along the riverside

Higher far,
Upward, into the pure realm,
Over sun or star,
Over the flickering Dæmon film,

NG 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 nocturna...

Give me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition
If I

Why should I keep holiday,
When other men have none
Why but because when these are gay,
I sit and mourn alone