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Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal hope; — that was Emerson's gospel. I hear it said that Emerson 100 was too sanguine; that the actual generation in America is not turning out so well as he expected. Very likely, he was too sanguine as to the near future; in this country it is difficult not to be too sanguine. Very possibly the present generation may prove unworthy of his high hopes; even 105 several generations succeeding this may prove unworthy of them. But by his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work for happiness, — by this conviction and 110 hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have been right in them. In this country it is difficult, as I said, not to be sanguine. Very many of your writers are over-sanguine, and on the wrong grounds. But you have two men who in what they have written show their 115 sanguineness in a line where courage and hope are just, where they are also infinitely important, but where they are not easy. The two men are Franklin and Emerson.1 These

I found with pleasure that this conjunction of Emerson's name with Franklin's had already occurred to an accomplished writer and delightful man, a friend of Emerson, left almost the sole survivor, alas! of the famous literary generation of Boston, - Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dr. Holmes has kindly allowed me to print here the ingenious and interesting lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus:

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'Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song,

Does he, the Buddha of the West belong?

He seems a wingèd Franklin, sweetly wise,

Born to unlock the secret of the skies;
And which the nobler calling- if 'tis fair
Terrestrial with celestial to compare

To guide the storm-cloud's elemental flame,

Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came
Amidst the sources of its subtile fire,

And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?"

[Arnold's note.]

two are, I think, the most distinctively and honourably American of your writers; they are the most original and the most valuable.

120

Shakespeare

Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality;

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honored, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguessed at.

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Better so!

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

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Of passion with eternal law;
And yet with reverential awe

We watched the fount of fiery life

Which served for that Titanic strife.

When Goethe's death was told, we said:
Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head.
Physician of the iron age,

Goethe has done his pilgrimage.

He took the suffering human race,

He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,

And said: Thou ailest here, and here!
He looked on Europe's dying hour
Of fitful dream and feverish power;
His eye plunged down the weltering strife,
The turmoil of expiring life

He said: The end is everywhere,

Art still has truth, take refuge there!
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow

Of terror, and insane distress,

And headlong fate, be happiness.

And Wordsworth!

Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice!

For never has such soothing voice

Been to your shadowy world conveyed,
Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade
Heard the clear song of Orpheus come
Through Hades, and the mournful gloom.
Wordsworth has gone from us
- and ye,
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we !
He too upon a wintry clime

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Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round;

He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth

On the cool flowery lap of earth,

Smiles broke from us and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sun-lit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
Our youth returned; for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.

Ah! since dark days still bring to light
Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear

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Requiescat

Strew on her roses, roses,

And never a spray of yew!

In quiet she reposes;

Ah, would that I did too!

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Her mirth the world required;

She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.

Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound;
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.

Her cabined, ample spirit,

It fluttered and failed for breath;

To-night it doth inherit

The vasty hall of death.

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10

155

The Fall of Sohrab

(From Sohrab and Rustum)

He spoke, and Rustum answered not, but hurled
His spear; down from the shoulder, down it came
As on some partridge in the corn a hawk

That long has towered in the airy clouds
Drops like a plummet; Sohrab saw it come,
And sprang aside, quick as a flash the spear
Hissed, and went quivering down into the sand,
Which it sent flying wide; — then Sohrab threw
In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang,
The iron plates rang sharp, but turned the spear.
And Rustum seized his club, which none but he
Could wield: an unlopped trunk it was, and huge,
Still rough like those which men in treeless plains
To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers,
Hyphasis or Hydaspes, when, high up

-

By their dark springs, the wind in wintertime
Has made in Himalayan forests wrack,

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And strewn the channels with torn boughs
The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck

so huge

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