Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/61

Rh town meetings and elections, as well here as in Troy neighborhood.

March 3, 1839. The poet must be something more than natural, even supernatural. Nature will not speak through him, but along with him. His voice will not proceed from her midst, but, breathing on her, will make her the expression of his thought. He then poetizes when he takes a fact out of nature into spirit. He speaks without reference to time or place. His thought is one world, hers, another. He is another nature, nature's brother.

March 3, 1841. I hear a man blowing a horn this still evening, and it sounds like the plaint of nature in these times. In this which I refer to some man there is something greater than any man. It is as if the earth spoke. It adds a great remoteness to the horizon, and its very distance is grand, as when one draws back the head to speak. That which I now hear in the west seems like an invitation to the east. It runs round the earth as round a whispering gallery. All things great seem transpiring where this sound comes from. It is friendly as a distant hermit's taper. When it trills or undulates, the heavens are crumpled into time, and successive waves flow across them. It is a strangely healthy sound for these disjointed times. It is a rare soundness when cow-bells