Page:May-day and other pieces, Emerson, 1867.djvu/142

130 What time the gods kept carnival,

Tricked out in star and flower,

And in cramp elf and saurian forms

They swathed their too much power.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,

They laid their courses well,

They boiled the sea, and baked the layers

Of granite, marl, and shell.

But he, the man-child glorious,—

Where tarries he the while?

The rainbow shines his harbinger,

The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,

Forthright my planets roll,

And still the man-child is not born,

The summit of the whole.