Page:Poems, Emerson, 1847.djvu/236

224 Of their imperfect functions.

But these young scholars, who invade our hills,

Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,

And travelling often in the cut he makes,

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,

And all their botany is Latin names.

The old men studied magic in the flowers,

And human fortunes in astronomy,

And an omnipotence in chemistry,

Preferring things to names, for these were men,

Were unitarians of the united world,

And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,

They caught the footsteps of the. Our eyes

Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,

And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,

And strangers to the plant and to the mine.

The injured elements say, 'Not in us;'

And night and day, ocean and continent,

Fire, plant, and mineral say, 'Not in us,'

And haughtily return us stare for stare.

For we invade them impiously for gain;

We devastate them unreligiously,