Page:Poems, Household Edition, Emerson, 1904.djvu/226

190 Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.

Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler?

Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.

Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,

Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,

Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?

And presently the sky is changed; O world!

What pictures and what harmonies are thine!

The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,

So like the soul of me, what if 't were me?

A melancholy better than all mirth.

Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,

Or at the foresight of obscurer years?

Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory

Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty

Superior to all its gaudy skirts.

And, that no day of life may lack romance,

The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down

A private beam into each several heart.

Daily the bending skies solicit man,

The seasons chariot him from this exile,

The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,

The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,

Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights

Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

With a vermilion pencil mark the day

When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs