Climacteric

I am not wiser for my age,
Nor skilful by my grief;
Life loiters at the book's first page,--
Ah! could we turn the leaf.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. His most famous work includes the essays 'Self-Reliance' and 'Nature.' He was a mentor and friend to Henry David Thoreau.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monadnoc From Afar

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simple Poetry

I Bear In Youth The Sad Infirmities

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simple Poetry

Gifts

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simple Poetry

Philosopher

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simple Poetry

English

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Heri, Cras, Hodie

Shines the last age, the next with hope is seen,
To-day slinks poorly off unmarked between:
Future or Past no richer secret folds,
O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Terminus

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:--
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: 'No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There's not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,--fault of novel germs,--
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sin...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To Ellen

And Ellen, when the graybeard years
Have brought us to life's evening hour,
And all the crowded Past appears
A tiny scene of sun and shower,

Then, if I read the page aright
Where Hope, the soothsayer, reads our lot,
Thyself shalt own the page was bright,
Well that we loved, woe had we not,

When Mirth is dumb and Flattery's fled,
And mute thy music's dearest tone,
When all but Love itself is dead
And all but deathless Reason gone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I Bear In Youth The Sad Infirmities

I bear in youth the sad infirmities
That use to undo the limb and sense of age;
It hath pleased Heaven to break the dream of bliss
Which lit my onward way with bright presage,
And my unserviceable limbs forego.
The sweet delight I found in fields and farms,
On windy hills, whose tops with morning glow,
And lakes, smooth mirrors of Aurora's charms.
Yet I think on them in the silent night,
Still breaks that morn, though dim, to Memory's eye,
And the firm soul does the pale train defy
Of grim Disease, that would her peace affright.
Please God, I'll wrap me in mine innocence,
And bid each awful Muse drive the damned harpies hence.

CAMBRIDGE, 1827.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fragments On Nature And Life - Transition

See yonder leafless trees against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And, ever subdividing, separate
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs.
As if they loved the element, and hasted
To dissipate their being into it.



Parks and ponds are good by day;
I do not delight
In black acres of the night,
Nor my unseasoned step disturbs
The sleeps of trees or dreams of herbs.



In Walden wood the chickadee
Runs round the pine and maple tree
Intent on insect slaughter:
O tufted entomologist!
Devour as many as you list,
Then drink in Walden water.



The low December vault in June be lifted high,
And largest clouds be flakes of down in that enormous sky.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Climacteric.

When do the reasoning Powers decline?
The Ancients said at Forty-Nine.
At Forty-Nine behoves it then
To quit the Inkhorn and the Pen,
Since ARISTOTLE so decreed.
Premising thus, we now proceed.

In that thrice-favoured Northern Land,
Where most the Flowers of Thought expand,
And all things nebulous grow clear,
Through Spectacles and Lager-Beer,
There lived, at Dumpelsheim the Lesser,
A certain High-Dutch Herr Professor.
Than GROTIUS more alert and quick,
More logical than BURGERSDYCK,
His Lectures both so much transcended,
That far and wide his Fame extended,
Proclaiming him to every clime
Within a Mile of Dumpelsheim.
But chief he taught, by Day and Night,
The Doctrine of the Stagirite,
Proving it fixed beyond Dispute,
In Ways th...

Henry Austin Dobson