RALPH WALDO EMERSON GOOD-BYE1 GOOD-BYE, proud world! I'm going home: Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face; To crowded halls, to court and street; I am going to my own hearth-stone, 10 20 1 In sending these verses to Rev. James Freeman Clarke, in 1839, Emerson said: They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me.. This corner of Roxbury' is now a part of Franklin Park. It is called Schoolmaster's Hill,' and one of its rocks bears the inscription: Near this rock, A. D. 1823-1825, was the house of Schoolmaster Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here some of his earlier poems were written; among them that from which the following lines are taken. . . .' There follows the last stanza of this poem. This poem should be compared with Wordsworth's Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree,' both because the two poems are similar in thought and mood, and because each marks the same point of development in its author's thought and powers of expression. This was written when Emerson was twenty-four years old, and Wordsworth's when he was twenty-five. 1 The first collected edition of Emerson's Poems, which bears the date 1847, and is listed under that year in the bibliographies, actually appeared in 1846. 2 Remember the Sunday morning in Naples when I said, This moment is the truest vision, the best spectacle I have seen amid all the wonders; and this moment, this vision, I might have had in my own closet in Boston.' (EMERSON's Journal, 1834.) Compare the essay on 'Self-Reliance: ' 'Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. 1 affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.' Compare also The Day's Ration,' and Whittier's 'The Last Walk in Autumn.' (The illustrative passages from Emerson's Journal given in these notes, and many of the parallel passages from Emerson's essays, are quoted by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his exceedingly valuable notes to the Centenary Edition' of the Poems, or in his Emerson in Concord.) Not less than was the first; the all-wise God Its spot of purple, and its streak of brown, So each man's life shall have its proper lights, And a few joys, a few peculiar charms, Of any woman that is now alive, — Pathetic silent poets that sing to me Besides, you need not be alone; the soul It keeps the key to all heroic hearts, Hunt knowledge as the lover wooes a maid, 3 Emerson's first wife, the Ellen' of the previous poems, died of consumption after they had been married only a year and a half. Don't you see you are the Universe to yourself? You carry your fortunes in your own hand. Change of place won't mend the matter. You will weave the same web at Pernambuco as at Boston, if you have only learned how to make one texture. (Journal, Divinity Hall, Cambridge, November, 1827.) |