Freedom

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Water

The water understands

Civilization well;

It wets my foot, but prettily,

It chills my life, but wittily,

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy:

Ill used, it will destroy,

In perfect time and measure

With a face of golden pleasure

Elegantly destroy.

Freedom 

Once I wished I might rehearse

Freedom's paean in my verse,

That the slave who caught the strain

Should throb until he snapped his chain.

But the Spirit said, 'Not so;

Speak it not, or speak it low;

Name not lightly to be said,

Gift too precious to be prayed,

Passion not to be expressed

But by heaving of the breast:

Yet,--wouldst thou the mountain find

Where this deity is shrined,

Who gives to seas and sunset skies

Their unspent beauty of surprise,

And, when it lists him, waken can

Brute or savage into man;

Or, if in thy heart he shine,

Blends the starry fates with thine,

Draws angels nigh to dwell with thee,

And makes thy thoughts archangels be;

Freedom's secret wilt thou know?--

Counsel not with flesh and blood;

Loiter not for cloak or food;

Right thou feelest, rush to do.' 

Waves 

ALL day the waves assailed the rock,

I heard no church-bell chime;

The sea-beat scorns the minster clock

And breaks the glass of Time. 

The River Note 

And I behold once more

My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,

The same blue wonder that my infant eye

Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,--

Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed

The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,

And where thereafter in the world he went.

Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now

He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales

With his redundant waves.

Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,

I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,

Much triumphing,--and these the fields

Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,

A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.

And hark! where overhead the ancient crows

Hold their sour conversation in the sky:--

These are the same, but I am not the same,

But wiser than I was, and wise enough

Not to regret the changes, tho' they cost

Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;

These trees and stones are audible to me,

These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,

I understand their faery syllables,

And all their sad significance. The wind,

That rustles down the well-known forest road--

It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.

The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,

All of them utter sounds of 'monishment

And grave parental love.

They are not of our race, they seem to say,

And yet have knowledge of our moral race,

And somewhat of majestic sympathy,

Something of pity for the puny clay,

That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.

I feel as I were welcome to these trees

After long months of weary wandering,

Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;

They know me as their son, for side by side,

They were coeval with my ancestors,

Adorned with them my country's primitive times,

And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.