IV.-APPENDIX.

MAY-DAY (FIRST VERSION).'

AUGHTER of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring.

DA With sudden passion languishing,

Maketh all things softly smile,

Painteth pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,
Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Girls are peeling the sweet willow,
Poplar white, and Gilead-tree,
And troops of boys

Shouting with whoop and hilloa,
And hip, hip, three times three.
The air is full of whistlings bland;
What was that I heard

Out of the hazy land:

Harp of the wind, or song of bird,
Or clapping of shepherd's hands,
Or vagrant booming of the air,
Voice of a meteor lost in day?
Such tidings of the starry sphere
Can this elastic air convey.
Or haply 'twas the cannonade
Of the pent and darkened lake,

Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade,

Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,

Afflicted moan, and latest hold

Even into May the iceberg cold.
Was it a squirrel's pettish bark,
Or clarionet of jay? or hark,

1 As stated before, this poem was so altered by Emerson, that both forms should be before the reader. The revised version is found in its place in the text; this is the original of 1867.---ED.

Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,
Steering north with raucous cry
Through tracts and provinces of sky,
Every night alighting down

In new landscapes of romance,

Where darkling feeds the clamorous clans
By lonely lakes to men unknown.
Come the tumult whence it will,
Voice of sport, or rush of wings,
It is a sound, it is a token
That the marble sleep is broken,
And a change has passed on things.

Beneath the calm, within the light,
A hid unruly appetite

Of swifter life, a surer hope,
Strains every sense to larger scope,
Impatient to anticipate

The halting steps of aged Fate.

Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl;
When Nature falters, fain would zeal
Grasp the felloes of her wheel,

And grasping give the orbs another whirl.
Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!

And sun this frozen side,

Bring hither back the robin's call,
Bring back the tulip's pride.

Why chidest thou the tardy Spring?
The hardy bunting does not chide;
The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee ;
The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,
The robins know the melting snow;
The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,
Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,
Secure the osier yet will hide
Her callow brood in mantling leaves;
And thou, by science all undone,
Why only must thy reason fail
To see the southing of the sun?

As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,
So Spring will not, foolish fond
Mix polar night with tropic glow,
Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,
Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,
But she has the temperance
Of the gods, whereof she is one,-
Masks her treasury of heat

Under east-winds crossed with sleet.

Plants and birds and humble creatures

Well accept her rule austere;
Titan-born, to hardy natures
Cold is genial and dear.

As Southern wrath to Northern right
Is but straw to anthracite ;
As in the day of sacrifice,
When heroes piled the pyre,
The dismal Massachusetts ice
Burned more than others' fire,
So Spring guards with surface cold
The garnered heat of ages old.
Hers to sow the seed of bread,
That man and all the kinds be fed;
And, when the sunlight fills the hours,
Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.

The world rolls round;-mistrust it not,-
Befalls again what once befell;
All things return, both sphere and mote,
And I shall hear my bluebird's note,
And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

When late I walked, in earlier days,
All was stiff and stark;

Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,
In the sky no spark;

Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,
Struggling through the drifted roads ;
The whited desert knew me not,
Snow-ridges masked each darling spot ;

VOL. V.

The summer dells, by genius haunted,
One arctic moon had disenchanted.
All the sweet secrets therein hid
By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.
Eldest mason, Frost, had piled
With wicked ingenuity

Swift cathedrals in the wild;
The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts
In the star-lit minster aisled.
I found no joy: the icy wind
Might rule the forest to his mind.
Who would freeze in frozen brakes ?
Back to books and sheltered home,
And wood-fire flickering on the walls,
To hear, when, 'mid our talk and games,
Without the baffled north-wind calls.
But soft! a sultry morning breaks;
The cowslips make the brown brook gay;
A happier hour, a longer day

Now the sun leads in the May,
Now desire of action wakes,
And the wish to roam.

The caged linnet in the spring
Hearkens for the choral glee,
When his fellows on the wing
Migrate from the Southern Sea;
When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,
And the new-born tendrils twine,
The old wine darkling in the cask
Feels the bloom on the living vine,
And bursts the hoops at hint of spring:
And so, perchance, in Adam's race,
Of Eden's bower some dream-like trace
Survived the Flight and swam the Flood,
And wakes the wish in youngest blood
To tread the forfeit Paradise,

And feed once more the exile's eyes;
And ever when the happy child
In May beholds the blooming wild,
And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,

"Onward," he cries, "your baskets bring,In the next field is air more mild,

And o'er yon hazy crest is Eden's balmier spring."

Not for a regiment's parade,

Nor evil laws or rulers made,

Blue Walden rolls its cannonade,
But for a lofty sign

Which the Zodiac threw,

That the bondage-days are told,

And waters free as winds shall flow.
Lo! how all the tribes combine
To rout the flying foe.

See, every patriot oak-leaf throws
His elfin length upon the snows,
Not idle, since the leaf all day
Draws to the spot the solar ray,
Ere sunset quarrying inches down,
And half-way to the mosses brown;
While the grass beneath the rime
Has hints of the propitious time,
And upward pries and perforates
Through the cold slab a thousand gates,
Till green lances peering through
Bend happy in the welkin blue.

April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues ;
Joy shed in rosy waves abroad
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.

Hither rolls the storm of heat;

I feel its finer billows beat
Like a sea which me infolds;
Heat with viewless fingers moulds,
Swells, and mellows, and matures,