"Lo, it is I, be not afraid! In many climes, without avail, Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail; Behold, it is here, this cup which thou In whatso we share with another's need: Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, — IX. Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound:- X. The castle gate stands open now, And the wanderer is welcome to the hall As the hangbird is to the elm-tree bough: No longer scowl the turrets tall, The Summer's long siege at last is o'er; When the first poor outcast went in at the door, And mastered the fortress by surprise; 315 320 325 380 335 340 There is no spot she loves so well on ground, She lingers and smiles there the whole year round; The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land Has hall and bower at his command; And there's no poor man in the North Countree 345 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather were all ministers, and, indeed, on both his father's and mother's side he belongs to a continuous line of ministerial descent from the seventeenth century. At the time of his birth, his father, the Rev. William Emerson, was minister of the First Church congregation, but on his death a few years afterward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a boy of seven, went to live in the old manse at Concord, where his grandfather had lived when the Concord fight occurred. The old manse was afterward the home at one time of Hawthorne, who wrote there the stories which he gathered into the volume, Mosses from an Old Manse. Emerson was graduated at Harvard in 1821, and after teaching a year or two gave himself to the study of divinity. From 1827 to 1832 he preached in Unitarian churches, and was for four years a colleague pastor in the Second Church in Boston. He then left the ministry and afterward devoted himself to literature. He travelled abroad in 1833, in 1847, and again in 1872, making friends among the leading thinkers during his first journey, and confirming the friendships when again in Europe; with the exception of these three journeys and occasional lecturing tours in the United States, he lived quietly at Concord until his death, April 27, 1882. He had delivered several special addresses, and in his early manhood was an important lecturer in the Lyceum courses which were so popular, especially in New England, forty years ago, but his first published book was Nature, in 1839. Subsequent prose writings were his Essays, under that title, and in several volumes with specific titles, Representative Men, and English Traits. In form the prose is either the oration or the essay, with one exception. English Traits records the observations of the writer after his first two journeys to England; and while it may loosely be classed among essays, it has certain distinctive features which separate it from the essays of the same writer; there is in it narrative, reminiscence, and description, which make it more properly the note-book of a philosophic traveller. It may be said of his essays as well as of his deliberate orations that the writer never was wholly unmindful of an audience; he was conscious always that he was not merely delivering his mind, but speaking directly to men. One is aware of a certain pointedness of speech which turns the writer into a speaker, and the printed words into a sounding voice. He wrote poems when in college, but his first publication of verse was through The Dial, a magazine established in 1840, and the representative of a knot of men and women of whom Emerson was the acknowledged or unacknowledged leader. The first volume of his poems was published in 1847, and included those by which he is best known, as The Problem, The Sphinx, The Rhodora, The Humble Bee, Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument. After the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, he contributed to it both prose and poetry, and verses published in the early numbers, mere enigmas to some, profound revelations to others, were fruitful of discussion and thought; his second volume of poems, May Day and other Pieces, was not issued until 1867. Since then a volume of his collected poetry has appeared, containing most of those published in the two volumes, and a few in addition. We are told, however, that the published writings of Emerson bear but small proportion to the unpublished. Many lectures have been delivered, but not printed; many poems written, and a few read, which have never been published. The inference from this, borne out by the marks upon what has been published, is that Mr. Emerson set a high value upon literature, and was jealous of the preroga tive of the poet. He is frequently called a seer, and this old word, indicating etymologically its original intention, is applied well to a poet who saw into nature and human life with a spiritual power which made him a marked man in his own time, and one destined to an unrivalled place in literature. He fulfilled Wordsworth's lines: "With an eye made quiet by the power |