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In sad remembrance that we once did meet,
And know that bliss irrevocably gone.

"The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,
For elegy has other subject none;

Each strain of music in my ears shall ring
Knell of departure from that other one.

"Is 't then too late the damage to repair?

Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft
The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare,
But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.

"If I but love that virtue which he is,

Though it be scented in the morning air, Still shall we be dearest acquaintances,

Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare."

The other poem seems to have been written earlier, before the separation of which this so loftily speaks; and it vibrates with a tenderer chord than sympathy. It begins,

"Low in the eastern sky

Is set thy glancing eye,"

and then it goes on with the picture of lover-like things, the thrushes and the flowers, until, he says,

"The trees a welcome waved,
And lakes their margin laved,

When thy free mind

To my retreat did wind."

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"Let us," said Hafiz, "break up the tiresome roof of heaven into new forms," and with as bold a flight did this young poet pass to his "stellar duties." Then dropping to the Concord meadow again, like the tuneful lark, he chose a less celestial path

"Of gentle slope and wide,

As thou wert by my side;

I'll walk with gentle pace,
And choose the smoothest place,

And careful dip the oar,

And shun the winding shore,
And gently steer my boat

Where water-lilies float,

And cardinal flowers

Stand in their sylvan bowers."

A frivolous question has sometimes been raised whether the young Thoreau knew what love was, like the Sicilian shepherd, who found him a native of the rocks, a lion's whelp. With his poet-nature, he early gathered this experience, and passed on; praising afterwards the lion's nature in the universal god:

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"There's nothing in the world, I know,

That can escape from Love,
For every depth it goes below,
And every height above."

The Red Journal of five hundred and ninety-six long pages, in which the early verses occur, was the first collection of Thoreau's systematic diarizing. It ran on from October, 1837, to June, 1840, and was suc

ceeded by another journal of three hundred and ninety-six pages, which was finished. early in 1841. He wrote his first lecture (on Society) in March, 1838, and read it before the Concord Lyceum in the Freemasons' Hall, April 11, 1838. In the December following he wrote a memorable essay on "Sound and Silence," and in February, 1840, wrote his "first printed paper of consequence," as he says, on "Aulus Perseus Flaccus." The best of the early verses seem to have been written in 1837-41. His contributions to the "Dial," which he helped edit, were taken from his journals, and ran through nearly every number from July, 1840, to April, 1844, when that magazine ceased.

For these papers he received nothing but the thanks of Emerson and the praise of a few readers. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in February, 1843, wrote to Thoreau, that "the regular income of the Dial' does not pay the cost of its printing and paper; yet there are readers enough to support it, if they would only subscribe; and they will subscribe, if they are convinced that only by doing so can they secure its continu

ance." They did not subscribe, and in the spring of 1844 it came to an end.

In 1842 Thoreau took a walk to Wachusett, his nearest mountain, and the journal of this excursion was printed in the "Boston Miscellany" of 1843. In it occurred the verses, written at least as early as 1841, in which he addresses the mountains of his horizon, Monadnoc, Wachusett, and the Peterborough Hills of New Hampshire. These verses were for some time in the hands of Margaret Fuller, for publication in the "Dial," if she saw fit, but she returned them with the following characteristic letter, the first addressed by her to Tho

reau :

"[CONCORD] 18th October, 1841.

"I do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of Nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music. The image of the ships does not please me originally. It illustrates the greater by the less, and affects me as when Byron compares the light on Jura to that of the dark eye of woman.

not define my position here, and readers would differ from me.

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