[364]
Till late he learned through doubt and fear,
Broad England harbored not his peer:
Unwilling still the last to own,
The genius on his cloudy throne.
Emerson learned a large proportion of his wisdom from
Goethe, as he frequently confessed, but where in
Goethe's poetry will you find a quatrain of more penetrating beauty or wider significance than this from “Woodnotes” :
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air
Nor dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.
Or this one from the “Building of the
House” --considered metaphorically as the life structure of man:
She lays her beams in music,
In music every one,
To the cadence of the whirling world
Which dances round the sun.
There is a flash as of heaven's own lightning in some of his verses, and his name has become a spell to conjure with.
