Foul Past, as my Master I scorn thee, As my servant I love thee, dear Past. One of your cold jelly-fish poets that find themselves cast up by some wave upon a sandy subject, and so wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let us see it through their substance—as if that were a great feat. Cousin cloud the wind of music blow me into wreath and curve of grace as it bloweth thee. And then A gentle violin mated with the flute, And both flew off into a wood of harmony, Two doves of tone. I have great trouble in behavior. I know what to do, I know what I at heart desire to do; but the _doing_ of it, that is work, that labor is. I construct in my lonesome meditations the fairest scheme of my relations to my fellow-men, and to fellow-events; but when I go to set the words of solitary thought to the music of much-crowded action, I find ten thousand difficulties never suspected: difficulties of race, temperament, mood, tradition, custom, passion, unreason and other difficulties which I do not understand, as, for instance, the failure of contemporary men to recognize genius and great art. I made me a song of serenade, And I stole in the Night, in the Night, To the window of the world where man slept light, And I sang: O my Love, my Love, my Fellow Man, My Love. I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage and I said: "I know that thou art the word of my God, dear Violet: And Oh the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads. Measure what space a violet stands above the ground, 'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that." [_Written on the fly-leaf of Emerson's "Representative Men," between 1874 and 1879_] While I lie here under the tree, Comes a strange insect and poises an instant at my cheek, And lays his antennæ there upon my skin, Then perceiving that I have nothing of nutriment for him, He leaves me with a quiet indifference which, do all I can, Crushes me more than the whole world's sarcasm, And now he is gone to the Jamestown weed, there, And is rioting in sweetness. I did not think so poorly of thee, dear Lord, As that thou wouldst wait until thou wert asked (As many think), And that thou wouldst be ugly, like a society person, Because thou wert not invited. [1881]