RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Or by knowledge grown too bright

To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

Straightway a forgetting wind

Stole over the celestial kind,

And their lips the secret kept,

If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But, now and then, truth-speaking things

Shamed the angels' veiling wings;

And, shrilling from the solar course,

Or from fruit of chemic force,

Procession of a soul in matter,

Or the speeding change of water,

Or out of the good of evil born,

Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,

And a blush tinged the upper sky,

And the gods shook, they knew not why.

671. Bacchus

"DRING me wine, but wine which never grew

• ~^ In the belly of the grape,

Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through

Under the Andes to the Cape,

SufFer'd no savour of the earth to 'scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute

From a nocturnal root,

Which feels the acrid juice

Of Styx and Erebus ;

And turns the woe of Night,

By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread; We buy diluted wine;

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