man.

EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was, like Lowell, the son of a clergyHe was born in Boston. His father died while the children were still young, but his mother, though poor, managed to send her sons through Harvard. Ralph graduated in 1821 (boys could graduate younger in those days; for the standard of the colleges was not then so advanced as now), and after teaching for a while entered the Unitarian ministry in 1829. He gave this up after three years, and turned his attention to writing and lecturing. His home, during the most of his life, was in Concord, Mass., where lived also Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Alcotts. Do you know Miss Alcott's books?

For thirty or forty years he was the most eminent and most inspiring public lecturer, and it was a time when public lecturing was a common thing for able men. His influence was very great. He stimulated many thousands of people to higher thinking and better living. He also wrote many essays and poems, which thoughtful people still find among the best things in our literature.

Here are two well-known passages:

And,

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The Youth replies, I can.

God said, I am tired of kings,

I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the moaning brings,
The outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball

A field of havoc and of war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?

5

10

15

20

THE CORN SONG

Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!
Heap high the golden corn!
No richer gift has Autumn poured

From out her lavish horn!

Let other lands, exulting, glean
The apple from the pine,
The orange from its glossy green,
The cluster from the vine;

We better love the hardy gift

Our rugged vales bestow,

To cheer us when the storm shall drift
Our harvest-fields with snow.

Through vales of grass and meads of flowers,
Our plows their furrows made,

While on the hills the sun and showers
Of changeful April played.

We dropped the seed o'er hill and plain
Beneath the sun of May,

And frightened from our sprouting grain
The robber crows away.

All through the long, bright days of June
Its leaves grew green and fair,

And waved in hot midsummer's noon
Its soft and yellow hair.

But let the good old crop adorn
The hills our fathers trod;
Still let us, for His golden corn,

Send up our thanks to God!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.

HELPS TO STUDY

This poem and the next are among Whittier's "Songs of Labor." They dignify and beautify the life of toil in the country.

Autumn's horn is the "horn of plenty." The pineapple is, properly speaking, not an apple at all. The "goodly root" is, of course, the potato. The "fly" is the so-called Hessian fly, a pest that destroys the wheat crop.

1. What beauty and what uses does the poet see in the corn? 2. With what other fruits and grains does he compare it?

For Study with the Glossary: Exulting, rugged, vapid, samp.

THE HUSKERS

It was late in mild October, and the long autumnal rain
Had left the summer harvest-fields all green with grass

again;

The first sharp frosts had fallen, leaving all the woodlands gay With the hues of summer's rainbow, or the meadow-flowers

of May.

5 Through a thin, dry mist, that morning, the sun rose broad and red,

At first a rayless disk of fire he brightened as he sped;
Yet, even his noontide glory fell chastened and subdued,
On the cornfields and the orchards, and softly pictured wood.