nd "The Boston Hymn" are in their widely
different ways the best. The last expresses, with a sublime
colloquiality in which the commonest words of every-day parlance seem
cut anew; and are made to shine with a fresh and novel lustre, the idea
and destiny of America. In "Voluntaries" our former great peril and
delusion--the mortal Union which lived by slavery--is at first the
theme, with the strong pulse of prophecy, however, in the mournful
music. Few motions of rhyme so win and touch as those opening lines,--

"Low and mournful be the strain,
Haughty thought be far from me;
Tones of penitence and pain,
Moanings of the tropic sea,"--

in which the poet, with a hardly articulate sorrow, regards the past;
and Mr. Emerson's peculiarly exalted and hopeful genius has nowhere
risen in clearer and loftier tones than in those stops which open full
upon us after the pathetic pleasing of his regrets:--

"In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right,
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom's fight,--
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay,
And quit proud homes and youthful dames,
For famine, toil, and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
The youth replies, _I can_.

* * * * *

"Blooms the laurel which belongs
To the valiant chief who fights;
I see the wreath, I hear the songs
Lauding the Eternal Rights,
Victors over daily wrongs:
Awful victors, they misguide
Whom they will destroy,
And their coming triumph hide
In our downfall, or our joy:
They reach no term, they never sleep,
In equal strength through space abide;
Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,
The strong they slay, the swift outstride:
Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,
And rankly on the castled steep,--
Speak it firmly, these are gods,
All are ghosts beside."

It is, of course, a somewhat Emersonian Gypsy that speaks in "The Romany
Girl," but still she speaks with the passionate, sudden energy of a
woman, and flashes upon the mind with intense vividness the conception
of a wild nature's gleeful consciousness of freedom, and ex