perched

Our little gymnast, the titmouse, or black-capped chickadee, must not be forgotten. He is not regarded as migratory, and yet he comes to us each winter, and seems to go northward in the spring. He is the most fearless bird of my acquaintance, frequently eating from my hand, and is almost omnivorous, taking anything that comes in his way, from a bone that we hang on a tree for his tiny lordship to pick, down to a plate of preserved berries we have placed on the doorstep for the bluebirds. But he is quite exclusive in his society, and does not mingle freely with the other winter birds. The cold Northern snow-storms seem only to increase his jollity; now here, now there, clinging to a bough, head downward, chanting his chick-a-dee-dee. Emerson pictures him in the following lines:

When piped a tiny voice hard by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
Chic-chicadeedee! saucy note
Out of sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said, Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places,
Where January brings few faces. 

This poet, though he live apart,
Moved by his hospitable heart,
Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,
To do the honors of his court,
As fits a feathered lord of land;
Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,
Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,
Prints his small impress in the snow,
Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray. 

Mary Treat, "Our Winter Birds." The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 49, March 1882.

*

Photos from Shilly Shally Lodge, Gatineau Park. From Library and Archives Canada, discovered via A London Salmagundi.

i will not move until i have the highest command

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of out labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.
'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'
'We have none.'
'What will you do, then?' cries the world.
'We will wait.'
'How long?'
'Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.'
'But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.'
'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command. If no calls should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist.

contained and uncontained

Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God ... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

the gift of tongues

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.

The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson's address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday evening, July 15, 1838.