English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
764. The Apology
T
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.
But ’tis figured in the flowers;
SWas never secret history
But birds tell it in the bowers.
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.