1 90 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



classic expression of the self-sufficingness of beauty, 

 and consequently of art, a sublime utterance of the 

 great secret in which their self-measured excellence 

 subsists : — 



In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, 

 I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, 

 Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, 

 To please the desert and the sluggish brook. 

 The purple petals, fallen in the pool, 



Made the black water with their beauty gay ; 

 Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, 



And court the flower that cheapens his array. 

 Rhodora ! if the sages ask thee why 

 This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, 

 Tell them, dear, that if eyes were tnade for seeing^ 

 Then beauty is its own excuse for being: 

 Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose, 



I never thought to ask, I never knew : 

 Bitt, in my simple ignorance, suppose 



The selfsame Power that brotiglit me there brought yoii. 



The self-excuse of beauty and the self-warrant of 

 human nature, holds the poet, are alike grounded 

 in the ideal being of the Power who is revealed in 

 both. We cannot hesitate to hold with Emerson. 

 The beautiful and the soul of man are indeed in 

 an eternal correlation. Each, as the expression of 

 the selfsame Ideal Reason that is the Light of 

 both, reflects the other and implies the other. In 

 this inherent union with the other, each is truly 

 self-complete, and, taken in its entire reality, needs 

 for its justification nothing but itself. It must be 



