Will no one tell me what she sings? 
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago: 
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day? 
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate’er the theme, the maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;—­
I listened motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

CXXXIII.  VALUE OF THE PRESENT. (447)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, the celebrated essayist and philosopher, was born in Boston.  His father was a Unitarian minister, and the son, after graduating at Harvard University, entered the ministry also, and took charge of a Unitarian congregation in Boston.  His peculiar ideas on religious topics soon caused him to retire from the ministry, and he then devoted himself to literature.  As a lecturer, Emerson attained a wide reputation, both in this country and in England, and he is considered as one of the most independent and original thinkers of the age.  His style is brief and pithy, dazzling by its wit, but sometimes paradoxical.  He wrote a few poems, but they are not generally admired, being didactic in style, bare, and obscure.  Among his best known publications are his volume “Nature,” and his lectures, “The Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century,” “The Superlative in Manners and Literature,” “English Character and Manners,” and “The Conduct of Life.”  In 1850 appeared “Representative Men,” embracing sketches of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe.

Such are the days,—­the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the immense bounty of nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but what a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end!  We are coaxed, flattered, and duped, from morn to eve, from birth to death; and where is the old eye that ever saw through the deception?  The Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of his principal attributes.  As if, in this gale of warring elements, which life is, it was necessary to bind souls to human life as mariners in a tempest lash themselves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship, and Nature employed certain illusions as her ties and straps,—­a rattle, a doll, an apple, for a child; skates, a river, a boat, a horse, a gun, for the growing boy;—­and I will not begin to name those of the youth and adult, for they are numberless.  Seldom and slowly the mask falls, and the pupil is permitted to see that all is one stuff, cooked and painted under many counterfeit appearances.  Hume’s doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.