Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures.
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures.
Under the heading "Morals" in his discourse on "Poetry and Imagination," he comes to the conclusion, entirely characteristic of him, that "Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks." On this theme Emerson writes occasionally with a recklessness not often associated with the "Victorian" period in America. For power, he intimates in "Mithridates," a poet may perhaps well pay with his soul:
Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry!
O all you virtues, methods, mights,
Means, appliances, delights,
Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,
Smug routine, and things allowed,
Minorities, things under cloud!
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry!
O all you virtues, methods, mights,
Means, appliances, delights,
Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,
Smug routine, and things allowed,
Minorities, things under cloud!
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!
As a priest of the "being God, not the God that has been," Emerson finds that even the greatest of the old poets do not wholly content him. As a
