THE RHODORA

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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 made 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:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The selfsame Power that brought me there, brought you.

DISSERTATION ON ROAST PIG

BY CHARLES LAMB

If, as has been said, "To get oneself loved is the best way of being useful," Charles Lamb was one of the most useful of men.

Letters and memoirs of his time by the choicest, the wittiest, the wisest, brim with love for him and with delight in him. Hazlitt declared," No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen half sentences as he does." Yet Lamb was of humble birth (his father had been a servant); he was of frail health, infirm of speech, and never in worldly place but a poor clerk. He was quick, and early eager to learn, knowing his letters

before he could speak. He was slight in frame, with sensitive, delicate features, eyes "brown and bright," and dark curling hair, almost black. Sweet and gentle and more than all, rare, was Charles Lamb, "a chance specimen in Chinese ware, one to the set, unique, quaint." His friendships with Coleridge and other literary men were the wine of his life. Though shy, he loved company, and much preferred London to the country. "The houses in streets are the places to live in" he believed. For almost forty years Lamb's life was clouded by the periodical insanity of his sister Mary to whom he tenderly devoted himself. Yet he was more often merry than sad; and always kind, alike to a poor man or a stray donkey. As critic, essayist and humorist, he holds a place peculiarly secure. With his sister he charmingly retold a number of the plays of Shakespeare for boys and girls. [Born in 1775-died in 1834] Lamb's essays appeared under the pen name, Elia.

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally, the Cook's Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother), was accidentally discovered in the manner following.

The swineherd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who, being fond of playing with fire, as youngsters of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which, kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion till it was reduced to ashes.

Together with the cottage-a sorry, antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it--what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-born pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the periods we read of.

East from the remotest

Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which

his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils unlike any scent which he had before experienced.

What could it proceed from? Not from the burned cottage, he had smelled that smell before, indeed, this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think.

He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burned his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life, indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted-crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now; still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit.

The truth at length broke into his slow understanding that it was the pig that smelled so, and the pig that tasted so delicious. Surrendering himself up to the new-born

pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with a cudgel. Finding how affairs stood, he began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hailstones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when something like the following dialogue ensued.

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that you have burned down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what--what have you got there, I say?"

"O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice the burned pig eats."

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that he should ever have a son that should eat burned pig.

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig and, fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burned pig, father! only taste! O!" with such like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.

Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the