The heart has needs beyond the head,
    And, starving in the plenitude
    Of strange gifts, craves its common food,
  Our human nature’s daily bread.

  We are but men:  no gods are we
    To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak,
    Each separate, on his painful peak,
  Thin-cloaked in self-complacency!

  Better his lot whose axe is swung
    In Wartburg woods, or that poor girl’s
    Who by the Ilm her spindle whirls
  And sings the songs that Luther sung,

  Than his, who, old and cold and vain,
    At Weimar sat, a demigod,
    And bowed with Jove’s imperial nod
  His votaries in and out again!

  Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet! 
    Ambition, hew thy rocky stair! 
    Who envies him who feeds on air
  The icy splendors of his seat?

  I see your Alps above me cut
    The dark, cold sky,—­and dim and lone
    I see ye sitting, stone on stone,
  With human senses dulled and shut.

  I could not reach you, if I would,
    Nor sit among your cloudy shapes;
    And (spare the fable of the Grapes
  And Fox) I would not, if I could.

  Keep to your lofty pedestals! 
    The safer plain below I choose: 
    Who never wins can rarely lose,
  Who never climbs as rarely falls.

  Let such as love the eagle’s scream
    Divide with him his home of ice: 
    For me shall gentler notes suffice,—­
  The valley-song of bird and stream,

  The pastoral bleat, the drone of bees,
    The flail-beat chiming far away,
    The cattle-low at shut of day,
  The voice of God in leaf and breeze!

  Then lend thy hand, my wiser friend,
    And help me to the vales below,
    (In truth, I have not far to go,)
  Where sweet with flowers the fields extend.

THE SINGING-BIRDS AND THEIR SONGS.

Those persons enjoy the most happiness, if possessed of a benevolent heart and favored by ordinary circumstances of fortune, who have acquired by habit and education the power of deriving pleasure from objects that lie immediately around them.  But these common sources of happiness are opened to those only who are endowed with genius, or who have received a certain kind of intellectual training.  The more ordinary the mental and moral organization and culture of the individual, the more far-fetched and dear-bought must be his enjoyments.  Nature has given us in full development only those appetites which are necessary to our physical well-being.  She has left our moral appetites and capacities in the germ, to be developed by education and circumstances.  Hence those agreeable sensations that come chiefly from the exercise of the imagination, which may be called the pleasures of sentiment, are available only to persons of a peculiar refinement of mind.  The ignorant and rude may be dazzled and delighted by physical beauty, and charmed by loud and stirring sounds; but those more simple melodies and less attractive colors and forms that appeal to the mind for their principal effect act more powerfully upon individuals of superior culture.