The Bell
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leading American lecturer, poet and essayist. Works include two volumes of essays (1841 and 1844), poems (1847) and numerous individual pieces including the famous essays Nature (1836) showing the natural world with its function to excite the intuition, The American Scholar (1837), Self Reliance (1844) which challenges readers to seek their own truths and the poem Terminus (1866). Emerson was a leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism and Romanticism and a strong influence on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson.

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The Bell
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which calls the sons of Time.

Thy voice upon the deep
The home-bound sea-boy hails,
It charms his cares to sleep,
It cheers him as he sails.

To house of God and heavenly joys
Thy summons called our sires,
And good men thought thy sacred voice
Disarmed the thunder's fires.

And soon thy music, sad death-bell,
Shall lift its notes once more,
And mix my requiem with the wind
That sweeps my native shore.

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The Bell by Ralph Waldo Emerson