Pearl in Emerson's Poetry

This high atmosphere of precious supremacy and reverence, which surrounds the gem now as it has for more than twenty centuries, is a legacy of Rome. The east loved pearls as beautiful and precious trinkets; while Rome gave to them imperial honors and drew around them the mystic circle of patrician favor. And since that day, in every land where an aristo¬cracy existed or came into existence, pearls have been the familiars of the exclusive.

This natural fitness of the gem for refined associations is recognized by Emerson in his Friendship，He says:

Thou foolish Hafiz! Say! Do churls know the worth of Oman's pearls? Give the gem which dims the moon to the noblest, or to none.

It is a late echo of the scriptural saying, "Cast not your pearls before swine." No modern poet shows more knowledge of the nature, or a more just appreciation of the delicate beauty of the gem than Emerson. In his "May Day," speaking of the tardiness of the spring, he writes: "Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl."

Evidently he knew of the slow process by which the successive coats of filmy nacre increase the size of the growing gem. Likewise a couplet in "Nature " betrays the poet's obser¬vation of the iridescent nature of the colors in mother-of-pearl, and in the gem occasionally when those fleeting tints are added to the beauty of its luster; the lines are a dainty illustration:

Illusions like the tints of pearl, Or changing colors of the sky.