Emerson's fugitive is an inspiring protean power. It animates while remaining on the move. ‘Quick and skilful’, his figure shifts from place to place, eluding the grasp, perpetually mutable. In ‘Ode to Beauty’ this chameleon is addressed directly, which grants the speaker intimacy— perhaps overfamiliarity—with his elusive ‘force’. But his identification with ‘Thou’ takes shape as a will to possession and attainment: ‘lavish, lavish promiser’, ‘Thou inscribest with a bond / In thy momentary play / Would bankrupt Nature to repay’. Ephemerality seems to be a tactic for escape from the artist-figure's accusative vigour: he cannot keep its tongue away from the ‘bond’, nor from bankruptcy, ownership or mastery.

Such language draws on the notion of one exiled or driven out, and of the wandering that takes place after fleeing a debtor, persecutor or tyrant. ‘Oft in streets or humblest places / I detect far wandered graces […] Which from Eden wide astray / In lowly homes have lost their way’. Emerson envisages self-exile in terms indicative of permanent vagrancy; a haunted occupation of public space: ‘Oft in streets’, ‘far wandered’, ‘from Eden […] astray’. It is a lostness which the poem makes perennially ‘hover’ over all. The fugitive is at once abidingly on the move and a frozen emblem of inspiration made to seem ‘eternal’:

All this talk of binding and finding depends upon the poet being as ‘fleet’ of foot as his escaping ‘Thee’. Taking on the character of what he hails, his movements trace out its eternally vanishing motion. Like the fugitive, the artist-figure's mapping, memorising, preserving impulses (haunting streets, moving between ‘homes’) affiliate him to lost origins, to remnants and traces.

In these post-Edenic wanderings through public and private space, the artist seeks orientation in architectural design, especially in tracing historical records, antique design models and aesthetic legacies.