glorious than its spring. That was hope; this is reality. Then a long
road beset with perils lay before him; now they have been passed.
Notwithstanding his trials, life has been sweet. It has not been
altogether toil. He has beheld with open sense this glorious world
and appreciated what the Creator has done for the happiness of his
creatures. The song of birds, the breath of flowers, the majesty of
seas, and the grandeur of mountains and of forests, the hope of spring,
the beauty of summer, and the sweet companionship of kindred hearts,
have all been his. But now he is to possess the source of all that so
delighted him. He is to grasp that unseen hand that led him when he
knew it not, and held the tangled thread of his daily life. He is to
exchange the stream for the fountain, the sunbeam for the sun itself.
The journey has not been without much of profit and pleasure, and the
heart of the wayfarer has been cheered by messages from loved ones, but
he would rather be at home. He who made the flower is lovelier than
the flower. He who gave the grace doth the grace exceed. To sow the
seed and watch its growth has been a hopeful labor, but it is better
to bind the sheaves. Rich are the fading splendors of the autumn and
gorgeous the dyes in which the Almighty has decked the departing year.
Sweet the murmur of autumnal winds among the falling leaves mingling
with the deeper cadence of the streams. But a brighter glory illumines
the autumn of life that has been spent with God and for God. What
language shall describe, what figures worthily set forth, the maturity
of a soul that in these days of secular knowledge and Gospel privilege
has gathered to itself, with a sanctified avarice, all that God has
taught in the mighty utterances of nature and the clearer revelation of
His word, that has laid art and science under contribution and grappled
to every opportunity of intellectual and spiritual growth, that by
trial has been refined, and by blessings quickened to a higher measure
of gratitude and love.
Permit one united to you by the college tie to which time only adds
intensity and depth, who has travelled over the path your feet are
now pressing, who has reached that period of life when the tissue
of the dream robe has fallen and when dreams unchilled by truth no
longer minister that maddening fuel to the feverish blood, permit one
to inquire if you are laying the foundations for such a maturity as
has been described. You are living in a day that affords opportunity
and likewise compels responsibility. Inspired by such sentiments,
using aright your splendid opportunities and holding yourself true to
your great responsibilities, may you resemble trees planted by living
waters. May you be enrolled among the inhabitants of the city that hath
foundations built by God on the banks of that river
“Whose sapphire crested waves in glory roll
O’er golden sands, and die upon the shore in music.”
THE ANCHOR OF HOPE
[From a sermon preached at the Second Parish church, Portland, Maine,
on Sunday, August 5, 1900, “Old Home Week.”]
Hebrews vi. 19. “_Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both
sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil._”
The apostle declares that the relation of a hope in Christ to the soul
is the same as that of the anchor to the ship.
The value of an anchor in emergencies is well known. A large ship
filled with passengers is making her passage in midwinter across the
western ocean. As she strikes soundings the weather thickens. The wind
is easterly; the gale increases; the sea makes; snow begins to fall;
and no pilot is to be found. But confident, too confident, of his
ability, the master, unwilling to lie off, runs into the narrow channel
of Boston Bay. The gale increases; the snow thickens. Sail after sail
is taken in until the ship under short canvas can no longer hold her
own, but makes leeway continually. Suddenly arises the cry, “Breakers
to leeward! Breakers to leeward!” and the seamen behold the long, black
line of ragged rocks and the white surf that breaks upon them, where
the strongest ship becomes in a few moments like the chips and bark
that fell from her timbers in framing.
There is now but one resource. Canvas can do no more. The navigator’s
expedients are exhausted. There is but one hope left to cling to. The
anchor may bring her up. With the skill and energy of men working for
their own lives and the lives of those dependent upon their exertions,
the ship is brought to and the anchors are let go. The ship trembles as
fathom after fathom of massive chain is jerked through the hawse-holes.
The fire flies from the iron folds that encircle the windlass, and, as
she comes up to that terrific sea breaking mountains high, taking it
over both shoulders and filling her whole waist with water, pitching
and wallowing till every stick seems about ready to go out of her, and
the windlass itself to be carried into the bows, anxious eyes look
ahead at the seas and astern at the breakers. A cry is heard: “She
drags! She drags! The surf is bringing the anchors home! They won’t
hold!” Every cheek grows pale and strong men tremble.
Presently there is another cry: “Now she holds! She holds! The anchors
have got her!” And men who have not spoken together during the voyage
embrace each other for joy. The last link of scope is given; the chains
are weather-bitted; the slatting canvas is furled; the yards are
sharpened to the wind, and then she lies in that tremendous surf, whose
pitiless diapason drowns every other sound--two hundred souls depending
for life upon the links of those chains and the strength and clutch of
those anchors.
Thus with the soul of man. Without the Christian hope it is a ship
without an anchor, adrift on a stormy sea, at the mercy of its own
passions, the temptations of life, and the wiles of the devil. These
are the tempests which the soul must meet and struggle with; and,
destitute of the gospel anchor, it must make shipwreck of faith and a
good conscience.
The anchor is the seaman’s last resort. He has many expedients with
which to battle and make head against the tempest, but when all other
methods fail, then the anchor must bring her up or she is lost.
Thus the Christian, when all other expedients fail, when his own
strength is but weakness, flings himself upon the mercy of God, and
moors head and stern to the eternal promise and the covenants of grace.
“Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast,
and which entereth into that within the veil.”
Many a good ship has been lost, not because her anchors were
insufficient and her ground tackle poor, not because they were not
thrown clear and the ship properly secured to them, but because
the holding ground was bad,--a smooth ledge, a soft mud, or loose
sand,--insomuch that the anchors either slip over or cut through, and
the seaman must perish without any fault of his own. In other places is
found a soft mud or gravel upon the surface and beneath a strong clay,
into which the anchor beds itself so sure and steadfast that no wind
or sea will bring it home--the best of holding ground. Such anchorages
are highly prized by seafaring men; they will beat up many a mile to
windward to gain an anchor in them.
Thus the anchor of the soul is both sure and steadfast, because as
the anchor of the ship goes through the surface mud into the deep,
tenacious clay, it entereth into that within the veil.
The Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the Jewish temple, was
concealed by a veil, which was rent in twain at the crucifixion. That
event was typical of those inward spiritual truths which are revealed
to the believer by Christ, and in which his hope consists. The promises
of grace and the inward witness of the spirit that he is an heir of
those promises through faith in Christ are the holding ground of the
believers’ anchor, where once bedded it is sure and steadfast.
These are inward spiritual joys of which the believer cannot be
deprived except by his own remissness and the letting down of the
anchor watch. These promises were the anchor of the apostle’s
experience. A rough, stormy life was his--almost always on a lee shore
and among the breakers. Very little smooth water did he see, for in
every city bonds and imprisonment awaited him; but he had on board
the gospel anchor, and shackled to it the chain of a rich and deep
experience. The bitter end of that chain was clinched around the riding
bits of his soul; and he had no fear that the anchor would come home or
the chain part that moored him to it, and he could say: “O death, where
is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Life is the sea; the soul is the vessel; the grace, gifts, and
experience of the soul make up the priceless cargo with which the ship
is freighted. Heaven is the harbor all hope to make. The temptations,
labor, and afflictions of life are the tempests we must encounter. It
is a stormy sea and a wintry passage. You need good ground tackle and
good holding ground. Have you them? If not, it is from negligence, not
necessity. It is, my friend, because you have not bestirred yourself to
take hold of the promises of grace that have been pressed upon you.
PRAYER OFFERED ON MEMORIAL DAY (May 30, 1883) AT BRUNSWICK, MAINE
O Thou who art equally supreme in the moral and the material universe,
guiding the sea-bird to her nest amid the blinding snows, the breaker’s
foam, and the driving mist of ocean, who makest small the drops of
rain, and a way for the lightning of thunder, and the thing that is hid
bringest forth to light, we adore thy power and thy wisdom; we magnify
thy grace; we hallow thy name. With penitence we confess our manifold
transgressions as individuals and as a nation. Holiness belongeth unto
Thee, but unto us shame and confusion of faces.
We thank Thee that Thou didst direct our forefathers to these shores,
and inspire them with purpose and wisdom to form a civil compact built
upon the principles of religion, education, law, and labor. We thank
Thee that, in the face of famine, pestilence, and relentless foes,
they accomplished their purpose, and with a spirit of self-sacrifice
worthy of the cause, devoted themselves as stepping stones to bridge
the path of future generations that they might create a republic, lay
the foundations of civil liberty, resist oppression, and seal their
devotion to their principles with their blood. We thank Thee that
though they have passed away, their principles have survived, and
that when the republic they had reared was rocking to its foundations,
assailed by foes without and treachery within, their children did
not prove unworthy of the sires who begat them, nor recreant to the
principles they drew in with their mothers’ milk and were taught at
their fathers’ knees. We thank Thee that they were equally ready to
vindicate at the cannon’s mouth and maintain with property or life the
principles of civil and religious liberty, and the inalienable right of
every man to the fruit of his own labor.
We pray Thee that, on this day, set apart by the Executive of the
nation as a day of grateful remembrance, we may appreciate the true
nature of the perils we have escaped and acknowledge our indebtedness
to the providence of that Being who ruleth over the affairs of nations.
May we not in our prosperity forget those dark hours when all faces
gathered blackness. May we not merely decorate the graves, but may we
ever cherish with affectionate remembrance our obligations to those
whose courage mounted in proportion to the imminence of the danger,
and who approved their loyalty with their blood. May we not on this
day fraught with associations so sad to those whose wounds, partially
healed, are this day reopened, forget the fatherless whose parents
sleep in bloody graves, and the widows whom this day reminds of all
they have lost, and the aged parents from whom war took the support
of their declining years. We commit these to thy care and keeping; we
commit unto Thee all those who suffered and sacrificed that the Union
might be preserved. And we thank Thee for the comfort of a vast army
come back from the deadly uproar of arms to take up again the unheroic
duties of life, and strive by honest living to maintain the principles
they fought to defend.
We pray for thy blessing upon thy servant. May he be enabled to expound
and enforce those principles which lie at the foundation of social
happiness and free institutions; those principles which have made this
republic, which a little more than a century ago was a mere shrub with
bare shade sufficient to cover its roots, to become a tree that hath
sent forth its roots to the sea and its branches to the rivers, and on
whose foliage the sunlight loves to linger, and on whose branches the
dew of heaven lieth all night.--AMEN.
VERSE
FROM “THE PHANTOMS OF THE MIND”
[First printed in _Bowdoin Portfolio_, September, 1839.]
I would not be a fragile flower
To languish in a lady’s bower,
A silken thing of texture rare
That fears to meet God’s blessed air;
My life a water, stagnant, low,
Without an ebb, without a flow;
Chained like a captive to his oar
To toil on, on, forevermore!
And supplicate with frantic cry
For the “poor privilege to die”;
A smooth-faced boy, a harmless thing,
A kitten playing with a string,
A child without, a brute within,
Without e’en energy to sin.
Not thus, when erst that iron race
From whom our birth we proudly trace,
No sculptured arras decked the bed
Whereon reposed the patriot’s head;
Nor proud device or motto wore
Those stern-faced men that lived of yore
In the good days of “auld lang syne,”
When liberty, a feeble vine,
Lay bruised and trailing on the ground,
Nor yet a single trellis found;
Gently they reared its drooping crest,
They bade its tendrils twine,
And many a traveller since hath blessed
The shadow of that vine.
THE DEMON OF THE SEA
[First printed in _Bowdoin Portfolio_, November, 1839.]
Ah! tell me not of your shady dells,
Where the lilies gleam and the fountain wells,
Where the reaper rests when his task is o’er,
And the lake-wave sobs on the verdant shore,
And the rustic maid with a heart all free,
Hies to the well-known trysting-tree;
For I’m the god of the rolling sea,
And the charms of earth are nought to me.
O’er the thundering chime of the breaking surge,
On the lightning’s wing my course I urge,
On the thrones of foam right joyous ride
’Mid the sullen dash of the angry tide.
I hear ye tell of music’s power,
The rapture of a sigh,
When beauty in her wizard bower
Unveils her languid eye.
Of those who die in rugged fight
And battling for their country’s right
With the shivered brand in the “red right hand,”
And the plaudits of a rescued land.
Ye never knew the infernal fire,
The withering curse, the scorching ire,
That rages, maddens in the breast
Of him who rules the billow’s crest.
Heard ye that last despairing yell
That wailed Creation’s funeral knell,
When young and old, the vile, the brave,
Were circled in one common grave?
While on my ear of driving foam
By moaning whirlwinds sped,
O’er what _was_ joyous earth I roam,
And trample on the dead.
This is the music that my ear
Thrills with stern ecstasy to hear!
I love to view some lonely bark,
The sport of storms, the lightning’s mark,
Scarce struggling through the fresh’ning wave
That foams and yawns to be her grave!
I saw a son and father fight
For a drifting spar their lives to save;
The son he throttled his father gray,
And tore the spar from his clutch away,
Till he sank beneath the wave;
And deemed it were a noble sight.
I saw upon a shattered wreck
All swinging at the tempest’s beck,
A mother lone, whose frenzied eye
Wandered in hopeless agony
O’er that vast plain where naught was seen,
The ocean and the sky between,
And there all buried to the breast
In the hungry surf that round her prest--
With feeble arms, in anguish wild,
High o’er her head she raised her child,
Endured of winds and waves the strife,
To add a unit to its life.
I whelmed that infant in the sea
To add a pang to her misery,
And the wretched mother’s frantic yell
Came o’er me like a soothing spell!
Are ye so haughty in your pride,
To deem of all the earth beside
That yours are fields and fragrant flowers,
And lute-like voices in your bowers,
And gold and gems of priceless worth,
And all the glory of the earth?
Ah, mean is all your pageantry
To that proud, fadeless blazonry,
That waves in scathless beauty free
Beneath the blue, old rolling sea!
For there are flowers that wither not,
And leaves that never fall,
Immortal forms in each wild grot,
Still bright and changeless all.
Decay is not on beauty’s bloom,
No canker in the rose,
No prescience of a future doom
To mar the sweet repose--
There Proteus’ changeful form is seen,
And Triton winds his shell,
While through old Ocean’s valleys green,
The tuneful echoes swell.
But though a Demon rightly named,
For terror more than mercy famed,--
Yet demons e’en respect the power
That nerves the heart in danger’s hour.
And when the veteran of a hundred storms,
Whom many a wild midnight
I’ve girded with a thousand startling forms
Of terror and affright,--
When tempests roar and hell-fiends scream,
The thunders crash, the lightnings gleam,
’Mid biting cold and driving hail
Still grasps the helm, still trims the sail,
Nor deigns to utter coward cries,
But as he lived, so fearless dies,--
Mingles his last faint, bubbling sigh
With the pealing tempest’s banner-cry;--
Then winds are hushed, the billow falls
Where storms were wont to be,
As I bear him to the untrodden halls
Of the deep unfathomed sea!
Now Triton sends a mournful strain
Through all that vast profound,--
At once a bright immortal train
Comes thronging at the sound.
And on a shining pearly car
They place the honored dust,
And Ocean’s chargers gently bear
Along the sacred trust,
While far o’er all the glassy plain
By mighty Neptune led,
In sadness moves that funeral train,--
Thus Ocean wails her dead!
And now the watch of life is past,
The shattered hulk is moored at last,
Nor e’en the tempest’s thrilling breath
Can wake “the dull, cold ear of death.”
No bitter thoughts of home and loved ones dart
Their untold anguish through the seaman’s heart.
Peaceful be thy slumbers, brother,
There’s no prouder grave for thee,
Well may pine for thee a mother,
Flower of ocean’s chivalry!
PORTLAND
Still may I love, beloved of thee,
My own fair city of the sea!
Where moulders back to kindred dust
The mother who my childhood nurst,
And strove, with ill-requited toil,
To till a rough, ungrateful soil;
Yet kindly spared by Heaven to know
That Faith’s reward is sure, though slow,
And see the prophet’s mantle grace
The rudest scion of her race.
And while around thy seaward shore
The Atlantic doth its surges pour,
(Those verdant isles, thy bosom-gems)
May Temples be thy diadems;
Spire after spire in beauty rise,
Still pointing upward to the skies,
Unwritten sermons, and rebukes of love,
To point thy toiling throngs to worlds above.
AN ODE
[Written for the Semi-centennial Celebration at Bowdoin College,
August 31, 1852.]
From waves that break to break again,
From winds that die to gather might,
How pleasant on the stormy main
Appears the sailor’s native height.
And sweet, I ween, the graceful tears
That glisten in the wand’rer’s eye,
As haunts and homes of early years
Begemmed with morning’s dewdrops lie.
Borne on the fragrant breath of morn,
His lazy vessel stems the tide
Among the fields of waving corn
That nestle on the river’s side.
His mother’s cottage through the leaves
Gleams like a rainbow seen at night,
While all the visions fancy weaves
Are stirring at the well-known sight.
But sweeter memories cluster here
Than ever stirred a seaman’s breast,
Than e’er provoked his grateful tear,
Or wooed the mariner to rest.
’Twas here our life of life began--
The spirit felt its dormant power;
’Twas here the child became a man--
The opening bud became a flower.
And from Niagara’s distant roar
And homes beside the heaving sea,
Rank upon rank thy children pour,
And gather to thy Jubilee.
On these old trees each nestling leaf,
The murmur of yon flowing stream,
Has power to stir a buried grief,
Or to recall some youthful dream.
Each path that skirts the tangled wood,
Or winds amidst its secret maze,
Worn by the feet of those we loved,
Brings back the forms of other days.
Of those whose smile was heaven to thee,
Whose voice a richer music made
Than brooks that murmur to the sea,
Or birds that warble in the shade.
Around these ancient altar fires
We cluster with a joyous heart,
While ardent youth and hoary sires
Alike sustain a grateful part.
A HYMN
[Written for the Celebration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the
Boston Seaman’s Friend Society, at Music Hall, Boston, May 28, 1856.]
I was not reared where heaves the swell
Of surf on coasts remote and drear,
But grew with roses, in a dell,
And waked with bird-notes in my ear.
Glad hours on golden pinions sped,
As folded to her throbbing breast,
A mother’s lips their fragrance shed,
And lulled me with a prayer to rest.
The red has faded from my cheek,
And bronzed and scarred the boyish face;
Affection’s eye might vainly seek
One lingering lineament to trace.
Shipwrecked, the Sailor’s Home I sought,
My raiment gone, my shipmates dead,
Through poverty reluctant brought,
And there a sober life I led.
But when the evening prayer was said,
It brought the unaccustomed tear,
A mother’s hand was on my head,
Her voice was thrilling in mine ear.
Old memories waked that long had slept,
They forced the spirit’s brazen crust;
I wept and prayed, I prayed and wept,
Till anguish ripened into trust.
Blest be the hands that reared thy dome
The wandering seaman’s step to greet;
Guiding the homeless to a home,
And sinners to a mercy-seat.
TRUE POETRY’S TASK
When first the human clay, instinct with thought,
Doth feel the motions of those hidden fires
That by a subtle alchemy sublime
The crude contexture of its grosser powers,
It is not life--rather capacity
Of life and power hereafter to be given.
Life lies beyond us, as an Orphic tale
Of things mysterious and dimly seen,
A gorgeous phantom, but a phantom still
That ever is, and ever is without.
We dwell amid the border flowers that bloom
To bless and cheer life’s brier-planted paths,
Its dusty turnpikes, and its scorching noons;
And thus our primal being is a dream
And most mysterious to the dreamer,
E’en as the dim and iron forms that frown
From the dark walls of some old corridor
On which the moonbeams thro’ the crumbling towers
Bestow expression and inform with life
Delicious but delight indefinite.
The finer tissues of that wondrous web
That doth so strangely link spirit to sense
Matter to mind, are all unwoven yet;
Those subtle telegraphs that make report
Of outward action to the inward life
Still in the secret caves of being sleep.
The soul is conscious of no other tie
To nature than to love its beauty
And with an open sense luxuriate
In woods and fields with animal delight.
For as the sturdy trunk and massive limbs
Of the gigantic oak, lie deftly hid
Within the acorn’s small periphery,
Till in the pregnant bosom of the earth,
Warmed by the sun, moistened with summer dews,
It bursts its coffin and leaps forth to light;
Thus when the soul is in its progress brought,
Led on by nature’s genial processes,
To touch reality and outward life,
There is a stirring, from its inmost depths,
Of yearning thoughts and deathless energies,
Seeking the outward vesture that confers
A definite existence and a form.
Strong roots shoot forth and fibres more minute
That by mysterious alchemy impart
Substance to shadow, breath to lifeless forms.
Life is no more a pageant to admire;
Since with a yearning for a higher life,
The power to struggle, and the thirst to know,
Awakes a bitter principle to sin,
Breeding intestine war and conflict fierce,
Till powers are marshalled in the mind itself
That with itself chaotic warfare wage.
Henceforth man’s life is conflict, and his doom
By conflict to grow stronger, to contend
From the rude cross within some Alpine gorge
To the proud blazon of ancestral tombs.
In eastern myths and Christian chronicles,
In heathen temples, and in holy shrines
The same stern truth is graven on them all--
That conflict only doth ennoble man.
But man is not sufficient to himself
In this great conflict, therefore God has given
A twofold revelation to his faith.
Subjective, one to reason makes appeal;
The other to the grosser sense explains
Stern truths by most persuasive images,
Graving dread mandates on the shifting clouds,
Weaving of wild flowers and of foliage green
A genial symbol for a genial faith.
This is the task to Poetry assigned:
Of life divine to be the messenger.
As to the sorrow-stricken soul of him
Who knelt and prayed in lone Gethsemane
The angel choir did gently minister,
E’en thus true Poetry doth nerve the soul
Upon its Alpine passage to commune
With truths that quicken and with thoughts that stir.
It is the soul’s sheet-anchor in the strife.
[Illustration: ELIJAH KELLOGG AT EIGHTY-SIX.
1899.]
MISCELLANEOUS
MEMORIES OF LONGFELLOW
TOPSHAM, MAINE, February 10, 1885.
EDITORS OF THE ORIENT: