James Russell Lowell.
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
[Illustration: _J.R.Lowell._]
HEARTSEASE AND RUE
BY
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1888
Copyright, 1888,
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
_Along the wayside where we pass bloom few_
_Gay plants of heartsease, more of saddening rue;_
_So life is mingled; so should poems be_
_That speak a conscious word to you and me._
CONTENTS.
I.
FRIENDSHIP.
PAGE
AGASSIZ 1
TO HOLMES ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY 23
IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM 26
ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON’S
“OLD WORLD IDYLLS” 27
TO C. F. BRADFORD ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM
PIPE 29
BANKSIDE 32
JOSEPH WINLOCK 36
SONNET. TO FANNY ALEXANDER 37
JEFFRIES WYMAN 38
TO A FRIEND 39
WITH AN ARMCHAIR 40
E. G. DE R. 41
BON VOYAGE! 42
TO WHITTIER ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY 43
ON AN AUTUMN SKETCH OF H. G. WILD 44
TO MISS D. T. 45
WITH A COPY OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE 46
ON PLANTING A TREE AT INVERARA 47
AN EPISTLE TO GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 49
II.
SENTIMENT.
ENDYMION 61
THE BLACK PREACHER 70
ARCADIA REDIVIVA 74
THE NEST 78
A YOUTHFUL EXPERIMENT IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS 81
BIRTHDAY VERSES 83
ESTRANGEMENT 85
PHŒBE 86
DAS EWIG-WEIBLICHE 89
THE RECALL 91
ABSENCE 92
MONNA LISA 93
THE OPTIMIST 94
ON BURNING SOME OLD LETTERS 96
THE PROTEST 99
THE PETITION 100
FACT OR FANCY? 101
AGRO-DOLCE 103
THE BROKEN TRYST 104
CASA SIN ALMA 105
A CHRISTMAS CAROL 106
MY PORTRAIT GALLERY 108
PAOLO TO FRANCESCA 109
SONNET. SCOTTISH BORDER 110
SONNET. ON BEING ASKED FOR AN AUTOGRAPH
IN VENICE 111
THE DANCING BEAR 112
THE MAPLE 113
NIGHTWATCHES 114
DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES 115
PRISON OF CERVANTES 116
TO A LADY PLAYING ON THE CITHERN 117
THE EYE’S TREASURY 118
PESSIMOPTIMISM 119
THE BRAKES 120
A FOREBODING 121
III.
FANCY.
UNDER THE OCTOBER MAPLES 125
LOVE’S CLOCK 127
ELEANOR MAKES MACAROONS 129
TELEPATHY 131
SCHERZO 132
“FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO SIC COGITAVIT” 134
AUSPEX 136
THE PREGNANT COMMENT 137
THE LESSON 139
SCIENCE AND POETRY 141
A NEW YEAR’S GREETING 142
THE DISCOVERY 143
WITH A SEASHELL 144
THE SECRET 146
IV.
HUMOR AND SATIRE.
FITZ ADAM’S STORY 149
THE ORIGIN OF DIDACTIC POETRY 173
THE FLYING DUTCHMAN 177
CREDIDIMUS JOVEM REGNARE 180
TEMPORA MUTANTUR 189
IN THE HALF-WAY HOUSE 192
AT THE BURNS CENTENNIAL 196
IN AN ALBUM 205
AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 1866 207
A PARABLE 212
V.
EPIGRAMS.
SAYINGS 215
INSCRIPTIONS
FOR A BELL AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY 216
FOR A MEMORIAL WINDOW TO SIR WALTER
RALEIGH 216
PROPOSED FOR A SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS'
MONUMENT IN BOSTON 216
A MISCONCEPTION 217
THE BOSS 217
SUN-WORSHIP 217
CHANGED PERSPECTIVE 217
WITH A PAIR OF GLOVES LOST IN A WAGER 218
SIXTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY 218
I.
FRIENDSHIP.
POEMS.
AGASSIZ.
Come
Dicesti _egli ebbe_? non viv' egli ancora?
Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome?
I. 1.
The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill
Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes,
Confutes poor Hope’s last fallacy of ease,--
The distance that divided her from ill:
Earth sentient seems again as when of old
The horny foot of Pan
Stamped, and the conscious horror ran
Beneath men’s feet through all her fibres cold:
Space’s blue walls are mined; we feel the throe
From underground of our night-mantled foe:
The flame-winged feet
Of Trade’s new Mercury, that dry-shod run
Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun,
Are mercilessly fleet,
And at a bound annihilate
Ocean’s prerogative of short reprieve;
Surely ill news might wait,
And man be patient of delay to grieve:
Letters have sympathies
And tell-tale faces that reveal,
To senses finer than the eyes,
Their errand’s purport ere we break the seal;
They wind a sorrow round with circumstance
To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace
The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance
The inexorable face:
But now Fate stuns as with a mace;
The savage of the skies, that men have caught
And some scant use of language taught,
Tells only what he must,--
The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.
2.
So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,
I scanned the festering news we half despise
Yet scramble for no less,
And read of public scandal, private fraud,
Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,
Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,
And all the unwholesome mess
The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late
To teach the Old World how to wait,
When suddenly,
As happens if the brain, from overweight
Of blood, infect the eye,
Three tiny words grew lurid as I read,
And reeled commingling: _Agassiz is dead._
As when, beneath the street’s familiar jar,
An earthquake’s alien omen rumbles far,
Men listen and forebode, I hung my head,
And strove the present to recall,
As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall.
3.
Uprooted is our mountain oak,
That promised long security of shade
And brooding-place for many a wingëd thought;
Not by Time’s softly-warning stroke
With pauses of relenting pity stayed,
But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed,
From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught
And in his broad maturity betrayed!
4.
Well might I, as of old, appeal to you,
O mountains woods and streams,
To help us mourn him, for ye loved him too;
But simpler moods befit our modern themes,
And no less perfect birth of nature can,
Though they yearn tow’rd him, sympathize with man,
Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall;
Answer ye rather to my call,
Strong poets of a more unconscious day,
When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why,
Too much for softer arts forgotten since
That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince,
And drown in music the heart’s bitter cry!
Lead me some steps in your directer way,
Teach me those words that strike a solid root
Within the ears of men;
Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel,
Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben,--
For he was masculine from head to heel.
Nay, let himself stand undiminished by
With those clear parts of him that will not die.
Himself from out the recent dark I claim
To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame;
To show himself, as still I seem to see,
A mortal, built upon the antique plan,
Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran,
And taking life as simply as a tree!
To claim my foiled good-bye let him appear,
Large-limbed and human as I saw him near,
Loosed from the stiffening uniform of fame:
And let me treat him largely: I should fear,
(If with too prying lens I chanced to err,
Mistaking catalogue for character,)
His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame.
Nor would I scant him with judicial breath
And turn mere critic in an epitaph;
I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff
That swells fame living, chokes it after death,
And would but memorize the shining half
Of his large nature that was turned to me:
Fain had I joined with those that honored him
With eyes that darkened because his were dim,
And now been silent: but it might not be.
II. 1.
In some the genius is a thing apart,
A pillared hermit of the brain,
Hoarding with incommunicable art
Its intellectual gain;
Man’s web of circumstance and fate
They from their perch of self observe,
Indifferent as the figures on a slate
Are to the planet’s sun-swung curve
Whose bright returns they calculate;
Their nice adjustment, part to part,
Were shaken from its serviceable mood
By unpremeditated stirs of heart
Or jar of human neighborhood:
Some find their natural selves, and only then,
In furloughs of divine escape from men,
And when, by that brief ecstasy left bare,
Driven by some instinct of desire,
They wander worldward, ’tis to blink and stare,
Like wild things of the wood about a fire,
Dazed by the social glow they cannot share;
His nature brooked no lonely lair,
But basked and bourgeoned in copartnery,
Companionship, and open-windowed glee:
He knew, for he had tried,
Those speculative heights that lure
The unpractised foot, impatient of a guide,
Tow’rd ether too attenuately pure
For sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride,
But better loved the foothold sure
Of paths that wind by old abodes of men
Who hope at last the churchyard’s peace secure,
And follow time-worn rules, that them suffice,
Learned from their sires, traditionally wise,
Careful of honest custom’s how and when;
His mind, too brave to look on Truth askance,
No more those habitudes of faith could share,
But, tinged with sweetness of the old Swiss manse,
Lingered around them still and fain would spare.
Patient to spy a sullen egg for weeks,
The enigma of creation to surprise,
His truer instinct sought the life that speaks
Without a mystery from kindly eyes;
In no self-spun cocoon of prudence wound,
He by the touch of men was best inspired,
And caught his native greatness at rebound
From generosities itself had fired;
Then how the heat through every fibre ran,
Felt in the gathering presence of the man,
While the apt word and gesture came unbid!
Virtues and faults it to one metal wrought,
Fined all his blood to thought,
And ran the molten man in all he said or did.
All Tully’s rules and all Quintilian’s too
He by the light of listening faces knew,
And his rapt audience all unconscious lent
Their own roused force to make him eloquent;
Persuasion fondled in his look and tone;
Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bring
To find new charm in accents not her own;
Her coy constraints and icy hindrances
Melted upon his lips to natural ease,
As a brook’s fetters swell the dance of spring.
Nor yet all sweetness: not in vain he wore,
Nor in the sheath of ceremony, controlled
By velvet courtesy or caution cold,
That sword of honest anger prized of old,
But, with two-handed wrath,
If baseness or pretension crossed his path,
Struck once nor needed to strike more.
2.
His magic was not far to seek,--
He was so human! Whether strong or weak,
Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared,
But sate an equal guest at every board:
No beggar ever felt him condescend,
No prince presume; for still himself he bare
At manhood’s simple level, and where’er
He met a stranger, there he left a friend.
How large an aspect! nobly unsevere,
With freshness round him of Olympian cheer,
Like visits of those earthly gods he came;
His look, wherever its good-fortune fell,
Doubled the feast without a miracle,
And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame;
Philemon’s crabbed vintage grew benign;
Amphitryon’s gold-juice humanized to wine.
III. 1.
The garrulous memories
Gather again from all their far-flown nooks,
Singly at first, and then by twos and threes,
Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks
Thicken their twilight files
Tow’rd Tintern’s gray repose of roofless aisles:
Once more I see him at the table’s head
When Saturday her monthly banquet spread
To scholars, poets, wits,
All choice, some famous, loving things, not names,
And so without a twinge at others' fames;
Such company as wisest moods befits,
Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth
Of undeliberate mirth,
Natures benignly mixed of air and earth,
Now with the stars and now with equal zest
Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.
2.
I see in vision the warm-lighted hall,
The living and the dead I see again,
And but my chair is empty; ’mid them all
’Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain
Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain:
Well nigh I doubt which world is real most,
Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane;
In this abstraction it were light to deem
Myself the figment of some stronger dream;
They are the real things, and I the ghost
That glide unhindered through the solid door,
Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,
And strive to speak and am but futile air,
As truly most of us are little more.
3.
Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,
The latest parted thence,
His features poised in genial armistice
And armed neutrality of self-defence
Beneath the forehead’s walled preëminence,
While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach,
Settles off-hand our human how and whence;
The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears
The infallible strategy of volunteers
Making through Nature’s walls its easy breach,
And seems to learn where he alone could teach.
Ample and ruddy, the board’s end he fills
As he our fireside were, our light and heat,
Centre where minds diverse and various skills
Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet;
I see the firm benignity of face,
Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,
The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,
The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips
While Holmes’s rockets curve their long ellipse,
And burst in seeds of fire that burst again
To drop in scintillating rain.
4.
There too the face half-rustic, half-divine,
Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,
Of him who taught us not to mow and mope
About our fancied selves, but seek our scope
In Nature’s world and Man’s, nor fade to hollow trope,
Content with our New World and timely bold
To challenge the o’ermastery of the Old;
Listening with eyes averse I see him sit
Pricked with the cider of the Judge’s wit
(Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again),
While the wise nose’s firm-built aquiline
Curves sharper to restrain
The merriment whose most unruly moods
Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods
Of silence-shedding pine:
Hard by is he whose art’s consoling spell
Hath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel,
His look still vernal ’mid the wintry ring
Of petals that remember, not foretell,
The paler primrose of a second spring.
5.
And more there are: but other forms arise
And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes:
First he from sympathy still held apart
By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,
Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow’s sweep
Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill,
And steeped in doom familiar field and hill,--
New England’s poet, soul reserved and deep,
November nature with a name of May,
Whom high o’er Concord plains we laid to sleep,
While the orchards mocked us in their white array
And building robins wondered at our tears,
Snatched in his prime, the shape august
That should have stood unbent ’neath fourscore years,
The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,
All gone to speechless dust.
And he our passing guest,
Shy nature, too, and stung with life’s unrest,
Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,
Who brought ripe Oxford’s culture to our board,
The Past’s incalculable hoard,
Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,
Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet
With immemorial lisp of musing feet;
Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar’s,
Boy face, but grave with answerless desires,
Poet in all that poets have of best,
But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims,
Who now hath found sure rest,
Not by still Isis or historic Thames,
Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me,
But, not misplaced, by Arno’s hallowed brim,
Nor scorned by Santa Croce’s neighboring fames,
Haply not mindless, wheresoe’er he be,
Of violets that to-day I scattered over him;
He, too, is there,
After the good centurion fitly named,
Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed,
Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair,
Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways,
Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the praise.
6.
Yea truly, as the sallowing years
Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves
Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days,
And that unwakened winter nears,
’Tis the void chair our surest guest receives,
’Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,
’Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;
We count our rosary by the beads we miss:
To me, at least, it seemeth so,
An exile in the land once found divine,
While my starved fire burns low,
And homeless winds at the loose casement whine
Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.
IV. 1.
Now forth into the darkness all are gone,
But memory, still unsated, follows on,
Retracing step by step our homeward walk,
With many a laugh among our serious talk,
Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,
The long red streamers from the windows glide,
Or the dim western moon
Rocks her skiff’s image on the broad lagoon,
And Boston shows a soft Venetian side
In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,
Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;
Or haply in the sky’s cold chambers wide
Shivered the winter stars, while all below,
As if an end were come of human ill,
The world was wrapt in innocence of snow
And the cast-iron bay was blind and still;
These were our poetry; in him perhaps
Science had barred the gate that lets in dream,
And he would rather count the perch and bream
Than with the current’s idle fancy lapse;
And yet he had the poet’s open eye
That takes a frank delight in all it sees,
Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky,
To him the life-long friend of fields and trees:
Then came the prose of the suburban street,
Its silence deepened by our echoing feet,
And converse such as rambling hazard finds;
Then he who many cities knew and many minds,
And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian forms
Of misty memory, bade them live anew
As when they shared earth’s manifold delight,
In shape, in gait, in voice, in gesture true,
And, with an accent heightening as he warms,
Would stop forgetful of the shortening night,
Drop my confining arm, and pour profuse
Much worldly wisdom kept for others' use,
Not for his own, for he was rash and free,
His purse or knowledge all men’s, like the sea.
Still can I hear his voice’s shrilling might
(With pauses broken, while the fitful spark
He blew more hotly rounded on the dark
To hint his features with a Rembrandt light)
Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck,
Or Cuvier’s taller shade, and many more
Whom he had seen, or knew from others' sight,
And make them men to me as ne’er before:
Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred
Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea,
German or French thrust by the lagging word,
For a good leash of mother-tongues had he.
At last, arrived at where our paths divide,
“Good night!” and, ere the distance grew too wide,
“Good night!” again; and now with cheated ear
I half hear his who mine shall never hear.
2.
Sometimes it seemed as if New England air
For his large lungs too parsimonious were,
As if those empty rooms of dogma drear
Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere
Counting the horns o’er of the Beast,
Still scaring those whose faith in it is least,
As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere
That sharpen all the needles of the East,
Had been to him like death,
Accustomed to draw Europe’s freer breath
In a more stable element;
Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose,
Our practical horizon grimly pent,
Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze,
Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close,
Our social monotone of level days,
Might make our best seem banishment;
But it was nothing so;
Haply his instinct might divine,
Beneath our drift of puritanic snow,
The marvel sensitive and fine
Of sanguinaria over-rash to blow
And trust its shyness to an air malign;
Well might he prize truth’s warranty and pledge
In the grim outcrop of our granite edge,
Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need
In the gaunt sons of Calvin’s iron breed,
As prompt to give as skilled to win and keep;
But, though such intuitions might not cheer,
Yet life was good to him, and, there or here,
With that sufficing joy, the day was never cheap;
Thereto his mind was its own ample sphere,
And, like those buildings great that through the year
Carry one temperature, his nature large
Made its own climate, nor could any marge
Traced by convention stay him from his bent:
He had a habitude of mountain air;
He brought wide outlook where he went,
And could on sunny uplands dwell
Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair
High-hung of viny Neufchâtel;
Nor, surely, did he miss
Some pale, imaginary bliss
Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss.
V. 1.
I cannot think he wished so soon to die
With all his senses full of eager heat,
And rosy years that stood expectant by
To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,
He that was friends with earth, and all her sweet
Took with both hands unsparingly:
Truly this life is precious to the root,
And good the feel of grass beneath the foot;
To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom,
Tenants in common with the bees,
And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees,
Is better than long waiting in the tomb;
Only once more to feel the coming spring
As the birds feel it when it bids them sing,
Only once more to see the moon
Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms
Curve her mild sickle in the West
Sweet with the breath of hay-cocks, were a boon
Worth any promise of soothsayer realms
Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest;
To take December by the beard
And crush the creaking snow with springy foot,
While overhead the North’s dumb streamers shoot,
Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared,
Then the long evening-ends
Lingered by cosy chimney-nooks,
With high companionship of books
Or slippered talk of friends
And sweet habitual looks,
Is better than to stop the ears with dust:
Too soon the spectre comes to say, “Thou must!”
2.
When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast,
They comfort us with sense of rest;
They must be glad to lie forever still;
Their work is ended with their day;
Another fills their room; ’tis the World’s ancient way,
Whether for good or ill;
But the deft spinners of the brain,
Who love each added day and find it gain,
Them overtakes the doom
To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom
(Trophy that was to be of life-long pain),
The thread no other skill can ever knit again.
’Twas so with him, for he was glad to live,
’Twas doubly so, for he left work begun;
Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive
Till all the allotted flax were spun?
It matters not; for, go at night or noon,
A friend, whene’er he dies, has died too soon,
And, once we hear the hopeless _He is dead_,
So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.
VI. 1.
I seem to see the black procession go:
That crawling prose of death too well I know,
The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe;
I see it wind through that unsightly grove,
Once beautiful, but long defaced
With granite permanence of cockney taste
And all those grim disfigurements we love:
There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste
Nature rebels at: and it is not true
Of those most precious parts of him we knew:
Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,
’Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents
Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;
Nay, to be mingled with the elements,
The fellow-servant of creative powers,
Partaker in the solemn year’s events,
To share the work of busy-fingered hours,
To be night’s silent almoner of dew,
To rise again in plants and breathe and grow,
To stream as tides the ocean caverns through,
Or with the rapture of great winds to blow
About earth’s shaken coignes, were not a fate
To leave us all-disconsolate;
Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod
Of charitable earth
That takes out all our mortal stains,
And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod,
Methinks were better worth
Than the poor fruit of most men’s wakeful pains,
The heart’s insatiable ache:
But such was not his faith,
Nor mine: it may be he had trod
Outside the plain old path of _God thus spake_,
But God to him was very God,
And not a visionary wraith
Skulking in murky corners of the mind,
And he was sure to be
Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He,
Not with His essence mystically combined,
As some high spirits long, but whole and free,
A perfected and conscious Agassiz.
And such I figure him: the wise of old
Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold,
Not truly with the guild enrolled
Of him who seeking inward guessed
Diviner riddles than the rest,
And groping in the darks of thought
Touched the Great Hand and knew it not;
Rather he shares the daily light,
From reason’s charier fountains won,
Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite,
And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.
2.
The shape erect is prone: forever stilled
The winning tongue; the forehead’s high-piled heap,
A cairn which every science helped to build,
Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:
He knows at last if Life or Death be best:
Wherever he be flown, whatever vest
The being hath put on which lately here
So many-friended was, so full of cheer
To make men feel the Seeker’s noble zest,
We have not lost him all; he is not gone
To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;
The beauty of his better self lives on
In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye
He trained to Truth’s exact severity;
He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him
Whose living word still stimulates the air?
In endless file shall loving scholars come
The glow of his transmitted touch to share,
And trace his features with an eye less dim
Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb.
FLORENCE, ITALY, _February, 1874_.
TO HOLMES
ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY.
Dear Wendell, why need count the years
Since first your genius made me thrill,
If what moved then to smiles or tears,
Or both contending, move me still?
What has the Calendar to do
With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth
With gay immortals such as you
Whose years but emphasize your youth?
One air gave both their lease of breath;
The same paths lured our boyish feet;
One earth will hold us safe in death,
With dust of saints and scholars sweet.
Our legends from one source were drawn,
I scarce distinguish yours from mine,
And _don’t_ we make the Gentiles yawn
With “You remembers?” o’er our wine!
If I, with too senescent air,
Invade your elder memory’s pale,
You snub me with a pitying “Where
Were you in the September Gale?”
Both stared entranced at Lafayette,
Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D.
What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet
As scarcely worth one’s while to see.
Ten years my senior, when my name
In Harvard’s entrance-book was writ,
Her halls still echoed with the fame
Of you, her poet and her wit.
’Tis fifty years from then to now:
But your Last Leaf renews its green,
Though, for the laurels on your brow
(So thick they crowd), ’tis hardly seen.
The oriole’s fledglings fifty times
Have flown from our familiar elms;
As many poets with their rhymes
Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms.
The birds are hushed, the poets gone
Where no harsh critic’s lash can reach,
And still your wingëd brood sing on
To all who love our English speech.
Nay, let the foolish records be
That make believe you’re seventy-five:
You’re the old Wendell still to me,--
And that’s the youngest man alive.
The gray-blue eyes, I see them still,
The gallant front with brown o’erhung,
The shape alert, the wit at will,
The phrase that stuck, but never stung.
You keep your youth as yon Scotch firs,
Whose gaunt line my horizon hems,
Though twilight all the lowland blurs,
Hold sunset in their ruddy stems.
_You_ with the elders? Yes, ’tis true,
But in no sadly literal sense,
With elders and coevals too,
Whose verb admits no preterite tense.
Master alike in speech and song
Of fame’s great antiseptic--Style,
You with the classic few belong
Who tempered wisdom with a smile.
Outlive us all! Who else like you
Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff,
And make us with the pen we knew
Deathless at least in epitaph?
WOLLASTON, _August 29, 1884_.
IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM.
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue,
When Contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new.
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!
The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl
Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel,
Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,
Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.
ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR.
AUSTIN DOBSON’S “OLD WORLD
IDYLLS.”
I.
At length arrived, your book I take
To read in for the author’s sake;
Too gray for new sensations grown,
Can charm to Art or Nature known
This torpor from my senses shake?
Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake?
Is a thrush gurgling from the brake?
Has Spring, on all the breezes blown,
At length arrived?
Long may you live such songs to make,
And I to listen while you wake,
With skill of late disused, each tone
Of the _Lesboum barbiton_,
At mastery, through long finger-ache,
At length arrived.
II.
As I read on, what changes steal
O’er me and through, from head to heel?
A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside,
My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,--
Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele!
Down vistas long of clipt _charmille_
Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel;
Tabor and pipe the dancers guide
As I read on.
While in and out the verses wheel
The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal,
Lithe ankles that to music glide,
But chastely and by chance descried;
Art? Nature? Which do I most feel
As I read on?
TO C. F. BRADFORD
ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE.
The pipe came safe, and welcome too,
As anything must be from you;
A meerschaum pure, ’twould float as light
As she the girls call Amphitrite.
Mixture divine of foam and clay,
From both it stole the best away:
Its foam is such as crowns the glow
Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot;
Its clay is but congested lymph
Jove chose to make some choicer nymph;
And here combined,--why, this must be
The birth of some enchanted sea,
Shaped to immortal form, the type
And very Venus of a pipe.
When high I heap it with the weed
From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed
Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore
And cast upon Virginia’s shore,
I’ll think,--So fill the fairer bowl
And wise alembic of thy soul,
With herbs far-sought that shall distil,
Not fumes to slacken thought and will,
But bracing essences that nerve
To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve.
When curls the smoke in eddies soft,
And hangs a shifting dream aloft,
That gives and takes, though chance-designed,
The impress of the dreamer’s mind,
I’ll think,--So let the vapors bred
By Passion, in the heart or head,
Pass off and upward into space,
Waving farewells of tenderest grace,
Remembered in some happier time,
To blend their beauty with my rhyme.
While slowly o’er its candid bowl
The color deepens (as the soul
That burns in mortals leaves its trace
Of bale or beauty on the face),
I’ll think,--So let the essence rare
Of years consuming make me fair;
So, ’gainst the ills of life profuse,
Steep me in some narcotic juice;
And if my soul must part with all
That whiteness which we greenness call,
Smooth back, O Fortune, half thy frown,
And make me beautifully brown!
Dream-forger, I refill thy cup
With reverie’s wasteful pittance up,
And while the fire burns slow away,
Hiding itself in ashes gray,
I’ll think,--As inward Youth retreats,
Compelled to spare his wasting heats,
When Life’s Ash-Wednesday comes about,
And my head’s gray with fires burnt out,
While stays one spark to light the eye,
With the last flash of memory,
’Twill leap to welcome C. F. B.,
Who sent my favorite pipe to me.
BANKSIDE.
(HOME OF EDMUND QUINCY.)
DEDHAM, MAY 21, 1877.
I.
I christened you in happier days, before
These gray forebodings on my brow were seen;
You are still lovely in your new-leaved green;
The brimming river soothes his grassy shore;
The bridge is there; the rock with lichens hoar;
And the same shadows on the water lean,
Outlasting us. How many graves between
That day and this! How many shadows more
Darken my heart, their substance from these eyes
Hidden forever! So our world is made
Of life and death commingled; and the sighs
Outweigh the smiles, in equal balance laid:
What compensation? None, save that the All-wise
So schools us to love things that cannot fade.
II.
Thank God, he saw you last in pomp of May,
Ere any leaf had felt the year’s regret;
Your latest image in his memory set
Was fair as when your landscape’s peaceful sway
Charmed dearer eyes with his to make delay
On Hope’s long prospect,--as if They forget
The happy, They, the unspeakable Three, whose debt,
Like the hawk’s shadow, blots our brightest day:
Better it is that ye should look so fair,
Slopes that he loved, and ever-murmuring pines
That make a music out of silent air,
And bloom-heaped orchard-trees in prosperous lines;
In you the heart some sweeter hints divines,
And wiser, than in winter’s dull despair.
III.
Old Friend, farewell! Your kindly door again
I enter, but the master’s hand in mine
No more clasps welcome, and the temperate wine,
That cheered our long nights, other lips must stain:
All is unchanged, but I expect in vain
The face alert, the manners free and fine,
The seventy years borne lightly as the pine
Wears its first down of snow in green disdain:
Much did he, and much well; yet most of all
I prized his skill in leisure and the ease
Of a life flowing full without a plan;
For most are idly busy; him I call
Thrice fortunate who knew himself to please,
Learned in those arts that make a gentleman.
IV.
Nor deem he lived unto himself alone;
His was the public spirit of his sire,
And in those eyes, soft with domestic fire,
A quenchless light of fiercer temper shone
What time about the world our shame was blown
On every wind; his soul would not conspire
With selfish men to soothe the mob’s desire,
Veiling with garlands Moloch’s bloody stone;
The high-bred instincts of a better day
Ruled in his blood, when to be citizen
Rang Roman yet, and a Free People’s sway
Was not the exchequer of impoverished men,
Nor statesmanship with loaded votes to play,
Nor public office a tramps' boosing-ken.
JOSEPH WINLOCK.
DIED JUNE 11, 1875.
Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient will
Through years one hair’s-breadth on our Dark to gain,
Who, from the stars he studied not in vain,
Had learned their secret to be strong and still,
Careless of fames that earth’s tin trumpets fill;
Born under Leo, broad of build and brain,
While others slept, he watched in that hushed fane
Of Science, only witness of his skill:
Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell,
But inextinguishable his luminous trace
In mind and heart of all that knew him well.
Happy man’s doom! To him the Fates were known
Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of space,
Unprescient, through God’s mercy, of his own!
SONNET.
TO FANNY ALEXANDER.
Unconscious as the sunshine, simply sweet
And generous as that, thou dost not close
Thyself in art, as life were but a rose
To rumple bee-like with luxurious feet;
Thy higher mind therein finds sure retreat,
But not from care of common hopes and woes;
Thee the dark chamber, thee the unfriended, knows,
Although no babbling crowds thy praise repeat:
Consummate artist, who life’s landscape bleak
Hast brimmed with sun to many a clouded eye,
Touched to a brighter hue the beggar’s cheek,
Hung over orphaned lives a gracious sky,
And traced for eyes, that else would vainly seek,
Fair pictures of an angel drawing nigh!
FLORENCE, 1873.
JEFFRIES WYMAN.
DIED SEPTEMBER 4, 1874.
The wisest man could ask no more of Fate
Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,
Safe from the Many, honored by the Few;
To count as naught in World, or Church, or State,
But inwardly in secret to be great;
To feel mysterious Nature ever new;
To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clew,
And learn by each discovery how to wait.
He widened knowledge and escaped the praise;
He wisely taught, because more wise to learn;
He toiled for Science, not to draw men’s gaze,
But for her lore of self-denial stern.
That such a man could spring from our decays
Fans the soul’s nobler faith until it burn.
TO A FRIEND
WHO GAVE ME A GROUP OF WEEDS AND GRASSES,
AFTER A DRAWING OF DÜRER.
True as the sun’s own work, but more refined,
It tells of love behind the artist’s eye,
Of sweet companionships with earth and sky,
And summers stored, the sunshine of the mind.
What peace! Sure, ere you breathe, the fickle wind
Will break its truce and bend that grass-plume high,
Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly
That flits a more luxurious perch to find.
Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall,
A serene moment, deftly caught and kept
To make immortal summer on my wall.
Had he who drew such gladness ever wept?
Ask rather could he else have seen at all,
Or grown in Nature’s mysteries an adept?
WITH AN ARMCHAIR.
About the oak that framed this chair, of old
The seasons danced their round; delighted wings
Brought music to its boughs; shy woodland things
Shared its broad roof, ’neath whose green glooms grown bold,
Lovers, more shy than they, their secret told;
The resurrection of a thousand springs
Swelled in its veins, and dim imaginings
Teased them, perchance, of life more manifold.
Such shall it know when its proud arms enclose
My Lady Goshawk, musing here at rest,
Careless of him who into exile goes,
Yet, while his gift by those fair limbs is prest,
Through some fine sympathy of nature knows
That, seas between us, she is still his guest.
E. G. DE R.
Why should I seek her spell to decompose
Or to its source each rill of influence trace
That feeds the brimming river of her grace?
The petals numbered but degrade to prose
Summer’s triumphant poem of the rose:
Enough for me to watch the wavering chase,
Like wind o’er grass, of moods across her face,
Fairest in motion, fairer in repose.
Steeped in her sunshine, let me, while I may,
Partake the bounty: I content should be
That her mirth cheats my temples of their gray,
Her charm makes years long spent seem yet to be.
Wit, goodness, grace, swift flash from grave to gay,--
All these are good, but better far is she.
BON VOYAGE!
Ship, blest to bear such freight across the blue,
May stormless stars control thy horoscope;
In keel and hull, in every spar and rope,
Be night and day to thy dear office true!
Ocean, men’s path and their divider too,
No fairer shrine of memory and hope
To the underworld adown thy westering slope
E’er vanished, or whom such regrets pursue:
Smooth all thy surges as when Jove to Crete
Swam with less costly burthen, and prepare
A pathway meet for her home-coming soon
With golden undulations such as greet
The printless summer-sandals of the moon
And tempt the Nautilus his cruise to dare!
TO WHITTIER
ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY.
New England’s poet, rich in love as years,
Her hills and valleys praise thee, her swift brooks
Dance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooks
Thy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hears
As maids their lovers', and no treason fears;
Through thee her Merrimacs and Agiochooks
And many a name uncouth win gracious looks,
Sweetly familiar to both Englands' ears:
Peaceful by birthright as a virgin lake,
The lily’s anchorage, which no eyes behold
Save those of stars, yet for thy brother’s sake
That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as bold
As that wherewith the heart of Roland brake,
Far heard across the New World and the Old.
ON AN AUTUMN SKETCH OF H. G. WILD.
Thanks to the artist, ever on my wall
The sunset stays: that hill in glory rolled,
Those trees and clouds in crimson and in gold,
Burn on, nor cool when evening’s shadows fall.
Not round _these_ splendors Midnight wraps her pall;
_These_ leaves the flush of Autumn’s vintage hold
In Winter’s spite, nor can the Northwind bold
Deface my chapel’s western window small:
On one, ah me! October struck his frost,
But not repaid him with those Tyrian hues;
His naked boughs but tell him what is lost,
And parting comforts of the sun refuse:
His heaven is bare,--ah, were its hollow crost
Even with a cloud whose light were yet to lose!
_April, 1854._
TO MISS D. T.
ON HER GIVING ME A DRAWING OF LITTLE
STREET ARABS.
As, cleansed of Tiber’s and Oblivion’s slime,
Glow Farnesina’s vaults with shapes again
That dreamed some exiled artist from his pain
Back to his Athens and the Muse’s clime,
So these world-orphaned waifs of Want and Crime,
Purged by Art’s absolution from the stain
Of the polluting city-flood, regain
Ideal grace secure from taint of time.
An Attic frieze you give, a pictured song;
For as with words the poet paints, for you
The happy pencil at its labor sings,
Stealing his privilege, nor does him wrong,
Beneath the false discovering the true,
And Beauty’s best in unregarded things.
WITH A COPY OF AUCASSIN AND
NICOLETE.
Leaves fit to have been poor Juliet’s cradle-rhyme,
With gladness of a heart long quenched in mould
They vibrate still, a nest not yet grown cold
From its fledged burthen. The numb hand of Time
Vainly his glass turns; here is endless prime;
Here lips their roses keep and locks their gold;
Here Love in pristine innocency bold
Speaks what our grosser conscience makes a crime.
Because it tells the dream that all have known
Once in their lives, and to life’s end the few;
Because its seeds o’er Memory’s desert blown
Spring up in heartsease such as Eden knew;
Because it hath a beauty all its own,
Dear Friend, I plucked this herb of grace for you.
ON PLANTING A TREE AT INVERARA.
Who does his duty is a question
Too complex to be solved by me,
But he, I venture the suggestion,
Does part of his that plants a tree.
For after he is dead and buried,
And epitaphed, and well forgot,
Nay, even his shade by Charon ferried
To--let us not inquire to what,
His deed, its author long outliving,
By Nature’s mother-care increased,
Shall stand, his verdant almoner, giving
A kindly dole to man and beast.
The wayfarer, at noon reposing,
Shall bless its shadow on the grass,
Or sheep beneath it huddle, dozing
Until the thundergust o’erpass.
The owl, belated in his plundering,
Shall here await the friendly night,
Blinking whene’er he wakes, and wondering
What fool it was invented light.
Hither the busy birds shall flutter,
With the light timber for their nests,
And, pausing from their labor, utter
The morning sunshine in their breasts.
What though his memory shall have vanished,
Since the good deed he did survives?
It is not wholly to be banished
Thus to be part of many lives.
Grow, then, my foster-child, and strengthen,
Bough over bough, a murmurous pile,
And, as your stately stem shall lengthen,
So may the statelier of Argyll!
1880.
AN EPISTLE TO GEORGE WILLIAM
CURTIS.
“De prodome,
Des qu’il s’atorne a grant bonte
Ja n’iert tot dit ne tot conte,
Que leingue ne puet pas retraire
Tant d’enor com prodom set faire.”
CRESTIEN DE TROIES,
_Li Romans dou Chevalier au Lyon_, 784-788.
1874.
Curtis, whose Wit, with Fancy arm in arm,
Masks half its muscle in its skill to charm,
And who so gently can the Wrong expose
As sometimes to make converts, never foes,
Or only such as good men must expect,
Knaves sore with conscience of their own defect,
I come with mild remonstrance. Ere I start,
A kindlier errand interrupts my heart,
And I must utter, though it vex your ears,
The love, the honor, felt so many years.
Curtis, skilled equally with voice and pen
To stir the hearts or mould the minds of men,--
That voice whose music, for I’ve heard you sing
Sweet as Casella, can with passion ring,
That pen whose rapid ease ne’er trips with haste,
Nor scrapes nor sputters, pointed with good taste,
First Steele’s, then Goldsmith’s, next it came to you,
Whom Thackeray rated best of all our crew,--
Had letters kept you, every wreath were yours;
Had the World tempted, all its chariest doors
Had swung on flattered hinges to admit
Such high-bred manners, such good-natured wit;
At courts, in senates, who so fit to serve?
And both invited, but you would not swerve,
All meaner prizes waiving that you might
In civic duty spend your heat and light,
Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain
Refusing posts men grovel to attain.
Good Man all own you; what is left me, then,
To heighten praise with but Good Citizen?
But why this praise to make you blush and stare,
And give a backache to your Easy-Chair?
Old Crestien rightly says no language can
Express the worth of a true Gentleman,
And I agree; but other thoughts deride
My first intent, and lure my pen aside.
Thinking of you, I see my firelight glow
On other faces, loved from long ago,
Dear to us both, and all these loves combine
With this I send and crowd in every line;
Fortune with me was in such generous mood
That all my friends were yours, and all were good;
Three generations come when one I call,
And the fair grandame, youngest of them all,
In her own Florida who found and sips
The fount that fled from Ponce’s longing lips.
How bright they rise and wreathe my hearthstone round,
Divine my thoughts, reply without a sound,
And with them many a shape that memory sees,
As dear as they, but crowned with aureoles these!
What wonder if, with protest in my thought,
Arrived, I find ’twas only love I brought?
I came with protest; Memory barred the road
Till I repaid you half the debt I owed.
No, ’twas not to bring laurels that I came,
Nor would you wish it, daily seeing fame,
(Or our cheap substitute, unknown of yore,)
Dumped like a load of coal at every door,
Mime and hetæra getting equal weight
With him whose toils heroic saved the State.
But praise can harm not who so calmly met
Slander’s worst word, nor treasured up the debt,
Knowing, what all experience serves to show,
No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.
You have heard harsher voices and more loud,
As all must, not sworn liegemen of the crowd,
And far aloof your silent mind could keep
As when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep,
The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can know
What hounds her lucent calm drives mad below.
But to my business, while you rub your eyes
And wonder how you ever thought me wise.
Dear friend and old, they say you shake your head
And wish some bitter words of mine unsaid:
I wish they might be,--there we are agreed;
I hate to speak, still more what makes the need;
But I must utter what the voice within
Dictates, for acquiescence dumb were sin;
I blurt ungrateful truths, if so they be,
That none may need to say them after me.
’Twere my felicity could I attain
The temperate zeal that balances your brain;
But nature still o’erleaps reflection’s plan,
And one must do his service as he can.
Think you it were not pleasanter to speak
Smooth words that leave unflushed the brow and cheek?
To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseen
In private box, spectator of the scene
Where men the comedy of life rehearse,
Idly to judge which better and which worse
Each hireling actor spoiled his worthless part?
Were it not sweeter with a careless heart,
In happy commune with the untainted brooks,
To dream all day, or, walled with silent books,
To hear nor heed the World’s unmeaning noise,
Safe in my fortress stored with lifelong joys?