But one hard question _will_ remain:
If one hypothesis you lose,
Another in its place you choose,
But, your faith gone, O man and brother,
Whose shop shall furnish you another?
One that will wash, I mean, and wear,
And wrap us warmly from despair?
While they are clearing up our puzzles,
And clapping prophylactic muzzles
On the Actæon’s hounds that sniff
Our devious track through But and If,
Would they’d explain away the Devil
And other facts that won’t keep level,
But rise beneath our feet or fail,
A reeling ship’s deck in a gale!
God vanished long ago, iwis,
A mere subjective synthesis;
A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears,
Too homely for us pretty dears,
Who want one that conviction carries,
Last make of London or of Paris.
He gone, I felt a moment’s spasm,
But calmed myself with Protoplasm,
A finer name, and, what is more,
As enigmatic as before;
Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease
Minds caught in the Symplegades
Of soul and sense, life’s two conditions,
Each baffled with its own omniscience.
The men who labor to revise
Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise,
And print it without foolish qualms
Instead of God in David’s psalms:
Noll had been more effective far
Could he have shouted at Dunbar,
“Rise, Protoplasm!” No dourest Scot
Had waited for another shot.
And yet I frankly must confess
A secret unforgivingness,
And shudder at the saving chrism
Whose best New Birth is Pessimism;
My soul--I mean the bit of phosphorus
That fills the place of what that was for us--
Can’t bid its inward bores defiance
With the new nursery-tales of science.
What profits me, though doubt by doubt,
As nail by nail, be driven out,
When every new one, like the last,
Still holds my coffin-lid as fast?
Would I find thought a moment’s truce,
Give me the young world’s Mother Goose,
With life and joy in every limb,
The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!
Our dear and admirable Huxley
Cannot explain to me why ducks lay,
Or, rather, how into their eggs
Blunder potential wings and legs
With will to move them and decide
Whether in air or lymph to glide.
Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing
That Something Else set all agoing?
Farther and farther back we push
From Moses and his burning bush;
Cry, “Art Thou there?” Above, below,
All nature mutters _yes_ and _no_!
’Tis the old answer: we’re agreed
Being from Being must proceed,
Life be Life’s source. I might as well
Obey the meeting-house’s bell,
And listen while Old Hundred pours
Forth through the summer-opened doors,
From old and young. I hear it yet,
Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,
While the gray minister, with face
Radiant, let loose his noble bass.
If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll
Waked all the echoes of the soul,
And in it many a life found wings
To soar away from sordid things.
Church gone and singers too, the song
Sings to me voiceless all night long,
Till my soul beckons me afar,
Glowing and trembling like a star.
Will any scientific touch
With my worn strings achieve as much?
I don’t object, not I, to know
My sires were monkeys, if ’twas so;
I touch my ear’s collusive tip
And own the poor-relationship.
That apes of various shapes and sizes
Contained their germs that all the prizes
Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win
May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin.
Who knows but from our loins may spring
(Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing
As much superior to us
As we to Cynocephalus?
This is consoling, but, alas,
It wipes no dimness from the glass
Where I am flattening my poor nose,
In hope to see beyond my toes.
Though I accept my pedigree,
Yet where, pray tell me, is the key
That should unlock a private door
To the Great Mystery, such no more?
Each offers his, but one nor all
Are much persuasive with the wall
That rises now, as long ago,
Between I wonder and I know,
Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep
At the veiled Isis in its keep.
Where is no door, I but produce
My key to find it of no use.
Yet better keep it, after all,
Since Nature’s economical,
And who can tell but some fine day
(If it occur to her) she may,
In her good-will to you and me,
_Make_ door and lock to match the key?
TEMPORA MUTANTUR.
The world turns mild; democracy, they say,
Rounds the sharp knobs of character away,
And no great harm, unless at grave expense
Of what needs edge of proof, the moral sense;
For man or race is on the downward path
Whose fibre grows too soft for honest wrath,
And there’s a subtle influence that springs
From words to modify our sense of things.
A plain distinction grows obscure of late:
Man, if he will, may pardon; but the State
Forgets its function if not fixed as Fate.
So thought our sires: a hundred years ago,
If men were knaves, why, people called them so,
And crime could see the prison-portal bend
Its brow severe at no long vista’s end.
In those days for plain things plain words would serve;
Men had not learned, to admire the graceful swerve
Wherewith the Æsthetic Nature’s genial mood
Makes public duty slope to private good;
No muddled conscience raised the saving doubt;
A soldier proved unworthy was drummed out,
An officer cashiered, a civil servant
(No matter though his piety were fervent)
Disgracefully dismissed, and through the land
Each bore for life a stigma from the brand
Whose far-heard hiss made others more averse
To take the facile step from bad to worse.
The Ten Commandments had a meaning then,
Felt in their bones by least considerate men,
Because behind them Public Conscience stood,
And without wincing made their mandates good.
But now that “Statesmanship” is just a way
To dodge the primal curse and make it pay,
Since office means a kind of patent drill
To force an entrance to the Nation’s till,
And peculation something rather less
Risky than if you spelt it with an _s_;
Now that to steal by law is grown an art,
Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart,
And “slightly irregular” dilutes the shame
Of what had once a somewhat blunter name,
With generous curve we draw the moral line:
Our swindlers are permitted to resign;
Their guilt is wrapped in deferential names,
And twenty sympathize for one that blames.
Add national disgrace to private crime,
Confront mankind with brazen front sublime,
Steal but enough, the world is unsevere,--
Tweed is a statesman, Fisk a financier;
Invent a mine, and be--the Lord knows what;
Secure, at any rate, with what you’ve got.
The public servant who has stolen or lied,
If called on, may resign with honest pride:
As unjust favor put him in, why doubt
Disfavor as unjust has turned him out?
Even if indicted, what is that but fudge
To him who counted-in the elective judge?
Whitewashed, he quits the politician’s strife
At ease in mind, with pockets filled for life:
His “lady” glares with gems whose vulgar blaze
The poor man through his heightened taxes pays,
Himself content if one huge Kohinoor
Bulge from a shirt-front ampler than before,
But not too candid, lest it haply tend
To rouse suspicion of the People’s Friend.
A public meeting, treated at his cost,
Resolves him back more virtue than he lost;
With character regilt he counts his gains;
What’s gone was air, the solid good remains;
For what is good, except what friend and foe
Seem quite unanimous in thinking so,
The stocks and bonds which, in our age of loans,
Replace the stupid pagan’s stocks and stones?
With choker white, wherein no cynic eye
Dares see idealized a hempen tie,
At parish-meetings he conducts in prayer,
And pays for missions to be sent elsewhere;
On ’Change respected, to his friends endeared,
Add but a Sunday-school-class, he’s revered,
And his too early tomb will not be dumb
To point a moral for our youth to come.
1872.
IN THE HALF-WAY HOUSE.
I.
At twenty we fancied the blest Middle Ages
A spirited cross of romantic and grand,
All templars and minstrels and ladies and pages,
And love and adventure in Outre-Mer land;
But ah, where the youth dreamed of building a minster,
The man takes a pew and sits reckoning his pelf,
And the Graces wear fronts, the Muse thins to a spinster,
When Middle-Age stares from one’s glass at oneself!
II.
Do you twit me with days when I had an Ideal,
And saw the sear future through spectacles green?
Then find me some charm, while I look round and see all
These fat friends of forty, shall keep me nineteen;
Should we go on pining for chaplets of laurel
Who’ve paid a perruquier for mending our thatch,
Or, our feet swathed in baize, with our Fate pick a quarrel,
If, instead of cheap bay-leaves, she sent a dear scratch?
III.
We called it our Eden, that small patent-baker,
When life was half moonshine and half Mary Jane;
But the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker!--
Did Adam have duns and slip down a back-lane?
Nay, after the Fall did the modiste keep coming
With last styles of fig-leaf to Madam Eve’s bower?
Did Jubal, or whoever taught the girls thrumming,
Make the patriarchs deaf at a dollar the hour?
IV.
As I think what I was, I sigh _Desunt nonnulla_!
Years are creditors Sheridan’s self could not bilk;
But then, as my boy says, “What right has a fullah
To ask for the cream, when himself spilt the milk?”
Perhaps when you’re older, my lad, you’ll discover
The secret with which Auld Lang Syne there is gilt,--
Superstition of old man, maid, poet, and lover,--
That cream rises thickest on milk that was spilt!
V.
We sailed for the moon, but, in sad disillusion,
Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast,
And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion
’Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past.
Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals,
He’s a genius or fool whom ye cheat at two-score,
And the man whose boy-promise was likened to Pascal’s
Is thankful at forty they don’t call him bore!
VI.
With what fumes of fame was each confident pate full!
How rates of insurance should rise on the Charles!
And which of us now would not feel wisely grateful,
If his rhymes sold as fast as the Emblems of Quarles?
E’en if won, what’s the good of Life’s medals and prizes?
The rapture’s in what never was or is gone;
That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys,
For the goose of To-day still is Memory’s swan.
VII.
And yet who would change the old dream for new treasure?
Make not youth’s sourest grapes the best wine of our life?
Need he reckon his date by the Almanac’s measure
Who is twenty life-long in the eyes of his wife?
Ah, Fate, should I live to be nonagenarian,
Let me still take Hope’s frail I. O. U.s upon trust,
Still talk of a trip to the Islands Macarian,
And still climb the dream-tree for--ashes and dust!
AT THE BURNS CENTENNIAL.
JANUARY, 1859.
I.
A hundred years! they’re quickly fled,
With all their joy and sorrow;
Their dead leaves shed upon the dead,
Their fresh ones sprung by morrow!
And still the patient seasons bring
Their change of sun and shadow;
New birds still sing with every spring,
New violets spot the meadow.
II.
A hundred years! and Nature’s powers
No greater grown nor lessened!
They saw no flowers more sweet than ours,
No fairer new moon’s crescent.
Would she but treat us poets so,
So from our winter free us,
And set our slow old sap aflow
To sprout in fresh ideas!
III.
Alas, think I, what worth or parts
Have brought me here competing,
To speak what starts in myriad hearts
With Burns’s memory beating!
Himself had loved a theme like this;
Must I be its entomber?
No pen save his but’s sure to miss
Its pathos or its humor.
IV.
As I sat musing what to say,
And how my verse to number,
Some elf in play passed by that way,
And sank my lids in slumber;
And on my sleep a vision stole,
Which I will put in metre,
Of Burns’s soul at the wicket-hole
Where sits the good Saint Peter.
V.
The saint, methought, had left his post
That day to Holy Willie,
Who swore, “Each ghost that comes shall toast
In brunstane, will he, nill he;
There’s nane need hope with phrases fine
Their score to wipe a sin frae;
I’ll chalk a sign, to save their tryin',--
A hand (☟) and '_Vide infra!_'”
VI.
Alas! no soil’s too cold or dry
For spiritual small potatoes,
Scrimped natures, spry the trade to ply
Of _diaboli advocatus_;
Who lay bent pins in the penance-stool
Where Mercy plumps a cushion,
Who’ve just one rule for knave and fool,
It saves so much confusion!
VII.
So when Burns knocked, Will knit his brows,
His window gap made scanter,
And said, “Go rouse the other house;
We lodge no Tam O’Shanter!”
“_We_ lodge!” laughed Burns. “Now well I see
Death cannot kill old nature;
No human flea but thinks that he
May speak for his Creator!
VIII.
“But, Willie, friend, don’t turn me forth,
Auld Clootie needs no gauger;
And if on earth I had small worth,
You’ve let in worse, I’se wager!”
“Na, nane has knockit at the yett
But found me hard as whunstane;
There’s chances yet your bread to get
Wi Auld Nick, gaugin' brunstane.”
IX.
Meanwhile, the Unco' Guid had ta’en
Their place to watch the process,
Flattening in vain on many a pane
Their disembodied noses.
Remember, please, ’tis all a dream;
One can’t control the fancies
Through sleep that stream with wayward gleam,
Like midnight’s boreal dances.
X.
Old Willie’s tone grew sharp’s a knife:
“_In primis_, I indite ye,
For makin' strife wi' the water o' life,
And preferrin' _aqua vitæ_!”
Then roared a voice with lusty din,
Like a skipper’s when ’tis blowy,
“If _that_'s a sin, _I_'d ne’er got in,
As sure as my name’s Noah!”
XI.
Baulked, Willie turned another leaf,--
“There’s many here have heard ye,
To the pain and grief o' true belief,
Say hard things o' the clergy!”
Then rang a clear tone over all,--
“One plea for him allow me:
I once heard call from o’er me, 'Saul,
Why persecutest thou me?'”
XII.
To the next charge vexed Willie turned,
And, sighing, wiped his glasses:
“I’m much concerned to find ye yearned
O’er-warmly tow’rd the lasses!”
Here David sighed; poor Willie’s face
Lost all its self-possession:
“I leave this case to God’s own grace;
It baffles _my_ discretion!”
XIII.
Then sudden glory round me broke,
And low melodious surges
Of wings whose stroke to splendor woke
Creation’s farthest verges;
A cross stretched, ladder-like, secure
From earth to heaven’s own portal,
Whereby God’s poor, with footing sure,
Climbed up to peace immortal.
XIV.
I heard a voice serene and low
(With my heart I seemed to hear it)
Fall soft and slow as snow on snow,
Like grace of the heavenly spirit;
As sweet as over new-born son
The croon of new-made mother,
The voice begun, “Sore tempted one!”
Then, pausing, sighed, “Our brother!
XV.
“If not a sparrow fall, unless
The Father sees and knows it,
Think! recks he less his form express,
The soul his own deposit?
If only dear to Him the strong,
That never trip nor wander,
Where were the throng whose morning song
Thrills His blue arches yonder?
XVI.
“Do souls alone clear-eyed, strong-kneed,
To Him true service render,
And they who need His hand to lead,
Find they His heart untender?
Through all your various ranks and fates
He opens doors to duty,
And he that waits there at your gates
Was servant of His Beauty.”
XVII.
“The Earth must richer sap secrete,
(Could ye in time but know it!)
Must juice concrete with fiercer heat,
Ere she can make her poet;
Long generations go and come,
At last she bears a singer,
For ages dumb, of senses numb
The compensation-bringer!”
XVIII.
“Her cheaper broods in palaces
She raises under glasses,
But souls like these, heav’n’s hostages,
Spring shelterless as grasses:
They share Earth’s blessing and her bane,
The common sun and shower;
What makes your pain to them is gain,
Your weakness is their power.
XIX.
“These larger hearts must feel the rolls
Of stormier-waved temptation;
These star-wide souls between their poles
Bear zones of tropic passion.
He loved much!--that is gospel good,
Howe’er the text you handle;
From common wood the cross was hewed,
By love turned priceless sandal.
XX.
“If scant his service at the kirk,
He _paters_ heard and _aves_
From choirs that lurk in hedge and birk,
From blackbird and from mavis;
The cowering mouse, poor unroofed thing,
In him found Mercy’s angel;
The daisy’s ring brought every spring
To him Love’s fresh evangel!
XXI.
“Not he the threatening texts who deals
Is highest ’mong the preachers,
But he who feels the woes and weals
Of all God’s wandering creatures.
He doth good work whose heart can find
The spirit ’neath the letter;
Who makes his kind of happier mind,
Leaves wiser men and better.
XXII.
“They make Religion be abhorred
Who round with darkness gulf her,
And think no word can please the Lord
Unless it smell of sulphur.
Dear Poet-heart, that childlike guessed
The Father’s loving kindness,
Come now to rest! Thou didst His hest,
If haply ’twas in blindness!”
XXIII.
Then leapt heaven’s portals wide apart,
And at their golden thunder
With sudden start I woke, my heart
Still throbbing-full of wonder.
“Father,” I said, “'tis known to Thee
How Thou thy Saints preparest;
But this I see,--Saint Charity
Is still the first and fairest!”
XXIV.
Dear Bard and Brother! let who may
Against thy faults be railing,
(Though far, I pray, from us be they
That never had a failing!)
One toast I’ll give, and that not long,
Which thou wouldst pledge if present,--
To him whose song, in nature strong,
Makes man of prince and peasant!
IN AN ALBUM.
The misspelt scrawl, upon the wall
By some Pompeian idler traced,
In ashes packed (ironic fact!)
Lies eighteen centuries uneffaced,
While many a page of bard and sage,
Deemed once mankind’s immortal gain,
Lost from Time’s ark, leaves no more mark
Than a keel’s furrow through the main.
O Chance and Change! our buzz’s range
Is scarcely wider than a fly’s;
Then let us play at fame to-day,
To-morrow be unknown and wise;
And while the fair beg locks of hair,
And autographs, and Lord knows what,
Quick! let us scratch our moment’s match,
Make our brief blaze, and be forgot!
Too pressed to wait, upon her slate
Fame writes a name or two in doubt;
Scarce written, these no longer please,
And her own finger rubs them out:
It may ensue, fair girl, that you
Years hence this yellowing leaf may see,
And put to task, your memory ask
In vain, “This Lowell, who was he?”
AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER,
1866, IN ACKNOWLEDGING A TOAST
TO THE SMITH PROFESSOR.
I rise, Mr. Chairman, as both of us know,
With the impromptu I promised you three weeks ago,
Dragged up to my doom by your might and my mane,
To do what I vowed I’d do never again;
And I feel like your good honest dough when possest
By a stirring, impertinent devil of yeast.
“You must rise,” says the leaven. “I can’t,” says the dough;
“Just examine my bumps, and you’ll see it’s no go.”
“But you must,” the tormentor insists, “'tis all right;
You must rise when I bid you, and, what’s more, be light.”
’Tis a dreadful oppression, this making men speak
What they ’re sure to be sorry for all the next week;
This asking some poor stick, like Aaron’s, to bud
Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood,
As if the dull brain that you vented your spite on
Could be got, like an ox, by mere poking, to Brighton.
They say it is wholesome to rise with the sun,
And I dare say it may be if not overdone;
(I think it was Thomson who made the remark
’Twas an excellent thing in its way--for a lark;)
But to rise after dinner and look down the meeting
On a distant (as Gray calls it) prospect of Eating,
With a stomach half full and a cerebrum hollow
As the tortoise-shell ere it was strung for Apollo,
Under contract to raise anerithmon gelasma
With rhymes so hard hunted they gasp with the asthma,
And jokes not much younger than Jethro’s phylacteries,
Is something I leave you yourselves to characterize.
I’ve a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech,
Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach,
Swerving this way and that as the wave of the moment
Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim’s foam on ’t,
And leaving on memory’s rim just a sense
Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense;
Not poetry,--no, not quite that, but as good,
A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would.
’Tis a time for gay fancies as fleeting and vain
As the whisper of foam-beads on fresh-poured champagne,
Since dinners were not perhaps strictly designed
For manœuvering the heavy dragoons of the mind.
When I hear your set speeches that start with a pop,
Then wander and maunder, too feeble to stop,
With a vague apprehension from popular rumor
There used to be something by mortals called humor,
Beginning again when you thought they were done,
Respectable, sensible, weighing a ton,
And as near to the present occasions of men
As a Fast Day discourse of the year eighteen ten,
I--well, I sit still, and my sentiments smother,
For am I not also a bore and a brother?
And a toast,--what should that be? Light, airy, and free,
The foam-Aphrodite of Bacchus’s sea,
A fancy-tinged bubble, an orbed rainbow-stain,
That floats for an instant ’twixt goblet and brain;
A breath-born perfection, half something, half naught,
And breaks if it strike the hard edge of a thought.
Do you ask me to make such? Ah no, not so simple;
Ask Apelles to paint you the ravishing dimple
Whose shifting enchantment lights Venus’s cheek,
And the artist will tell you his skill is too weak;
Once fix it, ’tis naught, for the charm of it rises
From the sudden bopeeps of its smiling surprises.
I’ve tried to define it, but what mother’s son
Could ever yet do what he knows should be done?
My rocket has burst, and I watch in the air
Its fast-fading heart’s-blood drop back in despair;
Yet one chance is left me, and, if I am quick,
I can palm off, before you suspect me, the stick.
Now since I’ve succeeded--I pray do not frown--
To Ticknor’s and Longfellow’s classical gown,
And profess four strange languages, which, luckless elf,
I speak like a native (of Cambridge) myself,
Let me beg, Mr. President, leave to propose
A sentiment treading on nobody’s toes,
And give, in such ale as with pump-handles _we_ brew,
Their memory who saved us from all talking Hebrew,--
A toast that to deluge with water is good,
For in Scripture they come in just after the flood:
I give you the men but for whom, as I guess, sir,
Modern languages ne’er could have had a professor,
The builders of Babel, to whose zeal the lungs
Of the children of men owe confusion of tongues;
And a name all-embracing I couple therewith,
Which is that of my founder--the late Mr. Smith.
A PARABLE.
An ass munched thistles, while a nightingale
From passion’s fountain flooded all the vale.
“Hee-haw!” cried he, “I hearken,” as who knew
For such ear-largess humble thanks were due.
“Friend,” said the wingèd pain, “in vain you bray,
Who tunnels bring, not cisterns, for my lay;
None but his peers the poet rightly hear,
Nor mete we listeners by their length of ear.”
COLONNA, ITALY, 1852.
V.
EPIGRAMS.
SAYINGS.
1.
In life’s small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscle trained: know’st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes, or when she’ll say to thee,
“I find thee worthy; do this deed for me”?
2.
A camel-driver, angry with his drudge,
Beating him, called him hunchback; to the hind
Thus spake a dervish: “Friend, the Eternal Judge
Dooms not His work, but ours, the crooked mind.”
3.
Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark?--he borrows a lantern;
Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his steps by the stars.
4.
“Where lies the capital, pilgrim, seat of who governs the Faithful?”
“Thither my footsteps are bent: it is where Saadi is lodged.”
INSCRIPTIONS.
FOR A BELL AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY.
I call as fly the irrevocable hours,
Futile as air or strong as fate to make
Your lives of sand or granite; awful powers,
Even as men choose, they either give or take.
FOR A MEMORIAL WINDOW TO SIR WALTER RALEIGH,
SET UP IN ST. MARGARET’S, WESTMINSTER,
BY AMERICAN CONTRIBUTORS.
The New World’s sons, from England’s breasts we drew
Such milk as bids remember whence we came;
Proud of her Past wherefrom our Present grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh’s name.
PROPOSED FOR A SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS'
MONUMENT IN BOSTON.
To those who died for her on land and sea,
That she might have a country great and free,
Boston builds this: build ye her monument
In lives like theirs, at duty’s summons spent.
A MISCONCEPTION.
B, taught by Pope to do his good by stealth,
’Twixt participle and noun no difference feeling,
In office placed to serve the Commonwealth,
Does himself all the good he can by stealing.
THE BOSS.
Skilled to pull wires, he baffles Nature’s hope,
Who sure intended him to stretch a rope.
SUN-WORSHIP.
If I were the rose at your window,
Happiest rose of its crew,
Every blossom I bore would bend inward,
_They’d_ know where the sunshine grew.
CHANGED PERSPECTIVE.