ACT II.

_Evening._ _The Summit of Etna._

EMPEDOCLES.

Alone!

On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste,

Crowned by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth,

Round which the sullen vapor rolls,--alone!

Pausanias is far hence, and that is well,

For I must henceforth speak no more with man.

He has his lesson too, and that debt’s paid;

And the good, learned, friendly, quiet man,

May bravelier front his life, and in himself

Find henceforth energy and heart. But I,--

The weary man, the banished citizen,

Whose banishment is not his greatest ill,

Whose weariness no energy can reach,

And for whose hurt courage is not the cure,--

What should I do with life and living more?

No, thou art come too late, Empedocles!

And the world hath the day, and must break thee,

Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live:

Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine.

And being lonely thou art miserable;

For something has impaired thy spirit’s strength,

And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy.

Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself,

O sage! O sage! Take, then, the one way left;

And turn thee to the elements, thy friends,

Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers,

And say: Ye servants, hear Empedocles,

Who asks this final service at your hands!

Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid

The last spark of man’s consciousness with words;

Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world,

Be disarrayed of their divinity;

Before the soul lose all her solemn joys,

And awe be dead, and hope impossible,

And the soul’s deep eternal night come on,--

Receive me, hide me, quench me, take me home!

_He advances to the edge of the crater. Smoke and fire

break forth with a loud noise, and CALLICLES is

heard below singing_:--

The lyre’s voice is lovely everywhere;

In the court of gods, in the city of men,

And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain-glen,

In the still mountain air.

Only to Typho it sounds hatefully,--

To Typho only, the rebel o’erthrown,

Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone,

To embed them in the sea.

Wherefore dost thou groan so loud?

Wherefore do thy nostrils flash,

Through the dark night, suddenly,

Typho, such red jets of flame?

Is thy tortured heart still proud?

Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash?

Still alert thy stone-crushed frame?

Doth thy fierce soul still deplore

Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills,

And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore?

Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep

The fight which crowned thine ills,

Thy last mischance on this Sicilian deep?

Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair,

Where erst the strong sea-currents sucked thee down,

Never to cease to writhe, and try to rest,

Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair?

That thy groans, like thunder prest,

Begin to roll, and almost drown

The sweet notes whose lulling spell

Gods and the race of mortals love so well,

When through thy caves thou hearest music swell?

But an awful pleasure bland

Spreading o’er the Thunderer’s face,

When the sound climbs near his seat,

The Olympian council sees;

As he lets his lax right hand,

Which the lightnings doth embrace,

Sink upon his mighty knees.

And the eagle, at the beck

Of the appeasing, gracious harmony,

Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,

Nestling nearer to Jove’s feet;

While o’er his sovran eye

The curtains of the blue films slowly meet.

And the white Olympus-peaks

Rosily brighten, and the soothed gods smile

At one another from their golden chairs,

And no one round the charmed circle speaks.

Only the loved Hebe bears

The cup about, whose draughts beguile

Pain and care, with a dark store

Of fresh-pulled violets wreathed and nodding o’er;

And her flushed feet glow on the marble floor.

EMPEDOCLES.

He fables, yet speaks truth!

The brave impetuous heart yields everywhere

To the subtle, contriving head;

Great qualities are trodden down,

And littleness united

Is become invincible.

These rumblings are not Typho’s groans, I know!

These angry smoke-bursts

Are not the passionate breath

Of the mountain-crushed, tortured, intractable Titan king;

But over all the world

What suffering is there not seen

Of plainness oppressed by cunning,

As the well-counselled Zeus oppressed

That self-helping son of earth!

What anguish of greatness,

Railed and hunted from the world,

Because its simplicity rebukes

This envious, miserable age!

I am weary of it.

--Lie there, ye ensigns

Of my unloved pre-eminence

In an age like this!

Among a people of children,

Who thronged me in their cities,

Who worshipped me in their houses,

And asked, not wisdom,

But drugs to charm with,

But spells to mutter

All the fool’s-armory of magic! Lie there,

My golden circlet,

My purple robe!

CALLICLES (_from below_).

As the sky-brightening south-wind clears the day,

And makes the massed clouds roll,

The music of the lyre blows away

The clouds which wrap the soul.

Oh that fate had let me see

That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,

That famous, final victory

When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire!

When, from far Parnassus’ side,

Young Apollo, all the pride

Of the Phrygian flutes to tame,

To the Phrygian highlands came;

Where the long green reed-beds sway

In the rippled waters gray

Of that solitary lake

Where Mæander’s springs are born;

Where the ridged pine-wooded roots

Of Messogis westward break,

Mounting westward, high and higher.

There was held the famous strife;

There the Phrygian brought his flutes,

And Apollo brought his lyre;

And, when now the westering sun

Touched the hills, the strife was done,

And the attentive muses said,--

“Marsyas, thou art vanquishèd!”

Then Apollo’s minister

Hanged upon a branching fir

Marsyas, that unhappy Faun,

And began to whet his knife.

But the Mænads, who were there,

Left their friend, and with robes flowing

In the wind, and loose dark hair

O’er their polished bosoms blowing,

Each her ribboned tambourine

Flinging on the mountain-sod,

With a lovely frightened mien

Came about the youthful god.

But he turned his beauteous face

Haughtily another way,

From the grassy sun-warmed place

Where in proud repose he lay,

With one arm over his head,

Watching how the whetting sped.

But aloof, on the lake-strand,

Did the young Olympus stand,

Weeping at his master’s end;

For the Faun had been his friend.

For he taught him how to sing,

And he taught him flute-playing.

Many a morning had they gone

To the glimmering mountain lakes,

And had torn up by the roots

The tall crested water-reeds

With long plumes and soft brown seeds,

And had carved them into flutes,

Sitting on a tabled stone

Where the shoreward ripple breaks.

And he taught him how to please

The red-snooded Phrygian girls,

Whom the summer evening sees

Flashing in the dance’s whirls

Underneath the starlit trees

In the mountain villages.

Therefore now Olympus stands,

At his master’s piteous cries

Pressing fast with both his hands

His white garment to his eyes,

Not to see Apollo’s scorn.--

Ah, poor Faun, poor Faun! ah, poor Faun!

EMPEDOCLES.

And lie thou there,

My laurel bough!

Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there!

Though thou hast been my shade in the world’s heat,

Though I have loved thee, lived in honoring thee,

Yet lie thou there,

My laurel bough!

I am weary of thee.

I am weary of the solitude

Where he who bears thee must abide,--

Of the rocks of Parnassus,

Of the gorge of Delphi,

Of the moonlight peaks, and the caves.

Thou guardest them, Apollo!

Over the grave of the slain Pytho,

Though young, intolerably severe!

Thou keepest aloof the profane,

But the solitude oppresses thy votary.

The jars of men reach him not in thy valley,

But can life reach him?

Thou fencest him from the multitude:

Who will fence him from himself?

He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents,

And the beating of his own heart;

The air is thin, the veins swell,

The temples tighten and throb there--

Air! air!

Take thy bough, set me free from my solitude;

I have been enough alone!

Where shall thy votary fly, then? back to men?

But they will gladly welcome him once more,

And help him to unbend his too tense thought,

And rid him of the presence of himself,

And keep their friendly chatter at his ear,

And haunt him, till the absence from himself,

That other torment, grow unbearable;

And he will fly to solitude again,

And he will find its air too keen for him,

And so change back; and many thousand times

Be miserably bandied to and fro

Like a sea-wave, betwixt the world and thee,

Thou young, implacable god! and only death

Shall cut his oscillations short, and so

Bring him to poise. There is no other way.

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!

When we were young, when we could number friends

In all the Italian cities like ourselves;

When with elated hearts we joined your train,

Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth.[16]

Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought

Nor outward things were closed and dead to us;

But we received the shock of mighty thoughts

On simple minds with a pure natural joy;

And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,

We had the power to feel the pressure eased,

The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,

In the delightful commerce of the world.

We had not lost our balance then, nor grown

Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.

The smallest thing could give us pleasure then,--

The sports of the country-people,

A flute-note from the woods,

Sunset over the sea;

Seed-time and harvest,

The reapers in the corn,

The vinedresser in his vineyard,

The village-girl at her wheel.

Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye

Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,

Who dwell on a firm basis of content!

But he who has outlived his prosperous days;

But he whose youth fell on a different world

From that on which his exiled age is thrown,--

Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained

By other rules than are in vogue to-day;

Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change,

But, in a world he loves not, must subsist

In ceaseless opposition, be the guard

Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards,

That the world win no mastery over him;

Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;

Who has no minute’s breathing-space allowed

To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy,--

Joy and the outward world must die to him,

As they are dead to me.

_A long pause, during which EMPEDOCLES remains motionless,

plunged in thought. The night deepens.

He moves forward, and gazes around him, and proceeds_:--

And yon, ye stars,

Who slowly begin to marshal,

As of old, in the fields of heaven,

Your distant, melancholy lines!

Have you, too, survived yourselves?

Are you, too, what I fear to become?

You too once lived;

You too moved joyfully,

Among august companions,

In an older world, peopled by gods,

In a mightier order,

The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven.

But now ye kindle

Your lonely, cold-shining lights,

Unwilling lingerers

In the heavenly wilderness,

For a younger, ignoble world;

And renew, by necessity,

Night after night your courses,

In echoing, unneared silence,

Above a race you know not,

Uncaring and undelighted,

Without friend and without home;

Weary like us, though not

Weary with our weariness.

No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,

No languor, no decay! languor and death,

They are with me, not you! ye are alive,--

Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride

Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world,

That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount

Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand,--

Thou, too, brimmest with life! the sea of cloud,

That heaves its white and billowy vapors up

To moat this isle of ashes from the world,

Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down,

O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads

To Etna’s Lipareän sister-fires

And the long dusky line of Italy,--

That mild and luminous floor of waters lives,

With held-in joy swelling its heart: I only,

Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has failed,

I, who have not, like these, in solitude

Maintained courage and force, and in myself

Nursed an immortal vigor,--I alone

Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read

In all things my own deadness.

_A long silence. He continues_:--

Oh that I could glow like this mountain!

Oh that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea!

Oh that my soul were full of light as the stars!

Oh that it brooded over the world like the air!

But no, this heart will glow no more; thou art

A living man no more, Empedocles!

Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,--

But a naked, eternally restless mind!

_After a pause_:--

To the elements it came from,

Every thing will return,--

Our bodies to earth,

Our blood to water,

Heat to fire,

Breath to air:

They were well born, they will be well entombed.

But mind?...

And we might gladly share the fruitful stir

Down in our mother earth’s miraculous womb;

Well would it be

With what rolled of us in the stormy main;

We might have joy, blent with the all-bathing air,

Or with the nimble, radiant life of fire.

But mind, but thought,

If these have been the master part of us,--

Where will _they_ find their parent element?

What will receive _them_, who will call _them_ home?

But we shall still be in them, and they in us;

And we shall be the strangers of the world;

And they will be our lords, as they are now,

And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,

And never let us clasp and feel the All

But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.

And we shall be unsatisfied as now;

And we shall feel the agony of thirst,

The ineffable longing for the life of life

Baffled forever; and still thought and mind

Will hurry us with them on their homeless march

Over the unallied unopening earth,

Over the unrecognizing sea; while air

Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth,

And fire repel us from its living waves.

And then we shall unwillingly return

Back to this meadow of calamity,

This uncongenial place, this human life:

And in our individual human state

Go through the sad probation all again,

To see if we will poise our life at last,

To see if we will now at last be true

To our own only true, deep-buried selves,

Being one with which, we are one with the whole world;

Or whether we will once more fall away

Into the bondage of the flesh or mind,

Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze

Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power.

And each succeeding age in which we are born

Will have more peril for us than the last;

Will goad our senses with a sharper spur,

Will fret our minds to an intenser play,

Will make ourselves harder to be discerned.

And we shall struggle a while, gasp and rebel;

And we shall fly for refuge to past times,

Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness;

And the reality will pluck us back,

Knead us in its hot hand, and change our nature.

And we shall feel our powers of effort flag,

And rally them for one last fight--and fail;

And we shall sink in the impossible strife,

And be astray forever.

Slave of sense

I have in no wise been; but slave of thought?

And who can say: I have been always free,

Lived ever in the light of my own soul?

I cannot; I have lived in wrath and gloom,

Fierce, disputatious, ever at war with man,

Far from my own soul, far from warmth and light;

But I have not grown easy in these bonds,

But I have not denied what bonds these were.

Yea, I take myself to witness,

That I have loved no darkness,

Sophisticated no truth,

Nursed no dlusion,

Allowed no fear!

And therefore, O ye elements! I know know--

Ye know it too--it hath been granted me

Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.

I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud

Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.

Is it but for a moment?

--Ah, boil up, ye vapors!

Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!

My soul glows to meet you.

Ere it flag, ere the mists

Of despondency and gloom

Rush over it again,

Receive me, save me!

[_He plunges into the crater._

CALLICLES (_from below_).

Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,

Thick breaks the red flame;

All Etna heaves fiercely

Her forest-clothed frame.

Not here, O Apollo!

Are haunts meet for thee;

But where Helicon breaks down

In cliff to the sea,--

Where the moon-silvered inlets

Send far their light voice

Up the still vale of Thisbe,--

Oh, speed, and rejoice!

On the sward at the cliff-top

Lie strewn the white flocks:

On the cliff-side the pigeons

Roost deep in the rocks.

In the moonlight the shepherds,

Soft lulled by the rills,

Lie wrapped in their blankets

Asleep on the hills.

--What forms are these coming

So white through the gloom?

What garments out-glistening

The gold-flowered broom?

What sweet-breathing presence

Out-perfumes the thyme?

What voices enrapture

The night’s balmy prime?

’Tis Apollo comes leading

His choir, the Nine.

The leader is fairest,

But all are divine.

They are lost in the hollows!

They stream up again!

What seeks on this mountain

The glorified train?

They bathe on this mountain,

In the spring by their road;

Then on to Olympus,

Their endless abode.

--Whose praise do they mention?

Of what is it told?

What will be forever,

What was from of old.

First hymn they the Father

Of all things; and then,

The rest of immortals,

The action of men.

The day in his hotness,

The strife with the palm;

The night in her silence,

The stars in their calm.

_BACCHANALIA; OR, THE NEW AGE._

I.

The evening comes, the fields are still.

The tinkle of the thirsty rill,

Unheard all day, ascends again;

Deserted is the half-mown plain,

Silent the swaths; the ringing wain,

The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms,

All housed within the sleeping farms.

The business of the day is done,

The last-left haymaker is gone.

And from the thyme upon the height,

And from the elder-blossom white

And pale dog-roses in the hedge,

And from the mint-plant in the sedge,

In puffs of balm the night-air blows

The perfume which the day foregoes.

And on the pure horizon far,

See, pulsing with the first-born star,

The liquid sky above the hill!

The evening comes, the fields are still.

Loitering and leaping,

With saunter, with bounds,

Flickering and circling

In files and in rounds,

Gayly their pine-staff green

Tossing in air,

Loose o’er their shoulders white

Showering their hair,

See! the wild Mænads

Break from the wood,

Youth and Iacchus

Maddening their blood.

See! through the quiet land

Rioting they pass,

Fling the fresh heaps about,

Trample the grass,

Tear from the rifled hedge

Garlands, their prize;

Fill with their sports the field,

Fill with their cries.

Shepherd, what ails thee, then?

Shepherd, why mute?

Forth with thy joyous song!

Forth with thy flute!

Tempts not the revel blithe?

Lure not their cries?

Glow not their shoulders smooth?

Melt not their eyes?

Is not, on cheeks like those,

Lovely the flush?

--_Ah! so the quiet was!

So was the hush!_

II.

The epoch ends, the world is still.

The age has talked and worked its fill.

The famous orators have shone,

The famous poets sung and gone,

The famous men of war have fought,

The famous speculators thought,

The famous players, sculptors, wrought,

The famous painters filled their wall,

The famous critics judged it all.

The combatants are parted now;

Uphung the spear, unbent the bow,

The puissant crowned, the weak laid low.

And in the after-silence sweet,

Now strifes are hushed, our ears doth meet,

Ascending pure, the bell-like fame

Of this or that down-trodden name,

Delicate spirits, pushed away

In the hot press of the noonday.

And o’er the plain, where the dead age

Did its now-silent warfare wage,--

O’er that wide plain, now wrapped in gloom,

Where many a splendor finds its tomb,

Many spent fames and fallen nights nights--

The one or two immortal lights

Rise slowly up into the sky,

To shine there everlastingly,

Like stars over the bounding hill.

The epoch ends, the world is still.

Thundering and bursting

In torrents, in waves,

Carolling and shouting

Over tombs, amid graves,

See! on the cumbered plain

Clearing a stage,

Scattering the past about,

Comes the new age.

Bards make new poems,

Thinkers new schools,

Statesmen new systems,

Critics new rules.

All things begin again;

Life is their prize;

Earth with their deeds they fill,

Fill with their cries.

Poet, what ails thee, then?

Say, why so mute?

Forth with thy praising voice!

Forth with thy flute!

Loiterer! why sittest thou

Sunk in thy dream?

Tempts not the bright new age?

Shines not its stream?

Look, ah! what genius,

Art, science, wit!

Soldiers like Cæsar,

Statesmen like Pitt!

Sculptors like Phidias,

Raphaels in shoals,

Poets like Shakspeare,--

Beautiful souls!

See, on their glowing cheeks

Heavenly the flush!

--_Ah! so the silence was!

So was the hush!_

The world but feels the present’s spell:

The poet feels the past as well;

Whatever men have done, might do,

Whatever thought, might think it too.

_EPILOGUE TO LESSING’S LAOCOÖN._

One morn as through Hyde Park we walked,

My friend and I, by chance we talked

Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön;

And after we a while had gone

In Lessing’s track, and tried to see

What painting is, what poetry,--

Diverging to another thought,

“Ah!” cries my friend, “but who hath taught

Why music and the other arts

Oftener perform aright their parts

Than poetry? why she, than they,

Fewer fine successes can display?

“For ’tis so, surely! Even in Greece,

Where best the poet framed his piece,

Even in that Phœbus-guarded ground

Pausanias on his travels found

Good poems, if he looked, more rare

(Though many) than good statues were--

For these, in truth, were everywhere.

Of bards full many a stroke divine

In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line,

The land of Ariosto showed;

And yet, e’en there, the canvas glowed

With triumphs, a yet ampler brood,

Of Raphael and his brotherhood.

And nobly perfect, in our day

Of haste, half-work, and disarray,

Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong,

Hath risen Goethe’s, Wordsworth’s song;

Yet even I (and none will bow

Deeper to these) must needs allow,

They yield us not, to soothe our pains,

Such multitude of heavenly strains

As from the kings of sound are blown,--

Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.”

While thus my friend discoursed, we pass

Out of the path, and take the grass.

The grass had still the green of May,

And still the unblackened elms were gay;

The kine were resting in the shade,

The flies a summer murmur made.

Bright was the morn, and south the air;

The soft-couched cattle were as fair

As those which pastured by the sea,

That old-world morn, in Sicily,

When on the beach the Cyclops lay,

And Galatea from the bay

Mocked her poor lovelorn giant’s lay.

“Behold,” I said, “the painter’s sphere!

The limits of his art appear.

The passing group, the summer morn,

The grass, the elms, that blossomed thorn,--

Those cattle couched, or, as they rise,

Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes,--

These, or much greater things, but caught

Like these, and in one aspect brought!

In outward semblance he must give

A moment’s life of things that live;

Then let him choose his moment well,

With power divine its story tell.”

Still we walked on, in thoughtful mood,

And now upon the bridge we stood.

Full of sweet breathings was the air,

Of sudden stirs and pauses fair.

Down o’er the stately bridge the breeze

Came rustling from the garden-trees,

And on the sparkling waters played;

Light-plashing waves an answer made,

And mimic boats their haven neared.

Beyond, the abbey-towers appeared,

By mist and chimneys unconfined,

Free to the sweep of light and wind;

While through their earth-moored nave below,

Another breath of wind doth blow,

Sound as of wandering breeze--but sound

In laws by human artists bound.

“The world of music!” I exclaimed,--

“This breeze that rustles by, that famed

Abbey, recall it! what a sphere,

Large and profound, hath genius here!

The inspired musician, what a range,

What power of passion, wealth of change!

Some source of feeling he must choose,

And its locked fount of beauty use,

And through the stream of music tell

Its else unutterable spell;

To choose it rightly is his part,

And press into its inmost heart.

“_Miserere, Domine!_

The words are uttered, and they flee.

Deep is their penitential moan,

Mighty their pathos, but ’tis gone.

They have declared the spirit’s sore,

Sore load, and words can do no more.

Beethoven takes them then,--those two

Poor, bounded words,--and makes them new;

Infinite makes them, makes them young;

Transplants them to another tongue,

Where they can now, without constraint,

Pour all the soul of their complaint,

And roll adown a channel large

The wealth divine they have in charge.

Page after page of music turn,

And still they live, and still they burn,

Eternal, passion-fraught, and free,--

_Miserere, Domine!_”

Onward we moved, and reached the ride

Where gayly flows the human tide.

Afar, in rest the cattle lay;

We heard, afar, faint music play;

But agitated, brisk, and near,

Men, with their stream of life, were here.

Some hang upon the rails, and some

On foot behind them go and come.

This through the ride upon his steed

Goes slowly by, and this at speed.

The young, the happy, and the fair,

The old, the sad, the worn, were there;

Some vacant and some musing went,

And some in talk and merriment.

Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells!

And now and then, perhaps, there swells

A sigh, a tear--but in the throng

All changes fast, and hies along.

Hies, ah! from whence, what native ground?

And to what goal, what ending, bound?

“Behold at last the poet’s sphere!

But who,” I said, “suffices here?

“For, ah! so much he has to do,--

Be painter and musician too!

The aspect of the moment show,

The feeling of the moment know!

The aspect not, I grant, express

Clear as the painter’s art can dress;

The feeling not, I grant, explore

So deep as the musician’s lore:

But clear as words can make revealing,

And deep as words can follow feeling.

But, ah! then comes his sorest spell

Of toil,--he must life’s _movement_ tell!

The thread which binds it all in one,

And not its separate parts alone.

The _movement_ he must tell of life,

Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife;

His eye must travel down, at full,

The long, unpausing spectacle;

With faithful, unrelaxing force

Attend it from its primal source,

From change to change and year to year

Attend it of its mid-career,

Attend it to the last repose

And solemn silence of its close.

“The cattle rising from the grass,

His thought must follow where they pass;

The penitent with anguish bowed,

His thought must follow through the crowd.

Yes! all this eddying, motley throng

That sparkles in the sun along,--

Girl, statesman, merchant, soldier bold,

Master and servant, young and old,

Grave, gay, child, parent, husband, wife,--

He follows home, and lives their life.

“And many, many are the souls

Life’s movement fascinates, controls.

It draws them on, they cannot save

Their feet from its alluring wave;

They cannot leave it, they must go

With its unconquerable flow.

But ah! how few, of all that try

This mighty march, do aught but die!

For ill-endowed for such a way,

Ill-stored in strength, in wits, are they.

They faint, they stagger to and fro,

And wandering from the stream they go;

In pain, in terror, in distress,

They see, all round, a wilderness.

Sometimes a momentary gleam

They catch of the mysterious stream;

Sometimes, a second’s space, their ear

The murmur of its waves doth hear;

That transient glimpse in song they say,

But not as painter can portray;

That transient sound in song they tell,

But not as the musician well.

And when at last their snatches cease,

And they are silent and at peace,

The stream of life’s majestic whole

Hath ne’er been mirrored on their soul.

“Only a few the life-stream’s shore

With safe unwandering feet explore;

Untired its movement bright attend,

Follow its windings to the end.

Then from its brimming waves their eye

Drinks up delighted ecstasy,

And its deep-toned, melodious voice

Forever makes their ear rejoice.

They speak! the happiness divine

They feel runs o’er in every line;

Its spell is round them like a shower;

It gives them pathos, gives them power.

No painter yet hath such a way,

Nor no musician made, as they,

And gathered on immortal knolls

Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.

Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach

The charm which Homer, Shakspeare, teach.

To these, to these, their thankful race

Gives, then, the first, the fairest place;

And brightest is their glory’s sheen,

For greatest hath their labor been.”

_PERSISTENCY OF POETRY._

Though the Muse be gone away,

Though she move not earth to-day,

Souls, erewhile who caught her word,

Ah! still harp on what they heard.

_A CAUTION TO POETS._

What poets feel not, when they make,

A pleasure in creating,

The world, in _its_ turn, will not take

Pleasure in contemplating.

_THE YOUTH OF NATURE._

Raised are the dripping oars,

Silent the boat! The lake,

Lovely and soft as a dream,

Swims in the sheen of the moon.

The mountains stand at its head

Clear in the pure June-night,

But the valleys are flooded with haze.

Rydal and Fairfield are there;

In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead.

So it is, so it will be for aye.

Nature is fresh as of old,

Is lovely; a mortal is dead.

The spots which recall him survive,

For he lent a new life to these hills.

The Pillar still broods o’er the fields

Which border Ennerdale Lake,

And Egremont sleeps by the sea.

The gleam of The Evening Star

Twinkles on Grasmere no more,

But ruined and solemn and gray

The sheepfold of Michael survives;

And far to the south, the heath

Still blows in the Quantock coombs,

By the favorite waters of Ruth.

These survive! Yet not without pain,

Pain and dejection to-night,

Can I feel that their poet is gone.

He grew old in an age he condemned.

He looked on the rushing decay

Of the times which had sheltered his youth;

Felt the dissolving throes

Of a social order he loved;

Outlived his brethren, his peers;

And, like the Theban seer,

Died in his enemies’ day.

Cold bubbled the spring of Tilphusa,

Copais lay bright in the moon,

Helicon glassed in the lake

Its firs, and afar rose the peaks

Of Parnassus, snowily clear;

Thebes was behind him in flames,

And the clang of arms in his ear,

When his awe-struck captors led

The Theban seer to the spring.

Tiresias drank and died.

Nor did reviving Thebes

See such a prophet again.

Well may we mourn, when the head

Of a sacred poet lies low

In an age which can rear them no more!

The complaining millions of men

Darken in labor and pain;

But he was a priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world,

Which we saw with his eyes, and were glad.

He is dead, and the fruit-bearing day

Of his race is past on the earth;

And darkness returns to our eyes.

For, oh! is it you, is it you,

Moonlight, and shadow, and lake,

And mountains, that fill us with joy,

Or the poet who sings you so well?

Is it you, O beauty, O grace,

O charm, O romance, that we feel,

Or the voice which reveals what you are?

Are ye, like daylight and sun,

Shared and rejoiced in by all?

Or are ye immersed in the mass

Of matter, and hard to extract,

Or sunk at the core of the world

Too deep for the most to discern?

Like stars in the deep of the sky,

Which arise on the glass of the sage,

But are lost when their watcher is gone.

“They are here,”--I heard, as men heard

In Mysian Ida the voice

Of the mighty Mother, or Crete,

The murmur of Nature, reply,--

“Loveliness, magic, grace,

They are here! they are set in the world,

They abide; and the finest of souls

Hath not been thrilled by them all,

Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.

The poet who sings them may die,

But they are immortal and live,

For they are the life of the world.

Will ye not learn it, and know,

When ye mourn that a poet is dead,

That the singer was less than his themes,

Life, and emotion, and I?

“More than the singer are these.

Weak is the tremor of pain

That thrills in his mournfullest chord

To that which once ran through his soul.

Cold the elation of joy

In his gladdest, airiest song,

To that which of old in his youth

Filled him and made him divine.

Hardly his voice at its best

Gives us a sense of the awe,

The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom,

Of the unlit gulf of himself.

“Ye know not yourselves; and your bards--

The clearest, the best, who have read

Most in themselves--have beheld

Less than they left unrevealed.

Ye express not yourselves: can ye make

With marble, with color, with word,

What charmed you in others re-live?

Can thy pencil, O artist! restore

The figure, the bloom of thy love,

As she was in her morning of spring?

Canst thou paint the ineffable smile

Of her eyes as they rested on thine?

Can the image of life have the glow,

The motion of life itself?

“Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me,

The mateless, the one, will ye know?

Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell

Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast,

My longing, my sadness, my joy?

Will ye claim for your great ones the gift

To have rendered the gleam of my skies,

To have echoed the moan of my seas,

Uttered the voice of my hills?

When your great ones depart, will ye say,--

_All things have suffered a loss,_

_Nature is hid in their grave_?

“Race after race, man after man,

Have thought that my secret was theirs,

Have dreamed that I lived but for them,

That they were my glory and joy.

--They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!

I remain.”

_THE YOUTH OF MAN._

We, O Nature, depart:

Thou survivest us! This,

This, I know, is the law.

Yes! but, more than this,

Thou who seest us die

Seest us change while we live;

Seest our dreams, one by one,

Seest our errors depart;

Watchest us, Nature! throughout

Mild and inscrutably calm.

Well for us that we change!

Well for us that the power

Which in our morning prime

Saw the mistakes of our youth,

Sweet, and forgiving, and good,

Sees the contrition of age!

Behold, O Nature, this pair!

See them to-night where they stand,

Not with the halo of youth

Crowning their brows with its light,

Not with the sunshine of hope,

Not with the rapture of spring,

Which they had of old, when they stood

Years ago at my side

In this self-same garden, and said,--

“We are young, and the world is ours;

Man, man is king of the world!

Fools that these mystics are

Who prate of Nature! but she

Hath neither beauty, nor warmth,

Nor life, nor emotion, nor power.

But man has a thousand gifts,

And the generous dreamer invests

The senseless world with them all.

Nature is nothing; her charm

Lives in our eyes which can paint,

Lives in our hearts which can feel.”

Thou, O Nature, wast mute,

Mute as of old! Days flew,

Days and years; and Time

With the ceaseless stroke of his wings

Brushed off the bloom from their soul.

Clouded and dim grew their eye,

Languid their heart--for youth

Quickened its pulses no more.

Slowly, within the walls

Of an ever-narrowing world,

They drooped, they grew blind, they grew old.

Thee, and their youth in thee,

Nature! they saw no more.

Murmur of living,

Stir of existence,

Soul of the world!

Make, oh, make yourselves felt

To the dying spirit of youth!

Come, like the breath of the spring!

Leave not a human soul

To grow old in darkness and pain!

Only the living can feel you,

But leave us not while we live!

Here they stand to-night,--

Here, where this gray balustrade

Crowns the still valley; behind

In the castled house with its woods

Which sheltered their childhood; the sun

On its ivied windows; a scent

From the gray-walled gardens, a breath

Of the fragrant stock and the pink,

Perfumes the evening air.

Their children play on the lawns.

They stand and listen; they hear

The children’s shouts, and at times,

Faintly, the bark of a dog

From a distant farm in the hills.

Nothing besides! in front

The wide, wide valley outspreads

To the dim horizon, reposed

In the twilight, and bathed in dew,

Cornfield and hamlet and copse

Darkening fast; but a light,

Far off, a glory of day,

Still plays on the city-spires;

And there in the dusk by the walls,

With the gray mist marking its course

Through the silent, flowery land,

On, to the plains, to the sea,

Floats the imperial stream.

Well I know what they feel!

They gaze, and the evening wind

Plays on their faces; they gaze,--

Airs from the Eden of youth

Awake and stir in their soul;

The past returns: they feel

What they are, alas! what they were.

They, not Nature, are changed.

Well I know what they feel!

Hush, for tears

Begin to steal to their eyes!

Hush, for fruit

Grows from such sorrow as theirs!

And they remember,

With piercing, untold anguish,

The proud boasting of their youth.

And they feel how Nature was fair.

And the mists of delusion,

And the scales of habit,

Fall away from their eyes;

And they see, for a moment,

Stretching out like the desert

In its weary, unprofitable length,

Their faded, ignoble lives.

While the locks are yet brown on thy head,

While the soul still looks through thine eyes,

While the heart still pours

The mantling blood to thy cheek,

Sink, O youth, in thy soul!

Yearn to the greatness of Nature;

Rally the good in the depths of thyself!

_PALLADIUM._

Set where the upper streams of Simois flow,

Was the Palladium, high ’mid rock and wood;

And Hector was in Ilium, far below,

And fought, and saw it not; but there it stood!

It stood, and sun and moonshine rained their light

On the pure columns of its glen-built hall.

Backward and forward rolled the waves of fight

Round Troy; but while this stood, Troy could not fall.

So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul.

Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air;

Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll:

We visit it by moments, ah, too rare!

Men will renew the battle in the plain

To-morrow: red with blood will Xanthus be;

Hector and Ajax will be there again,

Helen will come upon the wall to see.

Then we shall rust in shade, or shine in strife,

And fluctuate ’twixt blind hopes and blind despairs,

And fancy that we put forth all our life,

And never know how with the soul it fares.

Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high,

Upon our life a ruling effluence send;

And when it fails, fight as we will, we die;

And, while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.

_PROGRESS._

The Master stood upon the mount, and taught.

He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes;

“The old law,” they said, “is wholly come to naught:

Behold the new world rise!”

“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw

The old law observed by scribes and Pharisees?

I say unto you, see ye keep that law

More faithfully than these!

“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!

Think not that I to annul the law have willed:

No jot, no tittle, from the law shall pass

Till all have been fulfilled.”

So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.

And what, then, shall be said to those to-day,

Who cry aloud to lay the old world low

To clear the new world’s way?

“Religious fervors! ardor misapplied!

Hence, hence!” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind!

But keep him self-immersed, pre-occupied,

And lame the active mind.”

Ah! from the old world let some one answer give:

“Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?

I say unto you, see that _your_ souls live

A deeper life than theirs!

“Say ye, ‘The spirit of man has found new roads,

And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein’?

Leave, then, the cross as ye have left carved gods,

But guard the fire within!

“Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll,

And no man may the other’s hurt behold;

Yet each will have one anguish,--his own soul

Which perishes of cold.”

Here let that voice make end; then let a strain

From a far lonelier distance, like the wind

Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again

These men’s profoundest mind:--

“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye

Forever doth accompany mankind,

Hath looked on no religion scornfully

That men did ever find.

“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?

Which has not fallen on the dry heart like rain?

Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man,--

_Thou must be born again!_

“Children of men! not that your age excel

In pride of life the ages of your sires,

But that _ye_ think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,

The Friend of man desires.”

_REVOLUTIONS._

Before man parted for this earthly strand,

While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood,

God put a heap of letters in his hand,

And bade him make with them what word he could.

And man has turned them many times; made Greece,

Rome, England, France; yes, nor in vain essayed

Way after way, changes that never cease!

The letters have combined, something was made.

But ah! an inextinguishable sense

Haunts him that he has not made what he should;

That he has still, though old, to recommence,

Since he has not yet found the word God would.

And empire after empire, at their height

Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on;

Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,

And drooped, and slowly died upon their throne.

One day, thou say’st, there will at last appear

The word, the order, which God meant should be.

--Ah! we shall know _that_ well when it comes near;

The band will quit man’s heart, he will breathe free.

_SELF-DEPENDENCE._

Weary of myself, and sick of asking

What I am, and what I ought to be,

At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me

Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.

And a look of passionate desire

O’er the sea and to the stars I send:

“Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me,

Calm me, ah, compose me to the end!

Ah, once more,” I cried, “ye stars, ye waters,

On my heart your mighty charm renew;

Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you,

Feel my soul becoming vast like you!”

From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,

Over the lit sea’s unquiet way,

In the rustling night-air came the answer,--

“Wouldst thou _be_ as these are? _Live_ as they.

“Unaffrighted by the silence round them,

Undistracted by the sights they see,

These demand not that the things without them

Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.

“And with joy the stars perform their shining,

And the sea its long moon-silvered roll;

For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting

All the fever of some differing soul.

“Bounded by themselves, and unregardful

In what state God’s other works may be,

In their own tasks all their powers pouring,

These attain the mighty life you see.”

O air-born voice! long since, severely clear,

A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear,--

“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he

Who finds himself loses his misery!”

_MORALITY._

We cannot kindle when we will

The fire which in the heart resides;

The spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery our soul abides.

But tasks in hours of insight willed

Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

With aching hands and bleeding feet

We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;

We bear the burden and the heat

Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.

Not till the hours of light return,

All we have built do we discern.

Then, when the clouds are off the soul,

When thou dost bask in Nature’s eye,

Ask how _she_ viewed thy self-control,

Thy struggling, tasked morality,--

Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air,

Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.

And she, whose censure thou dost dread,

Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek,

See, on her face a glow is spread,

A strong emotion on her cheek!

“Ah, child!” she cries, “that strife divine,

Whence was it, for it is not mine?

“There is no effort on _my_ brow;

I do not strive, I do not weep:

I rush with the swift spheres, and glow

In joy, and when I will, I sleep.

Yet that severe, that earnest air,

I saw, I felt it once--but where?

“I knew not yet the gauge of time,

Nor wore the manacles of space;

I felt it in some other clime,

I saw it in some other place.

’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,

And lay upon the breast of God.”

_A SUMMER NIGHT._

In the deserted, moon-blanched street,

How lonely rings the echo of my feet!

Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,

Silent and white, unopening down,

Repellent as the world; but see,

A break between the housetops shows

The moon! and lost behind her, fading dim

Into the dewy dark obscurity

Down at the far horizon’s rim,

Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!

And to my mind the thought

Is on a sudden brought

Of a past night, and a far different scene.

Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep

As clearly as at noon;

The spring-tide’s brimming flow

Heaved dazzlingly between;

Houses, with long white sweep,

Girdled the glistening bay;

Behind, through the soft air,

The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.

That night was far more fair--

But the same restless pacings to and fro,

And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,

And the same bright, calm moon.

And the calm moonlight seems to say,--

_Hast thou, then, still the old unquiet breast,_

_Which neither deadens into rest,_

_Nor ever feels the fiery glow_

_That whirls the spirit from itself away,_

_But fluctuates to and fro,_

_Never by passion quite possessed,_

_And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway?_

And I, I know not if to pray

Still to be what I am, or yield, and be

Like all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,

Where, in the sun’s hot eye,

With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly

Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give,

Dreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.

And as, year after year,

Fresh products of their barren labor fall

From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.

And while they try to stem

The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,

Death in their prison reaches them,

Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

And the rest, a few,

Escape their prison, and depart

On the wide ocean of life anew.

There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart

Listeth, will sail;

Nor doth he know how there prevail,

Despotic on that sea,

Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.

Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred

By thwarting signs, and braves

The freshening wind and blackening waves.

And then the tempest strikes him; and between

The lightning-bursts is seen

Only a driving wreck,

And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck

With anguished face and flying hair,

Grasping the rudder hard,

Still bent to make some port, he knows not where,

Still standing for some false, impossible shore.

And sterner comes the roar

Of sea and wind; and through the deepening gloom

Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,

And he too disappears, and comes no more.

Is there no life, but these alone?

Madman or slave, must man be one?

Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!

Clearness divine!

Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign

Of languor, though so calm, and though so great

Are yet untroubled and unpassionate;

Who, though so noble, share in the world’s toil,

And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!

I will not say that your mild deeps retain

A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain

Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain;

But I will rather say that you remain

A world above man’s head, to let him see

How boundless might his soul’s horizons be,

How vast, yet of what clear transparency!

How it were good to live there, and breathe free;

How fair a lot to fill

Is left to each man still!

_THE BURIED LIFE._

Light flows our war of mocking words; and yet,

Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!

I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.

Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,

We know, we know that we can smile!

But there’s a something in this breast,

To which thy light words bring no rest,

And thy gay smiles no anodyne;

Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,

And turn those limpid eyes on mine,

And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak

To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

Are even lovers powerless to reveal

To one another what indeed they feel?

I knew the mass of men concealed

Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed

They would by other men be met

With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;

I knew they lived and moved

Tricked in disguises, alien to the rest

Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet

The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love! doth a like spell benumb

Our hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,

Even for a moment, can get free

Our heart, and have our lips unchained;

For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!

Fate, which foresaw

How frivolous a baby man would be,--

By what distractions he would be possessed,

How he would pour himself in every strife,

And well-nigh change his own identity,--

That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey

Even in his own despite his being’s law,

Bade through the deep recesses of our breast

The unregarded river of our life

Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;

And that we should not see

The buried stream, and seem to be

Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,

Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life;

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

In tracking out our true, original course;

A longing to inquire

Into the mystery of this heart which beats

So wild, so deep in us,--to know

Whence our lives come, and where they go.

And many a man in his own breast then delves,

But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.

And we have been on many thousand lines,

And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;

But hardly have we, for one little hour,

Been on our own line, have we been ourselves,--

Hardly had skill to utter one of all

The nameless feelings that course through our breast,

But they course on forever unexpressed.

And long we try in vain to speak and act

Our hidden self, and what we say and do

Is eloquent, is well--but ’tis not true!

And then we will no more be racked

With inward striving, and demand

Of all the thousand nothings of the hour

Their stupefying power;

Ah, yes, and they benumb us at our call!

Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,

From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne

As from an infinitely distant land,

Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey

A melancholy into all our day.

Only--but this is rare--

When a beloved hand is laid in ours,

When, jaded with the rush and glare

Of the interminable hours,

Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,

When our world-deafened ear

Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed,--

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,

And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,

And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.

A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,

And hears its winding murmur, and he sees

The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race

Wherein he doth forever chase

The flying and elusive shadow, rest.

An air of coolness plays upon his face,

And an unwonted calm pervades his breast;

And then he thinks he knows

The hills where his life rose,

And the sea where it goes.

_LINES WRITTEN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS._

In this lone, open glade I lie,

Screened by deep boughs on either hand;

And at its end, to stay the eye,

Those black-crowned, red-boled pine-trees stand.

Birds here make song, each bird has his,

Across the girdling city’s hum.

How green under the boughs it is!

How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!

Sometimes a child will cross the glade

To take his nurse his broken toy;

Sometimes a thrush flit overhead

Deep in her unknown day’s employ.

Here at my feet what wonders pass!

What endless, active life is here!

What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!

An air-stirred forest, fresh and clear.

Scarce fresher is the mountain sod

Where the tired angler lies, stretched out,

And, eased of basket and of rod,

Counts his day’s spoil, the spotted trout.

In the huge world which roars hard by,

Be others happy if they can!

But in my helpless cradle I

Was breathed on by the rural Pan.

I, on men’s impious uproar hurled,

Think often, as I hear them rave,

That peace has left the upper world,

And now keeps only in the grave.

Yet here is peace forever new!

When I who watch them am away,

Still all things in this glade go through

The changes of their quiet day.

Then to their happy rest they pass;

The flowers upclose, the birds are fed,

The night comes down upon the grass,

The child sleeps warmly in his bed.

Calm soul of all things! make it mine

To feel, amid the city’s jar,

That there abides a peace of thine,

Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry,

The power to feel with others, give!

Calm, calm me more! nor let me die

Before I have begun to live.

_A WISH._

I ask not that my bed of death

From bands of greedy heirs be free;

For these besiege the latest breath

Of fortune’s favored sons, not me.

I ask not each kind soul to keep

Tearless, when of my death he hears.

Let those who will, if any, weep!

There are worse plagues on earth than tears.

I ask but that my death may find

The freedom to my life denied;

Ask but the folly of mankind

Then, then at last, to quit my side.

Spare me the whispering, crowded room,

The friends who come, and gape, and go;

The ceremonious air of gloom,--

All which makes death a hideous show!

Nor bring, to see me cease to live,

Some doctor full of phrase and fame,

To shake his sapient head, and give

The ill he cannot cure a name.

Nor fetch, to take the accustomed toll

Of the poor sinner bound for death,

His brother-doctor of the soul,

To canvass with official breath

The future and its viewless things,--

That undiscovered mystery

Which one who feels death’s winnowing wings

Must needs read clearer, sure, than he!

Bring none of these; but let me be,

While all around in silence lies,

Moved to the window near, and see

Once more, before my dying eyes,--

Bathed in the sacred dews of morn

The wide aërial landscape spread,--

The world which was ere I was born,

The world which lasts when I am dead;

Which never was the friend of _one_,

Nor promised love it could not give,

But lit for all its generous sun,

And lived itself, and made us live.

There let me gaze, till I become

In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!

To feel the universe my home;

To have before my mind--instead

Of the sick-room, the mortal strife,

The turmoil for a little breath--

The pure eternal course of life,

Not human combatings with death!

Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow

Composed, refreshed, ennobled, clear;

Then willing let my spirit go

To work or wait elsewhere or here!

THE FUTURE.

A wanderer is man from his birth.

He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time;

Brimming with wonder and joy,

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.

Whether he wakes

Where the snowy mountainous pass,

Echoing the screams of the eagles,

Hems in its gorges the bed

Of the new-born, clear-flowing stream;

Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings

Sluggishly winds through the plain;

Whether in sound of the swallowing sea,--

As is the world on the banks,

So is the mind of the man.

Vainly does each, as he glides,

Fable and dream

Of the lands which the river of Time

Had left ere he woke on its breast,

Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed.

Only the tract where he sails

He wots of; only the thoughts,

Raised by the objects he passes, are his.

Who can see the green earth any more

As she was by the sources of Time?

Who imagines her fields as they lay

In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?

Who thinks as they thought,

The tribes who then roamed on her breast,

Her vigorous, primitive sons?

What girl

Now reads in her bosom as clear

As Rebekah read, when she sate

At eve by the palm-shaded well?

Who guards in her breast

As deep, as pellucid a spring

Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

What bard,

At the height of his vision, can deem

Of God, of the world, of the soul,

With a plainness as near,

As flashing, as Moses felt,

When he lay in the night by his flock

On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and obey

The beck of the Spirit like him?

This tract which the river of Time

Now flows through with us, is the plain.

Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.

Bordered by cities, and hoarse

With a thousand cries is its stream.

And we on its breast, our minds

Are confused as the cries which we hear,

Changing and short as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has fled

Forever the course of the river of Time.

That cities will crowd to its edge

In a blacker, incessanter line;

That the din will be more on its banks,

Denser the trade on its stream,

Flatter the plain where it flows,

Fiercer the sun overhead;

That never will those on its breast

See an ennobling sight,

Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us we know not,

And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply, the river of Time--

As it grows, as the towns on its marge

Fling their wavering lights

On a wider, statelier stream--

May acquire, if not the calm

Of its early mountainous shore,

Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush

Of the gray expanse where he floats,

Freshening its current, and spotted with foam

As it draws to the ocean, may strike

Peace to the soul of the man on its breast,--

As the pale waste widens around him,

As the banks fade dimmer away,

As the stars come out, and the night-wind

Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

ELEGIAC POEMS.

_THE SCHOLAR-GYPSY._[17]

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;

Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!

No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,

Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,

Nor the cropped grasses shoot another head;

But when the fields are still,

And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,

And only the white sheep are sometimes seen

Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green,

Come, shepherd, and again renew the quest!

Here, where the reaper was at work of late,--

In this high field’s dark corner, where he leaves

His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,

And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,

Then here at noon comes back his stores to use,--

Here will I sit and wait,

While to my ear from uplands far away

The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,

With distant cries of reapers in the corn,--

All the live murmur of a summer’s day.

Screened is this nook o’er the high, half-reaped field,

And here till sundown, shepherd! will I be.

Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,

And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see

Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep;

And air-swept lindens yield

Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers

Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,

And bower me from the August-sun with shade;

And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers.

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book.

Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!

The story of that Oxford scholar poor,

Of shining parts and quick inventive brain,

Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,

One summer-morn forsook

His friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore,

And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,

And came, as most men deemed, to little good,

But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

But once, years after, in the country-lanes,

Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,

Met him, and of his way of life inquired;

Whereat he answered, that the gypsy-crew,

His mates, had arts to rule as they desired

The workings of men’s brains,

And they can bind them to what thoughts they will.

“And I,” he said, “the secret of their art,

When fully learned, will to the world impart;

But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill.”

This said, he left them, and returned no more.

But rumors hung about the country-side,

That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,

Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,

In hat of antique shape, and cloak of gray,

The same the gypsies wore.

Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;

At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,

On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors

Had found him seated at their entering;

But, ’mid their drink and clatter, he would fly.

And I myself seem half to know thy looks,

And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace;

And boys who in lone wheat-fields scare the rooks

I ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;

Or in my boat I lie

Moored to the cool bank in the summer-heats,

Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,

And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,

And wonder if thou haunt’st their shy retreats.

For most, I know, thou lov’st retired ground!

Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,

Returning home on summer-nights, have met

Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,

Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,

As the punt’s rope chops round;

And leaning backward in a pensive dream,

And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers

Plucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,

And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.

And then they land, and thou art seen no more!

Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come

To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,

Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,

Or cross a stile into the public way;

Oft thou hast given them store

Of flowers,--the frail-leafed, white anemone,

Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,

And purple orchises with spotted leaves,--

But none hath words she can report of thee!

And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time’s here

In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,

Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass,

Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames,

To bathe in the abandoned lasher pass,

Have often passed thee near

Sitting upon the river-bank o’ergrown;

Marked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,

Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air:

But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!

At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills,

Where at her open door the housewife darns,

Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate

To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.

Children, who early range these slopes and late

For cresses from the rills,

Have known thee eying, all an April-day,

The springing pastures and the feeding kine;

And marked thee, when the stars come out and shine,

Through the long dewy grass move slow away.

In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,--

Where most the gypsies by the turf-edged way

Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see

With scarlet patches tagged and shreds of gray,

Above the forest ground called Thessaly,--

The blackbird picking food

Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;

So often has he known thee past him stray,

Rapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray,

And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

And once, in winter, on the causeway chill

Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,

Have I not passed thee on the wooden bridge

Wrapped in thy cloak and battling with the snow,

Thy face toward Hinksey and its wintry ridge?

And thou hast climbed the hill,

And gained the white brow of the Cumner range;

Turned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,

The line of festal light in Christ-church hall:

Then sought thy straw in some sequestered grange.

But what--I dream! Two hundred years are flown

Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,

And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe

That thou wert wandered from the studious walls

To learn strange arts, and join a gypsy-tribe.

And thou from earth art gone

Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid,--

Some country-nook, where o’er thy unknown grave

Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,

Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.

--No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!

For what wears out the life of mortal men?

’Tis that from change to change their being rolls;

’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,

Exhaust the energy of strongest souls,

And numb the elastic powers,

Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,

And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,

To the just-pausing Genius we remit

Our well-worn life, and are--what we have been.

Thou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so?

Thou hadst _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire;

Else wert thou long since numbered with thedead!

Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!

The generations of thy peers are fled,

And we ourselves shall go;

But thou possessest an immortal lot,

And we imagine thee exempt from age,

And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,

Because thou hadst--what we, alas! have not.

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

Fresh, undiverted to the world without,

Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;

Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,

Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.

O life unlike to ours!

Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,

Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,

And each half lives a hundred different lives;

Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,

Light half-believers of our casual creeds,

Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,

Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,

Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;

For whom each year we see

Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;

Who hesitate and falter life away,

And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day--

Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

Yes, we await it! but it still delays,

And then we suffer! and amongst us one,

Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly

His seat upon the intellectual throne;

And all his store of sad experience he

Lays bare of wretched days;

Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,

And how the dying spark of hope was fed,

And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,

And all his hourly varied anodynes.

This for our wisest! and we others pine,

And wish the long unhappy dream would end,

And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;

With close-lipped patience for our only friend,--

Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair,--

But none has hope like thine!

Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,

Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,

Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,

And every doubt long blown by time away.

Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,

And life ran gayly as the sparkling Thames;

Before this strange disease of modern life,

With its sick hurry, its divided aims,

Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife,--

Fly hence, our contact fear!

Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!

Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern

From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,

Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

Still clutching the inviolable shade,

With a free, onward impulse brushing through,

By night, the silvered branches of the glade,--

Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,

On some mild pastoral slope

Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales

Freshen thy flowers as in former years

With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,

From the dark dingles, to the nightingales!

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!

For strong the infection of our mental strife,

Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;

And we should win thee from thy own fair life,

Like us distracted, and like us unblest.

Soon, soon thy cheer would die,

Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers,

And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;

And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,

Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.

Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!

--As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,

Descried at sunrise an emerging prow

Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,

The fringes of a southward-facing brow

Among the Ægean isles;

And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,

Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,

Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine,

And knew the intruders on his ancient home,--

The young light-hearted masters of the waves,--

And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail,

And day and night held on indignantly

O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,

Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,

To where the Atlantic raves

Outside the western straits, and unbent sails

There where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,

Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;

And on the beach undid his corded bales.

_THYRSIS._[18]

_A MONODY, to commemorate the author’s friend, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, who

died at Florence, 1861._

How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!

In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;

The village street its haunted mansion lacks,

And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name,

And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks.--

Are ye too changed, ye hills?

See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men

To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!

Here came I often, often, in old days,--

Thyrsis and I: we still had Thyrsis then.

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,

Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns

The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?

The single-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,

The Vale, the three lone wears, the youthful Thames?

This winter-eve is warm;

Humid the air; leafless, yet soft as spring,

The tender purple spray on copse and briers;

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,

She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!--

Only, methinks, some loss of habit’s power

Befalls me wandering through this upland dim.

Once passed I blindfold here, at any hour;

Now seldom come I, since I came with him.

That single elm-tree bright

Against the west--I miss it! is it gone?

We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,

Our friend the Gypsy-Scholar was not dead;

While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on.

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here,

But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;

And with the country-folk acquaintance made

By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.

Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assayed.

Ah me! this many a year

My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s-holiday!

Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart

Into the world and wave of men depart,

But Thyrsis of his own will went away.

It irked him to be here, he could not rest.

He loved each simple joy the country yields,

He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,

For that a shadow lowered on the fields,

Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.

Some life of men unblest

He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.

He went; his piping took a troubled sound

Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;

He could not wait their passing; he is dead.

So, some tempestuous morn in early June,

When the year’s primal burst of bloom is o’er,

Before the roses and the longest day,--

When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor,

With blossoms red and white of fallen May,

And chestnut-flowers, are strewn,--

So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry,

From the wet field, through the vexed garden-trees,

Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:

_The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I_!

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?

Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on,

Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,

Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,

Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell,

And stocks in fragrant blow;

Roses that down the alleys shine afar,

And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,

And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,

And the full moon, and the white evening-star.

He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown!

What matters it? next year he will return,

And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days,

With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern,

And bluebells trembling by the forest-ways,

And scent of hay new-mown.

But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see,--

See him come back, and cut a smoother reed,

And blow a strain the world at last shall heed;

For Time, not Corydon, hath conquered thee!

Alack, for Corydon no rival now!--

But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate,

Some good survivor with his flute would go,

Piping a ditty sad for Bion’s fate;

And cross the unpermitted ferry’s flow,

And relax Pluto’s brow,

And make leap up with joy the beauteous head

Of Proserpine, among whose crownèd hair

Are flowers first opened on Sicilian air,

And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead.

Oh, easy access to the hearer’s grace

When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine!

For she herself had trod Sicilian fields,

She knew the Dorian water’s gush divine,

She knew each lily white which Enna yields,

Each rose with blushing face;

She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain.

But ah! of our poor Thames she never heard;

Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred;

And we should tease her with our plaint in vain.

Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be;

Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour

In the old haunt, and find our tree-topped hill!

Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?

I know the wood which hides the daffodil;

I know the Fyfield tree;

I know what white, what purple fritillaries

The grassy harvest of the river-fields,

Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields;

And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries;

I know these slopes: who knows them if not I?

But many a dingle on the loved hillside,

With thorns once studded, old white-blossomed trees,

Where thick the cowslips grew, and far descried

High towered the spikes of purple orchises,

Hath since our day put by

The coronals of that forgotten time;

Down each green bank hath gone the ploughboy’s team,

And only in the hidden brookside gleam

Primroses, orphans of the flowery prime.

Where is the girl who by the boatman’s door,

Above the locks, above the boating throng,

Unmoored our skiff when through the Wytham flats,

Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among,

And darting swallows and light water-gnats,

We tracked the shy Thames shore?

Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell

Of our boat passing heaved the river-grass,

Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?--

They all are gone, and thou art gone as well!

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night

In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.

I see her veil draw soft across the day,

I feel her slowly chilling breath invade

The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with gray;

I feel her finger light

Laid pausefully upon life’s headlong train,--

The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,

The heart less bounding at emotion new,

And hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.

And long the way appears, which seemed so short

To the less-practised eye of sanguine youth;

And high the mountain tops, in cloudy air,--

The mountain tops where is the throne of Truth,

Tops in life’s morning-sun so bright and bare!

Unbreachable the fort

Of the long-battered world uplifts its wall;

And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows,

And near and real the charm of thy repose,

And night as welcome as a friend would fall.

But hush! the upland hath a sudden loss

Of quiet! Look, adown the dusk hillside,

A troop of Oxford hunters going home,

As in old days, jovial and talking, ride!

From hunting with the Berkshire hounds they come.

Quick! let me fly, and cross

Into yon farther field! ’Tis done; and see,

Backed by the sunset, which doth glorify

The orange and pale violet evening-sky,

Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree! the Tree!

I take the omen! Eve lets down her veil,

The white fog creeps from bush to bush about,

The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright,

And in the scattered farms the lights come out.

I cannot reach the signal-tree to-night,

Yet, happy omen, hail!

Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale

(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep

The morningless and unawakening sleep

Under the flowery oleanders pale);

Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!--

Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim,

These brambles pale with mist engarlanded,

That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him:

To a boon southern country he is fled,

And now in happier air,

Wandering with the great Mother’s train divine

(And purer or more subtile soul than thee,

I trow the mighty Mother doth not see)

Within a folding of the Apennine,--

Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!

Putting his sickle to the perilous grain

In the hot cornfield of the Phrygian king,

For thee the Lityerses-song again

Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing;[19]

Sings his Sicilian fold,

His sheep, his hapless love, his blinded eyes;

And how a call celestial round him rang,

And heavenward from the fountain-brink he sprang,

And all the marvel of the golden skies.

There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here

Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair.

Despair I will not, while I yet descry

’Neath the soft canopy of English air

That lonely tree against the western sky.

Still, still these slopes, ’tis clear,

Our Gypsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee!

Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay,

Woods with anemones in flower till May,

Know him a wanderer still; then why not me?

A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,

Shy to illumine; and I seek it too.

This does not come with houses or with gold,

With place, with honor, and a flattering crew;

’Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold;

But the smooth-slipping weeks

Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;

Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,

He wends unfollowed, he must house alone;

Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.

Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wast bound!

Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour.

Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest,

If men esteemed thee feeble, gave thee power,

If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest.

And this rude Cumner ground,

Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields,

Here cam’st thou in thy jocund youthful time,

Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime!

And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields.

What though the music of thy rustic flute

Kept not for long its happy, country tone;

Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note

Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,

Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat--

It failed, and thou wast mute!

Yet hadst thou alway visions of our light,

And long with men of care thou couldst not stay,

And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way,

Left human haunt, and on alone till night.

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!

’Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore,

Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.

--Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar,

Let in thy voice a whisper often come,

To chase fatigue and fear:

_Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died._

_Roam on! The light we sought is shining still._

_Dost thou ask proof! Our tree yet crowns the hill,_

_Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside_.

_MEMORIAL VERSES._

APRIL, 1850.

Goethe in Weimar sleeps; and Greece,

Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.

But one such death remained to come:

The last poetic voice is dumb,--

We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.

When Byron’s eyes were shut in death,

We bowed our head, and held our breath.

He taught us little, but our soul

Had _felt_ him like the thunder’s roll.

With shivering heart the strife we saw

Of passion with eternal law;

And yet with reverential awe

We watched the fount of fiery life

Which served for that Titanic strife.

When Goethe’s death was told, we said,--

Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head.

Physician of the iron age,

Goethe has done his pilgrimage.

He took the suffering human race,

He read each wound, each weakness clear;

And struck his finger on the place,

And said, _Thou ailest here, and here_!

He looked on Europe’s dying hour

Of fitful dream and feverish power;

His eye plunged down the weltering strife,

The turmoil of expiring life:

He said, _The end is everywhere,

Art still has truth, take refuge there_!

And he was happy, if to know

Causes of things, and far below

His feet to see the lurid flow

Of terror, and insane distress,

And headlong fate, be happiness.

And Wordsworth! Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice!

For never has such soothing voice

Been to your shadowy world conveyed,

Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade

Heard the clear song of Orpheus come

Through Hades and the mournful gloom.

Wordsworth has gone from us; and ye,

Ah, may ye feel his voice as we!

He too upon a wintry clime

Had fallen,--on this iron time

Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.

He found us when the age had bound

Our souls in its benumbing round;

He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.

He laid us as we lay at birth

On the cool flowery lap of earth:

Smiles broke from us, and we had ease;

The hills were round us, and the breeze

Went o’er the sunlit fields again;

Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.

Our youth returned; for there was shed

On spirits that had long been dead,

Spirits dried up and closely furled,

The freshness of the early world.

Ah! since dark days still bring to light

Man’s prudence and man’s fiery might,

Time may restore us in his course

Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force;

But where will Europe’s latter hour

Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?

Others will teach us how to dare,

And against fear our breast to steel:

Others will strengthen us to bear--

But who, ah! who will make us feel?

The cloud of mortal destiny,

Others will front it fearlessly;

But who, like him, will put it by?

Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,

O Rotha, with thy living wave!

Sing him thy best! for few or none

Hear thy voice right, now he is gone.

_STANZAS._

IN MEMORY OF EDWARD QUILLINAN.

I saw him sensitive in frame,

I knew his spirits low;

And wished him health, success, and fame--

I do not wish it now.

For these are all their own reward,

And leave no good behind;

They try us, oftenest make us hard,

Less modest, pure, and kind.

Alas! yet to the suffering man,

In this his mortal state,

Friends could not give what fortune can,--

Health, ease, a heart elate.

But he is now by fortune foiled

No more; and we retain

The memory of a man unspoiled,

Sweet, generous, and humane;

With all the fortunate have not,

With gentle voice and brow.

--Alive, we would have changed his lot:

We would not change it now.

_STANZAS FROM CARNAC._

Far on its rocky knoll descried,

Saint Michael’s chapel cuts the sky.

I climbed; beneath me, bright and wide,

Lay the lone coast of Brittany.

Bright in the sunset, weird and still,

It lay beside the Atlantic wave,

As though the wizard Merlin’s will

Yet charmed it from his forest-grave.

Behind me on their grassy sweep,

Bearded with lichen, scrawled and gray,

The giant stones of Carnac sleep,

In the mild evening of the May.

No priestly stern procession now

Streams through their rows of pillars old;

No victims bleed, no Druids bow:

Sheep make the daisied aisles their fold.

From bush to bush the cuckoo flies,

The orchis red gleams everywhere;

Gold furze with broom in blossom vies,

The bluebells perfume all the air.

And o’er the glistening, lonely land,

Rise up, all round, the Christian spires;

The church of Carnac, by the strand,

Catches the westering sun’s last fires.