There is a vale which none hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been,
Such as here lives with toil and strife,
An anxious and a sinful life.
There every virtue has its birth,
Ere it descends upon the earth,
And thither every deed returns,
Which in the generous bosom burns.
There love is warm, and youth is young,
And poetry is yet unsung,
For Virtue still adventures there,
And freely breathes her native air.
And ever, if you hearken well,
You still may hear its vesper bell,
And tread of high-souled men go by,
Their thoughts conversing with the sky.
According to Jamblichus, “Pythagoras did not procure for himself a
thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but employing a
certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult to apprehend, he
extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of
the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the
universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are
moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody
than anything effected by mortal sounds.”
Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here about
twenty miles, from Caleb Harriman’s tavern in Hampstead toward
Haverhill, when I reached the railroad in Plaistow, I heard at some
distance a faint music in the air like an Æolian harp, which I
immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph
vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to
one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph
harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by
men, but by gods. Perchance, like the statue of Memnon, it resounds
only in the morning, when the first rays of the sun fall on it. It was
like the first lyre or shell heard on the sea-shore,—that vibrating
cord high in the air over the shores of earth. So have all things their
higher and their lower uses. I heard a fairer news than the journals
ever print. It told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the
electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and
flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things
which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.
Still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresh extravagance
that night. The clarion sound and clang of corselet and buckler were
heard from many a hamlet of the soul, and many a knight was arming for
the fight behind the encamped stars.
“Before each van
Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of Heaven the welkin burns.”
—————
Away! away! away! away!
Ye have not kept your secret well,
I will abide that other day,
Those other lands ye tell.
Has time no leisure left for these,
The acts that ye rehearse?
Is not eternity a lease
For better deeds than verse?
’T is sweet to hear of heroes dead,
To know them still alive,
But sweeter if we earn their bread,
And in us they survive.
Our life should feed the springs of fame
With a perennial wave.
As ocean feeds the babbling founts
Which find in it their grave.
Ye skies drop gently round my breast,
And be my corselet blue,
Ye earth receive my lance in rest,
My faithful charger you;
Ye stars my spear-heads in the sky,
My arrow-tips ye are;
I see the routed foemen fly,
My bright spears fixed are.
Give me an angel for a foe,
Fix now the place and time,
And straight to meet him I will go
Above the starry chime.
And with our clashing bucklers’ clang
The heavenly spheres shall ring,
While bright the northern lights shall hang
Beside our tourneying.
And if she lose her champion true,
Tell Heaven not despair,
For I will be her champion new,
Her fame I will repair.
There was a high wind this night, which we afterwards learned had been
still more violent elsewhere, and had done much injury to the
cornfields far and near; but we only heard it sigh from time to time,
as if it had no license to shake the foundations of our tent; the pines
murmured, the water rippled, and the tent rocked a little, but we only
laid our ears closer to the ground, while the blast swept on to alarm
other men, and long before sunrise we were ready to pursue our voyage
as usual.