What will the bears-at-forty do?
How will the merchants pay their dues?
How will the country stand the news?
What’ll the banks—but listen! hold!
In screwing upward the price of gold
To that dangerous, last, particular peg,
They had killed their Goose with the Golden Egg!
Just there the metal came pouring out,
All ways at once, like a water-spout,
Or a rushing, gushing, yellow flood,
That drenched the bulls wherever they stood!
Small need to open the Washington main,
Their coffer-dams were burst with the strain!
It came by runners, it came by wire,
To answer the bid of Israel Freyer,
It poured in millions from every side,
And almost strangled him as he cried,—
“I’ll give One Hundred and Sixty!”
Like Vulcan after Jupiter’s kick,
Or the aphoristical Rocket’s stick,
Down, down, down, the premium fell,
Faster than this rude rhyme can tell!
Thirty per cent the index slid,
Yet Freyer still kept making his bid,—
“One Hundred and Sixty for any part!”
—The sudden ruin had crazed _his_ heart,
Shattered his senses, cracked his brain,
And left him crying again and again,—
Still making his bid at the market’s top
(Like the Dutchman’s leg that never could stop,)
“One Hundred and Sixty—Five Millions more!”
Till they dragged him, howling, off the floor.
The very last words that seller and buyer
Heard from the mouth of Israel Freyer—
A cry to remember long as they live—
Were, “I’ll take Five Millions more! I’ll give,—
I’ll give One Hundred and Sixty!”
Suppose (to avoid the appearance of evil)
There’s such a thing as a Personal Devil,
It would seem that his Highness here got hold,
For once, of a bellowing Bull in Gold!
Whether bull or bear, it wouldn’t much matter
Should Israel Freyer keep up his clatter
On earth or under it (as, they say,
He is doomed) till the general Judgment Day,
When the Clerk, as he cites him to answer for’t,
Shall bid him keep silence in that Court!
But it matters most, as it seems to me,
That my countrymen, great and strong and free,
So marvel at fellows who seem to win,
That if even a Clown can only begin
By stealing a railroad, and use its purse
For cornering stocks and gold, or—worse—
For buying a Judge and Legislature,
And sinking still lower poor human nature,
The gaping public, whatever befall,
Will swallow him, tandem, harlots, and all!
While our rich men drivel and stand amazed
At the dust and pother his gang have raised,
And make us remember a nursery tale
Of the four-and-twenty who feared one snail.
What’s bred in the bone will breed, you know;
Clowns and their trainers, high and low,
Will cut such capers, long as they dare,
While honest Poverty says its prayer.
But tell me what prayer or fast can save
Some hoary candidate for the grave,
The market’s wrinkled Giant Despair,
Muttering, brooding, scheming there,—
Founding a college or building a church
Lest Heaven should leave him in the lurch!
Better come out in the rival way,
Issue your scrip in open day,
And pour your wealth in the grimy fist
Of some gross-mouthed, gambling pugilist;
Leave toil and poverty where they lie,
Pass thinkers, workers, artists, by,
Your pot-house fag from his counters bring
And make him into a Railway King!
Between such Gentiles and such Jews
Little enough one finds to choose:
Either the other will buy and use,
Eat the meat and throw him the bone,
And leave him to stand the brunt alone.
—Let the tempest come, that’s gathering near,
And give us a better atmosphere!
CUBA.
Is it naught? Is it naught
That the South-wind brings her wail to our shore,
That the spoilers compass our desolate sister?
Is it naught? Must we say to her, “Strive no more.”
With the lips wherewith we loved her and kissed her?
With the mocking lips wherewith we said,
“Thou art the dearest and fairest to us
Of all the daughters the sea hath bred,
Of all green-girdled isles that woo us!”
Is it naught?
Must ye wait? Must ye wait.
Till they ravage her gardens of orange and palm,
Till her heart is dust, till her strength is water?
Must ye see them trample her, and be calm
As priests when a virgin is led to slaughter?
Shall they smite the marvel of all lands,—
The nation’s longing, the Earth’s completeness,—
On her red mouth dropping myrrh, her hands
Filled with fruitage and spice and sweetness?
Must ye wait?
In the day, in the night,
In the burning day, in the dolorous night,
Her sun-browned cheeks are stained with weeping.
Her watch-fires beacon the misty height:—
Why are her friends and lovers sleeping?
“Ye, at whose ear the flatterer bends,
Who were my kindred before all others,—
Hath he set your hearts afar, my friends?
Hath he made ye alien, my brothers,
Day and night?”
Hear ye not? Hear ye not
From the hollow sea the sound of her voice;
The passionate, far-off tone, which sayeth:
“Alas, my brothers! alas, what choice,—
The lust that shameth, the sword that slayeth?
They bind me! they rend my delicate locks;
They shred the beautiful robes I won me!
My round limbs bleed on the mountain rocks:
Save me, ere they have quite undone me!”
Hear ye not?
Speak at last! Speak at last!
In the might of your strength, in the strength of your right,
Speak out at last to the treacherous spoiler!
Say: “Will ye harry her in our sight?
Ye shall not trample her down, nor soil her!
Loose her bonds! let her rise in her loveliness,—
Our virginal sister; or, if ye shame her,
Dark Amnon shall rue for her sore distress,
And her sure revenge shall be that of Tamar!”
Speak at last!
1870.
CRETE.
Though Arkádi’s shattered pile
Hides her dead without a dirge,
Lo! where still the mountain isle
Fronts the angry Moslem surges!
Hers, in old, heroic days,
Her unfettered heights afar
’Twixt the Grecian Gulf to raise,
And the torrid Libyan star.
From her bulwarks to the North
Stretched the glad Ægæan Sea,
Sending bards and warriors forth
To the triumphs of the free;
Ill the fierce invader throve,
When, from island or from main,
Side by side the Grecians strove:
Swift he sought his lair again!
Though the Cretan eagle fell,
And the ancient heights were won,
Freedom’s light was guarded well,—
Handed down from sire to son;
Through the centuries of shame,
Ah! it never wholly died,
But was hid, a sacred flame,
There on topmost Ida’s side.
Shades of heroes Homer sung—
Wearing once her hundred crowns—
Rise with shadowy swords among
Candia’s smoking fields and towns;
Not again their souls shall sleep,
Nor the crescent wane in peace,
Till from every island-keep
Shines the starry Cross of Greece.
THE OLD ADMIRAL.
Gone at last,
That brave old hero of the Past!
His spirit has a second birth,
An unknown, grander life;—
All of him that was earth
Lies mute and cold,
Like a wrinkled sheath and old
Thrown off forever from the shimmering blade
That has good entrance made
Upon some distant, glorious strife.
From another generation,
A simpler age, to ours Old Ironsides came;
The morn and noontide of the nation
Alike he knew, nor yet outlived his fame,—
O, not outlived his fame!
The dauntless men whose service guards our shore
Lengthen still their glory-roll
With his name to lead the scroll,
As a flagship at her fore
Carries the Union, with its azure and the stars,
Symbol of times that are no more
And the old heroic wars.
He was the one
Whom Death had spared alone
Of all the captains of that lusty age,
Who sought the foeman where he lay,
On sea or sheltering bay,
Nor till the prize was theirs repressed their rage.
They are gone,—all gone:
They rest with glory and the undying Powers;
Only their name and fame and what they saved are ours!
It was fifty years ago,
Upon the Gallic Sea,
He bore the banner of the free,
And fought the fight whereof our children know.
The deathful, desperate fight!—
Under the fair moon’s light
The frigate squared, and yawed to left and right.
Every broadside swept to death a score!
Roundly played her guns and well, till their fiery ensigns fell,
Neither foe replying more.
All in silence, when the night-breeze cleared the air,
Old Ironsides rested there,
Locked in between the twain, and drenched with blood.
Then homeward, like an eagle with her prey!
O, it was a gallant fray,
That fight in Biscay Bay!
Fearless the Captain stood, in his youthful hardihood;
He was the boldest of them all,
Our brave old Admiral!
And still our heroes bleed,
Taught by that olden deed.
Whether of iron or of oak
The ships we marshal at our country’s need,
Still speak their cannon now as then they spoke;
Still floats our unstruck banner from the mast
As in the stormy Past.
Lay him in the ground:
Let him rest where the ancient river rolls;
Let him sleep beneath the shadow and the sound
Of the bell whose proclamation, as it tolls,
Is of Freedom and the gift our fathers gave.
Lay him gently down:
The clamor of the town
Will not break the slumbers deep, the beautiful ripe sleep
Of this lion of the wave,
Will not trouble the old Admiral in his grave.
Earth to earth his dust is laid.
Methinks his stately shade
On the shadow of a great ship leaves the shore;
Over cloudless western seas
Seeks the far Hesperides,
The islands of the blest,
Where no turbulent billows roar,—
Where is rest.
His ghost upon the shadowy quarter stands
Nearing the deathless lands.
There all his martial mates, renewed and strong,
Await his coming long.
I see the happy Heroes rise
With gratulation in their eyes:
“Welcome, old comrade,” Lawrence cries;
“Ah, Stewart, tell us of the wars!
Who win the glory and the scars?
How floats the skyey flag,—how many stars?
Still speak they of Decatur’s name,
Of Bainbridge’s and Perry’s fame?
Of me, who earliest came?
Make ready, all:
Room for the Admiral!
Come, Stewart, tell us of the wars!”
GETTYSBURG.
Wave, wave your glorious battle-flags, brave soldiers of the North,
And from the field your arms have won to-day go proudly forth!
For now, O comrades dear and leal,—from whom no ills could part,
Through the long years of hopes and fears, the nation’s constant heart,—
Men who have driven so oft the foe, so oft have striven in vain,
Yet ever in the perilous hour have crossed his path again,—
At last we have our hearts’ desire, from them we met have wrung
A victory that round the world shall long be told and sung!
It was the memory of the past that bore us through the fray,
That gave the grand old Army strength to conquer on this day!
O now forget how dark and red Virginia’s rivers flow,
The Rappahannock’s tangled wilds, the glory and the woe;
The fever-hung encampments, where our dying knew full sore
How sweet the north-wind to the cheek it soon shall cool no more;
The fields we fought, and gained, and lost; the lowland sun and rain
That wasted us, that bleached the bones of our unburied slain!
There was no lack of foes to meet, of deaths to die no lack,
And all the hawks of heaven learned to follow on our track;
But henceforth, hovering southward, their flight shall mark afar
The paths of yon retreating hosts that shun the northern star.
At night, before the closing fray, when all the front was still,
We lay in bivouac along the cannon-crested hill.
Ours was the dauntless Second Corps; and many a soldier knew
How sped the fight, and sternly thought of what was yet to do.
Guarding the centre there, we lay, and talked with bated breath
Of Buford’s stand beyond the town, of gallant Reynold’s death,
Of cruel retreats through pent-up streets by murderous volleys swept,—
How well the Stone, the Iron, Brigades their bloody outposts kept:
’Twas for the Union, for the Flag, they perished, heroes all,
And we swore to conquer in the end, or even like them to fall.
And passed from mouth to mouth the tale of that grim day just done,
The fight by Round Top’s craggy spur,—of all the deadliest one;
It saved the left: but on the right they pressed us back too well,
And like a field in Spring the ground was ploughed with shot and shell.
There was the ancient graveyard, its hummocks crushed and red,
And there, between them, side by side, the wounded and the dead:
The mangled corpses fallen above,—the peaceful dead below,
Laid in their graves, to slumber here, a score of years ago;
It seemed their waking, wandering shades were asking of our slain,
What brought such hideous tumult now where they so still had lain!
Bright rose the sun of Gettysburg that morrow morning-tide,
And call of trump and roll of drum from height to height replied.
Hark! from the east already goes up the rattling din;
The Twelfth Corps, winning back their ground, right well the day begin!
They whirl fierce Ewell from their front! Now we of the Second pray,
As right and left the brunt have borne, the centre might to-day.
But all was still from hill to hill for many a breathless hour,
While for the coming battle-shock Lee gathered in his power;
And back and forth our leaders rode, who knew not rest or fear,
And along the lines, where’er they came, went up the ringing cheer.
’Twas past the hour of nooning; the Summer skies were blue;
Behind the covering timber the foe was hid from view;
So fair and sweet with waving wheat the pleasant valley lay,
It brought to mind our Northern homes and meadows far away;
When the whole western ridge at once was fringed with fire and smoke;
Against our lines from sevenscore guns the dreadful tempest broke!
Then loud our batteries answer, and far along the crest,
And to and fro the roaring bolts are driven east and west;
Heavy and dark around us glooms the stifling sulphur-cloud,
And the cries of mangled men and horse go up beneath its shroud.
The guns are still: the end is nigh: we grasp our arms anew;
O now let every heart be stanch and every aim be true!
For look! from yonder wood that skirts the valley’s further marge,
The flower of all the Southern host move to the final charge.
By Heaven! it is a fearful sight to see their double rank
Come with a hundred battle-flags,—a mile from flank to flank!
Tramping the grain to earth, they come, ten thousand men abreast;
Their standards wave,—their hearts are brave,—they hasten not, nor rest,
But close the gaps our cannon make, and onward press, and nigher,
And, yelling at our very front, again pour in their fire!
Now burst our sheeted lightnings forth, now all our wrath has vent!
They die, they wither; through and through their wavering lines are rent.
But these are gallant, desperate men, of our own race and land,
Who charge anew, and welcome death, and fight us hand to hand:
Vain, vain! give way, as well ye may—the crimson die is cast!
Their bravest leaders bite the dust, their strength is failing fast;
They yield, they turn, they fly the field: we smite them as they run;
Their arms, their colors are our spoil; the furious fight is done!
Across the plain we follow far and backward push the fray:
Cheer! cheer! the grand old Army at last has won the day!
Hurrah! the day has won the cause! No gray-clad host henceforth
Shall come with fire and sword to tread the highways of the North!
’Twas such a flood as when ye see, along the Atlantic shore,
The great Spring-tide roll grandly in with swelling surge and roar:
It seems no wall can stay its leap or balk its wild desire
Beyond the bound that Heaven hath fixed to higher mount, and higher;
But now, when whitest lifts its crest, most loud its billows call,
Touched by the Power that led them on, they fall, and fall, and fall.
Even thus, unstayed upon his course, to Gettysburg the foe
His legions led, and fought, and fled, and might no further go.
Full many a dark-eyed Southern girl shall weep her lover dead;
But with a price the fight was ours,—we too have tears to shed!
The bells that peal our triumph forth anon shall toll the brave,
Above whose heads the cross must stand, the hillside grasses wave!
Alas! alas! the trampled grass shall thrive another year,
The blossoms on the apple-boughs with each new Spring appear,
But when our patriot-soldiers fall, Earth gives them up to God;
Though their souls rise in clearer skies, their forms are as the sod;
Only their names and deeds are ours,—but, for a century yet,
The dead who fell at Gettysburg the land shall not forget.
God send us peace! and where for aye the loved and lost recline
Let fall, O South, your leaves of palm,—O North, your sprigs of pine!
But when, with every ripened year, we keep the harvest-home,
And to the clear Thanksgiving-feast our sons and daughters come,—
When children’s children throng the board in the old homestead spread,
And the bent soldier of these wars is seated at the head,
Long, long the lads shall listen to hear the gray-beard tell
Of those who fought at Gettysburg and stood their ground so well:
“’Twas for the Union and the Flag,” the veteran shall say,
“Our grand old Army held the ridge, and won that glorious day!”
DARTMOUTH ODE.
I.
PRELUDE.
A wind and a voice from the North!
A courier-wind sent forth
From the mountains to the sea:
A summons borne to me
From halls which the Muses haunt, from hills where the heart and the
wind are free!
“Come from the outer throng!”
(Such was the burden it bore,)
“Thou who hast gone before,
Hither! and sing us a song,
Far from the round of the town and the sound of the great world’s roar!”
O masterful voice of Youth;
That will have, like the upland wind, its own wild way!
O choral words, that with every season rise
Like the warblings of orchard-birds at break of day!
O faces, fresh with the light of morning skies!
No marvel world-worn toilers seek you here,
Even as they life renew, from year to year,
In woods and meadows lit with blossoming May;
But O, blithe voices, that have such sweet power,
Unto your high behest this summer hour
What answer has the poet? how shall he frame his lay?
II.
THEME.
“What shall my song rehearse?” I said
To a wise bard, whose hoary head
Is bowed, like Kearsarge crouching low
Beneath a winter weight of snow,
But whose songs of passion, joy, or scorn,
Within a fiery heart are born.
“What can I spread, what proper feast
For these young Magi of the East?
What wisdom find, what mystic lore,
What chant they have not heard before?
Strange words of old has every tongue
Those happy cloistered hills among;
For each riddle I divine
They can answer me with nine;
Their footsteps by the Muse are led,
Their lips on Plato’s honey fed;
Their eyes have skill to read the page
Of Theban bard or Attic sage;
For them all Nature’s mysteries,—
The deep-down secrets of the seas,
The cyclone’s whirl, the lightning’s shock,
The language of the riven rock;
They know the starry sisters seven,—
What clouds the molten suns enfold,
And all the golden woof of heaven
Unravelled in their lens behold!
Gazing in a thousand eyes,
So rapt and clear, so wonder-wise,
What shall my language picture, then,
Beyond their wont—that has not reached their ken?
“What else are poets used to sing,
Who sing of youth, than laurelled fame and love?
But ah! it needs no words to move
Young hearts to some impassioned vow,
To whom already on the wing
The blind god hastens. Even now
Their pulses quiver with a thrill
Than all that wisdom wiser still.
Nor any need to tell of rustling bays,
Of honor ever at the victor’s hand,
To them who at the portals stand
Like mettled steeds,—each eager from control
To leap, and, where the corso lies ablaze,
Let out his speed and soonest pass the goal.
“What is there left? what shall my verse
Within those ancient halls rehearse?”
Deep in his heart my plaint the minstrel weighed,
And a subtle answer made:
“The world that is, the ways of men,
Not yet are glassed within their ken.
Their foster-mother holds them long,—
Long, long to youth,—short, short to age, appear
The rounds of her Olympic Year,—
Their ears are quickened for the trumpet-call.
Sing to them one true song,
Ere from the Happy Vale they turn,
Of all the Abyssinian craved to learn,
And dared his fate, and scaled the mountain-wall
To join the ranks without, and meet what might befall.”
III.
VESTIGIA RETRORSUM.
Gone the Arcadian age,
When, from his hillside hermitage
Sent forth, the gentle scholar strode
At ease upon a royal road,
And found the outer regions all they seem
In Youth’s prophetic dream.
The graduate took his station then
By right, a ruler among men:
Courtly the three estates, and sure;
The bar, the bench, the pulpit, pure;
No cosmic doubts arose, to vex
The preacher’s heart, his faith perplex.
Content in ancient paths he trod,
Nor searched beyond his Book for God.
Great virtue lurked in many a saw
And in the doctor’s Latin lay;
Men thought, lived, died, in the appointed way.
Yet eloquence was slave to law,
And law to right: the statesman sought
A patriot’s fame, and served his land, unbought,
And bore erect his front, and held his oath in awe.
IV.
ÆREA PROLES.
But, now, far other days
Have made less green the poet’s bays,—
Have less revered the band and gown,
The grave physician’s learnéd frown,—
Shaken the penitential mind
That read the text nor looked behind,—
Brought from his throne the bookman down,
Made hard the road to station and renown!
Now from this seclusion deep
The scholar wakes,—as one from sleep,
As one from sleep remote and sweet,
In some fragrant garden-close
Between the lily and the rose,
Roused by the tramp of many feet,
Leaps up to find a ruthless, warring band,
Dust, strife, an untried weapon in his hand!
The time unto itself is strange,
Driven on from change to change,
Neither of past nor present sure,
The ideal vanished nor the real secure.
Heaven has faded from the skies,
Faith hides apart and weeps with clouded eyes;
A noise of cries we hear, a noise of creeds,
While the old heroic deeds
Not of the leaders now are told, as then,
But of lowly, common men.
See by what paths the loud-voiced gain
Their little heights above the plain:
Truth, honor, virtue, cast away
For the poor plaudits of a day!
Now fashion guides at will
The artist’s brush, the writer’s quill,
While, for a weary time unknown,
The reverent workman toils alone,
Asking for bread and given but a stone.
Fettered with gold the statesman’s tongue;
Now, even the church, among
New doubts and strange discoveries, half in vain
Defends her long, ancestral reign;
Now, than all others grown more great,
That which was the last estate
By turns reflects and rules the age,—
Laughs, scolds, weeps, counsels, jeers,—a jester and a sage!
V.
ENCHANTMENTS.
Here, in Learning’s shaded haunt,
The battle-fugue and mingled cries forlorn
Softened to music seem, nor the clear spirit daunt;
Here, in the gracious world that looks
From earth and sky and books,
Easeful and sweet it seems all else to scorn
Than works of noble use and virtue born;
Brave hope and high ambition consecrate
Our coming years to something great.
But when the man has stood,
Anon, in garish outer light,
Feeling the first wild fever of the blood
That places self with self at strife
Whether to hoard or drain the wine of life,—
When the broad pageant flares upon the sight,
And tuneful Pleasure plumes her wing
And the crowds jostle and the mad bells ring,—
Then he, who sees the vain world take slow heed
Albeit of his worthiest and best,
And still, through years of failure and unrest,
Would keep inviolate his vow,
Of all his faith and valor has sore need!
Even then, I know, do nobly as we will,
What we would not, we do, and see not how;
That which we would, is not, we know not why;
Some fortune holds us from our purpose still,—
Chance sternly beats us back, and turns our steps awry!
VI.
YOUTH AND AGE.
How slow, how sure, how swift,
The sands within each glass,
The brief, illusive moments, pass!
Half unawares we mark their drift
Till the awakened heart cries out,—Alas!
Alas, the fair occasion fled,
The precious chance to action all unwed!
And murmurs in its depths the old refrain,—
Had we but known betimes what now we know in vain!
When the veil from the eyes is lifted
The seer’s head is gray;
When the sailor to shore has drifted
The sirens are far away.
Why must the clearer vision,
The wisdom of Life’s late hour,
Come, as in Fate’s derision,
When the hand has lost its power?
Is there a rarer being,
Is there a fairer sphere
Where the strong are not unseeing,
And the harvests are not sere;
Where, ere the seasons dwindle
They yield their due return;
Where the lamps of knowledge kindle
While the flames of youth still burn?
O for the young man’s chances!
O for the old man’s will!
Those flee while this advances,
And the strong years cheat us still.
VII.
WHAT CHEER?
Is there naught else?—you say,—
No braver prospect far away?
No gladder song, no ringing call
Beyond the misty mountain-wall?
And were it thus indeed, I know
Your hearts would still with courage glow;
I know how yon historic stream
Is laden yet, as in the past,
With dreamful longings on it cast
By those who saunter from the crown
Of this broad slope, their reverend Academe,—
Who reach the meadowed banks, and lay them down
On the green sward, and set their faces south,
Embarked in Fancy’s shallop there,
And with the current seek the river’s mouth,
Finding the outer ocean grand and fair.
Ay, like the stream’s perpetual tide,
Wave after wave each blithe, successive throng