Whiter than moonshine upon snow_The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell

Her raiment is, but round the hem

Crimson stained; and, as to and fro

Her sandals flash, we see on them,

And on her instep veined with blue,

Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet,

High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet, 60

Fit for no grosser stain than dew:

Oh, call them rather chrisms than stains,

Sacred and from heroic veins!

For, in the glory-guarded pass,

Her haughty and far-shining head

She bowed to shrive Leonidas

With his imperishable dead;

Her, too, Morgarten saw,

Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw;

She followed Cromwell's quenchless star 70

Where the grim Puritan tread

Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar:

Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes

Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes.

Our fathers found her in the woods

Where Nature meditates and broods,

The seeds of unexampled things

Which Time to consummation brings

Through life and death and man's unstable moods;

They met her here, not recognized, 80

A sylvan huntress clothed in furs,

To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed,

Nor dreamed what destinies were hers:

She taught them bee-like to create

Their simpler forms of Church and State;

She taught them to endue

The past with other functions than it knew,

And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate;

Better than all, she fenced them in their need

With iron-handed Duty's sternest creed, 90

'Gainst Self's lean wolf that ravens word and deed.

Why cometh she hither to-day

To this low village of the plain

Far from the Present's loud highway,

From Trade's cool heart and seething brain?

Why cometh she? She was not far away.

Since the soul touched it, not in vain,

With pathos of Immortal gain,

'Tis here her fondest memories stay.

She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge 100

Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps,

Dear to both Englands; near him he

Who wore the ring of Canace;

But most her heart to rapture leaps

Where stood that era-parting bridge,

O'er which, with footfall still as dew,

The Old Time passed into the New;

Where, as your stealthy river creeps,

He whispers to his listening weeds

Tales of sublimest homespun deeds. 110

Here English law and English thought

'Gainst the self-will of England fought;

And here were men (coequal with their fate),

Who did great things, unconscious they were great.

They dreamed not what a die was cast

With that first answering shot; what then?

There was their duty; they were men

Schooled the soul's inward gospel to obey,

Though leading to the lion's den.

They felt the habit-hallowed world give way 120

Beneath their lives, and on went they,

Unhappy who was last.

When Buttrick gave the word,

That awful idol of the unchallenged Past,

Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong,

Fell crashing; if they heard it not,

Yet the earth heard,

Nor ever hath forgot,

As on from startled throne to throne,

Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong, 130

A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown.

Thrice venerable spot!

River more fateful than the Rubicon!

O'er those red planks, to snatch her diadem,

Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them,

And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.

VII

Think you these felt no charms

In their gray homesteads and embowered farms?

In household faces waiting at the door

Their evening step should lighten up no more? 140

In fields their boyish feet had known?

In trees their fathers' hands had set,

And which with them had grown,

Widening each year their leafy coronet?

Felt they no pang of passionate regret

For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?

These things are dear to every man that lives,

And life prized more for what it lends than gives.

Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet,

Strove to detain their fatal feet;

And yet the enduring half they chose, 151

Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,

The invisible things of God before the seen and known:

Therefore their memory inspiration blows

With echoes gathering on from zone to zone;

For manhood is the one immortal thing

Beneath Time's changeful sky,

And, where it lightened once, from age to age,

Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,

That length of days is knowing when to die. 160

VIII

What marvellous change of things and men!

She, a world-wandering orphan then,

So mighty now! Those are her streams

That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels

Of all that does, and all that dreams,

Of all that thinks, and all that feels,

Through spaces stretched from sea to sea;

By idle tongues and busy brains,

By who doth right, and who refrains,

Here are our losses and our gains; 170

Our maker and our victim she.

Maiden half mortal, half divine,

We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks

Our hearts were filled with pride's tumultuous wine;

Better to-day who rather feels than thinks.

Yet will some graver thoughts intrude,

And cares of sterner mood;

They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deeps

Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood, 179

And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps,

I hear the voice as of a mighty wind

From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,

'I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide

With men whom dust of faction cannot blind

To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind;

With men by culture trained and fortified,

Who bitter duty to sweet lusts prefer,

Fearless to counsel and obey.

Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword,

Not to be drawn in passion or in play, 190

But terrible to punish and deter;

Implacable as God's word,

Like it, a shepherd's crook to them that blindly err.

Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints,

Offshoots of that one stock whose patient sense

Hath known to mingle flux with permanence,

Rated my chaste denials and restraints

Above the moment's dear-paid paradise:

Beware lest, shifting with Time's gradual creep,

The light that guided shine into your eyes. 200

The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep;

Be therefore timely wise,

Nor laugh when this one steals, and that one lies,

As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies,

Till the deaf Fury comes your house to sweep!'

I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow;

Ye shall not be prophetic now,

Heralds of ill, that darkening fly

Between my vision and the rainbowed sky,

Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak 210

From many a blasted bough

On Yggdrasil's storm-sinewed oak,

That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou;

Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast;

For I have loved as those who pardon most.

Away, ungrateful doubt, away!

At least she is our own to-day.

Break into rapture, my song,

Verses, leap forth in the sun,

Bearing the joyance along 220

Like a train of fire as ye run!

Pause not for choosing of words,

Let them but blossom and sing

Blithe as the orchards and birds

With the new coming of spring!

Dance in your jollity, bells;

Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums;

Answer, ye hillside and dells;

Bow, all ye people! She comes,

Radiant, calm-fronted, as when 230

She hallowed that April day.

Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay.

Softener and strengthener of men,

Freedom, not won by the vain,

Not to be courted in play,

Not to be kept without pain.

Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay,

Handmaid and mistress of all,

Kindler of deed and of thought,

Thou that to hut and to hall 240

Equal deliverance brought!

Souls of her martyrs, draw near,

Touch our dull lips with your fire,

That we may praise without fear

Her our delight, our desire,

Our faith's inextinguishable star,

Our hope, our remembrance, our trust,

Our present, our past, our to be,

Who will mingle her life with our dust 249

And makes us deserve to be free!

UNDER THE OLD ELM

POEM READ AT CAMBRIDGE ON THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF WASHINGTON'S

TAKING COMMAND OF THE AMERICAN ARMY, 3D JULY, 1775

Words pass as wind, but where great deeds were done

A power abides transfused from sire to son:

The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear,

That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run,

With sure impulsion to keep honor clear.

When, pointing down, his father whispers, 'Here,

Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely great,

Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,

Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.'

Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust, 10

Once known to men as pious, learnèd, just,

And one memorial pile that dares to last:

But Memory greets with reverential kiss

No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this,

Touched by that modest glory as it past,

O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed

These hundred years its monumental shade.

Of our swift passage through this scenery

Of life and death, more durable than we,

What landmark so congenial as a tree 20

Repeating its green legend every spring,

And, with a yearly ring,

Recording the fair seasons as they flee,

Type of our brief but still-renewed mortality?

We fall as leaves: the immortal trunk remains,

Builded with costly juice of hearts and brains

Gone to the mould now, whither all that be

Vanish returnless, yet are procreant still

In human lives to come of good or ill,

And feed unseen the roots of Destiny. 30

Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names

They should eternize, but the place

Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace

Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their fames

Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace,

Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims,

That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames.

This insubstantial world and fleet

Seems solid for a moment when we stand

On dust ennobled by heroic feet 40

Once mighty to sustain a tottering land,

And mighty still such burthen to upbear,

Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely were:

Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot,

Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream

Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot,

No more a pallid image and a dream,

But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.

Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hint

To raise long-buried days from tombs of print; 50

'Here stood he,' softly we repeat,

And lo, the statue shrined and still

In that gray minster-front we call the Past,

Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill,

Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit.

It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last,

Its features human with familiar light,

A man, beyond the historian's art to kill,

Or sculptor's to efface with patient chisel-blight.

Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught 60

Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loom

Present and Past commingle, fruit and bloom

Of one fair bough, inseparably wrought

Into the seamless tapestry of thought.

So charmed, with undeluded eye we see

In history's fragmentary tale

Bright clues of continuity,

Learn that high natures over Time prevail,

And feel ourselves a link in that entail

That binds all ages past with all that are to be. 70

III

Beneath our consecrated elm

A century ago he stood,

Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood

Whose red surge sought, but could not overwhelm

The life foredoomed to wield our rough-hewn helm:--

From colleges, where now the gown

To arms had yielded, from the town,

Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to see

The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he.

No need to question long; close-lipped and tall, 80

Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone

To bridle others' clamors and his own,

Firmly erect, he towered above them all,

The incarnate discipline that was to free

With iron curb that armed democracy.

A motley rout was that which came to stare,

In raiment tanned by years of sun and storm,

Of every shape that was not uniform,

Dotted with regimentals here and there;

An array all of captains, used to pray 90

And stiff in fight, but serious drill's despair,

Skilled to debate their orders, not obey;

Deacons were there, selectmen, men of note

In half-tamed hamlets ambushed round with woods,

Ready to settle Freewill by a vote,

But largely liberal to its private moods;

Prompt to assert by manners, voice, or pen,

Or ruder arms, their rights as Englishmen,

Nor much fastidious as to how and when:

Yet seasoned stuff and fittest to create 100

A thought-staid army or a lasting state:

Haughty they said he was, at first; severe;

But owned, as all men own, the steady hand

Upon the bridle, patient to command,

Prized, as all prize, the justice pure from fear,

And learned to honor first, then love him, then revere.

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint

And purpose clean as light from every selfish taint.

Musing beneath the legendary tree,

The years between furl off: I seem to see 110

The sun-flecks, shaken the stirred foliage through,

Dapple with gold his sober buff and blue

And weave prophetic aureoles round the head

That shines our beacon now nor darkens with the dead.

O man of silent mood,

A stranger among strangers then,

How art thou since renowned the Great, the Good,

Familiar as the day in an the homes of men!

The winged years, that winnow praise and blame,

Blow many names out: they but fan to flame 120

The self-renewing splendors of thy fame.

How many subtlest influences unite,

With spiritual touch of Joy or pain,

Invisible as air and soft as light,

To body forth that image of the brain

We call our Country, visionary shape,

Loved more than woman, fuller of fire than wine,

Whose charm can none define,

Nor any, though he flee it, can escape!

All party-colored threads the weaver Time 130

Sets in his web, now trivial, now sublime,

All memories, all forebodings, hopes and fears,

Mountain and river, forest, prairie, sea,

A hill, a rock, a homestead, field, or tree,

The casual gleanings of unreckoned years,

Take goddess-shape at last and there is She,

Old at our birth, new as the springing hours,

Shrine of our weakness, fortress of our powers,

Consoler, kindler, peerless 'mid her peers,

A force that 'neath our conscious being stirs, 140

A life to give ours permanence, when we

Are borne to mingle our poor earth with hers,

And all this glowing world goes with us on our biers.

Nations are long results, by ruder ways

Gathering the might that warrants length of days;

They may be pieced of half-reluctant shares

Welded by hammer-strokes of broad-brained kings,

Or from a doughty people grow, the heirs

Of wise traditions widening cautious rings;

At best they are computable things, 150

A strength behind us making us feel bold

In right, or, as may chance, in wrong;

Whose force by figures may be summed and told,

So many soldiers, ships, and dollars strong,

And we but drops that bear compulsory part

In the dumb throb of a mechanic heart;

But Country is a shape of each man's mind

Sacred from definition, unconfined

By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind;

An inward vision, yet an outward birth 160

Of sweet familiar heaven and earth;

A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind

Of wings within our embryo being's shell

That wait but her completer spell

To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare

Life's nobler spaces and untarnished air.

You, who hold dear this self-conceived ideal,

Whose faith and works alone can make it real,

Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrine

Who lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine 170

And feeds the lamp of manhood more divine

With fragrant oils of quenchless constancy.

When all have done their utmost, surely he

Hath given the best who gives a character

Erect and constant, which nor any shock

Of loosened elements, nor the forceful sea

Of flowing or of ebbing fates, can stir

From its deep bases in the living rock

Of ancient manhood's sweet security:

And this he gave, serenely far from pride 180

As baseness, boon with prosperous stars allied,

Part of what nobler seed shall in our loins abide.

No bond of men as common pride so strong,

In names time-filtered for the lips of song,

Still operant, with the primal Forces bound

Whose currents, on their spiritual round,

Transfuse our mortal will nor are gainsaid:

These are their arsenals, these the exhaustless mines

That give a constant heart in great designs;

These are the stuff whereof such dreams are made 190

As make heroic men: thus surely he

Still holds in place the massy blocks he laid

'Neath our new frame, enforcing soberly

The self-control that makes and keeps a people free.

Oh, for a drop of that Cornelian ink

Which gave Agricola dateless length of days,

To celebrate him fitly, neither swerve

To phrase unkempt, nor pass discretion's brink,

With him so statue-like in sad reserve,

So diffident to claim, so forward to deserve! 200

Nor need I shun due influence of his fame

Who, mortal among mortals, seemed as now

The equestrian shape with unimpassioned brow,

That paces silent on through vistas of acclaim.

What figure more immovably august

Than that grave strength so patient and so pure,

Calm in good fortune, when it wavered, sure,

That mind serene, impenetrably just,

Modelled on classic lines so simple they endure?

That soul so softly radiant and so white 210

The track it left seems less of fire than light,

Cold but to such as love distemperature?

And if pure light, as some deem, be the force

That drives rejoicing planets on their course,

Why for his power benign seek an impurer source?

His was the true enthusiasm that burns long,

Domestically bright,

Fed from itself and shy of human sight,

The hidden force that makes a lifetime strong,

And not the short-lived fuel of a song. 220

Passionless, say you? What is passion for

But to sublime our natures and control,

To front heroic toils with late return,

Or none, or such as shames the conqueror?

That fire was fed with substance of the soul

And not with holiday stubble, that could burn,

Unpraised of men who after bonfires run,

Through seven slow years of unadvancing war,

Equal when fields were lost or fields were won,

With breath of popular applause or blame, 230

Nor fanned nor damped, unquenchably the same,

Too inward to be reached by flaws of idle fame.

Soldier and statesman, rarest unison;

High-poised example of great duties done

Simply as breathing, a world's honors worn

As life's indifferent gifts to all men born;

Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,

But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,

Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,

Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content; 240

Modest, yet firm as Nature's self; unblamed

Save by the men his nobler temper shamed;

Never seduced through show of present good

By other than unsetting lights to steer

New-trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast mood

More steadfast, far from rashness as from fear;

Rigid, but with himself first, grasping still

In swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will;

Not honored then or now because he wooed

The popular voice, but that he still withstood; 250

Broad-minded, higher-souled, there is but one

Who was all this and ours, and all men's,--WASHINGTON.

Minds strong by fits, irregularly great,

That flash and darken like revolving lights,

Catch more the vulgar eye unschooled to wait

On the long curve of patient days and nights

Bounding a whole life to the circle fair

Of orbed fulfilment; and this balanced soul,

So simple in its grandeur, coldly bare

Of draperies theatric, standing there 260

In perfect symmetry of self-control,

Seems not so great at first, but greater grows

Still as we look, and by experience learn

How grand this quiet is, how nobly stern

The discipline that wrought through life-long throes

That energetic passion of repose.

A nature too decorous and severe,

Too self-respectful in its griefs and joys,

For ardent girls and boys

Who find no genius in a mind so clear 270

That its grave depths seem obvious and near,

Nor a soul great that made so little noise.

They feel no force in that calm-cadenced phrase,

The habitual full-dress of his well-bred mind,

That seems to pace the minuet's courtly maze

And tell of ampler leisures, roomier length of days,

His firm-based brain, to self so little kind

That no tumultuary blood could blind,

Formed to control men, not amaze,

Looms not like those that borrow height of haze: 280

It was a world of statelier movement then

Than this we fret in, he a denizen

Of that ideal Rome that made a man for men.

The longer on this earth we live

And weigh the various Qualities of men,

Seeing how most are fugitive,

Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,

Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,

The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty

Of plain devotedness to duty, 290

Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise,

But finding amplest recompense

For life's ungarlanded expense

In work done squarely and unwasted days.

For this we honor him, that he could know

How sweet the service and how free

Of her, God's eldest daughter here below,

And choose in meanest raiment which was she.

Placid completeness, life without a fall

From faith or highest aims, truth's breachless wall, 300

Surely if any fame can bear the touch,

His will say 'Here!' at the last trumpet's call,

The unexpressive man whose life expressed so much.

VII

Never to see a nation born

Hath been given to mortal man,

Unless to those who, on that summer morn,

Gazed silent when the great Virginian

Unsheathed the sword whose fatal flash

Shot union through the incoherent clash

Of our loose atoms, crystallizing them 310

Around a single will's unpliant stem,

And making purpose of emotion rash.

Out of that scabbard sprang, as from its womb,

Nebulous at first but hardening to a star.

Through mutual share of sunburst and of gloom,

The common faith that made us what we are.

That lifted blade transformed our jangling clans,

Till then provincial, to Americans,

And made a unity of wildering plans;

Here was the doom fixed: here is marked the date 320

When this New World awoke to man's estate,

Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind:

Nor thoughtless was the choice; no love or hate

Could from its poise move that deliberate mind,

Weighing between too early and too late,

Those pitfalls of the man refused by Fate:

His was the impartial vision of the great

Who see not as they wish, but as they find.

He saw the dangers of defeat, nor less

The incomputable perils of success; 330

The sacred past thrown by, an empty rind;

The future, cloud-land, snare of prophets blind;

The waste of war, the ignominy of peace;

On either hand a sullen rear of woes,

Whose garnered lightnings none could guess,

Piling its thunder-heads and muttering 'Cease!'

Yet drew not back his hand, but gravely chose

The seeming-desperate task whence our new nation rose.

A noble choice and of immortal seed!

Nor deem that acts heroic wait on chance 340

Or easy were as in a boy's romance;

The man's whole life preludes the single deed

That shall decide if his inheritance

Be with the sifted few of matchless breed,

Our race's sap and sustenance,

Or with the unmotived herd that only sleep and feed.

Choice seems a thing indifferent: thus or so,

What matters it? The Fates with mocking face

Look on inexorable, nor seem to know

Where the lot lurks that gives life's foremost place. 350

Yet Duty's leaden casket holds it still,

And but two ways are offered to our will,

Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace,

The problem still for us and all of human race.

He chose, as men choose, where most danger showed,

Nor ever faltered 'neath the load

Of petty cares, that gall great hearts the most,

But kept right on the strenuous up-hill road,

Strong to the end, above complaint or boast:

The popular tempest on his rock-mailed coast 360

Wasted its wind-borne spray,

The noisy marvel of a day;

His soul sate still in its unstormed abode.

VIII

Virginia gave us this imperial man

Cast in the massive mould

Of those high-statured ages old

Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran;

She gave us this unblemished gentleman:

What shall we give her back but love and praise

As in the dear old unestrangèd days 370

Before the inevitable wrong began?

Mother of States and undiminished men,

Thou gavest us a country, giving him,

And we owe alway what we owed thee then:

The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us agen

Shines as before with no abatement dim,

A great man's memory is the only thing

With influence to outlast the present whim

And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.

All of him that was subject to the hours 380

Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours:

Across more recent graves,

Where unresentful Nature waves

Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod,

Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God,

We from this consecrated plain stretch out

Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt

As here the united North

Poured her embrownèd manhood forth

In welcome of our savior and thy son. 390

Through battle we have better learned thy worth,

The long-breathed valor and undaunted will,

Which, like his own, the day's disaster done,

Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.

Both thine and ours the victory hardly won;

If ever with distempered voice or pen

We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back,

And for the dead of both don common black.

Be to us evermore as thou wast then,

As we forget thou hast not always been, 400

Mother of States and unpolluted men,

Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!

AN ODE

FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1876

Entranced I saw a vision in the cloud

That loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky,

Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the eye,

Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasy

In golden mist, an ever-shifting crowd:

There, 'mid unreal forms that came and went

In air-spun robes, of evanescent dye,

A woman's semblance shone preeminent;

Not armed like Pallas, not like Hera proud,

But, as on household diligence intent, 10

Beside her visionary wheel she bent

Like Aretë or Bertha, nor than they

Less queenly in her port; about her knee

Glad children clustered confident in play:

Placid her pose, the calm of energy;

And over her broad brow in many a round

(That loosened would have gilt her garment's hem),

Succinct, as toil prescribes, the hair was wound

In lustrous coils, a natural diadem.

The cloud changed shape, obsequious to the whim 20

Of some transmuting influence felt in me,

And, looking now, a wolf I seemed to see

Limned in that vapor, gaunt and hunger-bold,

Threatening her charge; resolve in every limb,

Erect she flamed in mail of sun-wove gold,

Penthesilea's self for battle dight;

One arm uplifted braced a flickering spear,

And one her adamantine shield made light;

Her face, helm-shadowed, grew a thing to fear,

And her fierce eyes, by danger challenged, took 30

Her trident-sceptred mother's dauntless look.

'I know thee now, O goddess-born!' I cried,

And turned with loftier brow and firmer stride;

For in that spectral cloud-work I had seen

Her image, bodied forth by love and pride,

The fearless, the benign, the mother-eyed,

The fairer world's toil-consecrated queen.

What shape by exile dreamed elates the mind

Like hers whose hand, a fortress of the poor,

No blood in vengeance spilt, though lawful, stains? 40

Who never turned a suppliant from her door?

Whose conquests are the gains of all mankind?

To-day her thanks shall fly on every wind,

Unstinted, unrebuked, from shore to shore,

One love, one hope, and not a doubt behind!

Cannon to cannon shall repeat her praise,

Banner to banner flap it forth in flame;

Her children shall rise up to bless her name,

And wish her harmless length of days,

The mighty mother of a mighty brood, 50

Blessed in all tongues and dear to every blood,

The beautiful, the strong, and, best of all, the good.

Seven years long was the bow

Of battle bent, and the heightening

Storm-heaps convulsed with the throe

Of their uncontainable lightning;

Seven years long heard the sea

Crash of navies and wave-borne thunder;

Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee,

And new stars were seen, a world's wonder; 60

Each by her sisters made bright,

All binding all to their stations,

Cluster of manifold light

Startling the old constellations:

Men looked up and grew pale:

Was it a comet or star,

Omen of blessing or bale.

Hung o'er the ocean afar?

Stormy the day of her birth: 69

Was she not born of the strong.

She, the last ripeness of earth,

Beautiful, prophesied long?

Stormy the days of her prime:

Hers are the pulses that beat

Higher for perils sublime,

Making them fawn at her feet.

Was she not born of the strong?

Was she not born of the wise?

Daring and counsel belong

Of right to her confident eyes:

Human and motherly they, 81

Careless of station or race:

Hearken! her children to-day

Shout for the joy of her face.

No praises of the past are hers,

No fanes by hallowing time caressed,

No broken arch that ministers

To Time's sad instinct in the breast;

She has not gathered from the years

Grandeur of tragedies and tears, 90

Nor from long leisure the unrest

That finds repose in forms of classic grace:

These may delight the coming race

Who haply shall not count it to our crime

That we who fain would sing are here before our time.

She also hath her monuments;

Not such as stand decrepitly resigned

To ruin-mark the path of dead events

That left no seed of better days behind,

The tourist's pensioners that show their scars 100

And maunder of forgotten wars;

She builds not on the ground, but in the mind,

Her open-hearted palaces

For larger-thoughted men with heaven and earth at ease:

Her march the plump mow marks, the sleepless wheel,

The golden sheaf, the self-swayed commonweal;

The happy homesteads hid in orchard trees

Whose sacrificial smokes through peaceful air

Rise lost in heaven, the household's silent prayer;

What architect hath bettered these? 110

With softened eye the westward traveller sees

A thousand miles of neighbors side by side,

Holding by toil-won titles fresh from God

The lands no serf or seigneur ever trod,

With manhood latent in the very sod,

Where the long billow of the wheatfield's tide

Flows to the sky across the prairie wide,

A sweeter vision than the castled Rhine,

Kindly with thoughts of Ruth and Bible-days benign.

O ancient commonwealths, that we revere 120

Haply because we could not know you near,

Your deeds like statues down the aisles of Time

Shine peerless in memorial calm sublime,

And Athens is a trumpet still, and Rome;

Yet which of your achievements is not foam

Weighed with this one of hers (below you far

In fame, and born beneath a milder star),

That to Earth's orphans, far as curves the dome

Of death-deaf sky, the bounteous West means home,

With dear precedency of natural ties 130

That stretch from roof to roof and make men gently wise?

And if the nobler passions wane,

Distorted to base use, if the near goal

Of insubstantial gain

Tempt from the proper race-course of the soul

That crowns their patient breath

Whose feet, song-sandalled, are too fleet for Death,

Yet may she claim one privilege urbane

And haply first upon the civic roll,

That none can breathe her air nor grow humane. 140

Oh, better far the briefest hour

Of Athens self-consumed, whose plastic power

Hid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone;

Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles crowd

Whose fulgurous vans about the world had blown

Triumphant storm and seeds of polity;

Of Venice, fading o'er her shipless sea,

Last iridescence of a sunset cloud;

Than this inert prosperity,

This bovine comfort in the sense alone! 150

Yet art came slowly even to such as those.

Whom no past genius cheated of their own

With prudence of o'ermastering precedent;

Petal by petal spreads the perfect rose,

Secure of the divine event;

And only children rend the bud half-blown

To forestall Nature in her calm intent:

Time hath a quiver full of purposes

Which miss not of their aim, to us unknown,

And brings about the impossible with ease: 160

Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break

From where in legend-tinted line

The peaks of Hellas drink the morning's wine,

To tremble on our lids with mystic sign

Till the drowsed ichor in our veins awake

And set our pulse in time with moods divine:

Long the day lingered in its sea-fringed nest,

Then touched the Tuscan hills with golden lance

And paused; then on to Spain and France

The splendor flew, and Albion's misty crest: 170

Shall Ocean bar him from his destined West?

Or are we, then, arrived too late,

Doomed with the rest to grope disconsolate,

Foreclosed of Beauty by our modern date?

III

Poets, as their heads grow gray,

Look from too far behind the eyes,

Too long-experienced to be wise

In guileless youth's diviner way;

Life sings not now, but prophesies;

Time's shadows they no more behold, 180

But, under them, the riddle old

That mocks, bewilders, and defies:

In childhood's face the seed of shame,

In the green tree an ambushed flame,

In Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night,

They, though against their will, divine,

And dread the care-dispelling wine

Stored from the Muse's mintage bright,

By age imbued with second-sight.

From Faith's own eyelids there peeps out, 190

Even as they look, the leer of doubt;

The festal wreath their fancy loads

With care that whispers and forebodes:

Nor this our triumph-day can blunt Megæra's goads.

Murmur of many voices in the air

Denounces us degenerate,

Unfaithful guardians of a noble fate,

And prompts indifference or despair:

Is this the country that we dreamed in youth,

Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight, 200

Seed-field of simpler manners, braver truth,

Where shams should cease to dominate

In household, church, and state?

Is this Atlantis? This the unpoisoned soil,

Sea-whelmed for ages and recovered late,

Where parasitic greed no more should coil

Bound Freedom's stem to bend awry and blight

What grew so fair, sole plant of love and light?

Who sit where once in crowned seclusion sate

The long-proved athletes of debate 210

Trained from their youth, as none thinks needful now?

Is this debating club where boys dispute,

And wrangle o'er their stolen fruit,

The Senate, erewhile cloister of the few,

Where Clay once flashed and Webster's cloudy brow

Brooded those bolts of thought that all the horizon knew?

Oh, as this pensive moonlight blurs my pines,

Here while I sit and meditate these lines,

To gray-green dreams of what they are by day,

So would some light, not reason's sharp-edged ray, 220

Trance me in moonshine as before the flight

Of years had won me this unwelcome right

To see things as they are, or shall he soon,

In the frank prose of undissembling noon!

Back to my breast, ungrateful sigh!

Whoever fails, whoever errs,

The penalty be ours, not hers!

The present still seems vulgar, seen too nigh;

The golden age is still the age that's past:

I ask no drowsy opiate 230

To dull my vision of that only state

Founded on faith in man, and therefore sure to last.

For, O my country, touched by thee,

The gray hairs gather back their gold;

Thy thought sets all my pulses free;

The heart refuses to be old;

The love is all that I can see.

Not to thy natal-day belong

Time's prudent doubt or age's wrong,

But gifts of gratitude and song:

Unsummoned crowd the thankful words, 241

As sap in spring-time floods the tree.

Foreboding the return of birds,

For all that thou hast been to me!

Flawless his heart and tempered to the core

Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave,

First left behind him the firm-footed shore,

And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar,

Steered for the Unknown which gods to mortals gave.

Of thought and action the mysterious door, 250

Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave:

Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun,

And strange stars from beneath the horizon won,

And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave:

High-hearted surely he;

But bolder they who first off-cast

Their moorings from the habitable Past

And ventured chartless on the sea

Of storm-engendering Liberty:

For all earth's width of waters is a span, 260

And their convulsed existence mere repose,

Matched with the unstable heart of man,

Shoreless in wants, mist-girt in all it knows,

Open to every wind of sect or clan,

And sudden-passionate in ebbs and flows.

They steered by stars the elder shipmen knew,

And laid their courses where the currents draw

Of ancient wisdom channelled deep in law.

The undaunted few

Who changed the Old World for the New, 270

And more devoutly prized

Than all perfection theorized

The more imperfect that had roots and grew.

They founded deep and well,

Those danger-chosen chiefs of men

Who still believed in Heaven and Hell,

Nor hoped to find a spell,

In some fine flourish of a pen,

To make a better man

Than long-considering Nature will or can, 280

Secure against his own mistakes,

Content with what life gives or takes,

And acting still on some fore-ordered plan,

A cog of iron in an iron wheel,

Too nicely poised to think or feel,

Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal.

They wasted not their brain in schemes

Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere,

As if he must be other than he seems

Because he was not what he should be here, 290

Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams:

Yet herein they were great

Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore,

And wiser than the wisdom of the shelf,

That they conceived a deeper-rooted state,

Of hardier growth, alive from rind to core,

By making man sole sponsor of himself.

God of our fathers, Thou who wast,

Art, and shalt be when those eye-wise who flout

Thy secret presence shall be lost

In the great light that dazzles them to doubt, 301

We, sprung from loins of stalwart men

Whose strength was in their trust

That Thou woudst make thy dwelling in their dust

And walk with those a fellow-citizen

Who build a city of the just,

We, who believe Life's bases rest

Beyond the probe of chemic test,

Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near,

Sure that, while lasts the immutable decree, 310

The land to Human Nature dear

Shall not be unbeloved of Thee.

HEARTSEASE AND RUE

I. FRIENDSHIP

AGASSIZ

Come

Dicesti _egli ebbe?_ non viv' egli ancora?

Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome?

The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill

Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes,

Confutes poor Hope's last fallacy of ease,--

The distance that divided her from ill:

Earth sentient seems again as when of old

The horny foot of Pan

Stamped, and the conscious horror ran

Beneath men's feet through all her fibres cold:

Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throe

From underground of our night-mantled foe: 10

The flame-winged feet

Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run

Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun,

Are mercilessly fleet,

And at a bound annihilate

Ocean's prerogative of short reprieve;

Surely ill news might wait,

And man be patient of delay to grieve:

Letters have sympathies

And tell-tale faces that reveal, 20

To senses finer than the eyes.

Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;

They wind a sorrow round with circumstance

To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace

The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance

The inexorable face:

But now Fate stuns as with a mace;

The savage of the skies, that men have caught

And some scant use of language taught,

Tells only what he must,-- 30

The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,

I scanned the festering news we half despise

Yet scramble for no less,

And read of public scandal, private fraud,

Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,

Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,

And all the unwholesome mess

The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late

To teach the Old World how to wait, 40

When suddenly,

As happens if the brain, from overweight

Of blood, infect the eye,

Three tiny words grew lurid as I read,

And reeled commingling: _Agassiz is dead_.

As when, beneath the street's familiar jar,

An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far,

Men listen and forebode, I hung my head,

And strove the present to recall,

As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall. 50

Uprooted is our mountain oak,

That promised long security of shade

And brooding-place for many a wingèd thought;

Not by Time's softly cadenced stroke

With pauses of relenting pity stayed,

But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed,

From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught

And in his broad maturity betrayed!

Well might I, as of old, appeal to you,

O mountains, woods, and streams, 60

To help us mourn him, for ye loved him too;

But simpler moods befit our modern themes,

And no less perfect birth of nature can,

Though they yearn tow'rd him, sympathize with man.

Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall;

Answer ye rather to my call,

Strong poets of a more unconscious day,

When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why,

Too much for softer arts forgotten since

That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince, 70

And drown in music the heart's bitter cry!

Lead me some steps in your directer way,

Teach me those words that strike a solid root

Within the ears of men;

Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel,

Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben,

For he was masculine from head to heel.

Nay, let himself stand undiminished by

With those clear parts of him that will not die.

Himself from out the recent dark I claim 80

To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame;

To show himself, as still I seem to see,

A mortal, built upon the antique plan,

Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran,

And taking life as simply as a tree!

To claim my foiled good-by let him appear,

Large-limbed and human as I saw him near,

Loosed from the stiffening uniform of fame:

And let me treat him largely; I should fear,

(If with too prying lens I chanced to err, 90

Mistaking catalogue for character,)

His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame.

Nor would I scant him with judicial breath

And turn mere critic in an epitaph;

I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff

That swells fame living, chokes it after death,

And would but memorize the shining half

Of his large nature that was turned to me:

Fain had I joined with those that honored him

With eyes that darkened because his were dim, 100

And now been silent: but it might not be.

In some the genius is a thing apart,

A pillared hermit of the brain,

Hoarding with incommunicable art

Its intellectual gain;

Man's web of circumstance and fate

They from their perch of self observe,

Indifferent as the figures on a slate

Are to the planet's sun-swung curve

Whose bright returns they calculate; 110

Their nice adjustment, part to part,

Were shaken from its serviceable mood

By unpremeditated stirs of heart

Or jar of human neighborhood:

Some find their natural selves, and only then,

In furloughs of divine escape from men,

And when, by that brief ecstasy left bare,

Driven by some instinct of desire,

They wander worldward, 'tis to blink and stare,

Like wild things of the wood about a fire, 120

Dazed by the social glow they cannot share;

His nature brooked no lonely lair,

But basked and bourgeoned in co-partnery,

Companionship, and open-windowed glee:

He knew, for he had tried,

Those speculative heights that lure

The unpractised foot, impatient of a guide,

Tow'rd ether too attenuately pure

For sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride,

But better loved the foothold sure 130

Of paths that wind by old abodes of men

Who hope at last the churchyard's peace secure,

And follow time-worn rules, that them suffice,

Learned from their sires, traditionally wise,

Careful of honest custom's how and when;

His mind, too brave to look on Truth askance,

No more those habitudes of faith could share,

But, tinged with sweetness of the old Swiss manse,

Lingered around them still and fain would spare.

Patient to spy a sullen egg for weeks, 140

The enigma of creation to surprise,

His truer instinct sought the life that speaks

Without a mystery from kindly eyes;

In no self-spun cocoon of prudence wound,

He by the touch of men was best inspired,

And caught his native greatness at rebound

From generosities itself had fired;

Then how the heat through every fibre ran,

Felt in the gathering presence of the man,

While the apt word and gesture came unbid! 150

Virtues and faults it to one metal wrought,

Fined all his blood to thought,

And ran the molten man in all he said or did.

All Tully's rules and all Quintilian's too

He by the light of listening faces knew,

And his rapt audience all unconscious lent

Their own roused force to make him eloquent;

Persuasion fondled in his look and tone;

Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bring

To find new charm in accents not her own; 160

Her coy constraints and icy hindrances

Melted upon his lips to natural ease,

As a brook's fetters swell the dance of spring.

Nor yet all sweetness: not in vain he wore,

Nor in the sheath of ceremony, controlled

By velvet courtesy or caution cold,

That sword of honest anger prized of old,

But, with two-handed wrath,

If baseness or pretension crossed his path,

Struck once nor needed to strike more. 170

His magic was not far to seek.--

He was so human! Whether strong or weak,

Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared,

But sate an equal guest at every board:

No beggar ever felt him condescend,

No prince presume; for still himself he bare

At manhood's simple level, and where'er

He met a stranger, there he left a friend.

How large an aspect! nobly un-severe,

With freshness round him of Olympian cheer, 180

Like visits of those earthly gods he came;

His look, wherever its good-fortune fell,

Doubled the feast without a miracle,

And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame;

Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign;

Amphitryon's gold-juice humanized to wine.

III

The garrulous memories

Gather again from all their far-flown nooks,

Singly at first, and then by twos and threes,

Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks 190

Thicken their twilight files

Tow'rd Tintern's gray repose of roofless aisles:

Once more I see him at the table's head

When Saturday her monthly banquet spread

To scholars, poets, wits,

All choice, some famous, loving things, not names,

And so without a twinge at others' fames;

Such company as wisest moods befits,

Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth

Of undeliberate mirth, 200

Natures benignly mixed of air and earth,

Now with the stars and now with equal zest

Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.

I see in vision the warm-lighted hall,

The living and the dead I see again,

And but my chair is empty; 'mid them all

'Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain

Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain:

Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most,

Of sense or spirit to the truly sane; 210

In this abstraction it were light to deem

Myself the figment of some stronger dream;

They are the real things, and I the ghost

That glide unhindered through the solid door,

Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,

And strive to speak and am but futile air,

As truly most of us are little more.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,

The latest parted thence,

His features poised in genial armistice 220

And armed neutrality of self-defence

Beneath the forehead's walled preeminence,

While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach,

Settles off-hand our human how and whence;

The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears

The infallible strategy of volunteers

Making through Nature's walls its easy breach,

And seems to learn where he alone could teach.

Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fills

As he our fireside were, our light and heat, 230

Centre where minds diverse and various skills

Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet;

I see the firm benignity of face,

Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,

The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,

The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips

While Holmes's rockets, curve their long ellipse,

And burst in seeds of fire that burst again

To drop in scintillating rain.

There too the face half-rustic, half-divine, 240

Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,

Of him who taught us not to mow and mope

About our fancied selves, but seek our scope

In Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope,

Content with our New World and timely bold

To challenge the o'ermastery of the Old;

Listening with eyes averse I see him sit

Pricked with the cider of the Judge's wit

(Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again),

While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline 250

Curves sharper to restrain

The merriment whose most unruly moods

Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods

Of silence-shedding pine:

Hard by is he whose art's consoling spell

Hath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel,

His look still vernal 'mid the wintry ring

Of petals that remember, not foretell,

The paler primrose of a second spring.

And more there are: but other forms arise 260

And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes:

First he from sympathy still held apart

By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,

Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's sweep

Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill,

And steeped in doom familiar field and hill,--

New England's poet, soul reserved and deep,

November nature with a name of May,

Whom high o'er Concord plains we laid to sleep,

While the orchards mocked us in their white array 270

And building robins wondered at our tears,

Snatched in his prime, the shape august

That should have stood unbent 'neath fourscore years,

The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,

All gone to speechless dust.

And he our passing guest,

Shy nature, too, and stung with life's unrest,

Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,

Who brought ripe Oxford's culture to our board,

The Past's incalculable hoard, 280

Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,

Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet

With immemorial lisp of musing feet;

Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar's,

Boy face, but grave with answerless desires,

Poet in all that poets have of best,

But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims,

Who now hath found sure rest,

Not by still Isis or historic Thames,

Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me, 290

But, not misplaced, by Arno's hallowed brim,

Nor scorned by Santa Croce's neighboring fames,

Haply not mindless, wheresoe'er he be,

Of violets that to-day I scattered over him,

He, too, is there,

After the good centurion fitly named,

Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed,

Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair,

Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways,

Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the praise.

Yea truly, as the sallowing years 301

Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves

Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days,

And that unwakened winter nears,

'Tis the void chair our surest guest receives,

'Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,

'Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;

We count our rosary by the beads we miss:

To me, at least, it seemeth so,

An exile in the land once found divine, 310

While my starved fire burns low,

And homeless winds at the loose casement whine

Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.

Now forth into the darkness all are gone,

But memory, still unsated, follows on,

Retracing step by step our homeward walk,

With many a laugh among our serious talk,

Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,

The long red streamers from the windows glide,

Or the dim western moon

Rocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon, 321

And Boston shows a soft Venetian side

In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,

Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;

Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wide

Shivered the winter stars, while all below,

As if an end were come of human ill,

The world was wrapt in innocence of snow

And the cast-iron bay was blind and still;

These were our poetry; in him perhaps 330

Science had barred the gate that lets in dream,

And he would rather count the perch and bream

Than with the current's idle fancy lapse;

And yet he had the poet's open eye

That takes a frank delight in all it sees,

Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky,

To him the life-long friend of fields and trees:

Then came the prose of the suburban street,

Its silence deepened by our echoing feet,

And converse such as rambling hazard finds; 340

Then he who many cities knew and many minds,

And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian forms

Of misty memory, bade them live anew

As when they shared earth's manifold delight,

In shape, in gait, in voice, in gesture true,

And, with an accent heightening as he warms,

Would stop forgetful of the shortening night,

Drop my confining arm, and pour profuse

Much worldly wisdom kept for others' use,

Not for his own, for he was rash and free, 350

His purse or knowledge all men's, like the sea.

Still can I hear his voice's shrilling might

(With pauses broken, while the fitful spark

He blew more hotly rounded on the dark

To hint his features with a Rembrandt light)

Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck,

Or Cuvier's taller shade, and many more

Whom he had seen, or knew from others' sight,

And make them men to me as ne'er before:

Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred 360

Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea,

German or French thrust by the lagging word,

For a good leash of mother-tongues had he.

At last, arrived at where our paths divide,

'Good night!' and, ere the distance grew too wide,

'Good night!' again; and now with cheated ear

I half hear his who mine shall never hear.

Sometimes it seemed as if New England air

For his large lungs too parsimonious were,

As if those empty rooms of dogma drear 370

Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere

Counting the horns o'er of the Beast,

Still scaring those whose faith to it is least,

As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere

That sharpen all the needles of the East,

Had been to him like death,

Accustomed to draw Europe's freer breath

In a more stable element;

Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose,

Our practical horizon, grimly pent, 380

Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze,

Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close,

Our social monotone of level days,

Might make our best seem banishment;

But it was nothing so;

Haply this instinct might divine,

Beneath our drift of puritanic snow,

The marvel sensitive and fine

Of sanguinaria over-rash to blow

And trust its shyness to an air malign; 390

Well might he prize truth's warranty and pledge

In the grim outcrop of our granite edge,

Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need

In the gaunt sons of Calvin's iron breed,

As prompt to give as skilled to win and keep;

But, though such intuitions might not cheer,

Yet life was good to him, and, there or here,

With that sufficing joy, the day was never cheap;

Thereto his mind was its own ample sphere,

And, like those buildings great that through the year 400

Carry one temperature, his nature large

Made its own climate, nor could any marge

Traced by convention stay him from his bent:

He had a habitude of mountain air;

He brought wide outlook where he went,

And could on sunny uplands dwell

Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair

High-hung of viny Neufchâtel;

Nor, surely, did he miss

Some pale, imaginary bliss

Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss. 411

I cannot think he wished so soon to die

With all his senses full of eager heat,

And rosy years that stood expectant by

To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,

He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet

Took with both hands unsparingly:

Truly this life is precious to the root,

And good the feel of grass beneath the foot;

To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom, 420

Tenants in common with the bees,

And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees,

Is better than long waiting in the tomb;

Only once more to feel the coming spring

As the birds feel it, when it bids them sing,

Only once more to see the moon

Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms

Curve her mild sickle in the West

Sweet with the breath of haycocks, were a boon

Worth any promise of soothsayer realms 430

Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest;

To take December by the beard

And crush the creaking snow with springy foot,

While overhead the North's dumb streamers shoot,

Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared,

Then the long evening-ends

Lingered by cosy chimney-nooks,

With high companionship of books

Or slippered talk of friends

And sweet habitual looks,

Is better than to stop the ears with dust: 441

Too soon the spectre comes to say, 'Thou must!'

When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast,

They comfort us with sense of rest;

They must be glad to lie forever still;

Their work is ended with their day;

Another fills their room; 't is the World's ancient way,

Whether for good or ill;

But the deft spinners of the brain,

Who love each added day and find it gain, 450

Them overtakes the doom

To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom

(Trophy that was to be of life long pain),

The thread no other skill can ever knit again.

'Twas so with him, for he was glad to live,

'Twas doubly so, for he left work begun;

Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive

Till all the allotted flax were spun?

It matters not; for, go at night or noon,

A friend, whene'er he dies, has died too soon, 460

And, once we hear the hopeless _He is dead,_

So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

I seem to see the black procession go:

That crawling prose of death too well I know,

The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe;

I see it wind through that unsightly grove,

Once beautiful, but long defaced

With granite permanence of cockney taste

And all those grim disfigurements we love:

There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste 470

Nature rebels at: and it is not true

Of those most precious parts of him we knew:

Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,

'Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents

Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;

Nay, to be mingled with the elements,

The fellow-servants of creative powers,

Partaker in the solemn year's events,

To share the work of busy-fingered hours,

To be night's silent almoner of dew, 480

To rise again in plants and breathe and grow,

To stream as tides the ocean caverns through,

Or with the rapture of great winds to blow

About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate

To leave us all-disconsolate;

Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod

Of charitable earth

That takes out all our mortal stains,

And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod,

Methinks were better worth

Than the poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains, 491

The heart's insatiable ache:

But such was not his faith,

Nor mine: it may be he had trod

Outside the plain old path of _God thus spake_,

But God to him was very God

And not a visionary wraith

Skulking in murky corners of the mind,

And he was sure to be

Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, 500

Not with His essence mystically combined,

As some high spirits long, but whole and free,

A perfected and conscious Agassiz.

And such I figure him: the wise of old

Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold,

Not truly with the guild enrolled

Of him who seeking inward guessed

Diviner riddles than the rest,

And groping in the darks of thought

Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; 510

Rather he shares the daily light,

From reason's charier fountains won,

Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite,

And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled

The winning tongue; the forehead's high-piled heap,

A cairn which every science helped to build,

Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:

He knows at last if Life or Death be best:

Wherever he be flown, whatever vest 520

The being hath put on which lately here

So many-friended was, so full of cheer

To make men feel the Seeker's noble zest,

We have not lost him all; he is not gone

To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;

The beauty of his better self lives on

In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye

He trained to Truth's exact severity;

He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him

Whose living word still stimulates the air? 530

In endless file shall loving scholars come

The glow of his transmitted touch to share,

And trace his features with an eye less dim

Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes dumb.

TO HOLMES

ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

Dear Wendell, why need count the years

Since first your genius made me thrill,

If what moved then to smiles or tears,

Or both contending, move me still?

What has the Calendar to do

With poets? What Time's fruitless tooth

With gay immortals such as you

Whose years but emphasize your youth?

One air gave both their lease of breath;

The same paths lured our boyish feet;

One earth will hold us safe in death

With dust of saints and scholars sweet.

Our legends from one source were drawn,

I scarce distinguish yours from mine,

And _don't_ we make the Gentiles yawn

With 'You remembers?' o'er our wine!

If I, with too senescent air,

Invade your elder memory's pale,

You snub me with a pitying 'Where

Were you in the September Gale?'

Both stared entranced at Lafayette,

Saw Jackson dubbed with LL.D.

What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet

As scarcely worth one's while to see.

Ten years my senior, when my name

In Harvard's entrance-book was writ,

Her halls still echoed with the fame

Of you, her poet and her wit.

'Tis fifty years from then to now;

But your Last Leaf renews its green,

Though, for the laurels on your brow

(So thick they crowd), 'tis hardly seen.

The oriole's fledglings fifty times

Have flown from our familiar elms;

As many poets with their rhymes

Oblivion's darkling dust o'erwhelms.

The birds are hushed, the poets gone

Where no harsh critic's lash can reach,

And still your wingèd brood sing on

To all who love our English speech.

Nay, let the foolish records he

That make believe you're seventy-five:

You're the old Wendell still to me,--

And that's the youngest man alive.

The gray-blue eyes, I see them still,

The gallant front with brown o'erhung,

The shape alert, the wit at will,

The phrase that stuck, but never stung.

You keep your youth as yon Scotch firs,

Whose gaunt line my horizon hems,

Though twilight all the lowland blurs,

Hold sunset in their ruddy stems.

_You_ with the elders? Yes, 'tis true,

But in no sadly literal sense,

With elders and coevals too,

Whose verb admits no preterite tense.

Master alike in speech and song

Of fame's great antiseptic--Style,

You with the classic few belong

Who tempered wisdom with a smile.

Outlive us all! Who else like you

Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff,

And make us with the pen we knew

Deathless at least in epitaph?

IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,

Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;

The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,

Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue,

When Contemplation tells her pensive beads

Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new.

Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!

The moral? Where Doubt's eddies toss and twirl

Faith's slender shallop till her footing reel,

Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,

Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON'S 'OLD WORLD IDYLLS'

At length arrived, your book I take

To read in for the author's sake;

Too gray for new sensations grown,

Can charm to Art or Nature known

This torpor from my senses shake?

Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake?

Is a thrush gurgling from the brake?

Has Spring, on all the breezes blown,

At length arrived?

Long may you live such songs to make,

And I to listen while you wake,

With skill of late disused, each tone

Of the _Lesboum, barbiton_,

At mastery, through long finger-ache,

At length arrived.

As I read on, what changes steal

O'er me and through, from head to heel?

A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside,

My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,--

Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele!

Down vistas long of clipt _charmille_

Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel;

Tabor and pipe the dancers guide

As I read on.

While in and out the verses wheel

The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal,

Lithe ankles that to music glide,

But chastely and by chance descried;

Art? Nature? Which do I most feel

As I read on?

TO C.F. BRADFORD

ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE

The pipe came safe, and welcome too,

As anything must be from you;

A meerschaum pure, 'twould float as light

As she the girls call Amphitrite.

Mixture divine of foam and clay,

From both it stole the best away:

Its foam is such as crowns the glow

Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot;

Its clay is but congested lymph

Jove chose to make some choicer nymph;

And here combined,--why, this must be

The birth of some enchanted sea,

Shaped to immortal form, the type

And very Venus of a pipe.

When high I heap it with the weed

From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed

Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore

And cast upon Virginia's shore,

I'll think,--So fill the fairer bowl

And wise alembic of thy soul,

With herbs far-sought that shall distil,

Not fumes to slacken thought and will,

But bracing essences that nerve

To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve.

When curls the smoke in eddies soft,

And hangs a shifting dream aloft,

That gives and takes, though chance-designed,

The impress of the dreamer's mind,

I'll think,--So let the vapors bred

By Passion, in the heart or head,

Pass off and upward into space,

Waving farewells of tenderest grace,

Remembered in some happier time,

To blend their beauty with my rhyme.

While slowly o'er its candid bowl

The color deepens (as the soul

That burns in mortals leaves its trace

Of bale or beauty on the face),

I'll think,--So let the essence rare

Of years consuming make me fair;

So, 'gainst the ills of life profuse,

Steep me in some narcotic juice;

And if my soul must part with all

That whiteness which we greenness call,

Smooth back, O Fortune, half thy frown,

And make me beautifully brown!

Dream-forger, I refill thy cup

With reverie's wasteful pittance up,

And while the fire burns slow away,

Hiding itself in ashes gray,

I'll think,--As inward Youth retreats,

Compelled to spare his wasting heats,

When Life's Ash-Wednesday comes about,

And my head's gray with fires burnt out,

While stays one spark to light the eye,

With the last flash of memory,

'Twill leap to welcome C.F.B.,

Who sent my favorite pipe to me.

BANKSIDE

(HOME OF EDMUND QUINCY)

DEDHAM, MAY 21, 1877

I christened you in happier days, before

These gray forebodings on my brow were seen;

You are still lovely in your new-leaved green;

The brimming river soothes his grassy shore;

The bridge is there; the rock with lichens hoar;

And the same shadows on the water lean,

Outlasting us. How many graves between

That day and this! How many shadows more

Darken my heart, their substance from these eyes

Hidden forever! So our world is made

Of life and death commingled; and the sighs

Outweigh the smiles, in equal balance laid:

What compensation? None, save that the Allwise

So schools us to love things that cannot fade.

Thank God, he saw you last in pomp of May,

Ere any leaf had felt the year's regret;

Your latest image in his memory set

Was fair as when your landscape's peaceful sway

Charmed dearer eyes with his to make delay

On Hope's long prospect,--as if They forget

The happy, They, the unspeakable Three, whose debt,

Like the hawk's shadow, blots our brightest day:

Better it is that ye should look so fair.

Slopes that he loved, and ever-murmuring pines

That make a music out of silent air,

And bloom-heaped orchard-trees in prosperous lines;

In you the heart some sweeter hints divines,

And wiser, than in winter's dull despair.

III

Old Friend, farewell! Your kindly door again

I enter, but the master's hand in mine

No more clasps welcome, and the temperate wine,

That cheered our long nights, other lips must stain:

All is unchanged, but I expect in vain

The face alert, the manners free and fine,

The seventy years borne lightly as the pine

Wears its first down of snow in green disdain:

Much did he, and much well; yet most of all

I prized his skill in leisure and the ease

Of a life flowing full without a plan;

For most are idly busy; him I call

Thrice fortunate who knew himself to please,

Learned in those arts that make a gentleman.

Nor deem he lived unto himself alone;

His was the public spirit of his sire,

And in those eyes, soft with domestic fire,

A quenchless light of fiercer temper shone

What time about, the world our shame was blown

On every wind; his soul would not conspire

With selfish men to soothe the mob's desire,

Veiling with garlands Moloch's bloody stone;

The high-bred instincts of a better day

Ruled in his blood, when to be citizen

Rang Roman yet, and a Free People's sway

Was not the exchequer of impoverished men,

Nor statesmanship with loaded votes to play,

Nor public office a tramps' boosing-ken.

JOSEPH WINLOCK

DIED JUNE 11, 1875

Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient will

Through years one hair's-breadth on our Dark to gain,

Who, from the stars he studied not in vain,

Had learned their secret to be strong and still,

Careless of fames that earth's tin trumpets fill;

Born under Leo, broad of build and brain,

While others slept, he watched in that hushed fane

Of Science, only witness of his skill:

Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell,

But inextinguishable his luminous trace

In mind and heart of all that knew him well.

Happy man's doom! To him the Fates were known

Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of space,

Unprescient, through God's mercy, of his own!

SONNET

TO FANNY ALEXANDER

Unconscious as the sunshine, simply sweet

And generous as that, thou dost not close

Thyself in art, as life were but a rose

To rumple bee-like with luxurious feet;

Thy higher mind therein finds sure retreat,

But not from care of common hopes and woes;

Thee the dark chamber, thee the unfriended, knows,

Although no babbling crowds thy praise repeat:

Consummate artist, who life's landscape bleak

Hast brimmed with sun to many a clouded eye,

Touched to a brighter hue the beggar's cheek,

Hung over orphaned lives a gracious sky,

And traced for eyes, that else would vainly seek,

Fair pictures of an angel drawing nigh!

JEFFRIES WYMAN

DIED SEPTEMBER 4, 1874

The wisest man could ask no more of Fate

Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,

Safe from the Many, honored by the Few;

To count as naught in World, or Church, or State,

But, inwardly in secret to be great;

To feel mysterious Nature ever new;

To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clue,

And learn by each discovery how to wait.

He widened knowledge and escaped the praise;

He wisely taught, because more wise to learn;

He toiled for Science, not to draw men's gaze,

But for her lore of self-denial stern.

That such a man could spring from our decays

Fans the soul's nobler faith until it burn.

TO A FRIEND

WHO GAVE ME A GROUP OF WEEDS AND GRASSES, AFTER A DRAWING OF DÜRER

True as the sun's own work, but more refined,

It tells of love behind the artist's eye,

Of sweet companionships with earth and sky,

And summers stored, the sunshine of the mind.

What peace! Sure, ere you breathe, the fickle wind

Will break its truce and bend that grass-plume high,

Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly

That flits a more luxurious perch to find.

Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall,

A serene moment, deftly caught and kept

To make immortal summer on my wall.

Had he who drew such gladness ever wept?

Ask rather could he else have seen at all,

Or grown in Nature's mysteries an adept?

WITH AN ARMCHAIR

About the oak that framed this chair, of old

The seasons danced their round; delighted wings

Brought music to its boughs; shy woodland things

Shared its broad roof, 'neath whose green glooms grown bold,

Lovers, more shy than they, their secret told;

The resurrection of a thousand springs

Swelled in its veins, and dim imaginings

Teased them, perchance, of life more manifold.

Such shall it know when its proud arms enclose

My Lady Goshawk, musing here at rest,

Careless of him who into exile goes,

Yet, while his gift by those fair limbs is prest,

Through some fine sympathy of nature knows

That, seas between us, she is still his guest.

Yet sometimes, let me dream, the conscious wood

A momentary vision may renew

Of him who counts it treasure that he knew,

Though but in passing, such a priceless good,

And, like an elder brother, felt his mood

Uplifted by the spell that kept her true,

Amid her lightsome compeers, to the few

That wear the crown of serious womanhood:

Were he so happy, think of him as one

Who in the Louvre or Pitti feels his soul

Rapt by some dead face which, till then unseen,

Moves like a memory, and, till life outrun,

Is vexed with vague misgiving past control,

Of nameless loss and thwarted might-have-been.

E.G. DE R.

Why should I seek her spell to decompose

Or to its source each rill of influence trace

That feeds the brimming river of her grace?

The petals numbered but degrade to prose

Summer's triumphant poem of the rose:

Enough for me to watch the wavering chase,

Like wind o'er grass, of moods across her face,

Fairest in motion, fairer in repose.

Steeped in her sunshine, let me, while I may,

Partake the bounty; ample 'tis for me

That her mirth cheats my temples of their gray,

Her charm makes years long spent seem yet to be.

Wit, goodness, grace, swift flash from grave to gay,--

All these are good, but better far is she.

BON VOYAGE

Ship, blest to bear such freight across the blue,

May stormless stars control thy horoscope;

In keel and hull, in every spar and rope,

Be night and day to thy dear office true!

Ocean, men's path and their divider too,

No fairer shrine of memory and hope

To the underworld adown thy westering slope

E'er vanished, or whom such regrets pursue:

Smooth all thy surges as when Jove to Crete

Swam with less costly burthen, and prepare

A pathway meet for her home-coming soon

With golden undulations such as greet

The printless summer-sandals of the moon

And tempt the Nautilus his cruise to dare!

TO WHITTIER

ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

New England's poet, rich in love as years,

Her hills and valleys praise thee, her swift brooks

Dance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooks

Thy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hears

As maids their lovers', and no treason fears;

Through thee her Merrimacs and Agiochooks

And many a name uncouth win gracious looks,

Sweetly familiar to both Englands' ears:

Peaceful by birthright, as a virgin lake,

The lily's anchorage, which no eyes behold

Save those of stars, yet for thy brother's sake

That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as bold

As that wherewith the heart of Roland brake,

Far heard across the New World and the Old.

ON AN AUTUMN SKETCH OF H.G. WILD

Thanks to the artist, ever on my wall

The sunset stays: that hill in glory rolled,

Those trees and clouds in crimson and in gold,

Burn on, nor cool when evening's shadows fall.

Not round _these_ splendors Midnight wraps her pall;

_These_ leaves the flush of Autumn's vintage hold

In Winter's spite, nor can the Northwind bold

Deface my chapel's western window small:

On one, ah me! October struck his frost,

But not repaid him with those Tyrian hues;

His naked boughs but tell him what is lost,

And parting comforts of the sun refuse:

His heaven is bare,--ah, were its hollow crost

Even with a cloud whose light were yet to lose!

TO MISS D.T.

ON HER GIVING ME A DRAWING OF LITTLE STREET ARABS

As, cleansed of Tiber's and Oblivion's slime,

Glow Farnesina's vaults with shapes again

That dreamed some exiled artist from his pain

Back to his Athens and the Muse's clime,

So these world-orphaned waifs of Want and Crime,

Purged by Art's absolution from the stain

Of the polluting city-flood, regain

Ideal grace secure from taint of time.

An Attic frieze you give, a pictured song;

For as with words the poet paints, for you

The happy pencil at its labor sings,

Stealing his privilege, nor does him wrong,

Beneath the false discovering the true,

And Beauty's best in unregarded things.

WITH A COPY OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE

Leaves fit to have been poor Juliet's cradle-rhyme,

With gladness of a heart long quenched in mould

They vibrate still, a nest not yet grown cold

From its fledged burthen. The numb hand of Time

Vainly his glass turns; here is endless prime;

Here lips their roses keep and locks their gold;

Here Love in pristine innocency bold

Speaks what our grosser conscience makes a crime.

Because it tells the dream that all have known

Once in their lives, and to life's end the few;

Because its seeds o'er Memory's desert blown

Spring up in heartsease such as Eden knew;

Because it hath a beauty all its own,

Dear Friend, I plucked this herb of grace for you.

ON PLANTING A TREE AT INVERARAY

Who does his duty is a question

Too complex to be solved by me,

But he, I venture the suggestion,

Does part of his that plants a tree.

For after he is dead and buried,

And epitaphed, and well forgot,

Nay, even his shade by Charon ferried

To--let us not inquire to what,

His deed, its author long outliving,

By Nature's mother-care increased,

Shall stand, his verdant almoner, giving

A kindly dole to man and beast.

The wayfarer, at noon reposing,

Shall bless its shadow on the grass,

Or sheep beneath it huddle, dozing

Until the thundergust o'erpass.

The owl, belated in his plundering,

Shall here await the friendly night,

Blinking whene'er he wakes, and wondering

What fool it was invented light.

Hither the busy birds shall flutter,

With the light timber for their nests,

And, pausing from their labor, utter

The morning sunshine in their breasts.

What though his memory shall have vanished,

Since the good deed he did survives?

It is not wholly to be banished

Thus to be part of many lives.

Grow, then, my foster-child, and strengthen,

Bough over bough, a murmurous pile,

And, as your stately stem shall lengthen,

So may the statelier of Argyll!

AN EPISTLE TO GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

'De prodome,

Des qu'il s'atorne a grant bonte

Ja n'iert tot dit ne tot conte,

Que leingue ne puet pas retraire

Tant d'enor com prodom set faire.'

CRESTIEN DE TROIES, _Li Romans dou

Chevalier au Lyon_, 784-788.

1874

Curtis, whose Wit, with Fancy arm in arm,

Masks half its muscle in its skill to charm,

And who so gently can the Wrong expose

As sometimes to make converts, never foes,

Or only such as good men must expect,

Knaves sore with conscience of their own defect,

I come with mild remonstrance. Ere I start,

A kindlier errand interrupts my heart,

And I must utter, though it vex your ears,

The love, the honor, felt so many years. 10

Curtis, skilled equally with voice and pen

To stir the hearts or mould the minds of men,--

That voice whose music, for I've heard you sing

Sweet as Casella, can with passion ring,

That pen whose rapid ease ne'er trips with haste,

Nor scrapes nor sputters, pointed with good taste,

First Steele's, then Goldsmith's, next it came to you,

Whom Thackeray rated best of all our crew,--

Had letters kept you, every wreath were yours;

Had the World tempted, all its chariest doors 20

Had swung on flattered hinges to admit

Such high-bred manners, such good-natured wit;

At courts, in senates, who so fit to serve?

And both invited, but you would not swerve,

All meaner prizes waiving that you might

In civic duty spend your heat and light,

Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain

Refusing posts men grovel to attain.

Good Man all own you; what is left me, then,

To heighten praise with but Good Citizen? 30

But why this praise to make you blush and stare,

And give a backache to your Easy-Chair?

Old Crestien rightly says no language can

Express the worth of a true Gentleman,

And I agree; but other thoughts deride

My first intent, and lure my pen aside.

Thinking of you, I see my firelight glow

On other faces, loved from long ago,

Dear to us both, and all these loves combine

With this I send and crowd in every line; 40

Fortune with me was in such generous mood

That all my friends were yours, and all were good;

Three generations come when one I call,

And the fair grandame, youngest of them all,

In her own Florida who found and sips

The fount that fled from Ponce's longing lips.

How bright they rise and wreathe my hearthstone round,

Divine my thoughts, reply without a sound,

And with them many a shape that memory sees,

As dear as they, but crowned with aureoles these! 50

What wonder if, with protest in my thought,

Arrived, I find 'twas only love I brought?

I came with protest; Memory barred the road

Till I repaid you half the debt I owed.

No, 'twas not to bring laurels that I came,

Nor would you wish it, daily seeing fame,

(Or our cheap substitute, unknown of yore,)

Dumped like a load of coal at every door,

Mime and hetæra getting equal weight

With him whose toils heroic saved the State. 60

But praise can harm not who so calmly met

Slander's worst word, nor treasured up the debt,

Knowing, what all experience serves to show,

No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.

You have heard harsher voices and more loud,

As all must, not sworn liegemen of the crowd,

And far aloof your silent mind could keep

As when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep,

The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can know

What hounds her lucent calm drives mad below. 70

But to my business, while you rub your eyes

And wonder how you ever thought me wise.

Dear friend and old, they say you shake your head

And wish some bitter words of mine unsaid:

I wish they might be,--there we are agreed;

I hate to speak, still more what makes the need;

But I must utter what the voice within

Dictates, for acquiescence dumb were sin;

I blurt ungrateful truths, if so they be,

That none may need to say them after me. 80

'Twere my felicity could I attain

The temperate zeal that balances your brain;

But nature still o'erleaps reflection's plan,

And one must do his service as he can.

Think you it were not pleasanter to speak

Smooth words that leave unflushed the brow and cheek?

To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseen

In private box, spectator of the scene

Where men the comedy of life rehearse,

Idly to judge which better and which worse 90

Each hireling actor spoiled his worthless part?

Were it not sweeter with a careless heart,

In happy commune with the untainted brooks,

To dream all day, or, walled with silent books,

To hear nor heed the World's unmeaning noise,

Safe in my fortress stored with lifelong joys?

I love too well the pleasures of retreat

Safe from the crowd and cloistered from the street;

The fire that whispers its domestic joy,

Flickering on walls that knew me still a boy, 100

And knew my saintly father; the full days,

Not careworn from the world's soul-squandering ways,

Calm days that loiter with snow-silent tread,

Nor break my commune with the undying dead;

Truants of Time, to-morrow like to-day,

That come unbid, and claimless glide away

By shelves that sun them in the indulgent Past,

Where Spanish castles, even, were built to last,

Where saint and sage their silent vigil keep,

And wrong hath ceased or sung itself to sleep. 110

Dear were my walks, too, gathering fragrant store

Of Mother Nature's simple-minded lore:

I learned all weather-signs of day or night;

No bird but I could name him by his flight,

No distant tree but by his shape was known,

Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone.

This learning won by loving looks I hived

As sweeter lore than all from books derived.

I know the charm of hillside, field, and wood,

Of lake and stream, and the sky's downy brood, 120

Of roads sequestered rimmed with sallow sod,

But friends with hardhack, aster, goldenrod,

Or succory keeping summer long its trust

Of heaven-blue fleckless from the eddying dust:

These were my earliest friends, and latest too,

Still unestranged, whatever fate may do.

For years I had these treasures, knew their worth,

Estate most real man can have on earth.

I sank too deep in this soft-stuffed repose

That hears but rumors of earth's wrongs and woes; 130

Too well these Capuas could my muscles waste,

Not void of toils, but toils of choice and taste;

These still had kept me could I but have quelled

The Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled.

But there were times when silent were my books

As jailers are, and gave me sullen looks,

When verses palled, and even the woodland path,

By innocent contrast, fed my heart with wrath,

And I must twist my little gift of words

Into a scourge of rough and knotted cords 140

Unmusical, that whistle as they swing

To leave on shameless backs their purple sting.

How slow Time comes! Gone who so swift as he?

Add but a year, 'tis half a century

Since the slave's stifled moaning broke my sleep,

Heard 'gainst my will in that seclusion deep,

Haply heard louder for the silence there,

And so my fancied safeguard made my snare.

After that moan had sharpened to a cry,

And a cloud, hand-broad then, heaped all our sky 150

With its stored vengeance, and such thunders stirred

As heaven's and earth's remotest chambers heard,

I looked to see an ampler atmosphere

By that electric passion-gust blown clear.

I looked for this; consider what I see--

But I forbear, 'twould please nor you nor me

To check the items in the bitter list

Of all I counted on and all I mist.

Only three instances I choose from all,

And each enough to stir a pigeon's gall: 160

Office a fund for ballot-brokers made

To pay the drudges of their gainful trade;

Our cities taught what conquered cities feel

By ædiles chosen that they might safely steal;

And gold, however got, a title fair

To such respect as only gold can bear.

I seem to see this; how shall I gainsay

What all our journals tell me every day?

Poured our young martyrs their high-hearted blood

That we might trample to congenial mud 170

The soil with such a legacy sublimed?

Methinks an angry scorn is here well-timed:

Where find retreat? How keep reproach at bay?

Where'er I turn some scandal fouls the way.

Dear friend, if any man I wished to please,

'Twere surely you whose humor's honied ease

Flows flecked with gold of thought, whose generous mind

Sees Paradise regained by all mankind,

Whose brave example still to vanward shines,

Cheeks the retreat, and spurs our lagging lines. 180

Was I too bitter? Who his phrase can choose

That sees the life-blood of his dearest ooze?

I loved my Country so as only they

Who love a mother fit to die for may;

I loved her old renown, her stainless fame,--

What better proof than that I loathed her shame?

That many blamed me could not irk me long,

But, if you doubted, must I not be wrong?

'Tis not for me to answer; this I know.

That man or race so prosperously low 190

Sunk in success that wrath they cannot feel,

Shall taste the spurn of parting Fortune's heel;

For never land long lease of empire won

Whose sons sate silent when base deeds were done.

POSTSCRIPT, 1887

Curtis, so wrote I thirteen years ago,

Tost it unfinished by, and left it so;

Found lately, I have pieced it out, or tried,

Since time for callid juncture was denied.

Some of the verses pleased me, it is true,

And still were pertinent,--those honoring you. 200

These now I offer: take them, if you will,

Like the old hand-grasp, when at Shady Hill

We met, or Staten Island, in the days

When life was its own spur, nor needed praise.

If once you thought me rash, no longer fear;

Past my next milestone waits my seventieth year.

I mount no longer when the trumpets call;

My battle-harness idles on the wall,

The spider's castle, camping-ground of dust,

Not without dints, and all in front, I trust. 210

Shivering sometimes it calls me as it hears

Afar the charge's tramp and clash of spears;

But 'tis such murmur only as might be

The sea-shell's lost tradition of the sea,

That makes me muse and wonder Where? and When?

While from my cliff I watch the waves of men

That climb to break midway their seeming gain,

And think it triumph if they shake their chain.

Little I ask of Fate; will she refuse

Some days of reconcilement with the Muse? 220

I take my reed again and blow it free

Of dusty silence, murmuring, 'Sing to me!'

And, as its stops my curious touch retries,

The stir of earlier instincts I surprise,--

Instincts, if less imperious, yet more strong,

And happy in the toil that ends with song.

Home am I come: not, as I hoped might be,

To the old haunts, too full of ghosts for me,

But to the olden dreams that time endears,

And the loved books that younger grow with years; 230

To country rambles, timing with my tread

Some happier verse that carols in my head,

Yet all with sense of something vainly mist,

Of something lost, but when I never wist.

How empty seems to me the populous street,

One figure gone I daily loved to meet,--

The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow

Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below!

And, ah, what absence feel I at my side,

Like Dante when he missed his laurelled guide, 240

What sense of diminution in the air

Once so inspiring, Emerson not there!

But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet

Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet,

And Death is beautiful as feet of friend

Coming with welcome at our journey's end;

For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied,

A nature sloping to the southern side;

I thank her for it, though when clouds arise

Such natures double-darken gloomy skies. 250

I muse upon the margin of the sea,

Our common pathway to the new To Be,

Watching the sails, that lessen more and more,

Of good and beautiful embarked before;

With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear

Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere,

Whose friendly-peopled shore I sometimes see,

By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me,

Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun,

My moorings to the past snap one by one. 260

II. SENTIMENT

ENDYMION

A MYSTICAL COMMENT ON TITIAN'S 'SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE'

My day began not till the twilight fell,

And, lo, in ether from heaven's sweetest well,

The New Moon swam divinely isolate

In maiden silence, she that makes my fate

Haply not knowing it, or only so

As I the secrets of my sheep may know;

Nor ask I more, entirely blest if she,

In letting me adore, ennoble me

To height of what the Gods meant making man,

As only she and her best beauty can. 10

Mine be the love that in itself can find

Seed of white thoughts, the lilies of the mind,

Seed of that glad surrender of the will

That finds in service self's true purpose still:

Love that in outward fairness sees the tent

Pitched for an inmate far more excellent;

Love with a light irradiate to the core,

Lit at her lamp, but fed from inborn store;

Love thrice-requited with the single joy

Of an immaculate vision naught could cloy, 20

Dearer because, so high beyond my scope,

My life grew rich with her, unbribed by hope

Of other guerdon save to think she knew

One grateful votary paid her all her due;

Happy if she, high-radiant there, resigned

To his sure trust her image in his mind.

O fairer even than Peace is when she comes

Hushing War's tumult, and retreating drums

Fade to a murmur like the sough of bees

Hidden among the noon-stilled linden-trees, 30

Bringer of quiet, thou that canst allay

The dust and din and travail of the day,

Strewer of Silence, Giver of the dew

That doth our pastures and our souls renew,

Still dwell remote, still on thy shoreless sea

Float unattained in silent empery,

Still light my thoughts, nor listen to a prayer

Would make thee less imperishably fair!

Can, then, my twofold nature find content

In vain conceits of airy blandishment? 40

Ask I no more? Since yesterday I task

My storm-strewn thoughts to tell me what I ask:

Faint premenitions of mutation strange

Steal o'er my perfect orb, and, with the change,

Myself am changed; the shadow of my earth

Darkens the disk of that celestial worth

Which only yesterday could still suffice

Upwards to waft my thoughts in sacrifice;

My heightened fancy with its touches warm

Moulds to a woman's that ideal form; 50

Nor yet a woman's wholly, but divine

With awe her purer essence bred in mine.

Was it long brooding on their own surmise,

Which, of the eyes engendered, fools the eyes,

Or have I seen through that translucent air

A Presence shaped in its seclusions bare,

My Goddess looking on me from above

As look our russet maidens when they love,

But high-uplifted, o'er our human heat

And passion-paths too rough for her pearl feet? 60

Slowly the Shape took outline as I gazed

At her full-orbed or crescent, till, bedazed

With wonder-working light that subtly wrought

My brain to its own substance, steeping thought

In trances such as poppies give, I saw

Things shut from vision by sight's sober law,

Amorphous, changeful, but defined at last

Into the peerless Shape mine eyes hold fast.

This, too, at first I worshipt: soon, like wine,

Her eyes, in mine poured, frenzy-philtred mine; 70

Passion put Worship's priestly raiment on

And to the woman knelt, the Goddess gone.

Was I, then, more than mortal made? or she

Less than divine that she might mate with me?

If mortal merely, could my nature cope

With such o'ermastery of maddening hope?

If Goddess, could she feel the blissful woe

That women in their self-surrender know?

III

Long she abode aloof there in her heaven,

Far as the grape-bunch of the Pleiad seven 80

Beyond my madness' utmost leap; but here

Mine eyes have feigned of late her rapture near,

Moulded of mind-mist that broad day dispels,

Here in these shadowy woods and brook-lulled dells.

Have no heaven-habitants e'er felt a void

In hearts sublimed with ichor unalloyed?

E'er longed to mingle with a mortal fate

Intense with pathos of its briefer date?

Could she partake, and live, our human stains?

Even with the thought there tingles through my veins 90

Sense of unwarned renewal; I, the dead,

Receive and house again the ardor fled,

As once Alcestis; to the ruddy brim

Feel masculine virtue flooding every limb,

And life, like Spring returning, brings the key

That sets my senses from their winter free,

Dancing like naked fauns too glad for shame.

Her passion, purified to palest flame,

Can it thus kindle? Is her purpose this?

I will not argue, lest I lose a bliss 100

That makes me dream Tithonus' fortune mine,

(Or what of it was palpably divine

Ere came the fruitlessly immortal gift;)

I cannot curb my hope's imperious drift

That wings with fire my dull mortality;

Though fancy-forged, 'tis all I feel or see.

My Goddess sinks; round Latmos' darkening brow

Trembles the parting of her presence now,

Faint as the perfume left upon the grass

By her limbs' pressure or her feet that pass 110

By me conjectured, but conjectured so

As things I touch far fainter substance show.

Was it mine eyes' imposture I have seen

Flit with the moonbeams on from shade to sheen

Through the wood-openings? Nay, I see her now

Out of her heaven new-lighted, from her brow

The hair breeze-scattered, like loose mists that blow

Across her crescent, goldening as they go

High-kirtled for the chase, and what was shown,

Of maiden rondure, like the rose half-blown. 120

If dream, turn real! If a vision, stay!

Take mortal shape, my philtre's spell obey!

If hags compel thee from thy secret sky

With gruesome incantations, why not I,

Whose only magic is that I distil

A potion, blent of passion, thought, and will,

Deeper in reach, in force of fate more rich,

Than e'er was juice wrung by Thessalian witch

From moon-enchanted herbs,--a potion brewed

Of my best life in each diviner mood? 130

Myself the elixir am, myself the bowl

Seething and mantling with my soul of soul.

Taste and be humanized: what though the cup,

With thy lips frenzied, shatter? Drink it up!

If but these arms may clasp, o'erquited so,

My world, thy heaven, all life means I shall know.

Sure she hath heard my prayer and granted half,

As Gods do who at mortal madness laugh.

Yet if life's solid things illusion seem,

Why may not substance wear the mask of dream? 140

In sleep she comes; she visits me in dreams,

And, as her image in a thousand streams,

So in my veins, that her obey, she sees,

Floating and flaming there, her images

Bear to my little world's remotest zone

Glad messages of her, and her alone.

With silence-sandalled Sleep she comes to me,

(But softer-footed, sweeter-browed, than she,)

In motion gracious as a seagull's wing,

And all her bright limbs, moving, seem to sing. 150

Let me believe so, then, if so I may

With the night's bounty feed my beggared day.

In dreams I see her lay the goddess down

With bow and quiver, and her crescent-crown

Flicker and fade away to dull eclipse

As down to mine she deigns her longed-for lips;

And as her neck my happy arms enfold,

Flooded and lustred with her loosened gold,

She whispers words each sweeter than a kiss:

Then, wakened with the shock of sudden bliss, 160

My arms are empty, my awakener fled,

And, silent in the silent sky o'erhead,

But coldly as on ice-plated snow, she gleams,

Herself the mother and the child of dreams.