O sweet my friend, hastening with happy steps to your marriage-morn, O
my poet, singing under your hawthorn-tree the song that never can grow
old, am I then a bird of evil omen? Does it thunder towards the left
as I pass by? Be not so credulous. I take no lustre from the
golden-bright day that lies half-hidden under the mild haze of
September: but I would that fair day's light should shine as the
brightness of the firmament for ever and ever. I breathe no blight
upon the hawthorn, no discord to the song; but I would the bloom of
the one and the melody of the other might never die away. Dream, O
maiden! your pleasant dreams; sing, O poet! your happy songs; but
while the flush of the sunrise is yet ruddy on your brows, think it
not strange that I leave your sweet light and go down to them who are
sitting in the region and shadow of death.
Have _I_ written this book? It is but the voice of a thousand aching
hearts. Ten thousand dreary lives are wrought into its pages. It is
the sorrow of just such hearts as yours, the disappointment of just
such hopes, that have found a record here. The gloom that gathers on
these leaves is gloom that hangs over paths just as fair as yours in
their glad beginning. I feast my eyes on the beautiful temple of your
promise, and I pray that you may go no more out of it forever; but I
cannot forget that all my life I have seen highway and byway strewn
with the fragments of temples which in their majesty of completeness
must have been just as marvellous as yours. And being fully persuaded
in my own mind that there is a way whereby the wondrous edifice may be
made as enduring as it is brilliant, shall I not proclaim it
throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof, that the
trumpet of the jubilee may sound? You shall not make the darkness your
pavilion, because the world is hung with gloom; but neither shall you
reckon it offence, if I cannot wholly rejoice in your light for
thinking of the great multitudes who are sitting in a darkness which
may be felt. To-day is lost, but it is not too late for the morrow.
Wasted life can never be restored;--
"Though every summer green the plain,
This harvest cannot bloom again."
Only beyond the grave can a new life spring into beauty, and the death
of this be swallowed up in victory. But for the lives that have not
yet been lavished, for the "poor little maidens" of great-hearted Dr.
Luther, for gentle Magdalenchen, fiery young Lenore, merry Beatrice,
skipping along their separate paths, each to her unknown womanhood, or
walking already through its shadowy ways,--how earnestly for them do
we covet the best gift! But if they fail of this, shall not one show
them how to live worthily without it? Shall not one bid them see how
poor and false and mean is everything which offers itself instead; how
sad were the exchange of an ideal good for a base reality; how fatal
the disaster when the sacred torch pales before a grosser flame? So
through these summer days, my little maid, when all sweet summer
sounds but echo to you the music of one low voice, add to the happy
thought within your heart this happiest thought of all: There shall
come a day when the same sky that bends in blessing above your head
shall bend,--no cloud to darken, but only to adorn, no fogs to hide,
but only mist-wreaths to deck its blue,--soft, serene, and beautiful,
above an earth purified by the same love which makes to you all things
pure. Through that new atmosphere, my poet, the tuneful voices of your
song shall go, wakening all the woods to melody, summoning shy
response from the ever-charmed hills, ringing out over the listening
waters, giving and gathering sweetness wherever a human heart throbs;
till earth, all a-quiver with the harmony, shall lift from the dust
her long-neglected lyre, sweep once more to her place among the stars,
and raise again her happy voice in the unforgotten music of the
spheres.
Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.