On glist'ring beds of welt'ring leaves;
The starlight through the trees doth peep,
And fairy garments weaves.
And in the mere, all lily fair,
A maiden's corpse floats evermore,
Naked, and in her raven hair
Wrapped o'er and o'er.
And when the clock of yon old town
Peals midnight o'er the fenny heath,
In haunted chambers up and down
Marches the pomp of Death:
And stiff, stiff silks make rustlings,
Sweep sable satins murmuringly;
And then a voice so sweetly sings
An olden melody.
And foam-white creatures flit and dance
Along the dusty galleries,
With long, loose locks that strangely glance
And demon-glaring eyes.
But in one chamber, when the moon
Casts her cold silver wreath on wreath,
Holds there proud state on ghastly throne
The skeleton Death.
SUBSTRATUM.
Hear you r o music in the creaks
Made by the sallow grasshopper,
Who in the hot weeds sharply breaks
The mellow dryness with his cheer?
Or did you by the hearthstones hear
The cricket's kind, shrill strain when frost
Worked mysteries of silver near
Upon the casement's panes, and lost
Without the gate-post seemed a sheeted ghost?
Or through the dank, dim Springtide's night
Green minstrels of the marshlands tune
Their hoarse lyres in the pale twilight,
Hailing the sickle of the moon
From flag-thronged pools that glassed her lune?
Or in the Summer, dry and loud,
The hard cicada whirr aboon
His long lay in a poplar's cloud,
When the thin heat rose wraith-like in a shroud?
The cloud that lids the naked moon,
And smites the myriad leaves with night
Of stormy lashes, livid strewn
With veins of branched and splintered light;
The fruitful glebe with blossoms white,
The thistle's purple plume; the tears
Pearling the matin buds' delight,
Contain a something, it appears,
'Neath their real selves--a poetry that cheers.
Nor scoff at those who on the wold
See fairies whirling in the shine
Of prodigal moons, whose lavish gold
Paves wood-ways, forests wild with vine,
When all the wilderness with wine
Of tipsy dew is dazed; nor say
Our God's restricted to confine
His wonders solely to the day,
That yields the abstract tangible to clay.
Ponder the entrance of the Morn
When from her rubric forehead far
Shines one clean star, and the dead tarn,
The wooded river's red as war:
Where arid splinters of the scar
Lock horns above a blue abyss,
How roses prank each icy bar,
While piled aloft the mountains press,
Fling dawn below from many a hoary tress.
The jutting crags, all stubborn-veined
With iron life, where eaglets scream
In dizzy flocks, and cleave the stained
Mist-rainbows of the mountain stream;
Thus you will drink the thickest cream
Of nature if you do not scan
The bald external; and must deem
A plan existent in a plan--
As life in thrifty trees or soul in man.
ALONG THE OHIO.
Athwart a sky of brass rich ribs of gold;
A bullion bulk the wide Ohio lies;
Beneath the sunset, billowing manifold,
The purple hill-tops rise.
And lo! the crescent of a crystal moon,
And great cloud-feathers flushed with crimson light
Drifting above the pureness of her lune,
Rent from the wings of night.
A crescent boat slips o'er the burnished stream;
A silver wake, that broadens far behind,
Follows in ripples, and the paddles gleam
Against the evening wind.
So, in this solitude and evening hush,
Again to me the Old Kentucky glooms
Behold the red man lurking in yon bush
In paint and eagle plumes.
And now the breaking of the brittle brush--
An altered forehead hirsute swells in view,
And now comes stealing down the river's gush
The dip of the canoe.
The wigwams glimmer in night's settling waves,
And, wildly clad, around the camp-fire's glow
Sit long-haired chieftains 'mid their wily braves,
Each grasping his war-bow.
But now yon boat on fading waters fades;
The ostrich-feathered clouds have lost their light,
And from the West, like somber sachem shades,
Gallop the shades of night.
The broad Ohio wavers 'neath the stars,
And many murmurs whisper 'mid the woods--
Tumultuous mournings of dead warriors
For their lost solitudes.
And like a silver curl th' Ohio lies
Among the earth's luxuriance of hair;
Majestic as she met the red man's eyes--
As beautiful and fair.
No marvel that the warrior's love waxed flame
Fighting for thee, Kentucky, till he wound
Inseparably 'round thee that old name
Of dark and bloody ground!
But peace to those wild braves whose bones are thine!
And peace to those rude pioneers whose moon
Of glory rose, 'mid stars of lesser shine,
In name of Daniel Boone!
"Peace! peace!" the lips of all thy forests roar;
The rivers mutter peace unto thy strand:
Thy past is dead, and let us name thee o'er,
THE HOSPITABLE LAND!
THE OHIO FALLS.
Here on this jutting headland, where the trees
Spread a dusk carpet for the sun to cast
And count his golden guineas on, we'll stay;
For hence is the best prospect of the Falls,
Whose roar no more astounds the startled ear,
As when we bent and marked it from the bridge
Seething beneath and bounding like a steed--
A tameless steed with mane of flying spray--
Between the pillars rising sheer above.
But mark how soft its clamor now is grown,
Incessant rush like that of vernal groves
When, like some sweet surprise, a wand'ring wind,
Precursor of the coming rain, rides down
From a gray cloud and sets their leafy tongues
A-gabbing of the fresh, impending shower.
There runs the dam, and where its dark line cuts
The river's sheen, already you may see
The ripples glancing to the fervid sun,
As if the waves had couched a hundred spears
And tossed a hundred plumes of fleecy foam
In answer to the challenge of the Falls,
Blown on his bugle from the battlements
Of his subaqueous city's rocky walls.
And now you see their maddened coursers charge,
Hear wavy hoof-strokes on the jagged stones,
That pave the pathway of the current, beat,
While billowing they ride to ringing lists,
With shout and yell, and toss their hundred plumes,
And shock their riply spears in tournament
Upon the opposing billows' shining shields.
Now sinks a pennon, but 'tis raised again;
There falls or breaks a spear or sparkling sword;
A shattered helmet flies in flakes of foam
And on the frightened wind hisses away:
And o'er it all you hear the sound, the roar
Of waves that fall in onset or that strive.
On, on they come, a beautiful, mad troop!
On, on, along the sandy banks that fling
Red pebble-freckled arms far out to stay
The riotous waves that ride and hurl along
In casque and shield and wind their wat'ry horns.
And there where thousand oily eddies whirl,
And turn and turn like busy wheels of steel,
Is the Big Eddy, whose deep bottom none
As yet have felt with sounding plummet-line.
Like a huge giant, wily in its strength,
The Eddy lies; and bending from the shore
The spotted sycamores have looked and looked,
Watching his motions as a school boy might
A sleeping serpent coiled upon his path.
So long they've watched that their old backs have grown
Hump'd, gnarl'd, and crooked, nor seem they this to heed,
But gaze and gaze, and from the glossy waves
Their images stare back their wonderment.
Mayhap they've seen the guardian Genius lie
At its dark bottom in an oozy cave
Of shattered rock, recumbent on his mace
Of mineral; his locks of dripping green
Circling a crown of ore; his fishy eyes
Dull with the monotony of his aqueous realms.
But when the storm's abroad and smites the waves
With stinging lashes of the myriad rain,
Or scars with thunder some ancestral oak,
Sire of a forest, then he wakes in wrath,
And on the dark foundations of the stream
Stands monarch of the flood in iron crown,
And murmurs till the tempest fiends above
Stand stark with awe, and all the eddy breaks
To waves like those whose round and murky bulks.
Ribbed white with foam, wallow like battened swine
Along yon ridge of ragged rock o'erstrewn
With petrifactions of Time's earliest dawn;
Mollusks and trilobites and honey-combs
Of coral white; and here and there a mass
Of what seems writhing reptiles there convolved,
And in one moment when the change did come,
Which made and unmade continents and seas,
That teemed and groaned with dire monstrosities,
Had froze their glossy spines to sable stones.
There where uprises a dun knoll o'erstrewn
With black and rotten stumps in the mid river,
Erst rose an island green and beautiful
With willows, beeches, dappled sycamores;
Corn Island, on whose rich and fertile soil
The early pioneers a colony
Attempted once to found, ere ever this
Fair "City of the Falls"--now echoing to
The tingling bustle of its busy trade--
Was dreamed of. Here the woodman built
His rude log cabin; here he sowed his maize;
Here saw it tassel 'neath the Summer's smile,
And glance like ranks of feathered Indians thro'
The misty vistas of the broken woods;
Here reaped and sheaved its wealth of ivory ears
When Autumn came like a brown Indian maid
Tripping from the pink sunset o'er the hills,
That blushed for love and cast beneath her feet
Untold of gold in leaves and yellow fruit.
Here lived the pioneer and here he died,
And mingled his rough dust with the raw earth
Of that long isle which now disparted stands,
And nothing save a bed of limestone rock,--
Where in the quarry you may see the blast
Spout heavenward the dust and dirt and stone,
And flap and pound its echoes 'round the hills
Like giant strokes of some huge airy hammer,--
And that lone mound of stumpy earth to show
That there once stood an isle as rich and fair
As any isle that rises up to kiss
The sun and dream in tropic seas of balm.
There lies the other half of what was once
Corn Island; a broad channel flows between.
And this low half, mantled with a dwarf growth
Of what was once high brakes and forest land,
Goose Island now is named. In the dim morn,
Ere yet the East assumes her faintest blush.
Here may you hear the melancholy snipe
Piping, or see her paddling in the pools
That splash the low bed of the rocky isle.
Once here the Indian stole in natural craft
From brush to brush, his head plumes like a bird
Flutt'ring and nodding 'mid the undergrowth;
In his brown hand the pliant, polished bow,
And at his back his gaudy quiver filled
With tufted arrows headed with blue flint.
And while the deep flamingo colored West
Flamed on his ruddy cheek its airy fire,
Strung his quick bow and thro' the gray wild goose,
That rose with clamor from the rushy pool,
Launched a fleet barb, crested with quills--perchance
Plucked yestere'en from its dead mate's gray wing
To decorate the painted shaft that should
Dabble to-day their white in its mate's blood;--
It falling, gasping at its moccasined feet,
Its wild life breathed away, while the glad brave
Whooped to the sunset, and yon faint blue hills
Answered his exultation with a whoop.
THE RUINED MILL.
There is the ruined water-mill
With its rotten wheel, that stands as still
As its image that sleeps in the glassy pool
Where the water snake coils dim and cool
In the flaky light of the setting sun
Showering his gold in bullion.
And the languid daisies nod and shine
By the trickling fall in a starry line;
The drowsy daisies with eyes of gold--
Large as the eyes of a queen of old
Dreaming of revels by day and night--
Coyly o'erdropped with lashes white.
The hawk sails high in the sleepy air,
The buzzard on wings as strong and fair
Circles and stoops 'neath the lazy cloud,
And crows in the wood are cawing aloud.
Will ye enter with me this ruined mill
When the shades of night its chambers fill,
Stand and lurk in the heavy dark
Like scowling fiends, each eye a spark,
A spark of moonlight shot thro' gloom?
While a moist, rank, stifling, dead perfume
Of rotting timbers and rotting grain,
And roofs all warped with the sun and rain
Makes of the stagnant air a cell,
In the haunted chambers broods like a spell?
A spell that makes the awed mind run
To the thoughts of a hidden skeleton,
A skeleton ghastly and livid and lank
'Neath the mossy floors in a cellar dank,
Grinning and glow'ring, moisture wet,
In its hollow eyes a mad regret.
Or with me enter when the evening star
In the saffron heaven is sparkling afar,
In all its glory of light divine,
Like a diamond bathed in kingly wine.
Or when the heavens hang wild and gray,
And the chilly clouds are hurrying away
Like the driven leaves of an Autumn day;
When the night-rain sounds on the sodden roof,
And the spider lulls in his dusty woof;
When the wet wind whines like a hound that's lashed,
'Round the crazy angles strongly dashed,
Or wails in a cranny--'tis she who plays
On her airy harp sad, olden lays,
And sings and moans in a room above
Of a vague despair and a blighted love.
You will see her sit on the shattered sill,
Her sable tresses dropped loose at will;
And down in the West 'neath the storm's black bank
A belt of wild green, cold, livid, and lank,
And a crescent moon, like a demon's barque,
Into the green dips a horn from the dark,
While a lurid light of ghoulish gold
On the eldrich creature falls strangely cold.
Her insane eyes bulge mad with desire,
And her face's beauty is darkly dire;
For she sees in the pool, that solidly lies
'Neath the mill's great wheel and the stormy skies,
Her murdered lover lie faint and white,
A haunting horror, a loadstone's might
Drawing and dragging her soul from its seat
To the glimmering ice of his ghastly feet.
FROST.
White artist he, who, breezeless nights,
From tingling stars jocosely whirls,
A harlequin in spangled tights,
His wand a pot of pounded pearls.
The field a hasty pallet; for,
In thin or thick, with daub and streak,
It stretches from the barn-gate's bar
To the bleached ribbon of the creek.
A great geometer is he;
For, on the creek's diaphanous silk,
Sphere, cone, and star exquisitely
He's drawn in crystal lines of milk.
Most delicate, his talent keen
On casement panes he lavishes,
In many a Lilliputian scene
Of vague white hives and milky bees,
That sparkling in still swarms delight,
Or bow the jeweled bells of flowers;--
Of dim, deep landscapes of the night,
Hanging down limpid domes quaint showers
Of feathery stars and meteors
Above an upland's glimmering ways,
Where gambol 'neath the feverish stars
The erl-king and the fleecy fays.
Or last, one arabesque of ferns,
Chrysanthemums and mistletoe,
And death-pale roses bunched in urns
That with an innate glory glow.
In leafless woodlands saturnine,
Where reckless winds, like goblins mad,
Screech swinging in each barren vine,
His wagship shapes a lesson sad:
When slyly touched by his white hand
Of Midas-magic, forests old
Dariuses of pomp then stand
Barbaric-crowned with living gold....
Patrician state, plebeian blood
Soon foster sybarites, and they,
Squand'ring their riches, wood by wood,
Die palsied wrecks debauched and gray.
INVOCATION.
I.
O Life! O Death! O God!
Have I not striven?
Have I not known thee, God,
As thy stars know Heaven?
Have I not held thee true,
True as thy deepest,
Sweet and immaculate blue,
Of nights that feel thy dew?
Have I not _known_ thee true,
O God that keepest?
II.
O God, my father, God!
Didst give me fire
To rise above the clod,
And soar, aspire!
What tho' I strive and strive,
And all my life says live,
The sneerful scorn of men
But beats it down again;
And, O! sun-centered high,
O God! grand poet!
Beneath thy tender sky
Each day new Keatses die,
And thou dost know it!
III.
They know thee beautiful!
They know thee bitter!
And all their eyes are full,
O God! most beautiful!
Of tears that glitter.
Thou art above their tears;
Thou art beyond their years;
Thou sittest, God of Hosts,
Among thy glorious ghosts,
So high and holy;
And canst thou know the tears,
The strivings and the fears,
O God of godly peers!
Of such so lowly?
IV.
They who were fondly fain
To tell what mother pain
Of Nature makes the rain;
They who were glad to know
The sorrow of her snow,
Of her wild winds the woe;
The magic of her light,
The passion of her night,
And of her death the might;
They who had tears and sighs
For every bud that dies
While the dew on it lies;
They who had utterance for
Each warm, rose-hearted star
That stammers from afar;
The demon of vast seas,
The lips of lyric trees,
Lays of sonorous bees;
The fragrance-fays that dower
Each wildwood bosk and bower
With its faint musk of flower;
Of Time the feverish flight;
Earth, man, and, last, man's right
To thee, O Infinite!
FAIRIES.
On the tremulous coppice,
From her plenteous hair,
Large golden-rayed poppies
Of moon-litten air
The Night hath flung there.
In the fern-favored hollow
The fire-flies fleet
Uncertainly follow
Pale phantoms of heat,
Druid shadows that meet.
Hidden flowers are fragrant;
The night hazes furl
O'er the solitudes vagrant
In purple and pearl,
Sway-swinging and curl.
From moss-cushioned valley
Where the red sunlight fails,
Rocks where musically
The hollow spring wails,
And the limber fern trails,
With a ripple and twinkle
Of luminous arms,
Of voices that tinkle,
And feet that are storms
Of chaste, naked charms,
Like echoes that revel
On hills, where the brier
Vaults roofs of dishevel
And green, greedy fire,
They come as a choir.
At the root of the mountain
Where the dim forest lies,
By the spar-spouting fountain
Where the low lily dies,
With their star-stinging eyes.
They gather sweet singing
In voices that seem
Faint ringing and clinging
In dreams that we dream,
In visions that gleam.
Sweet lisping of kisses,
Dry rustle of hair;
A footfall that hisses
Like a leaf in the air
When the brown boughs are bare.
The music that scatters
From love-litten eyes;
The music that flatters
In words and low sighs,
In laughter that dies:
"Come hither, come hither,
In the million-eyed night,
Ere the moon-flowers wither
And the harvester white,
Morning reaps them with light.
"Come hither, where singing
Is pleasant as tears,
Or dead kisses, clinging
To the murdering years,
In memory's ears.
"Come hither where kisses
Are waiting for you,
For lips and long tresses,
As for wild flowers blue
The moon-heated dew.
"Come hither from coppice
And violet dale,
The mountain whose top is
In vapors that sail
With pearly hail pale.
"Why tarry? come hither
While the molten moon beams,
Ere the golden spark wither
Of the glow-worm that gleams
Like a star in still streams!"
THE TRYST.
Had fallen a fragrant shower;
The leaves were dripping yet;
Each fern and rain-weighed flower
Around were gleaming wet;
On ev'ry bosky bower
A million gems were set.
The dust's moist odors sifted
Cool with the summer rain,
Mixed with the musk that drifted
From orchard and from plain;--
Her garden's fence white lifted
Its length along the lane.
The moon the clouds had shattered
In curdled peaks of pearl;
The honeysuckle scattered
Warm odors from each curl,
Where the white moonlight, flattered,
Hung molten 'round a girl.
Then grew the night completer
With light and cloud and air;
Aromas sweet blew sweeter,
Sweet flowers fair, more fair;
Fleet feet and fast grew fleeter
Thro' that fair sorceress there.
AN ANTIQUE.
Mildewed and gray the marble stairs
Rise from their balustraded urns
To where a chiseled satyr glares
From a luxuriant bed of ferns;
A pebbled walk that labyrinths
'Twixt parallels of verdant box
To where, broad-based on grotesque plinths,
'Mid cushions of moss-padded rocks,
Rises a ruined pleasure-house,
Of shattered column, broken dome,
Where, reveling in thick carouse,
The buoyant ivy makes its home.
And here from bank, and there from bed,
Down the mad rillet's jubilant lymph,
The lavish violet's odors shed
In breathings of a fountain nymph.
And where, in lichened hoariness,
The broken marble dial-plate
Basks in the Summer's sultriness,
Rich houri roses palpitate.
Voluptuous, languid with perfumes,
As were the beauties that of old,
In damask satins, jeweled plumes,
With powdered gallants here that strolled.
When slender rapiers, proud with gems,
Sneered at the sun their haughty hues,
And Touchstone wit and apothegms
Laughed down the long, cool avenues.
Two pleated bowers of woodbine pave,
'Neath all their heaviness of musk,
Two fountains of pellucid wave,
With sunlight-tessellated dusk.
Beholding these, I seem to feel
An exodus of earthly sight,
An influx of ecstatic weal
Poured thro' my eyes in jets of light.
And so I see the fountains twain
Of hate and love in Arden there;
The time of regal Charlemagne,
Of Roland and of Oliver.
Rinaldo of Montalban's towers
Sleeps by the spring of hate; above
Bows, spilling all his face with flowers,
Angelica, who quaffed of love.
A GUINEVERE.
Sullen gold down all the sky,
In the roses sultry musk;
Nightingales hid in the dusk
Yonder sob and sigh.
You are here; and I could weep,
Weep for joy and suffering.
"Where is he?" He'd have me sing;--
There he sits asleep.
Think not of him! he is dead
For the moment to us twain;
He were dead but for this pain
Drumming in my head.
"Am I happy?" Ask the fire
When it bursts its bounds and thrills
Some mad hours as it wills
If those hours tire.
He had gold. As for the rest--
Well you know how they were set,
Saying that I must forget,
And 'twas for the best.
I forget! but let it go!--
Kiss me as you did of old.
There! your kisses are not cold!
Can you love me so,
Knowing what I am to him
Sitting in his gouty chair
On the breezy terrace where
Amber fire-flies swim?
"Yes?"--Your cheek a tear-drop wets,
But your kisses on my lip
Fall as warm as bees that sip
Sweets from violets.
See! the moon has risen white
As this bursten lily here
Rocking on the dusky mere
Like a silent light.
Let us walk. We soon must part--
All too soon! but he may miss!
Give me but another kiss;
It will heat my heart
And the bitter winter there.
So; we part, my Launcelot,
My true knight! and am I not
Your true Guinevere?
Oft they parted thus they tell
In that mystical romance.
Were they placed, think you, perchance,
For such love in hell?
No! it can not, can not be!
Love is God and God is love,
And they live and love above,
Guinevere and he!
I must go now. See! there fell,
Molten into purple light,
One wild star. Kiss me good-night;
And, once more, farewell!
CLOUDS.
All through the tepid Summer night
The starless sky had poured a cool
Monotony of pleasant rain
In music beautiful.
And for an hour I'd sat to watch
Clouds moving on majestic feet,
Had heard down avenues of night
Their hearts of thunder beat;
Saw ponderous limbs far-veined with gold
Pulse fiery life o'er wood and plain,
While scattered, fell from monstrous palms
The largess of the rain;
Beholding at each lightning's flash
The generous silver on the sod,
In meek devotion bowed, I thanked
These almoners of God.
NO MORE.
I.
The slanted storm tossed at their feet
The frost-nipped Autumn leaves;
The park's high pines were caked with sleet
And ice-spears armed the eaves.
They strolled adown the pillared pines
To part where wet and twisted vines
About the gate-posts flapped and beat.
She watched him dimming in the rain
Along the river's misty shore,
And laughed with lips that sneered disdain
"To meet no more!"
II.
'Mong heavy roses weighed with dew
The chirping crickets hid;
Down the honeysuckle avenue
Creaked the green katydid.
The scattered stars smiled thro' the pines;
Thro' stately windows draped with vines
The rising moonlight's silver blew.
He stared at lips proud, white, and dead,
A chiseled calm that wore;
Despair moaned on the lips that said
"To meet no more."
DESERTED.
A broken rainbow on the skies of May
Touching the sodden roses and low clouds,
And in wet clouds like scattered jewels lost:
Upon the heaven of a soul the ghost
Of a great love, perfect in its pure ray,
Touching the roses moist of memory
To die within the Present's grief of clouds--
A broken rainbow on the skies of May.
A flashing humming-bird amid strange flowers,
Or red or white; its darting length of tongue
Sucking and drinking all the cell-stored sweet,
And now the surfeit and the hurried fleet:
A love that put into expanding bowers
Of one's large heart a tongue's persuasive powers
To cream with joy, and riffled, so was gone--
A flashing humming-bird amid strange flowers.
A foamy moon which thro' a night of fleece
Moves amber girt into a bulk of dark,
And, lost to eye, rims all the black with froth:
A love of smiles, that, tinctured like a moth,
Moved thro' a soul's night-dun and made a peace--
More bland than Melancholy's white--to cease
In blanks of Time zoned with pale Memory's spark--
A foamy moon that brinks a storm with fleece.