THE GHOST-SEER.Ye who, passing graves by night,Glance not to the left or right,Lest a spirit should arise,Cold and white, to freeze your eyes,Some weak phantom, which your doubtShapes upon the dark withoutFrom the dark within, a guessAt the spirit's deathlessness,Which ye entertain with fearIn your self-built dungeon here,Where ye sell your God-given livesJust for gold to buy you gyves,—Ye without a shudder meetIn the city's noonday street,Spirits sadder and more dreadThan from out the clay have fled,Buried, beyond hope of light,In the body's haunted night!See ye not that woman pale?There are bloodhounds on her trail!Bloodhounds two, all gaunt and lean,—For the soul their scent is keen,—Want and Sin, and Sin is last,—They have followed far and fast,Want gave tongue, and, at her howl,Sin awakened with a growl.Ah, poor girl! she had a rightTo a blessing from the light,Title-deeds to sky and earthGod gave to her at her birth,But, before they were enjoyed,Poverty had made them void,And had drunk the sunshine upFrom all nature's ample cup,Leaving her a first-born's shareIn the dregs of darkness there.Often, on the sidewalk bleak,Hungry, all alone, and weak,She has seen, in night and storm,Rooms o'erflow with firelight warm,Which, outside the window-glass,Doubled all the cold, alas!Till each ray that on her fellStabbed her like an icicle,And she almost loved the wailOf the bloodhounds on her trail.Till the floor becomes her bier,She shall feel their pantings near,Close upon her very heels,Spite of all the din of wheels;Shivering on her pallet poor,She shall hear them at the doorWhine and scratch to be let in,Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin!Hark! that rustle of a dress,Stiff with lavish costliness!Here comes one whose cheek would flushBut to have her garment brush'Gainst the girl whose fingers thinWove the weary broidery in,Bending backward from her toil,Lest her tears the silk might soil,And, in midnight's chill and murk,Stitched her life into the work,Shaping from her bitter thoughtHeart's-ease and forget-me-not,Satirizing her despairWith the emblems woven there.Little doth the wearer heedOf the heart-break in the brede;A hyena by her sideSkulks, down-looking,—it is Pride.He digs for her in the earth,Where lie all her claims of birth,With his foul paws rooting o'erSome long-buried ancestor,Who, perhaps, a statue wonBy the ill deeds he had done,By the innocent blood he shed,By the desolation spreadOver happy villages,Blotting out the smile of peace.There walks Judas, he who soldYesterday his Lord for gold,Sold God's presence in his heartFor a proud step in the mart;He hath dealt in flesh and blood,—At the bank his name is good,At the bank, and only there,'Tis a marketable ware.In his eyes that stealthy gleamWas not learned of sky or stream,But it has the cold, hard glintOf new dollars from the mint.Open now your spirit's eyes,Look through that poor clay disguiseWhich has thickened, day by day,Till it keeps all light at bay,And his soul in pitchy gloomGropes about its narrow tomb,From whose dank and slimy wallsDrop by drop the horror falls.Look! a serpent lank and coldHugs his spirit fold on fold;From his heart, all day and night,It doth suck God's blessed light.Drink it will, and drink it must,Till the cup holds naught but dust;All day long he hears it hiss,Writhing in its fiendish bliss;All night long he sees its eyesFlicker with foul ecstasies,As the spirit ebbs awayInto the absorbing clay.Who is he that skulks, afraidOf the trust he has betrayed,Shuddering if perchance a gleamOf old nobleness should streamThrough the pent, unwholesome room,Where his shrunk soul cowers in gloom,—Spirit sad beyond the restBy more instinct for the best?'Tis a poet who was sentFor a bad world's punishment,By compelling it to seeGolden glimpses of To Be,By compelling it to hearSongs that prove the angels near;Who was sent to be the tongueOf the weak and spirit-wrung,Whence the fiery-winged DespairIn men's shrinking eyes might flare.'Tis our hope doth fashion usTo base use or glorious:He who might have been a larkOf Truth's morning, from the darkRaining down melodious hopeOf a freer, broader scope,Aspirations, prophecies,Of the spirit's full sunrise,Chose to be a bird of night,Which with eyes refusing light,Hooted from some hollow treeOf the world's idolatry.'Tis his punishment to hearFlutterings of pinions near,And his own vain wings to feelDrooping downward to his heel,All their grace and import lost,Burdening his weary ghost:Ever walking by his sideHe must see his angel guide,Who at intervals doth turnLooks on him so sadly stern,With such ever-new surpriseOf hushed anguish in her eyes,That it seems the light of dayFrom around him shrinks away,Or drops blunted from the wallBuilt around him by his fall.Then the mountains, whose white peaksCatch the morning's earliest streaks,He must see, where prophets sit,Turning east their faces lit,Whence, with footsteps beautiful,To the earth, yet dim and dull,They the gladsome tidings bring,Of the sunlight's hastening:Never can those hills of blissBe o'erclimbed by feet like his!But enough! O, do not dareFrom the next the veil to tear,Woven of station, trade, or dress,More obscene than nakedness,Wherewith plausible culture drapesFallen Nature's myriad shapes!Let us rather love to markHow the unextinguished sparkWill shine through the thin disguiseOf our customs, pomps, and lies,And, not seldom blown to flame,Vindicate its ancient claim.1844.
STUDIES FOR TWO HEADS.I.Some sort of heart I know is hers,—I chanced to feel her pulse one night;A brain she has that never errs,And yet is never nobly right;It does not leap to great results,But in some corner out of sight,Suspects a spot of latent blight,And, o'er the impatient infinite,She bargains, haggles, and consults.Her eye,—it seems a chemic testAnd drops upon you like an acid;It bites you with unconscious zest,So clear and bright, so coldly placid;It holds you quietly aloof,It holds,—and yet it does not win you;It merely puts you to the proofAnd sorts what qualities are in you;It smiles, but never brings you nearer,It lights,—her nature draws not nigh;'Tis but that yours is growing clearerTo her assays;—yes, try and try,You'll get no deeper than her eye.There, you are classified: she's goneFar, far away into herself;Each with its Latin label on,Your poor components, one by one,Are laid upon their proper shelfIn her compact and ordered mind,And what of you is left behindIs no more to her than the wind;In that clear brain, which, day and night,No movement of the heart e'er jostles,Her friends are ranged on left and right,—Here, silex, hornblende, sienite;There, animal remains and fossils.And yet, O subtile analyst,That canst each property detectOf mood or grain, that canst untwistEach tangled skein of intellect,And with thy scalpel eyes lay bareEach mental nerve more fine than air,—O brain exact, that in thy scalesCanst weigh the sun and never err,For once thy patient science fails,One problem still defies thy art;—Thou never canst compute for herThe distance and diameterOf any simple human heart.II.Hear him but speak, and you will feelThe shadows of the PorticoOver your tranquil spirit steal,To modulate all joy and woeTo one subdued, subduing glow;Above our squabbling business-hours,Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers,His nature satirizes ours;A form and front of Attic grace,He shames the higgling market-place,And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.What throbbing verse can fitly renderThat face,—so pure, so trembling-tender?Sensation glimmers through its rest,It speaks unmanacled by words,As full of motion as a nestThat palpitates with unfledged birds;'Tis likest to Bethesda's stream,Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,White with the angel's coming gleam,And rippled with his fanning wings.Hear him unfold his plots and plans,And larger destinies seem man's;You conjure from his glowing faceThe omen of a fairer race;With one grand trope he boldly spansThe gulf wherein so many fall,'Twixt possible and actual;His first swift word, talaria-shod,Exuberant with conscious God,Out of the choir of planets blotsThe present earth with all its spots.Himself unshaken as the sky,His words, like whirlwinds, spin on highSystems and creeds pellmell together;'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye,While trees uprooted splinter by,The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;Less of iconoclast than shaper,His spirit, safe behind the reachOf the tornado of his speech,Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper.So great in speech, but, ah! in actSo overrun with vermin troubles,The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly factOf life collapses all his bubbles:Had he but lived in Plato's day,He might, unless my fancy errs,Have shared that golden voice's swayO'er barefooted philosophers.Our nipping climate hardly suitsThe ripening of ideal fruits:His theories vanquish us all summer,But winter makes him dumb and dumberTo see him mid life's needful thingsIs something painfully bewildering;He seems an angel with clipt wingsTied to a mortal wife and children,And by a brother seraph takenIn the act of eating eggs and bacon.Like a clear fountain, his desireExults and leaps toward the light,In every drop it says "Aspire!"Striving for more ideal height;And as the fountain, falling thence,Crawls baffled through the common gutterSo, from his speech's eminence,He shrinks into the present tense,Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.Yet smile not, worldling, for in deedsNot all of life that's brave and wise is;He strews an ampler future's seeds,'Tis your fault if no harvest rises;Smooth back the sneer; for is it naughtThat all he is and has is Beauty's?By soul the soul's gains must be wrought,The Actual claims our coarser thought,The Ideal hath its higher duties.
ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO.Can this be thou who, lean and pale,With such immitigable eyeDidst look upon those writhing souls in bale,And note each vengeance, and pass byUnmoved, save when thy heart by chanceCast backward one forbidden glance,And saw Francesca, with child's glee,Subdue and mount thy wild-horse kneeAnd with proud hands control its fiery prance?With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow,And eye remote, that inly seesFair Beatrice's spirit wandering nowIn some sea-lulled Hesperides,Thou movest through the jarring street,Secluded from the noise of feetBy her gift-blossom in thy hand,Thy branch of palm from Holy Land;—No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.Yet there is something round thy lipsThat prophesies the coming doom,The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipseNotches the perfect disk with gloom;A something that would banish thee,And thine untamed pursuer be,From men and their unworthy fates,Though Florence had not shut her gates,And grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.Ah! he who follows fearlesslyThe beckonings of a poet-heartShall wander, and without the world's decree,A banished man in field and mart;Harder than Florence' walls the barWhich with deaf sternness holds him farFrom home and friends, till death's release,And makes his only prayer for peace,Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong war!
ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD.Death never came so nigh to me before,Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I musedOf calm and peace and deep forgetfulness,Of folded hands, closed eye, and heart at rest,And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf,Of faults forgotten, and an inner placeKept sacred for us in the heart of friends;But these were idle fancies, satisfiedWith the mere husk of this great mystery,And dwelling in the outward shows of things.Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams,Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youthAim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom,With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up,Whose golden rounds are our calamities,Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer GodThe spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.True is it that Death's face seems stern and cold,When he is sent to summon those we love,But all God's angels come to us disguised;Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death,One after other lift their frowning masks,And we behold the seraph's face beneath,All radiant with the glory and the calmOf having looked upon the front of God.With every anguish of our earthly partThe spirit's sight grows clearer; this was meantWhen Jesus touched the blind man's lids with clay.Life is the jailer, Death the angel sentTo draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.He flings not ope the ivory gate of Rest,—Only the fallen spirit knocks at that,—But to benigner regions beckons us,To destinies of more rewarded toil.In the hushed chamber, sitting by the dead,It grates on us to hear the flood of lifeWhirl rustling onward, senseless of our loss.The bee hums on; around the blossomed vineWhirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps;The locust's shrill alarum stings the ear;Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farm,His cheery brothers, telling of the sun,Answer, till far away the joyance dies:We never knew before how God had filledThe summer air with happy living sounds;All round us seems an overplus of life,And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.It is most strange, when the great miracleHath for our sakes been done, when we have hadOur inwardest experience of God,When with his presence still the room expands,And is awed after him, that naught is changed,That Nature's face looks unacknowledging,And the mad world still dances heedless onAfter its butterflies, and gives no sign.'Tis hard at first to see it all aright;In vain Faith blows her trump to summon backHer scattered troop; yet, through the clouded glassOf our own bitter tears, we learn to lookUndazzled on the kindness of God's face;Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through.It is no little thing, when a fresh soulAnd a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scopeFor good, not gravitating earthward yet,But circling in diviner periods,Are sent into the world,—no little thing,When this unbounded possibilityInto the outer silence is withdrawn.Ah, in this world, where every guiding threadEnds suddenly in the one sure centre, death,The visionary hand of Might-have-beenAlone can fill Desire's cup to the brim!How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child's!He bends abovethycradle now, or holdsHis warning finger out to be thy guide;Thou art the nurseling now; he watches theeSlow learning, one by one, the secret thingsWhich are to him used sights of every day;He smiles to see thy wondering glances conThe grass and pebbles of the spirit world,To thee miraculous; and he will teachThy knees their due observances of prayer.Children are God's apostles, day by daySent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace,Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone.To me, at least, his going hence hath givenSerener thoughts and nearer to the skies,And opened a new fountain in my heartFor thee, my friend, and all: and, O, if DeathMore near approaches meditates, and claspsEven now some dearer, more reluctant hand,God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may seeThat 'tis thine angel, who, with loving haste,Unto the service of the inner shrineDoth waken thy belovèd with a kiss!1844.
EURYDICE.Heaven's cup held down to me I drain,The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain;Bathing in grass, with thirsty eyeI suck the last drop of the sky;With each hot sense I draw to the leesThe quickening out-door influences,And empty to each radiant comerA supernaculum of summer:Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juiceCould bring enchantment so profuse,Though for its press each grape-bunch hadThe white feet of an Oread.Through our coarse art gleam, now and then,The features of angelic men;'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paintGlows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint;The dauber's botch no more obscuresThe mighty Master's portraitures.And who can say what luckier beamThe hidden glory shall redeem,For what chance clod the soul may waitTo stumble on its nobler fate,Or why, to his unwarned abode,Still by surprises comes the God?Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross,May mediate a whole youth's loss,Some windfall joy, we know not whence,Redeem a lifetime's rash expense,And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark,Stripped of their simulated dark,Mountains of gold that pierce the sky,Girdling its valleyed poverty.I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return,With olden heats my pulses burn,—Mine be the self-forgetting sweep,The torrent impulse swift and wild,Wherewith Taghkanic's rockborn childDares gloriously the dangerous leap,And, in his sky-descended mood,Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood,By touch of bravery's simple wand,To amethyst and diamond,Proving himself no bastard slip,But the true granite-cradled one,Nursed with the rock's primeval drip,The cloud-embracing mountain's son!Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's swayRebuilds the vanished yesterday;For plated wares of Sheffield stampWe gave the old Aladdin's lamp;'Tis we are changed; ah, whither wentThat undesigned abandonment,That wise, unquestioning content,Which could erect its microcosmOut of a weed's neglected blossom,Could call up Arthur and his peersBy a low moss's clump of spears,Or, in its shingle trireme launched,Where Charles in some green inlet branched,Could venture for the golden fleeceAnd dragon-watched Hesperides,Or, from its ripple-shattered fate,Ulysses' chances recreate?When, heralding life's every phase,There glowed a goddess-veiling haze,A plenteous, forewarning grace,Like that more tender dawn that fliesBefore the full moon's ample rise?Methinks thy parting glory shinesThrough yonder grove of singing pines;At that elm-vista's end I traceDimly thy sad leave-taking face,Eurydice! Eurydice!The tremulous leaves repeat to meEurydice! Eurydice!No gloomier Orcus swallows theeThan the unclouded sunset's glow;Thine is at least Elysian woe;Thou hast Good's natural decay,And fadest like a star awayInto an atmosphere whose shineWith fuller day o'ermasters thine,Entering defeat as 't were a shrine;For us,—we turn life's diary o'erTo find but one word,—Nevermore.1845.
SHE CAME AND WENT.As a twig trembles, which a birdLights on to sing, then leaves unbent,So is my memory thrilled and stirred;—I only know she came and went.As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven,The blue dome's measureless content,So my soul held that moment's heaven;—I only know she came and went.As, at one bound, our swift spring heapsThe orchards full of bloom and scent,So clove her May my wintry sleeps;—I only know she came and went.An angel stood and met my gaze,Through the low doorway of my tent;The tent is struck, the vision stays;—I only know she came and went.O, when the room grows slowly dim,And life's last oil is nearly spent,One gush of light these eyes will brim,Only to think she came and went.
THE CHANGELING.I had a little daughter,And she was given to meTo lead me gently backwardTo the Heavenly Father's knee,That I, by the force of nature,Might in some dim wise divineThe depth of his infinite patienceTo this wayward soul of mine.I know not how others saw her,But to me she was wholly fair,And the light of the heaven she came fromStill lingered and gleamed in her hair;For it was as wavy and golden,And as many changes took,As the shadows of sun-gilt ripplesOn the yellow bed of a brook.To what can I liken her smilingUpon me, her kneeling lover,How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids,And dimpled her wholly over,Till her outstretched hands smiled also,And I almost seemed to seeThe very heart of her motherSending sun through her veins to me!She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,And it hardly seemed a day,When a troop of wandering angelsStole my little daughter away;Or perhaps those heavenly ZingariBut loosed the hampering strings,And when they had opened her cage-doorMy little bird used her wings.But they left in her stead a changeling,A little angel child,That seems like her bud in full blossom,And smiles as she never smiled:When I wake in the morning, I see itWhere she always used to lie,And I feel as weak as a violetAlone 'neath the awful sky.As weak, yet as trustful also;For the whole year long I seeAll the wonders of faithful NatureStill worked for the love of me;Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,Rain falls, suns rise and set,Earth whirls, and all but to prosperA poor little violet.This child is not mine as the first was,I cannot sing it to rest,I cannot lift it up fatherlyAnd bliss it upon my breast;Yet it lies in my little one's cradleAnd sits in my little one's chair,And the light of the heaven she's gone toTransfigures its golden hair.
THE PIONEER.What man would live coffined with brick and stone,Imprisoned from the influences of air,And cramped with selfish land-marks everywhere,When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone,The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?What man would read and read the selfsame faces,And, like the marbles which the windmill grinds,Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds,This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces,When there are woods and un-man-stifled places?What man o'er one old thought would pore and pore,Shut like a book between its covers thinFor every fool to leave his dog's-ears in,When solitude is his, and God for evermore,Just for the opening of a paltry door?What man would watch life's oozy elementCreep Letheward forever, when he mightDown some great river drift beyond men's sight,To where the undethronèd forest's royal tentBroods with its hush o'er half a continent?What man with men would push and altercate,Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends,When he can have the skies and woods for friends,Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate,And in himself be ruler, church, and state?Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest,The wingèd brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan;The serf of his own Past is not a man;To change and change is life, to move and never rest;—Not what we are, but what we hope, is best.The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind;Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet,Patching one whole of many incomplete;The general preys upon the individual mind,And each alone is helpless as the wind.Each man is some man's servant; every soulIs by some other's presence quite discrowned;Each owes the next through all the imperfect round,Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal,And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll.Here, life the undiminished man demands;New faculties stretch out to meet new wants;What Nature asks, that Nature also grants;Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands,And to his life is knit with hourly bands.Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old ways,Before you harden to a crystal coldWhich the new life can shatter, but not mould;Freedom for you still waits, still, looking backward, stays,But widens still the irretrievable space.
LONGING.Of all the myriad moods of mindThat through the soul come thronging,Which one was e'er so dear, so kind,So beautiful as Longing?The thing we long for, that we areFor one transcendent moment,Before the Present poor and bareCan make its sneering comment.Still, through our paltry stir and strife,Glows down the wished Ideal,And Longing moulds in clay what LifeCarves in the marble Real;To let the new life in, we know,Desire must ope the portal;—Perhaps the longing to be soHelps make the soul immortal.Longing is God's fresh heavenward willWith our poor earthward striving;We quench it that we may be stillContent with merely living;But, would we learn that heart's full scopeWhich we are hourly wronging,Our lives must climb from hope to hopeAnd realize our longing.Ah! let us hope that to our praiseGood God not only reckonsThe moments when we tread his ways,But when the spirit beckons,—That some slight good is also wroughtBeyond self-satisfaction,When we are simply good in thought,Howe'er we fail in action.
ODE TO FRANCE.FEBRUARY, 1848.I.As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanchesBuild up their imminent crags of noiseless snow,Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launchesAnd the blind havoc leaps unwarned below,So grew and gathered through the silent yearsThe madness of a People, wrong by wrong.There seemed no strength in the dumb toiler's tears,—No strength in suffering;—but the Past was strong:The brute despair of trampled centuriesLeaped up with one hoarse yell and snapped its bands,Groped for its right with horny, callous hands,And stared around for God with bloodshot eyes.What wonder if those palms were all too hardFor nice distinctions,—if that mænad throng—They whose thick atmosphere no bardHad shivered with the lightning of his song,Brutes with the memories and desires of men,Whose chronicles were writ with iron pen,In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low—Set wrong to balance wrong,And physicked woe with woe?II.They did as they were taught; not theirs the blame,If men who scattered firebrands reaped the flame:They trampled Peace beneath their savage feet,And by her golden tresses drewMercy along the pavement of the street.O, Freedom! Freedom! is thy morning-dewSo gory red? Alas, thy light had ne'erShone in upon the chaos of their lair!They reared to thee such symbol as they knew,And worshipped it with flame and blood,A Vengeance, axe in hand, that stoodHolding a tyrant's head up by the clotted hair.III.What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know;These have found piteous voice in song and prose;But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe,Their grinding centuries,—what Muse had those?Though hall and palace had nor eyes nor ears,Hardening a people's heart to senseless stone,Thou knowest them, O Earth, that drank their tears,O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan!They noted down their fetters, link by link;Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink;Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men,—Notched with a headman's axe upon a block:What marvel if, when came the avenging shock,'Twas Ate, not Urania, held the pen?IV.With eye averted and an anguished frown,Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife,Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down,Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife;Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feetTurn never backward: hers no bloody glare;Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet,And where it enters there is no despair:Not first on palace and cathedral spireQuivers and gleams that unconsuming fire;While these stand black against her morning skies,The peasant sees it leap from peak to peakAlong his hills; the craftsman's burning eyesOwn with cool tears its influence mother-meek;It lights the poet's heart up like a star;—Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar,And twined with golden threads his futile snare,That swift, convicting glow all round him ran;'Twas close beside him there,Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man.V.O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit?A dynasty plucked out as 't were a weedGrown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed!Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root?But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain,—A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off,Thy race has ceased to reign,And thou become a fugitive and scoff:Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold,And weakest of all fences one of steel;—Go and keep school again like him of old,The Syracusan tyrant;—thou mayst feelRoyal amid a birch-swayed commonweal!VI.Not long can he be ruler who allowsHis time to run before him; thou wast naughtSoon as the strip of gold about thy browsWas no more emblem of the People's thought:Vain were thy bayonets against the foeThou hadst to cope with; thou didst wageWar not with Frenchmen merely;—no,Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age,The invisible Spirit whose first breath divineScattered thy frail endeavor,And, like poor last year's leaves, whirled thee and thineInto the Dark forever!VII.Is here no triumph? Nay, what thoughThe yellow blood of Trade meanwhile should pourAlong its arteries a shrunken flow,And the idle canvas droop around the shore?These do not make a state,Nor keep it great;I think God madeThe earth for man, not trade;And where each humblest human creatureCan stand, no more suspicious or afraid,Erect and kingly in his right of nature,To heaven and earth knit with harmonious ties,—Where I behold the exultationOf manhood glowing in those eyesThat had been dark for ages,—Or only lit with bestial loves and rages—There I behold a Nation:The France which liesBetween the Pyrenees and RhineIs the least part of France;I see her rather in the soul whose shineBurns through the craftsman's grimy countenance,In the new energy divineOf Toil's enfranchised glance.VIII.And if it be a dream,—If the great Future be the little Past'Neath a new mask, which drops and shows at lastThe same weird, mocking face to balk and blast,—Yet, Muse, a gladder measure suits the theme,And the Tyrtæan harpLoves notes more resolute and sharp,Throbbing, as throbs the bosom, hot and fast:Such visions are of morning,Theirs is no vague forewarning,The dreams which nations dream come true,And shape the world anew;If this be a sleep,Make it long, make it deep,O Father, who sendest the harvests men reap!While Labor so sleepethHis sorrow is gone,No longer he weepeth,But smileth and steepethHis thoughts in the dawn;He heareth Hope yonderRain, lark-like, her fancies,His dreaming hands wanderMid heart's-ease and pansies;"'Tis a dream! 'Tis a vision!"Shrieks Mammon aghast;"The day's broad derisionWill chase it at last;Ye are mad, ye have taken,A slumbering krakenFor firm land of the Past!"Ah! if he awaken,God shield us all then,If this dream rudely shakenShall cheat him again!IX.Since first I heard our North wind blow,Since first I saw Atlantic throwOn our fierce rocks his thunderous snow,I loved thee, Freedom; as a boyThe rattle of thy shield at MarathonDid with a Grecian joyThrough all my pulses run;But I have learned to love thee nowWithout the helm upon thy gleaming brow,A maiden mild and undefiledLike her who bore the world's redeeming child;And surely never did thy altars glanceWith purer fires than now in France;While, in their bright white flashes,Wrong's shadow, backward cast,Waves cowering o'er the ashesOf the dead, blaspheming Past,O'er the shapes of fallen giants,His own unburied brood,Whose dead hands clench defianceAt the overpowering Good:And down the happy future runs a floodOf prophesying light;It shows an Earth no longer stained with blood,Blossom and fruit where now we see the budOf Brotherhood and Right.