1.
Entranced I saw a vision in the cloudThat loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky,Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the eye,Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasyIn golden mist, an ever-shifting crowd:There, 'mid unreal forms that came and wentIn 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, 10Beside her visionary wheel she bentLike Aretë or Bertha, nor than theyLess queenly in her port; about her kneeGlad 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 woundIn lustrous coils, a natural diadem.The cloud changed shape, obsequious to the whim 20Of some transmuting influence felt in me,And, looking now, a wolf I seemed to seeLimned 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 30Her 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 seenHer image, bodied forth by love and pride,The fearless, the benign, the mother-eyed,The fairer world's toil-consecrated queen.
2.
What shape by exile dreamed elates the mindLike hers whose hand, a fortress of the poor,No blood in vengeance spilt, though lawful, stains? 40Who 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, 50Blessed in all tongues and dear to every blood,The beautiful, the strong, and, best of all, the good.
3.
Seven years long was the bowOf battle bent, and the heighteningStorm-heaps convulsed with the throeOf their uncontainable lightning;Seven years long heard the seaCrash of navies and wave-borne thunder;Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee,And new stars were seen, a world's wonder; 60Each by her sisters made bright,All binding all to their stations,Cluster of manifold lightStartling 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?
4.
Stormy the day of her birth: 69Was 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 beatHigher 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 belongOf right to her confident eyes:Human and motherly they, 81Careless of station or race:Hearken! her children to-dayShout for the joy of her face.
1.
No praises of the past are hers,No fanes by hallowing time caressed,No broken arch that ministersTo Time's sad instinct in the breast;She has not gathered from the yearsGrandeur of tragedies and tears, 90Nor from long leisure the unrestThat finds repose in forms of classic grace:These may delight the coming raceWho haply shall not count it to our crimeThat we who fain would sing are here before our time.She also hath her monuments;Not such as stand decrepitly resignedTo ruin-mark the path of dead eventsThat left no seed of better days behind,The tourist's pensioners that show their scars 100And maunder of forgotten wars;She builds not on the ground, but in the mind,Her open-hearted palacesFor 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 treesWhose sacrificial smokes through peaceful airRise lost in heaven, the household's silent prayer;What architect hath bettered these? 110With softened eye the westward traveller seesA thousand miles of neighbors side by side,Holding by toil-won titles fresh from GodThe lands no serf or seigneur ever trod,With manhood latent in the very sod,Where the long billow of the wheatfield's tideFlows to the sky across the prairie wide,A sweeter vision than the castled Rhine,Kindly with thoughts of Ruth and Bible-days benign.
2.
O ancient commonwealths, that we revere 120Haply because we could not know you near,Your deeds like statues down the aisles of TimeShine peerless in memorial calm sublime,And Athens is a trumpet still, and Rome;Yet which of your achievements is not foamWeighed with this one of hers (below you farIn fame, and born beneath a milder star),That to Earth's orphans, far as curves the domeOf death-deaf sky, the bounteous West means home,With dear precedency of natural ties 130That stretch from roof to roof and make men gently wise?And if the nobler passions wane,Distorted to base use, if the near goalOf insubstantial gainTempt from the proper race-course of the soulThat crowns their patient breathWhose feet, song-sandalled, are too fleet for Death,Yet may she claim one privilege urbaneAnd haply first upon the civic roll,That none can breathe her air nor grow humane. 140
3.
Oh, better far the briefest hourOf Athens self-consumed, whose plastic powerHid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone;Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles crowdWhose fulgurous vans about the world had blownTriumphant 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! 150Yet art came slowly even to such as those.Whom no past genius cheated of their ownWith prudence of o'ermastering precedent;Petal by petal spreads the perfect rose,Secure of the divine event;And only children rend the bud half-blownTo forestall Nature in her calm intent:Time hath a quiver full of purposesWhich miss not of their aim, to us unknown,And brings about the impossible with ease: 160Haply for us the ideal dawn shall breakFrom where in legend-tinted lineThe peaks of Hellas drink the morning's wine,To tremble on our lids with mystic signTill the drowsed ichor in our veins awakeAnd set our pulse in time with moods divine:Long the day lingered in its sea-fringed nest,Then touched the Tuscan hills with golden lanceAnd paused; then on to Spain and FranceThe splendor flew, and Albion's misty crest: 170Shall 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?
1.
Poets, as their heads grow gray,Look from too far behind the eyes,Too long-experienced to be wiseIn guileless youth's diviner way;Life sings not now, but prophesies;Time's shadows they no more behold, 180But, under them, the riddle oldThat 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 wineStored from the Muse's mintage bright,By age imbued with second-sight.From Faith's own eyelids there peeps out, 190Even as they look, the leer of doubt;The festal wreath their fancy loadsWith care that whispers and forebodes:Nor this our triumph-day can blunt Megæra's goads.
2.
Murmur of many voices in the airDenounces 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, 200Seed-field of simpler manners, braver truth,Where shams should cease to dominateIn household, church, and state?Is this Atlantis? This the unpoisoned soil,Sea-whelmed for ages and recovered late,Where parasitic greed no more should coilBound Freedom's stem to bend awry and blightWhat grew so fair, sole plant of love and light?Who sit where once in crowned seclusion sateThe long-proved athletes of debate 210Trained 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 browBrooded those bolts of thought that all the horizon knew?
3.
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, 220Trance me in moonshine as before the flightOf years had won me this unwelcome rightTo see things as they are, or shall he soon,In the frank prose of undissembling noon!
4.
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 230To dull my vision of that only stateFounded 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 belongTime's prudent doubt or age's wrong,But gifts of gratitude and song:Unsummoned crowd the thankful words, 241As sap in spring-time floods the tree.Foreboding the return of birds,For all that thou hast been to me!
1.
Flawless his heart and tempered to the coreWho, 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, 250Bugbear 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-castTheir moorings from the habitable PastAnd ventured chartless on the seaOf storm-engendering Liberty:For all earth's width of waters is a span, 260And 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.
2.
They steered by stars the elder shipmen knew,And laid their courses where the currents drawOf ancient wisdom channelled deep in law.The undaunted fewWho changed the Old World for the New, 270And more devoutly prizedThan all perfection theorizedThe more imperfect that had roots and grew.They founded deep and well,Those danger-chosen chiefs of menWho still believed in Heaven and Hell,Nor hoped to find a spell,In some fine flourish of a pen,To make a better manThan long-considering Nature will or can, 280Secure 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 schemesOf what man might be in some bubble-sphere,As if he must be other than he seemsBecause he was not what he should be here, 290Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams:Yet herein they were greatBeyond 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.
3.
God of our fathers, Thou who wast,Art, and shalt be when those eye-wise who floutThy secret presence shall be lostIn the great light that dazzles them to doubt, 301We, sprung from loins of stalwart menWhose strength was in their trustThat Thou woudst make thy dwelling in their dustAnd walk with those a fellow-citizenWho build a city of the just,We, who believe Life's bases restBeyond the probe of chemic test,Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near,Sure that, while lasts the immutable decree, 310The land to Human Nature dearShall not be unbeloved of Thee.
ComeDicestiegli ebbe?non viv' egli ancora?Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome?
1.
The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrillMakes 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 oldThe horny foot of PanStamped, and the conscious horror ranBeneath men's feet through all her fibres cold:Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throeFrom underground of our night-mantled foe: 10The flame-winged feetOf Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod runThrough briny abysses dreamless of the sun,Are mercilessly fleet,And at a bound annihilateOcean's prerogative of short reprieve;Surely ill news might wait,And man be patient of delay to grieve:Letters have sympathiesAnd tell-tale faces that reveal, 20To senses finer than the eyes.Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;They wind a sorrow round with circumstanceTo stay its feet, nor all unwarned displaceThe veil that darkened from our sidelong glanceThe inexorable face:But now Fate stuns as with a mace;The savage of the skies, that men have caughtAnd some scant use of language taught,Tells only what he must,— 30The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.
2.
So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,I scanned the festering news we half despiseYet 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 messThe Land of Honest Abraham serves of lateTo teach the Old World how to wait, 40When suddenly,As happens if the brain, from overweightOf 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
3.
Uprooted is our mountain oak,That promised long security of shadeAnd brooding-place for many a wingèd thought;Not by Time's softly cadenced strokeWith pauses of relenting pity stayed,But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed,From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caughtAnd in his broad maturity betrayed!
4.
Well might I, as of old, appeal to you,O mountains, woods, and streams, 60To 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 sinceThat teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince, 70And drown in music the heart's bitter cry!Lead me some steps in your directer way,Teach me those words that strike a solid rootWithin 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 byWith those clear parts of him that will not die.Himself from out the recent dark I claim 80To 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, 90Mistaking catalogue for character,)His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame.Nor would I scant him with judicial breathAnd turn mere critic in an epitaph;I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaffThat swells fame living, chokes it after death,And would but memorize the shining halfOf his large nature that was turned to me:Fain had I joined with those that honored himWith eyes that darkened because his were dim, 100And now been silent: but it might not be.
1.
In some the genius is a thing apart,A pillared hermit of the brain,Hoarding with incommunicable artIts intellectual gain;Man's web of circumstance and fateThey from their perch of self observe,Indifferent as the figures on a slateAre to the planet's sun-swung curveWhose bright returns they calculate; 110Their nice adjustment, part to part,Were shaken from its serviceable moodBy unpremeditated stirs of heartOr 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, 120Dazed 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 lureThe unpractised foot, impatient of a guide,Tow'rd ether too attenuately pureFor sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride,But better loved the foothold sure 130Of paths that wind by old abodes of menWho 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, 140The enigma of creation to surprise,His truer instinct sought the life that speaksWithout 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 reboundFrom 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! 150Virtues 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 tooHe by the light of listening faces knew,And his rapt audience all unconscious lentTheir own roused force to make him eloquent;Persuasion fondled in his look and tone;Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bringTo find new charm in accents not her own; 160Her coy constraints and icy hindrancesMelted 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, controlledBy 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
2.
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 bareAt manhood's simple level, and where'erHe met a stranger, there he left a friend.How large an aspect! nobly un-severe,With freshness round him of Olympian cheer, 180Like 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.
1.
The garrulous memoriesGather again from all their far-flown nooks,Singly at first, and then by twos and threes,Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks 190Thicken their twilight filesTow'rd Tintern's gray repose of roofless aisles:Once more I see him at the table's headWhen Saturday her monthly banquet spreadTo 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 worthOf undeliberate mirth, 200
Natures benignly mixed of air and earth,Now with the stars and now with equal zestTracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.
2.
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 remainImmortal, changeless creatures of the brain:Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most,Of sense or spirit to the truly sane; 210In this abstraction it were light to deemMyself the figment of some stronger dream;They are the real things, and I the ghostThat 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.
3.
Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,The latest parted thence,His features poised in genial armistice 220And armed neutrality of self-defenceBeneath 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 hearsThe infallible strategy of volunteersMaking through Nature's walls its easy breach,And seems to learn where he alone could teach.Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fillsAs he our fireside were, our light and heat, 230Centre where minds diverse and various skillsFind 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 lipsWhile Holmes's rockets, curve their long ellipse,And burst in seeds of fire that burst againTo drop in scintillating rain.
4.
There too the face half-rustic, half-divine, 240Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,Of him who taught us not to mow and mopeAbout our fancied selves, but seek our scopeIn Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope,Content with our New World and timely boldTo challenge the o'ermastery of the Old;Listening with eyes averse I see him sitPricked with the cider of the Judge's wit(Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again),While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline 250Curves sharper to restrainThe merriment whose most unruly moodsPass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woodsOf silence-shedding pine:Hard by is he whose art's consoling spellHath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel,His look still vernal 'mid the wintry ringOf petals that remember, not foretell,The paler primrose of a second spring.
5.
And more there are: but other forms arise 260And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes:First he from sympathy still held apartBy shrinking over-eagerness of heart,Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's sweepHeightened 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 270And building robins wondered at our tears,Snatched in his prime, the shape augustThat 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, 280Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweetWith 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, 290But, 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.
6.
Yea truly, as the sallowing years 301Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leavesPushed 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, 310While my starved fire burns low,And homeless winds at the loose casement whineShrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.
1.
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 moonRocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon, 321And Boston shows a soft Venetian sideIn that Arcadian light when roof and tree,Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wideShivered the winter stars, while all below,As if an end were come of human ill,The world was wrapt in innocence of snowAnd the cast-iron bay was blind and still;These were our poetry; in him perhaps 330Science had barred the gate that lets in dream,And he would rather count the perch and breamThan with the current's idle fancy lapse;And yet he had the poet's open eyeThat 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; 340Then he who many cities knew and many minds,And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian formsOf misty memory, bade them live anewAs 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 profuseMuch worldly wisdom kept for others' use,Not for his own, for he was rash and free, 350His purse or knowledge all men's, like the sea.Still can I hear his voice's shrilling might(With pauses broken, while the fitful sparkHe blew more hotly rounded on the darkTo hint his features with a Rembrandt light)Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck,Or Cuvier's taller shade, and many moreWhom 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 360Of 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 earI half hear his who mine shall never hear.
2.
Sometimes it seemed as if New England airFor his large lungs too parsimonious were,As if those empty rooms of dogma drear 370Where the ghost shivers of a faith austereCounting the horns o'er of the Beast,Still scaring those whose faith to it is least,As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphereThat sharpen all the needles of the East,Had been to him like death,Accustomed to draw Europe's freer breathIn a more stable element;Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose,Our practical horizon, grimly pent, 380Our 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 fineOf sanguinaria over-rash to blowAnd trust its shyness to an air malign; 390Well might he prize truth's warranty and pledgeIn the grim outcrop of our granite edge,Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at needIn 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 400Carry one temperature, his nature largeMade its own climate, nor could any margeTraced 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 dwellOf prospect sweeter than the pastures fairHigh-hung of viny Neufchâtel;Nor, surely, did he missSome pale, imaginary blissOf earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss. 411
1.
I cannot think he wished so soon to dieWith all his senses full of eager heat,And rosy years that stood expectant byTo buckle the winged sandals on their feet,He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweetTook 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, 420Tenants 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 springAs the birds feel it, when it bids them sing,Only once more to see the moonThrough leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elmsCurve her mild sickle in the WestSweet with the breath of haycocks, were a boonWorth any promise of soothsayer realms 430Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest;To take December by the beardAnd 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-endsLingered by cosy chimney-nooks,With high companionship of booksOr slippered talk of friendsAnd sweet habitual looks,Is better than to stop the ears with dust: 441Too soon the spectre comes to say, 'Thou must!'
2.
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, 450Them overtakes the doomTo 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 forgiveTill 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, 460And, once we hear the hopelessHe is dead,So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.
1.
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 defacedWith granite permanence of cockney tasteAnd all those grim disfigurements we love:There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste 470Nature rebels at: and it is not trueOf those most precious parts of him we knew:Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,'Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tentsSunk 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, 480To rise again in plants and breathe and grow,To stream as tides the ocean caverns through,Or with the rapture of great winds to blowAbout earth's shaken coignes, were not a fateTo leave us all-disconsolate;Even endless slumber in the sweetening sodOf charitable earthThat takes out all our mortal stains,And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod,Methinks were better worthThan the poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains, 491The heart's insatiable ache:But such was not his faith,Nor mine: it may be he had trodOutside the plain old path ofGod thus spake,But God to him was very GodAnd not a visionary wraithSkulking in murky corners of the mind,And he was sure to beSomehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, 500Not 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 oldWelcome and own him of their peaceful fold,Not truly with the guild enrolledOf him who seeking inward guessedDiviner riddles than the rest,And groping in the darks of thoughtTouched the Great Hand and knew it not; 510Rather 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.
2.
The shape erect is prone: forever stilledThe 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 520The being hath put on which lately hereSo many-friended was, so full of cheerTo make men feel the Seeker's noble zest,We have not lost him all; he is not goneTo the dumb herd of them that wholly die;The beauty of his better self lives onIn minds he touched with fire, in many an eyeHe trained to Truth's exact severity;He was a Teacher: why be grieved for himWhose living word still stimulates the air? 530In endless file shall loving scholars comeThe glow of his transmitted touch to share,And trace his features with an eye less dimThan ours whose sense familiar wont makes dumb.
Dear Wendell, why need count the yearsSince 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 doWith poets? What Time's fruitless toothWith gay immortals such as youWhose 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 deathWith dust of saints and scholars sweet.
Our legends from one source were drawn,I scarce distinguish yours from mine,Anddon'twe make the Gentiles yawnWith 'You remembers?' o'er our wine!
If I, with too senescent air,Invade your elder memory's pale,You snub me with a pitying 'WhereWere you in the September Gale?'
Both stared entranced at Lafayette,Saw Jackson dubbed with LL.D.What Cambridge saw not strikes us yetAs scarcely worth one's while to see.
Ten years my senior, when my nameIn Harvard's entrance-book was writ,Her halls still echoed with the fameOf 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 timesHave flown from our familiar elms;As many poets with their rhymesOblivion's darkling dust o'erwhelms.
The birds are hushed, the poets goneWhere no harsh critic's lash can reach,And still your wingèd brood sing onTo all who love our English speech.
Nay, let the foolish records heThat 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.
Youwith 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 songOf fame's great antiseptic—Style,You with the classic few belongWho tempered wisdom with a smile.
Outlive us all! Who else like youCould sift the seedcorn from our chaff,And make us with the pen we knewDeathless at least in epitaph?
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 beadsOf mortal thoughts, forever old and new.Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!
The moral? Where Doubt's eddies toss and twirlFaith's slender shallop till her footing reel,Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.
At length arrived, your book I takeTo read in for the author's sake;Too gray for new sensations grown,Can charm to Art or Nature knownThis 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 toneOf theLesboum, barbiton,At mastery, through long finger-ache,At length arrived.
As I read on, what changes stealO'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 cliptcharmilleWatteau as Pierrot leads the reel;Tabor and pipe the dancers guideAs I read on.
While in and out the verses wheelThe wind-caught robes trim feet reveal,Lithe ankles that to music glide,But chastely and by chance descried;Art? Nature? Which do I most feelAs I read on?
The pipe came safe, and welcome too,As anything must be from you;A meerschaum pure, 'twould float as lightAs 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 glowOf beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot;Its clay is but congested lymphJove chose to make some choicer nymph;And here combined,—why, this must beThe birth of some enchanted sea,Shaped to immortal form, the typeAnd very Venus of a pipe.
When high I heap it with the weedFrom Lethe wharf, whose potent seedNicotia, big from Bacchus, boreAnd cast upon Virginia's shore,I'll think,—So fill the fairer bowlAnd wise alembic of thy soul,With herbs far-sought that shall distil,Not fumes to slacken thought and will,But bracing essences that nerveTo 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 bredBy 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 bowlThe color deepens (as the soulThat burns in mortals leaves its traceOf bale or beauty on the face),I'll think,—So let the essence rareOf 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 allThat whiteness which we greenness call,Smooth back, O Fortune, half thy frown,And make me beautifully brown!
Dream-forger, I refill thy cupWith 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.
I christened you in happier days, beforeThese 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 betweenThat day and this! How many shadows moreDarken my heart, their substance from these eyesHidden forever! So our world is madeOf life and death commingled; and the sighsOutweigh the smiles, in equal balance laid:What compensation? None, save that the AllwiseSo 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 setWas fair as when your landscape's peaceful swayCharmed dearer eyes with his to make delayOn Hope's long prospect,—as if They forgetThe 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 pinesThat 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.
Old Friend, farewell! Your kindly door againI enter, but the master's hand in mineNo more clasps welcome, and the temperate wine,That cheered our long nights, other lips must stain:All is unchanged, but I expect in vainThe face alert, the manners free and fine,The seventy years borne lightly as the pineWears its first down of snow in green disdain:Much did he, and much well; yet most of allI prized his skill in leisure and the easeOf a life flowing full without a plan;For most are idly busy; him I callThrice 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 shoneWhat time about, the world our shame was blownOn every wind; his soul would not conspireWith selfish men to soothe the mob's desire,Veiling with garlands Moloch's bloody stone;The high-bred instincts of a better dayRuled in his blood, when to be citizenRang Roman yet, and a Free People's swayWas not the exchequer of impoverished men,Nor statesmanship with loaded votes to play,Nor public office a tramps' boosing-ken.
Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient willThrough 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 faneOf Science, only witness of his skill:Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell,But inextinguishable his luminous traceIn mind and heart of all that knew him well.Happy man's doom! To him the Fates were knownOf orbs dim hovering on the skirts of space,Unprescient, through God's mercy, of his own!
Unconscious as the sunshine, simply sweetAnd generous as that, thou dost not closeThyself in art, as life were but a roseTo 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 bleakHast 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!
The wisest man could ask no more of FateThan 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 decaysFans the soul's nobler faith until it burn.
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 windWill break its truce and bend that grass-plume high,Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded flyThat flits a more luxurious perch to find.Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall,A serene moment, deftly caught and keptTo 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?
1.
About the oak that framed this chair, of oldThe seasons danced their round; delighted wingsBrought music to its boughs; shy woodland thingsShared its broad roof, 'neath whose green glooms grown bold,Lovers, more shy than they, their secret told;The resurrection of a thousand springsSwelled in its veins, and dim imaginingsTeased them, perchance, of life more manifold.Such shall it know when its proud arms encloseMy 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 knowsThat, seas between us, she is still his guest.
2.
Yet sometimes, let me dream, the conscious woodA momentary vision may renewOf him who counts it treasure that he knew,Though but in passing, such a priceless good,And, like an elder brother, felt his moodUplifted by the spell that kept her true,Amid her lightsome compeers, to the fewThat wear the crown of serious womanhood:Were he so happy, think of him as oneWho in the Louvre or Pitti feels his soulRapt 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.
Why should I seek her spell to decomposeOr to its source each rill of influence traceThat feeds the brimming river of her grace?The petals numbered but degrade to proseSummer'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 meThat 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.
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 hopeTo the underworld adown thy westering slopeE'er vanished, or whom such regrets pursue:Smooth all thy surges as when Jove to CreteSwam with less costly burthen, and prepareA pathway meet for her home-coming soonWith golden undulations such as greetThe printless summer-sandals of the moonAnd tempt the Nautilus his cruise to dare!
New England's poet, rich in love as years,Her hills and valleys praise thee, her swift brooksDance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooksThy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hearsAs maids their lovers', and no treason fears;Through thee her Merrimacs and AgiochooksAnd 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 beholdSave those of stars, yet for thy brother's sakeThat lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as boldAs that wherewith the heart of Roland brake,Far heard across the New World and the Old.
Thanks to the artist, ever on my wallThe 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 roundthesesplendors Midnight wraps her pall;Theseleaves the flush of Autumn's vintage holdIn Winter's spite, nor can the Northwind boldDeface 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 crostEven with a cloud whose light were yet to lose!
As, cleansed of Tiber's and Oblivion's slime,Glow Farnesina's vaults with shapes againThat dreamed some exiled artist from his painBack to his Athens and the Muse's clime,So these world-orphaned waifs of Want and Crime,Purged by Art's absolution from the stainOf the polluting city-flood, regainIdeal grace secure from taint of time.An Attic frieze you give, a pictured song;For as with words the poet paints, for youThe 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.
Leaves fit to have been poor Juliet's cradle-rhyme,With gladness of a heart long quenched in mouldThey vibrate still, a nest not yet grown coldFrom its fledged burthen. The numb hand of TimeVainly his glass turns; here is endless prime;Here lips their roses keep and locks their gold;Here Love in pristine innocency boldSpeaks what our grosser conscience makes a crime.Because it tells the dream that all have knownOnce in their lives, and to life's end the few;Because its seeds o'er Memory's desert blownSpring 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.
Who does his duty is a questionToo 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 ferriedTo—let us not inquire to what,
His deed, its author long outliving,By Nature's mother-care increased,Shall stand, his verdant almoner, givingA kindly dole to man and beast.
The wayfarer, at noon reposing,Shall bless its shadow on the grass,Or sheep beneath it huddle, dozingUntil the thundergust o'erpass.
The owl, belated in his plundering,Shall here await the friendly night,Blinking whene'er he wakes, and wonderingWhat fool it was invented light.
Hither the busy birds shall flutter,With the light timber for their nests,And, pausing from their labor, utterThe 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 banishedThus 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!
'De prodome,Des qu'il s'atorne a grant bonteJa n'iert tot dit ne tot conte,Que leingue ne puet pas retraireTant d'enor com prodom set faire.'
CRESTIEN DE TROIES,Li Romans douChevalier 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 exposeAs 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. 10Curtis, skilled equally with voice and penTo stir the hearts or mould the minds of men,—That voice whose music, for I've heard you singSweet 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 20Had swung on flattered hinges to admitSuch 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 mightIn civic duty spend your heat and light,Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdainRefusing 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 canExpress the worth of a true Gentleman,And I agree; but other thoughts derideMy first intent, and lure my pen aside.Thinking of you, I see my firelight glowOn other faces, loved from long ago,Dear to us both, and all these loves combineWith this I send and crowd in every line; 40Fortune with me was in such generous moodThat 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 sipsThe 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! 50What wonder if, with protest in my thought,Arrived, I find 'twas only love I brought?I came with protest; Memory barred the roadTill 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 weightWith him whose toils heroic saved the State. 60But praise can harm not who so calmly metSlander'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 keepAs when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep,The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can knowWhat hounds her lucent calm drives mad below. 70But to my business, while you rub your eyesAnd wonder how you ever thought me wise.Dear friend and old, they say you shake your headAnd 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 withinDictates, 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 attainThe 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 speakSmooth words that leave unflushed the brow and cheek?To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseenIn private box, spectator of the sceneWhere men the comedy of life rehearse,Idly to judge which better and which worse 90Each 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 retreatSafe from the crowd and cloistered from the street;The fire that whispers its domestic joy,Flickering on walls that knew me still a boy, 100And 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 awayBy 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. 110Dear were my walks, too, gathering fragrant storeOf 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 hivedAs 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, 120Of roads sequestered rimmed with sallow sod,But friends with hardhack, aster, goldenrod,Or succory keeping summer long its trustOf 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 reposeThat hears but rumors of earth's wrongs and woes; 130Too 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 quelledThe Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled.But there were times when silent were my booksAs 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 wordsInto a scourge of rough and knotted cords 140Unmusical, that whistle as they swingTo leave on shameless backs their purple sting.
How slow Time comes! Gone who so swift as he?Add but a year, 'tis half a centurySince 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 150With its stored vengeance, and such thunders stirredAs heaven's and earth's remotest chambers heard,I looked to see an ampler atmosphereBy that electric passion-gust blown clear.I looked for this; consider what I see—But I forbear, 'twould please nor you nor meTo check the items in the bitter listOf all I counted on and all I mist.Only three instances I choose from all,And each enough to stir a pigeon's gall: 160Office a fund for ballot-brokers madeTo pay the drudges of their gainful trade;Our cities taught what conquered cities feelBy ædiles chosen that they might safely steal;And gold, however got, a title fairTo such respect as only gold can bear.I seem to see this; how shall I gainsayWhat all our journals tell me every day?Poured our young martyrs their high-hearted bloodThat we might trample to congenial mud 170The 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.