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To
Dr. Johnson's sturdy self-respect led him to invent the Bookseller as a substitute for the Patron. My relations with you have enabled me to discover how pleasantly the Friend may replace the Bookseller. Let me record my sense of many thoughtful services by associating your name with a poem which owes its appearance in this form to your partiality.
Cordially yours,
CAMBRIDGE,November29, 1869.
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Far through the memory shines a happy day,Cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense,And simply perfect from its own resource,As to a bee the new campanula'sIlluminate seclusion swung in air.Such days are not the prey of setting suns,Nor ever blurred with mist of afterthought;Like words made magical by poets dead,Wherein the music of all meaning isThe sense hath garnered or the soul divined, 10They mingle with our life's ethereal part,Sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore,By beauty's franchise disenthralled of time.
I can recall, nay, they are present still,Parts of myself, the perfume of my mind,Days that seem farther off than Homer's nowEre yet the child had loudened to the boy,And I, recluse from playmates, found perforceCompanionship in things that not deniedNor granted wholly; as is Nature's wont, 20Who, safe in uncontaminate reserve,Lets us mistake our longing for her love,And mocks with various echo of ourselves.
These first sweet frauds upon our consciousness,That blend the sensual with its imaged world,These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn,Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thoughtCan overtake the rapture of the sense,To thrust between ourselves and what we feel,Have something in them secretly divine. 30Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain,With pains deliberate studies to renewThe ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose;For beauty's acme hath a term as briefAs the wave's poise before it break in pearl,Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense,Looking too long and closely: at a flashWe snatch the essential grace of meaning out,And that first passion beggars all behind,Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. 40Who, seeing once, has truly seen againThe gray vague of unsympathizing seaThat dragged his Fancy from her moorings backTo shores inhospitable of eldest time,Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered powers,Pitiless seignories in the elements,Omnipotences blind that darkling smite,Misgave him, and repaganized the world?Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy,These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, 50Perplex the eye with pictures from within.This hath made poets dream of lives foregoneIn worlds fantastical, more fair than ours;So Memory cheats us, glimpsing half-revealed.Even as I write she tries her wonted spellIn that continuous redbreast boding rain:The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm;But the flown ecstasy my childhood heardIs vocal in my mind, renewed by him,Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill 60That threads my undivided life and stealsA pathos from the years and graves between.
I know not how it is with other men,Whom I but guess, deciphering myself;For me, once felt is so felt nevermore.The fleeting relish at sensation's brimHad in it the best ferment of the wine.One spring I knew as never any since:All night the surges of the warm southwestBoomed intermittent through the wallowing elms, 70And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift,Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charmStartled with crocuses the sullen turfAnd wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song:One summer hour abides, what time I perched,Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloofAn oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,Denouncing me an alien and a thief:One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest, 80When in the lane I watched the ash-leaves fall,Balancing softly earthward without wind,Or twirling with directer impulse downOn those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost,While I grew pensive with the pensive year:And once I learned how marvellous winter was,When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime,I creaked adventurous o'er the spangled crustThat made familiar fields seem far and strangeAs those stark wastes that whiten endlessly 90In ghastly solitude about the pole,And gleam relentless to the unsetting sun:Instant the candid chambers of my brainWere painted with these sovran images;And later visions seem but copies paleFrom those unfading frescos of the past,Which I, young savage, in my age of flint,Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in meParted from Nature by the joy in herThat doubtfully revealed me to myself. 100Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate;And paradise was paradise the more,Known once and barred against satiety.
What we call Nature, all outside ourselves,Is but our own conceit of what we see,Our own reaction upon what we feel;The world's a woman to our shifting mood,Feeling with us, or making due pretenceAnd therefore we the more persuade ourselvesTo make all things our thought's confederates, 110Conniving with us in whate'er we dream.So when our Fancy seeks analogies,Though she have hidden what she after finds,She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise.I find my own complexion everywhere;No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first,A marvel to the bush it dawned upon,The rapture of its life made visible,The mystery of its yearning realized,As the first babe to the first woman born; 120No falcon ever felt delight of wingsAs when, an eyas, from the stolid cliffLoosing himself, he followed his high heartTo swim on sunshine, masterless as wind;And I believe the brown earth takes delightIn the new snowdrop looking back at her,To think that by some vernal alchemyIt could transmute her darkness into pearl;What is the buxom peony after that,With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush? 130What the full summer to that wonder new?
But, if in nothing else, in us there isA sense fastidious hardly reconciledTo the poor makeshifts of life's scenery,Where the same slide must double all its parts,Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre,I blame not in the soul this daintiness,Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird,In things indifferent by sense purveyed;It argues her an immortality 140And dateless incomes of experience,This unthrift housekeeping that will not brookA dish warmed-over at the feast of life,And finds Twice stale, served with whatever sauce.Nor matters much how it may go with meWho dwell in Grub Street and am proud to drudgeWhere men, my betters, wet their crust with tears;Use can make sweet the peach's shady side,That only by reflection tastes of sun.
But she, my Princess, who will sometimes deign 150My garret to illumine till the walls,Narrow and dingy, scrawled with hackneyed thought(Poor Richard slowly elbowing Plato out),Dilate and drape themselves with tapestriesNausikaa might have stooped o'er, while, between,Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, sendHer only image on through deepening deepsWith endless repercussion of delight,—Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul,That sometimes almost gives me to believe 160I might have been a poet, gives at leastA brain dasaxonized, an ear that makesMusic where none is, and a keener pangOf exquisite surmise outleaping thought,—Her will I pamper in her luxury:No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choiceShall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams,Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall beThe invitiate firstlings of experience,Vibrations felt but once and felt life long: 170Oh, more than half-way turn that Grecian frontUpon me, while with self-rebuke I spell,On the plain fillet that confines thy hairIn conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint,TheNaught in overplus, thy race's badge!
One feast for her I secretly designedIn that Old World so strangely beautifulTo us the disinherited of eld,—A day at Chartres, with no soul besideTo roil with pedant prate my joy serene 180And make the minster shy of confidence.I went, and, with the Saxon's pious care,First ordered dinner at the pea-green inn,The flies and I its only customers.Eluding these, I loitered through the town,With hope to take my minster unawaresIn its grave solitude of memory.A pretty burgh, and such as Fancy lovesFor bygone grandeurs, faintly rumorous nowUpon the mind's horizon, as of storm 190Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof,That mingle with our mood, but not disturb.Its once grim bulwarks, tamed to lovers' walks,Look down unwatchful on the sliding Eure,Whose listless leisure suits the quiet place,Lisping among his shallows homelike soundsAt Concord and by Bankside heard before.Chance led me to a public pleasure-ground,Where I grew kindly with the merry groups,And blessed the Frenchman for his simple art 200Of being domestic in the light of day.His language has no word, we growl, for Home;But he can find a fireside in the sun,Play with his child, make love, and shriek his mind,By throngs of strangers undisprivacied.He makes his life a public gallery,Nor feels himself till what he feels comes backIn manifold reflection from without;While we, each pore alert with consciousness,Hide our best selves as we had stolen them, 210And each bystander a detective were,Keen-eyed for every chink of undisguise.
So, musing o'er the problem which was best,—A life wide-windowed, shining all abroad,Or curtains drawn to shield from sight profaneThe rites we pay to the mysterious I,—With outward senses furloughed and head bowedI followed some fine instinct in my feet,Till, to unbend me from the loom of thought,Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes 220Confronted with the minster's vast repose.Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliffLeft inland by the ocean's slow retreat,That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs,Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell,Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,It rose before me, patiently remoteFrom the great tides of life it breasted once,Hearing the noise of men as in a dream.I stood before the triple northern port, 230Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings,Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch,Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say,Ye come and go incessant; we remainSafe in the hallowed quiets of the past;Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,Of faith so nobly realized as this.I seem to have heard it said by learnèd folkWho drench you with æsthetics till you feelAs if all beauty were a ghastly bore, 240The faucet to let loose a wash of words,That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore worse;But, being convinced by much experimentHow little inventiveness there is in man,Grave copier of copies, I give thanksFor a new relish, careless to inquireMy pleasure's pedigree, if so it please,Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art.The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness,Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, 250The one thing finished in this hasty world,Forever finished, though the barbarous pit,Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shoutAs if a miracle could be encored.But ah! this other, this that never ends,Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,As full of morals half-divined as life,Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surpriseOf hazardous caprices sure to please,Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern, 260Imagination's very self in stone!With one long sigh of infinite releaseFrom pedantries past, present, or to come,I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth.Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream,Builders of aspiration incomplete,So more consummate, souls self-confident,Who felt your own thought worthy of recordIn monumental pomp! No Grecian dropRebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, 270After long exile, to the mother-tongue.
Ovid in Pontus, puling for his RomeOf men invirile and disnatured damesThat poison sucked from the Attic bloom decayed,Shrank with a shudder from the blue-eyed raceWhose force rough-handed should renew the world,And from the dregs of Romulus expressSuch wine as Dante poured, or he who blewRoland's vain blast, or sang the CampeadorIn verse that clanks like armor in the charge, 280Homeric juice, though brimmed in Odin's horn.And they could build, if not the columned faneThat from the height gleamed seaward many-hued,Something more friendly with their ruder skies:The gray spire, molten now in driving mist,Now lulled with the incommunicable blue;The carvings touched to meaning new with snow,Or commented with fleeting grace of shade;The statues, motley as man's memory,Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, 290History and legend meeting with a kissAcross this bound-mark where their realms confine;The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow,Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer,Meet symbol of the senses and the soul,And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thoughtOf life and death, and doom, life's equal fee,—These were before me: and I gazed abashed,Child of an age that lectures, not creates,Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, 300And twittering round the work of larger men,As we had builded what we but deface.Far up the great bells wallowed in delight,Tossing their clangors o'er the heedless town,To call the worshippers who never came,Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes.I entered, reverent of whatever shrineGuards piety and solace for my kindOr gives the soul a moment's truce of God,And shared decorous in the ancient rite 310My sterner fathers held idolatrous.The service over, I was tranced in thought:Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me,Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint,Or brick mock-pious with a marble front;Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof,The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved,Through which the organ blew a dream of storm,Though not more potent to sublime with aweAnd shut the heart up to tranquillity, 320Than aisles to me familiar that o'erarchThe conscious silences of brooding woods,Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk:,Yet here was sense of undefined regret,Irreparable loss, uncertain what:Was all this grandeur but anachronism,A shell divorced of its informing life,Where the priest housed him like a hermit-crab,An alien to that faith of elder daysThat gathered round it this fair shape of stone? 330Is old Religion but a spectre now,Haunting the solitude of darkened minds,Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day?Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt,Since Gutenberg made thought cosmopoliteAnd stretched electric threads from mind to mind?Nay, did Faith build this wonder? or did Fear,That makes a fetish and misnames it God(Blockish or metaphysic, matters not),Contrive this coop to shut its tyrant in, 340Appeased with playthings, that he might not harm?
I turned and saw a beldame on her knees;With eyes astray, she told mechanic beadsBefore some shrine of saintly womanhood,Bribed intercessor with the far-off Judge:Such my first thought, by kindlier soon rebuked,Pleading for whatsoever touches lifeWith upward impulse: be He nowhere else,God is in all that liberates and lifts,In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles: 350Blessed the natures shored on every sideWith landmarks of hereditary thought!Thrice happy they that wander not life longBeyond near succor of the household faith,The guarded fold that shelters, not confines!Their steps find patience In familiar paths,Printed with hope by loved feet gone beforeOf parent, child, or lover, glorifiedBy simple magic of dividing Time.My lids were moistened as the woman knelt, 360And—was it will, or some vibration faintOf sacred Nature, deeper than the will?—My heart occultly felt itself in hers,Through mutual intercession gently leagued.
Or was it not mere sympathy of brain?A sweetness intellectually conceivedIn simpler creeds to me impossible?A juggle of that pity for ourselvesIn others, which puts on such pretty masksAnd snares self-love with bait of charity? 370Something of all it might be, or of none:Yet for a moment I was snatched awayAnd had the evidence of things not seen;For one rapt moment; then it all came back,This age that blots out life with question-marks,This nineteenth century with its knife and glassThat make thought physical, and thrust far offThe Heaven, so neighborly with man of old,To voids sparse-sown with alienated stars.
'Tis irrecoverable, that ancient faith, 380Homely and wholesome, suited to the time,With rod or candy for child-minded men:No theologic tube, with lens on lensOf syllogism transparent, brings it near,—At best resolving some new nebula,Or blurring some fixed-star of hope to mist.Science was Faith once; Faith were Science now,Would she but lay her bow and arrows byAnd arm her with the weapons of the time.Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought. 390For there's no virgin-fort but self-respect,And Truth defensive hath lost hold on God.Shall we treat Him as if He were a childThat knew not his own purpose? nor dare trustThe Rock of Ages to their chemic tests,Lest some day the all-sustaining base divineShould fail from under us, dissolved in gas?The armèd eye that with a glance discernsIn a dry blood-speck between ox and manStares helpless at this miracle called life, 400This shaping potency behind the egg,This circulation swift of deity,Where suns and systems inconspicuous floatAs the poor blood-disks in our mortal veins.Each age must worship its own thought of God,More or less earthy, clarifying stillWith subsidence continuous of the dregs;Nor saint nor sage could fix immutablyThe fluent image of the unstable Best,Still changing in their very hands that wrought: 410To-day's eternal truth To-morrow provedFrail as frost-landscapes on a window-pane.Meanwhile Thou smiledst, inaccessible,At Thought's own substance made a cage for Thought,And Truth locked fast with her own master-key;Nor didst Thou reck what image man might makeOf his own shadow on the flowing world;The climbing instinct was enough for Thee.Or wast Thou, then, an ebbing tide that leftStrewn with dead miracle those eldest shores, 420For men to dry, and dryly lecture on,Thyself thenceforth incapable of flood?Idle who hopes with prophets to be snatchedBy virtue in their mantles left below;Shall the soul live on other men's report,Herself a pleasing fable of herself?Man cannot be God's outlaw if he would,Nor so abscond him in the caves of senseBut Nature stall shall search some crevice outWith messages of splendor from that Source 430Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures.This life were brutish did we not sometimesHave intimation clear of wider scope,Hints of occasion infinite, to keepThe soul alert with noble discontentAnd onward yearnings of unstilled desire;Fruitless, except we now and then divinedA mystery of Purpose, gleaming throughThe secular confusions of the world,Whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours, 440No man can think nor in himself perceive,Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes,Or on the hillside, always unforwarned.A grace of being, finer than himself,That beckons and is gone,—a larger lifeUpon his own impinging, with swift glimpseOf spacious circles luminous with mind,To which the ethereal substance of his ownSeems but gross cloud to make that visible,Touched to a sudden glory round the edge, 450Who that hath known these visitations fleetWould strive to make them trite and ritual?I, that still pray at morning and at eve,Loving those roots that feed us from the past,And prizing more than Plato things I learnedAt that best academe, a mother's knee,Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed,Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have feltThat perfect disenthralment which is God;Nor know I which to hold worst enemy, 460Him who on speculation's windy wasteWould turn me loose, stript of the raiment warmBy Faith contrived against our nakedness,Or him who, cruel-kind, would fain obscure,With painted saints and paraphrase of God,The soul's east-window of divine surprise,Where others worship I but look and long;For, though not recreant to my fathers' faith,Its forms to me are weariness, and mostThat drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, 470Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable,Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze.Words that have drawn transcendent meanings upFrom the best passion of all bygone time,Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse,Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed in martyr-fires,Can they, so consecrate and so inspired,By repetition wane to vexing wind?Alas! we cannot draw habitual breathIn the thin air of life's supremer heights, 480We cannot make each meal a sacrament,Nor with our tailors be disbodied souls,—We men, too conscious of earth's comedy,Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate,And only for great stakes can be sublime!Let us be thankful when, as I do here,We can read Bethel on a pile of stones,And, seeing where Godhasbeen, trust in Him.
Brave Peter Fischer there in Nuremberg,Moulding Saint Sebald's miracles in bronze, 490Put saint and stander-by in that quaint garbFamiliar to him in his daily walk,Not doubting God could grant a miracleThen and in Nuremberg, if so He would;But never artist for three hundred yearsHath dared the contradiction ludicrousOf supernatural in modern clothes.Perhaps the deeper faith that is to comeWill see God rather in the strenuous doubt,Than in the creed held as an infant's hand 500Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein.
Say it is drift, not progress, none the less,With the old sextant of the fathers' creed,We shape our courses by new-risen stars,And, still lip-loyal to what once was truth,Smuggle new meanings under ancient names,Unconscious perverts of the Jesuit, Time.Change is the mask that all Continuance wearsTo keep us youngsters harmlessly amused;Meanwhile some ailing or more watchful child, 510Sitting apart, sees the old eyes gleam out,Stern, and yet soft with humorous pity too.Whilere, men burnt men for a doubtful point,As if the mind were quenchable with fire,And Faith danced round them with her war-paint on,Devoutly savage as an Iroquois;Now Calvin and Servetus at one boardSnuff in grave sympathy a milder roast,And o'er their claret settle Comte unread.Fagot and stake were desperately sincere: 520Our cooler martyrdoms are done in types;And flames that shine in controversial eyesBurn out no brains but his who kindles them.This is no age to get cathedrals built:Did God, then, wait for one in Bethlehem?Worst is not yet: lo, where his coming looms,Of earth's anarchic children latest born,Democracy, a Titan who hath learnedTo laugh at Jove's old-fashioned thunder-bolts,—Could he not also forge them, if he would? 530He, better skilled, with solvents merciless,Loosened in air and borne on every wind,Saps unperceived: the calm Olympian heightOf ancient order feels its bases yield,And pale gods glance for help to gods as pale.What will be left of good or worshipful,Of spiritual secrets, mysteries,Of fair religion's guarded heritage,Heirlooms of soul, passed downward unprofanedFrom eldest Ind? This Western giant coarse, 540Scorning refinements which he lacks himself,Loves not nor heeds the ancestral hierarchies,Each rank dependent on the next aboveIn ordinary gradation fixed as fate.King by mere manhood, nor allowing aughtOf holier unction than the sweat of toil;In his own strength sufficient; called to solve,On the rough edges of society,Problems long sacred to the choicer few,And improvise what elsewhere men receive 550As gifts of deity; tough foundling rearedWhere every man's his own Melchisedek,How make him reverent of a King of kings?Or Judge self-made, executor of lawsBy him not first discussed and voted on?For him no tree of knowledge is forbid,Or sweeter if forbid. How save the ark,Or holy of holies, unprofaned a dayFrom his unscrupulous curiosityThat handles everything as if to buy, 560Tossing aside what fabrics delicateSuit not the rough-and-tumble of his ways?What hope for those fine-nerved humanitiesThat made earth gracious once with gentler arts,Now the rude hands have caught the trick of thoughtAnd claim an equal suffrage with the brain?
The born disciple of an elder time,(To me sufficient, friendlier than the new,)Who in my blood feel motions of the Past,I thank benignant nature most for this,— 570A force of sympathy, or call it lackOf character firm-planted, loosing meFrom the pent chamber of habitual selfTo dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought,Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that,And through imagination to possess,As they were mine, the lives of other men.This growth original of virgin soil,By fascination felt in opposites,Pleases and shocks, entices and perturbs. 580In this brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid,This backwoods Charlemagne of empires new,Whose blundering heel instinctively finds outThe goutier foot of speechless dignities,Who, meeting Cæsar's self, would slap his back,Call him 'Old Horse,' and challenge to a drink,My lungs draw braver air, my breast dilatesWith ampler manhood, and I front both worlds,Of sense and spirit, as my natural fiefs,To shape and then reshape them as I will. 590It was the first man's charter; why not mine?How forfeit? when, deposed in other hands?
Thou shudder'st, Ovid? Dost in him forebodeA new avatar of the large-limbed Goth,To break, or seem to break, tradition's clue.And chase to dreamland back thy gods dethroned?I think man's soul dwells nearer to the east,Nearer to morning's fountains than the sun;Herself the source whence all tradition sprang,Herself at once both labyrinth and clue, 600The miracle fades out of history,But faith and wonder and the primal earthAre born into the world with every child.Shall this self-maker with the prying eyes,This creature disenchanted of respectBy the New World's new fiend, Publicity,Whose testing thumb leaves everywhere its smutch,Not one day feel within himself the needOf loyalty to better than himself,That shall ennoble him with the upward look? 610Shall he not catch the Voice that wanders earth,With spiritual summons, dreamed or heard,As sometimes, just ere sleep seals up the sense,We hear our mother call from deeps of Time,And, waking, find it vision,—none the lessThe benediction bides, old skies return,And that unreal thing, preëminent,Makes air and dream of all we see and feel?Shall he divine no strength unmade of votes,Inward, impregnable, found soon as sought, 620Not cognizable of sense, o'er sense supreme?Else were he desolate as none before.His holy places may not be of stone,Nor made with hands, yet fairer far than aughtBy artist feigned or pious ardor reared,Fit altars for who guards inviolateGod's chosen seat, the sacred form of man.Doubtless his church will be no hospitalFor superannuate forms and mumping shams,No parlor where men issue policies 630Of life-assurance on the Eternal Mind,Nor his religion but an ambulanceTo fetch life's wounded and malingerers in,Scorned by the strong; yet he, unconscious heirTo the Influence sweet of Athens and of Rome,And old Judaea's gift of secret fire,Spite of himself shall surely learn to knowAnd worship some ideal of himself,Some divine thing, large-hearted, brotherly,Not nice in trifles, a soft creditor, 640Pleased with his world, and hating only cant.And, if his Church be doubtful, it is sureThat, in a world, made for whatever else,Not made for mere enjoyment, in a worldOf toil but half-requited, or, at best,Paid in some futile currency of breath,A world of incompleteness, sorrow swiftAnd consolation laggard, whatsoe'erThe form of building or the creed professed,The Cross, bold type of shame to homage turned, 650Of an unfinished life that sways the world,Shall tower as sovereign emblem over all.
The kobold Thought moves with us when we shiftOur dwelling to escape him; perched aloftOn the first load of household-stuff he went:For, where the mind goes, goes old furniture.I, who to Chartres came to feed my eyeAnd give to Fancy one clear holiday,Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirredBuzzing o'er past and future with vain quest. 660Here once there stood a homely wooden church,Which slow devotion nobly changed for thisThat echoes vaguely to my modern steps.By suffrage universal it was built,As practised then, for all the country cameFrom far as Rouen, to give votes for God,Each vote a block of stone securely laidObedient to the master's deep-mused plan.Will what our ballots rear, responsibleTo no grave forethought, stand so long as this? 670Delight like this the eye of after daysBrightening with pride that here, at least, were menWho meant and did the noblest thing they knew?Can our religion cope with deeds like this?We, too, build Gothic contract-shams, becauseOur deacons have discovered that it pays,And pews sell better under vaulted roofsOf plaster painted like an Indian squaw.Shall not that Western Goth, of whom we spoke,So fiercely practical, so keen of eye, 680Find out, some day, that nothing pays but God,Served whether on the smoke-shut battle-field,In work obscure done honestly, or voteFor truth unpopular, or faith maintainedTo ruinous convictions, or good deedsWrought for good's sake, mindless of heaven or hell?Shall he not learn that all prosperity,Whose bases stretch not deeper than the sense,Is but a trick of this world's atmosphere,A desert-born mirage of spire and dome, 690Or find too late, the Past's long lesson missed,That dust the prophets shake from off their feetGrows heavy to drag down both tower and wall?I know not; but, sustained by sure beliefThat man still rises level with the heightOf noblest opportunities, or makesSuch, if the time supply not, I can wait.I gaze round on the windows, pride of France,Each the bright gift of some mechanic guildWho loved their city and thought gold well spent 700To make her beautiful with piety;I pause, transfigured by some stripe of bloom,And my mind throngs with shining auguries,Circle on circle, bright as seraphim,With golden trumpets, silent, that awaitThe signal to blow news of good to men.Then the revulsion came that always comesAfter these dizzy elations of the mind:And with a passionate pang of doubt I cried,'O mountain-born, sweet with snow-filtered air 710From uncontaminate wells of ether drawnAnd never-broken secrecies of sky,Freedom, with anguish won, misprized till lost,They keep thee not who from thy sacred eyesCatch the consuming lust of sensual goodAnd the brute's license of unfettered will.Far from the popular shout and venal breathOf Cleon blowing the mob's baser mindTo bubbles of wind-piloted conceit,Thou shrinkest, gathering up thy skirts, to hide 720In fortresses of solitary thoughtAnd private virtue strong in self-restraint.Must we too forfeit thee misunderstood,Content with names, nor inly wise to knowThat best things perish of their own excess,And quality o'er-driven becomes defect?Nay, is it thou indeed that we have glimpsed,Or rather such illusion as of oldThrough Athens glided menadlike and Rome,A shape of vapor, mother of vain dreams 730And mutinous traditions, specious pleaOf the glaived tyrant and long-memoried priest?'
I walked forth saddened; for all thought is sad,And leaves a bitterish savor in the brain,Tonic, it may be, not delectable,And turned, reluctant, for a parting lookAt those old weather-pitted imagesOf bygone struggle, now so sternly calm.About their shoulders sparrows had built nests,And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, 740Now on a mitre poising, now a crown,Irreverently happy. While I thoughtHow confident they were, what careless heartsFlew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun,A larger shadow crossed; and looking up,I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers,The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air,With sidelong head that watched the joy below,Grim Norman baron o'er this clan of Kelts.Enduring Nature, force conservative, 750Indifferent to our noisy whims! Men prateOf all heads to an equal grade cashieredOn level with the dullest, and expect(Sick of no worse distemper than themselves)A wondrous cure-all in equality;They reason that To-morrow must be wiseBecause To-day was not, nor Yesterday,As if good days were shapen of themselves,Not of the very lifeblood of men's souls;Meanwhile, long-suffering, imperturbable, 760Thou quietly complet'st thy syllogism,And from the premise sparrow here belowDraw'st sure conclusion of the hawk above,Pleased with the soft-billed songster, pleased no lessWith the fierce beak of natures aquiline.
Thou beautiful Old Time, now hid awayIn the Past's valley of Avilion,Haply, like Arthur, till thy wound be healed,Then to reclaim the sword and crown again!Thrice beautiful to us; perchance less fair 770To who possessed thee, as a mountain seemsTo dwellers round its bases but a heapOf barren obstacle that lairs the stormAnd the avalanche's silent bolt holds backLeashed with a hair,—meanwhile some far-off clown,Hereditary delver of the plain,Sees it an unmoved vision of repose,Nest of the morning, and conjectures thereThe dance of streams to idle shepherds' pipes,And fairer habitations softly hung 780On breezy slopes, or hid in valleys cool,For happier men. No mortal ever dreamsThat the scant isthmus he encamps uponBetween two oceans, one, the Stormy, passed,And one, the Peaceful, yet to venture on,Has been that future whereto prophets yearnedFor the fulfilment of Earth's cheated hope,Shall be that past which nerveless poets moanAs the lost opportunity of song.
O Power, more near my life than life itself 790(Or what seems life to us in sense immured),Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth,Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceiveOf sunshine and wide air and wingèd thingsBy sympathy of nature, so do IHave evidence of Thee so far above,Yet in and of me! Rather Thou the rootInvisibly sustaining, hid in light,Not darkness, or in darkness made by us.If sometimes I must hear good men debate 800Of other witness of Thyself than Thou,As if there needed any help of oursTo nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease,Blown out, as 'twere a candle, by men's breath,My soul shall not be taken in their snare,To change her inward surety for their doubtMuffled from sight in formal robes of proof:While she can only feel herself through Thee,I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear,Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 810Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou,Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men,Missed in the commonplace of miracle.
'Coscienza fuscaO della propria o dell' altrui vergognaPur sentirà la tua parola brusca.'
If I let fall a word of bitter mirthWhen public shames more shameful pardon won,Some have misjudged me, and my service done,If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth:Through veins that drew their life from Western earthTwo hundred years and more my blood hath runIn no polluted course from sire to son;And thus was I predestined ere my birthTo love the soil wherewith my fibres ownInstinctive sympathies; yet love it soAs honor would, nor lightly to dethroneJudgment, the stamp of manhood, nor foregoThe son's right to a mother dearer grownWith growing knowledge and more chaste than snow.
* * * * *
To
These Three Poems
* * * * *
*** Readers, it is hoped, will remember that, by his Ode at the Harvard Commemoration, the author had precluded himself from many of the natural outlets of thought and feeling common to such occasions as are celebrated in these poems.
Who cometh over the hills,Her garments with morning sweet,The dance of a thousand rillsMaking music before her feet?Her presence freshens the air;Sunshine steals light from her face;The leaden footstep of CareLeaps to the tune of her pace,Fairness of all that is fair,Grace at the heart of all grace, 10Sweetener of hut and of hall,Bringer of life out of naught,Freedom, oh, fairest of allThe daughters of Time and Thought!
She cometh, cometh to-day:Hark! hear ye not her tread,Sending a thrill through your clay,Under the sod there, ye dead,Her nurslings and champions?Do ye not hear, as she comes, 20The bay of the deep-mouthed guns,The gathering rote of the drums?The belts that called ye to prayer,How wildly they clamor on her,Crying, 'She cometh! prepareHer to praise and her to honor,That a hundred years agoScattered here in blood and tearsPotent seeds wherefrom should growGladness for a hundred years!' 30
Tell me, young men, have ye seenCreature of diviner mienFor true hearts to long and cry for,Manly hearts to live and die for?What hath she that others want?Brows that all endearments haunt,Eyes that make it sweet to dare,Smiles that cheer untimely death,Looks that fortify despair,Tones more brave than trumpet's breath; 40Tell me, maidens, have ye knownHousehold charm more sweetly rare,Grace of woman ampler blown,Modesty more debonair,Younger heart with wit full grown?Oh for an hour of my prime,The pulse of my hotter years,That I might praise her in rhymeWould tingle your eyelids to tears,Our sweetness, our strength, and our star, 50Our hope, our joy, and our trust,Who lifted us out of the dust,And made us whatever we are!
Whiter than moonshine upon snowHer raiment is, but round the hemCrimson stained; and, as to and froHer sandals flash, we see on them,And on her instep veined with blue,Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet,High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet, 60Fit for no grosser stain than dew:Oh, call them rather chrisms than stains,Sacred and from heroic veins!For, in the glory-guarded pass,Her haughty and far-shining headShe bowed to shrive LeonidasWith his imperishable dead;Her, too, Morgarten saw,Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw;She followed Cromwell's quenchless star 70Where the grim Puritan treadShook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar:Yea, on her feet are dearer dyesYet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes.
Our fathers found her in the woodsWhere Nature meditates and broods,The seeds of unexampled thingsWhich Time to consummation bringsThrough life and death and man's unstable moods;They met her here, not recognized, 80A sylvan huntress clothed in furs,To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed,Nor dreamed what destinies were hers:She taught them bee-like to createTheir simpler forms of Church and State;She taught them to endueThe past with other functions than it knew,And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate;Better than all, she fenced them in their needWith iron-handed Duty's sternest creed, 90'Gainst Self's lean wolf that ravens word and deed.
Why cometh she hither to-dayTo this low village of the plainFar from the Present's loud highway,From Trade's cool heart and seething brain?Why cometh she? She was not far away.Since the soul touched it, not in vain,With pathos of Immortal gain,'Tis here her fondest memories stay.She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge 100Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps,Dear to both Englands; near him heWho wore the ring of Canace;But most her heart to rapture leapsWhere stood that era-parting bridge,O'er which, with footfall still as dew,The Old Time passed into the New;Where, as your stealthy river creeps,He whispers to his listening weedsTales of sublimest homespun deeds. 110Here English law and English thought'Gainst the self-will of England fought;And here were men (coequal with their fate),Who did great things, unconscious they were great.They dreamed not what a die was castWith that first answering shot; what then?There was their duty; they were menSchooled the soul's inward gospel to obey,Though leading to the lion's den.They felt the habit-hallowed world give way 120Beneath their lives, and on went they,Unhappy who was last.When Buttrick gave the word,That awful idol of the unchallenged Past,Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong,Fell crashing; if they heard it not,Yet the earth heard,Nor ever hath forgot,As on from startled throne to throne,Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong, 130A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown.Thrice venerable spot!River more fateful than the Rubicon!O'er those red planks, to snatch her diadem,Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them,And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.
Think you these felt no charmsIn their gray homesteads and embowered farms?In household faces waiting at the doorTheir evening step should lighten up no more? 140In fields their boyish feet had known?In trees their fathers' hands had set,And which with them had grown,Widening each year their leafy coronet?Felt they no pang of passionate regretFor those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?These things are dear to every man that lives,And life prized more for what it lends than gives.Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet,Strove to detain their fatal feet;And yet the enduring half they chose, 151Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,The invisible things of God before the seen and known:Therefore their memory inspiration blowsWith echoes gathering on from zone to zone;For manhood is the one immortal thingBeneath Time's changeful sky,And, where it lightened once, from age to age,Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,That length of days is knowing when to die. 160
What marvellous change of things and men!She, a world-wandering orphan then,So mighty now! Those are her streamsThat whirl the myriad, myriad wheelsOf all that does, and all that dreams,Of all that thinks, and all that feels,Through spaces stretched from sea to sea;By idle tongues and busy brains,By who doth right, and who refrains,Here are our losses and our gains; 170Our maker and our victim she.
Maiden half mortal, half divine,We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinksOur hearts were filled with pride's tumultuous wine;Better to-day who rather feels than thinks.Yet will some graver thoughts intrude,And cares of sterner mood;They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deepsWhere discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood, 179And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps,I hear the voice as of a mighty windFrom all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,'I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abideWith men whom dust of faction cannot blindTo the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind;With men by culture trained and fortified,Who bitter duty to sweet lusts prefer,Fearless to counsel and obey.Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword,Not to be drawn in passion or in play, 190But terrible to punish and deter;Implacable as God's word,Like it, a shepherd's crook to them that blindly err.Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints,Offshoots of that one stock whose patient senseHath known to mingle flux with permanence,Rated my chaste denials and restraintsAbove the moment's dear-paid paradise:Beware lest, shifting with Time's gradual creep,The light that guided shine into your eyes. 200The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep;Be therefore timely wise,Nor laugh when this one steals, and that one lies,As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies,Till the deaf Fury comes your house to sweep!'I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow;Ye shall not be prophetic now,Heralds of ill, that darkening flyBetween my vision and the rainbowed sky,Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak 210From many a blasted boughOn Yggdrasil's storm-sinewed oak,That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou;Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast;For I have loved as those who pardon most.
Away, ungrateful doubt, away!At least she is our own to-day.Break into rapture, my song,Verses, leap forth in the sun,Bearing the joyance along 220Like a train of fire as ye run!Pause not for choosing of words,Let them but blossom and singBlithe as the orchards and birdsWith the new coming of spring!Dance in your jollity, bells;Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums;Answer, ye hillside and dells;Bow, all ye people! She comes,Radiant, calm-fronted, as when 230She hallowed that April day.Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay.Softener and strengthener of men,Freedom, not won by the vain,Not to be courted in play,Not to be kept without pain.Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay,Handmaid and mistress of all,Kindler of deed and of thought,Thou that to hut and to hall 240Equal deliverance brought!Souls of her martyrs, draw near,Touch our dull lips with your fire,That we may praise without fearHer our delight, our desire,Our faith's inextinguishable star,Our hope, our remembrance, our trust,Our present, our past, our to be,Who will mingle her life with our dust 249And makes us deserve to be free!
1.
Words pass as wind, but where great deeds were doneA power abides transfused from sire to son:The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear,That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run,With sure impulsion to keep honor clear.When, pointing down, his father whispers, 'Here,Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely great,Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.'Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust, 10Once known to men as pious, learnèd, just,And one memorial pile that dares to last:But Memory greets with reverential kissNo spot in all thy circuit sweet as this,Touched by that modest glory as it past,O'er which yon elm hath piously displayedThese hundred years its monumental shade.
2.
Of our swift passage through this sceneryOf life and death, more durable than we,What landmark so congenial as a tree 20Repeating its green legend every spring,And, with a yearly ring,Recording the fair seasons as they flee,Type of our brief but still-renewed mortality?We fall as leaves: the immortal trunk remains,Builded with costly juice of hearts and brainsGone to the mould now, whither all that beVanish returnless, yet are procreant stillIn human lives to come of good or ill,And feed unseen the roots of Destiny. 30
1.
Men's monuments, grown old, forget their namesThey should eternize, but the placeWhere shining souls have passed imbibes a graceBeyond mere earth; some sweetness of their famesLeaves in the soil its unextinguished trace,Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims,That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames.This insubstantial world and fleetSeems solid for a moment when we standOn dust ennobled by heroic feet 40Once mighty to sustain a tottering land,And mighty still such burthen to upbear,Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely were:Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot,Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy streamRecalls him, the sole chief without a blot,No more a pallid image and a dream,But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.
2.
Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hintTo raise long-buried days from tombs of print; 50'Here stood he,' softly we repeat,And lo, the statue shrined and stillIn that gray minster-front we call the Past,Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill,Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit.It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last,Its features human with familiar light,A man, beyond the historian's art to kill,Or sculptor's to efface with patient chisel-blight.
3.
Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught 60Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loomPresent and Past commingle, fruit and bloomOf one fair bough, inseparably wroughtInto the seamless tapestry of thought.So charmed, with undeluded eye we seeIn history's fragmentary taleBright clues of continuity,Learn that high natures over Time prevail,And feel ourselves a link in that entailThat binds all ages past with all that are to be. 70
1.
Beneath our consecrated elmA century ago he stood,Famed vaguely for that old fight in the woodWhose red surge sought, but could not overwhelmThe life foredoomed to wield our rough-hewn helm:—From colleges, where now the gownTo arms had yielded, from the town,Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to seeThe new-come chiefs and wonder which was he.No need to question long; close-lipped and tall, 80Long trained in murder-brooding forests loneTo bridle others' clamors and his own,Firmly erect, he towered above them all,The incarnate discipline that was to freeWith iron curb that armed democracy.
2.
A motley rout was that which came to stare,In raiment tanned by years of sun and storm,Of every shape that was not uniform,Dotted with regimentals here and there;An array all of captains, used to pray 90And stiff in fight, but serious drill's despair,Skilled to debate their orders, not obey;Deacons were there, selectmen, men of noteIn half-tamed hamlets ambushed round with woods,Ready to settle Freewill by a vote,But largely liberal to its private moods;Prompt to assert by manners, voice, or pen,Or ruder arms, their rights as Englishmen,Nor much fastidious as to how and when:Yet seasoned stuff and fittest to create 100A thought-staid army or a lasting state:Haughty they said he was, at first; severe;But owned, as all men own, the steady handUpon the bridle, patient to command,Prized, as all prize, the justice pure from fear,And learned to honor first, then love him, then revere.Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraintAnd purpose clean as light from every selfish taint.
3.
Musing beneath the legendary tree,The years between furl off: I seem to see 110The sun-flecks, shaken the stirred foliage through,Dapple with gold his sober buff and blueAnd weave prophetic aureoles round the headThat shines our beacon now nor darkens with the dead.O man of silent mood,A stranger among strangers then,How art thou since renowned the Great, the Good,Familiar as the day in an the homes of men!The winged years, that winnow praise and blame,Blow many names out: they but fan to flame 120The self-renewing splendors of thy fame.
1.
How many subtlest influences unite,With spiritual touch of Joy or pain,Invisible as air and soft as light,To body forth that image of the brainWe call our Country, visionary shape,Loved more than woman, fuller of fire than wine,Whose charm can none define,Nor any, though he flee it, can escape!All party-colored threads the weaver Time 130Sets in his web, now trivial, now sublime,All memories, all forebodings, hopes and fears,Mountain and river, forest, prairie, sea,A hill, a rock, a homestead, field, or tree,The casual gleanings of unreckoned years,Take goddess-shape at last and there is She,Old at our birth, new as the springing hours,Shrine of our weakness, fortress of our powers,Consoler, kindler, peerless 'mid her peers,A force that 'neath our conscious being stirs, 140A life to give ours permanence, when weAre borne to mingle our poor earth with hers,And all this glowing world goes with us on our biers.
2.
Nations are long results, by ruder waysGathering the might that warrants length of days;They may be pieced of half-reluctant sharesWelded by hammer-strokes of broad-brained kings,Or from a doughty people grow, the heirsOf wise traditions widening cautious rings;At best they are computable things, 150A strength behind us making us feel boldIn right, or, as may chance, in wrong;Whose force by figures may be summed and told,So many soldiers, ships, and dollars strong,And we but drops that bear compulsory partIn the dumb throb of a mechanic heart;But Country is a shape of each man's mindSacred from definition, unconfinedBy the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind;An inward vision, yet an outward birth 160Of sweet familiar heaven and earth;A brooding Presence that stirs motions blindOf wings within our embryo being's shellThat wait but her completer spellTo make us eagle-natured, fit to dareLife's nobler spaces and untarnished air.
3.
You, who hold dear this self-conceived ideal,Whose faith and works alone can make it real,Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrineWho lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine 170And feeds the lamp of manhood more divineWith fragrant oils of quenchless constancy.When all have done their utmost, surely heHath given the best who gives a characterErect and constant, which nor any shockOf loosened elements, nor the forceful seaOf flowing or of ebbing fates, can stirFrom its deep bases in the living rockOf ancient manhood's sweet security:And this he gave, serenely far from pride 180As baseness, boon with prosperous stars allied,Part of what nobler seed shall in our loins abide.
4.
No bond of men as common pride so strong,In names time-filtered for the lips of song,Still operant, with the primal Forces boundWhose currents, on their spiritual round,Transfuse our mortal will nor are gainsaid:These are their arsenals, these the exhaustless minesThat give a constant heart in great designs;These are the stuff whereof such dreams are made 190As make heroic men: thus surely heStill holds in place the massy blocks he laid'Neath our new frame, enforcing soberlyThe self-control that makes and keeps a people free.
1.
Oh, for a drop of that Cornelian inkWhich gave Agricola dateless length of days,To celebrate him fitly, neither swerveTo phrase unkempt, nor pass discretion's brink,With him so statue-like in sad reserve,So diffident to claim, so forward to deserve! 200Nor need I shun due influence of his fameWho, mortal among mortals, seemed as nowThe equestrian shape with unimpassioned brow,That paces silent on through vistas of acclaim.
2.
What figure more immovably augustThan that grave strength so patient and so pure,Calm in good fortune, when it wavered, sure,That mind serene, impenetrably just,Modelled on classic lines so simple they endure?That soul so softly radiant and so white 210The track it left seems less of fire than light,Cold but to such as love distemperature?And if pure light, as some deem, be the forceThat drives rejoicing planets on their course,Why for his power benign seek an impurer source?His was the true enthusiasm that burns long,Domestically bright,Fed from itself and shy of human sight,The hidden force that makes a lifetime strong,And not the short-lived fuel of a song. 220Passionless, say you? What is passion forBut to sublime our natures and control,To front heroic toils with late return,Or none, or such as shames the conqueror?That fire was fed with substance of the soulAnd not with holiday stubble, that could burn,Unpraised of men who after bonfires run,Through seven slow years of unadvancing war,Equal when fields were lost or fields were won,With breath of popular applause or blame, 230Nor fanned nor damped, unquenchably the same,Too inward to be reached by flaws of idle fame.
3.
Soldier and statesman, rarest unison;High-poised example of great duties doneSimply as breathing, a world's honors wornAs life's indifferent gifts to all men born;Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content; 240Modest, yet firm as Nature's self; unblamedSave by the men his nobler temper shamed;Never seduced through show of present goodBy other than unsetting lights to steerNew-trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast moodMore steadfast, far from rashness as from fear;Rigid, but with himself first, grasping stillIn swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will;Not honored then or now because he wooedThe popular voice, but that he still withstood; 250Broad-minded, higher-souled, there is but oneWho was all this and ours, and all men's,—WASHINGTON.
4.
Minds strong by fits, irregularly great,That flash and darken like revolving lights,Catch more the vulgar eye unschooled to waitOn the long curve of patient days and nightsBounding a whole life to the circle fairOf orbed fulfilment; and this balanced soul,So simple in its grandeur, coldly bareOf draperies theatric, standing there 260In perfect symmetry of self-control,Seems not so great at first, but greater growsStill as we look, and by experience learnHow grand this quiet is, how nobly sternThe discipline that wrought through life-long throesThat energetic passion of repose.
5.
A nature too decorous and severe,Too self-respectful in its griefs and joys,For ardent girls and boysWho find no genius in a mind so clear 270That its grave depths seem obvious and near,Nor a soul great that made so little noise.They feel no force in that calm-cadenced phrase,The habitual full-dress of his well-bred mind,That seems to pace the minuet's courtly mazeAnd tell of ampler leisures, roomier length of days,His firm-based brain, to self so little kindThat no tumultuary blood could blind,Formed to control men, not amaze,Looms not like those that borrow height of haze: 280It was a world of statelier movement thenThan this we fret in, he a denizenOf that ideal Rome that made a man for men.
1.
The longer on this earth we liveAnd weigh the various Qualities of men,Seeing how most are fugitive,Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,The more we feel the high stern-featured beautyOf plain devotedness to duty, 290Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise,But finding amplest recompenseFor life's ungarlanded expenseIn work done squarely and unwasted days.For this we honor him, that he could knowHow sweet the service and how freeOf her, God's eldest daughter here below,And choose in meanest raiment which was she.
2.
Placid completeness, life without a fallFrom faith or highest aims, truth's breachless wall, 300Surely if any fame can bear the touch,His will say 'Here!' at the last trumpet's call,The unexpressive man whose life expressed so much.
1.
Never to see a nation bornHath been given to mortal man,Unless to those who, on that summer morn,Gazed silent when the great VirginianUnsheathed the sword whose fatal flashShot union through the incoherent clashOf our loose atoms, crystallizing them 310Around a single will's unpliant stem,And making purpose of emotion rash.Out of that scabbard sprang, as from its womb,Nebulous at first but hardening to a star.Through mutual share of sunburst and of gloom,The common faith that made us what we are.
2.
That lifted blade transformed our jangling clans,Till then provincial, to Americans,And made a unity of wildering plans;Here was the doom fixed: here is marked the date 320When this New World awoke to man's estate,Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind:Nor thoughtless was the choice; no love or hateCould from its poise move that deliberate mind,Weighing between too early and too late,Those pitfalls of the man refused by Fate:His was the impartial vision of the greatWho see not as they wish, but as they find.He saw the dangers of defeat, nor lessThe incomputable perils of success; 330The sacred past thrown by, an empty rind;The future, cloud-land, snare of prophets blind;The waste of war, the ignominy of peace;On either hand a sullen rear of woes,Whose garnered lightnings none could guess,Piling its thunder-heads and muttering 'Cease!'Yet drew not back his hand, but gravely choseThe seeming-desperate task whence our new nation rose.
3.
A noble choice and of immortal seed!Nor deem that acts heroic wait on chance 340Or easy were as in a boy's romance;The man's whole life preludes the single deedThat shall decide if his inheritanceBe with the sifted few of matchless breed,Our race's sap and sustenance,Or with the unmotived herd that only sleep and feed.Choice seems a thing indifferent: thus or so,What matters it? The Fates with mocking faceLook on inexorable, nor seem to knowWhere the lot lurks that gives life's foremost place. 350Yet Duty's leaden casket holds it still,And but two ways are offered to our will,Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace,The problem still for us and all of human race.He chose, as men choose, where most danger showed,Nor ever faltered 'neath the loadOf petty cares, that gall great hearts the most,But kept right on the strenuous up-hill road,Strong to the end, above complaint or boast:The popular tempest on his rock-mailed coast 360Wasted its wind-borne spray,The noisy marvel of a day;His soul sate still in its unstormed abode.
Virginia gave us this imperial manCast in the massive mouldOf those high-statured ages oldWhich into grander forms our mortal metal ran;She gave us this unblemished gentleman:What shall we give her back but love and praiseAs in the dear old unestrangèd days 370Before the inevitable wrong began?Mother of States and undiminished men,Thou gavest us a country, giving him,And we owe alway what we owed thee then:The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us agenShines as before with no abatement dim,A great man's memory is the only thingWith influence to outlast the present whimAnd bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.All of him that was subject to the hours 380Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours:Across more recent graves,Where unresentful Nature wavesHer pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod,Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God,We from this consecrated plain stretch outOur hands as free from afterthought or doubtAs here the united NorthPoured her embrownèd manhood forthIn welcome of our savior and thy son. 390Through battle we have better learned thy worth,The long-breathed valor and undaunted will,Which, like his own, the day's disaster done,Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.Both thine and ours the victory hardly won;If ever with distempered voice or penWe have misdeemed thee, here we take it back,And for the dead of both don common black.Be to us evermore as thou wast then,As we forget thou hast not always been, 400Mother of States and unpolluted men,Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!