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diff --git a/old/68260-0.txt b/old/68260-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4399364..0000000 --- a/old/68260-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6028 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Heartsease and Rue, by James Russell -Lowell - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Heartsease and Rue - -Author: James Russell Lowell - -Release Date: June 7, 2022 [eBook #68260] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed - Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was - produced from images generously made available by The - Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEARTSEASE AND RUE *** - - - - - - James Russell Lowell. - - - POEMS. _Cabinet Edition._ 16mo, $1.00. - - _Household Edition._ With Portrait. 12mo, $1.75; full - gilt, $2.25. - - _Red-Line Edition._ Illustrated. Small 4to, $2.50. - - _Blue and Gold Edition._ 2 vols. 32mo, $2.50. - - _Family Edition._ Illustrated. 8vo, full gilt, $2.50. - - _Illustrated Library Edition._ 8vo, $3.50. - - THE COURTIN'. Illustrated. 4to. - - THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. Illustrated. Small - 4to, $2.00. - - THE SAME. Illustrated by the best artists. A Holiday - Book. 4to, $10.00. - - THE SAME. With The Cathedral, etc. 32mo, 75 cents. - - THE BIGLOW PAPERS. _Riverside Aldine Edition._ Series - I. and II. Each, one volume, 16mo, $1.00. - - THREE MEMORIAL POEMS. Square 16mo, $1.25. - - THE ROSE. Illustrated. Square 16mo, $1.50. - - UNDER THE OLD ELM, etc. 16mo, paper, 15 cents. - - HEARTSEASE AND RUE. 16mo, $1.25. - - UNDER THE OLD ELM, etc. 16mo, paper, 15 cents. - - FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 12mo, $1.50. - - _Riverside Aldine Edition._ 16mo, $1.00. - - AMONG MY BOOKS. First Series. 12mo, $2.00. - - AMONG MY BOOKS. Second Series. 12mo, $2.00. - - MY STUDY WINDOWS. 12mo, $2.00. - - MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE, etc. 32mo, 75 cents. - - WORKS. 5 vols. 12mo, $9.00. - - NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. In American Men of Letters - Series. With Portrait. 16mo, $1.25. (_In Press._) - - DEMOCRACY AND OTHER ADDRESSES. 16mo, $1.25. - - LOWELL BIRTHDAY BOOK. Illustrated. 32mo, $1.00. - - LOWELL CALENDAR. 50 cents. - - HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, - BOSTON AND NEW YORK. - - [Illustration: _J.R.Lowell._] - - - - - HEARTSEASE AND RUE - - BY - - JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL - - [Illustration] - - BOSTON AND NEW YORK - HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY - The Riverside Press, Cambridge - 1888 - - - - - Copyright, 1888, - BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. - - _All rights reserved._ - - _The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: - Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. - - -_Along the wayside where we pass bloom few_ -_Gay plants of heartsease, more of saddening rue;_ -_So life is mingled; so should poems be_ -_That speak a conscious word to you and me._ - - - - -CONTENTS. - - -I. - -FRIENDSHIP. - - PAGE - -AGASSIZ 1 - -TO HOLMES ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY 23 - -IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM 26 - -ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON’S -“OLD WORLD IDYLLS” 27 - -TO C. F. BRADFORD ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM -PIPE 29 - -BANKSIDE 32 - -JOSEPH WINLOCK 36 - -SONNET. TO FANNY ALEXANDER 37 - -JEFFRIES WYMAN 38 - -TO A FRIEND 39 - -WITH AN ARMCHAIR 40 - -E. G. DE R. 41 - -BON VOYAGE! 42 - -TO WHITTIER ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY 43 - -ON AN AUTUMN SKETCH OF H. G. WILD 44 - -TO MISS D. T. 45 - -WITH A COPY OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE 46 - -ON PLANTING A TREE AT INVERARA 47 - -AN EPISTLE TO GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 49 - - -II. - -SENTIMENT. - -ENDYMION 61 - -THE BLACK PREACHER 70 - -ARCADIA REDIVIVA 74 - -THE NEST 78 - -A YOUTHFUL EXPERIMENT IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS 81 - -BIRTHDAY VERSES 83 - -ESTRANGEMENT 85 - -PHŒBE 86 - -DAS EWIG-WEIBLICHE 89 - -THE RECALL 91 - -ABSENCE 92 - -MONNA LISA 93 - -THE OPTIMIST 94 - -ON BURNING SOME OLD LETTERS 96 - -THE PROTEST 99 - -THE PETITION 100 - -FACT OR FANCY? 101 - -AGRO-DOLCE 103 - -THE BROKEN TRYST 104 - -CASA SIN ALMA 105 - -A CHRISTMAS CAROL 106 - -MY PORTRAIT GALLERY 108 - -PAOLO TO FRANCESCA 109 - -SONNET. SCOTTISH BORDER 110 - -SONNET. ON BEING ASKED FOR AN AUTOGRAPH -IN VENICE 111 - -THE DANCING BEAR 112 - -THE MAPLE 113 - -NIGHTWATCHES 114 - -DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES 115 - -PRISON OF CERVANTES 116 - -TO A LADY PLAYING ON THE CITHERN 117 - -THE EYE’S TREASURY 118 - -PESSIMOPTIMISM 119 - -THE BRAKES 120 - -A FOREBODING 121 - - -III. - -FANCY. - -UNDER THE OCTOBER MAPLES 125 - -LOVE’S CLOCK 127 - -ELEANOR MAKES MACAROONS 129 - -TELEPATHY 131 - -SCHERZO 132 - -“FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO SIC COGITAVIT” 134 - -AUSPEX 136 - -THE PREGNANT COMMENT 137 - -THE LESSON 139 - -SCIENCE AND POETRY 141 - -A NEW YEAR’S GREETING 142 - -THE DISCOVERY 143 - -WITH A SEASHELL 144 - -THE SECRET 146 - - -IV. - -HUMOR AND SATIRE. - -FITZ ADAM’S STORY 149 - -THE ORIGIN OF DIDACTIC POETRY 173 - -THE FLYING DUTCHMAN 177 - -CREDIDIMUS JOVEM REGNARE 180 - -TEMPORA MUTANTUR 189 - -IN THE HALF-WAY HOUSE 192 - -AT THE BURNS CENTENNIAL 196 - -IN AN ALBUM 205 - -AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 1866 207 - -A PARABLE 212 - - -V. - -EPIGRAMS. - -SAYINGS 215 - -INSCRIPTIONS - -FOR A BELL AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY 216 - -FOR A MEMORIAL WINDOW TO SIR WALTER -RALEIGH 216 - -PROPOSED FOR A SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' -MONUMENT IN BOSTON 216 - -A MISCONCEPTION 217 - -THE BOSS 217 - -SUN-WORSHIP 217 - -CHANGED PERSPECTIVE 217 - -WITH A PAIR OF GLOVES LOST IN A WAGER 218 - -SIXTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY 218 - - - - -I. - -FRIENDSHIP. - - - - -POEMS. - - - - -AGASSIZ. - - Come -Dicesti _egli ebbe_? non viv' egli ancora? -Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome? - - -I. 1. - -The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill -Makes 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 old - The horny foot of Pan -Stamped, and the conscious horror ran -Beneath men’s feet through all her fibres cold: -Space’s blue walls are mined; we feel the throe -From underground of our night-mantled foe: - The flame-winged feet -Of Trade’s new Mercury, that dry-shod run -Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun, - Are mercilessly fleet, - And at a bound annihilate -Ocean’s prerogative of short reprieve; - Surely ill news might wait, -And man be patient of delay to grieve: - Letters have sympathies - And tell-tale faces that reveal, - To senses finer than the eyes, -Their errand’s purport ere we break the seal; -They wind a sorrow round with circumstance -To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace -The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance - The inexorable face: - But now Fate stuns as with a mace; -The savage of the skies, that men have caught - And some scant use of language taught, - Tells only what he must,-- -The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust. - - -2. - -So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes, -I scanned the festering news we half despise - Yet 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 mess -The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late - To teach the Old World how to wait, - When suddenly, -As happens if the brain, from overweight - Of 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. - - -3. - - Uprooted is our mountain oak, -That promised long security of shade -And brooding-place for many a wingëd thought; - Not by Time’s softly-warning stroke -With pauses of relenting pity stayed, -But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed, -From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught -And in his broad maturity betrayed! - - -4. - -Well might I, as of old, appeal to you, - O mountains woods and streams, -To 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 since -That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince, -And drown in music the heart’s bitter cry! -Lead me some steps in your directer way, -Teach me those words that strike a solid root - Within 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 by -With those clear parts of him that will not die. -Himself from out the recent dark I claim -To 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-bye 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, -Mistaking catalogue for character,) -His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame. -Nor would I scant him with judicial breath -And turn mere critic in an epitaph; -I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff -That swells fame living, chokes it after death, -And would but memorize the shining half -Of his large nature that was turned to me: -Fain had I joined with those that honored him -With eyes that darkened because his were dim, -And now been silent: but it might not be. - - -II. 1. - -In some the genius is a thing apart, - A pillared hermit of the brain, -Hoarding with incommunicable art - Its intellectual gain; - Man’s web of circumstance and fate - They from their perch of self observe, -Indifferent as the figures on a slate - Are to the planet’s sun-swung curve - Whose bright returns they calculate; - Their nice adjustment, part to part, -Were shaken from its serviceable mood -By unpremeditated stirs of heart - Or 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, -Dazed by the social glow they cannot share; - His nature brooked no lonely lair, -But basked and bourgeoned in copartnery, -Companionship, and open-windowed glee: - He knew, for he had tried, - Those speculative heights that lure -The unpractised foot, impatient of a guide, - Tow’rd ether too attenuately pure -For sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride, - But better loved the foothold sure -Of paths that wind by old abodes of men -Who 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, -The enigma of creation to surprise, -His truer instinct sought the life that speaks -Without 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 rebound -From 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! -Virtues 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 too -He by the light of listening faces knew, -And his rapt audience all unconscious lent -Their own roused force to make him eloquent; -Persuasion fondled in his look and tone; -Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bring -To find new charm in accents not her own; -Her coy constraints and icy hindrances -Melted 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, controlled -By 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. - - -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 bare -At manhood’s simple level, and where’er -He met a stranger, there he left a friend. -How large an aspect! nobly unsevere, -With freshness round him of Olympian cheer, -Like 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. - - -III. 1. - - The garrulous memories -Gather again from all their far-flown nooks, -Singly at first, and then by twos and threes, -Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks - Thicken their twilight files -Tow’rd Tintern’s gray repose of roofless aisles: -Once more I see him at the table’s head -When Saturday her monthly banquet spread - To 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 worth - Of undeliberate mirth, -Natures benignly mixed of air and earth, -Now with the stars and now with equal zest -Tracing 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 remain -Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain: -Well nigh I doubt which world is real most, -Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane; -In this abstraction it were light to deem -Myself the figment of some stronger dream; -They are the real things, and I the ghost -That 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 -And armed neutrality of self-defence -Beneath the forehead’s walled preëminence, -While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach, -Settles off-hand our human how and whence; -The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears -The infallible strategy of volunteers -Making through Nature’s walls its easy breach, -And seems to learn where he alone could teach. -Ample and ruddy, the board’s end he fills -As he our fireside were, our light and heat, -Centre where minds diverse and various skills -Find 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 lips -While Holmes’s rockets curve their long ellipse, - And burst in seeds of fire that burst again - To drop in scintillating rain. - - -4. - - There too the face half-rustic, half-divine, - Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine, - Of him who taught us not to mow and mope - About our fancied selves, but seek our scope -In Nature’s world and Man’s, nor fade to hollow trope, - Content with our New World and timely bold - To challenge the o’ermastery of the Old; - Listening with eyes averse I see him sit - Pricked with the cider of the Judge’s wit - (Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again), - While the wise nose’s firm-built aquiline - Curves sharper to restrain - The merriment whose most unruly moods - Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods - Of silence-shedding pine: - Hard by is he whose art’s consoling spell - Hath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel, - His look still vernal ’mid the wintry ring - Of petals that remember, not foretell, - The paler primrose of a second spring. - - -5. - - And more there are: but other forms arise - And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes: -First he from sympathy still held apart -By shrinking over-eagerness of heart, -Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow’s sweep -Heightened 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 -And building robins wondered at our tears, -Snatched in his prime, the shape august -That 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, -Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old, -Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet -With 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, - But, 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 - Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves - Pushed 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, - While my starved fire burns low, -And homeless winds at the loose casement whine -Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine. - - -IV. 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 moon -Rocks her skiff’s image on the broad lagoon, -And Boston shows a soft Venetian side -In that Arcadian light when roof and tree, -Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy; -Or haply in the sky’s cold chambers wide -Shivered the winter stars, while all below, -As if an end were come of human ill, -The world was wrapt in innocence of snow -And the cast-iron bay was blind and still; -These were our poetry; in him perhaps -Science had barred the gate that lets in dream, -And he would rather count the perch and bream -Than with the current’s idle fancy lapse; -And yet he had the poet’s open eye -That 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; -Then he who many cities knew and many minds, -And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian forms -Of misty memory, bade them live anew -As 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 profuse -Much worldly wisdom kept for others' use, -Not for his own, for he was rash and free, -His purse or knowledge all men’s, like the sea. -Still can I hear his voice’s shrilling might -(With pauses broken, while the fitful spark -He blew more hotly rounded on the dark -To hint his features with a Rembrandt light) -Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck, -Or Cuvier’s taller shade, and many more -Whom 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 -Of 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 ear -I half hear his who mine shall never hear. - - -2. - -Sometimes it seemed as if New England air -For his large lungs too parsimonious were, -As if those empty rooms of dogma drear -Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere - Counting the horns o’er of the Beast, -Still scaring those whose faith in it is least, -As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere -That sharpen all the needles of the East, - Had been to him like death, - Accustomed to draw Europe’s freer breath - In a more stable element; - Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose, - Our practical horizon grimly pent, - Our 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 his instinct might divine, - Beneath our drift of puritanic snow, - The marvel sensitive and fine - Of sanguinaria over-rash to blow - And trust its shyness to an air malign; - Well might he prize truth’s warranty and pledge - In the grim outcrop of our granite edge, - Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need - In 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 - Carry one temperature, his nature large - Made its own climate, nor could any marge - Traced 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 dwell - Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair - High-hung of viny Neufchâtel; - Nor, surely, did he miss - Some pale, imaginary bliss -Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss. - - -V. 1. - - I cannot think he wished so soon to die - With all his senses full of eager heat, - And rosy years that stood expectant by - To buckle the winged sandals on their feet, - He that was friends with earth, and all her sweet - Took 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, - Tenants 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 spring - As the birds feel it when it bids them sing, - Only once more to see the moon - Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms - Curve her mild sickle in the West - Sweet with the breath of hay-cocks, were a boon - Worth any promise of soothsayer realms - Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest; - To take December by the beard - And 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-ends - Lingered by cosy chimney-nooks, - With high companionship of books - Or slippered talk of friends - And sweet habitual looks, -Is better than to stop the ears with dust: -Too 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; ’tis 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, - Them overtakes the doom - To 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 forgive - Till 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, - And, once we hear the hopeless _He is dead_, - So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said. - - -VI. 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 defaced - With granite permanence of cockney taste - And all those grim disfigurements we love: - There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste - Nature rebels at: and it is not true -Of those most precious parts of him we knew: - Could we be conscious but as dreamers be, - ’Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents - Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity; - Nay, to be mingled with the elements, - The fellow-servant 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, - To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, - To stream as tides the ocean caverns through, - Or with the rapture of great winds to blow - About earth’s shaken coignes, were not a fate - To leave us all-disconsolate; -Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod - Of charitable earth - That takes out all our mortal stains, - And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod, - Methinks were better worth -Than the poor fruit of most men’s wakeful pains, - The heart’s insatiable ache: - But such was not his faith, - Nor mine: it may be he had trod -Outside the plain old path of _God thus spake_, - But God to him was very God, - And not a visionary wraith -Skulking in murky corners of the mind, - And he was sure to be -Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, -Not 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 old -Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold, - Not truly with the guild enrolled - Of him who seeking inward guessed - Diviner riddles than the rest, - And groping in the darks of thought - Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; - Rather 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 stilled -The 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 -The being hath put on which lately here -So many-friended was, so full of cheer -To make men feel the Seeker’s noble zest, -We have not lost him all; he is not gone -To the dumb herd of them that wholly die; -The beauty of his better self lives on -In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye -He trained to Truth’s exact severity; -He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him -Whose living word still stimulates the air? -In endless file shall loving scholars come -The glow of his transmitted touch to share, -And trace his features with an eye less dim -Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb. - - FLORENCE, ITALY, _February, 1874_. - - - - -TO HOLMES - -ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY. - - -Dear Wendell, why need count the years - Since 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 do - With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth -With gay immortals such as you - Whose 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 death, - With dust of saints and scholars sweet. - -Our legends from one source were drawn, - I scarce distinguish yours from mine, -And _don’t_ we make the Gentiles yawn - With “You remembers?” o’er our wine! - -If I, with too senescent air, - Invade your elder memory’s pale, -You snub me with a pitying “Where - Were you in the September Gale?” - -Both stared entranced at Lafayette, - Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. -What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet - As scarcely worth one’s while to see. - -Ten years my senior, when my name - In Harvard’s entrance-book was writ, -Her halls still echoed with the fame - Of 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 times - Have flown from our familiar elms; -As many poets with their rhymes - Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms. - -The birds are hushed, the poets gone - Where no harsh critic’s lash can reach, -And still your wingëd brood sing on - To all who love our English speech. - -Nay, let the foolish records be - That 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. - -_You_ with 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 song - Of fame’s great antiseptic--Style, -You with the classic few belong - Who tempered wisdom with a smile. - -Outlive us all! Who else like you - Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff, -And make us with the pen we knew - Deathless at least in epitaph? - -WOLLASTON, _August 29, 1884_. - - - - -IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM. - - -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 beads -Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new. -Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you! - -The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl -Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel, -Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl, -Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl. - - - - -ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. -AUSTIN DOBSON’S “OLD WORLD -IDYLLS.” - - -I. - -At length arrived, your book I take -To read in for the author’s sake; -Too gray for new sensations grown, -Can charm to Art or Nature known -This 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 tone -Of the _Lesboum barbiton_, -At mastery, through long finger-ache, -At length arrived. - - -II. - -As I read on, what changes steal -O’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 clipt _charmille_ -Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel; -Tabor and pipe the dancers guide -As I read on. - -While in and out the verses wheel -The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal, -Lithe ankles that to music glide, -But chastely and by chance descried; -Art? Nature? Which do I most feel -As I read on? - - - - -TO C. F. BRADFORD - -ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE. - - -The pipe came safe, and welcome too, -As anything must be from you; -A meerschaum pure, ’twould float as light -As 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 glow -Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot; -Its clay is but congested lymph -Jove chose to make some choicer nymph; -And here combined,--why, this must be -The birth of some enchanted sea, -Shaped to immortal form, the type -And very Venus of a pipe. - -When high I heap it with the weed -From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed -Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore -And cast upon Virginia’s shore, -I’ll think,--So fill the fairer bowl -And wise alembic of thy soul, -With herbs far-sought that shall distil, -Not fumes to slacken thought and will, -But bracing essences that nerve -To 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 bred -By 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 bowl -The color deepens (as the soul -That burns in mortals leaves its trace -Of bale or beauty on the face), -I’ll think,--So let the essence rare -Of 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 all -That whiteness which we greenness call, -Smooth back, O Fortune, half thy frown, -And make me beautifully brown! - -Dream-forger, I refill thy cup -With 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. - - - - -BANKSIDE. - -(HOME OF EDMUND QUINCY.) - -DEDHAM, MAY 21, 1877. - - -I. - -I christened you in happier days, before -These 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 between -That day and this! How many shadows more -Darken my heart, their substance from these eyes -Hidden forever! So our world is made -Of life and death commingled; and the sighs -Outweigh the smiles, in equal balance laid: -What compensation? None, save that the All-wise -So schools us to love things that cannot fade. - - -II. - -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 set -Was fair as when your landscape’s peaceful sway -Charmed dearer eyes with his to make delay -On Hope’s long prospect,--as if They forget -The 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 pines -That 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. - - -III. - -Old Friend, farewell! Your kindly door again -I enter, but the master’s hand in mine -No more clasps welcome, and the temperate wine, -That cheered our long nights, other lips must stain: -All is unchanged, but I expect in vain -The face alert, the manners free and fine, -The seventy years borne lightly as the pine -Wears its first down of snow in green disdain: -Much did he, and much well; yet most of all -I prized his skill in leisure and the ease -Of a life flowing full without a plan; -For most are idly busy; him I call -Thrice fortunate who knew himself to please, -Learned in those arts that make a gentleman. - - -IV. - -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 shone -What time about the world our shame was blown -On every wind; his soul would not conspire -With selfish men to soothe the mob’s desire, -Veiling with garlands Moloch’s bloody stone; -The high-bred instincts of a better day -Ruled in his blood, when to be citizen -Rang Roman yet, and a Free People’s sway -Was not the exchequer of impoverished men, -Nor statesmanship with loaded votes to play, -Nor public office a tramps' boosing-ken. - - - - -JOSEPH WINLOCK. - -DIED JUNE 11, 1875. - - -Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient will -Through 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 fane -Of Science, only witness of his skill: -Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell, -But inextinguishable his luminous trace -In mind and heart of all that knew him well. -Happy man’s doom! To him the Fates were known -Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of space, -Unprescient, through God’s mercy, of his own! - - - - -SONNET. - -TO FANNY ALEXANDER. - - -Unconscious as the sunshine, simply sweet -And generous as that, thou dost not close -Thyself in art, as life were but a rose -To 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 bleak -Hast 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! - - FLORENCE, 1873. - - - - -JEFFRIES WYMAN. - -DIED SEPTEMBER 4, 1874. - - -The wisest man could ask no more of Fate -Than 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 clew, -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 decays -Fans the soul’s nobler faith until it burn. - - - - -TO A FRIEND - -WHO GAVE ME A GROUP OF WEEDS AND GRASSES, -AFTER A DRAWING OF DÜRER. - - -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 wind -Will break its truce and bend that grass-plume high, -Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly -That flits a more luxurious perch to find. -Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall, -A serene moment, deftly caught and kept -To 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? - - - - -WITH AN ARMCHAIR. - - -About the oak that framed this chair, of old -The seasons danced their round; delighted wings -Brought music to its boughs; shy woodland things -Shared its broad roof, ’neath whose green glooms grown bold, -Lovers, more shy than they, their secret told; -The resurrection of a thousand springs -Swelled in its veins, and dim imaginings -Teased them, perchance, of life more manifold. -Such shall it know when its proud arms enclose -My 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 knows -That, seas between us, she is still his guest. - - - - -E. G. DE R. - - -Why should I seek her spell to decompose -Or to its source each rill of influence trace -That feeds the brimming river of her grace? -The petals numbered but degrade to prose -Summer’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: I content should be -That 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. - - - - -BON VOYAGE! - - -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 hope -To the underworld adown thy westering slope -E’er vanished, or whom such regrets pursue: -Smooth all thy surges as when Jove to Crete -Swam with less costly burthen, and prepare -A pathway meet for her home-coming soon -With golden undulations such as greet -The printless summer-sandals of the moon -And tempt the Nautilus his cruise to dare! - - - - -TO WHITTIER - -ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY. - - -New England’s poet, rich in love as years, -Her hills and valleys praise thee, her swift brooks -Dance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooks -Thy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hears -As maids their lovers', and no treason fears; -Through thee her Merrimacs and Agiochooks -And 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 behold -Save those of stars, yet for thy brother’s sake -That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as bold -As that wherewith the heart of Roland brake, -Far heard across the New World and the Old. - - - - -ON AN AUTUMN SKETCH OF H. G. WILD. - - -Thanks to the artist, ever on my wall -The 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 round _these_ splendors Midnight wraps her pall; -_These_ leaves the flush of Autumn’s vintage hold -In Winter’s spite, nor can the Northwind bold -Deface 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 crost -Even with a cloud whose light were yet to lose! - - _April, 1854._ - - - - -TO MISS D. T. - -ON HER GIVING ME A DRAWING OF LITTLE -STREET ARABS. - - -As, cleansed of Tiber’s and Oblivion’s slime, -Glow Farnesina’s vaults with shapes again -That dreamed some exiled artist from his pain -Back to his Athens and the Muse’s clime, -So these world-orphaned waifs of Want and Crime, -Purged by Art’s absolution from the stain -Of the polluting city-flood, regain -Ideal grace secure from taint of time. -An Attic frieze you give, a pictured song; -For as with words the poet paints, for you -The 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. - - - - -WITH A COPY OF AUCASSIN AND -NICOLETE. - - -Leaves fit to have been poor Juliet’s cradle-rhyme, -With gladness of a heart long quenched in mould -They vibrate still, a nest not yet grown cold -From its fledged burthen. The numb hand of Time -Vainly his glass turns; here is endless prime; -Here lips their roses keep and locks their gold; -Here Love in pristine innocency bold -Speaks what our grosser conscience makes a crime. -Because it tells the dream that all have known -Once in their lives, and to life’s end the few; -Because its seeds o’er Memory’s desert blown -Spring 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. - - - - -ON PLANTING A TREE AT INVERARA. - - -Who does his duty is a question -Too 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 ferried -To--let us not inquire to what, - -His deed, its author long outliving, -By Nature’s mother-care increased, -Shall stand, his verdant almoner, giving -A kindly dole to man and beast. - -The wayfarer, at noon reposing, -Shall bless its shadow on the grass, -Or sheep beneath it huddle, dozing -Until the thundergust o’erpass. - -The owl, belated in his plundering, -Shall here await the friendly night, -Blinking whene’er he wakes, and wondering -What fool it was invented light. - -Hither the busy birds shall flutter, -With the light timber for their nests, -And, pausing from their labor, utter -The 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 banished -Thus 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! - -1880. - - - - -AN EPISTLE TO GEORGE WILLIAM -CURTIS. - - “De prodome, -Des qu’il s’atorne a grant bonte -Ja n’iert tot dit ne tot conte, -Que leingue ne puet pas retraire -Tant d’enor com prodom set faire.” - CRESTIEN DE TROIES, -_Li Romans dou Chevalier 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 expose -As 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. - -Curtis, skilled equally with voice and pen -To stir the hearts or mould the minds of men,-- -That voice whose music, for I’ve heard you sing -Sweet 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 -Had swung on flattered hinges to admit -Such 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 might -In civic duty spend your heat and light, -Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain -Refusing posts men grovel to attain. -Good Man all own you; what is left me, then, -To heighten praise with but Good Citizen? - -But why this praise to make you blush and stare, -And give a backache to your Easy-Chair? -Old Crestien rightly says no language can -Express the worth of a true Gentleman, -And I agree; but other thoughts deride -My first intent, and lure my pen aside. -Thinking of you, I see my firelight glow -On other faces, loved from long ago, -Dear to us both, and all these loves combine -With this I send and crowd in every line; -Fortune with me was in such generous mood -That 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 sips -The 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! -What wonder if, with protest in my thought, -Arrived, I find ’twas only love I brought? -I came with protest; Memory barred the road -Till 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 weight -With him whose toils heroic saved the State. -But praise can harm not who so calmly met -Slander’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 keep -As when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep, -The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can know -What hounds her lucent calm drives mad below. - -But to my business, while you rub your eyes -And wonder how you ever thought me wise. -Dear friend and old, they say you shake your head -And 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 within -Dictates, for acquiescence dumb were sin; -I blurt ungrateful truths, if so they be, -That none may need to say them after me. -’Twere my felicity could I attain -The 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 speak -Smooth words that leave unflushed the brow and cheek? -To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseen -In private box, spectator of the scene -Where men the comedy of life rehearse, -Idly to judge which better and which worse -Each 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 retreat -Safe from the crowd and cloistered from the street; -The fire that whispers its domestic joy, -Flickering on walls that knew me still a boy, -And 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 away -By 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. -Dear were my walks, too, gathering fragrant store -Of 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 hived -As 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, -Of roads sequestered rimmed with sallow sod, -But friends with hardhack, aster, goldenrod, -Or succory keeping summer long its trust -Of 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 repose -That hears but rumors of earth’s wrongs and woes; -Too 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 quelled -The Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled. -But there were times when silent were my books -As 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 words -Into a scourge of rough and knotted cords -Unmusical, that whistle as they swing -To leave on shameless backs their purple sting. - -How slow Time comes! Gone, who so swift as he? -Add but a year, ’tis half a century -Since 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 the cloud, hand-broad then, heaped all our sky -With its stored vengeance, and such thunders stirred -As heaven’s and earth’s remotest chambers heard, -I looked to see an ampler atmosphere -By that electric passion-gust blown clear. -I looked for this; consider what I see-- -But I forbear, ’twould please nor you nor me -To check the items in the bitter list -Of all I counted on and all I mist. -Only three instances I choose from all, -And each enough to stir a pigeon’s gall: -Office a fund for ballot-brokers made -To pay the drudges of their gainful trade; -Our cities taught what conquered cities feel -By ædiles chosen that they might safely steal; -And gold, however got, a title fair -To such respect as only gold can bear. -I seem to see this; how shall I gainsay -What all our journals tell me every day? -Poured our young martyrs their high-hearted blood -That we might trample to congenial mud -The 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. - -Dear friend, if any man I wished to please, -’Twere surely you whose humor’s honied ease -Flows necked with gold of thought, whose generous mind -Sees Paradise regained by all mankind, -Whose brave example still to vanward shines, -Checks the retreat, and spurs our lagging lines. -Was I too bitter? Who his phrase can choose -That sees the life-blood of his dearest ooze? -I loved my Country so as only they -Who love a mother fit to die for may; -I loved her old renown, her stainless fame,-- -What better proof than that I loathed her shame? -That many blamed me could not irk me long, -But, if you doubted, must I not be wrong? -’Tis not for me to answer: this I know, -That man or race so prosperously low -Sunk in success that wrath they cannot feel, -Shall taste the spurn of parting Fortune’s heel; -For never land long lease of empire won -Whose sons sate silent when base deeds were done. - - POSTSCRIPT, 1887. - -Curtis, so wrote I thirteen years ago, -Tost it unfinished by, and left it so; -Found lately, I have pieced it out, or tried, -Since time for callid juncture was denied. -Some of the verses pleased me, it is true, -And still were pertinent,--those honoring you. -These now I offer: take them, if you will, -Like the old hand-grasp, when at Shady Hill -We met, or Staten Island, in the days -When life was its own spur, nor needed praise. -If once you thought me rash, no longer fear; -Past my next milestone waits my seventieth year. -I mount no longer when the trumpets call; -My battle-harness idles on the wall, -The spider’s castle, camping-ground of dust, -Not without dints, and all in front, I trust. -Shivering sometimes it calls me as it hears -Afar the charge’s tramp and clash of spears; -But ’tis such murmur only as might be -The sea-shell’s lost tradition of the sea, -That makes me muse and wonder Where? and When? -While from my cliff I watch the waves of men -That climb to break midway their seeming gain, -And think it triumph if they shake their chain. -Little I ask of Fate; will she refuse -Some days of reconcilement with the Muse? -I take my reed again and blow it free -Of dusty silence, murmuring, “Sing to me!” -And, as its stops my curious touch retries, -The stir of earlier instincts I surprise,-- -Instincts, if less imperious, yet more strong, -And happy in the toil that ends with song. - -Home am I come: not, as I hoped might be, -To the old haunts, too full of ghosts for me, -But to the olden dreams that time endears, -And the loved books that younger grow with years; -To country rambles, timing with my tread -Some happier verse that carols in my head, -Yet all with sense of something vainly mist, -Of something lost, but when I never wist. -How empty seems to me the populous street, -One figure gone I daily loved to meet,-- -The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow -Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below! -And, ah, what absence feel I at my side, -Like Dante when he missed his laurelled guide, -What sense of diminution in the air -Once so inspiring, Emerson not there! -But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet -Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet, -And Death is beautiful as feet of friend -Coming with welcome at our journey’s end; -For me Fate gave, whate’er she else denied, -A nature sloping to the southern side; -I thank her for it, though when clouds arise -Such natures double-darken gloomy skies. -I muse upon the margin of the sea, -Our common pathway to the new To Be, -Watching the sails, that lessen more and more, -Of good and beautiful embarked before; -With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear -Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere, -Whose friendly-peopled shore I sometimes see, -By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me, -Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun, -My moorings to the past snap one by one. - - - - -II. - -SENTIMENT. - - - - -ENDYMION. - -A MYSTICAL COMMENT ON TITIAN’S “SACRED -AND PROFANE LOVE.” - - -I. - -My day began not till the twilight fell, -And, lo, in ether from heaven’s sweetest well, -The New Moon swam divinely isolate -In maiden silence, she that makes my fate -Haply not knowing it, or only so -As I the secrets of my sheep may know; -Nor ask I more, entirely blest if she, -In letting me adore, ennoble me -To height of what the Gods meant making man, -As only she and her best beauty can. -Mine be the love that in itself can find -Seed of white thoughts, the lilies of the mind, -Seed of that glad surrender of the will -That finds in service self’s true purpose still; -Love that in outward fairness sees the tent -Pitched for an inmate far more excellent; -Love with a light irradiate to the core, -Lit at her lamp, but fed from inborn store; -Love thrice-requited with the single joy -Of an immaculate vision naught could cloy, -Dearer because, so high beyond my scope, -My life grew rich with her, unbribed by hope -Of other guerdon save to think she knew -One grateful votary paid her all her due; -Happy if she, high-radiant there, resigned -To his sure trust her image in his mind. -O fairer even than Peace is when she comes -Hushing War’s tumult, and retreating drums -Fade to a murmur like the sough of bees -Hidden among the noon-stilled linden-trees, -Bringer of quiet, thou that canst allay -The dust and din and travail of the day, -Strewer of Silence, Giver of the dew -That doth our pastures and our souls renew, -Still dwell remote, still on thy shoreless sea -Float unattained in sacred empery, -Still light my thoughts, nor listen to a prayer -Would make thee less imperishably fair! - - -II. - -Can, then, my twofold nature find content -In vain conceits of airy blandishment? -Ask I no more? Since yesterday I task -My storm-strewn thoughts to tell me what I ask: -Faint premonitions of mutation strange -Steal o’er my perfect orb, and, with the change, -Myself am changed; the shadow of my earth -Darkens the disc of that celestial worth -Which only yesterday could still suffice -Upwards to waft my thoughts in sacrifice; -My heightened fancy with its touches warm -Moulds to a woman’s that ideal form; -Nor yet a woman’s wholly, but divine -With awe her purer essence bred in mine. -Was it long brooding on their own surmise, -Which, of the eyes engendered, fools the eyes, -Or have I seen through that translucent air -A Presence shaped in its seclusions bare, -My Goddess looking on me from above -As look our russet maidens when they love, -But high-uplifted o’er our human heat -And passion-paths too rough for her pearl feet? - -Slowly the Shape took outline as I gazed -At her full-orbed or crescent, till, bedazed -With wonder-working light that subtly wrought -My brain to its own substance, steeping thought -In trances such as poppies give, I saw -Things shut from vision by sight’s sober law, -Amorphous, changeful, but defined at last -Into the peerless Shape mine eyes hold fast. -This, too, at first I worshipt: soon, like wine, -Her eyes, in mine poured, frenzy-philtred mine; -Passion put Worship’s priestly raiment on -And to the woman knelt, the Goddess gone. -Was I, then, more than mortal made? or she -Less than divine that she might mate with me? -If mortal merely, could my nature cope -With such o’ermastery of maddening hope? -If Goddess, could she feel the blissful woe -That women in their self-surrender know? - - -III. - -Long she abode aloof there in her heaven, -Far as the grape-bunch of the Pleiad seven -Beyond my madness' utmost leap; but here -Mine eyes have feigned of late her rapture near, -Moulded of mind-mist that broad day dispels, -Here in these shadowy woods and brook-lulled dells. - -Have no heaven-habitants e’er felt a void -In hearts sublimed with ichor unalloyed? -E’er longed to mingle with a mortal fate -Intense with pathos of its briefer date? -Could she partake, and live, our human stains? -Even with the thought there tingles through my veins -Sense of unwarned renewal; I, the dead, -Receive and house again the ardor fled, -As once Alcestis; to the ruddy brim -Feel masculine virtue flooding every limb, -And life, like Spring returning, brings the key -That sets my senses from their winter free, -Dancing like naked fauns too glad for shame. -Her passion, purified to palest flame, -Can it thus kindle? Is her purpose this? -I will not argue, lest I lose a bliss -That makes me dream Tithonus' fortune mine, -(Or what of it was palpably divine -Ere came the fruitlessly immortal gift;) -I cannot curb my hope’s imperious drift -That wings with fire my dull mortality; -Though fancy-forged, ’tis all I feel or see. - - -IV. - -My Goddess sinks; round Latmos' darkening brow -Trembles the parting of her presence now, -Faint as the perfume left upon the grass -By her limbs' pressure or her feet that pass -By me conjectured, but conjectured so -As things I touch far fainter substance show. -Was it mine eyes' imposture I have seen -Flit with the moonbeams on from shade to sheen -Through the wood-openings? Nay, I see her now -Out of her heaven new-lighted, from her brow -The hair breeze-scattered, like loose mists that blow -Across her crescent, goldening as they go -High-kirtled for the chase, and what was shown, -Of maiden rondure, like the rose half-blown. -If dream, turn real! If a vision, stay! -Take mortal shape, my philtre’s spell obey! -If hags compel thee from thy secret sky -With gruesome incantations, why not I, -Whose only magic is that I distil -A potion, blent of passion, thought, and will, -Deeper in reach, in force of fate more rich, -Than e’er was juice wrung by Thessalian witch -From moon-enchanted herbs,--a potion brewed -Of my best life in each diviner mood? -Myself the elixir am, myself the bowl -Seething and mantling with my soul of soul. -Taste and be humanized: what though the cup, -With thy lips frenzied, shatter? Drink it up! -If but these arms may clasp, o’erquited so, -My world, thy heaven, all life means I shall know. - - -V. - -Sure she hath heard my prayer and granted half, -As Gods do who at mortal madness laugh. -In sleep she comes; she visits me in dreams, -And, as her image in a thousand streams, -So in my veins, that her obey, she sees, -Floating and flaming there, her images -Bear to my little world’s remotest zone -Glad messages of her, and her alone. -With silence-sandalled Sleep she comes to me, -(But softer-footed, sweeter-browed, than she,) -In motion gracious as a seagull’s wing, -And all her bright limbs, moving, seem to sing. -If life’s most solid things illusion seem, -Why should not substance wear the mask of dream? -Let me believe so, then, if so I may -With the night’s bounty feed my beggared day. -In dreams I see her lay the goddess down -With bow and quiver, and her crescent-crown -Flicker and fade away to dull eclipse -As down to mine she deigns her longed-for lips; -And as her neck my happy arms enfold, -Flooded and lustred with her loosened gold, -She whispers words each sweeter than a kiss: -Then, wakened with the shock of sudden bliss, -My arms are empty, my awakener fled, -And, silent in the silent sky o’erhead, -But coldly as on ice-plated snow, she gleams, -Herself the mother and the child of dreams. - - -VI. - -Gone is the time when phantasms could appease -My quest phantasmal and bring cheated ease; -When, if she glorified my dreams, I felt -Through all my limbs a change immortal melt -At touch of hers illuminate with soul. -Not long could I be stilled with Fancy’s dole; -Too soon the mortal mixture in me caught -Red fire from her celestial flame, and fought -For tyrannous control in all my veins: -My fool’s prayer was accepted; what remains? -Or was it some eidolon merely, sent -By her who rules the shades in banishment, -To mock me with her semblance? Were it thus, -How ’scape I shame, whose will was traitorous? -What shall-compensate an ideal dimmed? -How blanch again my statue virgin-limbed, -Soiled with the incense-smoke her chosen priest -Poured more profusely as within decreased -The fire unearthly, fed with coals from far -Within the soul’s shrine? Could my fallen star -Be set in heaven again by prayers and tears -And quenchless sacrifice of all my years, -How would the victim to the flamen leap, -And life for life’s redemption paid hold cheap! - -But what resource when she herself descends -From her blue throne, and o’er her vassal bends -That shape thrice-deified by love, those eyes -Wherein the Lethe of all others lies? -When my white queen of heaven’s remoteness tires, -Herself against her other self conspires, -Takes woman’s nature, walks in mortal ways, -And finds in my remorse her beauty’s praise? -Yet all would I renounce to dream again -The dream in dreams fulfilled that made my pain, -My noble pain that heightened all my years -With crowns to win and prowess-breeding tears; -Nay, would that dream renounce once more to see -Her from her sky there looking down at me! - - -VII. - -Goddess, reclimb thy heaven, and be once more -An inaccessible splendor to adore, -A faith, a hope of such transcendent worth -As bred ennobling discontent with earth; -Give back the longing, back the elated mood -That, fed with thee, spurned every meaner good; -Give even the spur of impotent despair -That, without hope, still bade aspire and dare; -Give back the need to worship that still pours -Down to the soul that virtue it adores! - -Nay, brightest and most beautiful, deem naught -These frantic words, the reckless wind of thought; -Still stoop, still grant,--I live but in thy will; -Be what thou wilt, but be a woman still! -Vainly I cried, nor could myself believe -That what I prayed for I would fain receive. -My moon is set; my vision set with her; -No more can worship vain my pulses stir. -Goddess Triform, I own thy triple spell, -My heaven’s queen,--queen, too, of my earth and hell! - - - - -THE BLACK PREACHER. - -A BRETON LEGEND. - - -At Carnac in Brittany, close on the bay, -They show you a church, or rather the gray -Ribs of a dead one, left there to bleach -With the wreck lying near on the crest of the beach, -Roofless and splintered with thunder-stone, -’Mid lichen-blurred gravestones all alone; -’Tis the kind of ruin strange sights to see -That may have their teaching for you and me. - -Something like this, then, my guide had to tell, -Perched on a saint cracked across when he fell; -But since I might chance give his meaning a wrench, -He talking his _patois_ and I English-French, -I’ll put what he told me, preserving the tone, -In a rhymed prose that makes it half his, half my own. - -An abbey-church stood here, once on a time, -Built as a death-bed atonement for crime: -’Twas for somebody’s sins, I know not whose; -But sinners are plenty, and you can choose. -Though a cloister now of the dusk-winged bat, -’Twas rich enough once, and the brothers grew fat, -Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl, -Singing good rest to the founder’s lost soul. - -But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire -Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire, -And left all a rubbish-heap, black and dreary, -Where only the wind sings _miserere_. - -No priest has kneeled since at the altar’s foot, -Whose crannies are searched by the nightshade’s root, -Nor sound of service is ever heard, -Except from throat of the unclean bird, -Hooting to unassoiled shapes as they pass -In midnights unholy his witches' mass, -Or shouting “Ho! ho!” from the belfry high -As the Devil’s sabbath-train whirls by. - -But once a year, on the eve of All-Souls, -Through these arches dishallowed the organ rolls, -Fingers long fleshless the bell-ropes work, -The chimes peal muffled with sea-mists mirk, -The skeleton windows are traced anew -On the baleful flicker of corpse-lights blue, -And the ghosts must come, so the legend saith, -To a preaching of Reverend Doctor Death. - -Abbots, monks, barons, and ladies fair -Hear the dull summons and gather there: -No rustle of silk now, no clink of mail, -Nor ever a one greets his church-mate pale; -No knight whispers love in the _châtelaine’s_ ear -His next-door neighbor this five hundred year; -No monk has a sleek _benedicite_ -For the great lord shadowy now as he; -Nor needeth any to hold his breath, -Lest he lose the least word of Doctor Death. - -He chooses his text in the Book Divine, -Tenth verse of the Preacher in chapter nine:-- -“'Whatsoever thy hand shall find thee to do, -That do with thy whole might, or thou shalt rue; -For no man is wealthy, or wise, or brave, -In that quencher of might-be’s and would-be’s, the grave.' -Bid by the Bridegroom, 'To-morrow,' ye said, -And To-morrow was digging a trench for your bed; -Ye said, 'God can wait; let us finish our wine;' -Ye had wearied Him, fools, and that last knock was mine!” - -But I can’t pretend to give you the sermon, -Or say if the tongue were French, Latin, or German; -Whatever he preached in, I give you my word -The meaning was easy to all that heard; -Famous preachers there have been and be, -But never was one so convincing as he; -So blunt was never a begging friar, -No Jesuit’s tongue so barbed with fire, -Cameronian never, nor Methodist, -Wrung gall out of Scripture with such a twist. - -And would you know who his hearers must be? -I tell you just what my guide told me: -Excellent teaching men have, day and night, -From two earnest friars, a black and a white, -The Dominican Death and the Carmelite Life; -And between these two there is never strife, -For each has his separate office and station, -And each his own work in the congregation; -Whoso to the white brother deafens his ears, -And cannot be wrought on by blessings or tears, -Awake in his coffin must wait and wait, -In that blackness of darkness that means _too late_, -And come once a year, when the ghost-bell tolls, -As till Doomsday it shall on the eve of All-Souls, -To hear Doctor Death, whose words smart with the brine -Of the Preacher, the tenth verse of chapter nine. - - - - -ARCADIA REDIVIVA. - - -I, walking the familiar street, - While a crammed horse-car jingled through it, -Was lifted from my prosy feet - And in Arcadia ere I knew it. - -Fresh sward for gravel soothed my tread, - And shepherd’s pipes my ear delighted; -The riddle may be lightly read: - I met two lovers newly plighted. - -They murmured by in happy care, - New plans for paradise devising, -Just as the moon, with pensive stare, - O’er Mistress Craigie’s pines was rising. - -Astarte, known nigh threescore years, - Me to no speechless rapture urges; -Them in Elysium she enspheres, - Queen, from of old, of thaumaturges. - -The railings put forth bud and bloom, - The house-fronts all with myrtles twine them, -And light-winged Loves in every room - Make nests, and then with kisses line them. - -O sweetness of untasted life! - O dream, its own supreme fulfilment! -O hours with all illusion rife, - As ere the heart divined what ill meant! - -“_Et ego_,” sighed I to myself, - And strove some vain regrets to bridle, -“Though now laid dusty on the shelf, - Was hero once of such an idyl! - -“An idyl ever newly sweet, - Although since Adam’s day recited, -Whose measures time them to Love’s feet, - Whose sense is every ill requited.” - -Maiden, if I may counsel, drain - Each drop of this enchanted season, -For even our honeymoons must wane, - Convicted of green cheese by Reason. - -And none will seem so safe from change, - Nor in such skies benignant hover, -As this, beneath whose witchery strange - You tread on rose-leaves with your lover. - -The glass unfilled all tastes can fit, - As round its brim Conjecture dances; -For not Mephisto’s self hath wit - To draw such vintages as Fancy’s. - -When our pulse beats its minor key, - When play-time halves and school-time doubles, -Age fills the cup with serious tea, - Which once Dame Clicquot starred with bubbles. - -“Fie, Mr. Graybeard! Is this wise? - Is this the moral of a poet, -Who, when the plant of Eden dies, - Is privileged once more to sow it? - -“That herb of clay-disdaining root, - From stars secreting what it feeds on, -Is burnt-out passion’s slag and soot - Fit soil to strew its dainty seeds on? - -“Pray, why, if in Arcadia once, - Need one so soon forget the way there? -Or why, once there, be such a dunce - As not contentedly to stay there?” - -Dear child, ’twas but a sorry jest, - And from my heart I hate the cynic -Who makes the Book of Life a nest - For comments staler than rabbinic. - -If Love his simple spell but keep, - Life with ideal eyes to flatter, -The Grail itself were crockery cheap - To Every-day’s communion-platter. - -One Darby is to me well known, - Who, as the hearth between them blazes, -Sees the old moonlight shine on Joan, - And float her youthward in its hazes. - -He rubs his spectacles, he stares,-- - ’Tis the same face that witched him early! -He gropes for his remaining hairs,-- - Is this a fleece that feels so curly? - -“Good heavens! but now ’twas winter gray, - And I of years had more than plenty; -The almanac’s a fool! ’Tis May! - Hang family Bibles! I am twenty! - -“Come, Joan, your arm; we’ll walk the room-- - The lane, I mean--do you remember? -How confident the roses bloom, - As if it ne’er could be December! - -“Nor more it shall, while in your eyes - My heart its summer heat recovers, -And you, howe’er your mirror lies, - Find your old beauty in your lover’s.” - - - - -THE NEST. - - -MAY. - -When oaken woods with buds are pink, - And new-come birds each morning sing, -When fickle May on Summer’s brink - Pauses, and knows not which to fling, -Whether fresh bud and bloom again, -Or hoar-frost silvering hill and plain, - -Then from the honeysuckle gray - The oriole with experienced quest -Twitches the fibrous bark away, - The cordage of his hammock-nest, -Cheering his labor with a note -Rich as the orange of his throat. - -High o’er the loud and dusty road - The soft gray cup in safety swings, -To brim ere August with its load - Of downy breasts and throbbing wings, -O’er which the friendly elm-tree heaves -An emerald roof with sculptured eaves. - -Below, the noisy World drags by - In the old way, because it must, -The bride with heartbreak in her eye, - The mourner following hated dust: -Thy duty, wingëd flame of Spring, -Is but to love, and fly, and sing. - -Oh, happy life, to soar and sway - Above the life by mortals led, -Singing the merry months away, - Master, not slave of daily bread, -And, when the Autumn comes, to flee -Wherever sunshine beckons thee! - - -PALINODE.--DECEMBER. - -Like some lorn abbey now, the wood - Stands roofless in the bitter air; -In ruins on its floor is strewed - The carven foliage quaint and rare, -And homeless winds complain along -The columned choir once thrilled with song. - -And thou, dear nest, whence joy and praise - The thankful oriole used to pour, -Swing’st empty while the north winds chase - Their snowy swarms from Labrador: -But, loyal to the happy past, -I love thee still for what thou wast. - -Ah, when the Summer graces flee - From other nests more dear than thou, -And, where June crowded once, I see - Only bare trunk and disleaved bough; -When springs of life that gleamed and gushed -Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed; - -When our own branches, naked long, - The vacant nests of Spring betray, -Nurseries of passion, love, and song - That vanished as our year grew gray; -When Life drones o’er a tale twice told -O’er embers pleading with the cold,-- - -I’ll trust, that, like the birds of Spring, - Our good goes not without repair, -But only flies to soar and sing - Far off in some diviner air, -Where we shall find it in the calms -Of that fair garden ’neath the palms. - - - - -A YOUTHFUL EXPERIMENT IN ENGLISH -HEXAMETERS. - -IMPRESSIONS OF HOMER. - - -Sometimes come pauses of calm, when the rapt bard, holding his heart back, -Over his deep mind muses, as when o’er awestricken ocean -Poises a heapt cloud luridly, ripening the gale and the thunder; -Slow rolls onward the verse with a long swell heaving and swinging, -Seeming to wait till, gradually wid’ning from far-off horizons, -Piling the deeps up, heaping the glad-hearted surges before it, -Gathers the thought as a strong wind darkening and cresting the tumult. -Then every pause, every heave, each trough in the waves, has its meaning; -Full-sailed, forth like a tall ship steadies the theme, and around it, -Leaping beside it in glad strength, running in wild glee beyond it, -Harmonies billow exulting and floating the soul where it lists them, -Swaying the listener’s fantasy hither and thither like driftweed. - - - - -BIRTHDAY VERSES. - -WRITTEN IN A CHILD’S ALBUM. - - -’Twas sung of old in hut and hall -How once a king in evil hour -Hung musing o’er his castle wall, -And, lost in idle dreams, let fall -Into the sea his ring of power. - -Then, let him sorrow as he might, -And pledge his daughter and his throne -To who restored the jewel bright, -The broken spell would ne’er unite; -The grim old ocean held its own. - -Those awful powers on man that wait, -On man, the beggar or the king, -To hovel bare or hall of state -A magic ring that masters fate -With each succeeding birthday bring. - -Therein are set four jewels rare: -Pearl winter, summer’s ruby blaze, -Spring’s emerald, and, than all more fair, -Fall’s pensive opal, doomed to bear -A heart of fire bedreamed with haze. - -To him the simple spell who knows -The spirits of the ring to sway, -Fresh power with every sunrise flows, -And royal pursuivants are those -That fly his mandates to obey. - -But he that with a slackened will -Dreams of things past or things to be, -From him the charm is slipping still, -And drops, ere he suspect the ill, -Into the inexorable sea. - - - - -ESTRANGEMENT. - - -The path from me to you that led, - Untrodden long, with grass is grown,-- -Mute carpet that his lieges spread - Before the Prince Oblivion -When he goes visiting the dead. - -And who are they but who forget? - You, who my coming could surmise -Ere any hint of me as yet - Warned other ears and other eyes, -See the path blurred without regret. - -But when I trace its windings sweet - With saddened steps, at every spot -That feels the memory in my feet, - Each grass-blade turns forget-me-not, -Where murmuring bees your name repeat. - - - - -PHŒBE. - - -Ere pales in Heaven the morning star, -A bird, the loneliest of its kind, -Hears Dawn’s faint footfall from afar -While all its mates are dumb and blind. - -It is a wee sad-colored thing, -As shy and secret as a maid, -That, ere in choir the robins ring, -Pipes its own name like one afraid. - -It seems pain-prompted to repeat -The story of some ancient ill, -But _Phœbe!_ _Phœbe!_ sadly sweet -Is all it says, and then is still. - -It calls and listens. Earth and sky, -Hushed by the pathos of its fate, -Listen: no whisper of reply -Comes from its doom-dissevered mate. - -_Phœbe!_ it calls and calls again, -And Ovid, could he but have heard, -Had hung a legendary pain -About the memory of the bird; -A pain articulate so long -In penance of some mouldered crime -Whose ghost still flies the Furies' thong -Down the waste solitudes of time. - -Waif of the young World’s wonder-hour, -When gods found mortal maidens fair, -And will malign was joined with power -Love’s kindly laws to overbear, - -Like Progne, did it feel the stress -And coil of the prevailing words -Close round its being, and compress -Man’s ampler nature to a bird’s? - -One only memory left of all -The motley crowd of vanished scenes, -Hers, and vain impulse to recall -By repetition what it means. - -_Phœbe!_ is all it has to say -In plaintive cadence o’er and o’er, -Like children that have lost their way, -And know their names, but nothing more. - -Is it a type, since Nature’s Lyre -Vibrates to every note in man, -Of that insatiable desire, -Meant to be so since life began? - -I, in strange lands at gray of dawn, -Wakeful, have heard that fruitless plaint -Through Memory’s chambers deep withdrawn -Renew its iterations faint. - -So nigh! yet from remotest years -It summons back its magic, rife -With longings unappeased, and tears -Drawn from the very source of life. - - - - -DAS EWIG-WEIBLICHE. - - -How was I worthy so divine a loss, - Deepening my midnights, kindling all my morns? -Why waste such precious wood to make my cross, - Such far-sought roses for my crown of thorns? - -And when she came, how earned I such a gift? - Why spend on me, a poor earth-delving mole, -The fireside sweetnesses, the heavenward lift, - The hourly mercy, of a woman’s soul? - -Ah, did we know to give her all her right, - What wonders even in our poor clay were done! -It is not Woman leaves us to our night, - But our brute earth that grovels from her sun. - -Our nobler cultured fields and gracious domes - We whirl too oft from her who still shines on -To light in vain our caves and clefts, the homes - Of night-bird instincts pained till she be gone. - -Still must this body starve our souls with shade; - But when Death makes us what we were before, -Then shall her sunshine all our depths invade, - And not a shadow stain heaven’s crystal floor. - - - - -THE RECALL. - - -Come back before the birds are flown, -Before the leaves desert the tree, -And, through the lonely alleys blown, -Whisper their vain regrets to me -Who drive before a blast more rude, -The plaything of my gusty mood, -In vain pursuing and pursued! - -Nay, come although the boughs be bare, -Though snowflakes fledge the summer’s nest, -And in some far Ausonian air -The thrush, your minstrel, warm his breast. -Come, sunshine’s treasurer, and bring -To doubting flowers their faith in spring, -To birds and me the need to sing! - - - - -ABSENCE. - - -Sleep is Death’s image,--poets tell us so; -But Absence is the bitter self of Death, -And, you away, Life’s lips their red forego, -Parched in an air unfreshened by thy breath. - -Light of those eyes that made the light of mine, -Where shine you? On what happier fields and flowers? -Heaven’s lamps renew their lustre less divine, -But only serve to count my darkened hours. - -If with your presence went your image too, -That brain-born ghost my path would never cross -Which meets me now where’er I once met you, -Then vanishes, to multiply my loss. - - - - -MONNA LISA. - - -She gave me all that woman can, -Nor her soul’s nunnery forego, -A confidence that man to man -Without remorse can never show. - -Rare art, that can the sense refine -Till not a pulse rebellious stirs, -And, since she never can be mine, -Makes it seem sweeter to be hers! - - - - -THE OPTIMIST. - - - Turbid from London’s noise and smoke, - Here I find air and quiet too: - Air filtered through the beech and oak, - Quiet by nothing harsher broke - Than wood-dove’s meditative coo. - - The Truce of God is here; the breeze - Sighs as men sigh relieved from care, - Or tilts as lightly in the trees - As might a robin: all is ease, - With pledge of ampler ease to spare. - - Repose fills all the generous space - Of undulant plain; the rook and crow - Hush; ’tis as if a silent grace, - By Nature murmured, calmed the face - Of Heaven above and Earth below. - - From past and future toils I rest, - One Sabbath pacifies my year; - I am the halcyon, this my nest; - And all is safely for the best - While the World’s there and I am here. - - So I turn tory for the nonce, - And think the radical a bore, - Who cannot see, thick-witted dunce, - That what was good for people once - Must be as good forevermore. - - Sun, sink no deeper down the sky; - Earth, never change this summer mood; - Breeze, loiter thus forever by, - Stir the dead leaf or let it lie: - Since I am happy, all is good. - -MIDDLETON, _August, 1884_. - - - - -ON BURNING SOME OLD LETTERS. - - -With what odorous woods and spices -Spared for royal sacrifices, -With what costly gums seld-seen, -Hoarded to embalm a queen, -With what frankincense and myrrh, -Burn these precious parts of her, -Full of life and light and sweetness -As a summer day’s completeness, -Joy of sun and song of bird -Running wild in every word, -Full of all the superhuman -Grace and winsomeness of woman? - -O’er these leaves her wrist has slid, -Thrilled with veins where fire is hid -’Neath the skin’s pellucid veil, -Like the opal’s passion pale; -This her breath hath sweetened; this -Still seems trembling with the kiss -She half-ventured on my name, -Brow and cheek and throat aflame; -Over all caressing lies -Sunshine left there by her eyes; -From them all an effluence rare -With her nearness fills the air, -Till the murmur I half-hear -Of her light feet drawing near. - -Rarest woods were coarse and rough, -Sweetest spice not sweet enough, -Too impure all earthly fire -For this sacred funeral-pyre; -These rich relics must suffice -For their own dear sacrifice. - -Seek we first an altar fit -For such victims laid on it: -It shall be this slab brought home -In old happy days from Rome,-- -Lazuli, once blest to line -Dian’s inmost cell and shrine. -Gently now I lay them there, -Pure as Dian’s forehead bare, -Yet suffused with warmer hue, -Such as only Latmos knew. - -Fire I gather from the sun -In a virgin lens: ’tis done! -Mount the flames, red, yellow, blue, -As her moods were shining through, -Of the moment’s impulse born,-- -Moods of sweetness, playful scorn, -Half defiance, half surrender, -More than cruel, more than tender, -Flouts, caresses, sunshine, shade, -Gracious doublings of a maid -Infinite in guileless art, -Playing hide-seek with her heart. - -On the altar now, alas, -There they lie a crinkling mass, -Writhing still, as if with grief -Went the life from every leaf; -Then (heart-breaking palimpsest!) -Vanishing ere wholly guessed, -Suddenly some lines flash back, -Traced in lightning on the black, -And confess, till now denied, -All the fire they strove to hide. -What they told me, sacred trust, -Stays to glorify my dust, -There to burn through dusk and damp -Like a mage’s deathless lamp, -While an atom of this frame -Lasts to feed the dainty flame. - -All is ashes now, but they -In my soul are laid away, -And their radiance round me hovers -Soft as moonlight over lovers, -Shutting her and me alone -In dream-Edens of our own; -First of lovers to invent -Love, and teach men what it meant. - - - - -THE PROTEST. - - -I could not bear to see those eyes -On all with wasteful largesse shine, -And that delight of welcome rise -Like sunshine strained through amber wine, -But that a glow from deeper skies, -From conscious fountains more divine, -Is (is it?) mine. - -Be beautiful to all mankind, -As Nature fashioned thee to be; -’Twould anger me did all not find -The sweet perfection that’s in thee: -Yet keep one charm of charms behind,-- -Nay, thou ’rt so rich, keep two or three -For (is it?) me! - - - - -THE PETITION. - - -Oh, tell me less or tell me more, -Soft eyes with mystery at the core, -That always seem to meet my own -Frankly as pansies fully blown, -Yet waver still ’tween no and yes! - -So swift to cavil and deny, -Then parley with concessions shy, -Dear eyes, that share their youth with mine -And through my inmost shadows shine, -Oh, tell me more or tell me less! - - - - -FACT OR FANCY? - - -In town I hear, scarce wakened yet, -My neighbor’s clock behind the wall -Record the day’s increasing debt, -And _Cuckoo! Cuckoo!_ faintly call. - -Our senses run in deepening grooves, -Thrown out of which they lose their tact, -And consciousness with effort moves -From habit past to present fact. - -So, in the country waked to-day, -I hear, unwitting of the change, -A cuckoo’s throb from far away -Begin to strike, nor think it strange. - -The sound creates its wonted frame: -My bed at home, the songster hid -Behind the wainscoting,--all came -As long association bid. - -I count to learn how late it is, -Until, arrived at thirty-four, -I question, “What strange world is this -Whose lavish hours would make me poor?” - -_Cuckoo! Cuckoo!_ Still on it went, -With hints of mockery in its tone; -How could such hoards of time be spent -By one poor mortal’s wit alone? - -I have it! Grant, ye kindly Powers, -I from this spot may never stir, -If only these uncounted hours -May pass, and seem too short, with Her! - -But who She is, her form and face, -These to the world of dream belong; -She moves through fancy’s visioned space, -Unbodied, like the cuckoo’s song. - - - - -AGRO-DOLCE. - - -One kiss from all others prevents me, -And sets all my pulses astir, -And burns on my lips and torments me: -’Tis the kiss that I fain would give her. - -One kiss for all others requites me, -Although it is never to be, -And sweetens my dreams and invites me: -’Tis the kiss that she dare not give me. - -Ah, could it be mine, it were sweeter -Than honey bees garner in dream, -Though its bliss on my lips were fleeter -Than a swallow’s dip to the stream. - -And yet, thus denied, it can never -In the prose of life vanish away; -O’er my lips it must hover forever, -The sunshine and shade of my day. - - - - -THE BROKEN TRYST. - - -Walking alone where we walked together, -When June was breezy and blue, -I watch in the gray autumnal weather -The leaves fall inconstant as you. - -If a dead leaf startle behind me, -I think ’tis your garment’s hem, -And, oh, where no memory could find me, -Might I whirl away with them! - - - - -CASA SIN ALMA. - -RECUERDO DE MADRID. - - -Silencioso por la puerta -Voy de su casa desierta -Do siempre feliz entré, -Y la encuentro en vano abierta -Cual la boca de una muerta -Despues que el alma se fué. - - - - -A CHRISTMAS CAROL. - -FOR THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL CHILDREN OF THE -CHURCH OF THE DISCIPLES. - - -“What means this glory round our feet,” - The Magi mused, “more bright than morn?” -And voices chanted clear and sweet, - “To-day the Prince of Peace is born!” - -“What means that star,” the Shepherds said, - “That brightens through the rocky glen?” -And angels, answering overhead, - Sang, “Peace on earth, good-will to men!” - -’Tis eighteen hundred years and more - Since those sweet oracles were dumb; -We wait for Him, like them of yore; - Alas, He seems so slow to come! - -But it was said, in words of gold - No time or sorrow e’er shall dim, -That little children might be bold - In perfect trust to come to Him. - -All round about our feet shall shine - A light like that the wise men saw, -If we our loving wills incline - To that sweet Life which is the Law. - -So shall we learn to understand - The simple faith of shepherds then, -And, clasping kindly hand in hand, - Sing, “Peace on earth, good-will to men!” - -And they who do their souls no wrong, - But keep at eve the faith of morn, -Shall daily hear the angel-song, - “To-day the Prince of Peace is born!” - - - - -MY PORTRAIT GALLERY. - - -Oft round my hall of portraiture I gaze, -By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy, -From stainless quarries of deep-buried days. -There, as I muse in soothing melancholy, -Your faces glow in more than mortal youth, -Companions of my prime, now vanished wholly, -The loud, impetuous boy, the low-voiced maiden. -Ah, never master that drew mortal breath -Can match thy portraits, just and generous Death, -Whose brush with sweet regretful tints is laden! -Thou paintest that which struggled here below -Half understood, or understood for woe, -And with a sweet forewarning -Mak’st round the sacred front an aureole glow -Woven of that light that rose on Easter morning. - - - - -PAOLO TO FRANCESCA. - - -I was with thee in Heaven: I cannot tell -If years or moments, so the sudden bliss, -When first we found, then lost, us in a kiss, -Abolished Time, abolished Earth and Hell, -Left only Heaven. Then from our blue there fell -The dagger’s flash, and did not fall amiss, -For nothing now can rob my life of this,-- -That once with thee in Heaven, all else is well. -Us, undivided when man’s vengeance came, -God’s half-forgives that doth not here divide; -And, were this bitter whirl-blast fanged with flame, -To me ’twere summer, we being side by side: -This granted, I God’s mercy will not blame, -For, given thy nearness, nothing is denied. - - - - -SONNET. - -_Scottish Border._ - - -As sinks the sun behind yon alien hills -Whose heather-purpled slopes, in glory rolled, -Flush all my thought with momentary gold, -What pang of vague regret my fancy thrills? -Here ’tis enchanted ground the peasant tills, -Where the shy ballad dared its blooms unfold, -And memory’s glamour makes new sights seem old, -As when our life some vanished dream fulfils. -Yet not to thee belong these painless tears, -Land loved ere seen: before my darkened eyes, -From far beyond the waters and the years, -Horizons mute that wait their poet rise; -The stream before me fades and disappears, -And in the Charles the western splendor dies. - - - - -SONNET. - -_On being asked for an Autograph in Venice._ - - -Amid these fragments of heroic days -When thought met deed with mutual passion’s leap, -There sits a Fame whose silent trump makes cheap -What short-lived rumor of ourselves we raise. -They had far other estimate of praise -Who stamped the signet of their souls so deep -In art and action, and whose memories keep -Their height like stars above our misty ways: -In this grave presence to record my name -Something within me hangs the head and shrinks. -Dull were the soul without some joy in fame; -Yet here to claim remembrance were, methinks, -Like him who, in the desert’s awful frame, -Notches his cockney initials on the Sphinx. - - - - -THE DANCING BEAR. - - -Far over Elf-land poets stretch their sway, -And win their dearest crowns beyond the goal -Of their own conscious purpose; they control -With gossamer threads wide-flown our fancy’s play, -And so our action. On my walk to-day, -A wallowing bear begged clumsily his toll, -When straight a vision rose of Atta Troll, -And scenes ideal witched mine eyes away. -“_Merci, Mossieu!_” the astonished bear-ward cried, -Grateful for thrice his hope to me, the slave -Of partial memory, seeing at his side -A bear immortal. The glad dole I gave -Was none of mine; poor Heine o’er the wide -Atlantic welter reached it from his grave. - - - - -THE MAPLE. - - -The Maple puts her corals on in May, -While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling, -To be in tune with what the robins sing, -Plastering new log-huts ’mid her branches gray; -But when the Autumn southward turns away, -Then in her veins burns most the blood of Spring, -And every leaf, intensely blossoming, -Makes the year’s sunset pale the set of day. -O Youth unprescient, were it only so -With trees you plant, and in whose shade reclined, -Thinking their drifting blooms Fate’s coldest snow! -You carve dear names upon the faithful rind, -Nor in that vernal stem the cross foreknow -That Age shall bear, silent, yet unresigned! - - - - -NIGHTWATCHES. - - -While the slow clock, as they were miser’s gold, -Counts and recounts the mornward steps of Time, -The darkness thrills with conscience of each crime -By Death committed, daily grown more bold. -Once more the list of all my wrongs is told, -And ghostly hands stretch to me from my prime -Helpless farewells, as from an alien clime; -For each new loss redoubles all the old. -This morn ’twas May; the blossoms were astir -With southern wind; but now the boughs are bent -With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze. -How much of all my past is dumb with her, -And of my future, too, for with her went -Half of that world I ever cared to please! - - - - -DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES. - - -Hers all that Earth could promise or bestow,-- -Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years, -Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears, -A life remote from every sordid woe, -And by a nation’s swelled to lordlier flow. -What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts or fears, -When, the day’s swan, she swam along the cheers -Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago? -The guns were shouting Io Hymen then -That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom; -The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men -To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb. -Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it blind, -Knowing what life is, what our humankind? - - - - -PRISON OF CERVANTES. - - -Seat of all woes! Though Nature’s firm decree -The narrowing soul with narrowing dungeon bind, -Yet was his free of motion as the wind, -And held both worlds, of spirit and sense, in fee. -In charmed communion with his dual mind -He wandered Spain, himself both knight and hind, -Redressing wrongs he knew must ever be. -His humor wise could see life’s long deceit, -Man’s baffled aims, nor therefore both despise; -His knightly nature could ill fortune greet -Like an old friend. Whose ever such kind eyes -That pierced so deep, such scope, save his whose feet -By Avon ceased ’neath the same April’s skies? - - - - -TO A LADY PLAYING ON THE CITHERN. - - -So dreamy-soft the notes, so far away -They seem to fall, the horns of Oberon -Blow their faint Hunt’s-up from the good-time gone; -Or, on a morning of long-withered May, -Larks tinkle unseen o’er Claudian arches gray, -That Romeward crawl from Dreamland; and anon -My fancy flings her cloak of Darkness on, -To vanish from the dungeon of To-day. -In happier times and scenes I seem to be, -And, as her fingers flutter o’er the strings, -The days return when I was young as she, -And my fledged thoughts began to feel their wings -With all Heaven’s blue before them: Memory -Or Music is it such enchantment sings? - - - - -THE EYE’S TREASURY. - - -Gold of the reddening sunset, backward thrown -In largess on my tall paternal trees, -Thou with false hope or fear didst never tease -His heart that hoards thee; nor is childhood flown -From him whose life no fairer boon hath known -Than that what pleased him earliest still should please. -And who hath incomes safe from chance as these, -Gone in a moment, yet for life his own? -All other gold is slave of earthward laws; -This to the deeps of ether takes its flight, -And on the topmost leaves makes glorious pause -Of parting pathos ere it yield to night: -So linger, as from me earth’s light withdraws, -Dear touch of Nature, tremulously bright! - - - - -PESSIMOPTIMISM. - - -Ye little think what toil it was to build -A world of men imperfect even as this, -Where we conceive of Good by what we miss, -Of Ill by that wherewith best days are filled; -A world whose every atom is self-willed, -Whose corner-stone is propt on artifice, -Whose joy is shorter-lived than woman’s kiss, -Whose wisdom hoarded is but to be spilled. -Yet this is better than a life of caves, -Whose highest art was scratching on a bone, -Or chipping toilsome arrowheads of flint; -Better, though doomed to hear while Cleon raves, -To see wit’s want eterned in paint or stone, -And wade the drain-drenched shoals of daily print. - - - - -THE BRAKES. - - -What countless years and wealth of brain were spent -To bring us hither from our caves and huts, -And trace through pathless wilds the deep-worn ruts -Of faith and habit, by whose deep indent -Prudence may guide if genius be not lent,-- -Genius, not always happy when it shuts -Its ears against the plodder’s ifs and buts, -Hoping in one rash leap to snatch the event. -The coursers of the sun, whose hoofs of flame -Consume morn’s misty threshold, are exact -As bankers' clerks, and all this star-poised frame, -One swerve allowed, were with convulsion rackt; -This world were doomed, should Dulness fail, to tame -Wit’s feathered heels in the stern stocks of fact. - - - - -A FOREBODING. - - -What were the whole void world, if thou wert dead, -Whose briefest absence can eclipse my day, -And make the hours that danced with Time away -Drag their funereal steps with muffled head? -Through thee, meseems, the very rose is red, -From thee the violet steals its breath in May, -From thee draw life all things that grow not gray, -And by thy force the happy stars are sped. -Thou near, the hope of thee to overflow -Fills all my earth and heaven, as when in Spring, -Ere April come, the birds and blossoms know, -And grasses brighten round her feet to cling; -Nay, and this hope delights all nature so -That the dumb turf I tread on seems to sing. - - - - -III. - -FANCY. - - - - -UNDER THE OCTOBER MAPLES. - - -What mean these banners spread, -These paths with royal red -So gaily carpeted? -Comes there a prince to-day? -Such footing were too fine -For feet less argentine -Than Dian’s own or thine, -Queen whom my tides obey. - -Surely for thee are meant -These hues so orient -That with a sultan’s tent -Each tree invites the sun; -Our Earth such homage pays, -So decks her dusty ways, -And keeps such holidays, -For one, and only one. - -My brain shapes form and face, -Throbs with the rhythmic grace -And cadence of her pace -To all fine instincts true; -Her footsteps, as they pass, -Than moonbeams over grass -Fall lighter,--and, alas, -More insubstantial too! - - - - -LOVE’S CLOCK. - -A PASTORAL. - - -DAPHNIS _waiting_. - -“O Dryad feet, - Be doubly fleet, - Timed to my heart’s expectant beat - While I await her! - 'At four,' vowed she; - ’Tis scarcely three, - Yet by _my_ time it seems to be - A good hour later!” - - -CHLOE. - -“Bid me not stay! - Hear reason, pray! - ’Tis striking six! Sure never day - Was short as this is!” - -DAPHNIS. - -“Reason nor rhyme - Is in the chime! - It can’t be five; I’ve scarce had time - To beg two kisses!” - -BOTH. - -“Early or late, - When lovers wait, - And Love’s watch gains, if Time a gait - So snail-like chooses, - Why should his feet - Become more fleet - Than cowards' are, when lovers meet -And Love’s watch loses?” - - - - -ELEANOR MAKES MACAROONS. - - - Light of triumph in her eyes, - Eleanor her apron ties; - As she pushes back her sleeves, - High resolve her bosom heaves. - Hasten, cook! impel the fire - To the pace of her desire; - As you hope to save your soul, - Bring a virgin casserole, - Brightest bring of silver spoons,-- - Eleanor makes macaroons! - - Almond-blossoms, now adance - In the smile of Southern France, - Leave your sport with sun and breeze, - Think of duty, not of ease; - Fashion, ’neath their jerkins brown, - Kernels white as thistle-down, - Tiny cheeses made with cream - From the Galaxy’s mid-stream, - Blanched in light of honeymoons,-- - Eleanor makes macaroons! - - Now for sugar,--nay, our plan - Tolerates no work of man. - Hurry, then, ye golden bees; - Fetch your clearest honey, please, - Garnered on a Yorkshire moor, - While the last larks sing and soar, - From the heather-blossoms sweet - Where sea-breeze and sunshine meet, - And the Augusts mask as Junes,-- - Eleanor makes macaroons! - - Next the pestle and mortar find, - Pure rock-crystal,--these to grind - Into paste more smooth than silk, - Whiter than the milkweed’s milk: - Spread it on a rose-leaf, thus, - Cate to please Theocritus; - Then the fire with spices swell, - While, for her completer spell, - Mystic canticles she croons,-- - Eleanor makes macaroons! - - Perfect! and all this to waste - On a graybeard’s palsied taste! - Poets so their verses write, - Heap them full of life and light, - And then fling them to the rude - Mumbling of the multitude. - Not so dire her fate as theirs, - Since her friend this gift declares - Choicest of his birthday boons,-- - Eleanor’s dear macaroons! - -_February 22, 1884._ - - - - -TELEPATHY. - - -“And how could you dream of meeting?” - Nay, how can you ask me, sweet? - All day my pulse had been beating - The tune of your coming feet. - - And as nearer and ever nearer - I felt the throb of your tread, - To be in the world grew dearer, - And my blood ran rosier red. - - Love called, and I could not linger, - But sought the forbidden tryst, - As music follows the finger - Of the dreaming lutanist. - - And though you had said it and said it, - “We must not be happy to-day,” - Was I not wiser to credit - The fire in my feet than your Nay? - - - - -SCHERZO. - - -When the down is on the chin -And the gold-gleam in the hair, -When the birds their sweethearts win -And champagne is in the air, -Love is here, and Love is there, -Love is welcome everywhere. - -Summer’s cheek too soon turns thin, -Days grow briefer, sunshine rare; -Autumn from his cannekin -Blows the froth to chase Despair: -Love is met with frosty stare, -Cannot house ’neath branches bare. - -When new red is in the rose -And new life is in the leaf, -Though Love’s Maytime be as brief -As a dragon-fly’s repose, -Never moments come like those, -Be they Heaven or Hell: who knows? - -All too soon comes Winter’s grief, -Spendthrift Love’s false friends turn foes; -Softly comes Old Age, the thief, -Steals the rapture, leaves the throes: -Love his mantle round him throws,-- -“Time to say Good-bye; it snows.” - - - - -“FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO SIC -COGITAVIT.” - - -That’s a rather bold speech, my Lord Bacon, - For, indeed, is’t so easy to know -Just how much we from others have taken, - And how much our own natural flow? - -Since your mind bubbled up at its fountain, - How many streams made it elate, -While it calmed to the plain from the mountain, - As every mind must that grows great? - -While you thought ’twas You thinking as newly - As Adam still wet with God’s dew, -You forgot in your self-pride that truly - The whole Past was thinking through you. - -Greece, Rome, nay, your namesake, old Roger, - With Truth’s nameless delvers who wrought -In the dark mines of Truth, helped to prod your - Fine brain with the goad of their thought. - -As mummy was prized for a rich hue - The painter no elsewhere could find, -So ’twas buried men’s thinking with which you - Gave the ripe mellow tone to your mind. - -I heard the proud strawberry saying, - “Only look what a ruby I’ve made!” -It forgot how the bees in their maying - Had brought it the stuff for its trade. - -And yet there’s the half of a truth in it, - And my Lord might his copyright sue; -For a thought’s his who kindles new youth in it, - Or so puts it as makes it more true. - -The birds but repeat without ending - The same old traditional notes, -Which some, by more happily blending, - Seem to make over new in their throats; - -And we men through our old bit of song run, - Until one just improves on the rest, -And we call a thing his, in the long run, - Who utters it clearest and best. - - - - -AUSPEX. - - -My heart, I cannot still it, -Nest that had song-birds in it; -And when the last shall go, -The dreary days, to fill it, -Instead of lark or linnet, -Shall whirl dead leaves and snow. - -Had they been swallows only, -Without the passion stronger -That skyward longs and sings,-- -Woe’s me, I shall be lonely -When I can feel no longer -The impatience of their wings! - -A moment, sweet delusion, -Like birds the brown leaves hover; -But it will not be long -Before their wild confusion -Fall wavering down to cover -The poet and his song. - - - - -THE PREGNANT COMMENT. - - -Opening one day a book of mine, -I absent, Hester found a line -Praised with a pencil-mark, and this -She left transfigured with a kiss. - -“When next upon the page I chance, -Like Poussin’s nymphs my pulses dance, -And whirl my fancy where it sees -Pan piping ’neath Arcadian trees, -Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse, -Still young and glad as Homer’s verse. -“What mean,” I ask, “these sudden joys? -This feeling fresher than a boy’s? -What makes this line, familiar long, -New as the first bird’s April song? -I could, with sense illumined thus, -Clear doubtful texts in Æschylus!” - -Laughing, one day she gave the key, -My riddle’s open-sesame; -Then added, with a smile demure, -Whose downcast lids veiled triumph sure, -“If what I left there give you pain, -You--you--can take it off again; -’Twas for _my_ poet, not for him, -Your Doctor Donne there!” - - Earth grew dim -And wavered in a golden mist, -As rose, not paper, leaves I kissed. -Donne, you forgive? I let you keep -Her precious comment, poet deep. - - - - -THE LESSON. - - -I sat and watched the walls of night -With cracks of sudden lightning glow, -And listened while with clumsy might -The thunder wallowed to and fro. - -The rain fell softly now; the squall, -That to a torrent drove the trees, -Had whirled beyond us to let fall -Its tumult on the whitening seas. - -But still the lightning crinkled keen, -Or fluttered fitful from behind -The leaden drifts, then only seen, -That rumbled eastward on the wind. - -Still as gloom followed after glare, -While bated breath the pine-trees drew, -Tiny Salmoneus of the air, -His mimic bolts the firefly threw. - -He thought, no doubt, “Those flashes grand, -That light for leagues the shuddering sky, -Are made, a fool could understand, -By some superior kind of fly. - -“He’s of our race’s elder branch -His family-arms the same as ours, -Both born the twy-forked flame to launch, -Of kindred, if unequal, powers.” - -And is man wiser? Man who takes -His consciousness the law to be -Of all beyond his ken, and makes -God but a bigger kind of Me? - - - - -SCIENCE AND POETRY. - - -He who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire -Over the land and through the sea-depths still, -Thought only of the flame-winged messenger -As a dull drudge that should encircle earth -With sordid messages of Trade, and tame -Blithe Ariel to a bagman. But the Muse -Not long will be defrauded. From her foe -Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch, -The Age of Wonder is renewed again, -And to our disenchanted day restores -The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to Thought, -The Cloak that makes invisible; and with these -I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore, -Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay. - - - - -A NEW YEAR’S GREETING. - - -The century numbers fourscore years; -You, fortressed in your teens, -To Time’s alarums close your ears, -And, while he devastates your peers, -Conceive not what he means. - -If e’er life’s winter fleck with snow -Your hair’s deep shadowed bowers, -That winsome head an art would know -To make it charm, and wear it so -As ’twere a wreath of flowers. - -If to such fairies years must come, -May yours fall soft and slow -As, shaken by a bee’s low hum, -The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb, -Down to their mates below! - - - - -THE DISCOVERY. - - -I watched a moorland torrent run -Down through the drift itself had made, -Golden as honey in the sun, -Of darkest amber in the shade. - -In this wild glen at last, methought, -The magic’s secret I surprise; -Here Celia’s guardian fairy caught -The changeful splendors of her eyes. - -All else grows tame, the sky’s one blue, -The one long languish of the rose, -But these, beyond prevision new, -Shall charm and startle to the close. - - - - -WITH A SEASHELL. - - -Shell, whose lips, than mine more cold, -Might with Dian’s ear make bold, -Seek my Lady’s; if thou win -To that portal, shut from sin, -Where commissioned angels' swords -Startle back unholy words, -Thou a miracle shalt see -Wrought by it and wrought in thee; -Thou, the dumb one, shalt recover -Speech of poet, speech of lover. -If she deign to lift you there, -Murmur what I may not dare; -In that archway, pearly-pink -As the Dawn’s untrodden brink, -Murmur, “Excellent and good, -Beauty’s best in every mood, -Never common, never tame, -Changeful fair as windward flame”-- -Nay, I maunder; this she hears -Every day with mocking ears, -With a brow not sudden-stained -With the flush of bliss restrained, -With no tremor of the pulse -More than feels the dreaming dulse -In the midmost ocean’s caves, -When a tempest heaps the waves. -Thou must woo her in a phrase -Mystic as the opal’s blaze, -Which pure maids alone can see -When their lovers constant be. -I with thee a secret share, -Half a hope, and half a prayer, -Though no reach of mortal skill -Ever told it all, or will; -Say, “He bids me--nothing more-- -Tell you what you guessed before!” - - - - -THE SECRET. - - -I have a fancy: how shall I bring it -Home to all mortals wherever they be? -Say it or sing it? Shoe it or wing it, -So it may outrun or outfly ME, -Merest cocoon-web whence it broke free? - -Only one secret can save from disaster, -Only one magic is that of the Master: -Set it to music; give it a tune,-- -Tune the brook sings you, tune the breeze brings you, -Tune the wild columbines nod to in June! - -This is the secret: so simple, you see! -Easy as loving, easy as kissing, -Easy as--well, let me ponder--as missing, -Known, since the world was, by scarce two or three. - - - - -IV. - -HUMOR AND SATIRE. - - - - -FITZ ADAM’S STORY. - -[The greater part of this poem was written many years -ago as part of a larger one, to be called “The Nooning,” -made up of tales in verse, some of them grave, some -comic. It gives me a sad pleasure to remember that I -was encouraged in this project by my friend the late -Arthur Hugh Clough.] - - -The next whose fortune ’twas a tale to tell -Was one whom men, before they thought, loved well, -And after thinking wondered why they did, -For half he seemed to let them, half forbid, -And wrapped him so in humors, sheath on sheath, -’T was hard to guess the mellow soul beneath; -But, once divined, you took him to your heart, -While he appeared to bear with you as part -Of life’s impertinence, and once a year -Betrayed his true self by a smile or tear, -Or rather something sweetly-shy and loath, -Withdrawn ere fully shown, and mixed of both. -A cynic? Not precisely: one who thrust -Against a heart too prone to love and trust, -Who so despised false sentiment he knew -Scarce in himself to part the false and true, -And strove to hide, by roughening-o’er the skin, -Those cobweb nerves he could not dull within. -Gentle by birth, but of a stem decayed, -He shunned life’s rivalries and hated trade; -On a small patrimony and larger pride, -He lived uneaseful on the Other Side -(So he called Europe), only coming West -To give his Old-World appetite new zest; -Yet still the New World spooked it in his veins, -A ghost he could not lay with all his pains; -For never Pilgrims' offshoot scapes control -Of those old instincts that have shaped his soul. -A radical in thought, he puffed away -With shrewd contempt the dust of usage gray, -Yet loathed democracy as one who saw, -In what he longed to love, some vulgar flaw, -And, shocked through all his delicate reserves, -Remained a Tory by his taste and nerves. -His fancy’s thrall, he drew all ergoes thence, -And thought himself the type of common sense; -Misliking women, not from cross or whim, -But that his mother shared too much in him, -And he half felt that what in them was grace -Made the unlucky weakness of his race. -What powers he had he hardly cared to know, -But sauntered through the world as through a show; -A critic fine in his haphazard way, -A sort of mild La Bruyère on half-pay. -For comic weaknesses he had an eye -Keen as an acid for an alkali, -Yet you could feel, through his sardonic tone, -He loved them all, unless they were his own. -You might have called him, with his humorous twist, -A kind of human entomologist: -As these bring home, from every walk they take, -Their hat-crowns stuck with bugs of curious make, -So he filled all the lining of his head -With characters impaled and ticketed, -And had a cabinet behind his eyes -For all they caught of mortal oddities. -He might have been a poet--many worse-- -But that he had, or feigned, contempt of verse; -Called it tattooing language, and held rhymes -The young world’s lullaby of ruder times. -Bitter in words, too indolent for gall, -He satirized himself the first of all, -In men and their affairs could find no law, -And was the ill logic that he thought he saw. - - Scratching a match to light his pipe anew, -With eyes half shut some musing whiffs he drew, -And thus began: “I give you all my word, -I think this mock-Decameron absurd; -Boccaccio’s garden! how bring that to pass -In our bleak clime save under double glass? -The moral east-wind of New England life -Would snip its gay luxuriance like a knife; -Mile-deep the glaciers brooded here, they say, -Through æons numb; we feel their chill to-day. -These foreign plants are but half-hardy still, -Die on a south, and on a north wall chill. -Had we stayed Puritans! _They_ had some heat, -(Though whence derived I have my own conceit,) -But you have long ago raked up their fires; -Where they had faith, you’ve ten sham-Gothic spires. -Why more exotics? Try your native vines, -And in some thousand years you _may_ have wines; -Your present grapes are harsh, all pulps and skins, -And want traditions of ancestral bins -That saved for evenings round the polished board -Old lava-fires, the sun-steeped hillside’s hoard. -Without a Past, you lack that southern wall -O’er which the vines of Poesy should crawl; -Still they’re your only hope; no midnight oil -Makes up for virtue wanting in the soil; -Manure them well and prune them; ’t won’t be France, -Nor Spain, nor Italy, but there’s your chance. -You have one story-teller worth a score -Of dead Boccaccios,--nay, add twenty more,-- -A hawthorn asking spring’s most dainty breath, -And him you’re freezing pretty well to death. -However, since you say so, I will tease -My memory to a story by degrees, -Though you will cry, 'Enough!' I’m wellnigh sure, -Ere I have dreamed through half my overture. -Stories were good for men who had no books, -(Fortunate race!) and built their nests like rooks -In lonely towers, to which the Jongleur brought -His pedler’s-box of cheap and tawdry thought, -With here and there a fancy fit to see -Wrought to quaint grace in golden filigree,-- -Some ring that with the Muse’s finger yet -Is warm, like Aucassin and Nicolete; -The morning newspaper has spoilt his trade, -(For better or for worse, I leave unsaid,) -And stories now, to suit a public nice, -Must be half epigram, half pleasant vice. - - “All tourists know Shebagog County: there -The summer idlers take their yearly stare, -Dress to see Nature in a well-bred way, -As ’twere Italian opera, or play, -Encore the sunrise (if they’re out of bed), -And pat the Mighty Mother on the head: -These have I seen,--all things are good to see,-- -And wondered much at their complacency. -This world’s great show, that took in getting-up -Millions of years, they finish ere they sup; -Sights that God gleams through with soul-tingling force -They glance approvingly as things of course, -Say, 'That’s a grand rock,' 'This a pretty fall,' -Not thinking, 'Are we worthy?' What if all -The scornful landscape should turn round and say, -'This is a fool, and that a popinjay'? -I often wonder what the Mountain thinks -Of French boots creaking o’er his breathless brinks, -Or how the Sun would scare the chattering crowd, -If some fine day he chanced to think aloud. -I, who love Nature much as sinners can, -Love her where she most grandeur shows,--in man: -Here find I mountain, forest, cloud, and sun, -River and sea, and glows when day is done; -Nay, where she makes grotesques, and moulds in jest -The clown’s cheap clay, I find unfading zest. -The natural instincts year by year retire, -As deer shrink northward from the settler’s fire, -And he who loves the wild game-flavor more -Than city-feasts, where every man’s a bore -To every other man, must seek it where -The steamer’s throb and railway’s iron blare -Have not yet startled with their punctual stir -The shy, wood-wandering brood of Character. - - “There is a village, once the county town, -Through which the weekly mail rolled dustily down, -Where the courts sat, it may be, twice a year, -And the one tavern reeked with rustic cheer; -Cheeshogquesumscot erst, now Jethro hight, -Red-man and pale-face bore it equal spite. -The railway ruined it, the natives say, -That passed unwisely fifteen miles away, -And made a drain to which, with steady ooze, -Filtered away law, stage-coach, trade, and news. -The railway saved it; so at least think those -Who love old ways, old houses, old repose. -Of course the Tavern stayed: its genial host -Thought not of flitting more than did the post -On which high-hung the fading signboard creaks, -Inscribed, 'The Eagle Inn, by Ezra Weeks.' - - “If in life’s journey you should ever find -An inn medicinal for body and mind, -’Tis sure to be some drowsy-looking house -Whose easy landlord has a bustling spouse: -He, if he like you, will not long forego -Some bottle deep in cobwebbed dust laid low, -That, since the War we used to call the 'Last,' -Has dozed and held its lang-syne memories fast; -From him exhales that Indian-summer air -Of hazy, lazy welcome everywhere, -While with her toil the napery is white, -The china dustless, the keen knife-blades bright, -Salt dry as sand, and bread that seems as though -’Twere rather sea-foam baked than vulgar dough. - - “In our swift country, houses trim and white -Are pitched like tents, the lodging of a night; -Each on its bank of baked turf mounted high -Perches impatient o’er the roadside dry, -While the wronged landscape coldly stands aloof, -Refusing friendship with the upstart roof. -Not so the Eagle; on a grass-green swell -That toward the south with sweet concessions fell -It dwelt retired, and half had grown to be -As aboriginal as rock or tree. -It nestled close to earth, and seemed to brood -O’er homely thoughts in a half-conscious mood, -As by the peat that rather fades than burns -The smouldering grandam nods and knits by turns, -Happy, although her newest news were old -Ere the first hostile drum at Concord rolled. -If paint it e’er had known, it knew no more -Than yellow lichens spattered thickly o’er -That soft lead-gray, less dark beneath the eaves -Which the slow brush of wind and weather leaves. -The ample roof sloped backward to the ground, -And vassal lean-tos gathered thickly round, -Patched on, as sire or son had felt the need, -Like chance growths sprouting from the old roof’s seed, -Just as about a yellow-pine-tree spring -Its rough-barked darlings in a filial ring. -But the great chimney was the central thought -Whose gravitation through the cluster wrought; -For ’tis not styles far-fetched from Greece or Rome, -But just the Fireside, that can make a home; -None of your spindling things of modern style, -Like pins stuck through to stay the card-built pile, -It rose broad-shouldered, kindly, debonair, -Its warm breath whitening in the October air, -While on its front a heart in outline showed -The place it filled in that serene abode. - - “When first I chanced the Eagle to explore, -Ezra sat listless by the open door; -One chair careened him at an angle meet, -Another nursed his hugely-slippered feet; -Upon a third reposed a shirt-sleeved arm, -And the whole man diffused tobacco’s charm. -'Are you the landlord?' 'Wahl, I guess I be,' -Watching the smoke, he answered leisurely. -He was a stoutish man, and through the breast -Of his loose shirt there showed a brambly chest; -Streaked redly as a wind-foreboding morn, -His tanned cheeks curved to temples closely shorn; -Clean-shaved he was, save where a hedge of gray -Upon his brawny throat leaned every way -About an Adam’s-apple, that beneath -Bulged like a boulder from a brambly heath. -The Western World’s true child and nursling he, -Equipt with aptitudes enough for three: -No eye like his to value horse or cow, -Or gauge the contents of a stack or mow; -He could foretell the weather at a word, -He knew the haunt of every beast and bird, -Or where a two-pound trout was sure to lie, -Waiting the flutter of his home-made fly; -Nay, once in autumns five, he had the luck -To drop at fair-play range a ten-tined buck; -Of sportsmen true he favored every whim, -But never cockney found a guide in him; -A natural man, with all his instincts fresh, -Not buzzing helpless in Reflection’s mesh, -Firm on its feet stood his broad-shouldered mind, -As bluffly honest as a northwest wind; -Hard-headed and soft-hearted, you’d scarce meet -A kindlier mixture of the shrewd and sweet; -Generous by birth, and ill at saying 'No,' -Yet in a bargain he was all men’s foe, -Would yield no inch of vantage in a trade, -And give away ere nightfall all he made. - - “'Can I have lodging here?' once more I said. -He blew a whiff, and, leaning back his head, -'You come a piece through Bailey’s woods, I s’pose, -Acrost a bridge where a big swamp-oak grows? -It don’t grow, neither; it’s ben dead ten year, -Nor th' ain’t a livin' creetur, fur nor near, -Can tell wut killed it; but I some misdoubt -’Twas borers, there’s sech heaps on ’em about. -You did n' chance to run ag’inst my son, -A long, slab-sided youngster with a gun? -He’d oughto ben back more ’n an hour ago, -An' brought some birds to dress for supper--sho! -There he comes now. 'Say, Obed, wut ye got? -(He’ll hev some upland plover like as not.) -Wal, them’s real nice uns, an’ll eat A 1, -Ef I can stop their bein' over-done; -Nothin' riles _me_ (I pledge my fastin' word) -Like cookin' out the natur' of a bird; -(Obed, you pick ’em out o' sight an' sound, -Your ma’am don’t love no feathers cluttrin' round;) -Jes' scare ’em with the coals,--thet’s _my_ idee.' -Then, turning suddenly about on me, -'Wal, Square, I guess so. Callilate to stay? -I’ll ask Mis' Weeks; ’bout _thet_ it’s hern to say.' - - “Well, there I lingered all October through, -In that sweet atmosphere of hazy blue, -So leisurely, so soothing, so forgiving, -That sometimes makes New England fit for living. -I watched the landscape, erst so granite glum, -Bloom like the south side of a ripening plum, -And each rock-maple on the hillside make -His ten days' sunset doubled in the lake; -The very stone walls draggling up the hills -Seemed touched, and wavered in their roundhead wills. -Ah! there’s a deal of sugar in the sun! -Tap me in Indian summer, I should run -A juice to make rock-candy of,--but then -We get such weather scarce one year in ten. - - “There was a parlor in the house, a room -To make you shudder with its prudish gloom. -The furniture stood round with such an air, -There seemed an old maid’s ghost in every chair, -Which looked as it had scuttled to its place -And pulled extempore a Sunday face, -Too smugly proper for a world of sin, -Like boys on whom the minister comes in. -The table, fronting you with icy stare, -Strove to look witless that its legs were bare, -While the black sofa with its horse-hair pall -Gloomed like a bier for Comfort’s funeral. -Each piece appeared to do its chilly best -To seem an utter stranger to the rest, -As if acquaintanceship were deadly sin, -Like Britons meeting in a foreign inn. -Two portraits graced the wall in grimmest truth, -Mister and Mistress W. in their youth,-- -New England youth, that seems a sort of pill, -Half wish-I-dared, half Edwards on the Will, -Bitter to swallow, and which leaves a trace -Of Calvinistic cholic on the face. -Between them, o’er the mantel, hung in state -Solomon’s temple, done in copperplate; -Invention pure, but meant, we may presume, -To give some Scripture sanction to the room. -Facing this last, two samplers you might see, -Each, with its urn and stiffly-weeping tree, -Devoted to some memory long ago -More faded than their lines of worsted woe; -Cut paper decked their frames against the flies, -Though none e’er dared an entrance who were wise, -And bushed asparagus in fading green -Added its shiver to the franklin clean. - - “When first arrived, I chilled a half-hour there, -Nor dared deflower with use a single chair; -I caught no cold, yet flying pains could find -For weeks in me,--a rheumatism of mind. -One thing alone imprisoned there had power -To hold me in the place that long half-hour: -A scutcheon this, a helm-surmounted shield, -Three griffins argent on a sable field; -A relic of the shipwrecked past was here, -And Ezra held some Old-World lumber dear. -Nay, do not smile; I love this kind of thing, -These cooped traditions with a broken wing, -This freehold nook in Fancy’s pipe-blown ball, -This less than nothing that is more than all! -Have I not seen sweet natures kept alive -Amid the humdrum of your business hive, -Undowered spinsters shielded from all harms, -By airy incomes from a coat of arms?” - - He paused a moment, and his features took -The flitting sweetness of that inward look -I hinted at before; but, scarcely seen, -It shrank for shelter ’neath his harder mien, -And, rapping his black pipe of ashes clear, -He went on with a self-derisive sneer: -“No doubt we make a part of God’s design, -And break the forest-path for feet divine; -To furnish foothold for this grand prevision -Is good, and yet--to be the mere transition, -That, you will say, is also good, though I -Scarce like to feed the ogre By-and-by. -Raw edges rasp my nerves; my taste is wooed -By things that are, not going to be, good, -Though were I what I dreamed two lustres gone, -I’d stay to help the Consummation on, -Whether a new Rome than the old more fair, -Or a deadflat of rascal-ruled despair; -But _my_ skull somehow never closed the suture -That seems to knit yours firmly with the future, -So you ’ll excuse me if I’m sometimes fain -To tie the past’s warm nightcap o’er my brain; -I’m quite aware ’tis not in fashion here, -But then your northeast winds are _so_ severe! - - “But to my story: though ’tis truly naught -But a few hints in Memory’s sketchbook caught, -And which may claim a value on the score -Of calling back some scenery now no more. -Shall I confess? The tavern’s only Lar -Seemed (be not shocked!) its homely-featured bar. -Here dozed a fire of beechen logs, that bred -Strange fancies in its embers golden-red, -And nursed the loggerhead whose hissing dip, -Timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip -That made from mouth to mouth its genial round, -Nor left one nature wholly winter-bound; -Hence dropt the tinkling coal all mellow-ripe -For Uncle Reuben’s talk-extinguished pipe; -Hence rayed the heat, as from an in-door sun, -That wooed forth many a shoot of rustic fun. -Here Ezra ruled as king by right divine; -No other face had such a wholesome shine, -No laugh like his so full of honest cheer; -Above the rest it crowed like Chanticleer. - - “In this one room his dame you never saw, -Where reigned by custom old a Salic law; -Here coatless lolled he on his throne of oak, -And every tongue paused midway if he spoke. -Due mirth he loved, yet was his sway severe; -No blear-eyed driveller got his stagger here; -'Measure was happiness; who wanted more, -Must buy his ruin at the Deacon’s store;' -None but his lodgers after ten could stay, -Nor after nine on eves of Sabbath-day. -He had his favorites and his pensioners, -The same that gypsy Nature owns for hers: -Loose-ended souls, whose skills bring scanty gold, -And whom the poor-house catches when they ’re old; -Rude country-minstrels, men who doctor kine, -Or graft, and, out of scions ten, save nine; -Creatures of genius they, but never meant -To keep step with the civic regiment. -These Ezra welcomed, feeling in his mind -Perhaps some motions of the vagrant kind; -These paid no money, yet for them he drew -Special Jamaica from a tap they knew, -And, for their feelings, chalked behind the door -With solemn face a visionary score. -This thawed to life in Uncle Reuben’s throat -A torpid shoal of jest and anecdote, -Like those queer fish that doze the droughts away, -And wait for moisture, wrapt in sun-baked clay; -This warmed the one-eyed fiddler to his task, -Perched in the corner on an empty cask, -By whose shrill art rapt suddenly, some boor -Rattled a double-shuffle on the floor; -'Hull’s Victory' was, indeed, the favorite air, -Though 'Yankee Doodle' claimed its proper share. - - “'Twas there I caught from Uncle Reuben’s lips, -In dribbling monologue ’twixt whiffs and sips, -The story I so long have tried to tell; -The humor coarse, the persons common,--well, -From Nature only do I love to paint, -Whether she send a satyr or a saint; -To me Sincerity’s the one thing good, -Soiled though she be and lost to maidenhood. -Quompegan is a town some ten miles south -From Jethro, at Nagumscot river-mouth, -A seaport town, and makes its title good -With lumber and dried fish and eastern wood. -Here Deacon Bitters dwelt and kept the Store, -The richest man for many a mile of shore; -In little less than everything dealt he, -From meeting-houses to a chest of tea; -So dextrous therewithal a flint to skin, -He could make profit on a single pin; -In business strict, to bring the balance true -He had been known to bite a fig in two, -And change a board-nail for a shingle-nail. -All that he had he ready held for sale, -His house, his tomb, whate’er the law allows, -And he had gladly parted with his spouse. -His one ambition still to get and get, -He would arrest your very ghost for debt. -His store looked righteous, should the Parson come, -But in a dark back-room he peddled rum, -And eased Ma’am Conscience, if she e’er would scold, -By christening it with water ere he sold. -A small, dry man he was, who wore a queue, -And one white neckcloth all the week-days through,-- -On Monday white, by Saturday as dun -As that worn homeward by the prodigal son. -His frosted earlocks, striped with foxy brown, -Were braided up to hide a desert crown; -His coat was brownish, black perhaps of yore; -In summer-time a banyan loose he wore; -His trousers short, through many a season true, -Made no pretence to hide his stockings blue; -A waistcoat buff his chief adornment was, -Its porcelain buttons rimmed with dusky brass. -A deacon he, you saw it in each limb, -And well he knew to deacon-off a hymn, -Or lead the choir through all its wandering woes -With voice that gathered unction in his nose, -Wherein a constant snuffle you might hear, -As if with him ’twere winter all the year. -At pew-head sat he with decorous pains, -In sermon-time could foot his weekly gains, -Or, with closed eyes and heaven-abstracted air, -Could plan a new investment in long-prayer. -A pious man, and thrifty too, he made -The psalms and prophets partners in his trade, -And in his orthodoxy straitened more -As it enlarged the business at his store; -He honored Moses, but, when gain he planned, -Had his own notion of the Promised Land. - - “Soon as the winter made the sledding good, -From far around the farmers hauled him wood, -For all the trade had gathered ’neath his thumb. -He paid in groceries and New England rum, -Making two profits with a conscience clear,-- -Cheap all he bought, and all he paid with dear. -With his own mete-wand measuring every load, -Each somehow had diminished on the road; -An honest cord in Jethro still would fail -By a good foot upon the Deacon’s scale, -And, more to abate the price, his gimlet eye -Would pierce to cat-sticks that none else could spy; -Yet none dared grumble, for no farmer yet -But New Year found him in the Deacon’s debt. - - “While the first snow was mealy under feet, -A team drawled creaking down Quompegan street. -Two cords of oak weighed down the grinding sled, -And cornstalk fodder rustled overhead; -The oxen’s muzzles, as they shouldered through, -Were silver-fringed; the driver’s own was blue -As the coarse frock that swung below his knee. -Behind his load for shelter waded he; -His mittened hands now on his chest he beat, -Now stamped the stiffened cowhides of his feet, -Hushed as a ghost’s; his armpit scarce could hold -The walnut whipstock slippery-bright with cold. -What wonder if, the tavern as he past, -He looked and longed, and stayed his beasts at last, -Who patient stood and veiled themselves in steam -While he explored the bar-room’s ruddy gleam? - - “Before the fire, in want of thought profound, -There sat a brother-townsman weather-bound: -A sturdy churl, crisp-headed, bristly-eared, -Red as a pepper; ’twixt coarse brows and beard -His eyes lay ambushed, on the watch for fools, -Clear, gray, and glittering like two bay-edged pools; -A shifty creature, with a turn for fun, -Could swap a poor horse for a better one,-- -He’d a high-stepper always in his stall; -Liked far and near, and dreaded therewithal. -To him the in-comer, 'Perez, how d’ye do?' -'Jest as I’m mind to, Obed; how do you?' -Then, his eyes twinkling such swift gleams as run -Along the levelled barrel of a gun -Brought to his shoulder by a man you know -Will bring his game down, he continued, 'So, -I s’pose you’re haulin' wood? But you’re too late; -The Deacon’s off; Old Splitfoot couldn’t wait; -He made a bee-line las' night in the storm -To where he won’t need wood to keep him warm. -’Fore this he’s treasurer of a fund to train -Young imps as missionaries; hopes to gain -That way a contract that he has in view -For fireproof pitchforks of a pattern new. -It must have tickled him, all drawbacks weighed, -To think he stuck the Old One in a trade; -His soul, to start with, wasn’t worth a carrot, -And all he’d left ’ould hardly serve to swear at.' - - “By this time Obed had his wits thawed out, -And, looking at the other half in doubt, -Took off his fox-skin cap to scratch his head, -Donned it again, and drawled forth, 'Mean he’s dead?' -'Jesso; he’s dead and t’other _d_ that follers -With folks that never love a thing but dollars. -He pulled up stakes last evening, fair and square, -And ever since there’s been a row Down There. -The minute the old chap arrived, you see, -Comes the Boss-devil to him, and says he, -“What are you good at? Little enough, I fear; -We callilate to make folks useful here.” -“Well,” says old Bitters, “I expect I can -Scale a fair load of wood with e’er a man.” -“Wood we don’t deal in; but perhaps you’ll suit, -Because we buy our brimstone by the foot: -Here, take this measurin'-rod, as smooth as sin, -And keep a reckonin' of what loads comes in. -You’ll not want business, for we need a lot -To keep the Yankees that you send us hot; -At firin' up they’re barely half as spry -As Spaniards or Italians, though they’re dry; -At first we have to let the draught on stronger, -But, heat ’em through, they seem to hold it longer.” - - “'Bitters he took the rod, and pretty soon -A teamster comes, whistling an ex-psalm tune. -A likelier chap you wouldn’t ask to see, -No different, but his limp, from you or me'-- -'No different, Perez! Don’t your memory fail? -Why, where in thunder was his horns and tail?' -'They’re only worn by some old-fashioned pokes; -They mostly aim at looking just like folks. -Sech things are scarce as queues and top-boots here; -’Twould spoil their usefulness to look too queer. -Ef you could always know ’em when they come, -They’d get no purchase on you: now be mum. -On come the teamster, smart as Davy Crockett, -Jinglin' the red-hot coppers in his pocket, -And clost behind, ('twas gold-dust, you’d ha' sworn,) -A load of sulphur yallower’n seed-corn; -To see it wasted as it is Down There -Would make a Friction-Match Co. tear its hair! -“Hold on!” says Bitters, “stop right where you be; -You can’t go in athout a pass from me.” -“All right,” says t’other, “only step round smart; -I must be home by noon-time with the cart.” -Bitters goes round it sharp-eyed as a rat, -Then with a scrap of paper on his hat -Pretends to cipher. “By the public staff, -That load scarce rises twelve foot and a half.” -“There’s fourteen foot and over,” says the driver, -“Worth twenty dollars, ef it’s worth a stiver; -Good fourth-proof brimstone, that’ll make ’em squirm,-- -I leave it to the Headman of the Firm; -After we masure it, we always lay -Some on to allow for settlin' by the way. -Imp and full-grown, I’ve carted sulphur here, -And given fair satisfaction, thirty year.” -With that they fell to quarrellin' so loud -That in five minutes they had drawed a crowd, -And afore long the Boss, who heard the row, -Comes elbowin' in with “What’s to pay here now?” -Both parties heard, the measurin'-rod he takes, -And of the load a careful survey makes. -“Sence I’ve bossed the business here,” says he, -“No fairer load was ever seen by me.” -Then, turnin' to the Deacon, “You mean cus, -None of your old Quompegan tricks with us! -They won’t do here: we’re plain old-fashioned folks, -And don’t quite understand that kind o' jokes. -I know this teamster, and his pa afore him, -And the hard-working Mrs. D. that bore him; -He wouldn’t soil his conscience with a lie, -Though he might get the custom-house thereby. -Here, constable, take Bitters by the queue, -And clap him into furnace ninety-two, -And try this brimstone on him; if he’s bright, -He’ll find the masure honest afore night. -He isn’t worth his fuel, and I’ll bet -The parish oven has to take him yet!”’ - - “This is my tale, heard twenty years ago -From Uncle Reuben, as the logs burned low, -Touching the walls and ceiling with that bloom -That makes a rose’s calyx of a room. -I could not give his language, wherethrough ran -The gamy flavor of the bookless man -Who shapes a word before the fancy cools, -As lonely Crusoe improvised his tools. -I liked the tale,--’twas like so many told -By Rutebeuf and his brother Trouvères bold; -Nor were the hearers much unlike to theirs, -Men unsophisticate, rude-nerved as bears. -Ezra is gone and his large-hearted kind, -The landlords of the hospitable mind; -Good Warriner of Springfield was the last; -An inn is now a vision of the past; -One yet-surviving host my mind recalls,-- -You’ll find him if you go to Trenton Falls.” - - - - -THE ORIGIN OF DIDACTIC POETRY. - - -When wise Minerva still was young - And just the least romantic, -Soon after from Jove’s head she flung - That preternatural antic, -’Tis said, to keep from idleness - Or flirting, those twin curses, -She spent her leisure, more or less, - In writing po----, no, verses. - -How nice they were! to rhyme with _far_ - A kind _star_ did not tarry; -The metre, too, was regular - As schoolboy’s dot and carry; -And full they were of pious plums, - So extra-super-moral,-- -For sucking Virtue’s tender gums - Most tooth-enticing coral. - -A clean, fair copy she prepares, - Makes sure of moods and tenses, -With her own hand,--for prudence spares - A man-(or woman-)-uensis; -Complete, and tied with ribbons proud, - She hinted soon how cosy a -Treat it would be to read them loud - After next day’s Ambrosia. - -The Gods thought not it would amuse - So much as Homer’s Odyssees, -But could not very well refuse - The properest of Goddesses; -So all sat round in attitudes - Of various dejection, -As with a _hem!_ the queen of prudes - Began her grave prelection. - -At the first pause Zeus said, “Well sung!-- - I mean--ask Phœbus,--_he_ knows.” -Says Phœbus, “Zounds! a wolf’s among - Admetus’s merinos! -Fine! very fine! but I must go; - They stand in need of me there; -Excuse me!” snatched his stick, and so - Plunged down the gladdened ether. - -With the next gap, Mars said, “For me - Don’t wait,--naught could be finer, -But I’m engaged at half past three,-- - A fight in Asia Minor!” -Then Venus lisped, “I’m sorely tried, - These duty-calls are vip’rous; -But I _must_ go; I have a bride - To see about in Cyprus.” - -Then Bacchus,--“I must say good bye, - Although my peace it jeopards; -I meet a man at four, to try - A well-broke pair of leopards.” -His words woke Hermes. “Ah!” he said, - “I _so_ love moral theses!” -Then winked at Hebe, who turned red, - And smoothed her apron’s creases. - -Just then Zeus snored,--the Eagle drew - His head the wing from under; -Zeus snored,--o’er startled Greece there flew - The many-volumed thunder. -Some augurs counted nine, some, ten; - Some said ’twas war, some, famine, -And all, that other-minded men - Would get a precious----. - -Proud Pallas sighed, “It will not do; - Against the Muse I’ve sinned, oh!” -And her torn rhymes sent flying through - Olympus’s back window. -Then, packing up a peplus clean, - She took the shortest path thence, -And opened, with a mind serene, - A Sunday-school in Athens. - -The verses? Some in ocean swilled, - Killed every fish that bit to ’em; -Some Galen caught, and, when distilled, - Found morphine the residuum; -But some that rotted on the earth - Sprang up again in copies, -And gave two strong narcotics birth, - Didactic verse and poppies. - -Years after, when a poet asked - The Goddess’s opinion, -As one whose soul its wings had tasked - In Art’s clear-aired dominion, -“Discriminate,” she said, “betimes; - The Muse is unforgiving; -Put all your beauty in your rhymes, - Your morals in your living.” - - - - -THE FLYING DUTCHMAN. - - -Don’t believe in the Flying Dutchman? - I’ve known the fellow for years; -My button I’ve wrenched from his clutch, man: - I shudder whenever he nears! - -He’s a Rip van Winkle skipper, - A Wandering Jew of the sea, -Who sails his bedevilled old clipper - In the wind’s eye, straight as a bee. - -Back topsails! you can’t escape him; - The man-ropes stretch with his weight, -And the queerest old toggeries drape him, - The Lord knows how long out of date! - -Like a long-disembodied idea, - (A kind of ghost plentiful now,) -He stands there; you fancy you see a - Coeval of Teniers or Douw. - -He greets you; would have you take letters: - You scan the addresses with dread, -While he mutters his _donners_ and _wetters_,-- - They’re all from the dead to the dead! - -You seem taking time for reflection, - But the heart fills your throat with a jam, -As you spell in each faded direction - An ominous ending in _dam_. - -Am I tagging my rhymes to a legend? - That were changing green turtle to mock: -No, thank you! I’ve found out which wedge-end - Is meant for the head of a block. - -The fellow I have in my mind’s eye - Plays the old Skipper’s part here on shore, -And sticks like a burr, till he finds I - Have got just the gauge of his bore. - -This postman ’twixt one ghost and t’other, - With last dates that smell of the mould, -I have met him (O man and brother, - Forgive me!) in azure and gold. - -In the pulpit I’ve known of his preaching, - Out of hearing behind the time, -Some statement of Balaam’s impeaching, - Giving Eve a due sense of her crime. - -I have seen him some poor ancient thrashing - Into something (God save us!) more dry, -With the Water of Life itself washing - The life out of earth, sea, and sky. - -O dread fellow-mortal, get newer - Despatches to carry, or none! -We’re as quick as the Greek and the Jew were - At knowing a loaf from a stone. - -Till the couriers of God fail in duty, - We sha’n’t ask a mummy for news, -Nor sate the soul’s hunger for beauty - With your drawings from casts of a Muse. - - - - -CREDIDIMUS JOVEM REGNARE. - - -O days endeared to every Muse, -When nobody had any Views, -Nor, while the cloudscape of his mind -By every breeze was new designed, -Insisted all the world should see -Camels or whales where none there be! -O happy days, when men received -From sire to son what all believed, -And left the other world in bliss, -Too busy with bedevilling this! - -Beset by doubts of every breed -In the last bastion of my creed, -With shot and shell for Sabbath-chime, -I watch the storming-party climb, -Panting (their prey in easy reach), -To pour triumphant through the breach -In walls that shed like snowflakes tons -Of missiles from old-fashioned guns, -But crumble ’neath the storm that pours -All day and night from bigger bores. -There, as I hopeless watch and wait -The last life-crushing coil of Fate, -Despair finds solace in the praise -Of those serene dawn-rosy days -Ere microscopes had made us heirs -To large estates of doubts and snares, -By proving that the title-deeds, -Once all-sufficient for men’s needs, -Are palimpsests that scarce disguise -The tracings of still earlier lies, -Themselves as surely written o’er -An older fib erased before. - -So from these days I fly to those -That in the landlocked Past repose, -Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes -From bloom-flushed boughs untimely flakes; -Where morning’s eyes see nothing strange, -No crude perplexity of change, -And morrows trip along their ways -Secure as happy yesterdays. -Then there were rulers who could trace -Through heroes up to gods their race, -Pledged to fair fame and noble use -By veins from Odin filled or Zeus, -And under bonds to keep divine -The praise of a celestial line. -Then priests could pile the altar’s sods, -With whom gods spake as they with gods, -And everywhere from haunted earth -Broke springs of wonder, that had birth -In depths divine beyond the ken -And fatal scrutiny of men; -Then hills and groves and streams and seas -Thrilled with immortal presences, -Not too ethereal for the scope -Of human passion’s dream or hope. - -Now Pan at last is surely dead, -And King No-Credit reigns instead, -Whose officers, morosely strict, -Poor Fancy’s tenantry evict, -Chase the last Genius from the door, -And nothing dances any more. -Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do, -Drumming the Old One’s own tattoo, -And, if the oracles are dumb, -Have we not mediums? Why be glum? - -Fly thither? Why, the very air -Is full of hindrance and despair! -Fly thither? But I cannot fly; -My doubts enmesh me if I try,-- -Each lilliputian, but, combined, -Potent a giant’s limbs to bind. -This world and that are growing dark; -A huge interrogation mark, -The Devil’s crook episcopal, -Still borne before him since the Fall, -Blackens with its ill-omened sign -The old blue heaven of faith benign. -Whence? Whither? Wherefore? How? Which? Why? -All ask at once, all wait reply. -Men feel old systems cracking under ’em; -Life saddens to a mere conundrum -Which once Religion solved, but she -Has lost--has Science found?--the key. - -What was snow-bearded Odin, trow, -The mighty hunter long ago, -Whose horn and hounds the peasant hears -Still when the Northlights shake their spears? -Science hath answers twain, I’ve heard; -Choose which you will, nor hope a third; -Whichever box the truth be stowed in, -There’s not a sliver left of Odin. -Either he was a pinchbrowed thing, -With scarcely wit a stone to fling, -A creature both in size and shape -Nearer than we are to the ape, -Who hung sublime with brat and spouse -By tail prehensile from the boughs, -And, happier than his maimed descendants, -The culture-curtailed independents, -Could pluck his cherries with both paws, -And stuff with both his big-boned jaws; -Or else the core his name enveloped -Was from a solar myth developed, -Which, hunted to its primal shoot, -Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root, -Thereby to instant death explaining -The little poetry remaining. - -Try it with Zeus, ’tis just the same; -The thing evades, we hug a name; -Nay, scarcely that,--perhaps a vapor -Born of some atmospheric caper. -All Lempriere’s fables blur together -In cloudy symbols of the weather, -And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas -But to illustrate such hypotheses. -With years enough behind his back, -Lincoln will take the selfsame track, -And prove, hulled fairly to the cob, -A mere vagary of Old Prob. -Give the right man a solar myth, -And he’ll confute the sun therewith. - -They make things admirably plain, -But one hard question _will_ remain: -If one hypothesis you lose, -Another in its place you choose, -But, your faith gone, O man and brother, -Whose shop shall furnish you another? -One that will wash, I mean, and wear, -And wrap us warmly from despair? -While they are clearing up our puzzles, -And clapping prophylactic muzzles -On the Actæon’s hounds that sniff -Our devious track through But and If, -Would they’d explain away the Devil -And other facts that won’t keep level, -But rise beneath our feet or fail, -A reeling ship’s deck in a gale! - -God vanished long ago, iwis, -A mere subjective synthesis; -A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears, -Too homely for us pretty dears, -Who want one that conviction carries, -Last make of London or of Paris. -He gone, I felt a moment’s spasm, -But calmed myself with Protoplasm, -A finer name, and, what is more, -As enigmatic as before; -Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease -Minds caught in the Symplegades -Of soul and sense, life’s two conditions, -Each baffled with its own omniscience. -The men who labor to revise -Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise, -And print it without foolish qualms -Instead of God in David’s psalms: -Noll had been more effective far -Could he have shouted at Dunbar, -“Rise, Protoplasm!” No dourest Scot -Had waited for another shot. - -And yet I frankly must confess -A secret unforgivingness, -And shudder at the saving chrism -Whose best New Birth is Pessimism; -My soul--I mean the bit of phosphorus -That fills the place of what that was for us-- -Can’t bid its inward bores defiance -With the new nursery-tales of science. -What profits me, though doubt by doubt, -As nail by nail, be driven out, -When every new one, like the last, -Still holds my coffin-lid as fast? -Would I find thought a moment’s truce, -Give me the young world’s Mother Goose, -With life and joy in every limb, -The chimney-corner tales of Grimm! - -Our dear and admirable Huxley -Cannot explain to me why ducks lay, -Or, rather, how into their eggs -Blunder potential wings and legs -With will to move them and decide -Whether in air or lymph to glide. -Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing -That Something Else set all agoing? -Farther and farther back we push -From Moses and his burning bush; -Cry, “Art Thou there?” Above, below, -All nature mutters _yes_ and _no_! -’Tis the old answer: we’re agreed -Being from Being must proceed, -Life be Life’s source. I might as well -Obey the meeting-house’s bell, -And listen while Old Hundred pours -Forth through the summer-opened doors, -From old and young. I hear it yet, -Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet, -While the gray minister, with face -Radiant, let loose his noble bass. -If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll -Waked all the echoes of the soul, -And in it many a life found wings -To soar away from sordid things. -Church gone and singers too, the song -Sings to me voiceless all night long, -Till my soul beckons me afar, -Glowing and trembling like a star. -Will any scientific touch -With my worn strings achieve as much? - -I don’t object, not I, to know -My sires were monkeys, if ’twas so; -I touch my ear’s collusive tip -And own the poor-relationship. -That apes of various shapes and sizes -Contained their germs that all the prizes -Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win -May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin. -Who knows but from our loins may spring -(Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing -As much superior to us -As we to Cynocephalus? - -This is consoling, but, alas, -It wipes no dimness from the glass -Where I am flattening my poor nose, -In hope to see beyond my toes. -Though I accept my pedigree, -Yet where, pray tell me, is the key -That should unlock a private door -To the Great Mystery, such no more? -Each offers his, but one nor all -Are much persuasive with the wall -That rises now, as long ago, -Between I wonder and I know, -Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep -At the veiled Isis in its keep. -Where is no door, I but produce -My key to find it of no use. -Yet better keep it, after all, -Since Nature’s economical, -And who can tell but some fine day -(If it occur to her) she may, -In her good-will to you and me, -_Make_ door and lock to match the key? - - - - -TEMPORA MUTANTUR. - - -The world turns mild; democracy, they say, -Rounds the sharp knobs of character away, -And no great harm, unless at grave expense -Of what needs edge of proof, the moral sense; -For man or race is on the downward path -Whose fibre grows too soft for honest wrath, -And there’s a subtle influence that springs -From words to modify our sense of things. -A plain distinction grows obscure of late: -Man, if he will, may pardon; but the State -Forgets its function if not fixed as Fate. -So thought our sires: a hundred years ago, -If men were knaves, why, people called them so, -And crime could see the prison-portal bend -Its brow severe at no long vista’s end. -In those days for plain things plain words would serve; -Men had not learned, to admire the graceful swerve -Wherewith the Æsthetic Nature’s genial mood -Makes public duty slope to private good; -No muddled conscience raised the saving doubt; -A soldier proved unworthy was drummed out, -An officer cashiered, a civil servant -(No matter though his piety were fervent) -Disgracefully dismissed, and through the land -Each bore for life a stigma from the brand -Whose far-heard hiss made others more averse -To take the facile step from bad to worse. -The Ten Commandments had a meaning then, -Felt in their bones by least considerate men, -Because behind them Public Conscience stood, -And without wincing made their mandates good. -But now that “Statesmanship” is just a way -To dodge the primal curse and make it pay, -Since office means a kind of patent drill -To force an entrance to the Nation’s till, -And peculation something rather less -Risky than if you spelt it with an _s_; -Now that to steal by law is grown an art, -Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart, -And “slightly irregular” dilutes the shame -Of what had once a somewhat blunter name, -With generous curve we draw the moral line: -Our swindlers are permitted to resign; -Their guilt is wrapped in deferential names, -And twenty sympathize for one that blames. -Add national disgrace to private crime, -Confront mankind with brazen front sublime, -Steal but enough, the world is unsevere,-- -Tweed is a statesman, Fisk a financier; -Invent a mine, and be--the Lord knows what; -Secure, at any rate, with what you’ve got. -The public servant who has stolen or lied, -If called on, may resign with honest pride: -As unjust favor put him in, why doubt -Disfavor as unjust has turned him out? -Even if indicted, what is that but fudge -To him who counted-in the elective judge? -Whitewashed, he quits the politician’s strife -At ease in mind, with pockets filled for life: -His “lady” glares with gems whose vulgar blaze -The poor man through his heightened taxes pays, -Himself content if one huge Kohinoor -Bulge from a shirt-front ampler than before, -But not too candid, lest it haply tend -To rouse suspicion of the People’s Friend. -A public meeting, treated at his cost, -Resolves him back more virtue than he lost; -With character regilt he counts his gains; -What’s gone was air, the solid good remains; -For what is good, except what friend and foe -Seem quite unanimous in thinking so, -The stocks and bonds which, in our age of loans, -Replace the stupid pagan’s stocks and stones? -With choker white, wherein no cynic eye -Dares see idealized a hempen tie, -At parish-meetings he conducts in prayer, -And pays for missions to be sent elsewhere; -On ’Change respected, to his friends endeared, -Add but a Sunday-school-class, he’s revered, -And his too early tomb will not be dumb -To point a moral for our youth to come. - 1872. - - - - -IN THE HALF-WAY HOUSE. - - -I. - -At twenty we fancied the blest Middle Ages - A spirited cross of romantic and grand, -All templars and minstrels and ladies and pages, - And love and adventure in Outre-Mer land; -But ah, where the youth dreamed of building a minster, - The man takes a pew and sits reckoning his pelf, -And the Graces wear fronts, the Muse thins to a spinster, - When Middle-Age stares from one’s glass at oneself! - - -II. - -Do you twit me with days when I had an Ideal, - And saw the sear future through spectacles green? -Then find me some charm, while I look round and see all - These fat friends of forty, shall keep me nineteen; -Should we go on pining for chaplets of laurel - Who’ve paid a perruquier for mending our thatch, -Or, our feet swathed in baize, with our Fate pick a quarrel, - If, instead of cheap bay-leaves, she sent a dear scratch? - - -III. - -We called it our Eden, that small patent-baker, - When life was half moonshine and half Mary Jane; -But the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker!-- - Did Adam have duns and slip down a back-lane? -Nay, after the Fall did the modiste keep coming - With last styles of fig-leaf to Madam Eve’s bower? -Did Jubal, or whoever taught the girls thrumming, - Make the patriarchs deaf at a dollar the hour? - - -IV. - -As I think what I was, I sigh _Desunt nonnulla_! - Years are creditors Sheridan’s self could not bilk; -But then, as my boy says, “What right has a fullah - To ask for the cream, when himself spilt the milk?” -Perhaps when you’re older, my lad, you’ll discover - The secret with which Auld Lang Syne there is gilt,-- -Superstition of old man, maid, poet, and lover,-- - That cream rises thickest on milk that was spilt! - - -V. - -We sailed for the moon, but, in sad disillusion, - Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast, -And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion - ’Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past. -Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals, - He’s a genius or fool whom ye cheat at two-score, -And the man whose boy-promise was likened to Pascal’s - Is thankful at forty they don’t call him bore! - - -VI. - -With what fumes of fame was each confident pate full! - How rates of insurance should rise on the Charles! -And which of us now would not feel wisely grateful, - If his rhymes sold as fast as the Emblems of Quarles? -E’en if won, what’s the good of Life’s medals and prizes? - The rapture’s in what never was or is gone; -That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys, - For the goose of To-day still is Memory’s swan. - - -VII. - -And yet who would change the old dream for new treasure? - Make not youth’s sourest grapes the best wine of our life? -Need he reckon his date by the Almanac’s measure - Who is twenty life-long in the eyes of his wife? -Ah, Fate, should I live to be nonagenarian, - Let me still take Hope’s frail I. O. U.s upon trust, -Still talk of a trip to the Islands Macarian, - And still climb the dream-tree for--ashes and dust! - - - - -AT THE BURNS CENTENNIAL. - -JANUARY, 1859. - - -I. - -A hundred years! they’re quickly fled, - With all their joy and sorrow; -Their dead leaves shed upon the dead, - Their fresh ones sprung by morrow! -And still the patient seasons bring - Their change of sun and shadow; -New birds still sing with every spring, - New violets spot the meadow. - - -II. - -A hundred years! and Nature’s powers - No greater grown nor lessened! -They saw no flowers more sweet than ours, - No fairer new moon’s crescent. -Would she but treat us poets so, - So from our winter free us, -And set our slow old sap aflow - To sprout in fresh ideas! - - -III. - -Alas, think I, what worth or parts - Have brought me here competing, -To speak what starts in myriad hearts - With Burns’s memory beating! -Himself had loved a theme like this; - Must I be its entomber? -No pen save his but’s sure to miss - Its pathos or its humor. - - -IV. - -As I sat musing what to say, - And how my verse to number, -Some elf in play passed by that way, - And sank my lids in slumber; -And on my sleep a vision stole, - Which I will put in metre, -Of Burns’s soul at the wicket-hole - Where sits the good Saint Peter. - - -V. - -The saint, methought, had left his post - That day to Holy Willie, -Who swore, “Each ghost that comes shall toast - In brunstane, will he, nill he; -There’s nane need hope with phrases fine - Their score to wipe a sin frae; -I’ll chalk a sign, to save their tryin',-- - A hand (☟) and '_Vide infra!_'” - - -VI. - -Alas! no soil’s too cold or dry - For spiritual small potatoes, -Scrimped natures, spry the trade to ply - Of _diaboli advocatus_; -Who lay bent pins in the penance-stool - Where Mercy plumps a cushion, -Who’ve just one rule for knave and fool, - It saves so much confusion! - - -VII. - -So when Burns knocked, Will knit his brows, - His window gap made scanter, -And said, “Go rouse the other house; - We lodge no Tam O’Shanter!” -“_We_ lodge!” laughed Burns. “Now well I see - Death cannot kill old nature; -No human flea but thinks that he - May speak for his Creator! - - -VIII. - -“But, Willie, friend, don’t turn me forth, - Auld Clootie needs no gauger; - And if on earth I had small worth, - You’ve let in worse, I’se wager!” - “Na, nane has knockit at the yett - But found me hard as whunstane; - There’s chances yet your bread to get - Wi Auld Nick, gaugin' brunstane.” - - -IX. - -Meanwhile, the Unco' Guid had ta’en - Their place to watch the process, -Flattening in vain on many a pane - Their disembodied noses. -Remember, please, ’tis all a dream; - One can’t control the fancies -Through sleep that stream with wayward gleam, - Like midnight’s boreal dances. - - -X. - -Old Willie’s tone grew sharp’s a knife: - “_In primis_, I indite ye, -For makin' strife wi' the water o' life, - And preferrin' _aqua vitæ_!” -Then roared a voice with lusty din, - Like a skipper’s when ’tis blowy, -“If _that_'s a sin, _I_'d ne’er got in, - As sure as my name’s Noah!” - - -XI. - -Baulked, Willie turned another leaf,-- - “There’s many here have heard ye, -To the pain and grief o' true belief, - Say hard things o' the clergy!” -Then rang a clear tone over all,-- - “One plea for him allow me: -I once heard call from o’er me, 'Saul, - Why persecutest thou me?'” - - -XII. - -To the next charge vexed Willie turned, - And, sighing, wiped his glasses: -“I’m much concerned to find ye yearned - O’er-warmly tow’rd the lasses!” -Here David sighed; poor Willie’s face - Lost all its self-possession: -“I leave this case to God’s own grace; - It baffles _my_ discretion!” - - -XIII. - -Then sudden glory round me broke, - And low melodious surges -Of wings whose stroke to splendor woke - Creation’s farthest verges; -A cross stretched, ladder-like, secure - From earth to heaven’s own portal, -Whereby God’s poor, with footing sure, - Climbed up to peace immortal. - - -XIV. - -I heard a voice serene and low - (With my heart I seemed to hear it) -Fall soft and slow as snow on snow, - Like grace of the heavenly spirit; -As sweet as over new-born son - The croon of new-made mother, -The voice begun, “Sore tempted one!” - Then, pausing, sighed, “Our brother! - - -XV. - -“If not a sparrow fall, unless - The Father sees and knows it, - Think! recks he less his form express, - The soul his own deposit? - If only dear to Him the strong, - That never trip nor wander, - Where were the throng whose morning song - Thrills His blue arches yonder? - - -XVI. - -“Do souls alone clear-eyed, strong-kneed, - To Him true service render, - And they who need His hand to lead, - Find they His heart untender? - Through all your various ranks and fates - He opens doors to duty, - And he that waits there at your gates - Was servant of His Beauty.” - - -XVII. - -“The Earth must richer sap secrete, - (Could ye in time but know it!) - Must juice concrete with fiercer heat, - Ere she can make her poet; - Long generations go and come, - At last she bears a singer, - For ages dumb, of senses numb - The compensation-bringer!” - - -XVIII. - -“Her cheaper broods in palaces - She raises under glasses, - But souls like these, heav’n’s hostages, - Spring shelterless as grasses: - They share Earth’s blessing and her bane, - The common sun and shower; - What makes your pain to them is gain, - Your weakness is their power. - - -XIX. - -“These larger hearts must feel the rolls - Of stormier-waved temptation; - These star-wide souls between their poles - Bear zones of tropic passion. - He loved much!--that is gospel good, - Howe’er the text you handle; - From common wood the cross was hewed, - By love turned priceless sandal. - - -XX. - -“If scant his service at the kirk, - He _paters_ heard and _aves_ - From choirs that lurk in hedge and birk, - From blackbird and from mavis; - The cowering mouse, poor unroofed thing, - In him found Mercy’s angel; - The daisy’s ring brought every spring - To him Love’s fresh evangel! - - -XXI. - -“Not he the threatening texts who deals - Is highest ’mong the preachers, - But he who feels the woes and weals - Of all God’s wandering creatures. - He doth good work whose heart can find - The spirit ’neath the letter; - Who makes his kind of happier mind, - Leaves wiser men and better. - - -XXII. - -“They make Religion be abhorred - Who round with darkness gulf her, - And think no word can please the Lord - Unless it smell of sulphur. - Dear Poet-heart, that childlike guessed - The Father’s loving kindness, - Come now to rest! Thou didst His hest, - If haply ’twas in blindness!” - - -XXIII. - -Then leapt heaven’s portals wide apart, - And at their golden thunder -With sudden start I woke, my heart - Still throbbing-full of wonder. -“Father,” I said, “'tis known to Thee - How Thou thy Saints preparest; -But this I see,--Saint Charity - Is still the first and fairest!” - - -XXIV. - -Dear Bard and Brother! let who may - Against thy faults be railing, -(Though far, I pray, from us be they - That never had a failing!) -One toast I’ll give, and that not long, - Which thou wouldst pledge if present,-- -To him whose song, in nature strong, - Makes man of prince and peasant! - - - - -IN AN ALBUM. - - -The misspelt scrawl, upon the wall -By some Pompeian idler traced, -In ashes packed (ironic fact!) -Lies eighteen centuries uneffaced, -While many a page of bard and sage, -Deemed once mankind’s immortal gain, -Lost from Time’s ark, leaves no more mark -Than a keel’s furrow through the main. - -O Chance and Change! our buzz’s range -Is scarcely wider than a fly’s; -Then let us play at fame to-day, -To-morrow be unknown and wise; -And while the fair beg locks of hair, -And autographs, and Lord knows what, -Quick! let us scratch our moment’s match, -Make our brief blaze, and be forgot! - -Too pressed to wait, upon her slate -Fame writes a name or two in doubt; -Scarce written, these no longer please, -And her own finger rubs them out: -It may ensue, fair girl, that you -Years hence this yellowing leaf may see, -And put to task, your memory ask -In vain, “This Lowell, who was he?” - - - - -AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER, -1866, IN ACKNOWLEDGING A TOAST -TO THE SMITH PROFESSOR. - - -I rise, Mr. Chairman, as both of us know, -With the impromptu I promised you three weeks ago, -Dragged up to my doom by your might and my mane, -To do what I vowed I’d do never again; -And I feel like your good honest dough when possest -By a stirring, impertinent devil of yeast. -“You must rise,” says the leaven. “I can’t,” says the dough; -“Just examine my bumps, and you’ll see it’s no go.” -“But you must,” the tormentor insists, “'tis all right; -You must rise when I bid you, and, what’s more, be light.” - -’Tis a dreadful oppression, this making men speak -What they ’re sure to be sorry for all the next week; -This asking some poor stick, like Aaron’s, to bud -Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood, -As if the dull brain that you vented your spite on -Could be got, like an ox, by mere poking, to Brighton. - -They say it is wholesome to rise with the sun, -And I dare say it may be if not overdone; -(I think it was Thomson who made the remark -’Twas an excellent thing in its way--for a lark;) -But to rise after dinner and look down the meeting -On a distant (as Gray calls it) prospect of Eating, -With a stomach half full and a cerebrum hollow -As the tortoise-shell ere it was strung for Apollo, -Under contract to raise anerithmon gelasma -With rhymes so hard hunted they gasp with the asthma, -And jokes not much younger than Jethro’s phylacteries, -Is something I leave you yourselves to characterize. - -I’ve a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech, -Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach, -Swerving this way and that as the wave of the moment -Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim’s foam on ’t, -And leaving on memory’s rim just a sense -Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense; -Not poetry,--no, not quite that, but as good, -A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would. -’Tis a time for gay fancies as fleeting and vain -As the whisper of foam-beads on fresh-poured champagne, -Since dinners were not perhaps strictly designed -For manœuvering the heavy dragoons of the mind. -When I hear your set speeches that start with a pop, -Then wander and maunder, too feeble to stop, -With a vague apprehension from popular rumor -There used to be something by mortals called humor, -Beginning again when you thought they were done, -Respectable, sensible, weighing a ton, -And as near to the present occasions of men -As a Fast Day discourse of the year eighteen ten, -I--well, I sit still, and my sentiments smother, -For am I not also a bore and a brother? - -And a toast,--what should that be? Light, airy, and free, -The foam-Aphrodite of Bacchus’s sea, -A fancy-tinged bubble, an orbed rainbow-stain, -That floats for an instant ’twixt goblet and brain; -A breath-born perfection, half something, half naught, -And breaks if it strike the hard edge of a thought. -Do you ask me to make such? Ah no, not so simple; -Ask Apelles to paint you the ravishing dimple -Whose shifting enchantment lights Venus’s cheek, -And the artist will tell you his skill is too weak; -Once fix it, ’tis naught, for the charm of it rises -From the sudden bopeeps of its smiling surprises. - -I’ve tried to define it, but what mother’s son -Could ever yet do what he knows should be done? -My rocket has burst, and I watch in the air -Its fast-fading heart’s-blood drop back in despair; -Yet one chance is left me, and, if I am quick, -I can palm off, before you suspect me, the stick. - -Now since I’ve succeeded--I pray do not frown-- -To Ticknor’s and Longfellow’s classical gown, -And profess four strange languages, which, luckless elf, -I speak like a native (of Cambridge) myself, -Let me beg, Mr. President, leave to propose -A sentiment treading on nobody’s toes, -And give, in such ale as with pump-handles _we_ brew, -Their memory who saved us from all talking Hebrew,-- -A toast that to deluge with water is good, -For in Scripture they come in just after the flood: -I give you the men but for whom, as I guess, sir, -Modern languages ne’er could have had a professor, -The builders of Babel, to whose zeal the lungs -Of the children of men owe confusion of tongues; -And a name all-embracing I couple therewith, -Which is that of my founder--the late Mr. Smith. - - - - -A PARABLE. - - -An ass munched thistles, while a nightingale -From passion’s fountain flooded all the vale. -“Hee-haw!” cried he, “I hearken,” as who knew -For such ear-largess humble thanks were due. -“Friend,” said the wingèd pain, “in vain you bray, -Who tunnels bring, not cisterns, for my lay; -None but his peers the poet rightly hear, -Nor mete we listeners by their length of ear.” - - COLONNA, ITALY, 1852. - - - - -V. - -EPIGRAMS. - - - - -SAYINGS. - - -1. - -In life’s small things be resolute and great -To keep thy muscle trained: know’st thou when Fate -Thy measure takes, or when she’ll say to thee, -“I find thee worthy; do this deed for me”? - - -2. - -A camel-driver, angry with his drudge, -Beating him, called him hunchback; to the hind -Thus spake a dervish: “Friend, the Eternal Judge -Dooms not His work, but ours, the crooked mind.” - - -3. - -Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark?--he borrows a lantern; -Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his steps by the stars. - - -4. - -“Where lies the capital, pilgrim, seat of who governs the Faithful?” -“Thither my footsteps are bent: it is where Saadi is lodged.” - - - - -INSCRIPTIONS. - - -FOR A BELL AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY. - -I call as fly the irrevocable hours, - Futile as air or strong as fate to make -Your lives of sand or granite; awful powers, - Even as men choose, they either give or take. - - -FOR A MEMORIAL WINDOW TO SIR WALTER RALEIGH, -SET UP IN ST. MARGARET’S, WESTMINSTER, -BY AMERICAN CONTRIBUTORS. - -The New World’s sons, from England’s breasts we drew - Such milk as bids remember whence we came; -Proud of her Past wherefrom our Present grew, - This window we inscribe with Raleigh’s name. - - -PROPOSED FOR A SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' -MONUMENT IN BOSTON. - -To those who died for her on land and sea, -That she might have a country great and free, -Boston builds this: build ye her monument -In lives like theirs, at duty’s summons spent. - - - - -A MISCONCEPTION. - - -B, taught by Pope to do his good by stealth, -’Twixt participle and noun no difference feeling, -In office placed to serve the Commonwealth, -Does himself all the good he can by stealing. - - - - -THE BOSS. - - -Skilled to pull wires, he baffles Nature’s hope, -Who sure intended him to stretch a rope. - - - - -SUN-WORSHIP. - - -If I were the rose at your window, -Happiest rose of its crew, -Every blossom I bore would bend inward, -_They’d_ know where the sunshine grew. - - - - -CHANGED PERSPECTIVE. - - -Full oft the pathway to her door -I’ve measured by the selfsame track, -Yet doubt the distance more and more, -’Tis so much longer coming back! - - - - -WITH A PAIR OF GLOVES LOST IN A -WAGER. - - -We wagered, she for sunshine, I for rain, -And I should hint sharp practice if I dared; -For was not she beforehand sure to gain -Who made the sunshine we together shared? - - - - -SIXTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY. - - -As life runs on, the road grows strange -With faces new, and near the end -The milestones into headstones change, -’Neath every one a friend. - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEARTSEASE AND RUE *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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