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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, Vol. 9, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. 9
+       The Iron Gate And Other Poems (1877-1881)
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Release Date: September 30, 2004 [EBook #7396]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POETRY OF HOLMES, VOL. 9 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                           THE POETICAL WORKS
+
+                                   OF
+
+                         OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+                 [Volume 3 of the 1893 three volume set]
+
+
+
+
+                             THE IRON GATE
+
+                            AND OTHER POEMS
+
+                               1877-1881
+
+
+
+
+     THE IRON GATE
+     VESTIGIA QUINQUE RETRORSUM
+     MY AVIARY
+     ON THE THRESHOLD
+     TO GEORGE PEABODY
+     AT THE PAPYRUS CLUB
+     FOR WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
+     TWO SONNETS: HARVARD
+     THE COMING ERA
+     IN RESPONSE
+     FOR THE MOORE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+     TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE
+     WELCOME TO THE CHICAGO COMMERCIAL CLUB
+     AMERICAN ACADEMY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+     THE SCHOOL-BOY
+     THE SILENT MELODY
+     OUR HOME--OUR COUNTRY
+     POEM AT THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS
+          MEDICAL SOCIETY
+     RHYMES OF A LIFE-TIME
+
+
+
+
+
+THE IRON GATE
+
+Read at the Breakfast given in honor of Dr. Holmes's Seventieth Birthday
+by the publishers of the "Atlantic  Monthly," Boston, December 3, 1879.
+
+WHERE is this patriarch you are kindly greeting?
+Not unfamiliar to my ear his name,
+Nor yet unknown to many a joyous meeting
+In days long vanished,--is he still the same,
+
+Or changed by years, forgotten and forgetting,
+Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought,
+Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting,
+Where all goes wrong, and nothing as it ought?
+
+Old age, the graybeard! Well, indeed, I know him,--
+Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;
+In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem,
+Oft have I met him from my earliest day.
+
+In my old AEsop, toiling with his bundle,--
+His load of sticks,--politely asking Death,
+Who comes when called for,--would he lug or trundle
+His fagot for him?--he was scant of breath.
+
+And sad "Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher,"--
+Has he not stamped the image on my soul,
+In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher
+Sighs o'er the loosened cord, the broken bowl?
+
+Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance,
+And now my lifted door-latch shows him here;
+I take his shrivelled hand without resistance,
+And find him smiling as his step draws near.
+
+What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us,
+Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime;
+Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us,
+The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time!
+
+Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant,
+Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep,
+Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant,
+Life's flow less noisy, but the stream how deep!
+
+Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender,
+Its lightened task-work tugs with lessening strain,
+Hands get more helpful, voices, grown more tender,
+Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous brain.
+
+Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers,
+Sits by the raked-up ashes of the past,
+Spreads its thin hands above the whitening embers
+That warm its creeping life-blood till the last.
+
+Dear to its heart is every loving token
+That comes unbidden ere its pulse grows cold,
+Ere the last lingering ties of life are broken,
+Its labors ended and its story told.
+
+Ah, while around us rosy youth rejoices,
+For us the sorrow-laden breezes sigh,
+And through the chorus of its jocund voices
+Throbs the sharp note of misery's hopeless cry.
+
+As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying
+From some far orb I track our watery sphere,
+Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying,
+The silvered globule seems a glistening tear.
+
+But Nature lends her mirror of illusion
+To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes,
+And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion
+The wintry landscape and the summer skies.
+
+So when the iron portal shuts behind us,
+And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,
+Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,
+And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.
+
+I come not here your morning hour to sadden,
+A limping pilgrim, leaning on his staff,--
+I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden
+This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh.
+
+If word of mine another's gloom has brightened,
+Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came;
+If hand of mine another's task has lightened,
+It felt the guidance that it dares not claim.
+
+But, O my gentle sisters, O my brothers,
+These thick-sown snow-flakes hint of toil's release;
+These feebler pulses bid me leave to others
+The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace.
+
+Time claims his tribute; silence now is golden;
+Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre;
+Though to your love untiring still beholden,
+The curfew tells me--cover up the fire.
+
+And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful,
+And warmer heart than look or word can tell,
+In simplest phrase--these traitorous eyes are tearful--
+Thanks, Brothers, Sisters,--Children,--and farewell!
+
+
+
+
+
+VESTIGIA QUINQUE RETRORSUM
+
+AN ACADEMIC POEM
+
+1829-1879
+
+Read at the Commencement Dinner of the Alumni of Harvard
+University, June 25, 1879.
+
+WHILE fond, sad memories all around us throng,
+Silence were sweeter than the sweetest song;
+Yet when the leaves are green and heaven is blue,
+The choral tribute of the grove is due,
+And when the lengthening nights have chilled the skies,
+We fain would hear the song-bird ere be flies,
+And greet with kindly welcome, even as now,
+The lonely minstrel on his leafless bough.
+
+This is our golden year,--its golden day;
+Its bridal memories soon must pass away;
+Soon shall its dying music cease to ring,
+And every year must loose some silver string,
+Till the last trembling chords no longer thrill,--
+Hands all at rest and hearts forever still.
+
+A few gray heads have joined the forming line;
+We hear our summons,--"Class of 'Twenty-Nine!"
+Close on the foremost, and, alas, how few!
+Are these "The Boys" our dear old Mother knew?
+Sixty brave swimmers. Twenty--something more--
+Have passed the stream and reached this frosty shore!
+
+How near the banks these fifty years divide
+When memory crosses with a single stride!
+'T is the first year of stern "Old Hickory" 's rule
+When our good Mother lets us out of school,
+Half glad, half sorrowing, it must be confessed,
+To leave her quiet lap, her bounteous breast,
+Armed with our dainty, ribbon-tied degrees,
+Pleased and yet pensive, exiles and A. B.'s.
+
+Look back, O comrades, with your faded eyes,
+And see the phantoms as I bid them rise.
+Whose smile is that? Its pattern Nature gave,
+A sunbeam dancing in a dimpled wave;
+KIRKLAND alone such grace from Heaven could win,
+His features radiant as the soul within;
+That smile would let him through Saint Peter's gate
+While sad-eyed martyrs had to stand and wait.
+Here flits mercurial _Farrar_; standing there,
+See mild, benignant, cautious, learned _Ware_,
+And sturdy, patient, faithful, honest _Hedge_,
+Whose grinding logic gave our wits their edge;
+_Ticknor_, with honeyed voice and courtly grace;
+And _Willard_, larynxed like a double bass;
+And _Channing_, with his bland, superior look,
+Cool as a moonbeam on a frozen brook,
+
+While the pale student, shivering in his shoes,
+Sees from his theme the turgid rhetoric ooze;
+And the born soldier, fate decreed to wreak
+His martial manhood on a class in Greek,
+_Popkin_! How that explosive name recalls
+The grand old Busby of our ancient halls
+Such faces looked from Skippon's grim platoons,
+Such figures rode with Ireton's stout dragoons:
+He gave his strength to learning's gentle charms,
+But every accent sounded "Shoulder arms!"
+
+Names,--empty names! Save only here and there
+Some white-haired listener, dozing in his chair,
+Starts at the sound he often used to hear,
+And upward slants his Sunday-sermon ear.
+And we--our blooming manhood we regain;
+Smiling we join the long Commencement train,
+One point first battled in discussion hot,--
+Shall we wear gowns? and settled: We will not.
+How strange the scene,--that noisy boy-debate
+Where embryo-speakers learn to rule the State!
+This broad-browed youth, sedate and sober-eyed,
+Shall wear the ermined robe at Taney's side;
+And he, the stripling, smooth of face and slight,
+Whose slender form scarce intercepts the light,
+Shall rule the Bench where Parsons gave the law,
+And sphinx-like sat uncouth, majestic Shaw
+Ah, many a star has shed its fatal ray
+On names we loved--our brothers--where are they?
+
+Nor these alone; our hearts in silence claim
+Names not less dear, unsyllabled by fame.
+
+How brief the space! and yet it sweeps us back
+Far, far along our new-born history's track
+Five strides like this;--the sachem rules the land;
+The Indian wigwams cluster where we stand.
+
+The second. Lo! a scene of deadly strife--
+A nation struggling into infant life;
+Not yet the fatal game at Yorktown won
+Where failing Empire fired its sunset gun.
+LANGDON sits restless in the ancient chair,--
+Harvard's grave Head,--these echoes heard his prayer
+When from yon mansion, dear to memory still,
+The banded yeomen marched for Bunker's Hill.
+Count on the grave triennial's thick-starred roll
+What names were numbered on the lengthening scroll,--
+Not unfamiliar in our ears they ring,--
+Winthrop, Hale, Eliot, Everett, Dexter, Tyng.
+
+Another stride. Once more at 'twenty-nine,--
+GOD SAVE KING GEORGE, the Second of his line!
+And is Sir Isaac living? Nay, not so,--
+He followed Flainsteed two short years ago,--
+And what about the little hump-backed man
+Who pleased the bygone days of good Queen Anne?
+What, Pope? another book he's just put out,--
+"The Dunciad,"--witty, but profane, no doubt.
+
+Where's Cotton Mather? he was always here.
+And so he would be, but he died last year.
+Who is this preacher our Northampton claims,
+Whose rhetoric blazes with sulphureous flames
+And torches stolen from Tartarean mines?
+Edwards, the salamander of divines.
+A deep, strong nature, pure and undefiled;
+Faith, firm as his who stabbed his sleeping child;
+Alas for him who blindly strays apart,
+And seeking God has lost his human heart!
+Fall where they might, no flying cinders caught
+These sober halls where WADSWORTH ruled and
+taught.
+
+One footstep more; the fourth receding stride
+Leaves the round century on the nearer side.
+GOD SAVE KING CHARLES! God knows that pleasant knave
+His grace will find it hard enough to save.
+Ten years and more, and now the Plague, the Fire,
+Talk of all tongues, at last begin to tire;
+One fear prevails, all other frights forgot,--
+White lips are whispering,--hark! The Popish Plot!
+Happy New England, from such troubles free
+In health and peace beyond the stormy sea!
+No Romish daggers threat her children's throats,
+No gibbering nightmare mutters "Titus Oates;"
+Philip is slain, the Quaker graves are green,
+Not yet the witch has entered on the scene;
+Happy our Harvard; pleased her graduates four;
+URIAN OAKES the name their parchments bore.
+
+Two centuries past, our hurried feet arrive
+At the last footprint of the scanty five;
+Take the fifth stride; our wandering eyes explore
+A tangled forest on a trackless shore;
+Here, where we stand, the savage sorcerer howls,
+The wild cat snarls, the stealthy gray wolf prowls,
+The slouching bear, perchance the trampling moose
+Starts the brown squaw and scares her red pappoose;
+At every step the lurking foe is near;
+His Demons reign; God has no temple here!
+
+Lift up your eyes! behold these pictured walls;
+Look where the flood of western glory falls
+Through the great sunflower disk of blazing panes
+In ruby, saffron, azure, emerald stains;
+With reverent step the marble pavement tread
+Where our proud Mother's martyr-roll is read;
+See the great halls that cluster, gathering round
+This lofty shrine with holiest memories crowned;
+See the fair Matron in her summer bower,
+Fresh as a rose in bright perennial flower;
+Read on her standard, always in the van,
+"TRUTH,"--the one word that makes a slave a man;
+Think whose the hands that fed her altar-fires,
+Then count the debt we owe our scholar-sires!
+
+Brothers, farewell! the fast declining ray
+Fades to the twilight of our golden day;
+Some lesson yet our wearied brains may learn,
+Some leaves, perhaps, in life's thin volume turn.
+How few they seem as in our waning age
+We count them backwards to the title-page!
+Oh let us trust with holy men of old
+Not all the story here begun is told;
+So the tired spirit, waiting to be freed,
+On life's last leaf with tranquil eye shall read
+By the pale glimmer of the torch reversed,
+Not Finis, but _The End of Volume First_!
+
+
+
+
+
+MY AVIARY
+
+Through my north window, in the wintry weather,--
+My airy oriel on the river shore,--
+I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together
+Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.
+
+The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
+Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
+The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
+Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.
+
+I see the solemn gulls in council sitting
+On some broad ice-floe pondering long and late,
+While overhead the home-bound ducks are flitting,
+And leave the tardy conclave in debate,
+
+Those weighty questions in their breasts revolving
+Whose deeper meaning science never learns,
+Till at some reverend elder's look dissolving,
+The speechless senate silently adjourns.
+
+But when along the waves the shrill north-easter
+Shrieks through the laboring coaster's shrouds "Beware!"
+The pale bird, kindling like a Christmas feaster
+When some wild chorus shakes the vinous air,
+
+Flaps from the leaden wave in fierce rejoicing,
+Feels heaven's dumb lightning thrill his torpid nerves,
+Now on the blast his whistling plumage poising,
+Now wheeling, whirling in fantastic curves.
+
+Such is our gull; a gentleman of leisure,
+Less fleshed than feathered; bagged you'll find him such;
+His virtue silence; his employment pleasure;
+Not bad to look at, and not good for much.
+
+What of our duck? He has some high-bred cousins,--
+His Grace the Canvas-back, My Lord the Brant,--
+Anas and Anser,--both served up by dozens,
+At Boston's Rocher, half-way to Nahant.
+
+As for himself, he seems alert and thriving,--
+Grubs up a living somehow--what, who knows?
+Crabs? mussels? weeds?--Look quick! there 's one just diving!
+Flop! Splash! his white breast glistens--down he goes!
+
+And while he 's under--just about a minute--
+I take advantage of the fact to say
+His fishy carcase has no virtue in it
+The gunning idiot's worthless hire to pay.
+
+Shrewd is our bird; not easy to outwit him!
+Sharp is the outlook of those pin-head eyes;
+Still, he is mortal and a shot may hit him,
+One cannot always miss him if he tries.
+
+He knows you! "sportsmen" from suburban alleys,
+Stretched under seaweed in the treacherous punt;
+Knows every lazy, shiftless lout that sallies
+Forth to waste powder--as he says, to "hunt."
+
+I watch you with a patient satisfaction,
+Well pleased to discount your predestined luck;
+The float that figures in your sly transaction
+Will carry back a goose, but not a duck.
+
+Look! there's a young one, dreaming not of danger;
+Sees a flat log come floating down the stream;
+Stares undismayed upon the harmless stranger;
+Ah! were all strangers harmless as they seem!
+
+_Habet_! a leaden shower his breast has shattered;
+Vainly he flutters, not again to rise;
+His soft white plumes along the waves are scattered;
+Helpless the wing that braved the tempest lies.
+
+He sees his comrades high above him flying
+To seek their nests among the island reeds;
+Strong is their flight; all lonely he is lying
+Washed by the crimsoned water as he bleeds.
+
+O Thou who carest for the falling sparrow,
+Canst Thou the sinless sufferer's pang forget?
+Or is thy dread account-book's page so narrow
+Its one long column scores thy creatures' debt?
+
+Poor gentle guest, by nature kindly cherished,
+A world grows dark with thee in blinding death;
+One little gasp--thy universe has perished,
+Wrecked by the idle thief who stole thy breath!
+
+Is this the whole sad story of creation,
+Lived by its breathing myriads o'er and o'er,--
+One glimpse of day, then black annihilation,--
+A sunlit passage to a sunless shore?
+
+Give back our faith, ye mystery-solving lynxes!
+Robe us once more in heaven-aspiring creeds
+Happier was dreaming Egypt with her sphinxes,
+The stony convent with its cross and beads!
+
+How often gazing where a bird reposes,
+Rocked on the wavelets, drifting with the tide,
+I lose myself in strange metempsychosis
+And float a sea-fowl at a sea-fowl's side;
+
+From rain, hail, snow in feathery mantle muffled,
+Clear-eyed, strong-limbed, with keenest sense to hear
+My mate soft murmuring, who, with plumes unruffled,
+Where'er I wander still is nestling near;
+
+The great blue hollow like a garment o'er me;
+Space all unmeasured, unrecorded time;
+While seen with inward eye moves on before me
+Thought's pictured train in wordless pantomime.
+
+A voice recalls me.--From my window turning
+I find myself a plumeless biped still;
+No beak, no claws, no sign of wings discerning,--
+In fact with nothing bird-like but my quill.
+
+
+
+
+
+ON THE THRESHOLD
+
+INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF POEMS BYDIFFERENT AUTHORS
+
+AN usher standing at the door
+I show my white rosette;
+A smile of welcome, nothing more,
+Will pay my trifling debt;
+Why should I bid you idly wait
+Like lovers at the swinging gate?
+
+Can I forget the wedding guest?
+The veteran of the sea?
+In vain the listener smites his breast,--
+"There was a ship," cries he!
+Poor fasting victim, stunned and pale,
+He needs must listen to the tale.
+
+He sees the gilded throng within,
+The sparkling goblets gleam,
+The music and the merry din
+Through every window stream,
+But there he shivers in the cold
+Till all the crazy dream is told.
+
+Not mine the graybeard's glittering eye
+That held his captive still
+To hold my silent prisoners by
+And let me have my will;
+Nay, I were like the three-years' child,
+To think you could be so beguiled!
+
+My verse is but the curtain's fold
+That hides the painted scene,
+The mist by morning's ray unrolled
+That veils the meadow's green,
+The cloud that needs must drift away
+To show the rose of opening day.
+
+See, from the tinkling rill you hear
+In hollowed palm I bring
+These scanty drops, but ah, how near
+The founts that heavenward spring!
+Thus, open wide the gates are thrown
+And founts and flowers are all your own!
+
+
+
+
+
+TO GEORGE PEABODY
+
+DANVERS, 1866
+
+BANKRUPT! our pockets inside out!
+Empty of words to speak his praises!
+Worcester and Webster up the spout!
+Dead broke of laudatory phrases!
+Yet why with flowery speeches tease,
+With vain superlatives distress him?
+Has language better words than these?
+THE FRIEND OF ALL HIS RACE, GOD BLESS HIM!
+
+A simple prayer--but words more sweet
+By human lips were never uttered,
+Since Adam left the country seat
+Where angel wings around him fluttered.
+The old look on with tear-dimmed eyes,
+The children cluster to caress him,
+And every voice unbidden cries,
+THE FRIEND OF ALL HIS RACE, GOD BLESS HIM!
+
+
+
+
+
+AT THE PAPYRUS CLUB
+
+A LOVELY show for eyes to see
+I looked upon this morning,--
+A bright-hued, feathered company
+Of nature's own adorning;
+But ah! those minstrels would not sing
+A listening ear while I lent,--
+The lark sat still and preened his wing,
+The nightingale was silent;
+I longed for what they gave me not--
+Their warblings sweet and fluty,
+But grateful still for all I got
+I thanked them for their beauty.
+
+A fairer vision meets my view
+Of Claras, Margarets, Marys,
+In silken robes of varied hue,
+Like bluebirds and canaries;
+The roses blush, the jewels gleam,
+The silks and satins glisten,
+The black eyes flash, the blue eyes beam,
+We look--and then we listen
+Behold the flock we cage to-night--
+Was ever such a capture?
+To see them is a pure delight;
+To hear them--ah! what rapture!
+
+Methinks I hear Delilah's laugh
+At Samson bound in fetters;
+"We captured!" shrieks each lovelier half,
+"Men think themselves our betters!
+We push the bolt, we turn the key
+On warriors, poets, sages,
+Too happy, all of them, to be
+Locked in our golden cages!"
+Beware! the boy with bandaged eyes
+Has flung away his blinder;
+
+He 's lost his mother--so he cries--
+And here he knows he'll find her:
+The rogue! 't is but a new device,--
+Look out for flying arrows
+Whene'er the birds of Paradise
+Are perched amid the sparrows!
+
+
+
+
+
+FOR WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
+
+DECEMBER 17, 1877
+
+I BELIEVE that the copies of verses I've spun,
+Like Scheherezade's tales, are a thousand and one;
+You remember the story,--those mornings in bed,--
+'T was the turn of a copper,--a tale or a head.
+
+A doom like Scheherezade's falls upon me
+In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree
+I'm a florist in verse, and what would people say
+If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?
+
+It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows
+Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose,
+The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring,
+And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string.
+
+Yes,--"the style is the man," and the nib of one's pen
+Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten;
+It is so in all matters, if truth may be told;
+Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould.
+
+How we all know each other! no use in disguise;
+Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the eyes;
+We can tell by his--somewhat--each one of our tribe,
+As we know the old hat which we cannot describe.
+
+Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw you write,
+Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night,
+Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod;
+Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod,
+
+We shall say, "You can't cheat us,--we know it is you,"
+There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two,
+Maestro, whose chant like the dulcimer rings
+And the woods will be hushed while the nightingale sings.
+
+And he, so serene, so majestic, so true,
+Whose temple hypethral the planets shine through,
+Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen,
+We should know our one sage from all children of men.
+
+And he whose bright image no distance can dim,
+Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him,
+Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge
+(With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge.
+
+Do you know whom we send you, Hidalgos of Spain?
+Do you know your old friends when you see them again?
+Hosea was Sancho! you Dons of Madrid,
+But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid!
+
+And the wood-thrush of Essex,--you know whom I mean,
+Whose song echoes round us while he sits unseen,
+Whose heart-throbs of verse through our memories thrill
+Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill,
+
+So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure,
+We hear but one strain and our verdict is sure,--
+Thee cannot elude us,--no further we search,--
+'T is Holy George Herbert cut loose from his church!
+
+We think it the voice of a seraph that sings,--
+Alas! we remember that angels have wings,--
+What story is this of the day of his birth?
+Let him live to a hundred! we want him on earth!
+
+One life has been paid him (in gold) by the sun;
+One account has been squared and another begun;
+But he never will die if he lingers below
+Till we've paid him in love half the balance we owe!
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO SONNETS: HARVARD
+
+At the meeting of the New York Harvard Club,
+February 21, 1878.
+
+"CHRISTO ET ECCLESLE." 1700
+
+To GOD'S ANOINTED AND HIS CHOSEN FLOCK
+So ran the phrase the black-robed conclave chose
+To guard the sacred cloisters that arose
+Like David's altar on Moriah's rock.
+Unshaken still those ancient arches mock
+The ram's-horn summons of the windy foes
+Who stand like Joshua's army while it blows
+And wait to see them toppling with the shock.
+Christ and the Church. Their church, whose narrow door
+Shut out the many, who if overbold
+Like hunted wolves were driven from the fold,
+Bruised with the flails these godly zealots bore,
+Mindful that Israel's altar stood of old
+Where echoed once Araunah's threshing-floor.
+
+
+1643 "VERITAS." 1878
+
+TRUTH: So the frontlet's older legend ran,
+On the brief record's opening page displayed;
+Not yet those clear-eyed scholars were afraid
+Lest the fair fruit that wrought the woe of man
+By far Euphrates--where our sire began
+His search for truth, and, seeking, was betrayed--
+Might work new treason in their forest shade,
+Doubling the curse that brought life's shortened span.
+Nurse of the future, daughter of the past,
+That stern phylactery best becomes thee now
+Lift to the morning star thy marble brow
+Cast thy brave truth on every warring blast!
+Stretch thy white hand to that forbidden bough,
+And let thine earliest symbol be thy last!
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING ERA
+
+THEY tell us that the Muse is soon to fly hence,
+Leaving the bowers of song that once were dear,
+Her robes bequeathing to her sister, Science,
+The groves of Pindus for the axe to clear.
+
+Optics will claim the wandering eye of fancy,
+Physics will grasp imagination's wings,
+Plain fact exorcise fiction's necromancy,
+The workshop hammer where the minstrel sings,
+
+No more with laugher at Thalia's frolics
+Our eyes shall twinkle till the tears run down,
+But in her place the lecturer on hydraulics
+Spout forth his watery science to the town.
+
+No more our foolish passions and affections
+The tragic Muse with mimic grief shall try,
+But, nobler far, a course of vivisections
+Teach what it costs a tortured brute to die.
+
+The unearthed monad, long in buried rocks hid,
+Shall tell the secret whence our being came;
+The chemist show us death is life's black oxide,
+Left when the breath no longer fans its flame.
+
+Instead of crack-brained poets in their attics
+Filling thin volumes with their flowery talk,
+There shall be books of wholesome mathematics;
+The tutor with his blackboard and his chalk.
+
+No longer bards with madrigal and sonnet
+Shall woo to moonlight walks the ribboned sex,
+But side by side the beaver and the bonnet
+Stroll, calmly pondering on some problem's x.
+
+The sober bliss of serious calculation
+Shall mock the trivial joys that fancy drew,
+And, oh, the rapture of a solved equation,--
+One self-same answer on the lips of two!
+
+So speak in solemn tones our youthful sages,
+Patient, severe, laborious, slow, exact,
+As o'er creation's protoplasmic pages
+They browse and munch the thistle crops of fact.
+
+And yet we 've sometimes found it rather pleasant
+To dream again the scenes that Shakespeare drew,--
+To walk the hill-side with the Scottish peasant
+Among the daisies wet with morning's dew;
+
+To leave awhile the daylight of the real,
+Led by the guidance of the master's hand,
+For the strange radiance of the far ideal,--
+"The light that never was on sea or land."
+
+Well, Time alone can lift the future's curtain,--
+Science may teach our children all she knows,
+But Love will kindle fresh young hearts, 't is certain,
+And June will not forget her blushing rose.
+
+And so, in spite of all that Time is bringing,--
+Treasures of truth and miracles of art,
+Beauty and Love will keep the poet singing,
+And song still live, the science of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+
+IN RESPONSE
+
+Breakfast at the Century Club, New York, May, 1879.
+
+SUCH kindness! the scowl of a cynic would soften,
+His pulse beat its way to some eloquent words,
+Alas! my poor accents have echoed too often,
+Like that Pinafore music you've some of you heard.
+
+Do you know me, dear strangers--the hundredth time comer
+At banquets and feasts since the days of my Spring?
+Ah! would I could borrow one rose of my Summer,
+But this is a leaf of my Autumn I bring.
+
+
+I look at your faces,--I'm sure there are some from
+The three-breasted mother I count as my own;
+You think you remember the place you have come from,
+But how it has changed in the years that have flown!
+
+Unaltered, 't is true, is the hall we call "Funnel,"
+Still fights the "Old South" in the battle for life,
+But we've opened our door to the West through the tunnel,
+And we've cut off Fort Hill with our Amazon knife.
+
+You should see the new Westminster Boston has builded,--
+Its mansions, its spires, its museums of arts,--
+You should see the great dome we have gorgeously gilded,--
+'T is the light of our eyes, 't is the joy of our hearts.
+
+When first in his path a young asteroid found it,
+As he sailed through the skies with the stars in his wake,
+He thought 't was the sun, and kept circling around it
+Till Edison signalled, "You've made a mistake."
+
+We are proud of our city,--her fast-growing figure,
+The warp and the woof of her brain and her hands,--
+But we're proudest of all that her heart has grown bigger,
+And warms with fresh blood as her girdle expands.
+
+One lesson the rubric of conflict has taught her
+Though parted awhile by war's earth-rending shock,
+The lines that divide us are written in water,
+The love that unites us cut deep in the rock.
+
+As well might the Judas of treason endeavor
+To write his black name on the disk of the sun
+As try the bright star-wreath that binds us to sever
+And blot the fair legend of "Many in One."
+
+We love You, tall sister, the stately, the splendid,--
+The banner of empire floats high on your towers,
+Yet ever in welcome your arms are extended,--
+We share in your splendors, your glory is ours.
+
+Yes, Queen of the Continent! All of us own thee,--
+The gold-freighted argosies flock at thy call,
+The naiads, the sea-nymphs have met to enthrone thee,
+But the Broadway of one is the Highway of all!
+
+I thank you. Three words that can hardly be mended,
+Though phrases on phrases their eloquence pile,
+If you hear the heart's throb with their eloquence blended,
+And read all they mean in a sunshiny smile.
+
+
+
+
+
+FOR THE MOORE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+
+MAY 28, 1879.
+
+ENCHANTER of Erin, whose magic has bound us,
+Thy wand for one moment we fondly would claim,
+Entranced while it summons the phantoms around us
+That blush into life at the sound of thy name.
+
+The tell-tales of memory wake from their slumbers,--
+I hear the old song with its tender refrain,--
+What passion lies hid in those honey-voiced numbers
+What perfume of youth in each exquisite strain!
+
+The home of my childhood comes back as a vision,--
+Hark! Hark! A soft chord from its song-haunted room,--
+'T is a morning of May, when the air is Elysian,--
+The syringa in bud and the lilac in bloom,--
+
+We are clustered around the "Clementi" piano,--
+There were six of us then,--there are two of us now,--
+She is singing--the girl with the silver soprano--
+How "The Lord of the Valley" was false to his vow;
+
+"Let Erin remember" the echoes are calling;
+Through "The Vale of Avoca" the waters are rolled;
+"The Exile" laments while the night-dews falling;
+"The Morning of Life" dawns again as of old.
+
+But ah! those warm love-songs of fresh adolescence!
+Around us such raptures celestial they flung
+That it seemed as if Paradise breathed its quintessence
+Through the seraph-toned lips of the maiden that sung!
+
+Long hushed are the chords that my boyhood enchanted
+As when the smooth wave by the angel was stirred,
+Yet still with their music is memory haunted,
+And oft in my dreams are their melodies heard.
+
+I feel like the priest to his altar returning,--
+The crowd that was kneeling no longer is there,
+The flame has died down, but the brands are still burning,
+And sandal and cinnamon sweeten the air.
+
+
+II.
+The veil for her bridal young Summer is weaving
+In her azure-domed hall with its tapestried floor,
+And Spring the last tear-drop of May-dew is leaving
+On the daisy of Burns and the shamrock of Moore.
+
+How like, how unlike, as we view them together,
+The song of the minstrels whose record we scan,--
+One fresh as the breeze blowing over the heather,
+One sweet as the breath from an odalisque's fan!
+
+Ah, passion can glow mid a palace's splendor;
+The cage does not alter the song of the bird;
+And the curtain of silk has known whispers as tender
+As ever the blossoming hawthorn has heard.
+
+No fear lest the step of the soft-slippered Graces
+Should fright the young Loves from their warm little nest,
+For the heart of a queen, under jewels and laces,
+Beats time with the pulse in the peasant girl's breast!
+
+Thrice welcome each gift of kind Nature's bestowing!
+Her fountain heeds little the goblet we hold;
+Alike, when its musical waters are flowing,
+The shell from the seaside, the chalice of gold.
+
+The twins of the lyre to her voices had listened;
+Both laid their best gifts upon Liberty's shrine;
+For Coila's loved minstrel the holly-wreath glistened;
+For Erin's the rose and the myrtle entwine.
+
+And while the fresh blossoms of summer are braided
+For the sea-girdled, stream-silvered, lake-jewelled isle,
+While her mantle of verdure is woven unfaded,
+While Shannon and Liffey shall dimple and  smile,
+
+The land where the staff of Saint Patrick was planted,
+Where the shamrock grows green from the cliffs to the shore,
+The land of fair maidens and heroes undaunted,
+Shall wreathe her bright harp with the garlands of Moore!
+
+
+
+
+
+TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE
+
+APRIL 4, 1880
+
+I BRING the simplest pledge of love,
+Friend of my earlier days;
+Mine is the hand without the glove,
+The heart-beat, not the phrase.
+
+How few still breathe this mortal air
+We called by school-boy names!
+You still, whatever robe you wear,
+To me are always James.
+
+That name the kind apostle bore
+Who shames the sullen creeds,
+Not trusting less, but loving more,
+And showing faith by deeds.
+
+What blending thoughts our memories share!
+What visions yours and mine
+Of May-days in whose morning air
+The dews were golden wine,
+
+Of vistas bright with opening day,
+Whose all-awakening sun
+Showed in life's landscape, far away,
+The summits to be won!
+
+The heights are gained. Ah, say not so
+For him who smiles at time,
+Leaves his tired comrades down below,
+And only lives to climb!
+
+His labors,--will they ever cease,--
+With hand and tongue and pen?
+Shall wearied Nature ask release
+At threescore years and ten?
+
+Our strength the clustered seasons tax,--
+For him new life they mean;
+Like rods around the lictor's axe
+They keep him bright and keen.
+
+The wise, the brave, the strong, we know,--
+We mark them here or there,
+But he,--we roll our eyes, and lo!
+We find him everywhere!
+
+With truth's bold cohorts, or alone,
+He strides through error's field;
+His lance is ever manhood's own,
+His breast is woman's shield.
+
+Count not his years while earth has need
+Of souls that Heaven inflames
+With sacred zeal to save, to lead,--
+Long live our dear Saint James!
+
+
+
+
+
+WELCOME TO THE CHICAGO COMMERCIAL CLUB
+
+January 14, 1880
+
+CHICAGO sounds rough to the maker of verse;
+One comfort we have--Cincinnati sounds worse;
+If we only were licensed to say Chicago!
+But Worcester and Webster won't let us, you know.
+
+No matter, we songsters must sing as we can;
+We can make some nice couplets with Lake Michigan,
+And what more resembles a nightingale's voice,
+Than the oily trisyllable, sweet Illinois?
+
+Your waters are fresh, while our harbor is salt,
+But we know you can't help it--it is n't your fault;
+Our city is old and your city is new,
+But the railroad men tell us we're greener than you.
+
+You have seen our gilt dome, and no doubt you've been told
+That the orbs of the universe round it are rolled;
+But I'll own it to you, and I ought to know best,
+That this is n't quite true of all stars of the West.
+
+You'll go to Mount Auburn,--we'll show you the track,--
+And can stay there,--unless you prefer to come back;
+And Bunker's tall shaft you can climb if you will,
+But you'll puff like a paragraph praising a pill.
+
+You must see--but you have seen--our old Faneuil Hall,
+Our churches, our school-rooms, our sample-rooms, all;
+And, perhaps, though the idiots must have their jokes,
+You have found our good people much like other folks.
+
+There are cities by rivers, by lakes, and by seas,
+Each as full of itself as a cheese-mite of cheese;
+And a city will brag as a game-cock will crow
+Don't your cockerels at home--just a little, you know?
+
+But we'll crow for you now--here's a health to the boys,
+Men, maidens, and matrons of fair Illinois,
+And the rainbow of friendship that arches its span
+From the green of the sea to the blue Michigan!
+
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN ACADEMY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+
+MAY 26, 1880
+
+SIRE, son, and grandson; so the century glides;
+Three lives, three strides, three foot-prints in the sand;
+Silent as midnight's falling meteor slides
+Into the stillness of the far-off land;
+How dim the space its little arc has spanned!
+
+See on this opening page the names renowned
+Tombed in these records on our dusty shelves,
+Scarce on the scroll of living memory found,
+Save where the wan-eyed antiquarian delves;
+Shadows they seem; ab, what are we ourselves?
+
+Pale ghosts of Bowdoin, Winthrop, Willard, West,
+Sages of busy brain and wrinkled brow,
+Searchers of Nature's secrets unconfessed,
+Asking of all things Whence and Why and How--
+What problems meet your larger vision now?
+
+Has Gannett tracked the wild Aurora's path?
+Has Bowdoin found his all-surrounding sphere?
+What question puzzles ciphering Philomath?
+Could Williams make the hidden causes clear
+Of the Dark Day that filled the land with fear?
+
+Dear ancient school-boys! Nature taught to them
+The simple lessons of the star and flower,
+Showed them strange sights; how on a single stem,--
+Admire the marvels of Creative Power!--
+Twin apples grew, one sweet, the other sour;
+
+How from the hill-top where our eyes beheld
+In even ranks the plumed and bannered maize
+Range its long columns, in the days of old
+The live volcano shot its angry blaze,--
+Dead since the showers of Noah's watery days;
+
+How, when the lightning split the mighty rock,
+The spreading fury of the shaft was spent!
+How the young scion joined the alien stock,
+And when and where the homeless swallows went
+To pass the winter of their discontent.
+
+Scant were the gleanings in those years of dearth;
+No Cuvier yet had clothed the fossil bones
+That slumbered, waiting for their second birth;
+No Lyell read the legend of the stones;
+Science still pointed to her empty thrones.
+
+Dreaming of orbs to eyes of earth unknown,
+Herschel looked heavenwards in the starlight pale;
+Lost in those awful depths he trod alone,
+Laplace stood mute before the lifted veil;
+While home-bred Humboldt trimmed his toy ship's sail.
+
+No mortal feet these loftier heights had gained
+Whence the wide realms of Nature we descry;
+In vain their eyes our longing fathers strained
+To scan with wondering gaze the summits high
+That far beneath their children's footpaths lie.
+
+Smile at their first small ventures as we may,
+The school-boy's copy shapes the scholar's hand,
+Their grateful memory fills our hearts to-day;
+Brave, hopeful, wise, this bower of peace they planned,
+While war's dread ploughshare scarred the suffering land.
+
+Child of our children's children yet unborn,
+When on this yellow page you turn your eyes,
+Where the brief record of this May-day morn
+In phrase antique and faded letters lies,
+How vague, how pale our flitting ghosts will rise!
+
+Yet in our veins the blood ran warm and red,
+For us the fields were green, the skies were blue,
+Though from our dust the spirit long has fled,
+We lived, we loved, we toiled, we dreamed like you,
+Smiled at our sires and thought how much we knew.
+
+Oh might our spirits for one hour return,
+When the next century rounds its hundredth ring,
+All the strange secrets it shall teach to learn,
+To hear the larger truths its years shall bring,
+Its wiser sages talk, its sweeter minstrels sing!
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCHOOL-BOY
+
+Read at the Centennial Celebration of the
+foundation of Phillips Academy, Andover.
+
+1778-1878
+
+THESE hallowed precincts, long to memory dear,
+Smile with fresh welcome as our feet draw near;
+With softer gales the opening leaves are fanned,
+With fairer hues the kindling flowers expand,
+The rose-bush reddens with the blush of June,
+The groves are vocal with their minstrels' tune,
+The mighty elm, beneath whose arching shade
+The wandering children of the forest strayed,
+Greets the bright morning in its bridal dress,
+And spreads its arms the gladsome dawn to bless.
+Is it an idle dream that nature shares
+Our joys, our griefs, our pastimes, and our cares?
+Is there no summons when, at morning's call,
+The sable vestments of the darkness fall?
+Does not meek evening's low-voiced Ave blend
+With the soft vesper as its notes ascend?
+Is there no whisper in the perfumed air
+When the sweet bosom of the rose is bare?
+Does not the sunshine call us to rejoice?
+Is there no meaning in the storm-cloud's voice?
+No silent message when from midnight skies
+Heaven looks upon us with its myriad eyes?
+
+Or shift the mirror; say our dreams diffuse
+O'er life's pale landscape their celestial hues,
+Lend heaven the rainbow it has never known,
+And robe the earth in glories not its own,
+Sing their own music in the summer breeze,
+With fresher foliage clothe the stately trees,
+Stain the June blossoms with a livelier dye
+And spread a bluer azure on the sky,--
+Blest be the power that works its lawless will
+And finds the weediest patch an Eden still;
+No walls so fair as those our fancies build,--
+No views so bright as those our visions gild!
+
+So ran my lines, as pen and paper met,
+The truant goose-quill travelling like Planchette;
+Too ready servant, whose deceitful ways
+Full many a slipshod line, alas! betrays;
+Hence of the rhyming thousand not a few
+Have builded worse--a great deal--than they knew.
+
+What need of idle fancy to adorn
+Our mother's birthplace on her birthday morn?
+Hers are the blossoms of eternal spring,
+From these green boughs her new-fledged birds take wing,
+These echoes hear their earliest carols sung,
+In this old nest the brood is ever young.
+If some tired wanderer, resting from his flight,
+Amid the gay young choristers alight,
+These gather round him, mark his faded plumes
+That faintly still the far-off grove perfumes,
+And listen, wondering if some feeble note
+Yet lingers, quavering in his weary throat:--
+I, whose fresh voice yon red-faced temple knew,
+What tune is left me, fit to sing to you?
+Ask not the grandeurs of a labored song,
+But let my easy couplets slide along;
+Much could I tell you that you know too well;
+Much I remember, but I will not tell;
+Age brings experience; graybeards oft are wise,
+But oh! how sharp a youngster's ears and eyes!
+
+My cheek was bare of adolescent down
+When first I sought the academic town;
+Slow rolls the coach along the dusty road,
+Big with its filial and parental load;
+The frequent hills, the lonely woods are past,
+The school-boy's chosen home is reached at last.
+I see it now, the same unchanging spot,
+The swinging gate, the little garden plot,
+The narrow yard, the rock that made its floor,
+The flat, pale house, the knocker-garnished door,
+The small, trim parlor, neat, decorous, chill,
+The strange, new faces, kind, but grave and still;
+Two, creased with age,--or what I then called age,--
+Life's volume open at its fiftieth page;
+One, a shy maiden's, pallid, placid, sweet
+As the first snow-drop, which the sunbeams greet;
+One, the last nursling's; slight she was, and fair,
+Her smooth white forehead warmed with auburn hair;
+Last came the virgin Hymen long had spared,
+Whose daily cares the grateful household shared,
+Strong, patient, humble; her substantial frame
+Stretched the chaste draperies I forbear to name.
+Brave, but with effort, had the school-boy come
+To the cold comfort of a stranger's home;
+How like a dagger to my sinking heart
+Came the dry summons, "It is time to part;
+Good-by!" "Goo-ood-by!" one fond maternal kiss. . . .
+Homesick as death! Was ever pang like this?
+Too young as yet with willing feet to stray
+From the tame fireside, glad to get away,--
+Too old to let my watery grief appear,--
+And what so bitter as a swallowed tear!
+One figure still my vagrant thoughts pursue;
+First boy to greet me, Ariel, where are you?
+Imp of all mischief, heaven alone knows how
+You learned it all,--are you an angel now,
+Or tottering gently down the slope of years,
+Your face grown sober in the vale of tears?
+Forgive my freedom if you are breathing still;
+
+If in a happier world, I know you will.
+You were a school-boy--what beneath the sun
+So like a monkey? I was also one.
+Strange, sure enough, to see what curious shoots
+The nursery raises from the study's roots!
+In those old days the very, very good
+Took up more room--a little--than they should;
+Something too much one's eyes encountered then
+Of serious youth and funeral-visaged men;
+The solemn elders saw life's mournful half,--
+Heaven sent this boy, whose mission was to laugh,
+Drollest of buffos, Nature's odd protest,
+A catbird squealing in a blackbird's nest.
+Kind, faithful Nature! While the sour-eyed Scot--
+Her cheerful smiles forbidden or forgot--
+Talks only of his preacher and his kirk,--
+Hears five-hour sermons for his Sunday work,--
+Praying and fasting till his meagre face
+Gains its due length, the genuine sign of grace,--
+An Ayrshire mother in the land of Knox
+Her embryo poet in his cradle rocks;--
+Nature, long shivering in her dim eclipse,
+Steals in a sunbeam to those baby lips;
+So to its home her banished smile returns,
+And Scotland sweetens with the song of Burns!
+
+The morning came; I reached the classic hall;
+A clock-face eyed me, staring from the wall;
+Beneath its hands a printed line I read
+YOUTH IS LIFE'S SEED-TIME: so the clock-face said:
+Some took its counsel, as the sequel showed,--
+Sowed,--their wild oats,--and reaped as they had sowed.
+How all comes back! the upward slanting floor,--
+The masters' thrones that flank the central door,--
+The long, outstretching alleys that divide
+The rows of desks that stand on either side,--
+The staring boys, a face to every desk,
+Bright, dull, pale, blooming, common, picturesque.
+Grave is the Master's look; his forehead wears
+Thick rows of wrinkles, prints of worrying cares;
+Uneasy lie the heads of all that rule,
+His most of all whose kingdom is a school.
+Supreme he sits; before the awful frown
+That bends his brows the boldest eye goes down;
+Not more submissive Israel heard and saw
+At Sinai's foot the Giver of the Law.
+Less stern he seems, who sits in equal Mate
+On the twin throne and shares the empire's weight;
+Around his lips the subtle life that plays
+Steals quaintly forth in many a jesting phrase;
+A lightsome nature, not so hard to chafe,
+Pleasant when pleased; rough-handled, not so safe;
+Some tingling memories vaguely I recall,
+But to forgive him. God forgive us all!
+
+One yet remains, whose well-remembered name
+Pleads in my grateful heart its tender claim;
+His was the charm magnetic, the bright look
+That sheds its sunshine on the dreariest book;
+A loving soul to every task he brought
+That sweetly mingled with the lore he taught;
+Sprung from a saintly race that never could
+From youth to age be anything but good,
+His few brief years in holiest labors spent,
+Earth lost too soon the treasure heaven had lent.
+Kindest of teachers, studious to divine
+Some hint of promise in my earliest line,
+These faint and faltering words thou canst not hear
+Throb from a heart that holds thy memory dear.
+As to the traveller's eye the varied plain
+Shows through the window of the flying train,
+A mingled landscape, rather felt than seen,
+A gravelly bank, a sudden flash of green,
+A tangled wood, a glittering stream that flows
+Through the cleft summit where the cliff once rose,
+All strangely blended in a hurried gleam,
+Rock, wood, waste, meadow, village, hill-side, stream,--
+So, as we look behind us, life appears,
+Seen through the vista of our bygone years.
+Yet in the dead past's shadow-filled domain,
+Some vanished shapes the hues of life retain;
+Unbidden, oft, before our dreaming eyes
+From the vague mists in memory's path they rise.
+So comes his blooming image to my view,
+The friend of joyous days when life was new,
+Hope yet untamed, the blood of youth unchilled,
+No blank arrear of promise unfulfilled,
+Life's flower yet hidden in its sheltering fold,
+Its pictured canvas yet to be unrolled.
+His the frank smile I vainly look to greet,
+His the warm grasp my clasping hand should meet;
+How would our lips renew their school-boy talk,
+Our feet retrace the old familiar walk!
+For thee no more earth's cheerful morning shines
+Through the green fringes of the tented pines;
+Ah me! is heaven so far thou canst not hear,
+Or is thy viewless spirit hovering near,
+A fair young presence, bright with morning's glow,
+The fresh-cheeked boy of fifty years ago?
+Yes, fifty years, with all their circling suns,
+Behind them all my glance reverted runs;
+Where now that time remote, its griefs, its joys,
+Where are its gray-haired men, its bright-haired boys?
+Where is the patriarch time could hardly tire,--
+The good old, wrinkled, immemorial "squire "?
+(An honest treasurer, like a black-plumed swan,
+Not every day our eyes may look upon.)
+Where the tough champion who, with Calvin's sword,
+In wordy conflicts battled for the Lord?
+Where the grave scholar, lonely, calm, austere,
+Whose voice like music charmed the listening ear,
+Whose light rekindled, like the morning star
+Still shines upon us through the gates ajar?
+Where the still, solemn, weary, sad-eyed man,
+Whose care-worn face and wandering eyes would scan,--
+His features wasted in the lingering strife
+With the pale foe that drains the student's life?
+Where my old friend, the scholar, teacher, saint,
+Whose creed, some hinted, showed a speck of taint;
+He broached his own opinion, which is not
+Lightly to be forgiven or forgot;
+Some riddle's point,--I scarce remember now,--
+Homoi-, perhaps, where they said homo-ou.
+(If the unlettered greatly wish to know
+Where lies the difference betwixt oi and o,
+Those of the curious who have time may search
+Among the stale conundrums of their church.)
+Beneath his roof his peaceful life I shared,
+And for his modes of faith I little cared,--
+I, taught to judge men's dogmas by their deeds,
+Long ere the days of india-rubber creeds.
+
+Why should we look one common faith to find,
+Where one in every score is color-blind?
+If here on earth they know not red from green,
+Will they see better into things unseen!
+Once more to time's old graveyard I return
+And scrape the moss from memory's pictured urn.
+Who, in these days when all things go by steam,
+Recalls the stage-coach with its four-horse team?
+Its sturdy driver,--who remembers him?
+Or the old landlord, saturnine and grim,
+Who left our hill-top for a new abode
+And reared his sign-post farther down the road?
+Still in the waters of the dark Shawshine
+Do the young bathers splash and think they're clean?
+Do pilgrims find their way to Indian Ridge,
+Or journey onward to the far-off bridge,
+And bring to younger ears the story back
+Of the broad stream, the mighty Merrimac?
+Are there still truant feet that stray beyond
+These circling bounds to Pomp's or Haggett's Pond,
+Or where the legendary name recalls
+The forest's earlier tenant,--"Deerjump Falls"?
+Yes, every nook these youthful feet explore,
+Just as our sires and grand sires did of yore;
+So all life's opening paths, where nature led
+Their father's feet, the children's children tread.
+Roll the round century's fivescore years away,
+Call from our storied past that earliest day
+When great Eliphalet (I can see him now,--
+Big name, big frame, big voice, and beetling brow),
+Then young Eliphalet,--ruled the rows of boys
+In homespun gray or old-world corduroys,--
+And save for fashion's whims, the benches show
+The self-same youths, the very boys we know.
+Time works strange marvels: since I trod the green
+And swung the gates, what wonders I have seen!
+But come what will,--the sky itself may fall,--
+As things of course the boy accepts them all.
+The prophet's chariot, drawn by steeds of flame,
+For daily use our travelling millions claim;
+The face we love a sunbeam makes our own;
+No more the surgeon hears the sufferer's groan;
+What unwrit histories wrapped in darkness lay
+Till shovelling Schliemann bared them to the day!
+Your Richelieu says, and says it well, my lord,
+The pen is (sometimes) mightier than the sword;
+Great is the goosequill, say we all; Amen!
+Sometimes the spade is mightier than the pen;
+It shows where Babel's terraced walls were raised,
+The slabs that cracked when Nimrod's palace blazed,
+Unearths Mycenee, rediscovers Troy,--
+Calmly he listens, that immortal boy.
+A new Prometheus tips our wands with fire,
+A mightier Orpheus strains the whispering wire,
+Whose lightning thrills the lazy winds outrun
+And hold the hours as Joshua stayed the sun,--
+So swift, in truth, we hardly find a place
+For those dim fictions known as time and space.
+Still a new miracle each year supplies,--
+See at his work the chemist of the skies,
+Who questions Sirius in his tortured rays
+And steals the secret of the solar blaze;
+Hush! while the window-rattling bugles play
+The nation's airs a hundred miles away!
+That wicked phonograph! hark! how it swears!
+Turn it again and make it say its prayers!
+And was it true, then, what the story said
+Of Oxford's friar and his brazen head?
+While wondering Science stands, herself perplexed
+At each day's miracle, and asks "What next?"
+The immortal boy, the coming heir of all,
+Springs from his desk to "urge the flying ball,"
+Cleaves with his bending oar the glassy waves,
+With sinewy arm the dashing current braves,
+The same bright creature in these haunts of ours
+That Eton shadowed with her "antique towers."
+
+Boy! Where is he? the long-limbed youth inquires,
+Whom his rough chin with manly pride inspires;
+Ah, when the ruddy cheek no longer glows,
+When the bright hair is white as winter snows,
+When the dim eye has lost its lambent flame,
+Sweet to his ear will be his school-boy name
+Nor think the difference mighty as it seems
+Between life's morning and its evening dreams;
+Fourscore, like twenty, has its tasks and toys;
+In earth's wide school-house all are girls and boys.
+
+Brothers, forgive my wayward fancy. Who
+Can guess beforehand what his pen will do?
+Too light my strain for listeners such as these,
+Whom graver thoughts and soberer speech shall please.
+Is he not here whose breath of holy song
+Has raised the downcast eyes of Faith so long?
+Are they not here, the strangers in your gates,
+For whom the wearied ear impatient waits,--
+The large-brained scholars whom their toils release,--
+The bannered heralds of the Prince of Peace?
+
+Such was the gentle friend whose youth unblamed
+In years long past our student-benches claimed;
+Whose name, illumined on the sacred page,
+Lives in the labors of his riper age;
+Such he whose record time's destroying march
+Leaves uneffaced on Zion's springing arch
+Not to the scanty phrase of measured song,
+Cramped in its fetters, names like these belong;
+One ray they lend to gild my slender line,--
+Their praise I leave to sweeter lips than mine.
+
+Homes of our sires, where Learning's temple rose,
+While vet they struggled with their banded foes,
+As in the West thy century's sun descends,
+One parting gleam its dying radiance lends.
+Darker and deeper though the shadows fall
+From the gray towers on Doubting Castle's wall,
+Though Pope and Pagan re-array their hosts,
+And her new armor youthful Science boasts,
+Truth, for whose altar rose this holy shrine,
+Shall fly for refuge to these bowers of thine;
+No past shall chain her with its rusted vow,
+No Jew's phylactery bind her Christian brow,
+But Faith shall smile to find her sister free,
+And nobler manhood draw its life from thee.
+
+Long as the arching skies above thee spread,
+As on thy groves the dews of heaven are shed,
+With currents widening still from year to year,
+And deepening channels, calm, untroubled, clear,
+Flow the twin streamlets from thy sacred hill--
+Pieria's fount and Siloam's shaded rill!
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENT MELODY
+
+"BRING me my broken harp," he said;
+"We both are wrecks,--but as ye will,--
+Though all its ringing tones have fled,
+Their echoes linger round it still;
+It had some golden strings, I know,
+But that was long--how long!--ago.
+
+"I cannot see its tarnished gold,
+I cannot hear its vanished tone,
+Scarce can my trembling fingers hold
+The pillared frame so long their own;
+We both are wrecks,--a while ago
+It had some silver strings, I know,
+
+"But on them Time too long has played
+The solemn strain that knows no change,
+And where of old my fingers strayed
+The chords they find are new and strange,--
+Yes! iron strings,--I know,--I know,--
+We both are wrecks of long ago.
+
+"We both are wrecks,--a shattered pair,--
+Strange to ourselves in time's disguise.
+What say ye to the lovesick air
+That brought the tears from Marian's eyes?
+Ay! trust me,--under breasts of snow
+Hearts could be melted long ago!
+
+"Or will ye hear the storm-song's crash
+That from his dreams the soldier woke,
+And bade him face the lightning flash
+When battle's cloud in thunder broke? . . .
+Wrecks,--nought but wrecks!--the time was when
+We two were worth a thousand men!"
+
+And so the broken harp they bring
+With pitying smiles that none could blame;
+Alas! there's not a single string
+Of all that filled the tarnished frame!
+But see! like children overjoyed,
+His fingers rambling through the void!
+
+"I clasp thee! Ay . . . mine ancient lyre . . .
+Nay, guide my wandering fingers. . . There
+They love to dally with the wire
+As Isaac played with Esau's hair.
+Hush! ye shall hear the famous tune
+That Marian called the Breath of June!"
+
+And so they softly gather round
+Rapt in his tuneful trance he seems
+His fingers move: but not a sound!
+A silence like the song of dreams. . . .
+"There! ye have heard the air," he cries,
+"That brought the tears from Marian's eyes!"
+
+Ah, smile not at his fond conceit,
+Nor deem his fancy wrought in vain;
+To him the unreal sounds are sweet,--
+No discord mars the silent strain
+Scored on life's latest, starlit page--
+The voiceless melody of age.
+
+Sweet are the lips, of all that sing,
+When Nature's music breathes unsought,
+But never yet could voice or string
+So truly shape our tenderest thought
+As when by life's decaying fire
+Our fingers sweep the stringless lyre!
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR HOME--OUR COUNTRY
+
+FOR THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE
+SETTLEMENT OF CAMBRIDGE, MASS., DECEMBER 28, 1880
+
+YOUR home was mine,--kind Nature's gift;
+My love no years can chill;
+In vain their flakes the storm-winds sift,
+The snow-drop hides beneath the drift,
+A living blossom still.
+
+Mute are a hundred long-famed lyres,
+Hushed all their golden strings;
+One lay the coldest bosom fires,
+One song, one only, never tires
+While sweet-voiced memory sings.
+
+No spot so lone but echo knows
+That dear familiar strain;
+In tropic isles, on arctic snows,
+Through burning lips its music flows
+And rings its fond refrain.
+
+From Pisa's tower my straining sight
+Roamed wandering leagues away,
+When lo! a frigate's banner bright,
+The starry blue, the red, the white,
+In far Livorno's bay.
+
+Hot leaps the life-blood from my heart,
+Forth springs the sudden tear;
+The ship that rocks by yonder mart
+Is of my land, my life, a part,--
+Home, home, sweet home, is here!
+
+Fades from my view the sunlit scene,--
+My vision spans the waves;
+I see the elm-encircled green,
+The tower,--the steeple,--and, between,
+The field of ancient graves.
+
+There runs the path my feet would tread
+When first they learned to stray;
+There stands the gambrel roof that spread
+Its quaint old angles o'er my head
+When first I saw the day.
+
+The sounds that met my boyish ear
+My inward sense salute,--
+The woodnotes wild I loved to hear,--
+The robin's challenge, sharp and clear,--
+The breath of evening's flute.
+
+The faces loved from cradle days,--
+Unseen, alas, how long!
+As fond remembrance round them plays,
+Touched with its softening moonlight rays,
+Through fancy's portal throng.
+
+And see! as if the opening skies
+Some angel form had spared
+Us wingless mortals to surprise,
+The little maid with light-blue eyes,
+White necked and golden haired!
+
+      . . . . . . . . . .
+
+So rose the picture full in view
+I paint in feebler song;
+Such power the seamless banner knew
+Of red and white and starry blue
+For exiles banished long.
+
+Oh, boys, dear boys, who wait as men
+To guard its heaven-bright folds,
+Blest are the eyes that see again
+That banner, seamless now, as then,--
+The fairest earth beholds!
+
+Sweet was the Tuscan air and soft
+In that unfading hour,
+And fancy leads my footsteps oft
+Up the round galleries, high aloft
+On Pisa's threatening tower.
+
+And still in Memory's holiest shrine
+I read with pride and joy,
+"For me those stars of empire shine;
+That empire's dearest home is mine;
+I am a Cambridge boy!"
+
+
+
+
+
+POEM
+
+AT THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE
+MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL SOCIETY, JUNE 8, 1881
+
+THREE paths there be where Learning's favored sons,
+Trained in the schools which hold her favored ones,
+Follow their several stars with separate aim;
+Each has its honors, each its special claim.
+Bred in the fruitful cradle of the East,
+First, as of oldest lineage, comes the Priest;
+The Lawyer next, in wordy conflict strong,
+Full armed to battle for the right,--or wrong;
+Last, he whose calling finds its voice in deeds,
+Frail Nature's helper in her sharpest needs.
+
+Each has his gifts, his losses and his gains,
+Each his own share of pleasures and of pains;
+No life-long aim with steadfast eye pursued
+Finds a smooth pathway all with roses strewed;
+Trouble belongs to man of woman born,--
+Tread where he may, his foot will find its thorn.
+
+Of all the guests at life's perennial feast,
+Who of her children sits above the Priest?
+For him the broidered robe, the carven seat,
+Pride at his beck, and beauty at his feet,
+For him the incense fumes, the wine is poured,
+Himself a God, adoring and adored!
+His the first welcome when our hearts rejoice,
+His in our dying ear the latest voice,
+Font, altar, grave, his steps on all attend,
+Our staff, our stay, our all but heavenly friend!
+
+Where is the meddling hand that dares to probe
+The secret grief beneath his sable robe?
+How grave his port! how every gesture tells
+Here truth abides, here peace forever dwells;
+Vex not his lofty soul with comments vain;
+Faith asks no questions; silence, ye profane!
+
+Alas! too oft while all is calm without
+The stormy spirit wars with endless doubt;
+This is the mocking spectre, scarce concealed
+Behind tradition's bruised and battered shield.
+He sees the sleepless critic, age by age,
+Scrawl his new readings on the hallowed page,
+The wondrous deeds that priests and prophets saw
+Dissolved in legend, crystallized in law,
+And on the soil where saints and martyrs trod
+Altars new builded to the Unknown God;
+His shrines imperilled, his evangels torn,--
+He dares not limp, but ah! how sharp his thorn!
+
+Yet while God's herald questions as he reads
+The outworn dogmas of his ancient creeds,
+Drops from his ritual the exploded verse,
+Blots from its page the Athanasian curse,
+Though by the critic's dangerous art perplexed,
+His holy life is Heaven's unquestioned text;
+That shining guidance doubt can never mar,--
+The pillar's flame, the light of Bethlehem's star!
+
+
+Strong is the moral blister that will draw
+Laid on the conscience of the Man of Law
+Whom blindfold Justice lends her eyes to see
+Truth in the scale that holds his promised fee.
+What! Has not every lie its truthful side,
+Its honest fraction, not to be denied?
+Per contra,--ask the moralist,--in sooth
+Has not a lie its share in every truth?
+Then what forbids an honest man to try
+To find the truth that lurks in every lie,
+And just as fairly call on truth to yield
+The lying fraction in its breast concealed?
+So the worst rogue shall claim a ready friend
+His modest virtues boldly to defend,
+And he who shows the record of a saint
+See himself blacker than the devil could paint.
+
+What struggles to his captive soul belong
+Who loves the right, yet combats for the wrong,
+Who fights the battle he would fain refuse,
+And wins, well knowing that he ought to lose,
+Who speaks with glowing lips and look sincere
+In spangled words that make the worse appear
+The better reason; who, behind his mask,
+Hides his true self and blushes at his task,--
+What quips, what quillets cheat the inward scorn
+That mocks such triumph? Has he not his thorn?
+
+Yet stay thy judgment; were thy life the prize,
+Thy death the forfeit, would thy cynic eyes
+See fault in him who bravely dares defend
+The cause forlorn, the wretch without a friend
+Nay, though the rightful side is wisdom's choice,
+Wrong has its rights and claims a champion's voice;
+Let the strong arm be lifted for the weak,
+For the dumb lips the fluent pleader speak;--
+When with warm "rebel" blood our street was dyed
+Who took, unawed, the hated hirelings' side?
+No greener civic wreath can Adams claim,
+No brighter page the youthful Quincy's name!
+
+
+How blest is he who knows no meaner strife
+Than Art's long battle with the foes of life!
+No doubt assails him, doing still his best,
+And trusting kindly Nature for the rest;
+No mocking conscience tears the thin disguise
+That wraps his breast, and tells him that he lies.
+He comes: the languid sufferer lifts his head
+And smiles a welcome from his weary bed;
+He speaks: what music like the tones that tell,
+"Past is the hour of danger,--all is well!"
+How can he feel the petty stings of grief
+Whose cheering presence always brings relief?
+What ugly dreams can trouble his repose
+Who yields himself to soothe another's woes?
+
+Hour after hour the busy day has found
+The good physician on his lonely round;
+Mansion and hovel, low and lofty door,
+He knows, his journeys every path explore,--
+Where the cold blast has struck with deadly chill
+The sturdy dweller on the storm-swept hill,
+Where by the stagnant marsh the sickening gale
+Has blanched the poisoned tenants of the vale,
+Where crushed and maimed the bleeding victim lies,
+Where madness raves, where melancholy sighs,
+And where the solemn whisper tells too plain
+That all his science, all his art, were vain.
+
+How sweet his fireside when the day is done
+And cares have vanished with the setting sun!
+Evening at last its hour of respite brings
+And on his couch his weary length he flings.
+Soft be thy pillow, servant of mankind,
+Lulled by an opiate Art could never find;
+Sweet be thy slumber,--thou hast earned it well,--
+Pleasant thy dreams! Clang! goes the midnight bell!
+
+Darkness and storm! the home is far away
+That waits his coming ere the break of day;
+The snow-clad pines their wintry plumage toss,--
+Doubtful the frozen stream his road must cross;
+Deep lie the drifts, the slanted heaps have shut
+The hardy woodman in his mountain hut,--
+Why should thy softer frame the tempest brave?
+Hast thou no life, no health, to lose or save?
+Look! read the answer in his patient eyes,--
+For him no other voice when suffering cries;
+Deaf to the gale that all around him blows,
+A feeble whisper calls him,--and he goes.
+
+Or seek the crowded city,--summer's heat
+Glares burning, blinding, in the narrow street,
+Still, noisome, deadly, sleeps the envenomed air,
+Unstirred the yellow flag that says "Beware!"
+Tempt not thy fate,--one little moment's breath
+Bears on its viewless wing the seeds of death;
+Thou at whose door the gilded chariots stand,
+Whose dear-bought skill unclasps the miser's hand,
+Turn from thy fatal quest, nor cast away
+That life so precious; let a meaner prey
+Feed the destroyer's hunger; live to bless
+Those happier homes that need thy care no less!
+
+Smiling he listens; has he then a charm
+Whose magic virtues peril can disarm?
+No safeguard his; no amulet he wears,
+Too well he knows that Nature never spares
+Her truest servant, powerless to defend
+From her own weapons her unshrinking friend.
+He dares the fate the bravest well might shun,
+Nor asks reward save only Heaven's "Well done!"
+
+Such are the toils, the perils that he knows,
+Days without rest and nights without repose,
+Yet all unheeded for the love he bears
+His art, his kind, whose every grief he shares.
+
+Harder than these to know how small the part
+Nature's proud empire yields to striving Art;
+How, as the tide that rolls around the sphere
+Laughs at the mounds that delving arms uprear,--
+Spares some few roods of oozy earth, but still
+Wastes and rebuilds the planet at its will,
+Comes at its ordered season, night or noon,
+Led by the silver magnet of the moon,--
+So life's vast tide forever comes and goes,
+Unchecked, resistless, as it ebbs and flows.
+
+Hardest of all, when Art has done her best,
+To find the cuckoo brooding in her nest;
+The shrewd adventurer, fresh from parts unknown,
+Kills off the patients Science thought her own;
+Towns from a nostrum-vender get their name,
+Fences and walls the cure-all drug proclaim,
+Plasters and pads the willing world beguile,
+Fair Lydia greets us with astringent smile,
+Munchausen's fellow-countryman unlocks
+His new Pandora's globule-holding box,
+And as King George inquired, with puzzled grin,
+"How--how the devil get the apple in?"
+So we ask how,--with wonder-opening eyes,--
+Such pygmy pills can hold such giant lies!
+
+Yes, sharp the trials, stern the daily tasks
+That suffering Nature from her servant asks;
+His the kind office dainty menials scorn,
+His path how hard,--at every step a thorn!
+What does his saddening, restless slavery buy?
+What save a right to live, a chance to die,--
+To live companion of disease and pain,
+To die by poisoned shafts untimely slain?
+
+Answer from hoary eld, majestic shades,--
+From Memphian courts, from Delphic colonnades,
+Speak in the tones that Persia's despot heard
+When nations treasured every golden word
+The wandering echoes wafted o'er the seas,
+From the far isle that held Hippocrates;
+And thou, best gift that Pergamus could send
+Imperial Rome, her noblest Caesar's friend,
+Master of masters, whose unchallenged sway
+Not bold Vesalius dared to disobey;
+Ye who while prophets dreamed of dawning times
+Taught your rude lessons in Salerno's rhymes,
+And ye, the nearer sires, to whom we owe
+The better share of all the best we know,
+In every land an ever-growing train,
+Since wakening Science broke her rusted chain,--
+Speak from the past, and say what prize was sent
+To crown the toiling years so freely spent!
+
+List while they speak:
+                   In life's uneven road
+Our willing hands have eased our brothers' load;
+One forehead smoothed, one pang of torture less,
+One peaceful hour a sufferer's couch to bless,
+The smile brought back to fever's parching lips,
+The light restored to reason in eclipse,
+Life's treasure rescued like a burning brand
+Snatched from the dread destroyer's wasteful hand;
+Such were our simple records day by day,
+For gains like these we wore our lives away.
+In toilsome paths our daily bread we sought,
+But bread from heaven attending angels brought;
+Pain was our teacher, speaking to the heart,
+Mother of pity, nurse of pitying art;
+Our lesson learned, we reached the peaceful shore
+Where the pale sufferer asks our aid no more,--
+These gracious words our welcome, our reward
+Ye served your brothers; ye have served your Lord!
+
+
+
+
+
+RHYMES OF A LIFE-TIME
+
+FROM the first gleam of morning to the gray
+Of peaceful evening, lo, a life unrolled!
+In woven pictures all its changes told,
+Its lights, its shadows, every flitting ray,
+Till the long curtain, falling, dims the day,
+Steals from the dial's disk the sunlight's gold,
+And all the graven hours grow dark and cold
+Where late the glowing blaze of noontide lay.
+Ah! the warm blood runs wild in youthful veins,--
+Let me no longer play with painted fire;
+New songs for new-born days! I would not tire
+The listening ears that wait for fresher strains
+In phrase new-moulded, new-forged rhythmic chains,
+With plaintive measures from a worn-out lyre.
+August 2, 1881.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, Vol. 9, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
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+eBook #7396 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7396)
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+Project Gutenberg EBook The Poetical Works of O. W. Holmes, Volume 9.
+The Iron Gate and Other Poems
+#23 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+
+Title: The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Volume 9.
+       The Iron Gate and Other Poems
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Release Date: January, 2005 [Etext #7396]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[Most recently updated: April 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POETRY OF O. W. HOLMES, V9 ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger  [widger@cecomet.net]
+
+
+
+
+
+                           THE POETICAL WORKS
+
+                                  OF
+
+                         OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+                                 1893
+                       (Printed in three volumes)
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+THE IRON GATE AND OTHER POEMS.
+     THE IRON GATE
+     VESTIGIA QUINQUE RETRORSUM
+     MY AVIARY
+     ON THE THRESHOLD
+     TO GEORGE PEABODY
+     AT THE PAPYRUS CLUB
+     FOR WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
+     TWO SONNETS: HARVARD
+     THE COMING ERA
+     IN RESPONSE
+     FOR THE MOORE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+     TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE
+     WELCOME TO THE CHICAGO COMMERCIAL CLUB
+     AMERICAN ACADEMY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+     THE SCHOOL-BOY
+     THE SILENT MELODY
+     OUR HOME--OUR COUNTRY
+     POEM AT THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS
+          MEDICAL SOCIETY
+     RHYMES OF A LIFE-TIME
+
+
+
+
+                             THE IRON GATE
+
+                            AND OTHER POEMS
+
+                               1877-1881
+
+
+
+THE IRON GATE
+
+Read at the Breakfast given in honor of Dr. Holmes's Seventieth Birthday
+by the publishers of the "Atlantic  Monthly," Boston, December 3, 1879.
+
+WHERE is this patriarch you are kindly greeting?
+Not unfamiliar to my ear his name,
+Nor yet unknown to many a joyous meeting
+In days long vanished,--is he still the same,
+
+Or changed by years, forgotten and forgetting,
+Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought,
+Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting,
+Where all goes wrong, and nothing as it ought?
+
+Old age, the graybeard! Well, indeed, I know him,--
+Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;
+In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem,
+Oft have I met him from my earliest day
+
+In my old AEsop, toiling with his bundle,--
+His load of sticks,--politely asking Death,
+Who comes when called for,--would he lug or trundle
+His fagot for him?--he was scant of breath.
+
+And sad "Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher,"--
+Has he not stamped the image on my soul,
+In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher
+Sighs o'er the loosened cord, the broken bowl?
+
+Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance,
+And now my lifted door-latch shows him here;
+I take his shrivelled hand without resistance,
+And find him smiling as his step draws near.
+
+What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us,
+Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime;
+Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us,
+The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time!
+
+Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant,
+Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep,
+Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant,
+Life's flow less noisy, but the stream how deep!
+
+Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender,
+Its lightened task-work tugs with lessening strain,
+Hands get more helpful, voices, grown more tender,
+Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous brain.
+
+Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers,
+Sits by the raked-up ashes of the past,
+Spreads its thin hands above the whitening embers
+That warm its creeping life-blood till the last.
+
+Dear to its heart is every loving token
+That comes unbidden ere its pulse grows cold,
+Ere the last lingering ties of life are broken,
+Its labors ended and its story told.
+
+Ah, while around us rosy youth rejoices,
+For us the sorrow-laden breezes sigh,
+And through the chorus of its jocund voices
+Throbs the sharp note of misery's hopeless cry.
+
+As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying
+From some far orb I track our watery sphere,
+Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying,
+The silvered globule seems a glistening tear.
+
+But Nature lends her mirror of illusion
+To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes,
+And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion
+The wintry landscape and the summer skies.
+
+So when the iron portal shuts behind us,
+And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,
+Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,
+And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.
+
+I come not here your morning hour to sadden,
+A limping pilgrim, leaning on his staff,--
+I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden
+This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh.
+
+If word of mine another's gloom has brightened,
+Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came;
+If hand of mine another's task has lightened,
+It felt the guidance that it dares not claim.
+
+But, O my gentle sisters, O my brothers,
+These thick-sown snow-flakes hint of toil's release;
+These feebler pulses bid me leave to others
+The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace.
+
+Time claims his tribute; silence now is golden;
+Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre;
+Though to your love untiring still beholden,
+The curfew tells me--cover up the fire.
+
+And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful,
+And warmer heart than look or word can tell,
+In simplest phrase--these traitorous eyes are tearful--
+Thanks, Brothers, Sisters,--Children,--and farewell!
+
+
+
+
+
+VESTIGIA QUINQUE RETRORSUM
+
+AN ACADEMIC POEM
+
+1829-1879
+
+Read at the Commencement Dinner of the Alumni of Harvard
+University, June 25, 1879.
+
+WHILE fond, sad memories all around us throng,
+Silence were sweeter than the sweetest song;
+Yet when the leaves are green and heaven is blue,
+The choral tribute of the grove is due,
+And when the lengthening nights have chilled the skies,
+We fain would hear the song-bird ere be flies,
+And greet with kindly welcome, even as now,
+The lonely minstrel on his leafless bough.
+
+This is our golden year,--its golden day;
+Its bridal memories soon must pass away;
+Soon shall its dying music cease to ring,
+And every year must loose some silver string,
+Till the last trembling chords no longer thrill,--
+Hands all at rest and hearts forever still.
+
+A few gray heads have joined the forming line;
+We hear our summons,--"Class of 'Twenty-Nine!"
+Close on the foremost, and, alas, how few!
+Are these "The Boys" our dear old Mother knew?
+Sixty brave swimmers. Twenty--something more--
+Have passed the stream and reached this frosty shore!
+
+How near the banks these fifty years divide
+When memory crosses with a single stride!
+'T is the first year of stern "Old Hickory" 's rule
+When our good Mother lets us out of school,
+Half glad, half sorrowing, it must be confessed,
+To leave her quiet lap, her bounteous breast,
+Armed with our dainty, ribbon-tied degrees,
+Pleased and yet pensive, exiles and A. B.'s.
+
+Look back, O comrades, with your faded eyes,
+And see the phantoms as I bid them rise.
+Whose smile is that? Its pattern Nature gave,
+A sunbeam dancing in a dimpled wave;
+KIRKLAND alone such grace from Heaven could win,
+His features radiant as the soul within;
+That smile would let him through Saint Peter's gate
+While sad-eyed martyrs had to stand and wait.
+Here flits mercurial _Farrar_; standing there,
+See mild, benignant, cautious, learned _Ware_,
+And sturdy, patient, faithful, honest _Hedge_,
+Whose grinding logic gave our wits their edge;
+_Ticknor_, with honeyed voice and courtly grace;
+And _Willard_, larynxed like a double bass;
+And _Channing_, with his bland, superior look,
+Cool as a moonbeam on a frozen brook,
+
+While the pale student, shivering in his shoes,
+Sees from his theme the turgid rhetoric ooze;
+And the born soldier, fate decreed to wreak
+His martial manhood on a class in Greek,
+_Popkin_! How that explosive name recalls
+The grand old Busby of our ancient halls
+Such faces looked from Skippon's grim platoons,
+Such figures rode with Ireton's stout dragoons:
+He gave his strength to learning's gentle charms,
+But every accent sounded "Shoulder arms!"
+
+Names,--empty names! Save only here and there
+Some white-haired listener, dozing in his chair,
+Starts at the sound he often used to hear,
+And upward slants his Sunday-sermon ear.
+And we--our blooming manhood we regain;
+Smiling we join the long Commencement train,
+One point first battled in discussion hot,--
+Shall we wear gowns? and settled: We will not.
+How strange the scene,--that noisy boy-debate
+Where embryo-speakers learn to rule the State!
+This broad-browed youth, sedate and sober-eyed,
+Shall wear the ermined robe at Taney's side;
+And he, the stripling, smooth of face and slight,
+Whose slender form scarce intercepts the light,
+Shall rule the Bench where Parsons gave the law,
+And sphinx-like sat uncouth, majestic Shaw
+Ah, many a star has shed its fatal ray
+On names we loved--our brothers--where are they?
+
+Nor these alone; our hearts in silence claim
+Names not less dear, unsyllabled by fame.
+
+How brief the space! and yet it sweeps us back
+Far, far along our new-born history's track
+Five strides like this;--the sachem rules the land;
+The Indian wigwams cluster where we stand.
+
+The second. Lo! a scene of deadly strife--
+A nation struggling into infant life;
+Not yet the fatal game at Yorktown won
+Where failing Empire fired its sunset gun.
+LANGDON sits restless in the ancient chair,--
+Harvard's grave Head,--these echoes heard his prayer
+When from yon mansion, dear to memory still,
+The banded yeomen marched for Bunker's Hill.
+Count on the grave triennial's thick-starred roll
+What names were numbered on the lengthening scroll,--
+Not unfamiliar in our ears they ring,--
+Winthrop, Hale, Eliot, Everett, Dexter, Tyng.
+
+Another stride. Once more at 'twenty-nine,--
+GOD SAVE KING GEORGE, the Second of his line!
+And is Sir Isaac living? Nay, not so,--
+He followed Flainsteed two short years ago,--
+And what about the little hump-backed man
+Who pleased the bygone days of good Queen Anne?
+What, Pope? another book he's just put out,--
+"The Dunciad,"--witty, but profane, no doubt.
+
+Where's Cotton Mather? he was always here.
+And so he would be, but he died last year.
+Who is this preacher our Northampton claims,
+Whose rhetoric blazes with sulphureous flames
+And torches stolen from Tartarean mines?
+Edwards, the salamander of divines.
+A deep, strong nature, pure and undefiled;
+Faith, firm as his who stabbed his sleeping child;
+Alas for him who blindly strays apart,
+And seeking God has lost his human heart!
+Fall where they might, no flying cinders caught
+These sober halls where WADSWORTH ruled and
+taught.
+
+One footstep more; the fourth receding stride
+Leaves the round century on the nearer side.
+GOD SAVE KING CHARLES! God knows that pleasant knave
+His grace will find it hard enough to save.
+Ten years and more, and now the Plague, the Fire,
+Talk of all tongues, at last begin to tire;
+One fear prevails, all other frights forgot,--
+White lips are whispering,--hark! The Popish Plot!
+Happy New England, from such troubles free
+In health and peace beyond the stormy sea!
+No Romish daggers threat her children's throats,
+No gibbering nightmare mutters "Titus Oates;"
+Philip is slain, the Quaker graves are green,
+Not yet the witch has entered on the scene;
+Happy our Harvard; pleased her graduates four;
+URIAN OAKES the name their parchments bore.
+
+Two centuries past, our hurried feet arrive
+At the last footprint of the scanty five;
+Take the fifth stride; our wandering eyes explore
+A tangled forest on a trackless shore;
+Here, where we stand, the savage sorcerer howls,
+The wild cat snarls, the stealthy gray wolf prowls,
+The slouching bear, perchance the trampling moose
+Starts the brown squaw and scares her red pappoose;
+At every step the lurking foe is near;
+His Demons reign; God has no temple here!
+
+Lift up your eyes! behold these pictured walls;
+Look where the flood of western glory falls
+Through the great sunflower disk of blazing panes
+In ruby, saffron, azure, emerald stains;
+With reverent step the marble pavement tread
+Where our proud Mother's martyr-roll is read;
+See the great halls that cluster, gathering round
+This lofty shrine with holiest memories crowned;
+See the fair Matron in her summer bower,
+Fresh as a rose in bright perennial flower;
+Read on her standard, always in the van,
+"TRUTH,"--the one word that makes a slave a man;
+Think whose the hands that fed her altar-fires,
+Then count the debt we owe our scholar-sires!
+
+Brothers, farewell! the fast declining ray
+Fades to the twilight of our golden day;
+Some lesson yet our wearied brains may learn,
+Some leaves, perhaps, in life's thin volume turn.
+How few they seem as in our waning age
+We count them backwards to the title-page!
+Oh let us trust with holy men of old
+Not all the story here begun is told;
+So the tired spirit, waiting to be freed,
+On life's last leaf with tranquil eye shall read
+By the pale glimmer of the torch reversed,
+Not Finis, but _The End of Volume First_!
+
+
+
+
+
+MY AVIARY
+
+Through my north window, in the wintry weather,--
+My airy oriel on the river shore,--
+I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together
+Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.
+
+The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
+Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
+The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
+Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.
+
+I see the solemn gulls in council sitting
+On some broad ice-floe pondering long and late,
+While overhead the home-bound ducks are flitting,
+And leave the tardy conclave in debate,
+
+Those weighty questions in their breasts revolving
+Whose deeper meaning science never learns,
+Till at some reverend elder's look dissolving,
+The speechless senate silently adjourns.
+
+But when along the waves the shrill north-easter
+Shrieks through the laboring coaster's shrouds "Beware!"
+The pale bird, kindling like a Christmas feaster
+When some wild chorus shakes the vinous air,
+
+Flaps from the leaden wave in fierce rejoicing,
+Feels heaven's dumb lightning thrill his torpid nerves,
+Now on the blast his whistling plumage poising,
+Now wheeling, whirling in fantastic curves.
+
+Such is our gull; a gentleman of leisure,
+Less fleshed than feathered; bagged you'll find him such;
+His virtue silence; his employment pleasure;
+Not bad to look at, and not good for much.
+
+What of our duck? He has some high-bred cousins,--
+His Grace the Canvas-back, My Lord the Brant,--
+Anas and Anser,--both served up by dozens,
+At Boston's Rocher, half-way to Nahant.
+
+As for himself, he seems alert and thriving,--
+Grubs up a living somehow--what, who knows?
+Crabs? mussels? weeds?--Look quick! there 's one just diving!
+Flop! Splash! his white breast glistens--down he goes!
+
+And while he 's under--just about a minute--
+I take advantage of the fact to say
+His fishy carcase has no virtue in it
+The gunning idiot's worthless hire to pay.
+
+Shrewd is our bird; not easy to outwit him!
+Sharp is the outlook of those pin-head eyes;
+Still, he is mortal and a shot may hit him,
+One cannot always miss him if he tries.
+
+He knows you! "sportsmen" from suburban alleys,
+Stretched under seaweed in the treacherous punt;
+Knows every lazy, shiftless lout that sallies
+Forth to waste powder--as he says, to "hunt."
+
+I watch you with a patient satisfaction,
+Well pleased to discount your predestined luck;
+The float that figures in your sly transaction
+Will carry back a goose, but not a duck.
+
+Look! there's a young one, dreaming not of danger;
+Sees a flat log come floating down the stream;
+Stares undismayed upon the harmless stranger;
+Ah! were all strangers harmless as they seem!
+
+_Habet_! a leaden shower his breast has shattered;
+Vainly he flutters, not again to rise;
+His soft white plumes along the waves are scattered;
+Helpless the wing that braved the tempest lies.
+
+He sees his comrades high above him flying
+To seek their nests among the island reeds;
+Strong is their flight; all lonely he is lying
+Washed by the crimsoned water as he bleeds.
+
+O Thou who carest for the falling sparrow,
+Canst Thou the sinless sufferer's pang forget?
+Or is thy dread account-book's page so narrow
+Its one long column scores thy creatures' debt?
+
+Poor gentle guest, by nature kindly cherished,
+A world grows dark with thee in blinding death;
+One little gasp--thy universe has perished,
+Wrecked by the idle thief who stole thy breath!
+
+Is this the whole sad story of creation,
+Lived by its breathing myriads o'er and o'er,--
+One glimpse of day, then black annihilation,--
+A sunlit passage to a sunless shore?
+
+Give back our faith, ye mystery-solving lynxes!
+Robe us once more in heaven-aspiring creeds
+Happier was dreaming Egypt with her sphinxes,
+The stony convent with its cross and beads!
+
+How often gazing where a bird reposes,
+Rocked on the wavelets, drifting with the tide,
+I lose myself in strange metempsychosis
+And float a sea-fowl at a sea-fowl's side;
+
+From rain, hail, snow in feathery mantle muffled,
+Clear-eyed, strong-limbed, with keenest sense to hear
+My mate soft murmuring, who, with plumes unruffled,
+Where'er I wander still is nestling near;
+
+The great blue hollow like a garment o'er me;
+Space all unmeasured, unrecorded time;
+While seen with inward eye moves on before me
+Thought's pictured train in wordless pantomime.
+
+A voice recalls me.--From my window turning
+I find myself a plumeless biped still;
+No beak, no claws, no sign of wings discerning,--
+In fact with nothing bird-like but my quill.
+
+
+
+
+
+ON THE THRESHOLD
+
+INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF POEMS BYDIFFERENT AUTHORS
+
+AN usher standing at the door
+I show my white rosette;
+A smile of welcome, nothing more,
+Will pay my trifling debt;
+Why should I bid you idly wait
+Like lovers at the swinging gate?
+
+Can I forget the wedding guest?
+The veteran of the sea?
+In vain the listener smites his breast,--
+"There was a ship," cries he!
+Poor fasting victim, stunned and pale,
+He needs must listen to the tale.
+
+He sees the gilded throng within,
+The sparkling goblets gleam,
+The music and the merry din
+Through every window stream,
+But there he shivers in the cold
+Till all the crazy dream is told.
+
+Not mine the graybeard's glittering eye
+That held his captive still
+To hold my silent prisoners by
+And let me have my will;
+Nay, I were like the three-years' child,
+To think you could be so beguiled!
+
+My verse is but the curtain's fold
+That hides the painted scene,
+The mist by morning's ray unrolled
+That veils the meadow's green,
+The cloud that needs must drift away
+To show the rose of opening day.
+
+See, from the tinkling rill you hear
+In hollowed palm I bring
+These scanty drops, but ah, how near
+The founts that heavenward spring!
+Thus, open wide the gates are thrown
+And founts and flowers are all your own!
+
+
+
+
+
+TO GEORGE PEABODY
+
+DANVERS, 1866
+
+BANKRUPT! our pockets inside out!
+Empty of words to speak his praises!
+Worcester and Webster up the spout!
+Dead broke of laudatory phrases!
+Yet why with flowery speeches tease,
+With vain superlatives distress him?
+Has language better words than these?
+THE FRIEND OF ALL HIS RACE, GOD BLESS HIM!
+
+A simple prayer--but words more sweet
+By human lips were never uttered,
+Since Adam left the country seat
+Where angel wings around him fluttered.
+The old look on with tear-dimmed eyes,
+The children cluster to caress him,
+And every voice unbidden cries,
+THE FRIEND OF ALL HIS RACE, GOD BLESS HIM!
+
+
+
+
+
+AT THE PAPYRUS CLUB
+
+A LOVELY show for eyes to see
+I looked upon this morning,--
+A bright-hued, feathered company
+Of nature's own adorning;
+But ah! those minstrels would not sing
+A listening ear while I lent,--
+The lark sat still and preened his wing,
+The nightingale was silent;
+I longed for what they gave me not--
+Their warblings sweet and fluty,
+But grateful still for all I got
+I thanked them for their beauty.
+
+A fairer vision meets my view
+Of Claras, Margarets, Marys,
+In silken robes of varied hue,
+Like bluebirds and canaries;
+The roses blush, the jewels gleam,
+The silks and satins glisten,
+The black eyes flash, the blue eyes beam,
+We look--and then we listen
+Behold the flock we cage to-night--
+Was ever such a capture?
+To see them is a pure delight;
+To hear them--ah! what rapture!
+
+Methinks I hear Delilah's laugh
+At Samson bound in fetters;
+"We captured!" shrieks each lovelier half,
+"Men think themselves our betters!
+We push the bolt, we turn the key
+On warriors, poets, sages,
+Too happy, all of them, to be
+Locked in our golden cages!"
+Beware! the boy with bandaged eyes
+Has flung away his blinder;
+
+He 's lost his mother--so he cries--
+And here he knows he'll find her:
+The rogue! 't is but a new device,--
+Look out for flying arrows
+Whene'er the birds of Paradise
+Are perched amid the sparrows!
+
+
+
+
+
+FOR WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
+
+DECEMBER 17, 1877
+
+I BELIEVE that the copies of verses I've spun,
+Like Scheherezade's tales, are a thousand and one;
+You remember the story,--those mornings in bed,--
+'T was the turn of a copper,--a tale or a head.
+
+A doom like Scheherezade's falls upon me
+In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree
+I'm a florist in verse, and what would people say
+If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?
+
+It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows
+Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose,
+The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring,
+And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string.
+
+Yes,--"the style is the man," and the nib of one's pen
+Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten;
+It is so in all matters, if truth may be told;
+Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould.
+
+How we all know each other! no use in disguise;
+Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the eyes;
+We can tell by his--somewhat--each one of our tribe,
+As we know the old hat which we cannot describe.
+
+Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw you write,
+Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night,
+Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod;
+Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod,
+
+We shall say, "You can't cheat us,--we know it is you,"
+There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two,
+Maestro, whose chant like the dulcimer rings
+And the woods will be hushed while the nightingale sings.
+
+And he, so serene, so majestic, so true,
+Whose temple hypethral the planets shine through,
+Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen,
+We should know our one sage from all children of men.
+
+And he whose bright image no distance can dim,
+Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him,
+Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge
+(With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge.
+
+Do you know whom we send you, Hidalgos of Spain?
+Do you know your old friends when you see them again?
+Hosea was Sancho! you Dons of Madrid,
+But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid!
+
+And the wood-thrush of Essex,--you know whom I mean,
+Whose song echoes round us while he sits unseen,
+Whose heart-throbs of verse through our memories thrill
+Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill,
+
+So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure,
+We hear but one strain and our verdict is sure,--
+Thee cannot elude us,--no further we search,--
+'T is Holy George Herbert cut loose from his church!
+
+We think it the voice of a seraph that sings,--
+Alas! we remember that angels have wings,--
+What story is this of the day of his birth?
+Let him live to a hundred! we want him on earth!
+
+One life has been paid him (in gold) by the sun;
+One account has been squared and another begun;
+But he never will die if he lingers below
+Till we've paid him in love half the balance we owe!
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO SONNETS: HARVARD
+
+At the meeting of the New York Harvard Club,
+February 21, 1878.
+
+"CHRISTO ET ECCLESLE." 1700
+
+To GOD'S ANOINTED AND HIS CHOSEN FLOCK
+So ran the phrase the black-robed conclave chose
+To guard the sacred cloisters that arose
+Like David's altar on Moriah's rock.
+Unshaken still those ancient arches mock
+The ram's-horn summons of the windy foes
+Who stand like Joshua's army while it blows
+And wait to see them toppling with the shock.
+Christ and the Church. Their church, whose narrow door
+Shut out the many, who if overbold
+Like hunted wolves were driven from the fold,
+Bruised with the flails these godly zealots bore,
+Mindful that Israel's altar stood of old
+Where echoed once Araunah's threshing-floor.
+
+
+1643 "VERITAS." 1878
+
+TRUTH: So the frontlet's older legend ran,
+On the brief record's opening page displayed;
+Not yet those clear-eyed scholars were afraid
+Lest the fair fruit that wrought the woe of man
+By far Euphrates--where our sire began
+His search for truth, and, seeking, was betrayed--
+Might work new treason in their forest shade,
+Doubling the curse that brought life's shortened span.
+Nurse of the future, daughter of the past,
+That stern phylactery best becomes thee now
+Lift to the morning star thy marble brow
+Cast thy brave truth on every warring blast!
+Stretch thy white hand to that forbidden bough,
+And let thine earliest symbol be thy last!
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING ERA
+
+THEY tell us that the Muse is soon to fly hence,
+Leaving the bowers of song that once were dear,
+Her robes bequeathing to her sister, Science,
+The groves of Pindus for the axe to clear.
+
+Optics will claim the wandering eye of fancy,
+Physics will grasp imagination's wings,
+Plain fact exorcise fiction's necromancy,
+The workshop hammer where the minstrel sings,
+
+No more with laugher at Thalia's frolics
+Our eyes shall twinkle till the tears run down,
+But in her place the lecturer on hydraulics
+Spout forth his watery science to the town.
+
+No more our foolish passions and affections
+The tragic Muse with mimic grief shall try,
+But, nobler far, a course of vivisections
+Teach what it costs a tortured brute to die.
+
+The unearthed monad, long in buried rocks hid,
+Shall tell the secret whence our being came;
+The chemist show us death is life's black oxide,
+Left when the breath no longer fans its flame.
+
+Instead of crack-brained poets in their attics
+Filling thin volumes with their flowery talk,
+There shall be books of wholesome mathematics;
+The tutor with his blackboard and his chalk.
+
+No longer bards with madrigal and sonnet
+Shall woo to moonlight walks the ribboned sex,
+But side by side the beaver and the bonnet
+Stroll, calmly pondering on some problem's x.
+
+The sober bliss of serious calculation
+Shall mock the trivial joys that fancy drew,
+And, oh, the rapture of a solved equation,--
+One self-same answer on the lips of two!
+
+So speak in solemn tones our youthful sages,
+Patient, severe, laborious, slow, exact,
+As o'er creation's protoplasmic pages
+They browse and munch the thistle crops of fact.
+
+And yet we 've sometimes found it rather pleasant
+To dream again the scenes that Shakespeare drew,--
+To walk the hill-side with the Scottish peasant
+Among the daisies wet with morning's dew;
+
+To leave awhile the daylight of the real,
+Led by the guidance of the master's hand,
+For the strange radiance of the far ideal,--
+"The light that never was on sea or land."
+
+Well, Time alone can lift the future's curtain,--
+Science may teach our children all she knows,
+But Love will kindle fresh young hearts, 't is certain,
+And June will not forget her blushing rose.
+
+And so, in spite of all that Time is bringing,--
+Treasures of truth and miracles of art,
+Beauty and Love will keep the poet singing,
+And song still live, the science of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+
+IN RESPONSE
+
+Breakfast at the Century Club, New York, May, 1879.
+
+SUCH kindness! the scowl of a cynic would soften,
+His pulse beat its way to some eloquent words,
+Alas! my poor accents have echoed too often,
+Like that Pinafore music you've some of you heard.
+
+Do you know me, dear strangers--the hundredth time comer
+At banquets and feasts since the days of my Spring?
+Ah! would I could borrow one rose of my Summer,
+But this is a leaf of my Autumn I bring.
+
+
+I look at your faces,--I'm sure there are some from
+The three-breasted mother I count as my own;
+You think you remember the place you have come from,
+But how it has changed in the years that have flown!
+
+Unaltered, 't is true, is the hall we call "Funnel,"
+Still fights the "Old South" in the battle for life,
+But we've opened our door to the West through the tunnel,
+And we've cut off Fort Hill with our Amazon knife.
+
+You should see the new Westminster Boston has builded,--
+Its mansions, its spires, its museums of arts,--
+You should see the great dome we have gorgeously gilded,--
+'T is the light of our eyes, 't is the joy of our hearts.
+
+When first in his path a young asteroid found it,
+As he sailed through the skies with the stars in his wake,
+He thought 't was the sun, and kept circling around it
+Till Edison signalled, "You've made a mistake."
+
+We are proud of our city,--her fast-growing figure,
+The warp and the woof of her brain and her hands,--
+But we're proudest of all that her heart has grown bigger,
+And warms with fresh blood as her girdle expands.
+
+One lesson the rubric of conflict has taught her
+Though parted awhile by war's earth-rending shock,
+The lines that divide us are written in water,
+The love that unites us cut deep in the rock.
+
+As well might the Judas of treason endeavor
+To write his black name on the disk of the sun
+As try the bright star-wreath that binds us to sever
+And blot the fair legend of "Many in One."
+
+We love You, tall sister, the stately, the splendid,--
+The banner of empire floats high on your towers,
+Yet ever in welcome your arms are extended,--
+We share in your splendors, your glory is ours.
+
+Yes, Queen of the Continent! All of us own thee,--
+The gold-freighted argosies flock at thy call,
+The naiads, the sea-nymphs have met to enthrone thee,
+But the Broadway of one is the Highway of all!
+
+I thank you. Three words that can hardly be mended,
+Though phrases on phrases their eloquence pile,
+If you hear the heart's throb with their eloquence blended,
+And read all they mean in a sunshiny smile.
+
+
+
+
+
+FOR THE MOORE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+
+MAY 28, 1879.
+
+ENCHANTER of Erin, whose magic has bound us,
+Thy wand for one moment we fondly would claim,
+Entranced while it summons the phantoms around us
+That blush into life at the sound of thy name.
+
+The tell-tales of memory wake from their slumbers,--
+I hear the old song with its tender refrain,--
+What passion lies hid in those honey-voiced numbers
+What perfume of youth in each exquisite strain!
+
+The home of my childhood comes back as a vision,--
+Hark! Hark! A soft chord from its song-haunted room,--
+'T is a morning of May, when the air is Elysian,--
+The syringa in bud and the lilac in bloom,--
+
+We are clustered around the "Clementi" piano,--
+There were six of us then,--there are two of us now,--
+She is singing--the girl with the silver soprano--
+How "The Lord of the Valley" was false to his vow;
+
+"Let Erin remember" the echoes are calling;
+Through "The Vale of Avoca" the waters are rolled;
+"The Exile" laments while the night-dews falling;
+"The Morning of Life" dawns again as of old.
+
+But ah! those warm love-songs of fresh adolescence!
+Around us such raptures celestial they flung
+That it seemed as if Paradise breathed its quintessence
+Through the seraph-toned lips of the maiden that sung!
+
+Long hushed are the chords that my boyhood enchanted
+As when the smooth wave by the angel was stirred,
+Yet still with their music is memory haunted,
+And oft in my dreams are their melodies heard.
+
+I feel like the priest to his altar returning,--
+The crowd that was kneeling no longer is there,
+The flame has died down, but the brands are still burning,
+And sandal and cinnamon sweeten the air.
+
+
+II.
+The veil for her bridal young Summer is weaving
+In her azure-domed hall with its tapestried floor,
+And Spring the last tear-drop of May-dew is leaving
+On the daisy of Burns and the shamrock of Moore.
+
+How like, how unlike, as we view them together,
+The song of the minstrels whose record we scan,--
+One fresh as the breeze blowing over the heather,
+One sweet as the breath from an odalisque's fan!
+
+Ah, passion can glow mid a palace's splendor;
+The cage does not alter the song of the bird;
+And the curtain of silk has known whispers as tender
+As ever the blossoming hawthorn has heard.
+
+No fear lest the step of the soft-slippered Graces
+Should fright the young Loves from their warm little nest,
+For the heart of a queen, under jewels and laces,
+Beats time with the pulse in the peasant girl's breast!
+
+Thrice welcome each gift of kind Nature's bestowing!
+Her fountain heeds little the goblet we hold;
+Alike, when its musical waters are flowing,
+The shell from the seaside, the chalice of gold.
+
+The twins of the lyre to her voices had listened;
+Both laid their best gifts upon Liberty's shrine;
+For Coila's loved minstrel the holly-wreath glistened;
+For Erin's the rose and the myrtle entwine.
+
+And while the fresh blossoms of summer are braided
+For the sea-girdled, stream-silvered, lake-jewelled isle,
+While her mantle of verdure is woven unfaded,
+While Shannon and Liffey shall dimple and  smile,
+
+The land where the staff of Saint Patrick was planted,
+Where the shamrock grows green from the cliffs to the shore,
+The land of fair maidens and heroes undaunted,
+Shall wreathe her bright harp with the garlands of Moore!
+
+
+
+
+
+TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE
+
+APRIL 4, 1880
+
+I BRING the simplest pledge of love,
+Friend of my earlier days;
+Mine is the hand without the glove,
+The heart-beat, not the phrase.
+
+How few still breathe this mortal air
+We called by school-boy names!
+You still, whatever robe you wear,
+To me are always James.
+
+That name the kind apostle bore
+Who shames the sullen creeds,
+Not trusting less, but loving more,
+And showing faith by deeds.
+
+What blending thoughts our memories share!
+What visions yours and mine
+Of May-days in whose morning air
+The dews were golden wine,
+
+Of vistas bright with opening day,
+Whose all-awakening sun
+Showed in life's landscape, far away,
+The summits to be won!
+
+The heights are gained. Ah, say not so
+For him who smiles at time,
+Leaves his tired comrades down below,
+And only lives to climb!
+
+His labors,--will they ever cease,--
+With hand and tongue and pen?
+Shall wearied Nature ask release
+At threescore years and ten?
+
+Our strength the clustered seasons tax,--
+For him new life they mean;
+Like rods around the lictor's axe
+They keep him bright and keen.
+
+The wise, the brave, the strong, we know,--
+We mark them here or there,
+But he,--we roll our eyes, and lo!
+We find him everywhere!
+
+With truth's bold cohorts, or alone,
+He strides through error's field;
+His lance is ever manhood's own,
+His breast is woman's shield.
+
+Count not his years while earth has need
+Of souls that Heaven inflames
+With sacred zeal to save, to lead,--
+Long live our dear Saint James!
+
+
+
+
+
+WELCOME TO THE CHICAGO COMMERCIAL CLUB
+
+January 14, 1880
+
+CHICAGO sounds rough to the maker of verse;
+One comfort we have--Cincinnati sounds worse;
+If we only were licensed to say Chicago!
+But Worcester and Webster won't let us, you know.
+
+No matter, we songsters must sing as we can;
+We can make some nice couplets with Lake Michigan,
+And what more resembles a nightingale's voice,
+Than the oily trisyllable, sweet Illinois?
+
+Your waters are fresh, while our harbor is salt,
+But we know you can't help it--it is n't your fault;
+Our city is old and your city is new,
+But the railroad men tell us we're greener than you.
+
+You have seen our gilt dome, and no doubt you've been told
+That the orbs of the universe round it are rolled;
+But I'll own it to you, and I ought to know best,
+That this is n't quite true of all stars of the West.
+
+You'll go to Mount Auburn,--we'll show you the track,--
+And can stay there,--unless you prefer to come back;
+And Bunker's tall shaft you can climb if you will,
+But you'll puff like a paragraph praising a pill.
+
+You must see--but you have seen--our old Faneuil Hall,
+Our churches, our school-rooms, our sample-rooms, all;
+And, perhaps, though the idiots must have their jokes,
+You have found our good people much like other folks.
+
+There are cities by rivers, by lakes, and by seas,
+Each as full of itself as a cheese-mite of cheese;
+And a city will brag as a game-cock will crow
+Don't your cockerels at home--just a little, you know?
+
+But we'll crow for you now--here's a health to the boys,
+Men, maidens, and matrons of fair Illinois,
+And the rainbow of friendship that arches its span
+From the green of the sea to the blue Michigan!
+
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN ACADEMY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
+
+MAY 26, 1880
+
+SIRE, son, and grandson; so the century glides;
+Three lives, three strides, three foot-prints in the sand;
+Silent as midnight's falling meteor slides
+Into the stillness of the far-off land;
+How dim the space its little arc has spanned!
+
+See on this opening page the names renowned
+Tombed in these records on our dusty shelves,
+Scarce on the scroll of living memory found,
+Save where the wan-eyed antiquarian delves;
+Shadows they seem; ab, what are we ourselves?
+
+Pale ghosts of Bowdoin, Winthrop, Willard, West,
+Sages of busy brain and wrinkled brow,
+Searchers of Nature's secrets unconfessed,
+Asking of all things Whence and Why and How--
+What problems meet your larger vision now?
+
+Has Gannett tracked the wild Aurora's path?
+Has Bowdoin found his all-surrounding sphere?
+What question puzzles ciphering Philomath?
+Could Williams make the hidden causes clear
+Of the Dark Day that filled the land with fear?
+
+Dear ancient school-boys! Nature taught to them
+The simple lessons of the star and flower,
+Showed them strange sights; how on a single stem,--
+Admire the marvels of Creative Power!--
+Twin apples grew, one sweet, the other sour;
+
+How from the hill-top where our eyes beheld
+In even ranks the plumed and bannered maize
+Range its long columns, in the days of old
+The live volcano shot its angry blaze,--
+Dead since the showers of Noah's watery days;
+
+How, when the lightning split the mighty rock,
+The spreading fury of the shaft was spent!
+How the young scion joined the alien stock,
+And when and where the homeless swallows went
+To pass the winter of their discontent.
+
+Scant were the gleanings in those years of dearth;
+No Cuvier yet had clothed the fossil bones
+That slumbered, waiting for their second birth;
+No Lyell read the legend of the stones;
+Science still pointed to her empty thrones.
+
+Dreaming of orbs to eyes of earth unknown,
+Herschel looked heavenwards in the starlight pale;
+Lost in those awful depths he trod alone,
+Laplace stood mute before the lifted veil;
+While home-bred Humboldt trimmed his toy ship's sail.
+
+No mortal feet these loftier heights had gained
+Whence the wide realms of Nature we descry;
+In vain their eyes our longing fathers strained
+To scan with wondering gaze the summits high
+That far beneath their children's footpaths lie.
+
+Smile at their first small ventures as we may,
+The school-boy's copy shapes the scholar's hand,
+Their grateful memory fills our hearts to-day;
+Brave, hopeful, wise, this bower of peace they planned,
+While war's dread ploughshare scarred the suffering land.
+
+Child of our children's children yet unborn,
+When on this yellow page you turn your eyes,
+Where the brief record of this May-day morn
+In phrase antique and faded letters lies,
+How vague, how pale our flitting ghosts will rise!
+
+Yet in our veins the blood ran warm and red,
+For us the fields were green, the skies were blue,
+Though from our dust the spirit long has fled,
+We lived, we loved, we toiled, we dreamed like you,
+Smiled at our sires and thought how much we knew.
+
+Oh might our spirits for one hour return,
+When the next century rounds its hundredth ring,
+All the strange secrets it shall teach to learn,
+To hear the larger truths its years shall bring,
+Its wiser sages talk, its sweeter minstrels sing!
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCHOOL-BOY
+
+Read at the Centennial Celebration of the
+foundation of Phillips Academy, Andover.
+
+1778-1878
+
+THESE hallowed precincts, long to memory dear,
+Smile with fresh welcome as our feet draw near;
+With softer gales the opening leaves are fanned,
+With fairer hues the kindling flowers expand,
+The rose-bush reddens with the blush of June,
+The groves are vocal with their minstrels' tune,
+The mighty elm, beneath whose arching shade
+The wandering children of the forest strayed,
+Greets the bright morning in its bridal dress,
+And spreads its arms the gladsome dawn to bless.
+Is it an idle dream that nature shares
+Our joys, our griefs, our pastimes, and our cares?
+Is there no summons when, at morning's call,
+The sable vestments of the darkness fall?
+Does not meek evening's low-voiced Ave blend
+With the soft vesper as its notes ascend?
+Is there no whisper in the perfumed air
+When the sweet bosom of the rose is bare?
+Does not the sunshine call us to rejoice?
+Is there no meaning in the storm-cloud's voice?
+No silent message when from midnight skies
+Heaven looks upon us with its myriad eyes?
+
+Or shift the mirror; say our dreams diffuse
+O'er life's pale landscape their celestial hues,
+Lend heaven the rainbow it has never known,
+And robe the earth in glories not its own,
+Sing their own music in the summer breeze,
+With fresher foliage clothe the stately trees,
+Stain the June blossoms with a livelier dye
+And spread a bluer azure on the sky,--
+Blest be the power that works its lawless will
+And finds the weediest patch an Eden still;
+No walls so fair as those our fancies build,--
+No views so bright as those our visions gild!
+
+So ran my lines, as pen and paper met,
+The truant goose-quill travelling like Planchette;
+Too ready servant, whose deceitful ways
+Full many a slipshod line, alas! betrays;
+Hence of the rhyming thousand not a few
+Have builded worse--a great deal--than they knew.
+
+What need of idle fancy to adorn
+Our mother's birthplace on her birthday morn?
+Hers are the blossoms of eternal spring,
+From these green boughs her new-fledged birds take wing,
+These echoes hear their earliest carols sung,
+In this old nest the brood is ever young.
+If some tired wanderer, resting from his flight,
+Amid the gay young choristers alight,
+These gather round him, mark his faded plumes
+That faintly still the far-off grove perfumes,
+And listen, wondering if some feeble note
+Yet lingers, quavering in his weary throat:--
+I, whose fresh voice yon red-faced temple knew,
+What tune is left me, fit to sing to you?
+Ask not the grandeurs of a labored song,
+But let my easy couplets slide along;
+Much could I tell you that you know too well;
+Much I remember, but I will not tell;
+Age brings experience; graybeards oft are wise,
+But oh! how sharp a youngster's ears and eyes!
+
+My cheek was bare of adolescent down
+When first I sought the academic town;
+Slow rolls the coach along the dusty road,
+Big with its filial and parental load;
+The frequent hills, the lonely woods are past,
+The school-boy's chosen home is reached at last.
+I see it now, the same unchanging spot,
+The swinging gate, the little garden plot,
+The narrow yard, the rock that made its floor,
+The flat, pale house, the knocker-garnished door,
+The small, trim parlor, neat, decorous, chill,
+The strange, new faces, kind, but grave and still;
+Two, creased with age,--or what I then called age,--
+Life's volume open at its fiftieth page;
+One, a shy maiden's, pallid, placid, sweet
+As the first snow-drop, which the sunbeams greet;
+One, the last nursling's; slight she was, and fair,
+Her smooth white forehead warmed with auburn hair;
+Last came the virgin Hymen long had spared,
+Whose daily cares the grateful household shared,
+Strong, patient, humble; her substantial frame
+Stretched the chaste draperies I forbear to name.
+Brave, but with effort, had the school-boy come
+To the cold comfort of a stranger's home;
+How like a dagger to my sinking heart
+Came the dry summons, "It is time to part;
+Good-by!" "Goo-ood-by!" one fond maternal kiss. . . .
+Homesick as death! Was ever pang like this?
+Too young as yet with willing feet to stray
+From the tame fireside, glad to get away,--
+Too old to let my watery grief appear,--
+And what so bitter as a swallowed tear!
+One figure still my vagrant thoughts pursue;
+First boy to greet me, Ariel, where are you?
+Imp of all mischief, heaven alone knows how
+You learned it all,--are you an angel now,
+Or tottering gently down the slope of years,
+Your face grown sober in the vale of tears?
+Forgive my freedom if you are breathing still;
+
+If in a happier world, I know you will.
+You were a school-boy--what beneath the sun
+So like a monkey? I was also one.
+Strange, sure enough, to see what curious shoots
+The nursery raises from the study's roots!
+In those old days the very, very good
+Took up more room--a little--than they should;
+Something too much one's eyes encountered then
+Of serious youth and funeral-visaged men;
+The solemn elders saw life's mournful half,--
+Heaven sent this boy, whose mission was to laugh,
+Drollest of buffos, Nature's odd protest,
+A catbird squealing in a blackbird's nest.
+Kind, faithful Nature! While the sour-eyed Scot--
+Her cheerful smiles forbidden or forgot--
+Talks only of his preacher and his kirk,--
+Hears five-hour sermons for his Sunday work,--
+Praying and fasting till his meagre face
+Gains its due length, the genuine sign of grace,--
+An Ayrshire mother in the land of Knox
+Her embryo poet in his cradle rocks;--
+Nature, long shivering in her dim eclipse,
+Steals in a sunbeam to those baby lips;
+So to its home her banished smile returns,
+And Scotland sweetens with the song of Burns!
+
+The morning came; I reached the classic hall;
+A clock-face eyed me, staring from the wall;
+Beneath its hands a printed line I read
+YOUTH IS LIFE'S SEED-TIME: so the clock-face said:
+Some took its counsel, as the sequel showed,--
+Sowed,--their wild oats,--and reaped as they had sowed.
+How all comes back! the upward slanting floor,--
+The masters' thrones that flank the central door,--
+The long, outstretching alleys that divide
+The rows of desks that stand on either side,--
+The staring boys, a face to every desk,
+Bright, dull, pale, blooming, common, picturesque.
+Grave is the Master's look; his forehead wears
+Thick rows of wrinkles, prints of worrying cares;
+Uneasy lie the heads of all that rule,
+His most of all whose kingdom is a school.
+Supreme he sits; before the awful frown
+That bends his brows the boldest eye goes down;
+Not more submissive Israel heard and saw
+At Sinai's foot the Giver of the Law.
+Less stern he seems, who sits in equal Mate
+On the twin throne and shares the empire's weight;
+Around his lips the subtle life that plays
+Steals quaintly forth in many a jesting phrase;
+A lightsome nature, not so hard to chafe,
+Pleasant when pleased; rough-handled, not so safe;
+Some tingling memories vaguely I recall,
+But to forgive him. God forgive us all!
+
+One yet remains, whose well-remembered name
+Pleads in my grateful heart its tender claim;
+His was the charm magnetic, the bright look
+That sheds its sunshine on the dreariest book;
+A loving soul to every task he brought
+That sweetly mingled with the lore he taught;
+Sprung from a saintly race that never could
+From youth to age be anything but good,
+His few brief years in holiest labors spent,
+Earth lost too soon the treasure heaven had lent.
+Kindest of teachers, studious to divine
+Some hint of promise in my earliest line,
+These faint and faltering words thou canst not hear
+Throb from a heart that holds thy memory dear.
+As to the traveller's eye the varied plain
+Shows through the window of the flying train,
+A mingled landscape, rather felt than seen,
+A gravelly bank, a sudden flash of green,
+A tangled wood, a glittering stream that flows
+Through the cleft summit where the cliff once rose,
+All strangely blended in a hurried gleam,
+Rock, wood, waste, meadow, village, hill-side, stream,--
+So, as we look behind us, life appears,
+Seen through the vista of our bygone years.
+Yet in the dead past's shadow-filled domain,
+Some vanished shapes the hues of life retain;
+Unbidden, oft, before our dreaming eyes
+From the vague mists in memory's path they rise.
+So comes his blooming image to my view,
+The friend of joyous days when life was new,
+Hope yet untamed, the blood of youth unchilled,
+No blank arrear of promise unfulfilled,
+Life's flower yet hidden in its sheltering fold,
+Its pictured canvas yet to be unrolled.
+His the frank smile I vainly look to greet,
+His the warm grasp my clasping hand should meet;
+How would our lips renew their school-boy talk,
+Our feet retrace the old familiar walk!
+For thee no more earth's cheerful morning shines
+Through the green fringes of the tented pines;
+Ah me! is heaven so far thou canst not hear,
+Or is thy viewless spirit hovering near,
+A fair young presence, bright with morning's glow,
+The fresh-cheeked boy of fifty years ago?
+Yes, fifty years, with all their circling suns,
+Behind them all my glance reverted runs;
+Where now that time remote, its griefs, its joys,
+Where are its gray-haired men, its bright-haired boys?
+Where is the patriarch time could hardly tire,--
+The good old, wrinkled, immemorial "squire "?
+(An honest treasurer, like a black-plumed swan,
+Not every day our eyes may look upon.)
+Where the tough champion who, with Calvin's sword,
+In wordy conflicts battled for the Lord?
+Where the grave scholar, lonely, calm, austere,
+Whose voice like music charmed the listening ear,
+Whose light rekindled, like the morning star
+Still shines upon us through the gates ajar?
+Where the still, solemn, weary, sad-eyed man,
+Whose care-worn face nf'y wandering eyes would scan,--
+His features wasted in the lingering strife
+With the pale foe that drains the student's life?
+Where my old friend, the scholar, teacher, saint,
+Whose creed, some hinted, showed a speck of taint;
+He broached his own opinion, which is not
+Lightly to be forgiven or forgot;
+Some riddle's point,--I scarce remember now,--
+Homoi-, perhaps, where they said homo-ou.
+(If the unlettered greatly wish to know
+Where lies the difference betwixt oi and o,
+Those of the curious who have time may search
+Among the stale conundrums of their church.)
+Beneath his roof his peaceful life I shared,
+And for his modes of faith I little cared,--
+I, taught to judge men's dogmas by their deeds,
+Long ere the days of india-rubber creeds.
+
+Why should we look one common faith to find,
+Where one in every score is color-blind?
+If here on earth they know not red from green,
+Will they see better into things unseen!
+Once more to time's old graveyard I return
+And scrape the moss from memory's pictured urn.
+Who, in these days when all things go by steam,
+Recalls the stage-coach with its four-horse team?
+Its sturdy driver,--who remembers him?
+Or the old landlord, saturnine and grim,
+Who left our hill-top for a new abode
+And reared his sign-post farther down the road?
+Still in the waters of the dark Shawshine
+Do the young bathers splash and think they're clean?
+Do pilgrims find their way to Indian Ridge,
+Or journey onward to the far-off bridge,
+And bring to younger ears the story back
+Of the broad stream, the mighty Merrimac?
+Are there still truant feet that stray beyond
+These circling bounds to Pomp's or Haggett's Pond,
+Or where the legendary name recalls
+The forest's earlier tenant,--"Deerjump Falls"?
+Yes, every nook these youthful feet explore,
+Just as our sires and grand sires did of yore;
+So all life's opening paths, where nature led
+Their father's feet, the children's children tread.
+Roll the round century's fivescore years away,
+Call from our storied past that earliest day
+When great Eliphalet (I can see him now,--
+Big name, big frame, big voice, and beetling brow),
+Then young Eliphalet,--ruled the rows of boys
+In homespun gray or old-world corduroys,--
+And save for fashion's whims, the benches show
+The self-same youths, the very boys we know.
+Time works strange marvels: since I trod the green
+And swung the gates, what wonders I have seen!
+But come what will,--the sky itself may fall,--
+As things of course the boy accepts them all.
+The prophet's chariot, drawn by steeds of flame,
+For daily use our travelling millions claim;
+The face we love a sunbeam makes our own;
+No more the surgeon hears the sufferer's groan;
+What unwrit histories wrapped in darkness lay
+Till shovelling Schliemann bared them to the day!
+Your Richelieu says, and says it well, my lord,
+The pen is (sometimes) mightier than the sword;
+Great is the goosequill, say we all; Amen!
+Sometimes the spade is mightier than the pen;
+It shows where Babel's terraced walls were raised,
+The slabs that cracked when Nimrod's palace blazed,
+Unearths Mycenee, rediscovers Troy,--
+Calmly he listens, that immortal boy.
+A new Prometheus tips our wands with fire,
+A mightier Orpheus strains the whispering wire,
+Whose lightning thrills the lazy winds outrun
+And hold the hours as Joshua stayed the sun,--
+So swift, in truth, we hardly find a place
+For those dim fictions known as time and space.
+Still a new miracle each year supplies,--
+See at his work the chemist of the skies,
+Who questions Sirius in his tortured rays
+And steals the secret of the solar blaze;
+Hush! while the window-rattling bugles play
+The nation's airs a hundred miles away!
+That wicked phonograph! hark! how it swears!
+Turn it again and make it say its prayers!
+And was it true, then, what the story said
+Of Oxford's friar and his brazen head?
+While wondering Science stands, herself perplexed
+At each day's miracle, and asks "What next?"
+The immortal boy, the coming heir of all,
+Springs from his desk to "urge the flying ball,"
+Cleaves with his bending oar the glassy waves,
+With sinewy arm the dashing current braves,
+The same bright creature in these haunts of ours
+That Eton shadowed with her "antique towers."
+
+Boy! Where is he? the long-limbed youth inquires,
+Whom his rough chin with manly pride inspires;
+Ah, when the ruddy cheek no longer glows,
+When the bright hair is white as winter snows,
+When the dim eye has lost its lambent flame,
+Sweet to his ear will be his school-boy name
+Nor think the difference mighty as it seems
+Between life's morning and its evening dreams;
+Fourscore, like twenty, has its tasks and toys;
+In earth's wide school-house all are girls and boys.
+
+Brothers, forgive my wayward fancy. Who
+Can guess beforehand what his pen will do?
+Too light my strain for listeners such as these,
+Whom graver thoughts and soberer speech shall please.
+Is he not here whose breath of holy song
+Has raised the downcast eyes of Faith so long?
+Are they not here, the strangers in your gates,
+For whom the wearied ear impatient waits,--
+The large-brained scholars whom their toils release,--
+The bannered heralds of the Prince of Peace?
+
+Such was the gentle friend whose youth unblamed
+In years long past our student-benches claimed;
+Whose name, illumined on the sacred page,
+Lives in the labors of his riper age;
+Such he whose record time's destroying march
+Leaves uneffaced on Zion's springing arch
+Not to the scanty phrase of measured song,
+Cramped in its fetters, names like these belong;
+One ray they lend to gild my slender line,--
+Their praise I leave to sweeter lips than mine.
+
+Homes of our sires, where Learning's temple rose,
+While vet they struggled with their banded foes,
+As in the West thy century's sun descends,
+One parting gleam its dying radiance lends.
+Darker and deeper though the shadows fall
+From the gray towers on Doubting Castle's wall,
+Though Pope and Pagan re-array their hosts,
+And her new armor youthful Science boasts,
+Truth, for whose altar rose this holy shrine,
+Shall fly for refuge to these bowers of thine;
+No past shall chain her with its rusted vow,
+No Jew's phylactery bind her Christian brow,
+But Faith shall smile to find her sister free,
+And nobler manhood draw its life from thee.
+
+Long as the arching skies above thee spread,
+As on thy groves the dews of heaven are shed,
+With currents widening still from year to year,
+And deepening channels, calm, untroubled, clear,
+Flow the twin streamlets from thy sacred hill--
+Pieria's fount and Siloam's shaded rill!
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENT MELODY
+
+"BRING me my broken harp," he said;
+"We both are wrecks,--but as ye will,--
+Though all its ringing tones have fled,
+Their echoes linger round it still;
+It had some golden strings, I know,
+But that was long--how long!--ago.
+
+"I cannot see its tarnished gold,
+I cannot hear its vanished tone,
+Scarce can my trembling fingers hold
+The pillared frame so long their own;
+We both are wrecks,--a while ago
+It had some silver strings, I know,
+
+"But on them Time too long has played
+The solemn strain that knows no change,
+And where of old my fingers strayed
+The chords they find are new and strange,--
+Yes! iron strings,--I know,--I know,--
+We both are wrecks of long ago.
+
+"We both are wrecks,--a shattered pair,--
+Strange to ourselves in time's disguise .
+What say ye to the lovesick air
+That brought the tears from Marian's eyes?
+Ay! trust me,--under breasts of snow
+Hearts could be melted long ago!
+
+"Or will ye hear the storm-song's crash
+That from his dreams the soldier woke,
+And bade him face the lightning flash
+When battle's cloud in thunder broke? . . .
+Wrecks,--nought but wrecks!--the time was when
+We two were worth a thousand men!"
+
+And so the broken harp they bring
+With pitying smiles that none could blame;
+Alas! there's not a single string
+Of all that filled the tarnished frame!
+But see! like children overjoyed,
+His fingers rambling through the void!
+
+"I clasp thee! Ay . . . mine ancient lyre . . .
+Nay, guide my wandering fingers. . . There
+They love to dally with the wire
+As Isaac played with Esau's hair.
+Hush! ye shall hear the famous tune
+That Marian called the Breath of June!"
+
+And so they softly gather round
+Rapt in his tuneful trance he seems
+His fingers move: but not a sound!
+A silence like the song of dreams. . . .
+"There! ye have heard the air," he cries,
+"That brought the tears from Marian's eyes!"
+
+Ah, smile not at his fond conceit,
+Nor deem his fancy wrought in vain;
+To him the unreal sounds are sweet,--
+No discord mars the silent strain
+Scored on life's latest, starlit page--
+The voiceless melody of age.
+
+Sweet are the lips, of all that sing,
+When Nature's music breathes unsought,
+But never yet could voice or string
+So truly shape our tenderest thought
+As when by life's decaying fire
+Our fingers sweep the stringless lyre!
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR HOME--OUR COUNTRY
+
+FOR THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE
+SETTLEMENT OF CAMBRIDGE, MASS., DECEMBER 28, 1880
+
+YOUR home was mine,--kind Nature's gift;
+My love no years can chill;
+In vain their flakes the storm-winds sift,
+The snow-drop hides beneath the drift,
+A living blossom still.
+
+Mute are a hundred long-famed lyres,
+Hushed all their golden strings;
+One lay the coldest bosom fires,
+One song, one only, never tires
+While sweet-voiced memory sings.
+
+No spot so lone but echo knows
+That dear familiar strain;
+In tropic isles, on arctic snows,
+Through burning lips its music flows
+And rings its fond refrain.
+
+From Pisa's tower my straining sight
+Roamed wandering leagues away,
+When lo! a frigate's banner bright,
+The starry blue, the red, the white,
+In far Livorno's bay.
+
+Hot leaps the life-blood from my heart,
+Forth springs the sudden tear;
+The ship that rocks by yonder mart
+Is of my land, my life, a part,--
+Home, home, sweet home, is here!
+
+Fades from my view the sunlit scene,--
+My vision spans the waves;
+I see the elm-encircled green,
+The tower,--the steeple,--and, between,
+The field of ancient graves.
+
+There runs the path my feet would tread
+When first they learned to stray;
+There stands the gambrel roof that spread
+Its quaint old angles o'er my head
+When first I saw the day.
+
+The sounds that met my boyish ear
+My inward sense salute,--
+The woodnotes wild I loved to hear,--
+The robin's challenge, sharp and clear,--
+The breath of evening's flute.
+
+The faces loved from cradle days,--
+Unseen, alas, how long!
+As fond remembrance round them plays,
+Touched with its softening moonlight rays,
+Through fancy's portal throng.
+
+And see! as if the opening skies
+Some angel form had spared
+Us wingless mortals to surprise,
+The little maid with light-blue eyes,
+White necked and golden haired!
+
+      . . . . . . . . . .
+
+So rose the picture full in view
+I paint in feebler song;
+Such power the seamless banner knew
+Of red and white and starry blue
+For exiles banished long.
+
+Oh, boys, dear boys, who wait as men
+To guard its heaven-bright folds,
+Blest are the eyes that see again
+That banner, seamless now, as then,--
+The fairest earth beholds!
+
+Sweet was the Tuscan air and soft
+In that unfading hour,
+And fancy leads my footsteps oft
+Up the round galleries, high aloft
+On Pisa's threatening tower.
+
+And still in Memory's holiest shrine
+I read with pride and joy,
+"For me those stars of empire shine;
+That empire's dearest home is mine;
+I am a Cambridge boy!"
+
+
+
+
+
+POEM
+
+AT THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE
+MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL SOCIETY, JUNE 8, 1881
+
+THREE paths there be where Learning's favored sons,
+Trained in the schools which hold her favored ones,
+Follow their several stars with separate aim;
+Each has its honors, each its special claim.
+Bred in the fruitful cradle of the East,
+First, as of oldest lineage, comes the Priest;
+The Lawyer next, in wordy conflict strong,
+Full armed to battle for the right,--or wrong;
+Last, he whose calling finds its voice in deeds,
+Frail Nature's helper in her sharpest needs.
+
+Each has his gifts, his losses and his gains,
+Each his own share of pleasures and of pains;
+No life-long aim with steadfast eye pursued
+Finds a smooth pathway all with roses strewed;
+Trouble belongs to man of woman born,--
+Tread where he may, his foot will find its thorn.
+
+Of all the guests at life's perennial feast,
+Who of her children sits above the Priest?
+For him the broidered robe, the carven seat,
+Pride at his beck, and beauty at his feet,
+For him the incense fumes, the wine is poured,
+Himself a God, adoring and adored!
+His the first welcome when our hearts rejoice,
+His in our dying ear the latest voice,
+Font, altar, grave, his steps on all attend,
+Our staff, our stay, our all but heavenly friend!
+
+Where is the meddling hand that dares to probe
+The secret grief beneath his sable robe?
+How grave his port! how every gesture tells
+Here truth abides, here peace forever dwells;
+Vex not his lofty soul with comments vain;
+Faith asks no questions; silence, ye profane!
+
+Alas! too oft while all is calm without
+The stormy spirit wars with endless doubt;
+This is the mocking spectre, scarce concealed
+Behind tradition's bruised and battered shield.
+He sees the sleepless critic, age by age,
+Scrawl his new readings on the hallowed page,
+The wondrous deeds that priests and prophets saw
+Dissolved in legend, crystallized in law,
+And on the soil where saints and martyrs trod
+Altars new builded to the Unknown God;
+His shrines imperilled, his evangels torn,--
+He dares not limp, but ah! how sharp his thorn!
+
+Yet while God's herald questions as he reads
+The outworn dogmas of his ancient creeds,
+Drops from his ritual the exploded verse,
+Blots from its page the Athanasian curse,
+Though by the critic's dangerous art perplexed,
+His holy life is Heaven's unquestioned text;
+That shining guidance doubt can never mar,--
+The pillar's flame, the light of Bethlehem's star!
+
+
+Strong is the moral blister that will draw
+Laid on the conscience of the Man of Law
+Whom blindfold Justice lends her eyes to see
+Truth in the scale that holds his promised fee.
+What! Has not every lie its truthful side,
+Its honest fraction, not to be denied?
+Per contra,--ask the moralist,--in sooth
+Has not a lie its share in every truth?
+Then what forbids an honest man to try
+To find the truth that lurks in every lie,
+And just as fairly call on truth to yield
+The lying fraction in its breast concealed?
+So the worst rogue shall claim a ready friend
+His modest virtues boldly to defend,
+And he who shows the record of a saint
+See himself blacker than the devil could paint.
+
+What struggles to his captive soul belong
+Who loves the right, yet combats for the wrong,
+Who fights the battle he would fain refuse,
+And wins, well knowing that he ought to lose,
+Who speaks with glowing lips and look sincere
+In spangled words that make the worse appear
+The better reason; who, behind his mask,
+Hides his true self and blushes at his task,--
+What quips, what quillets cheat the inward scorn
+That mocks such triumph? Has he not his thorn?
+
+Yet stay thy judgment; were thy life the prize,
+Thy death the forfeit, would thy cynic eyes
+See fault in him who bravely dares defend
+The cause forlorn, the wretch without a friend
+Nay, though the rightful side is wisdom's choice,
+Wrong has its rights and claims a champion's voice;
+Let the strong arm be lifted for the weak,
+For the dumb lips the fluent pleader speak;--
+When with warm "rebel" blood our street was dyed
+Who took, unawed, the hated hirelings' side?
+No greener civic wreath can Adams claim,
+No brighter page the youthful Quincy's name!
+
+
+How blest is he who knows no meaner strife
+Than Art's long battle with the foes of life!
+No doubt assails him, doing still his best,
+And trusting kindly Nature for the rest;
+No mocking conscience tears the thin disguise
+That wraps his breast, and tells him that he lies.
+He comes: the languid sufferer lifts his head
+And smiles a welcome from his weary bed;
+He speaks: what music like the tones that tell,
+"Past is the hour of danger,--all is well!"
+How can he feel the petty stings of grief
+Whose cheering presence always brings relief?
+What ugly dreams can trouble his repose
+Who yields himself to soothe another's woes?
+
+Hour after hour the busy day has found
+The good physician on his lonely round;
+Mansion and hovel, low and lofty door,
+He knows, his journeys every path explore,--
+Where the cold blast has struck with deadly chill
+The sturdy dweller on the storm-swept hill,
+Where by the stagnant marsh the sickening gale
+Has blanched the poisoned tenants of the vale,
+Where crushed and maimed the bleeding victim lies,
+Where madness raves, where melancholy sighs,
+And where the solemn whisper tells too plain
+That all his science, all his art, were vain.
+
+How sweet his fireside when the day is done
+And cares have vanished with the setting sun!
+Evening at last its hour of respite brings
+And on his couch his weary length he flings.
+Soft be thy pillow, servant of mankind,
+Lulled by an opiate Art could never find;
+Sweet be thy slumber,--thou hast earned it well,--
+Pleasant thy dreams! Clang! goes the midnight bell!
+
+Darkness and storm! the home is far away
+That waits his coming ere the break of day;
+The snow-clad pines their wintry plumage toss,--
+Doubtful the frozen stream his road must cross;
+Deep lie the drifts, the slanted heaps have shut
+The hardy woodman in his mountain hut,--
+Why should thy softer frame the tempest brave?
+Hast thou no life, no health, to lose or save?
+Look! read the answer in his patient eyes,--
+For him no other voice when suffering cries;
+Deaf to the gale that all around him blows,
+A feeble whisper calls him,--and he goes.
+
+Or seek the crowded city,--summer's heat
+Glares burning, blinding, in the narrow street,
+Still, noisome, deadly, sleeps the envenomed air,
+Unstirred the yellow flag that says "Beware!"
+Tempt not thy fate,--one little moment's breath
+Bears on its viewless wing the seeds of death;
+Thou at whose door the gilded chariots stand,
+Whose dear-bought skill unclasps the miser's hand,
+Turn from thy fatal quest, nor cast away
+That life so precious; let a meaner prey
+Feed the destroyer's hunger; live to bless
+Those happier homes that need thy care no less!
+
+Smiling he listens; has he then a charm
+Whose magic virtues peril can disarm?
+No safeguard his; no amulet he wears,
+Too well he knows that Nature never spares
+Her truest servant, powerless to defend
+From her own weapons her unshrinking friend.
+He dares the fate the bravest well might shun,
+Nor asks reward save only Heaven's "Well done!"
+
+Such are the toils, the perils that he knows,
+Days without rest and nights without repose,
+Yet all unheeded for the love he bears
+His art, his kind, whose every grief he shares.
+
+Harder than these to know how small the part
+Nature's proud empire yields to striving Art;
+How, as the tide that rolls around the sphere
+Laughs at the mounds that delving arms uprear,--
+Spares some few roods of oozy earth, but still
+Wastes and rebuilds the planet at its will,
+Comes at its ordered season, night or noon,
+Led by the silver magnet of the moon,--
+So life's vast tide forever comes and goes,
+Unchecked, resistless, as it ebbs and flows.
+
+Hardest of all, when Art has done her best,
+To find the cuckoo brooding in her nest;
+The shrewd adventurer, fresh from parts unknown,
+Kills off the patients Science thought her own;
+Towns from a nostrum-vender get their name,
+Fences and walls the cure-all drug proclaim,
+Plasters and pads the willing world beguile,
+Fair Lydia greets us with astringent smile,
+Munchausen's fellow-countryman unlocks
+His new Pandora's globule-holding box,
+And as King George inquired, with puzzled grin,
+"How--how the devil get the apple in?"
+So we ask how,--with wonder-opening eyes,--
+Such pygmy pills can hold such giant lies!
+
+Yes, sharp the trials, stern the daily tasks
+That suffering Nature from her servant asks;
+His the kind office dainty menials scorn,
+His path how hard,--at every step a thorn!
+What does his saddening, restless slavery buy?
+What save a right to live, a chance to die,--
+To live companion of disease and pain,
+To die by poisoned shafts untimely slain?
+
+Answer from hoary eld, majestic shades,--
+From Memphian courts, from Delphic colonnades,
+Speak in the tones that Persia's despot heard
+When nations treasured every golden word
+The wandering echoes wafted o'er the seas,
+From the far isle that held Hippocrates;
+And thou, best gift that Pergamus could send
+Imperial Rome, her noblest Caesar's friend,
+Master of masters, whose unchallenged sway
+Not bold Vesalius dared to disobey;
+Ye who while prophets dreamed of dawning times
+Taught your rude lessons in Salerno's rhymes,
+And ye, the nearer sires, to whom we owe
+The better share of all the best we know,
+In every land an ever-growing train,
+Since wakening Science broke her rusted chain,--
+Speak from the past, and say what prize was sent
+To crown the toiling years so freely spent!
+
+List while they speak:
+                   In life's uneven road
+Our willing hands have eased our brothers' load;
+One forehead smoothed, one pang of torture less,
+One peaceful hour a sufferer's couch to bless,
+The smile brought back to fever's parching lips,
+The light restored to reason in eclipse,
+Life's treasure rescued like a burning brand
+Snatched from the dread destroyer's wasteful hand;
+Such were our simple records day by day,
+For gains like these we wore our lives away.
+In toilsome paths our daily bread we sought,
+But bread from heaven attending angels brought;
+Pain was our teacher, speaking to the heart,
+Mother of pity, nurse of pitying art;
+Our lesson learned, we reached the peaceful shore
+Where the pale sufferer asks our aid no more,--
+These gracious words our welcome, our reward
+Ye served your brothers; ye have served your Lord!
+
+
+
+
+
+RHYMES OF A LIFE-TIME
+
+FROM the first gleam of morning to the gray
+Of peaceful evening, lo, a life unrolled!
+In woven pictures all its changes told,
+Its lights, its shadows, every flitting ray,
+Till the long curtain, falling, dims the day,
+Steals from the dial's disk the sunlight's gold,
+And all the graven hours grow dark and cold
+Where late the glowing blaze of noontide lay.
+Ah! the warm blood runs wild in youthful veins,--
+Let me no longer play with painted fire;
+New songs for new-born days! I would not tire
+The listening ears that wait for fresher strains
+In phrase new-moulded, new-forged rhythmic chains,
+With plaintive measures from a worn-out lyre.
+August 2, 1881.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POETRY OF O. W. HOLMES, V9 ***
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+******* This file should be named ohp0910.txt or ohp0910.zip ********
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