Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, Float the green Fortunate Isles
Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share Our martyrdoms and toils; 60
The present moves attended
With all of brave and excellent and fair That made the old time splendid.
TO THE FUTURE
O Land of Promise! from what Pisgah’s height Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers, Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers? Gazing upon the sunset’s high-heaped gold, Its crags of opal and of chrysolite,
Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold Still brightening abysses,
And blazing precipices,
Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven, 10 Sometimes a glimpse is given
Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.
O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surf Of the perturbed Present rolls and sleeps; Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps, As to a mother’s, the o’erwearied heart, Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart, The hurrying feet, the curses without number, And, circled with the glow Elysian 20 Of thine exulting vision,
Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber.
To thee the earth lifts up her fettered hands And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands, And her old woe-worn face a little while Grows young and noble; unto thee the Oppressor Looks, and is dumb with awe;
The eternal law,
Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser, 30 Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding, And he can see the grim-eyed Doom
From out the trembling gloom
Its silent-footed steeds towards his palace goading.
What promises hast thou for Poets’ eyes, A-weary of the turmoil and the wrong!
To all their hopes what overjoyed replies! What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song! Thy happy plains no war-trump’s brawling clangor Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor; 40 The humble glares not on the high with anger; Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more; In vain strives Self the godlike sense to smother; From the soul’s deeps
It throbs and leaps;
The noble ‘neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.
To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free; To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires,
And grief and hunger climb about his knee, 50 Welcome as children; thou upholdest
The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest, And gazing o’er the midnight’s bleak abyss, Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss, And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.
Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly The guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee, Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly Their own souls they were scarring; conquerors see 60 With horror in their hands the accursed spear That tore the meek One’s side on Calvary, And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear; Thou, too, art the Forgiver,
The beauty of man’s soul to man revealing; The arrows from thy quiver
Pierce Error’s guilty heart, but only pierce for healing.
Oh, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams, From out Life’s, sweat and turmoil would ye bear me? Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,– 70 This agony of hopeless contrast spare me! Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night! He is a coward, who would borrow
A charm against the present sorrow From the vague Future’s promise of delight: As life’s alarums nearer roll,
The ancestral buckler calls,
Self-clanging from the walls
In the high temple of the soul;
Where are most sorrows, there the poet’s sphere is, 80 To feed the soul with patience,
To heal its desolations
With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies.
HEBE
I saw the twinkle of white feet,
I saw the flush of robes descending; Before her ran an influence fleet,
That bowed my heart like barley bending.
As, in bare fields, the searching bees Pilot to blooms beyond our finding,
It led me on, by sweet degrees
Joy’s simple honey-cells unbinding.
Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; With nearer love the sky leaned o’er me; The long-sought Secret’s golden gates
On musical hinges swung before me.
I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp
Thrilling with godhood; like a lover I sprang the proffered life to clasp;– The beaker fell; the luck was over.
The Earth has drunk the vintage up;
What boots it patch the goblet’s splinters? Can Summer fill the icy cup,
Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter’s?
O spendthrift haste! await the Gods; The nectar crowns the lips of Patience;
Haste scatters on unthankful sods
The immortal gift in vain libations.
Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hands would seize upon her; Follow thy life, and she will sue
To pour for thee the cup of honor.
THE SEARCH
I went to seek for Christ,
And Nature seemed so fair
That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And I was sure to find him there:
The temple I forsook,
And to the solitude
Allegiance paid; but winter came and shook The crown and purple from my wood;
His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift, Besieged the columned aisle and palace-gate; My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn rift, But epitaphed her own sepulchered state: Then I remembered whom I went to seek,
And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak.
Back to the world I turned,
For Christ, I said, is King;
So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, As far beneath his sojourning:
Mid power and wealth I sought,
But found no trace of him,
And all the costly offerings I had brought With sudden rust and mould grew dim:
I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, All must on stated days themselves imprison, Mocking with bread a dead creed’s grinning jaws, Witless how long the life had thence arisen; Due sacrifice to this they set apart,
Prizing it more than Christ’s own living heart.
So from my feet the dust
Of the proud World I shook;
Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust. And half my sorrow’s burden took.
After the World’s soft bed,
Its rich and dainty fare,
Like down seemed Love’s coarse pillow to my head, His cheap food seemed as manna rare;
Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet, Turned to the heedless city whence I came, Hard by I saw, and springs of worship sweet Gushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same; Love looked me in the face and spake no words, But straight I knew those footprints were the Lord’s.
I followed where they led,
And in a hovel rude,
With naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for meekly stood;
A naked, hungry child
Clung round his gracious knee,
And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled To bless the smile that set him free:
New miracles I saw his presence do,– No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, The gathered chips into a woodpile grew, The broken morsel swelled to goodly store; I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak.
THE PRESENT CRISIS
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.
Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro; At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart. 10
So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod, Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.
For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;– In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim. 20
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong. 30
Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff must fly;
Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.
Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,– Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. 40
We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great. Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din. List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,– ‘They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.’
Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;– Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play? 50
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,–they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design. 60
By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.
For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn. 70
‘Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers’ graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;– Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future that make Plymouth Rock sublime?
They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free. Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee 70 The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.
They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key. 90
AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE
What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or humbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!
No more the landscape holds its wealth apart, Making me poorer in my poverty,
But mingles with my senses and my heart; 10 My own projected spirit seems to me
In her own reverie the world to steep; ‘Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.
How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon’s languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances!
The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, In waves of dreamier purple roll away, 20 And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.
Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden’s glow went by,
So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.
The cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, 30 Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan’s Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails,
With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.
The sobered robin, hunger-silent now. Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the shingly shag-bark’s bough Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40 Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.
O’er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree
Says Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.
The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities
With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.
He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, With distant eye broods over other sights, 60 Sees the hushed wood the city’s flare replace, The wounded turf heal o’er the railway’s trace, And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.
The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;
The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the sunshine hoarded ‘neath her favoring eye. 70
The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush; The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood’s edge creeps the skirting blaze Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, Ere the rain fall, the cautious farmer burns his brush.
O’er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.
Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, Whose loose blocks topple ‘neath the ploughboy’s foot, Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm’s straight stem aspires, Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires; 90 In the ivy’s paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.
Below, the Charles, a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond–
Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.
Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, 100 From every season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare; Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free On them its largess of variety,
For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.
In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green, O’er which the light winds run with glimmering feet: Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen, There, darker growths o’er hidden ditches meet; And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd, 110 As if the silent shadow of a cloud
Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.
All round, upon the river’s slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide.
In Summer ’tis a blithesome sight to see, 120 As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the wiry grass; Then, stretched beneath a rick’s shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies ‘neath the close sky of brass.
Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops
Just ere he sweeps o’er rapture’s tremulous brink. And ‘twixt the winrows most demurely drops, 130 A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops.
Another change subdues them in the Fall, But saddens not; they still show merrier tints, Though sober russet seems to cover all; When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints, Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across, Redeems with rarer hues the season’s loss, As Dawn’s feet there had touched and left their rosy prints. 140
Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest, Lean o’er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill, While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west, Glow opposite;–the marshes drink their fill And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade, Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simonds’ darkening hill.
Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts, Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates, And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts, 150 While firmer ice the eager boy awaits,
Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire, And until bedtime plays with his desire, Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;–
Then, every morn, the river’s banks shine bright With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail, By the frost’s clinking hammers forged at night, ‘Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail, Giving a pretty emblem of the day
When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, 160 And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war’s cramping mail.
And now those waterfalls the ebbing river Twice every day creates on either side
Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver In grass-arched channels to the sun denied; High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow, The silvered flats gleam frostily below, Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide.
But crowned in turn by vying seasons three, Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; 170 This glory seems to rest immovably,–
The others were too fleet and vanishing; When the hid tide is at its highest flow. O’er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.
The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day;
Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o’er their lee, 180 White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway.
But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, From mid-sea’s prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean’s blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.
Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, 190 With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.
But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes; The early evening with her misty dyes 200 Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes.
There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change’s waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood’s history, Sanding with houses the diminished green; There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square and stiff the Muses’ factories:– How with my life knit up is every well-known scene! 210
Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow To outward sight, and through your marshes wind; Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago, Your twin flows silent through my world of mind: Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening’s gray! Before my inner sight ye stretch away, And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.
Beyond the hillock’s house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, 220 Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise, Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died, Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.
_Virgilium vidi tantum_,–I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all,
That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling’s faintest call;– Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came;– 230 One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.
Swiftly the present fades in memory’s glow,– Our only sure possession is the past;
The village blacksmith died a month ago, And dim to me the forge’s roaring blast; Soon fire-new mediaevals we shall see
Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree, And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.
How many times, prouder than king on throne, Loosed from the village school-dame’s A’s and B’s, 240 Panting have I the creaky bellows blown, And watched the pent volcano’s red increase, Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down By that hard arm voluminous and brown, From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.
Dear native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,–to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day,
And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250 The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away.
So palpable, I’ve seen those unshorn few, The six old willows at the causey’s end (Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew), Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send, Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread, Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red, Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird’s flashes blend.
Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e’er, 260 Beneath the awarded crown of victory,
Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer; Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet _collegisse juvat_, I am glad
That here what colleging was mine I had,– It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!
Nearer art thou than simply native earth, My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie; A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, Something of kindred more than sympathy; 270 For in thy bounds I reverently laid away That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,
That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be;– The Artist saw his statue of the soul
Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the impoverished seasons roll. 280
THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND
A FRAGMENT
A legend that grew in the forest’s hush Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush,
When a word some poet chanced to say Ages ago, in his careless way,
Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud Clearly as under yon thunder-cloud
I see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew, From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue, Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vast Norwegian forests of the past; 10
And it grew itself like a true Northern pine, First a little slender line,
Like a mermaid’s green eyelash, and then anon A stem that a tower might rest upon,
Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss, Its bony roots clutching around and across, As if they would tear up earth’s heart in their grasp Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp; Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine, To snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine, 20 Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor, Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way ‘Twixt the frothed gnashing tusks of some ship-crunching bay.
So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall, As the Gypsy child grows that eats crusts in the hall; It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the sky, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it supply; ‘Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, True part of the landscape as sea, land, and air; 30 For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force these wild births of the woods under glass, And so, if ’tis told as it should be told, Though ’twere sung under Venice’s moonlight of gold, You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sealike and northern through every line, And the verses should grow, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody,
Like the lithe moonlit limbs of the parent tree.
Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food 40 For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood, The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing From Michael’s white shoulder, is hewn and defaced By iconoclast axes in desperate waste,
And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song? Then the legends go with them,–even yet on the sea A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree, And the sailor’s night-watches are thrilled to the core 50 With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.
Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in, Since the day of creation, the light and the din Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed From the midnight primeval its armful of shade, And has kept the weird Past with its child-faith alive Mid the hum and the stir of To-day’s busy hive. There the legend takes root in the age-gathered gloom, And its murmurous boughs for their sagas find room.
Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes 60 Groping down to the sea ‘neath his mountainous snows; Where the lake’s frore Sahara of never-tracked white, When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost, As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires that throw Their own threatening shadows far round o’er the snow, When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear, When the wood’s huge recesses, half-lighted, supply 70 A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try, Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town, But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood Mid the Dark’s creeping whispers that curdle the blood, When the eye, glanced in dread o’er the shoulder, may dream, Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire’s companioning gleam, That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red Man crouch back To the shroud of the tree-trunk’s invincible black; There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-shadowed camp, 80 Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground, While the border-tale’s told and the canteen flits round.
A CONTRAST
Thy love thou sendest oft to me,
And still as oft I thrust it back; Thy messengers I could not see
In those who everything did lack,
The poor, the outcast and the black.
Pride held his hand before mine eyes, The world with flattery stuffed mine ears; I looked to see a monarch’s guise,
Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years, Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears.
Yet, when I sent my love to thee,
Thou with a smile didst take it in, And entertain’dst it royally,
Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin, And leprous with the taint of sin.
Now every day thy love I meet,
As o’er the earth it wanders wide, With weary step and bleeding feet,
Still knocking at the heart of pride And offering grace, though still denied.
EXTREME UNCTION
Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be Alone with the consoler, Death;
Far sadder eyes than thine will see This crumbling clay yield up its breath; These shrivelled hands have deeper stains Than holy oil can cleanse away,
Hands that have plucked the world’s coarse gains As erst they plucked the flowers of May.
Call, if thou canst, to these gray eyes Some faith from youth’s traditions wrung; 10 This fruitless husk which dustward dries Hath been a heart once, hath been young; On this bowed head the awful Past
Once laid its consecrating hands;
The Future in its purpose vast
Paused, waiting my supreme commands.
But look! whose shadows block the door? Who are those two that stand aloof?
See! on my hands this freshening gore Writes o’er again its crimson proof! 20 My looked-for death-bed guests are met;
There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, And there, with eyes that goad me yet,
The ghost of my Ideal stands!
God bends from out the deep and says, ‘I gave thee the great gift of life;
Wast thou not called in many ways?
Are not my earth and heaven at strife? I gave thee of my seed to sow,
Bringest thou me my hundredfold?’ 30 Can I look up with face aglow,
And answer, ‘Father, here is gold’?
I have been innocent; God knows
When first this wasted life began, Not grape with grape more kindly grows,
Than I with every brother-man:
Now here I gasp; what lose my kind, When this fast ebbing breath shall part? What bands of love and service bind
This being to a brother heart? 40
Christ still was wandering o’er the earth Without a place to lay his head;
He found free welcome at my hearth, He shared my cup and broke my bread:
Now, when I hear those steps sublime, That bring the other world to this,
My snake-turned nature, sunk in slime, Starts sideway with defiant hiss.
Upon the hour when I was born,
God said, ‘Another man shall be,’ 50 And the great Maker did not scorn
Out of himself to fashion me:
He sunned me with his ripening looks, And Heaven’s rich instincts in me grew, As effortless as woodland nooks
Send violets up and paint them blue.
Yes, I who now, with angry tears,
Am exiled back to brutish clod,
Have borne unqueached for fourscore years A spark of the eternal God; 60
And to what end? How yield I back
The trust for such high uses given? Heaven’s light hath but revealed a track Whereby to crawl away from heaven.
Men think it is an awful sight
To see a soul just set adrift
On that drear voyage from whose night The ominous shadows never lift;
But ’tis more awful to behold
A helpless infant newly born, 70 Whose little hands unconscious hold
The keys of darkness and of morn.
Mine held them once; I flung away
Those keys that might have open set The golden sluices of the day,
But clutch the keys of darkness yet; I hear the reapers singing go
Into God’s harvest; I, that might
With them have chosen, here below
Grope shuddering at the gates of night. 80
O glorious Youth, that once wast mine! O high Ideal! all in vain
Ye enter at this ruined shrine
Whence worship ne’er shall rise again; The bat and owl inhabit here,
The snake nests in the altar-stone, The sacred vessels moulder near,
The image of the God is gone.
THE OAK
What gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his! There needs no crown to mark the forest’s king; How in his leaves outshines full summer’s bliss! Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, Which he with such benignant royalty
Accepts, as overpayeth what is lent; All nature seems his vassal proud to be, And cunning only for his ornament.
How towers he, too, amid the billowed snows, An unquelled exile from the summer’s throne, Whose plain, uncinctured front more kingly shows, Now that the obscuring courtier leaves are flown. His boughs make music of the winter air, Jewelled with sleet, like some cathedral front Where clinging snow-flakes with quaint art repair The dints and furrows of time’s envious brunt.
How doth his patient strength the rude March wind Persuade to seem glad breaths of summer breeze, And win the soil that fain would be unkind, To swell his revenues with proud increase! He is the gem; and all the landscape wide (So doth his grandeur isolate the sense) Seems but the setting, worthless all beside, An empty socket, were he fallen thence.
So, from oft converse with life’s wintry gales, Should man learn how to clasp with tougher roots The inspiring earth; how otherwise avails The leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots? So every year that falls with noiseless flake Should fill old scars up on the stormward side, And make hoar age revered for age’s sake, Not for traditions of youth’s leafy pride.
So, from the pinched soil of a churlish fate, True hearts compel the sap of sturdier growth, So between earth and heaven stand simply great, That these shall seem but their attendants both; For nature’s forces with obedient zeal
Wait on the rooted faith and oaken will; As quickly the pretender’s cheat they feel, And turn mad Pucks to flout and mock him still.
Lord! all thy works are lessons; each contains Some emblem of man’s all-containing soul; Shall he make fruitless all thy glorious pains, Delving within thy grace an eyeless mole? Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove,
Cause me some message of thy truth to bring, Speak but a word through me, nor let thy love Among my boughs disdain to perch and sing.
AMBROSE
Never, surely, was holier man
Than Ambrose, since the world began; With diet spare and raiment thin
He shielded himself from the father of sin; With bed of iron and scourgings oft,
His heart to God’s hand as wax made soft.
Through earnest prayer and watchings long He sought to know ‘tween right and wrong, Much wrestling with the blessed Word
To make it yield the sense of the Lord, 10 That he might build a storm-proof creed
To fold the flock in at their need.
At last he builded a perfect faith,
Fenced round about with _The Lord thus saith_; To himself he fitted the doorway’s size, Meted the light to the need of his eyes, And knew, by a sure and inward sign,
That the work of his fingers was divine.
Then Ambrose said, ‘All those shall die The eternal death who believe not as I;’ 20 And some were boiled, some burned in fire, Some sawn in twain, that his heart’s desire, For the good of men’s souls might be satisfied By the drawing of all to the righteous side.
One day, as Ambrose was seeking the truth In his lonely walk, he saw a youth
Resting himself in the shade of a tree; It had never been granted him to see
So shining a face, and the good man thought ‘Twere pity he should not believe as he ought. 30
So he set himself by the young man’s side, And the state of his soul with questions tried; But the heart of the stranger was hardened indeed, Nor received the stamp of the one true creed; And the spirit of Ambrose waxed sore to find Such features the porch of so narrow a mind.
‘As each beholds in cloud and fire
The shape that answers his own desire, So each,’ said the youth, ‘in the Law shall find The figure and fashion of his mind; 40 And to each in his mercy hath God allowed His several pillar of fire and cloud.’
The soul of Ambrose burned with zeal
And holy wrath for the young man’s weal: ‘Believest thou then, most wretched youth,’ Cried he, ‘a dividual essence in Truth?
I fear me thy heart is too cramped with sin To take the Lord in his glory in.’
Now there bubbled beside them where they stood A fountain of waters sweet and good: 50 The youth to the streamlet’s brink drew near Saying, ‘Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here!’ Six vases of crystal then he took,
And set them along the edge of the brook.
‘As into these vessels the water I pour, There shall one hold less, another more, And the water unchanged, in every case,
Shall put on the figure of the vase; O thou, who wouldst unity make through strife, Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life?’ 60
When Ambrose looked up, he stood alone, The youth and the stream and the vases were gone; But he knew, by a sense of humbled grace, He had talked with an angel face to face, And felt his heart change inwardly,
As he fell on his knees beneath the tree.
ABOVE AND BELOW
I
O dwellers in the valley-land,
Who in deep twilight grope and cower, Till the slow mountain’s dial-hand
Shorten to noon’s triumphal hour,
While ye sit idle, do ye think
The Lord’s great work sits idle too? That light dare not o’erleap the brink
Of morn, because ’tis dark with you?
Though yet your valleys skulk in night, In God’s ripe fields the day is cried,
And reapers, with their sickles bright, Troop, singing, down the mountain-side: Come up, and feel what health there is
In the frank Dawn’s delighted eyes, As, bending with a pitying kiss,
The night-shed tears of Earth she dries!
The Lord wants reapers: oh, mount up, Before night comes, and says, ‘Too late!’ Stay not for taking scrip or cup,
The Master hungers while ye wait;
‘Tis from these heights alone your eyes The advancing spears of day can see,
That o’er the eastern hill-tops rise, To break your long captivity.
II
Lone watcher on the mountain-height,
It is right precious to behold
The first long surf of climbing light Flood all the thirsty east with gold;
But we, who in the shadow sit,
Know also when the day is nigh,
Seeing thy shining forehead lit
With his inspiring prophecy.
Thou hast thine office; we have ours; God lacks not early service here,
But what are thine eleventh hours
He counts with us for morning cheer; Our day, for Him, is long enough,
And when He giveth work to do,
The bruised reed is amply tough
To pierce the shield of error, through.
But not the less do thou aspire
Light’s earlier messages to preach; Keep back no syllable of fire,
Plunge deep the rowels of thy speech. Yet God deems not thine aeried sight
More worthy than our twilight dim; For meek Obedience, too, is Light,
And following that is finding Him.
THE CAPTIVE
It was past the hour of trysting,
But she lingered for him still;
Like a child, the eager streamlet
Leaped and laughed adown the hill, Happy to be free at twilight
From its toiling at the mill.
Then the great moon on a sudden
Ominous, and red as blood,
Startling as a new creation,
O’er the eastern hilltop stood,
Casting deep and deeper shadows
Through the mystery of the wood.
Dread closed fast and vague about her, And her thoughts turned fearfully
To her heart, if there some shelter From the silence there might be,
Like bare cedars leaning inland
From the blighting of the sea.
Yet he came not, and the stillness
Dampened round her like a tomb;
She could feel cold eyes of spirits Looking on her through the gloom,
She could hear the groping footsteps Of some blind, gigantic doom.
Suddenly the silence wavered
Like a light mist in the wind,
For a voice broke gently through it, Felt like sunshine by the blind,
And the dread, like mist in sunshine, Furled serenely from her mind.
‘Once my love, my love forever,
Flesh or spirit, still the same,
If I failed at time of trysting,
Deem then not my faith to blame;
I, alas, was made a captive,
As from Holy Land I came.
‘On a green spot in the desert,
Gleaming like an emerald star,
Where a palm-tree, in lone silence, Yearning for its mate afar,
Droops above a silver runnel,
Slender as a scimitar,
‘There thou’lt find the humble postern To the castle of my foe;
If thy love burn clear and faithful, Strike the gateway, green and low,
Ask to enter, and the warder
Surely will not say thee no.’
Slept again the aspen silence,
But her loneliness was o’er;
Bound her soul a motherly patience
Clasped its arms forevermore;
From her heart ebbed back the sorrow, Leaving smooth the golden shore.
Donned she now the pilgrim scallop,
Took the pilgrim staff in hand;
Like a cloud-shade flitting eastward, Wandered she o’er sea and land;
And her footsteps in the desert
Fell like cool rain on the sand.
Soon, beneath the palm-tree’s shadow, Knelt she at the postern low;
And thereat she knocked full gently, Fearing much the warder’s no;
All her heart stood still and listened, As the door swung backward slow.
There she saw no surly warder
With an eye like bolt and bar;
Through her soul a sense of music
Throbbed, and, like a guardian Lar, On the threshold stood an angel,
Bright and silent as a star.
Fairest seemed he of God’s seraphs,
And her spirit, lily-wise,
Opened when he turned upon her
The deep welcome of his eyes,
Sending upward to that sunlight
All its dew for sacrifice.
Then she heard a voice come onward
Singing with a rapture new,
As Eve heard the songs in Eden,
Dropping earthward with the dew;
Well she knew the happy singer,
Well the happy song she knew.
Forward leaped she o’er the threshold, Eager as a glancing surf;
Fell from her the spirit’s languor, Fell from her the body’s scurf;
‘Neath the palm next day some Arabs Found a corpse upon the turf.
THE BIRCH-TREE
Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine, Among thy leaves that palpitate forever; Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned, The soul once of some tremulous inland river, Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever!
While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine, Holds up its leaves in happy, happy stillness, Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended, I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands, And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.
On the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, Dripping round thy slim white stem, whose shadow Slopes quivering down the water’s dusky quiet, Thou shrink’st as on her bath’s edge would some startled Naiad.
Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers; Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping; Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.
Thou art to me like my beloved maiden, So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences; Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o’er my senses, And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.
Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble, Thou sympathizest still; wild and unquiet, I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river, Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it My heart is floated down into the land of quiet.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH
I sat one evening in my room,
In that sweet hour of twilight
When blended thoughts, half light, half gloom, Throng through the spirit’s skylight;
The flames by fits curled round the bars, Or up the chimney crinkled,
While embers dropped like falling stars, And in the ashes tinkled.
I sat, and mused; the fire burned low, And, o’er my senses stealing, 10
Crept something of the ruddy glow
That bloomed on wall and ceiling;
My pictures (they are very few,
The heads of ancient wise men)
Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grew As rosy as excisemen.
My antique high-backed Spanish chair
Felt thrills through wood and leather, That had been strangers since whilere,
Mid Andaluslan heather, 20 The oak that built its sturdy frame
His happy arms stretched over
The ox whose fortunate hide became
The bottom’s polished cover.
It came out in that famous bark,
That brought our sires intrepid,
Capacious as another ark
For furniture decrepit;
For, as that saved of bird and beast A pair for propagation, 30
So has the seed of these increased
And furnished half the nation.
Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats; But those slant precipices
Of ice the northern voyager meets
Less slippery are than this is;
To cling therein would pass the wit Of royal man or woman,
And whatsoe’er can stay in it
Is more or less than human. 40
I offer to all bores this perch,
Dear well-intentioned people
With heads as void as week-day church, Tongues longer than the steeple;
To folks with missions, whose gaunt eyes See golden ages rising,–
Salt of the earth! in what queer Guys Thou’rt fond of crystallizing!
My wonder, then, was not unmixed
With merciful suggestion, 50 When, as my roving eyes grew fixed
Upon the chair in question,
I saw its trembling arms enclose
A figure grim and rusty,
Whose doublet plain and plainer hose Were something worn and dusty.
Now even such men as Nature forms
Merely to fill the street with,
Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms, 59 Are serious things to meet with;
Your penitent spirits are no jokes, And, though I’m not averse to
A quiet shade, even they are folks
One cares not to speak first to.
Who knows, thought I, but he has come, By Charon kindly ferried,
To tell me of a mighty sum
Behind my wainscot buried?
There is a buccaneerish air
About that garb outlandish– 70
Just then the ghost drew up his chair And said, ‘My name is Standish.
‘I come from Plymouth, deadly bored
With toasts, and songs, and speeches, As long and flat as my old sword,
As threadbare as my breeches:
_They_ understand us Pilgrims! they, Smooth men with rosy faces.
Strength’s knots and gnarls all pared away, And varnish in their places! 80
‘We had some toughness in our grain,
The eye to rightly see us is
Not just the one that lights the brain Of drawing-room Tyrtaeuses:
_They_ talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy!
A mountain-stream that ends in mud
Methinks is melancholy.
‘He had stiff knees, the Puritan,
That were not good at bending;
The homespun dignity of man 91 He thought was worth defending;
He did not, with his pinchbeck ore, His country’s shame forgotten,
Gild Freedom’s coffin o’er and o’er, When all within was rotten.
‘These loud ancestral boasts of yours, How can they else than vex us?
Where were your dinner orators
When slavery grasped at Texas? 100 Dumb on his knees was every one
That now is bold as Caesar;
Mere pegs to hang an office on
Such stalwart men as these are.’
‘Good sir,’ I said, ‘you seem much stirred; The sacred compromises’–
‘Now God confound the dastard word! My gall thereat arises:
Northward it hath this sense alone
That you, your conscience blinding, 110 Shall bow your fool’s nose to the stone, When slavery feels like grinding.
”Tis shame to see such painted sticks In Vane’s and Winthrop’s places,
To see your spirit of Seventy-Six
Drag humbly in the traces,
With slavery’s lash upon her back,
And herds, of office-holders
To shout applause, as, with a crack, 119 It peels her patient shoulders.
‘_We_ forefathers to such a rout!–
No, by my faith in God’s word!’
Half rose the ghost, and half drew out The ghost of his old broadsword,
Then thrust it slowly back again,
And said, with reverent gesture,
‘No, Freedom, no! blood should not stain The hem of thy white vesture.
‘I feel the soul in me draw near
The mount of prophesying; 130 In this bleak wilderness I hear
A John the Baptist crying;
Far in the east I see upleap
The streaks of first forewarning,
And they who sowed the light shall reap The golden sheaves of morning.
‘Child of our travail and our woe,
Light in our day of sorrow,
Through my rapt spirit I foreknow
The glory of thy morrow; 140 I hear great steps, that through the shade Draw nigher still and nigher,
And voices call like that which bade The prophet come up higher.’
I looked, no form mine eyes could find, I heard the red cock crowing,
And through my window-chinks the wind A dismal tune was blowing;
Thought I, My neighbor Buckingham
Hath somewhat in him gritty, 150 Some Pilgrim-stuff that hates all sham,
And he will print my ditty.
ON THE CAPTURE OF FUGITIVE SLAVES NEAR WASHINGTON
Look on who will in apathy, and stifle they who can, The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man; Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up with interest or with ease Consent to hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds like these!
I first drew in New England’s air, and from her hardy breast Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest; And if my words seem treason to the dullard and the tame, ‘Tis but my Bay-State dialect,–our fathers spake the same!
Shame on the costly mockery of piling stone on stone To those who won our liberty, the heroes dead and gone, While we look coldly on and see law-shielded ruffians slay The men who fain would win their own, the heroes of to-day!
Are we pledged to craven silence? Oh, fling it to the wind, The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind, That makes us cringe and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest, While Pity’s burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast!
Though we break our fathers’ promise, we have nobler duties first; The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!
We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more, To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit’s core; Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
He’s true to God who’s true to man; wherever wrong is done, To the humblest and the weakest, ‘neath the all-beholding sun, That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base, Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.
God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of being free With parallels of latitude, with mountain-range or sea. Put golden padlocks on Truth’s lips, be callous as ye will, From soul to soul, o’er all the world, leaps one electric thrill.
Chain down your slaves with ignorance, ye cannot keep apart, With all your craft of tyranny, the human heart from heart: When first the Pilgrims landed on the Bay State’s iron shore, The word went forth that slavery should one day be no more.
Out from the land of bondage ’tis decreed our slaves shall go, And signs to us are offered, as erst to Pharaoh; If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel’s of yore, Through a Red Sea is doomed to be, whose surges are of gore.
‘Tis ours to save our brethren, with peace and love to win Their darkened hearts from error, ere they harden it to sin; But if before his duty man with listless spirit stands, Erelong the Great Avenger takes the work from out his hands.
TO THE DANDELION
Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May,
Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold, High-hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they An Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth’s ample round May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.
Gold such as thine ne’er drew the Spanish prow Through the primeval hush of Indian seas, Nor wrinkled the lean brow
Of age, to rob the lover’s heart of ease; ‘Tis the Spring’s largess, which she scatters now To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, Though most hearts never understand
To take it at God’s value, but pass by The offered wealth with unrewarded eye.
Thou art my tropics and mine Italy;
To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime; The eyes thou givest me
Are in the heart, and heed not space or time: Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee Feels a more summer-like warm ravishment In the white lily’s breezy tent,
His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when first From the dark green thy yellow circles burst.
Then think I of deep shadows on the grass, Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze, Where, as the breezes pass,
The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways, Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass, Or whiten in the wind, of waters blue
That from the distance sparkle through Some woodland gap, and of a sky above,
Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move.
My childhood’s earliest thoughts are linked with thee; The sight of thee calls back the robin’s song, Who, from the dark old tree
Beside the door, sang clearly all day long, And I, secure in childish piety,
Listened as if I heard an angel sing With news from heaven, which he could bring Fresh every day to my untainted ears
When birds and flowers and I were happy peers.
How like a prodigal doth nature seem, When thou, for all thy gold, so common art! Thou teachest me to deem
More sacredly of every human heart, Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show, Did we but pay the love we owe,
And with a child’s undoubting wisdom look On all these living pages of God’s book.
THE GHOST-SEER
Ye who, passing graves by night,
Glance not to the left or right,
Lest a spirit should arise,
Cold and white, to freeze your eyes, Some weak phantom, which your doubt
Shapes upon the dark without
From the dark within, a guess
At the spirit’s deathlessness,
Which ye entertain with fear
In your self-built dungeon here, 10 Where ye sell your God-given lives
Just for gold to buy you gyves,–
Ye without a shudder meet
In the city’s noonday street,
Spirits sadder and more dread
Than from out the clay have fled,
Buried, beyond hope of light,
In the body’s haunted night!
See ye not that woman pale?
There are bloodhounds on her trail! 20 Bloodhounds two, all gaunt and lean,
(For the soul their scent is keen,) Want and Sin, and Sin is last.
They have followed far and fast;
Want gave tongue, and, at her howl, Sin awakened with a growl.
Ah, poor girl! she had a right
To a blessing from the light;
Title-deeds to sky and earth
God gave to her at her birth; 30 But, before they were enjoyed,
Poverty had made them void,
And had drunk the sunshine up
From all nature’s ample cup,
Leaving her a first-born’s share
In the dregs of darkness there.
Often, on the sidewalk bleak,
Hungry, all alone, and weak,
She has seen, in night and storm,
Rooms o’erflow with firelight warm, 40 Which, outside the window-glass,
Doubled all the cold, alas!
Till each ray that on her fell
Stabbed her like an icicle,
And she almost loved the wail
Of the bloodhounds on her trail.
Till the floor becomes her bier,
She shall feel their pantings near, Close upon her very heels,
Spite of all the din of wheels; 50 Shivering on her pallet poor,
She shall hear them at the door
Whine and scratch to be let in,
Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin!
Hark! that rustle of a dress,
Stiff with lavish costliness!
Here comes one whose cheek would flush But to have her garment brush
‘Gainst the girl whose fingers thin Wove the weary broidery in, 60
Bending backward from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil, And, in midnights chill and murk,
Stitched her life into the work,
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart’s-ease and forget-me-not,
Satirizing her despair
With the emblems woven there.
Little doth the wearer heed
Of the heart-break in the brede; 70 A hyena by her side
Skulks, down-looking,–it is Pride. He digs for her in the earth,
Where lie all her claims of birth,
With his foul paws rooting o’er
Some long-buried ancestor,
Who perhaps a statue won
By the ill deeds he had done,
By the innocent blood he shed,
By the desolation spread 80
Over happy villages,
Blotting out the smile of peace.
There walks Judas, he who sold
Yesterday his Lord for gold,
Sold God’s presence in his heart
For a proud step in the mart;
He hath dealt in flesh and blood:
At the bank his name is good;
At the bank, and only there,
‘Tis a marketable ware. 90
In his eyes that stealthy gleam
Was not learned of sky or stream,
But it has the cold, hard glint
Of new dollars from the mint.
Open now your spirit’s eyes,
Look through that poor clay disguise Which has thickened, day by day,
Till it keeps all light at bay,
And his soul in pitchy gloom
Gropes about its narrow tomb, 100 From whose dank and slimy walls
Drop by drop the horror falls.
Look! a serpent lank and cold
Hugs his spirit fold on fold;
From his heart, all day and night,
It doth suck God’s blessed light.
Drink it will, and drink it must,
Till the cup holds naught but dust; All day long he hears it hiss,
Writhing in its fiendish bliss; 110 All night long he sees its eyes
Flicker with foul ecstasies,
As the spirit ebbs away
Into the absorbing clay.
Who is he that skulks, afraid
Of the trust he has betrayed,
Shuddering if perchance a gleam
Of old nobleness should stream
Through the pent, unwholesome room, Where his shrunk soul cowers in gloom, 120 Spirit sad beyond the rest
By more Instinct for the best?
‘Tis a poet who was sent
For a bad world’s punishment,
By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear
Songs that prove the angels near;
Who was sent to be the tongue
Of the weak and spirit-wrung, 130 Whence the fiery-winged Despair
In men’s shrinking eyes might flare. ‘Tis our hope doth fashion us
To base use or glorious:
He who might have been a lark
Of Truth’s morning, from the dark
Raining down melodious hope
Of a freer, broader scope,
Aspirations, prophecies,
Of the spirit’s full sunrise, 140 Chose to be a bird of night,
That, with eyes refusing light,
Hooted from some hollow tree
Of the world’s idolatry.
‘Tis his punishment to hear
Sweep of eager pinions near,
And his own vain wings to feel
Drooping downward to his heel,
All their grace and import lost,
Burdening his weary ghost: 150
Ever walking by his side
He must see his angel guide,
Who at intervals doth turn
Looks on him so sadly stern,
With such ever-new surprise
Of hushed anguish in her eyes,
That it seems the light of day
From around him shrinks away,
Or drops blunted from the wall
Built around him by his fall. 160 Then the mountains, whose white peaks
Catch the morning’s earliest streaks, He must see, where prophets sit,
Turning east their faces lit,
Whence, with footsteps beautiful,
To the earth, yet dim and dull,
They the gladsome tidings bring
Of the sunlight’s hastening:
Never can these hills of bliss 169 Be o’erclimbed by feet like his!
But enough! Oh, do not dare
From the next the veil to tear,
Woven of station, trade, or dress,
More obscene than nakedness,
Wherewith plausible culture drapes
Fallen Nature’s myriad shapes!
Let us rather love to mark
How the unextingnished spark
Still gleams through the thin disguise 179 Of our customs, pomps, and lies,
And, not seldom blown to flame,
Vindicates its ancient claim.
STUDIES FOR TWO HEADS
I
Some sort of heart I know is hers,–
I chanced to feel her pulse one night; A brain she has that never errs,
And yet is never nobly right;
It does not leap to great results,
But, in some corner out of sight
Suspects a spot of latent blight,
And, o’er the impatient infinite,
She hargains, haggles, and consults.
Her eye,–it seems a chemic test
And drops upon you like an acid; 11 It bites you with unconscious zest,
So clear and bright, so coldly placid; It holds you quietly aloof,
It holds,–and yet it does not win you; It merely puts you to the proof
And sorts what qualities are in you: It smiles, but never brings you nearer,
It lights,–her nature draws not nigh; ‘Tis but that yours is growing clearer 20 To her assays;–yes, try and try,
You’ll get no deeper than her eye.
There, you are classified: she’s gone Far, far away into herself;
Each with its Latin label on,
Your poor components, one by one,
Are laid upon their proper shelf
In her compact and ordered mind,
And what of you is left behind
Is no more to her than the wind;
In that clear brain, which, day and night, 31 No movement of the heart e’er jostles,
Her friends are ranged on left and right,– Here, silex, hornblende, sienite;
There, animal remains and fossils.
And yet, O subtile analyst,
That canst each property detect
Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect,
And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare 40 Each mental nerve more fine than air,–
O brain exact, that in thy scales
Canst weigh the sun and never err,
For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art;–
Thou never canst compute for her
The distance and diameter
Of any simple human heart.
II
Hear him but speak, and you will feel The shadows of the Portico 50
Over your tranquil spirit steal,
To modulate all joy and woe
To one subdued, subduing glow;
Above our squabbling business-hours, Like Phidian Jove’s, his beauty lowers,
His nature satirizes ours;
A form and front of Attic grace,
He shames the higgling market-place, And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.
What throbbing verse can fitly render 60 That face so pure, so trembling-tender?
Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words,
As full of motion as a nest
That palpitates with unfledged birds; ‘Tis likest to Bethesda’s stream,
Forewarned through all its thrilling springs, White with the angel’s coming gleam,
And rippled with his fanning wings.
Hear him unfold his plots and plans, 70 And larger destinies seem man’s;
You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans The gulf wherein so many fall,
‘Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod, Exuberant with conscious God,
Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth with all its spots. 80
Himself unshaken as the sky,
His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high Systems and creeds pellmell together;
‘Tis strange as to a deaf man’s eye, While trees uprooted splinter by,
The dumb turmoil of stormy weather; Less of iconoclast than shaper,
His spirit, safe behind the reach
Of the tornado of his speech,
Burns calmly as a glowworm’s taper. 90
So great in speech, but, ah! in act
So overrun with vermin troubles,
The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact Of life collapses all his bubbles:
Had he but lived in Plato’s day,
He might, unless my fancy errs,
Have shared that golden voice’s sway O’er barefooted philosophers.
Our nipping climate hardly suits
The ripening of ideal fruits: 100 His theories vanquish us all summer,
But winter makes him dumb and dumber; To see him mid life’s needful things
Is something painfully bewildering; He seems an angel with clipt wings
Tied to a mortal wife and children, And by a brother seraph taken
In the act of eating eggs and bacon. Like a clear fountain, his desire
Exults and leaps toward the light, 110 In every drop it says ‘Aspire!’
Striving for more ideal height;
And as the fountain, falling thence, Crawls baffled through the common gutter, So, from his speech’s eminence,
He shrinks into the present tense,
Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.
Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds Not all of life that’s brave and wise is; He strews an ampler future’s seeds, 120 ‘Tis your fault if no harvest rises;
Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught That all he is and has is Beauty’s?
By soul the soul’s gains must be wrought, The Actual claims our coarser thought,
The Ideal hath its higher duties.
ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO
Can this be thou who, lean and pale,
With such immitigable eye
Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale, And note each vengeance, and pass by
Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance Cast backward one forbidden glance,
And saw Francesca, with child’s glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee
And with proud hands control its fiery prance?
With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow, And eye remote, that inly sees
Fair Beatrice’s spirit wandering now In some sea-lulled Hesperides,
Thou movest through the jarring street, Secluded from the noise of feet
By her gift-blossom in thy hand,
Thy branch of palm from Holy Land;– No trace is here of ruin’s fiery sleet.
Yet there is something round thy lips That prophesies the coming doom,
The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse Notches the perfect disk with gloom;
A something that would banish thee, And thine untamed pursuer be,
From men and their unworthy fates, Though Florence had not shut her gates, And Grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.
Ah! he who follows fearlessly
The beckonings of a poet-heart
Shall wander, and without the world’s decree, A banished man in field and mart;
Harder than Florence’ walls the bar Which with deaf sternness holds him far
From home and friends, till death’s release, And makes his only prayer for peace,
Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong war!
ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND’S CHILD
Death never came so nigh to me before, Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused Of calm and peace and safe forgetfulness, Of folded hands, closed eyes, and heart at rest, And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf, Of faults forgotten, and an inner place
Kept sacred for us in the heart of friends; But these were idle fancies, satisfied
With the mere husk of this great mystery, And dwelling in the outward shows of things. 10 Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams, Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom, With earth’s warm patch of sunshine well content: ‘Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities,
Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.
True is it that Death’s face seems stern and cold, When he is sent to summon those we love, 20 But all God’s angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death,
One after other lift their frowning masks, And we behold the seraph’s face beneath, All radiant with the glory and the calm
Of having looked upon the front of God. With every anguish of our earthly part
The spirit’s sight grows clearer; this was meant When Jesus touched the blind man’s lids with clay. Life is the jailer, Death the angel sent 30 To draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. He flings not ope the ivory gate of Rest,– Only the fallen spirit knocks at that,– But to benigner regions beckons us,
To destinies of more rewarded toil. In the hushed chamber, sitting by the dead, It grates on us to hear the flood of life Whirl rustling onward, senseless of our loss. The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps; 40 The locust’s shrill alarum stings the ear; Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farm, His cheery brothers, telling of the sun, Answer, till far away the joyance dies:
We never knew before how God had filled The summer air with happy living sounds; All round us seems an overplus of life,
And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still. It is most strange, when the great miracle Hath for our sakes been done, when we have had 50 Our inwardest experience of God,
When with his presence still the room expands, And is awed after him, that naught is changed, That Nature’s face looks unacknowledging, And the mad world still dances heedless on After its butterflies, and gives no sign. ‘Tis hard at first to see it all aright: In vain Faith blows her trump to summon back Her scattered troop: yet, through the clouded glass Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look 60 Undazzled on the kindness of God’s face; Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through.
It is no little thing, when a fresh soul And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scope For good, not gravitating earthward yet, But circling in diviner periods,
Are sent into the world,–no little thing, When this unbounded possibility
Into the outer silence is withdrawn. Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread 70 Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been
Alone can fill Desire’s cup to the brim!
How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child’s! He bends above _thy_ cradle now, or holds His warning finger out to be thy guide;
Thou art the nursling now; he watches thee Slow learning, one by one, the secret things Which are to him used sights of every day; He smiles to see thy wondering glances con 80 The grass and pebbles of the spirit-world, To thee miraculous; and he will teach
Thy knees their due observances of prayer. Children are God’s apostles, day by day
Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace; Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone. To me, at least, his going hence hath given Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies, And opened a new fountain in my heart
For thee, my friend, and all: and oh, if Death 90 More near approaches meditates, and clasps Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand, God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see That ’tis thine angel, who, with loving haste,