That death within the sulphurous hostile lines, In the mere wreck of nobly pitched designs, Plucks heart’s-ease, and not rue. 40
Happy their end
Who vanish down life’s evening stream Placid as swans that drift in dream
Round the next river-bend!
Happy long life, with honor at the close, Friends’ painless tears, the softened thought of foes! And yet, like him, to spend
All at a gush, keeping our first faith sure From mid-life’s doubt and eld’s contentment poor, What more could Fortune send? 50
Right in the van,
On the red rampart’s slippery swell, With heart that beat a charge, he fell
Foeward, as fits a man;
But the high soul burns on to light men’s feet Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet; His life her crescent’s span
Orbs full with share in their undarkening days Who ever climbed the battailous steeps of praise Since valor’s praise began. 60
III
His life’s expense
Hath won him coeternal youth
With the immaculate prime of Truth; While we, who make pretence
At living on, and wake and eat and sleep, And life’s stale trick by repetition keep, Our fickle permanence
(A poor leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play Of busy idlesse ceases with our day)
Is the mere cheat of sense. 70
We bide our chance,
Unhappy, and make terms with Fate
A little more to let us wait;
He leads for aye the advance,
Hope’s forlorn-hopes that plant the desperate good For nobler Earths and days of manlier mood; Our wall of circumstance
Cleared at a bound, he flashes o’er the fight, A saintly shape of fame, to cheer the right And steel each wavering glance. 80
I write of one,
While with dim eyes I think of three; Who weeps not others fair and brave as he? Ah, when the fight is won,
Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn, (Thee! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn,) How nobler shall the sun
Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air, That thou bred’st children who for thee could dare And die as thine have done!
ON BOARD THE ’76
WRITTEN FOR MR. BRYANT’S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
NOVEMBER 3, 1884
Our ship lay tumbling in an angry sea, Her rudder gone, her mainmast o’er the side; Her scuppers, from the waves’ clutch staggering free, Trailed threads of priceless crimson through the tide; Sails, shrouds, and spars with pirate cannon torn, We lay, awaiting morn.
Awaiting morn, such morn as mocks despair; And she that bare the promise of the world. Within her sides, now hopeless, helmless, bare, At random o’er the wildering waters hurled; 10 The reek of battle drifting slow alee
Not sullener than we.
Morn came at last to peer into our woe, When lo, a sail! Mow surely help was nigh; The red cross flames aloft, Christ’s pledge; but no, Her black guns grinning hate, she rushes by And hails us:–‘Gains the leak! Ay, so we thought! Sink, then, with curses fraught!’
I leaned against my gun still angry-hot, And my lids tingled with the tears held back: 20 This scorn methought was crueller than shot: The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack, Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly far Than such fear-smothered war.
There our foe wallowed, like a wounded brute The fiercer for his hurt. What now were best? Once more tug bravely at the peril’s root, Though death came with it? Or evade the test If right or wrong in this God’s world of ours Be leagued with mightier powers? 30
Some, faintly loyal, felt their pulses lag With the slow beat that doubts and then despairs; Some, caitiff, would have struck the starry flag That knits us with our past, and makes us heirs Of deeds high-hearted as were ever done
‘Neath the all-seeing sun.
But there was one, the Singer of our crew, Upon whose head Age waved his peaceful sign, But whose red heart’s-blood no surrender knew; And couchant under brows of massive line, 40 The eyes, like guns beneath a parapet,
Watched, charged with lightnings yet.
The voices of the hills did his obey; The torrents flashed and tumbled in his song; He brought our native fields from far away, Or set us ‘mid the innumerable throng
Of dateless woods, or where we heard the calm Old homestead’s evening psalm.
But now he sang of faith to things unseen, Of freedom’s birthright given to us in trust; 50 And words of doughty cheer he spoke between, That made all earthly fortune seem as dust, Matched with that duty, old as Time and new, Of being brave and true.
We, listening, learned what makes the might of words,– Manhood to back them, constant as a star: His voice rammed home our cannon, edged our swords, And sent our boarders shouting; shroud and spar Heard him and stiffened; the sails heard, and wooed The winds with loftier mood. 60
In our dark hours he manned our guns again; Remanned ourselves from his own manhood’s stores; Pride, honor, country, throbbed through all his strain; And shall we praise? God’s praise was his before; And on our futile laurels he looks down, Himself our bravest crown.
ODE RECITED AT THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION
JULY 21, 1865
I
Weak-winged is song,
Nor aims at that clear-ethered height Whither the brave deed climbs for light: We seem to do them wrong,
Bringing our robin’s-leaf to deck their hearse Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse, Our trivial song to honor those who come With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire: 10 Yet sometimes feathered words are strong, A gracious memory to buoy up and save
From Lethe’s dreamless ooze, the common grave Of the unventurous throng.
II
To-day our Reverend Mother welcomes back Her wisest Scholars, those who understood The deeper teaching of her mystic tome,
And offered their fresh lives to make it good: No lore of Greece or Rome,
No science peddling with the names of things, 20 Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, Can lift our life with wings
Far from Death’s idle gulf that for the many waits, And lengthen out our dates
With that clear fame whose memory sings In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates: Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all! Not such the trumpet-call
Of thy diviner mood,
That could thy sons entice 30 From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest Of those half-virtues which the world calls best, Into War’s tumult rude;
But rather far that stern device The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood In the dim, unventured wood,
The VERITAS that lurks beneath
The letter’s unprolific sheath,
Life of whate’er makes life worth living, Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food, 40 One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving.
III
Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil Amid the dust of books to find her,
Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. Many in sad faith sought for her,
Many with crossed hands sighed for her; But these, our brothers, fought for her, At life’s dear peril wrought for her,
So loved her that they died for her, 50 Tasting the raptured fleetness
Of her divine completeness:
Their higher instinct knew
Those love her best who to themselves are true, And what they dare to dream of, dare to do; They followed her and found her
Where all may hope to find,
Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, But beautiful, with danger’s sweetness round her. Where faith made whole with deed 60
Breathes its awakening breath
Into the lifeless creed,
They saw her plumed and mailed,
With sweet, stern face unveiled.
And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.
IV
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last? Is earth too poor to give us 70
Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon
Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune’s fickle moon? The little that we see
From doubt is never free;
The little that we do
Is but half-nobly true;
With our laborious hiving
What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a fest of Fate’s contriving, 80 Only secure in every one’s conniving,
A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e’er degenerate,
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90 Ah, there is something here
Unfathomed by the cynic’s sneer,
Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night,
Something that leaps life’s narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; A seed of sunshine that can leaven
Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, And glorify our clay
With light from fountains elder than the Day; 100 A conscience more divine than we,
A gladness fed with secret tears, A vexing, forward-reaching sense
Of some more noble permanence;
A light across the sea,
Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years.
V
Whither leads the path
To ampler fates that leads?
Not down through flowery meads, 110 To reap an aftermath
Of youth’s vainglorious weeds,
But up the steep, amid the wrath
And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, Where the world’s best hope and stay
By battle’s flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,
Ere yet the sharp, decisive word
Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword 120 Dreams in its easeful sheath;
But some day the live coal behind the thought, Whether from Baael’s stone obscene,
Or from the shrine serene
Of God’s pure altar brought,
Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men: Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed 130 Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And cries reproachful: ‘Was it, then, my praise, And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth; Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase, The victim of thy genius, not its mate!’ Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field, So bountiful is Fate; 140 But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms and not to yield, This shows, methinks, God’s plan
And measure of a stalwart man,
Limbed like the old heroic breeds, Who stands self-poised on manhood’s solid earth, Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, Fed from within with all the strength he needs.
VI
Such was he, our Martyr-Chief, 150 Whom late the Nation he had led.
With ashes on her head,
Wept with the passion of an angry grief: Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating as by rote: 160
For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true, How beautiful to see
Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat of birth, 170 But by his clear-grained human worth,
And brave old wisdom of sincerity!
They knew that outward grace is dust; They could not choose but trust
In that sure-footed mind’s unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will
That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind. Thrusting to thin air o’er our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind; 180 Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here,
Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer
Could Nature’s equal scheme deface And thwart her genial will;
Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face. 190 I praise him not; it were too late;
And some innative weakness there must be In him who condescends to victory
Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait, Safe in himself as in a fate,
So always firmly he:
He knew to bide his time,
And can his fame abide,
Still patient in his simple faith sublime, Till the wise years decide.
Great captains, with their guns and drums, 201 Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes;
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower. Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man. Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American.
VII
Long as man’s hope insatiate can discern Or only guess some more inspiring goal 210 Outside of Self, enduring as the pole, Along whose course the flying axles burn Of spirits bravely pitched, earth’s manlier brood, Long as below we cannot find
The meed that stills the inexorable mind; So long this faith to some ideal Good,
Under whatever mortal names it masks, Freedom, Law, Country, this ethereal mood That thanks the Fates for their severer tasks, Feeling its challenged pulses leap, 220 While others skulk in subterfuges cheap, And, set in Danger’s van, has all the boon it asks, Shall win man’s praise and woman’s love, Shall be a wisdom that we set above
All other skills and gifts to culture dear, A virtue round whose forehead we inwreathe Laurels that with a living passion breathe When other crowns grow, while we twine them, sear. What brings us thronging these high rites to pay, And seal these hours the noblest of our year, 230 Save that our brothers found this better way?
VIII
We sit here in the Promised Land
That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk; But ’twas they won it, sword in hand,
Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk. We welcome back our bravest and our best;– Ah me! not all! some come not with the rest, Who went forth brave and bright as any here! I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, But the sad strings complain, 240
And will not please the ear:
I sweep them for a paean, but they wane Again and yet again
Into a dirge, and die away, in pain. In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, Dark to the triumph which they died to gain: Fitlier may others greet the living,
For me the past is unforgiving;
I with uncovered head 250
Salute the sacred dead,
Who went, and who return not.–Say not so! ‘Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, But the high faith that failed not by the way; Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave; No ban of endless night exiles the brave; And to the saner mind
We rather seem the dead that stayed behind. Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow! For never shall their aureoled presence lack: 260 I see them muster in a gleaming row,
With ever-youthful brows that nobler show; We find in our dull road their shining track; In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life’s unalterable good,
Of all our saintlier aspiration;
They come transfigured back,
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays 270 Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!
IX
But is there hope to save
Even this ethereal essence from the grave? What ever ‘scaped Oblivion’s subtle wrong Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of song? Before my musing eye
The mighty ones of old sweep by,
Disvoiced now and insubstantial things, As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings, Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust, 280 And many races, nameless long ago,
To darkness driven by that imperious gust Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow: O visionary world, condition strange,
Where naught abiding is but only Change, Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and range! Shall we to more continuance make pretence? Renown builds tombs, a life-estate is Wit; And, bit by bit,
The cunning years steal all from us but woe; 290 Leaves are we, whose decays no harvest sow. But, when we vanish hence,
Shall they lie forceless in the dark below, Save to make green their little length of souls, Or deepen pansies for a year or two,
Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods? Was dying all they had the skill to do?
That were not fruitless: but the Soul resents Such short-lived service, as if blind events Ruled without her, or earth could so endure; 300 She claims a more divine investiture
Of longer tenure than Fame’s airy rents; Whate’er she touches doth her nature share; Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air, Gives eyes to mountains blind,
Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind, And her clear trump slugs succor everywhere By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind;
For soul inherits all that soul could dare: Yea, Manhood hath a wider span 310 And larger privilege of life than man.
The single deed, the private sacrifice, So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears, Is covered up erelong from mortal eyes
With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years; But that high privilege that makes all men peers, That leap of heart whereby a people rise Up to a noble anger’s height,
And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright, That swift validity in noble veins, 320 Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, Of being set on flame
By the pure fire that flies all contact base But wraps its chosen with angelic might, These are imperishable gains,
Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, These hold great futures in their lusty reins And certify to earth a new imperial race.
X
Who now shall sneer?
Who dare again to say we trace 330 Our lines to a plebeian race?
Roundhead and Cavalier!
Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud; Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud,
They flit across the ear:
That is best blood that hath most iron in ‘t, To edge resolve with, pouring without stint For what makes manhood dear.
Tell us not of Plantagenets,
Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods crawl 340 Down from some victor in a border-brawl! How poor their outworn coronets,
Matched with one leaf of that plain civic wreath Our brave for honor’s blazon shall bequeath, Through whose desert a rescued Nation sets Her heel on treason, and the trumpet hears Shout victory, tingling Europe’s sullen ears With vain resentments and more vain regrets!
XI
Not in anger, not in pride,
Pure from passion’s mixture rude 350 Ever to base earth allied,
But with far-heard gratitude,
Still with heart and voice renewed, To heroes living and dear martyrs dead, The strain should close that consecrates our brave. Lift the heart and lift the head!
Lofty be its mood and grave,
Not without a martial ring,
Not without a prouder tread
And a peal of exultation: 360 Little right has he to sing
Through whose heart in such an hour Beats no march of conscious power,
Sweeps no tumult of elation!
‘Tis no Man we celebrate,
By his country’s victories great, A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, But the pith and marrow of a Nation
Drawing force from all her men,
Highest, humblest, weakest, all, 370 For her time of need, and then
Pulsing it again through them,
Till the basest can no longer cower, Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. Come back, then, noble pride, for ’tis her dower! How could poet ever tower,
If his passions, hopes, and fears, If his triumphs and his tears,
Kept not measure with his people? 380 Boom, cannon, boom to all the winds and waves! Clash out, glad bells, from every rocking steeple! Banners, adance with triumph, bend your staves! And from every mountain-peak
Let beacon-fire to answering beacon speak, Katahdin tell Monadnock, Whiteface he, And so leap on in light from sea to sea, Till the glad news be sent
Across a kindling continent,
Making earth feel more firm and air breathe braver: 390 ‘Be proud! for she is saved, and all have helped to save her! She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, She of the open soul and open door,
With room about her hearth for all mankind! The fire is dreadful in her eyes no more; From her bold front the helm she doth unbind, Sends all her handmaid armies back to spin, And bids her navies, that so lately hurled Their crashing battle, hold their thunders in, Swimming like birds of calm along the unharmful shore. 400 No challenge sends she to the elder world, That looked askance and hated; a light scorn Plays o’er her mouth, as round her mighty knees She calls her children back, and waits the morn Of nobler day, enthroned between her subject seas.’
XII
Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release! Thy God, in these distempered days,
Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of his ways, And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace! Bow down in prayer and praise! 410 No poorest in thy borders but may now
Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow. O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more! Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair O’er such sweet brows as never other wore, And letting thy set lips,
Freed from wrath’s pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, What words divine of lover or of poet
Could tell our love and make thee know it, 420 Among the Nations bright beyond compare? What were our lives without thee?
What all our lives to save thee?
We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee,
But ask whatever else, and we will dare!
L’ENVOI
TO THE MUSE
Whither? Albeit I follow fast,
In all life’s circuit I but find,
Not where thou art, but where thou wast, Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind!
I haunt the pine-dark solitudes,
With soft brown silence carpeted,
And plot to snare thee in the woods: Peace I o’ertake, but thou art fled!
I find the rock where thou didst rest, The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; 10 All Nature with thy parting thrills,
Like branches after birds new-flown; Thy passage hill and hollow fills
With hints of virtue not their own; In dimples still the water slips
Where thou hast dipt thy finger-tips; Just, just beyond, forever burn
Gleams of a grace without return;
Upon thy shade I plant my foot,
And through my frame strange raptures shoot; 20 All of thee but thyself I grasp;
I seem to fold thy luring shape,
And vague air to my bosom clasp,
Thou lithe, perpetual Escape!
One mask and then another drops,
And thou art secret as before;
Sometimes with flooded ear I list, And hear thee, wondrous organist,
From mighty continental stops
A thunder of new music pour; 30 Through pipes of earth and air and stone Thy inspiration deep is blown;
Through mountains, forests, open downs, Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns, Thy gathering fugue goes rolling on
From Maine to utmost Oregon;
The factory-wheels in cadence hum,
From brawling parties concords come; All this I hear, or seem to hear,
But when, enchanted, I draw near 40 To mate with words the various theme,
Life seems a whiff of kitchen steam, History an organ-grinder’s thrum,
For thou hast slipt from it and me And all thine organ-pipes left dumb,
Most mutable Perversity!
Not weary yet, I still must seek,
And hope for luck next day, next week; I go to see the great man ride,
Shiplike, the swelling human tide 50 That floods to bear him into port,
Trophied from Senate-hall and Court; Thy magnetism, I feel it there,
Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare, Making the Mob a moment fine
With glimpses of their own Divine,
As in their demigod they see
Their cramped ideal soaring free;
‘Twas thou didst bear the fire about, That, like the springing of a mine, 60 Sent up to heaven the street-long shout; Full well I know that thou wast here,
It was thy breath that brushed my ear; But vainly in the stress and whirl
I dive for thee, the moment’s pearl.
Through every shape thou well canst run, Proteus, ‘twixt rise and set of sun,
Well pleased with logger-camps in Maine As where Milan’s pale Duomo lies
A stranded glacier on the plain, 70 Its peaks and pinnacles of ice
Melted in many a quaint device,
And sees, above the city’s din,
Afar its silent Alpine kin:
I track thee over carpets deep
To wealth’s and beauty’s inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors
Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where browse the hay-field’s fragrant heats, Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; 80 I dog thee through the market’s throngs
To where the sea with myriad tongues Laps the green edges of the pier,
And the tall ships that eastward steer, Curtsy their farewells to the town,
O’er the curved distance lessening down: I follow allwhere for thy sake,
Touch thy robe’s hem, but ne’er o’ertake, Find where, scarce yet unmoving, lies,
Warm from thy limbs, thy last disguise; 90 But thou another shape hast donned,
And lurest still just, just beyond!
But here a voice, I know not whence,
Thrills clearly through my inward sense, Saying: ‘See where she sits at home
While thou in search of her dost roam! All summer long her ancient wheel
Whirls humming by the open door,
Or, when the hickory’s social zeal
Sets the wide chimney in a roar, 100 Close-nestled by the tinkling hearth,
It modulates the household mirth
With that sweet serious undertone
Of duty, music all her own;
Still as of old she sits and spins
Our hopes, our sorrows, and our sins; With equal care she twines the fates
Of cottages and mighty states;
She spins the earth, the air, the sea, The maiden’s unschooled fancy free, 110 The boy’s first love, the man’s first grief, The budding and the fall o’ the leaf;
The piping west-wind’s snowy care
For her their cloudy fleeces spare, Or from the thorns of evil times
She can glean wool to twist her rhymes; Morning and noon and eve supply
To her their fairest tints for dye, But ever through her twirling thread
There spires one line of warmest red, 120 Tinged from the homestead’s genial heart, The stamp and warrant of her art;
With this Time’s sickle she outwears, And blunts the Sisters’ baffled shears.
‘Harass her not: thy heat and stir
But greater coyness breed in her;
Yet thou mayst find, ere Age’s frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost,
Learning at last that Stygian Fate
Unbends to him that knows to wait. 130 The Muse is womanish, nor deigns
Her love to him that pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands
To him that wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of Manhood’s guild;
Pull down thy barns and greater build; The wood, the mountain, and the plain
Wave breast-deep with the poet’s grain; Pluck thou the sunset’s fruit of gold,
Glean from the heavens and ocean old; 140 From fireside lone and trampling street
Let thy life garner daily wheat;
The epic of a man rehearse,
Be something better than thy verse; Make thyself rich, and then the Muse
Shall court thy precious interviews, Shall take thy head upon her knee,
And such enchantment lilt to thee,
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow From farthest stars to grass-blades low, 150 And find the Listener’s science still
Transcends the Singer’s deepest skill!’
THE CATHEDRAL
* * * * *
To
MR. JAMES T. FIELDS
MY DEAR FIELDS:
Dr. Johnson’s sturdy self-respect led him to invent the Bookseller as a substitute for the Patron. My relations with you have enabled me to discover how pleasantly the Friend may replace the Bookseller. Let me record my sense of many thoughtful services by associating your name with a poem which owes its appearance in this form to your partiality.
Cordially yours,
J.R. LOWELL.
CAMBRIDGE, _November_ 29, 1869.
* * * * *
Far through the memory shines a happy day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense, And simply perfect from its own resource, As to a bee the new campanula’s
Illuminate seclusion swung in air.
Such days are not the prey of setting suns, Nor ever blurred with mist of afterthought; Like words made magical by poets dead,
Wherein the music of all meaning is The sense hath garnered or the soul divined, 10 They mingle with our life’s ethereal part, Sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore, By beauty’s franchise disenthralled of time.
I can recall, nay, they are present still, Parts of myself, the perfume of my mind, Days that seem farther off than Homer’s now Ere yet the child had loudened to the boy, And I, recluse from playmates, found perforce Companionship in things that not denied
Nor granted wholly; as is Nature’s wont, 20 Who, safe in uncontaminate reserve,
Lets us mistake our longing for her love, And mocks with various echo of ourselves.
These first sweet frauds upon our consciousness, That blend the sensual with its imaged world, These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn, Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thought Can overtake the rapture of the sense,
To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. 30 Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew
The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty’s acme hath a term as brief
As the wave’s poise before it break in pearl, Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely: at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, And that first passion beggars all behind, Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. 40 Who, seeing once, has truly seen again
The gray vague of unsympathizing sea That dragged his Fancy from her moorings back To shores inhospitable of eldest time,
Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered powers, Pitiless seignories in the elements,
Omnipotences blind that darkling smite, Misgave him, and repaganized the world?
Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, 50 Perplex the eye with pictures from within. This hath made poets dream of lives foregone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing half-revealed. Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous redbreast boding rain: The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm; But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him,
Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill 60 That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves between.
I know not how it is with other men,
Whom I but guess, deciphering myself; For me, once felt is so felt nevermore.
The fleeting relish at sensation’s brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine.
One spring I knew as never any since: All night the surges of the warm southwest Boomed intermittent through the wallowing elms, 70 And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm Startled with crocuses the sullen turf
And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song: One summer hour abides, what time I perched, Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, Denouncing me an alien and a thief:
One morn of autumn lords it o’er the rest, 80 When in the lane I watched the ash-leaves fall, Balancing softly earthward without wind, Or twirling with directer impulse down
On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost, While I grew pensive with the pensive year: And once I learned how marvellous winter was, When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, I creaked adventurous o’er the spangled crust That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly 90 In ghastly solitude about the pole,
And gleam relentless to the unsetting sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain
Were painted with these sovran images; And later visions seem but copies pale
From those unfading frescos of the past, Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me
Parted from Nature by the joy in her That doubtfully revealed me to myself. 100 Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate; And paradise was paradise the more,
Known once and barred against satiety.
What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel; The world’s a woman to our shifting mood, Feeling with us, or making due pretence
And therefore we the more persuade ourselves To make all things our thought’s confederates, 110 Conniving with us in whate’er we dream.
So when our Fancy seeks analogies,
Though she have hidden what she after finds, She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise. I find my own complexion everywhere;
No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon,
The rapture of its life made visible, The mystery of its yearning realized,
As the first babe to the first woman born; 120 No falcon ever felt delight of wings
As when, an eyas, from the stolid cliff Loosing himself, he followed his high heart To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy
It could transmute her darkness into pearl; What is the buxom peony after that,
With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush? 130 What the full summer to that wonder new?
But, if in nothing else, in us there is A sense fastidious hardly reconciled
To the poor makeshifts of life’s scenery, Where the same slide must double all its parts, Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre, I blame not in the soul this daintiness, Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird,
In things indifferent by sense purveyed; It argues her an immortality 140
And dateless incomes of experience, This unthrift housekeeping that will not brook A dish warmed-over at the feast of life, And finds Twice stale, served with whatever sauce. Nor matters much how it may go with me
Who dwell in Grub Street and am proud to drudge Where men, my betters, wet their crust with tears; Use can make sweet the peach’s shady side, That only by reflection tastes of sun.
But she, my Princess, who will sometimes deign 150 My garret to illumine till the walls,
Narrow and dingy, scrawled with hackneyed thought (Poor Richard slowly elbowing Plato out), Dilate and drape themselves with tapestries Nausikaa might have stooped o’er, while, between, Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, send Her only image on through deepening deeps With endless repercussion of delight,–
Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul, That sometimes almost gives me to believe 160 I might have been a poet, gives at least A brain dasaxonized, an ear that makes
Music where none is, and a keener pang Of exquisite surmise outleaping thought,– Her will I pamper in her luxury:
No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choice Shall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams, Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall be The invitiate firstlings of experience,
Vibrations felt but once and felt life long: 170 Oh, more than half-way turn that Grecian front Upon me, while with self-rebuke I spell, On the plain fillet that confines thy hair In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, The _Naught in overplus_, thy race’s badge!
One feast for her I secretly designed In that Old World so strangely beautiful To us the disinherited of eld,–
A day at Chartres, with no soul beside To roil with pedant prate my joy serene 180 And make the minster shy of confidence.
I went, and, with the Saxon’s pious care, First ordered dinner at the pea-green inn, The flies and I its only customers.
Eluding these, I loitered through the town, With hope to take my minster unawares
In its grave solitude of memory.
A pretty burgh, and such as Fancy loves For bygone grandeurs, faintly rumorous now Upon the mind’s horizon, as of storm 190 Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof,
That mingle with our mood, but not disturb. Its once grim bulwarks, tamed to lovers’ walks, Look down unwatchful on the sliding Eure, Whose listless leisure suits the quiet place, Lisping among his shallows homelike sounds At Concord and by Bankside heard before. Chance led me to a public pleasure-ground, Where I grew kindly with the merry groups, And blessed the Frenchman for his simple art 200 Of being domestic in the light of day.
His language has no word, we growl, for Home; But he can find a fireside in the sun,
Play with his child, make love, and shriek his mind, By throngs of strangers undisprivacied.
He makes his life a public gallery, Nor feels himself till what he feels comes back In manifold reflection from without;
While we, each pore alert with consciousness, Hide our best selves as we had stolen them, 210 And each bystander a detective were,
Keen-eyed for every chink of undisguise.
So, musing o’er the problem which was best,– A life wide-windowed, shining all abroad, Or curtains drawn to shield from sight profane The rites we pay to the mysterious I,–
With outward senses furloughed and head bowed I followed some fine instinct in my feet, Till, to unbend me from the loom of thought, Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes 220 Confronted with the minster’s vast repose. Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff Left inland by the ocean’s slow retreat, That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs, Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,
It rose before me, patiently remote From the great tides of life it breasted once, Hearing the noise of men as in a dream.
I stood before the triple northern port, 230 Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings, Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch, Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say, _Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this._
I seem to have heard it said by learned folk Who drench you with aesthetics till you feel As if all beauty were a ghastly bore, 240 The faucet to let loose a wash of words, That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore worse; But, being convinced by much experiment
How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies, I give thanks
For a new relish, careless to inquire My pleasure’s pedigree, if so it please, Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art.
The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, 250 The one thing finished in this hasty world, Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout
As if a miracle could be encored.
But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals half-divined as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern, 260 Imagination’s very self in stone!
With one long sigh of infinite release From pedantries past, present, or to come, I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth. Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream, Builders of aspiration incomplete,
So more consummate, souls self-confident, Who felt your own thought worthy of record In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop
Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, 270 After long exile, to the mother-tongue.
Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome
Of men invirile and disnatured dames That poison sucked from the Attic bloom decayed, Shrank with a shudder from the blue-eyed race Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, And from the dregs of Romulus express
Such wine as Dante poured, or he who blew Roland’s vain blast, or sang the Campeador In verse that clanks like armor in the charge, 280 Homeric juice, though brimmed in Odin’s horn. And they could build, if not the columned fane That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, Something more friendly with their ruder skies: The gray spire, molten now in driving mist, Now lulled with the incommunicable blue; The carvings touched to meaning new with snow, Or commented with fleeting grace of shade; The statues, motley as man’s memory,
Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, 290 History and legend meeting with a kiss
Across this bound-mark where their realms confine; The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow, Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer, Meet symbol of the senses and the soul,
And the whole pile, grim with the Northman’s thought Of life and death, and doom, life’s equal fee,– These were before me: and I gazed abashed, Child of an age that lectures, not creates, Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, 300 And twittering round the work of larger men, As we had builded what we but deface.
Far up the great bells wallowed in delight, Tossing their clangors o’er the heedless town, To call the worshippers who never came,
Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes. I entered, reverent of whatever shrine
Guards piety and solace for my kind Or gives the soul a moment’s truce of God, And shared decorous in the ancient rite 310 My sterner fathers held idolatrous.
The service over, I was tranced in thought: Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me, Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint, Or brick mock-pious with a marble front; Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof,
The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, Through which the organ blew a dream of storm, Though not more potent to sublime with awe And shut the heart up to tranquillity, 320 Than aisles to me familiar that o’erarch The conscious silences of brooding woods, Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk:, Yet here was sense of undefined regret,
Irreparable loss, uncertain what:
Was all this grandeur but anachronism, A shell divorced of its informing life,
Where the priest housed him like a hermit-crab, An alien to that faith of elder days
That gathered round it this fair shape of stone? 330 Is old Religion but a spectre now,
Haunting the solitude of darkened minds, Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day? Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt, Since Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite And stretched electric threads from mind to mind? Nay, did Faith build this wonder? or did Fear, That makes a fetish and misnames it God
(Blockish or metaphysic, matters not), Contrive this coop to shut its tyrant in, 340 Appeased with playthings, that he might not harm?
I turned and saw a beldame on her knees; With eyes astray, she told mechanic beads Before some shrine of saintly womanhood, Bribed intercessor with the far-off Judge: Such my first thought, by kindlier soon rebuked, Pleading for whatsoever touches life
With upward impulse: be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts,
In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles: 350 Blessed the natures shored on every side With landmarks of hereditary thought!
Thrice happy they that wander not life long Beyond near succor of the household faith, The guarded fold that shelters, not confines! Their steps find patience In familiar paths, Printed with hope by loved feet gone before Of parent, child, or lover, glorified
By simple magic of dividing Time.
My lids were moistened as the woman knelt, 360 And–was it will, or some vibration faint Of sacred Nature, deeper than the will?– My heart occultly felt itself in hers,
Through mutual intercession gently leagued.
Or was it not mere sympathy of brain? A sweetness intellectually conceived
In simpler creeds to me impossible? A juggle of that pity for ourselves
In others, which puts on such pretty masks And snares self-love with bait of charity? 370 Something of all it might be, or of none: Yet for a moment I was snatched away
And had the evidence of things not seen; For one rapt moment; then it all came back, This age that blots out life with question-marks, This nineteenth century with its knife and glass That make thought physical, and thrust far off The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old, To voids sparse-sown with alienated stars.
‘Tis irrecoverable, that ancient faith, 380 Homely and wholesome, suited to the time, With rod or candy for child-minded men:
No theologic tube, with lens on lens Of syllogism transparent, brings it near,– At best resolving some new nebula,
Or blurring some fixed-star of hope to mist. Science was Faith once; Faith were Science now, Would she but lay her bow and arrows by
And arm her with the weapons of the time. Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought. 390 For there’s no virgin-fort but self-respect, And Truth defensive hath lost hold on God. Shall we treat Him as if He were a child That knew not his own purpose? nor dare trust The Rock of Ages to their chemic tests,
Lest some day the all-sustaining base divine Should fail from under us, dissolved in gas? The armed eye that with a glance discerns In a dry blood-speck between ox and man
Stares helpless at this miracle called life, 400 This shaping potency behind the egg,
This circulation swift of deity,
Where suns and systems inconspicuous float As the poor blood-disks in our mortal veins. Each age must worship its own thought of God, More or less earthy, clarifying still
With subsidence continuous of the dregs; Nor saint nor sage could fix immutably
The fluent image of the unstable Best, Still changing in their very hands that wrought: 410 To-day’s eternal truth To-morrow proved
Frail as frost-landscapes on a window-pane. Meanwhile Thou smiledst, inaccessible,
At Thought’s own substance made a cage for Thought, And Truth locked fast with her own master-key; Nor didst Thou reck what image man might make Of his own shadow on the flowing world;
The climbing instinct was enough for Thee. Or wast Thou, then, an ebbing tide that left Strewn with dead miracle those eldest shores, 420 For men to dry, and dryly lecture on,
Thyself thenceforth incapable of flood? Idle who hopes with prophets to be snatched By virtue in their mantles left below;
Shall the soul live on other men’s report, Herself a pleasing fable of herself?
Man cannot be God’s outlaw if he would, Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense But Nature stall shall search some crevice out With messages of splendor from that Source 430 Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures. This life were brutish did we not sometimes Have intimation clear of wider scope,
Hints of occasion infinite, to keep The soul alert with noble discontent
And onward yearnings of unstilled desire; Fruitless, except we now and then divined A mystery of Purpose, gleaming through
The secular confusions of the world, Whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours, 440 No man can think nor in himself perceive, Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, Or on the hillside, always unforwarned.
A grace of being, finer than himself, That beckons and is gone,–a larger life Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse Of spacious circles luminous with mind,
To which the ethereal substance of his own Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, Touched to a sudden glory round the edge, 450 Who that hath known these visitations fleet Would strive to make them trite and ritual? I, that still pray at morning and at eve, Loving those roots that feed us from the past, And prizing more than Plato things I learned At that best academe, a mother’s knee,
Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt That perfect disenthralment which is God; Nor know I which to hold worst enemy, 460 Him who on speculation’s windy waste
Would turn me loose, stript of the raiment warm By Faith contrived against our nakedness, Or him who, cruel-kind, would fain obscure, With painted saints and paraphrase of God, The soul’s east-window of divine surprise, Where others worship I but look and long; For, though not recreant to my fathers’ faith, Its forms to me are weariness, and most
That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, 470 Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable, Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze. Words that have drawn transcendent meanings up From the best passion of all bygone time, Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse, Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed in martyr-fires, Can they, so consecrate and so inspired, By repetition wane to vexing wind?
Alas! we cannot draw habitual breath In the thin air of life’s supremer heights, 480 We cannot make each meal a sacrament,
Nor with our tailors be disbodied souls,– We men, too conscious of earth’s comedy, Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate, And only for great stakes can be sublime! Let us be thankful when, as I do here,
We can read Bethel on a pile of stones, And, seeing where God _has_ been, trust in Him.
Brave Peter Fischer there in Nuremberg, Moulding Saint Sebald’s miracles in bronze, 490 Put saint and stander-by in that quaint garb Familiar to him in his daily walk,
Not doubting God could grant a miracle Then and in Nuremberg, if so He would;
But never artist for three hundred years Hath dared the contradiction ludicrous
Of supernatural in modern clothes.
Perhaps the deeper faith that is to come Will see God rather in the strenuous doubt, Than in the creed held as an infant’s hand 500 Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein.
Say it is drift, not progress, none the less, With the old sextant of the fathers’ creed, We shape our courses by new-risen stars, And, still lip-loyal to what once was truth, Smuggle new meanings under ancient names, Unconscious perverts of the Jesuit, Time. Change is the mask that all Continuance wears To keep us youngsters harmlessly amused; Meanwhile some ailing or more watchful child, 510 Sitting apart, sees the old eyes gleam out, Stern, and yet soft with humorous pity too. Whilere, men burnt men for a doubtful point, As if the mind were quenchable with fire, And Faith danced round them with her war-paint on, Devoutly savage as an Iroquois;
Now Calvin and Servetus at one board Snuff in grave sympathy a milder roast,
And o’er their claret settle Comte unread. Fagot and stake were desperately sincere: 520 Our cooler martyrdoms are done in types; And flames that shine in controversial eyes Burn out no brains but his who kindles them. This is no age to get cathedrals built:
Did God, then, wait for one in Bethlehem? Worst is not yet: lo, where his coming looms, Of earth’s anarchic children latest born, Democracy, a Titan who hath learned
To laugh at Jove’s old-fashioned thunder-bolts,– Could he not also forge them, if he would? 530 He, better skilled, with solvents merciless, Loosened in air and borne on every wind, Saps unperceived: the calm Olympian height Of ancient order feels its bases yield,
And pale gods glance for help to gods as pale. What will be left of good or worshipful, Of spiritual secrets, mysteries,
Of fair religion’s guarded heritage, Heirlooms of soul, passed downward unprofaned From eldest Ind? This Western giant coarse, 540 Scorning refinements which he lacks himself, Loves not nor heeds the ancestral hierarchies, Each rank dependent on the next above
In ordinary gradation fixed as fate. King by mere manhood, nor allowing aught Of holier unction than the sweat of toil; In his own strength sufficient; called to solve, On the rough edges of society,
Problems long sacred to the choicer few, And improvise what elsewhere men receive 550 As gifts of deity; tough foundling reared Where every man’s his own Melchisedek,
How make him reverent of a King of kings? Or Judge self-made, executor of laws
By him not first discussed and voted on? For him no tree of knowledge is forbid,
Or sweeter if forbid. How save the ark, Or holy of holies, unprofaned a day
From his unscrupulous curiosity
That handles everything as if to buy, 560 Tossing aside what fabrics delicate
Suit not the rough-and-tumble of his ways? What hope for those fine-nerved humanities That made earth gracious once with gentler arts, Now the rude hands have caught the trick of thought And claim an equal suffrage with the brain?
The born disciple of an elder time,
(To me sufficient, friendlier than the new,) Who in my blood feel motions of the Past, I thank benignant nature most for this,– 570 A force of sympathy, or call it lack
Of character firm-planted, loosing me From the pent chamber of habitual self
To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought, Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that,
And through imagination to possess, As they were mine, the lives of other men. This growth original of virgin soil,
By fascination felt in opposites,
Pleases and shocks, entices and perturbs. 580 In this brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid, This backwoods Charlemagne of empires new, Whose blundering heel instinctively finds out The goutier foot of speechless dignities, Who, meeting Caesar’s self, would slap his back, Call him ‘Old Horse,’ and challenge to a drink, My lungs draw braver air, my breast dilates With ampler manhood, and I front both worlds, Of sense and spirit, as my natural fiefs, To shape and then reshape them as I will. 590 It was the first man’s charter; why not mine? How forfeit? when, deposed in other hands?
Thou shudder’st, Ovid? Dost in him forebode A new avatar of the large-limbed Goth,
To break, or seem to break, tradition’s clue. And chase to dreamland back thy gods dethroned? I think man’s soul dwells nearer to the east, Nearer to morning’s fountains than the sun; Herself the source whence all tradition sprang, Herself at once both labyrinth and clue, 600 The miracle fades out of history,
But faith and wonder and the primal earth Are born into the world with every child. Shall this self-maker with the prying eyes, This creature disenchanted of respect
By the New World’s new fiend, Publicity, Whose testing thumb leaves everywhere its smutch, Not one day feel within himself the need Of loyalty to better than himself,
That shall ennoble him with the upward look? 610 Shall he not catch the Voice that wanders earth, With spiritual summons, dreamed or heard, As sometimes, just ere sleep seals up the sense, We hear our mother call from deeps of Time, And, waking, find it vision,–none the less The benediction bides, old skies return, And that unreal thing, preeminent,
Makes air and dream of all we see and feel? Shall he divine no strength unmade of votes, Inward, impregnable, found soon as sought, 620 Not cognizable of sense, o’er sense supreme? Else were he desolate as none before.
His holy places may not be of stone, Nor made with hands, yet fairer far than aught By artist feigned or pious ardor reared, Fit altars for who guards inviolate
God’s chosen seat, the sacred form of man. Doubtless his church will be no hospital For superannuate forms and mumping shams, No parlor where men issue policies 630 Of life-assurance on the Eternal Mind,
Nor his religion but an ambulance
To fetch life’s wounded and malingerers in, Scorned by the strong; yet he, unconscious heir To the Influence sweet of Athens and of Rome, And old Judaea’s gift of secret fire,
Spite of himself shall surely learn to know And worship some ideal of himself,
Some divine thing, large-hearted, brotherly, Not nice in trifles, a soft creditor, 640 Pleased with his world, and hating only cant. And, if his Church be doubtful, it is sure That, in a world, made for whatever else, Not made for mere enjoyment, in a world
Of toil but half-requited, or, at best, Paid in some futile currency of breath,
A world of incompleteness, sorrow swift And consolation laggard, whatsoe’er
The form of building or the creed professed, The Cross, bold type of shame to homage turned, 650 Of an unfinished life that sways the world, Shall tower as sovereign emblem over all.
The kobold Thought moves with us when we shift Our dwelling to escape him; perched aloft On the first load of household-stuff he went: For, where the mind goes, goes old furniture. I, who to Chartres came to feed my eye
And give to Fancy one clear holiday, Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirred Buzzing o’er past and future with vain quest. 660 Here once there stood a homely wooden church, Which slow devotion nobly changed for this That echoes vaguely to my modern steps.
By suffrage universal it was built, As practised then, for all the country came From far as Rouen, to give votes for God, Each vote a block of stone securely laid Obedient to the master’s deep-mused plan. Will what our ballots rear, responsible
To no grave forethought, stand so long as this? 670 Delight like this the eye of after days
Brightening with pride that here, at least, were men Who meant and did the noblest thing they knew? Can our religion cope with deeds like this? We, too, build Gothic contract-shams, because Our deacons have discovered that it pays, And pews sell better under vaulted roofs Of plaster painted like an Indian squaw. Shall not that Western Goth, of whom we spoke, So fiercely practical, so keen of eye, 680 Find out, some day, that nothing pays but God, Served whether on the smoke-shut battle-field, In work obscure done honestly, or vote
For truth unpopular, or faith maintained To ruinous convictions, or good deeds
Wrought for good’s sake, mindless of heaven or hell? Shall he not learn that all prosperity,
Whose bases stretch not deeper than the sense, Is but a trick of this world’s atmosphere, A desert-born mirage of spire and dome, 690 Or find too late, the Past’s long lesson missed, That dust the prophets shake from off their feet Grows heavy to drag down both tower and wall? I know not; but, sustained by sure belief That man still rises level with the height Of noblest opportunities, or makes
Such, if the time supply not, I can wait. I gaze round on the windows, pride of France, Each the bright gift of some mechanic guild Who loved their city and thought gold well spent 700 To make her beautiful with piety;
I pause, transfigured by some stripe of bloom, And my mind throngs with shining auguries, Circle on circle, bright as seraphim,
With golden trumpets, silent, that await The signal to blow news of good to men.
Then the revulsion came that always comes After these dizzy elations of the mind:
And with a passionate pang of doubt I cried, ‘O mountain-born, sweet with snow-filtered air 710 From uncontaminate wells of ether drawn
And never-broken secrecies of sky,
Freedom, with anguish won, misprized till lost, They keep thee not who from thy sacred eyes Catch the consuming lust of sensual good And the brute’s license of unfettered will. Far from the popular shout and venal breath Of Cleon blowing the mob’s baser mind
To bubbles of wind-piloted conceit, Thou shrinkest, gathering up thy skirts, to hide 720 In fortresses of solitary thought
And private virtue strong in self-restraint. Must we too forfeit thee misunderstood,
Content with names, nor inly wise to know That best things perish of their own excess, And quality o’er-driven becomes defect?
Nay, is it thou indeed that we have glimpsed, Or rather such illusion as of old
Through Athens glided menadlike and Rome, A shape of vapor, mother of vain dreams 730 And mutinous traditions, specious plea
Of the glaived tyrant and long-memoried priest?’
I walked forth saddened; for all thought is sad, And leaves a bitterish savor in the brain, Tonic, it may be, not delectable,
And turned, reluctant, for a parting look At those old weather-pitted images
Of bygone struggle, now so sternly calm. About their shoulders sparrows had built nests, And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, 740 Now on a mitre poising, now a crown,
Irreverently happy. While I thought How confident they were, what careless hearts Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun, A larger shadow crossed; and looking up, I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers, The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air, With sidelong head that watched the joy below, Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts. Enduring Nature, force conservative, 750 Indifferent to our noisy whims! Men prate Of all heads to an equal grade cashiered On level with the dullest, and expect
(Sick of no worse distemper than themselves) A wondrous cure-all in equality;
They reason that To-morrow must be wise Because To-day was not, nor Yesterday,
As if good days were shapen of themselves, Not of the very lifeblood of men’s souls; Meanwhile, long-suffering, imperturbable, 760 Thou quietly complet’st thy syllogism,
And from the premise sparrow here below Draw’st sure conclusion of the hawk above, Pleased with the soft-billed songster, pleased no less With the fierce beak of natures aquiline.
Thou beautiful Old Time, now hid away In the Past’s valley of Avilion,
Haply, like Arthur, till thy wound be healed, Then to reclaim the sword and crown again! Thrice beautiful to us; perchance less fair 770 To who possessed thee, as a mountain seems To dwellers round its bases but a heap
Of barren obstacle that lairs the storm And the avalanche’s silent bolt holds back Leashed with a hair,–meanwhile some far-off clown, Hereditary delver of the plain,
Sees it an unmoved vision of repose, Nest of the morning, and conjectures there The dance of streams to idle shepherds’ pipes, And fairer habitations softly hung 780 On breezy slopes, or hid in valleys cool, For happier men. No mortal ever dreams
That the scant isthmus he encamps upon Between two oceans, one, the Stormy, passed, And one, the Peaceful, yet to venture on, Has been that future whereto prophets yearned For the fulfilment of Earth’s cheated hope, Shall be that past which nerveless poets moan As the lost opportunity of song.
O Power, more near my life than life itself 790 (Or what seems life to us in sense immured), Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, Share in the tree-top’s joyance, and conceive Of sunshine and wide air and winged things By sympathy of nature, so do I
Have evidence of Thee so far above, Yet in and of me! Rather Thou the root
Invisibly sustaining, hid in light, Not darkness, or in darkness made by us. If sometimes I must hear good men debate 800 Of other witness of Thyself than Thou,
As if there needed any help of ours To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, Blown out, as ’twere a candle, by men’s breath, My soul shall not be taken in their snare, To change her inward surety for their doubt Muffled from sight in formal robes of proof: While she can only feel herself through Thee, I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear,
Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 810 Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou, Walking Thy garden still, commun’st with men, Missed in the commonplace of miracle.
THREE MEMORIAL POEMS
‘Coscienza fusca
O della propria o dell’ altrui vergogna Pur sentira la tua parola brusca.’
If I let fall a word of bitter mirth
When public shames more shameful pardon won, Some have misjudged me, and my service done, If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth: Through veins that drew their life from Western earth Two hundred years and more my blood hath run In no polluted course from sire to son;
And thus was I predestined ere my birth To love the soil wherewith my fibres own Instinctive sympathies; yet love it so
As honor would, nor lightly to dethrone Judgment, the stamp of manhood, nor forego The son’s right to a mother dearer grown With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow.
* * * * *
To
E.L. GODKIN,
IN CORDIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS EMINENT SERVICE IN HEIGHTENING AND PURIFYING THE TONE OF OUR POLITICAL THOUGHT,
These Three Poems
ARE DEDICATED.
* * * * *
*** Readers, it is hoped, will remember that, by his Ode at the Harvard Commemoration, the author had precluded himself from many of the natural outlets of thought and feeling common to such occasions as are celebrated in these poems.
ODE
READ AT THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIGHT AT CONCORD BRIDGE
19TH APRIL, 1875
I
Who cometh over the hills,
Her garments with morning sweet,
The dance of a thousand rills
Making music before her feet?
Her presence freshens the air;
Sunshine steals light from her face; The leaden footstep of Care
Leaps to the tune of her pace,
Fairness of all that is fair,
Grace at the heart of all grace, 10 Sweetener of hut and of hall,
Bringer of life out of naught,
Freedom, oh, fairest of all
The daughters of Time and Thought!
II
She cometh, cometh to-day:
Hark! hear ye not her tread,
Sending a thrill through your clay, Under the sod there, ye dead,
Her nurslings and champions?
Do ye not hear, as she comes, 20 The bay of the deep-mouthed guns,
The gathering rote of the drums?
The belts that called ye to prayer, How wildly they clamor on her,
Crying, ‘She cometh! prepare
Her to praise and her to honor,
That a hundred years ago
Scattered here in blood and tears
Potent seeds wherefrom should grow
Gladness for a hundred years!’ 30
III
Tell me, young men, have ye seen
Creature of diviner mien
For true hearts to long and cry for, Manly hearts to live and die for?
What hath she that others want?
Brows that all endearments haunt,
Eyes that make it sweet to dare,
Smiles that cheer untimely death,
Looks that fortify despair,
Tones more brave than trumpet’s breath; 40 Tell me, maidens, have ye known
Household charm more sweetly rare,
Grace of woman ampler blown,
Modesty more debonair,
Younger heart with wit full grown?
Oh for an hour of my prime,
The pulse of my hotter years,
That I might praise her in rhyme
Would tingle your eyelids to tears, Our sweetness, our strength, and our star, 50 Our hope, our joy, and our trust,
Who lifted us out of the dust,
And made us whatever we are!
IV
Whiter than moonshine upon snow
Her raiment is, but round the hem
Crimson stained; and, as to and fro Her sandals flash, we see on them,
And on her instep veined with blue, Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet,
High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet, 60 Fit for no grosser stain than dew:
Oh, call them rather chrisms than stains, Sacred and from heroic veins!
For, in the glory-guarded pass,
Her haughty and far-shining head
She bowed to shrive Leonidas
With his imperishable dead;
Her, too, Morgarten saw,
Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw; She followed Cromwell’s quenchless star 70 Where the grim Puritan tread
Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar:
Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes
Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes.
V
Our fathers found her in the woods
Where Nature meditates and broods,
The seeds of unexampled things
Which Time to consummation brings
Through life and death and man’s unstable moods; They met her here, not recognized, 80 A sylvan huntress clothed in furs,
To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed, Nor dreamed what destinies were hers:
She taught them bee-like to create
Their simpler forms of Church and State; She taught them to endue
The past with other functions than it knew, And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate; Better than all, she fenced them in their need With iron-handed Duty’s sternest creed, 90 ‘Gainst Self’s lean wolf that ravens word and deed.
VI
Why cometh she hither to-day
To this low village of the plain
Far from the Present’s loud highway, From Trade’s cool heart and seething brain? Why cometh she? She was not far away.
Since the soul touched it, not in vain, With pathos of Immortal gain,
‘Tis here her fondest memories stay. She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge 100 Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps,
Dear to both Englands; near him he
Who wore the ring of Canace;
But most her heart to rapture leaps Where stood that era-parting bridge,
O’er which, with footfall still as dew, The Old Time passed into the New;
Where, as your stealthy river creeps, He whispers to his listening weeds
Tales of sublimest homespun deeds. 110 Here English law and English thought
‘Gainst the self-will of England fought; And here were men (coequal with their fate), Who did great things, unconscious they were great. They dreamed not what a die was cast
With that first answering shot; what then? There was their duty; they were men
Schooled the soul’s inward gospel to obey, Though leading to the lion’s den.
They felt the habit-hallowed world give way 120 Beneath their lives, and on went they,
Unhappy who was last.
When Buttrick gave the word,
That awful idol of the unchallenged Past, Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong, Fell crashing; if they heard it not,
Yet the earth heard,
Nor ever hath forgot,
As on from startled throne to throne, Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong, 130 A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown. Thrice venerable spot!
River more fateful than the Rubicon! O’er those red planks, to snatch her diadem, Man’s Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them, And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.
VII
Think you these felt no charms
In their gray homesteads and embowered farms? In household faces waiting at the door
Their evening step should lighten up no more? 140 In fields their boyish feet had known?
In trees their fathers’ hands had set, And which with them had grown,
Widening each year their leafy coronet? Felt they no pang of passionate regret
For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own? These things are dear to every man that lives, And life prized more for what it lends than gives. Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet;
And yet the enduring half they chose, 151 Whose choice decides a man life’s slave or king, The invisible things of God before the seen and known: Therefore their memory inspiration blows With echoes gathering on from zone to zone; For manhood is the one immortal thing
Beneath Time’s changeful sky,
And, where it lightened once, from age to age, Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, That length of days is knowing when to die. 160
VIII
What marvellous change of things and men! She, a world-wandering orphan then,
So mighty now! Those are her streams That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels
Of all that does, and all that dreams, Of all that thinks, and all that feels,
Through spaces stretched from sea to sea; By idle tongues and busy brains,
By who doth right, and who refrains, Here are our losses and our gains; 170 Our maker and our victim she.
IX
Maiden half mortal, half divine,
We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks Our hearts were filled with pride’s tumultuous wine; Better to-day who rather feels than thinks. Yet will some graver thoughts intrude,
And cares of sterner mood;
They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deeps Where discrowned empires o’er their ruins brood, 179 And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps, I hear the voice as of a mighty wind
From all heaven’s caverns rushing unconfined, ‘I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide With men whom dust of faction cannot blind To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind; With men by culture trained and fortified, Who bitter duty to sweet lusts prefer,
Fearless to counsel and obey.
Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword, Not to be drawn in passion or in play, 190 But terrible to punish and deter;
Implacable as God’s word,
Like it, a shepherd’s crook to them that blindly err. Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints, Offshoots of that one stock whose patient sense Hath known to mingle flux with permanence, Rated my chaste denials and restraints
Above the moment’s dear-paid paradise: Beware lest, shifting with Time’s gradual creep, The light that guided shine into your eyes. 200 The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep; Be therefore timely wise,
Nor laugh when this one steals, and that one lies, As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies, Till the deaf Fury comes your house to sweep!’ I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow;
Ye shall not be prophetic now,
Heralds of ill, that darkening fly
Between my vision and the rainbowed sky, Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak 210 From many a blasted bough
On Yggdrasil’s storm-sinewed oak,
That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou; Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast;
For I have loved as those who pardon most.
X
Away, ungrateful doubt, away!
At least she is our own to-day.
Break into rapture, my song,
Verses, leap forth in the sun,
Bearing the joyance along 220 Like a train of fire as ye run!
Pause not for choosing of words,
Let them but blossom and sing
Blithe as the orchards and birds
With the new coming of spring!
Dance in your jollity, bells;
Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums; Answer, ye hillside and dells;
Bow, all ye people! She comes,
Radiant, calm-fronted, as when 230 She hallowed that April day.
Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay. Softener and strengthener of men,
Freedom, not won by the vain,
Not to be courted in play,
Not to be kept without pain.
Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay,
Handmaid and mistress of all,
Kindler of deed and of thought,
Thou that to hut and to hall 240 Equal deliverance brought!
Souls of her martyrs, draw near,
Touch our dull lips with your fire, That we may praise without fear
Her our delight, our desire,
Our faith’s inextinguishable star,
Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, Our present, our past, our to be,
Who will mingle her life with our dust 249 And makes us deserve to be free!
UNDER THE OLD ELM