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

POEM READ AT CAMBRIDGE ON THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF WASHINGTON'S TAKING COMMAND OF THE AMERICAN ARMY, 3D JULY, 1775

I

1.

Words pass as wind, but where great deeds were done A power abides transfused from sire to son: The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear, That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run, With sure impulsion to keep honor clear. When, pointing down, his father whispers, 'Here, Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely great, Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere, Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.' Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust, 10 Once known to men as pious, learned, just, And one memorial pile that dares to last: But Memory greets with reverential kiss No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this, Touched by that modest glory as it past, O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed These hundred years its monumental shade.

2.

Of our swift passage through this scenery Of life and death, more durable than we, What landmark so congenial as a tree 20 Repeating its green legend every spring, And, with a yearly ring, Recording the fair seasons as they flee, Type of our brief but still-renewed mortality? We fall as leaves: the immortal trunk remains, Builded with costly juice of hearts and brains Gone to the mould now, whither all that be Vanish returnless, yet are procreant still In human lives to come of good or ill, And feed unseen the roots of Destiny. 30

II

1.

Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names They should eternize, but the place Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their fames Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace, Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims, That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames. This insubstantial world and fleet Seems solid for a moment when we stand On dust ennobled by heroic feet 40 Once mighty to sustain a tottering land, And mighty still such burthen to upbear, Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely were: Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot, Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot, No more a pallid image and a dream, But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.

2.

Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hint To raise long-buried days from tombs of print; 50 'Here stood he,' softly we repeat, And lo, the statue shrined and still In that gray minster-front we call the Past, Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill, Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit. It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last, Its features human with familiar light, A man, beyond the historian's art to kill, Or sculptor's to efface with patient chisel-blight.

3.

Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught 60 Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loom Present and Past commingle, fruit and bloom Of one fair bough, inseparably wrought Into the seamless tapestry of thought. So charmed, with undeluded eye we see In history's fragmentary tale Bright clues of continuity, Learn that high natures over Time prevail, And feel ourselves a link in that entail That binds all ages past with all that are to be. 70

III

1.

Beneath our consecrated elm A century ago he stood, Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood Whose red surge sought, but could not overwhelm The life foredoomed to wield our rough-hewn helm:— From colleges, where now the gown To arms had yielded, from the town, Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to see The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he. No need to question long; close-lipped and tall, 80 Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone To bridle others' clamors and his own, Firmly erect, he towered above them all, The incarnate discipline that was to free With iron curb that armed democracy.

2.

A motley rout was that which came to stare, In raiment tanned by years of sun and storm, Of every shape that was not uniform, Dotted with regimentals here and there; An array all of captains, used to pray 90 And stiff in fight, but serious drill's despair, Skilled to debate their orders, not obey; Deacons were there, selectmen, men of note In half-tamed hamlets ambushed round with woods, Ready to settle Freewill by a vote, But largely liberal to its private moods; Prompt to assert by manners, voice, or pen, Or ruder arms, their rights as Englishmen, Nor much fastidious as to how and when: Yet seasoned stuff and fittest to create 100 A thought-staid army or a lasting state: Haughty they said he was, at first; severe; But owned, as all men own, the steady hand Upon the bridle, patient to command, Prized, as all prize, the justice pure from fear, And learned to honor first, then love him, then revere. Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint And purpose clean as light from every selfish taint.

3.

Musing beneath the legendary tree, The years between furl off: I seem to see 110 The sun-flecks, shaken the stirred foliage through, Dapple with gold his sober buff and blue And weave prophetic aureoles round the head That shines our beacon now nor darkens with the dead. O man of silent mood, A stranger among strangers then, How art thou since renowned the Great, the Good, Familiar as the day in an the homes of men! The winged years, that winnow praise and blame, Blow many names out: they but fan to flame 120 The self-renewing splendors of thy fame.

IV

1.

How many subtlest influences unite, With spiritual touch of Joy or pain, Invisible as air and soft as light, To body forth that image of the brain We call our Country, visionary shape, Loved more than woman, fuller of fire than wine, Whose charm can none define, Nor any, though he flee it, can escape! All party-colored threads the weaver Time 130 Sets in his web, now trivial, now sublime, All memories, all forebodings, hopes and fears, Mountain and river, forest, prairie, sea, A hill, a rock, a homestead, field, or tree, The casual gleanings of unreckoned years, Take goddess-shape at last and there is She, Old at our birth, new as the springing hours, Shrine of our weakness, fortress of our powers, Consoler, kindler, peerless 'mid her peers, A force that 'neath our conscious being stirs, 140 A life to give ours permanence, when we Are borne to mingle our poor earth with hers, And all this glowing world goes with us on our biers.

2.

Nations are long results, by ruder ways Gathering the might that warrants length of days; They may be pieced of half-reluctant shares Welded by hammer-strokes of broad-brained kings, Or from a doughty people grow, the heirs Of wise traditions widening cautious rings; At best they are computable things, 150 A strength behind us making us feel bold In right, or, as may chance, in wrong; Whose force by figures may be summed and told, So many soldiers, ships, and dollars strong, And we but drops that bear compulsory part In the dumb throb of a mechanic heart; But Country is a shape of each man's mind Sacred from definition, unconfined By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind; An inward vision, yet an outward birth 160 Of sweet familiar heaven and earth; A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind Of wings within our embryo being's shell That wait but her completer spell To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare Life's nobler spaces and untarnished air.

3.

You, who hold dear this self-conceived ideal, Whose faith and works alone can make it real, Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrine Who lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine 170 And feeds the lamp of manhood more divine With fragrant oils of quenchless constancy. When all have done their utmost, surely he Hath given the best who gives a character Erect and constant, which nor any shock Of loosened elements, nor the forceful sea Of flowing or of ebbing fates, can stir From its deep bases in the living rock Of ancient manhood's sweet security: And this he gave, serenely far from pride 180 As baseness, boon with prosperous stars allied, Part of what nobler seed shall in our loins abide.

4.

No bond of men as common pride so strong, In names time-filtered for the lips of song, Still operant, with the primal Forces bound Whose currents, on their spiritual round, Transfuse our mortal will nor are gainsaid: These are their arsenals, these the exhaustless mines That give a constant heart in great designs; These are the stuff whereof such dreams are made 190 As make heroic men: thus surely he Still holds in place the massy blocks he laid 'Neath our new frame, enforcing soberly The self-control that makes and keeps a people free.

V

1.

Oh, for a drop of that Cornelian ink Which gave Agricola dateless length of days, To celebrate him fitly, neither swerve To phrase unkempt, nor pass discretion's brink, With him so statue-like in sad reserve, So diffident to claim, so forward to deserve! 200 Nor need I shun due influence of his fame Who, mortal among mortals, seemed as now The equestrian shape with unimpassioned brow, That paces silent on through vistas of acclaim.

2.

What figure more immovably august Than that grave strength so patient and so pure, Calm in good fortune, when it wavered, sure, That mind serene, impenetrably just, Modelled on classic lines so simple they endure? That soul so softly radiant and so white 210 The track it left seems less of fire than light, Cold but to such as love distemperature? And if pure light, as some deem, be the force That drives rejoicing planets on their course, Why for his power benign seek an impurer source? His was the true enthusiasm that burns long, Domestically bright, Fed from itself and shy of human sight, The hidden force that makes a lifetime strong, And not the short-lived fuel of a song. 220 Passionless, say you? What is passion for But to sublime our natures and control, To front heroic toils with late return, Or none, or such as shames the conqueror? That fire was fed with substance of the soul And not with holiday stubble, that could burn, Unpraised of men who after bonfires run, Through seven slow years of unadvancing war, Equal when fields were lost or fields were won, With breath of popular applause or blame, 230 Nor fanned nor damped, unquenchably the same, Too inward to be reached by flaws of idle fame.

3.

Soldier and statesman, rarest unison; High-poised example of great duties done Simply as breathing, a world's honors worn As life's indifferent gifts to all men born; Dumb for himself, unless it were to God, But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent, Tramping the snow to coral where they trod, Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content; 240 Modest, yet firm as Nature's self; unblamed Save by the men his nobler temper shamed; Never seduced through show of present good By other than unsetting lights to steer New-trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast mood More steadfast, far from rashness as from fear; Rigid, but with himself first, grasping still In swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will; Not honored then or now because he wooed The popular voice, but that he still withstood; 250 Broad-minded, higher-souled, there is but one Who was all this and ours, and all men's,—WASHINGTON.

4.

Minds strong by fits, irregularly great, That flash and darken like revolving lights, Catch more the vulgar eye unschooled to wait On the long curve of patient days and nights Bounding a whole life to the circle fair Of orbed fulfilment; and this balanced soul, So simple in its grandeur, coldly bare Of draperies theatric, standing there 260 In perfect symmetry of self-control, Seems not so great at first, but greater grows Still as we look, and by experience learn How grand this quiet is, how nobly stern The discipline that wrought through life-long throes That energetic passion of repose.

5.

A nature too decorous and severe, Too self-respectful in its griefs and joys, For ardent girls and boys Who find no genius in a mind so clear 270 That its grave depths seem obvious and near, Nor a soul great that made so little noise. They feel no force in that calm-cadenced phrase, The habitual full-dress of his well-bred mind, That seems to pace the minuet's courtly maze And tell of ampler leisures, roomier length of days, His firm-based brain, to self so little kind That no tumultuary blood could blind, Formed to control men, not amaze, Looms not like those that borrow height of haze: 280 It was a world of statelier movement then Than this we fret in, he a denizen Of that ideal Rome that made a man for men.

VI

1.

The longer on this earth we live And weigh the various Qualities of men, Seeing how most are fugitive, Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then, Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty Of plain devotedness to duty, 290 Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, But finding amplest recompense For life's ungarlanded expense In work done squarely and unwasted days. For this we honor him, that he could know How sweet the service and how free Of her, God's eldest daughter here below, And choose in meanest raiment which was she.

2.

Placid completeness, life without a fall From faith or highest aims, truth's breachless wall, 300 Surely if any fame can bear the touch, His will say 'Here!' at the last trumpet's call, The unexpressive man whose life expressed so much.

VII

1.

Never to see a nation born Hath been given to mortal man, Unless to those who, on that summer morn, Gazed silent when the great Virginian Unsheathed the sword whose fatal flash Shot union through the incoherent clash Of our loose atoms, crystallizing them 310 Around a single will's unpliant stem, And making purpose of emotion rash. Out of that scabbard sprang, as from its womb, Nebulous at first but hardening to a star. Through mutual share of sunburst and of gloom, The common faith that made us what we are.

2.

That lifted blade transformed our jangling clans, Till then provincial, to Americans, And made a unity of wildering plans; Here was the doom fixed: here is marked the date 320 When this New World awoke to man's estate, Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind: Nor thoughtless was the choice; no love or hate Could from its poise move that deliberate mind, Weighing between too early and too late, Those pitfalls of the man refused by Fate: His was the impartial vision of the great Who see not as they wish, but as they find. He saw the dangers of defeat, nor less The incomputable perils of success; 330 The sacred past thrown by, an empty rind; The future, cloud-land, snare of prophets blind; The waste of war, the ignominy of peace; On either hand a sullen rear of woes, Whose garnered lightnings none could guess, Piling its thunder-heads and muttering 'Cease!' Yet drew not back his hand, but gravely chose The seeming-desperate task whence our new nation rose.

3.

A noble choice and of immortal seed! Nor deem that acts heroic wait on chance 340 Or easy were as in a boy's romance; The man's whole life preludes the single deed That shall decide if his inheritance Be with the sifted few of matchless breed, Our race's sap and sustenance, Or with the unmotived herd that only sleep and feed. Choice seems a thing indifferent: thus or so, What matters it? The Fates with mocking face Look on inexorable, nor seem to know Where the lot lurks that gives life's foremost place. 350 Yet Duty's leaden casket holds it still, And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race. He chose, as men choose, where most danger showed, Nor ever faltered 'neath the load Of petty cares, that gall great hearts the most, But kept right on the strenuous up-hill road, Strong to the end, above complaint or boast: The popular tempest on his rock-mailed coast 360 Wasted its wind-borne spray, The noisy marvel of a day; His soul sate still in its unstormed abode.

VIII

Virginia gave us this imperial man Cast in the massive mould Of those high-statured ages old Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran; She gave us this unblemished gentleman: What shall we give her back but love and praise As in the dear old unestranged days 370 Before the inevitable wrong began? Mother of States and undiminished men, Thou gavest us a country, giving him, And we owe alway what we owed thee then: The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us agen Shines as before with no abatement dim, A great man's memory is the only thing With influence to outlast the present whim And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring. All of him that was subject to the hours 380 Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours: Across more recent graves, Where unresentful Nature waves Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod, Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God, We from this consecrated plain stretch out Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt As here the united North Poured her embrowned manhood forth In welcome of our savior and thy son. 390 Through battle we have better learned thy worth, The long-breathed valor and undaunted will, Which, like his own, the day's disaster done, Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still. Both thine and ours the victory hardly won; If ever with distempered voice or pen We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back, And for the dead of both don common black. Be to us evermore as thou wast then, As we forget thou hast not always been, 400 Mother of States and unpolluted men, Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!



AN ODE

FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1876

I

1.

Entranced I saw a vision in the cloud That loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky, Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the eye, Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasy In golden mist, an ever-shifting crowd: There, 'mid unreal forms that came and went In air-spun robes, of evanescent dye, A woman's semblance shone preeminent; Not armed like Pallas, not like Hera proud, But, as on household diligence intent, 10 Beside her visionary wheel she bent Like Arete or Bertha, nor than they Less queenly in her port; about her knee Glad children clustered confident in play: Placid her pose, the calm of energy; And over her broad brow in many a round (That loosened would have gilt her garment's hem), Succinct, as toil prescribes, the hair was wound In lustrous coils, a natural diadem. The cloud changed shape, obsequious to the whim 20 Of some transmuting influence felt in me, And, looking now, a wolf I seemed to see Limned in that vapor, gaunt and hunger-bold, Threatening her charge; resolve in every limb, Erect she flamed in mail of sun-wove gold, Penthesilea's self for battle dight; One arm uplifted braced a flickering spear, And one her adamantine shield made light; Her face, helm-shadowed, grew a thing to fear, And her fierce eyes, by danger challenged, took 30 Her trident-sceptred mother's dauntless look. 'I know thee now, O goddess-born!' I cried, And turned with loftier brow and firmer stride; For in that spectral cloud-work I had seen Her image, bodied forth by love and pride, The fearless, the benign, the mother-eyed, The fairer world's toil-consecrated queen.

2.

What shape by exile dreamed elates the mind Like hers whose hand, a fortress of the poor, No blood in vengeance spilt, though lawful, stains? 40 Who never turned a suppliant from her door? Whose conquests are the gains of all mankind? To-day her thanks shall fly on every wind, Unstinted, unrebuked, from shore to shore, One love, one hope, and not a doubt behind! Cannon to cannon shall repeat her praise, Banner to banner flap it forth in flame; Her children shall rise up to bless her name, And wish her harmless length of days, The mighty mother of a mighty brood, 50 Blessed in all tongues and dear to every blood, The beautiful, the strong, and, best of all, the good.

3.

Seven years long was the bow Of battle bent, and the heightening Storm-heaps convulsed with the throe Of their uncontainable lightning; Seven years long heard the sea Crash of navies and wave-borne thunder; Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee, And new stars were seen, a world's wonder; 60 Each by her sisters made bright, All binding all to their stations, Cluster of manifold light Startling the old constellations: Men looked up and grew pale: Was it a comet or star, Omen of blessing or bale. Hung o'er the ocean afar?

4.

Stormy the day of her birth: 69 Was she not born of the strong. She, the last ripeness of earth, Beautiful, prophesied long? Stormy the days of her prime: Hers are the pulses that beat Higher for perils sublime, Making them fawn at her feet. Was she not born of the strong? Was she not born of the wise? Daring and counsel belong Of right to her confident eyes: Human and motherly they, 81 Careless of station or race: Hearken! her children to-day Shout for the joy of her face.

II

1.

No praises of the past are hers, No fanes by hallowing time caressed, No broken arch that ministers To Time's sad instinct in the breast; She has not gathered from the years Grandeur of tragedies and tears, 90 Nor from long leisure the unrest That finds repose in forms of classic grace: These may delight the coming race Who haply shall not count it to our crime That we who fain would sing are here before our time. She also hath her monuments; Not such as stand decrepitly resigned To ruin-mark the path of dead events That left no seed of better days behind, The tourist's pensioners that show their scars 100 And maunder of forgotten wars; She builds not on the ground, but in the mind, Her open-hearted palaces For larger-thonghted men with heaven and earth at ease: Her march the plump mow marks, the sleepless wheel, The golden sheaf, the self-swayed commonweal; The happy homesteads hid in orchard trees Whose sacrificial smokes through peaceful air Rise lost in heaven, the household's silent prayer; What architect hath bettered these? 110 With softened eye the westward traveller sees A thousand miles of neighbors side by side, Holding by toil-won titles fresh from God The lands no serf or seigneur ever trod, With manhood latent in the very sod, Where the long billow of the wheatfield's tide Flows to the sky across the prairie wide, A sweeter vision than the castled Rhine, Kindly with thoughts of Ruth and Bible-days benign.

2.

O ancient commonwealths, that we revere 120 Haply because we could not know you near, Your deeds like statues down the aisles of Time Shine peerless in memorial calm sublime, And Athens is a trumpet still, and Rome; Yet which of your achievements is not foam Weighed with this one of hers (below you far In fame, and born beneath a milder star), That to Earth's orphans, far as curves the dome Of death-deaf sky, the bounteous West means home, With dear precedency of natural ties 130 That stretch from roof to roof and make men gently wise? And if the nobler passions wane, Distorted to base use, if the near goal Of insubstantial gain Tempt from the proper race-course of the soul That crowns their patient breath Whose feet, song-sandalled, are too fleet for Death, Yet may she claim one privilege urbane And haply first upon the civic roll, That none can breathe her air nor grow humane. 140

3.

Oh, better far the briefest hour Of Athens self-consumed, whose plastic power Hid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone; Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles crowd Whose fulgurous vans about the world had blown Triumphant storm and seeds of polity; Of Venice, fading o'er her shipless sea, Last iridescence of a sunset cloud; Than this inert prosperity, This bovine comfort in the sense alone! 150 Yet art came slowly even to such as those. Whom no past genius cheated of their own With prudence of o'ermastering precedent; Petal by petal spreads the perfect rose, Secure of the divine event; And only children rend the bud half-blown To forestall Nature in her calm intent: Time hath a quiver full of purposes Which miss not of their aim, to us unknown, And brings about the impossible with ease: 160 Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break From where in legend-tinted line The peaks of Hellas drink the morning's wine, To tremble on our lids with mystic sign Till the drowsed ichor in our veins awake And set our pulse in time with moods divine: Long the day lingered in its sea-fringed nest, Then touched the Tuscan hills with golden lance And paused; then on to Spain and France The splendor flew, and Albion's misty crest: 170 Shall Ocean bar him from his destined West? Or are we, then, arrived too late, Doomed with the rest to grope disconsolate, Foreclosed of Beauty by our modern date?

III

1.

Poets, as their heads grow gray, Look from too far behind the eyes, Too long-experienced to be wise In guileless youth's diviner way; Life sings not now, but prophesies; Time's shadows they no more behold, 180 But, under them, the riddle old That mocks, bewilders, and defies: In childhood's face the seed of shame, In the green tree an ambushed flame, In Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night, They, though against their will, divine, And dread the care-dispelling wine Stored from the Muse's mintage bright, By age imbued with second-sight. From Faith's own eyelids there peeps out, 190 Even as they look, the leer of doubt; The festal wreath their fancy loads With care that whispers and forebodes: Nor this our triumph-day can blunt Megaera's goads.

2.

Murmur of many voices in the air Denounces us degenerate, Unfaithful guardians of a noble fate, And prompts indifference or despair: Is this the country that we dreamed in youth, Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight, 200 Seed-field of simpler manners, braver truth, Where shams should cease to dominate In household, church, and state? Is this Atlantis? This the unpoisoned soil, Sea-whelmed for ages and recovered late, Where parasitic greed no more should coil Bound Freedom's stem to bend awry and blight What grew so fair, sole plant of love and light? Who sit where once in crowned seclusion sate The long-proved athletes of debate 210 Trained from their youth, as none thinks needful now? Is this debating club where boys dispute, And wrangle o'er their stolen fruit, The Senate, erewhile cloister of the few, Where Clay once flashed and Webster's cloudy brow Brooded those bolts of thought that all the horizon knew?

3.

Oh, as this pensive moonlight blurs my pines, Here while I sit and meditate these lines, To gray-green dreams of what they are by day, So would some light, not reason's sharp-edged ray, 220 Trance me in moonshine as before the flight Of years had won me this unwelcome right To see things as they are, or shall he soon, In the frank prose of undissembling noon!

4.

Back to my breast, ungrateful sigh! Whoever fails, whoever errs, The penalty be ours, not hers! The present still seems vulgar, seen too nigh; The golden age is still the age that's past: I ask no drowsy opiate 230 To dull my vision of that only state Founded on faith in man, and therefore sure to last. For, O my country, touched by thee, The gray hairs gather back their gold; Thy thought sets all my pulses free; The heart refuses to be old; The love is all that I can see. Not to thy natal-day belong Time's prudent doubt or age's wrong, But gifts of gratitude and song: Unsummoned crowd the thankful words, 241 As sap in spring-time floods the tree. Foreboding the return of birds, For all that thou hast been to me!

IV

1.

Flawless his heart and tempered to the core Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave, First left behind him the firm-footed shore, And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar, Steered for the Unknown which gods to mortals gave. Of thought and action the mysterious door, 250 Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave: Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun, And strange stars from beneath the horizon won, And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave: High-hearted surely he; But bolder they who first off-cast Their moorings from the habitable Past And ventured chartless on the sea Of storm-engendering Liberty: For all earth's width of waters is a span, 260 And their convulsed existence mere repose, Matched with the unstable heart of man, Shoreless in wants, mist-girt in all it knows, Open to every wind of sect or clan, And sudden-passionate in ebbs and flows.

2.

They steered by stars the elder shipmen knew, And laid their courses where the currents draw Of ancient wisdom channelled deep in law. The undaunted few Who changed the Old World for the New, 270 And more devoutly prized Than all perfection theorized The more imperfect that had roots and grew. They founded deep and well, Those danger-chosen chiefs of men Who still believed in Heaven and Hell, Nor hoped to find a spell, In some fine flourish of a pen, To make a better man Than long-considering Nature will or can, 280 Secure against his own mistakes, Content with what life gives or takes, And acting still on some fore-ordered plan, A cog of iron in an iron wheel, Too nicely poised to think or feel, Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal. They wasted not their brain in schemes Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, As if he must be other than he seems Because he was not what he should be here, 290 Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams: Yet herein they were great Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore, And wiser than the wisdom of the shelf, That they conceived a deeper-rooted state, Of hardier growth, alive from rind to core, By making man sole sponsor of himself.

3.

God of our fathers, Thou who wast, Art, and shalt be when those eye-wise who flout Thy secret presence shall be lost In the great light that dazzles them to doubt, 301 We, sprung from loins of stalwart men Whose strength was in their trust That Thou woudst make thy dwelling in their dust And walk with those a fellow-citizen Who build a city of the just, We, who believe Life's bases rest Beyond the probe of chemic test, Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near, Sure that, while lasts the immutable decree, 310 The land to Human Nature dear Shall not be unbeloved of Thee.



HEARTSEASE AND RUE



I. FRIENDSHIP

AGASSIZ

Come Dicesti egli ebbe? non viv' egli ancora? Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome?

I

1.

The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes, Confutes poor Hope's last fallacy of ease,— The distance that divided her from ill: Earth sentient seems again as when of old The horny foot of Pan Stamped, and the conscious horror ran Beneath men's feet through all her fibres cold: Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throe From underground of our night-mantled foe: 10 The flame-winged feet Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun, Are mercilessly fleet, And at a bound annihilate Ocean's prerogative of short reprieve; Surely ill news might wait, And man be patient of delay to grieve: Letters have sympathies And tell-tale faces that reveal, 20 To senses finer than the eyes. Their errand's purport ere we break the seal; They wind a sorrow round with circumstance To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance The inexorable face: But now Fate stuns as with a mace; The savage of the skies, that men have caught And some scant use of language taught, Tells only what he must,— 30 The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.

2.

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes, I scanned the festering news we half despise Yet scramble for no less, And read of public scandal, private fraud, Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud, Office made vile to bribe unworthiness, And all the unwholesome mess The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late To teach the Old World how to wait, 40 When suddenly, As happens if the brain, from overweight Of blood, infect the eye, Three tiny words grew lurid as I read, And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead. As when, beneath the street's familiar jar, An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far, Men listen and forebode, I hung my head, And strove the present to recall, As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall. 50

3.

Uprooted is our mountain oak, That promised long security of shade And brooding-place for many a winged thought; Not by Time's softly cadenced stroke With pauses of relenting pity stayed, But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed, From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught And in his broad maturity betrayed!

4.

Well might I, as of old, appeal to you, O mountains, woods, and streams, 60 To help us mourn him, for ye loved him too; But simpler moods befit our modern themes, And no less perfect birth of nature can, Though they yearn tow'rd him, sympathize with man. Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall; Answer ye rather to my call, Strong poets of a more unconscious day, When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why, Too much for softer arts forgotten since That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince, 70 And drown in music the heart's bitter cry! Lead me some steps in your directer way, Teach me those words that strike a solid root Within the ears of men; Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel, Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben, For he was masculine from head to heel. Nay, let himself stand undiminished by With those clear parts of him that will not die. Himself from out the recent dark I claim 80 To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame; To show himself, as still I seem to see, A mortal, built upon the antique plan, Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran, And taking life as simply as a tree! To claim my foiled good-by let him appear, Large-limbed and human as I saw him near, Loosed from the stiffening uniform of fame: And let me treat him largely; I should fear, (If with too prying lens I chanced to err, 90 Mistaking catalogue for character,) His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame. Nor would I scant him with judicial breath And turn mere critic in an epitaph; I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff That swells fame living, chokes it after death, And would but memorize the shining half Of his large nature that was turned to me: Fain had I joined with those that honored him With eyes that darkened because his were dim, 100 And now been silent: but it might not be.

II

1.

In some the genius is a thing apart, A pillared hermit of the brain, Hoarding with incommunicable art Its intellectual gain; Man's web of circumstance and fate They from their perch of self observe, Indifferent as the figures on a slate Are to the planet's sun-swung curve Whose bright returns they calculate; 110 Their nice adjustment, part to part, Were shaken from its serviceable mood By unpremeditated stirs of heart Or jar of human neighborhood: Some find their natural selves, and only then, In furloughs of divine escape from men, And when, by that brief ecstasy left bare, Driven by some instinct of desire, They wander worldward, 'tis to blink and stare, Like wild things of the wood about a fire, 120 Dazed by the social glow they cannot share; His nature brooked no lonely lair, But basked and bourgeoned in co-partnery, Companionship, and open-windowed glee: He knew, for he had tried, Those speculative heights that lure The unpractised foot, impatient of a guide, Tow'rd ether too attenuately pure For sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride, But better loved the foothold sure 130 Of paths that wind by old abodes of men Who hope at last the churchyard's peace secure, And follow time-worn rules, that them suffice, Learned from their sires, traditionally wise, Careful of honest custom's how and when; His mind, too brave to look on Truth askance, No more those habitudes of faith could share, But, tinged with sweetness of the old Swiss manse, Lingered around them still and fain would spare. Patient to spy a sullen egg for weeks, 140 The enigma of creation to surprise, His truer instinct sought the life that speaks Without a mystery from kindly eyes; In no self-spun cocoon of prudence wound, He by the touch of men was best inspired, And caught his native greatness at rebound From generosities itself had fired; Then how the heat through every fibre ran, Felt in the gathering presence of the man, While the apt word and gesture came unbid! 150 Virtues and faults it to one metal wrought, Fined all his blood to thought, And ran the molten man in all he said or did. All Tully's rules and all Quintilian's too He by the light of listening faces knew, And his rapt audience all unconscious lent Their own roused force to make him eloquent; Persuasion fondled in his look and tone; Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bring To find new charm in accents not her own; 160 Her coy constraints and icy hindrances Melted upon his lips to natural ease, As a brook's fetters swell the dance of spring. Nor yet all sweetness: not in vain he wore, Nor in the sheath of ceremony, controlled By velvet courtesy or caution cold, That sword of honest anger prized of old, But, with two-handed wrath, If baseness or pretension crossed his path, Struck once nor needed to strike more. 170

2.

His magic was not far to seek.— He was so human! Whether strong or weak, Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared, But sate an equal guest at every board: No beggar ever felt him condescend, No prince presume; for still himself he bare At manhood's simple level, and where'er He met a stranger, there he left a friend. How large an aspect! nobly un-severe, With freshness round him of Olympian cheer, 180 Like visits of those earthly gods he came; His look, wherever its good-fortune fell, Doubled the feast without a miracle, And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame; Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign; Amphitryon's gold-juice humanized to wine.

III

1.

The garrulous memories Gather again from all their far-flown nooks, Singly at first, and then by twos and threes, Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks 190 Thicken their twilight files Tow'rd Tintern's gray repose of roofless aisles: Once more I see him at the table's head When Saturday her monthly banquet spread To scholars, poets, wits, All choice, some famous, loving things, not names, And so without a twinge at others' fames; Such company as wisest moods befits, Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth Of undeliberate mirth, 200

Natures benignly mixed of air and earth, Now with the stars and now with equal zest Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.

2.

I see in vision the warm-lighted hall, The living and the dead I see again, And but my chair is empty; 'mid them all 'Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain: Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most, Of sense or spirit to the truly sane; 210 In this abstraction it were light to deem Myself the figment of some stronger dream; They are the real things, and I the ghost That glide unhindered through the solid door, Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair, And strive to speak and am but futile air, As truly most of us are little more.

3.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss, The latest parted thence, His features poised in genial armistice 220 And armed neutrality of self-defence Beneath the forehead's walled preeminence, While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach, Settles off-hand our human how and whence; The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears The infallible strategy of volunteers Making through Nature's walls its easy breach, And seems to learn where he alone could teach. Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fills As he our fireside were, our light and heat, 230 Centre where minds diverse and various skills Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet; I see the firm benignity of face, Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet, The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace, The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips While Holmes's rockets, curve their long ellipse, And burst in seeds of fire that burst again To drop in scintillating rain.

4.

There too the face half-rustic, half-divine, 240 Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine, Of him who taught us not to mow and mope About our fancied selves, but seek our scope In Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope, Content with our New World and timely bold To challenge the o'ermastery of the Old; Listening with eyes averse I see him sit Pricked with the cider of the Judge's wit (Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again), While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline 250 Curves sharper to restrain The merriment whose most unruly moods Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods Of silence-shedding pine: Hard by is he whose art's consoling spell Hath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel, His look still vernal 'mid the wintry ring Of petals that remember, not foretell, The paler primrose of a second spring.

5.

And more there are: but other forms arise 260 And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes: First he from sympathy still held apart By shrinking over-eagerness of heart, Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's sweep Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill, And steeped in doom familiar field and hill,— New England's poet, soul reserved and deep, November nature with a name of May, Whom high o'er Concord plains we laid to sleep, While the orchards mocked us in their white array 270 And building robins wondered at our tears, Snatched in his prime, the shape august That should have stood unbent 'neath fourscore years, The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust, All gone to speechless dust. And he our passing guest, Shy nature, too, and stung with life's unrest, Whom we too briefly had but could not hold, Who brought ripe Oxford's culture to our board, The Past's incalculable hoard, 280 Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old, Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet With immemorial lisp of musing feet; Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar's, Boy face, but grave with answerless desires, Poet in all that poets have of best, But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims, Who now hath found sure rest, Not by still Isis or historic Thames, Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me, 290 But, not misplaced, by Arno's hallowed brim, Nor scorned by Santa Croce's neighboring fames, Haply not mindless, wheresoe'er he be, Of violets that to-day I scattered over him, He, too, is there, After the good centurion fitly named, Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed, Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair, Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways, Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the praise.

6.

Yea truly, as the sallowing years 301 Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days, And that unwakened winter nears, 'Tis the void chair our surest guest receives, 'Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss, 'Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears; We count our rosary by the beads we miss: To me, at least, it seemeth so, An exile in the land once found divine, 310 While my starved fire burns low, And homeless winds at the loose casement whine Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.

IV

1.

Now forth into the darkness all are gone, But memory, still unsated, follows on, Retracing step by step our homeward walk, With many a laugh among our serious talk, Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide, The long red streamers from the windows glide, Or the dim western moon Rocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon, 321 And Boston shows a soft Venetian side In that Arcadian light when roof and tree, Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy; Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wide Shivered the winter stars, while all below, As if an end were come of human ill, The world was wrapt in innocence of snow And the cast-iron bay was blind and still; These were our poetry; in him perhaps 330 Science had barred the gate that lets in dream, And he would rather count the perch and bream Than with the current's idle fancy lapse; And yet he had the poet's open eye That takes a frank delight in all it sees, Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky, To him the life-long friend of fields and trees: Then came the prose of the suburban street, Its silence deepened by our echoing feet, And converse such as rambling hazard finds; 340 Then he who many cities knew and many minds, And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian forms Of misty memory, bade them live anew As when they shared earth's manifold delight, In shape, in gait, in voice, in gesture true, And, with an accent heightening as he warms, Would stop forgetful of the shortening night, Drop my confining arm, and pour profuse Much worldly wisdom kept for others' use, Not for his own, for he was rash and free, 350 His purse or knowledge all men's, like the sea. Still can I hear his voice's shrilling might (With pauses broken, while the fitful spark He blew more hotly rounded on the dark To hint his features with a Rembrandt light) Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck, Or Cuvier's taller shade, and many more Whom he had seen, or knew from others' sight, And make them men to me as ne'er before: Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred 360 Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea, German or French thrust by the lagging word, For a good leash of mother-tongues had he. At last, arrived at where our paths divide, 'Good night!' and, ere the distance grew too wide, 'Good night!' again; and now with cheated ear I half hear his who mine shall never hear.