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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL | 1 |
I. | 1 |
II. | 3 |
III. | 4 |
IV. | 6 |
V. | 7 |
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL | 8 |
PRELUDE TO PART FIRST. | 10 |
PART FIRST. | 12 |
I. | 12 |
II. | 12 |
III. | 12 |
IV. | 12 |
V. | 13 |
VI. | 13 |
PART SECOND. | 15 |
I. | 15 |
II. | 15 |
III. | 15 |
IV. | 15 |
V. | 15 |
VI. | 16 |
VII. | 16 |
VIII. | 16 |
IX. | 16 |
X. | 16 |
I. | 17 |
II. | 17 |
III. | 18 |
IV. | 18 |
V. | 19 |
VI. | 19 |
VII. | 20 |
VIII. | 21 |
IX. | 22 |
X. | 23 |
XI. | 23 |
XII. | 24 |
AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE. | 26 |
THE FIRST SNOW-FALL. | 33 |
THE OAK. | 33 |
PROMETHEUS. | 34 |
TO W.L. GARRISON. | 41 |
WENDELL PHILLIPS. | 43 |
VILLA FRANCA. | 46 |
THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY. | 48 |
BEAVER BROOK. | 49 |
THE SHEPHERD OF KING ADMETUS. | 50 |
AL FRESCO. | 54 |
THE FOOT-PATH. | 55 |
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. | 58 |
PROSE AND POETRY. | 58 |
SEPARATE WORKS AND COMPILATIONS. | 58 |
FOR SCHOOL USE. | 59 |
Elmwood.
About half a mile from the Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the road leading to the old town of Watertown, is Elmwood, a spacious square house set amongst lilac and syringa bushes, and overtopped by elms. Pleasant fields are on either side, and from the windows one may look out on the Charles River winding its way among the marshes. The house itself is one of a group which before the war for independence belonged to Boston merchants and officers of the crown who refused to take the side of the revolutionary party. Tory Row was the name given to the broad winding road on which the houses stood. Great farms and gardens were attached to them, and some sign of their roomy ease still remains. The estates fell into the hands of various persons after the war, and in process of time Longfellow came to occupy Craigie House. Elmwood at that time was the property of the Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, and when Longfellow thus became his neighbor, James Russell Lowell was a junior in Harvard College. He was born at Elmwood, February 22, 1819. Any one who will read An Indian Summer Reverie will discover how affectionately Lowell dwelt on the scenes of nature and life amidst which he grew up. Indeed, it would be a pleasant task to draw from the full storehouse of his poetry the golden phrases with which he characterizes the trees, meadows, brooks, flowers, birds, and human companions that were so near to him in his youth and so vivid in his recollection. In his prose works also a lively paper, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, contains many reminiscences of his early life.
To know any one well it is needful to inquire into his ancestry, and two or three hints may be given of the currents that met in this poet. On his father’s side he came from a succession of New England men who for the previous three generations had been in professional life. The Lowells traced their descent from Percival Lowell,—a name which survives in the family,—of Bristol, England, who settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1639. The great-grandfather was a minister in Newburyport, one of those, as Dr. Hale says, “who preached sermons when young men went out to fight the French, and preached sermons again in memory of their death when they had been slain in battle.” The grandfather was John Lowell, a member of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts in 1780. It was he who introduced into the Bill of Rights a phrase from the Bill of Rights of Virginia, “All men are created free and equal,” with the purpose which it effected of setting free every man then held as a slave in Massachusetts. A son of John Lowell and brother of the Rev. Charles Lowell was Francis Cabot Lowell, who gave a great impetus to New England
[Illustration: Elmwood, Mr. Lowell’s home in Cambridge.]
Mrs. Harriet Spence Lowell, the poet’s mother, was of Scotch origin, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She is described as having “a great memory, an extraordinary aptitude for language, and a passionate fondness for ancient songs and ballads.” It pleased her to fancy herself descended from the hero of one of the most famous ballads, Sir Patrick Spens, and at any rate she made a genuine link in the Poetic Succession. In a letter to his mother, written in 1837, Lowell says: “I am engaged in several poetical effusions, one of which I have dedicated to you, who have always been the patron and encourager of my youthful muse.” The Russell in his name seems to intimate a strain of Jewish ancestry; at any rate Lowell took pride in the name on this account, for he was not slow to recognize the intellectual power of the Hebrew race. He was the youngest of a family of five, two daughters and three sons. An older brother who outlived him a short time, was the Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell, who wrote besides a novel, The New Priest in Conception Bay, which contains a delightful study of a Yankee, some poems, and a story of school-boy life.
Not long before his death, Lowell wrote to an English friend a description of Elmwood, and as he was very fond of the house in which he lived and died, it is agreeable to read words which strove to set it before the eyes of one who had never seen it. “’Tis a pleasant old house, just about twice as old as I am, four miles from Boston, in what was once the country and is now a populous suburb. But it still has some ten acres of open about it, and some fine old trees. When the worst comes to the worst (if I live so long) I shall still have four and a half acres left with the house, the rest belonging to my brothers and sisters or their heirs. It is a square house, with four rooms on a floor, like some houses of the Georgian era I have seen in English provincial towns, only they are of brick, and this is of wood. But it is solid with its heavy oaken beams, the spaces between which in the four outer walls are filled in with brick, though you mustn’t fancy a brick-and-timber house, for outwardly it is sheathed with wood. Inside there is much wainscot (of deal) painted white
Education.
His acquaintance with books and his schooling began early. He learned his letters at a dame school. Mr. William Wells, an Englishman, opened a classical school in one of the spacious Tory Row houses near Elmwood, and, bringing with him English public school thoroughness and severity, gave the boy a drilling in Latin, which he must have made almost a native speech to judge by the ease with which he handled it afterward in mock heroics. Of course he went to Harvard College. He lived at his father’s house, more than a mile away from the college yard; but this could have been no great privation to him, for he had the freedom of his friends’ rooms, and he loved the open air. The Rev. Edward Everett Hale has given a sketch of their common life in college. “He was a little older than I,” he says, “and was one class in advance of me. My older brother, with whom I lived in college, and he were most intimate friends. He had no room within the college walls, and was a great deal with us.
Lowell was but fifteen years old when he entered college in the class which graduated in 1838. He was a reader, as so many of his fellows were, and the letters which he wrote shortly after leaving college show how intent he had been on making acquaintance with the best things in literature. He began also to scribble verse, and he wrote both poems and essays for college magazines. His class chose him their poet for Class Day, and he wrote his poem; but he was careless about conforming to college regulations respecting attendance at morning prayers; and for this was suspended from college the last term of his last year, and not allowed to come back to read his poem. “I have heard in later years,” says Dr. Hale, “what I did not know then, that he rode down from Concord in a canvas-covered wagon, and peeped out through the chinks of the wagon to see the dancing around the tree. I fancy he received one or two visits from his friends in the wagon; but in those times it would have been treason to speak of this.” He was sent to Concord for his rustication, and so passed a few weeks of his youth amongst scenes dear to every lover of American letters.
First venture.
After his graduation he set about the study of law, and for a short time even was a clerk in a counting-room; but his bent was strongly toward literature. There was at that time no magazine of commanding importance in America, and young men were given to starting magazines with enthusiasm and very little other capital. Such a one was the Boston Miscellany, launched by Nathan Hale, Lowell’s college friend, and for this Lowell wrote gaily. It lived a year, and shortly after Lowell himself, with Robert Carter, essayed The Pioneer in 1843. It lived just three months; but in that time printed contributions by Lowell, Hawthorne, Whittier, Story, Poe, and Dr. Parsons,—a group which it would be hard to match in any of the little magazines that hop across the world’s path to-day. Lowell had already collected, in 1841, the poems which he had written and sometimes contributed to periodicals into a volume entitled A Year’s Life; but he retained
About the time of his marriage, he published two books which, by their character, show pretty well the divided interest of his life. His bent from the beginning was more decidedly literary than that of any contemporary American poet. That is to say, the history and art of literature divided his interest with the production of literature, and he carried the unusual gift of a rare critical power, joined to hearty spontaneous creation. It may indeed be guessed that the keenness of judgment and incisiveness of wit which characterize his examination of literature sometimes interfered with his poetic power, and made him liable to question his art when he would rather have expressed it unchecked. One of the two books was a volume of poems; the other was a prose work, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. He did not keep this book alive; but it is interesting as marking the enthusiasm of a young scholar treading a way then almost wholly neglected in America, and intimating a line of thought and study in which he afterward made most noteworthy venture. Another series of poems followed in 1848, and in the same year The Vision of Sir Launfal. Perhaps it was in reaction from the marked sentiment of his poetry that he issued now a jeu d’esprit, A Fable for Critics, in which he hit off, with a rough and ready wit, the characteristics of the writers of the day, not forgetting himself in these lines:
There is Lowell, who’s
striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms
tied together with rhyme;
He might get on alone, spite
of brambles and boulders,
But he can’t with that
bundle he has on his shoulders;
The top of the hill he will
ne’er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction
’twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that
would ring pretty well,
But he’d rather by half
make a drum of the shell,
And rattle away till he’s
old as Methusalem,
At the head of a march to
the last new Jerusalem.
This, of course, is but a half serious portrait of himself, and it touches but a single feature; others can say better that Lowell’s ardent nature showed itself in the series of satirical poems which made him famous, The Biglow Papers, written in a spirit of indignation and fine scorn, when the Mexican War was causing many Americans to blush with shame at the use of the country by a class for its own ignoble ends. Lowell and his wife, who brought a fervid anti-slavery temper as part of her marriage portion, were both contributors to the Liberty Bell; and Lowell was a frequent contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard, and was, indeed, for a while a corresponding editor. In June, 1846, there appeared one day in the Boston Courier a letter from Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jaalam to the editor, Hon. Joseph T. Buckingham, inclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. It was no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had many imitators; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea’s poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in at the appearance of something new in American literature. The force which Lowell displayed in these satires made his book at once a powerful ally of an anti-slavery sentiment, which heretofore had been ridiculed.
VERSE AND PROSE.
A year in Europe, 1851-1852, with his wife, whose health was then precarious, stimulated his scholarly interests, and gave substance to his study of Dante and Italian literature. In October, 1853, his wife died; she had borne him three children: the first-born, Blanche, died in infancy; the second, Walter, also died young; the third, a daughter, Mrs. Burnett, survived her parents. In 1855 he was chosen successor to Longfellow as Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literature, and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College. He spent two years in Europe in further preparation for the duties of his office, and in 1857 was again established in Cambridge, and installed in his academic chair. He married, also, at this time Miss Frances Dunlap, of Portland, Maine.
Lowell was now in his thirty-ninth year. As a scholar, in his professional work, he had acquired a versatile knowledge of the Romance languages, and was an adept in old French and Provencal poetry; he had given a course of twelve lectures on English poetry before the Lowell Institute in Boston, which had made a strong impression on the community, and his work on the series of British Poets in connection with Professor Child, especially his biographical sketch of Keats, had been recognized as of a high order. In poetry he had published the volumes already mentioned.
In these papers, when studying poetry, he was very alive to the personality of the poets, and it was the strong interest in humanity which led Lowell, when he was most diligent in the pursuit of literature, to apply himself also to history and politics. Several of his essays bear witness to this, such as Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries Ago, A Great Public Character (Josiah Quincy), Abraham Lincoln, and his great Political Essays. But the most remarkable of his writings of this order was the second series of The Biglow Papers, published during the war for the Union. In these, with the wit and fun of the earlier series, there was mingled a deeper strain of feeling and a larger tone of patriotism. The limitations of his style in these satires forbade the fullest expression of his thought and emotion; but afterward in a succession of poems, occasioned by the honors paid to student soldiers in Cambridge, the death of Agassiz, and the celebration of national anniversaries during the years 1875 and 1876, he sang in loftier, more ardent strains. The most famous of these poems was his noble Commemoration Ode.
PUBLIC LIFE.
It was at the close of this period, when he had done incalculable service to the Republic, that Lowell was called on to represent the country, first in Madrid, where he was sent in 1877, and then in London, to which he was transferred in 1880. Eight years were thus spent by him in the foreign service of the country. He had a good knowledge of the Spanish language and literature when he went to Spain; but he at once took pains to make his knowledge fuller and his accent more perfect, so that he could have intimate relations with the best Spanish men of the time. In England he was at once a most welcome guest, and was in great demand as a public speaker. No one can read his dispatches from Madrid and London without being struck by his sagacity, his readiness
The public life of Mr. Lowell made him more of a figure before the world. He received honors from societies and universities; he was decorated by the highest honors which Harvard could pay officially; and Oxford and Cambridge, St. Andrews and Edinburgh and Bologna, gave gowns. He established warm personal relations with Englishmen, and, after his release from public office, he made several visits to England. There, too, was buried his wife, who died in 1885. The closing years of his life in his own country, though touched with domestic loneliness and diminished by growing physical infirmities that predicted his death, were rich also with the continued expression of his large personality. He delivered the public address in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University; he gave a course of lectures on the Old English Dramatists before the Lowell Institute; he collected a volume of his poems; he wrote and spoke on public affairs; and, the year before his death, revised, rearranged, and carefully edited a definitive series of his writings in ten volumes. He died at Elmwood, August 12, 1891. Since his death three small volumes have been added to his collected writings, and Mr. Norton has published Letters of James Russell Lowell, in two volumes.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Lowell was in his thirtieth year when he wrote and published The Vision of Sir Launfal. It appeared when he had just dashed off his Fable for Critics, and when he was in the thick of the anti-slavery fight, writing poetry and prose for The Anti-Slavery Standard, and sending out his witty Biglow Papers. He had married four years before, and was living in the homestead at Elmwood, walking in the country about, and full of eagerness at the prospect which lay before him. In a letter to his friend Charles F. Briggs, written in December, 1848, he says: “Last night ... I walked to Watertown over the snow, with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as
It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking of Sir Launfal when he wrote this last sentence, yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson, who had lately been reviving the legends for the pleasure of English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the leveling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the Biglow Papers with Sir Launfal; it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.
The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested by Tennyson’s Sir Galahad, though Lowell had no doubt read Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The following is the note which accompanied The Vision when first published in 1848, and retained by Lowell in all subsequent editions:—
“According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word, and deed; but, one of the keepers having broken this condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a favorite enterprise of the Knights of Arthur’s court to go in search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most exquisite of his poems.
“The plot (if I may give thatPage 10
name to anything so slight) of the following poem is my own, and, to serve its purposes, I have enlarged the circle of competition in search of the miraculous cup in such a manner as to include not only other persons than the heroes of the Round Table, but also a period of time subsequent to the date of King Arthur’s reign.”
Over his keys the musing organist,
Beginning doubtfully
and far away,
First lets his fingers wander
as they list,
And builds a Bridge
from Dreamland for his lay:
Then, as the touch of his
loved instrument 5
Gives hope and
fervor, nearer draws his theme,
First guessed by faint auroral
flushes sent
Along the wavering
vista of his dream.
Not only around our infancy[1]
Doth heaven with all its splendors
lie; 10
Daily, with souls that cringe
and plot,
We Sinais climb and know it
not.
Over our manhood bend the
skies;
Against our fallen
and traitor lives
The great winds utter prophecies:
15
With our faint
hearts the mountain strives;
Its arms outstretched, the
druid wood
Waits with its
benedicite;
And to our age’s drowsy
blood
Still shouts the
inspiring sea. 20
Earth gets its price for what
Earth gives us;
The beggar is
taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who
comes and shrives us,
We bargain for
the graves we lie in;
[Footnote 1: In allusion to Wordsworth’s “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” in his ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.]
At the Devil’s booth
are all things sold, 25
Each ounce of dross costs
its ounce of gold;
For a cap and
bells our lives we pay,[2]
Bubbles we buy with a whole
soul’s tasking:
’T is heaven
alone that is given away,
’T is only God may be
had for the asking; 30
No price is set on the lavish
summer;
June may be had by the poorest
comer.
And what is so rare as a day
in June?
Then, if ever,
come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth
if it be in tune, 35
And over it softly
her warm ear lays:
Whether we look, or whether
we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see
it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of
might,
An instinct within
it that reaches and towers, 40
And, groping blindly above
it for light,
Climbs to a soul
in grass and flowers;
The flush of life may well
be seen
Thrilling back
over hills and valleys;
[Footnote 2: In the Middle Ages kings and noblemen had in their courts jesters to make sport for the company; as every one then wore a dress indicating his rank or occupation, so the jester wore a cap hung with bells. The fool of Shakespeare’s plays is the king’s jester at his best.]
Now is the high-tide of the
year,
And whatever of
life hath ebbed away
Comes flooding back with a
ripply cheer,
Into every bare
inlet and creek and bay; 60
Now the heart is so full that
a drop overfills it,
We are happy now because God
wills it;
No matter how barren the past
may have been,
’Tis enough for us now
that the leaves are green;
We sit in the warm shade and
feel right well 65
How the sap creeps up and
the blossoms swell;
We may shut our eyes, but
we cannot help knowing
That skies are clear and grass
is growing;
The breeze comes whispering
in our ear,
That dandelions are blossoming
near, 70
That maize has
sprouted, that streams are flowing,
That the river is bluer than
the sky,
That the robin is plastering
his house hard by;
And if the breeze kept the
good news back,
For other couriers we should
not lack; 75
We could guess
it all by yon heifer’s lowing,—
And hark! how clear bold chanticleer,
Warmed with the new wine of
the year,
Tells all in his
lusty crowing!
Joy comes, grief goes, we
know not how; 80
Everything is happy now,
Everything is
upward striving;
’T is as easy now for
the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or
skies to be blue,—
’T is the
natural way of living:
85
Who knows whither the clouds
have fled?
In the unscarred
heaven they leave no wake,
And the eyes forget the tears
they have shed,
The heart forgets
its sorrow and ache;
The soul partakes of the season’s
youth, 90
And the sulphurous
rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep ’neath a silence
pure and smooth,
Like burnt-out
craters healed with snow.
What wonder if Sir Launfal
now
Remembered the keeping of
his vow? 95
“My golden spurs now
bring to me,
And bring to me
my richest mail,
For to-morrow I go over land
and sea,
In search of the
Holy Grail;
Shall never a bed for me be
spread, 100
Nor shall a pillow be under
my head,
Till I begin my vow to keep;
Here on the rushes will I
sleep,
And perchance there may come
a vision true
Ere day create the world anew.”
105
Slowly Sir Launfal’s
eyes grew dim,
Slumber fell like
a cloud on him,
And into his soul the vision
flew.
The crows flapped over by
twos and threes,
In the pool drowsed the cattle
up to their knees, 110
The little birds
sang as if it were
The one day of
summer in all the year,
And the very leaves seemed
to sing on the trees:
The castle alone in the landscape
lay
Like an outpost of winter,
dull and gray: 115
’Twas the proudest hall
in the North Countree,
And never its gates might
opened be,
Save to lord or lady of high
degree;
Summer besieged it on every
side,
But the churlish stone her
assaults defied; 120
She could not scale the chilly
wall,
Though around it for leagues
her pavilions tall
Stretched left and right,
Over the hills and out of
sight;
Green and broad
was every tent, 125
And out of each
a murmur went
Till the breeze fell off at
night.
The drawbridge dropped with
a surly clang,
And through the dark arch
a charger sprang,
Bearing Sir Launfal, the maiden
knight, 130
In his gilded mail, that flamed
so bright
It seemed the dark castle
had gathered all
Those shafts the fierce sun
had shot over its wall
In his siege of
three hundred summers long,
And, binding them all in one
blazing sheaf, 135
Had cast them
forth: so, young and strong,
And lightsome as a locust-leaf,
Sir Launfal flashed forth
in his unscarred mail,
To seek in all climes for
the Holy Grail.
It was morning on hill and
stream and tree, 140
And morning in
the young knight’s heart;
Only the castle moodily
Rebuffed the gifts of the
sunshine free,
And gloomed by
itself apart;
The season brimmed all other
things up 145
Full as the rain fills the
pitcher-plant’s cup.
As Sir Launfal made morn through the darksome gate, He was ’ware of a leper, crouched by the same, Who begged with his hand and moaned as he sate; And a loathing over Sir Launfal came; 150 The sunshine went out of his soul with a thrill, The flesh ’neath his armor ’gan shrink and crawl, And midway its leap his heart stood still Like a frozen waterfall; For this man, so foul and bent of stature, 155 Rasped harshly against his dainty nature, And seemed the one blot on the summer morn,— So he tossed him a piece of gold in scorn.
The leper raised not the gold
from the dust:
“Better
to me the poor man’s crust,
160
Better the blessing of the
poor,
Though I turn me empty from
his door;
That is no true alms which
the hand can hold;
He gives nothing but worthless
gold
Who gives from
a sense of duty; 165
But he who gives but a slender
mite,
And gives to that which is
out of sight,
That thread of
the all-sustaining Beauty
Which runs through all and
doth all unite,—
The hand cannot clasp the
whole of his alms, 170
The heart outstretches its
eager palms,
For a god goes with it and
makes it store
To the soul that was starving
in darkness before.”
PRELUDE TO PART SECOND.
Down swept the chill wind
from the mountain peak,[3]
From the snow
five thousand summers old;
175
On open wold and hill-top
bleak
It had gathered
all the cold,
And whirled it like sleet
on the wanderer’s cheek;
It carried a shiver everywhere
From the unleafed boughs and
pastures bare; 180
The little brook heard it
and built a roof
’Neath which he could
house him, winter-proof;
All night by the white stars
frosty gleams
He groined his arches and
matched his beams;
Slender and clear were his
crystal spars 185
As the lashes of light that
trim the stars;
He sculptured every summer
delight
In his halls and chambers
out of sight;
Sometimes his tinkling waters
slipt
Down through a frost-leaved
forest-crypt, 190
Long, sparkling aisles of
steel-stemmed trees
Bending to counterfeit a breeze;
Sometimes the roof no fretwork
knew
But silvery mosses that downward
grew;
Sometimes it was carved in
sharp relief 195
With quaint arabesques of
ice-fern leaf;
[Footnote 3: Note the different moods that are indicated by the two preludes. The one is of June, the other of snow and winter. By these preludes the poet, like an organist, strikes a key which he holds in the subsequent parts.]
[Illustration: As Sir Launfal Made Morn Through the Darksome Gate.]
Sometimes it was simply smooth
and clear
For the gladness of heaven
to shine through, and here
He had caught the nodding
bulrush-tops
And hung them thickly with
diamond-drops, 200
That crystalled the beams
of moon and sun,
And made a star of every one:
No mortal builder’s
most rare device[4]
Could match this winter-palace
of ice;
’Twas as if every image
that mirrored lay 205
In his depths serene through
the summer day,[5]
Each fleeting shadow of earth
and sky,
Lest the happy
model should be lost,
Had been mimicked in fairy
masonry
By the elfin builders
of the frost. 210
Within the hall are song and
laughter,
The cheeks of
Christmas grow red and jolly,
And sprouting is every corbel
and rafter
With lightsome
green of ivy and holly;
Through the deep gulf of the
chimney wide 215
Wallows the Yule-log’s
roaring tide
The broad flame-pennons droop
and flap
And belly and
tug as a flag in the wind;
Like a locust shrills the
imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death
in its galleries blind; 220
And swift little troops of
silent sparks,
Now pausing, now
scattering away as in fear,
Go threading the soot-forest’s
tangled darks
Like herds of
startled deer.
But the wind without was eager
and sharp, 225
Of Sir Launfal’s gray
hair it makes a harp,
And
rattles and wrings
The
icy strings,
Singing, in dreary
monotone,
A Christmas carol
of its own, 230
Whose burden still,
as he might guess,
Was—“Shelterless,
shelterless, shelterless!”
The voice of the seneschal
flared like a torch
As he shouted the wanderer
away from the porch,
And he sat in the gateway
and saw all night 235
The great hall-fire,
so cheery and bold,
Through the window-slits
of the castle old,
Build out its piers of ruddy
light
Against the drift
of the cold.
[Footnote 4: The Empress of Russia, Catherine II., in a magnificent freak, built a palace of ice, which was a nine-days’ wonder. Cowper has given a poetical description of it in The Task, Book V. lines 131-176.]
[Footnote 5: The Yule-log was anciently a huge log burned at the feast of Juul (pronounced Yule) by our Scandinavian ancestors in honor of the god Thor. Juul-tid (Yule-time) corresponded in time to Christmas tide, and when Christian festivities took the place of pagan, many ceremonies remained. The great log, still called the Yule-log, was dragged in and burned in the fireplace after Thor had been forgotten.]
There was never a leaf on
bush or tree, 240
The bare boughs rattled shudderingly;
The river was dumb and could
not speak,
For the weaver
Winter its shroud had spun,
A single crow on the tree-top
bleak
From his shining
feathers shed off the cold sun; 245
Again it was morning, but
shrunk and cold,
As if her veins were sapless
and old,
And she rose up decrepitly
For a last dim look at earth
and sea.
Sir Launfal turned from his
own hard gate, 250
For another heir in his earldom
sate;
An old, bent man, worn out
and frail,
He came back from seeking
the Holy Grail;
Little he recked of his earldom’s
loss,
No more on his surcoat was
blazoned the cross, 255
But deep in his soul the sign
he wore,
The badge of the suffering
and the poor.
Sir Launfal’s raiment
thin and spare
Was idle mail ’gainst
the barbed air,
For it was just at the Christmas
time; 260
So he mused, as he sat, of
a sunnier clime,
And sought for a shelter from
cold and snow
In the light and warmth of
long-ago;
He sees the snake-like caravan
crawl
O’er the edge of the
desert, black and small, 265
Then nearer and nearer, till,
one by one,
He can count the camels in
the sun,
As over the red-hot sands
they pass
To where, in its slender necklace
of grass,
The little spring laughed
and leapt in the shade, 270
And with its own self like
an infant played,
And waved its signal of palms.
“For Christ’s
sweet sake, I beg an alms;”—
The happy camels may reach
the spring,
But Sir Launfal sees only
the grewsome thing, 275
The leper, lank as the rain-blanched
bone,
That cowers beside him, a
thing as lone
And white as the ice-isles
of Northern seas
In the desolate horror of
his disease.
And Sir Launfal said,—“I
behold in thee 280
An image of Him who died on
the tree;
Thou also hast had thy crown
of thorns,—
Thou also hast had the world’s
buffets and scorns,—
And to thy life were not denied
The wounds in the hands and
feet and side; 285
Mild Mary’s Son, acknowledge
me;
Behold, through him, I give
to Thee!”
Then the soul of the leper
stood up in his eyes
And looked at
Sir Launfal, and straightway he
Remembered in what a haughtier
guise 290
He had flung an
alms to leprosie,
When he girt his young life
up in gilded mail
And set forth in search of
the Holy Grail.
The heart within him was ashes
and dust;
He parted in twain his single
crust, 295
He broke the ice on the streamlet’s
brink,
And gave the leper to eat
and drink:
’T was a mouldy crust
of coarse brown bread,
’T was water
out of a wooden bowl,—
Yet with fine wheaten bread
was the leper fed, 300
And ’t was
red wine he drank with his thirsty soul.
[Illustration: So he Mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime.]
As Sir Launfal mused with
a downcast face,
A light shone round about
the place;
The leper no longer crouched
at his side,
But stood before him glorified,
305
Shining and tall and fair
and straight
As the pillar that stood by
the Beautiful Gate,—
Himself the Gate whereby men
can
Enter the temple of God in
Man.
His words were shed softer
than leaves from the pine, 310
And they fell on Sir Launfal
as snows on the brine,
That mingle their softness
and quiet in one
With the shaggy unrest they
float down upon;
And the voice that was calmer
than silence said,
“Lo it is I, be not
afraid! 315
In many climes, without avail,
Thou hast spent thy life for
the Holy Grail;
Behold, it is here,—this
cup which thou
Didst fill at the streamlet
for Me but now;
This crust is My body broken
for thee, 320
This water His blood that
died on the tree;
The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s
need:
Not what we give, but what
we share,—
For the gift without the giver
is bare; 325
Who gives himself with his
alms feeds three,—
Himself, his hungering neighbor,
and Me.”
Sir Launfal awoke as from
a swound:—
“The Grail in my castle
here is found!
Hang my idle armor up on the
wall, 330
Let it be the spider’s
banquet-hall;
He must be fenced with stronger
mail
Who would seek and find the
Holy Grail.”
The castle gate stands open
now,
And the wanderer
is welcome to the hall 335
As the hangbird is to the
elm-tree bough;
No longer scowl
the turrets tall,
The Summer’s long siege
at last is o’er;
When the first poor outcast
went in at the door,
She entered with him in disguise,
340
And mastered the fortress
by surprise;
There is no spot she loves
so well on ground,
She lingers and smiles there
the whole year round;
The meanest serf on Sir Launfal’s
land
Has hall and bower at his
command; 345
And there’s no poor
man in the North Countree
But is lord of the earldom
as much as he.
ODE RECITED AT THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION.
[On the 21st of July, 1865, Harvard University welcomed back those of its students and graduates who had fought in the war for the Union. By exercises in the church and at the festival which followed, the services of the dead and the living were commemorated. It was on this occasion that Mr. Lowell recited the following ode.]
Weak-winged is song,
Nor aims at that clear-ethered height
Whither the brave deed climbs for light:
We seem to do them wrong,
Bringing our robin’s-leaf to deck their
hearse 5
Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse,
Our trivial song to honor those who come
With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum,
And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire,
Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire:
10
Yet sometimes feathered words are strong,
A gracious memory to buoy up and save
From Lethe’s dreamless ooze, the common
grave
Of the unventurous throng.
To-day our Reverend Mother welcomes
back 15
Her wisest Scholars, those who understood
The deeper teaching of her mystic tome,
And offered their fresh lives to make it good:
No lore of Greece or Rome,
No science peddling with the names of things,
20
Or reading stars to find inglorious fates,
Can lift our life with wings
Far from Death’s idle gulf that for the
many waits,
And lengthen out our dates
With that clear fame whose memory sings
25
In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates:
Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all!
Not such the trumpet-call
Of thy diviner mood,
That could thy sons entice
30
From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest
Of those half-virtues which the world calls best,
Into War’s tumult rude;
But rather far that stern device
The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood
35
In the dim, unventured wood,
The VERITAS that lurks beneath[6]
The letter’s unprolific sheath,
Life of whate’er makes life worth living,
Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food,
40
One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving.
Many loved Truth, and lavished
life’s best oil
Amid the dust
of books to find her,
Content at last, for guerdon
of their toil,
With the cast
mantle she hath left behind her.
45
Many
in sad faith sought for her,
Many
with crossed hands sighed for her;
But
these, our brothers, fought for her,
At
life’s dear peril wrought for her,
So
loved her that they died for her,
50
Tasting
the raptured fleetness
Of
her divine completeness
Their
higher instinct knew
Those love her best who to
themselves are true,
And what they dare to dream
of, dare to do; 55
They
followed her and found her
Where
all may hope to find,
Not in the ashes of the burnt-out
mind,
But beautiful, with danger’s
sweetness round her.
Where faith made
whole with deed 60
Breathes its awakening
breath
Into the lifeless
creed,
They saw her plumed
and mailed,
With sweet, stern
face unveiled,
And all-repaying eyes, look
proud on them in death. 65
[Footnote 6: An early emblem of Harvard College was a shield with Veritas (truth) upon three open books. This device is still used.]
Our slender life runs rippling
by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?
Is earth too poor to give us
70
Something to live for here that shall outlive
us?
Some more substantial boon
Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune’s
fickle moon?
The little that we see
From doubt is never free;
75
The little that we do
Is but half-nobly true;
With our laborious hiving
What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
Life seems a jest of Fate’s contriving,
80
Only secure in every one’s conniving,
A long account of nothings paid with loss,
Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
After our little hour of strut and rave,
With all our pasteboard passions and desires,
85
Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave.
But stay! no age was e’er degenerate,
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
For in our likeness still we shape our fate.
90
Ah, there is something here
Unfathomed by the cynic’s sneer,
Something that gives our feeble light
A high immunity from Night,
Something that leaps life’s narrow bars
95
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;
Whither leads the path
To ampler fates that leads?
Not down through flowery meads,
110
To reap an aftermath
Of youth’s vainglorious weeds;
But up the steep, amid the wrath
And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,
Where the world’s best hope and stay
115
By battle’s flashes gropes a desperate way,
And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds.
Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,
Ere yet the sharp, decisive word
Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword
120
Dreams in its easeful sheath;
But some day the live coal behind the thought,
Whether from Baal’s stone obscene,
Or from the shrine serene
Of God’s pure altar brought,
125
Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen
Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,
And, helpless in the fiery passion caught,
Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men:
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed
130
Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,
And cries reproachful: “Was it, then,
my praise,
And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;
Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase,
135
The victim of thy genius, not its mate!”
Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is Fate;
140
But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God’s plan
And measure of a stalwart man,
145
Limbed like the old heroic breeds,
Who stands self-poised on manhood’s solid
earth;
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,
Fed from within with all the strength he needs.
Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,
150
Whom
late the Nation he had led,
With
ashes on her head,
Wept with the passion of an
angry grief:
Forgive me, if from present
things I turn
To speak what in my heart
will beat and burn, 155
Long as man’s
hope insatiate can discern
Or
only guess some more inspiring goal
210
Outside
of Self, enduring as the pole,
Along whose course
the flying axles burn
Of spirits bravely-pitched,
earth’s manlier brood;
Long
as below we cannot find
The meed that
stills the inexorable mind;
215
So long this faith
to some ideal Good,
Under whatever
mortal name it masks,
Freedom, Law,
Country, this ethereal mood
That thanks the Fates for
their severer tasks,
Feeling its challenged
pulses leap, 220
While others skulk
in subterfuges cheap,
And, set in Danger’s
van, has all the boon it asks,
Shall win man’s
praise and woman’s love,
Shall be a wisdom
that we set above
All other skills and gifts
to culture dear, 225
A virtue round
whose forehead we enwreathe
Laurels that with
a living passion breathe
When other crowns grow, while
we twine them, sear.
What brings us
thronging these high rites to pay,
And seal these hours the noblest
of our year, 230
Save that our
brothers found this better way?
We sit here in the Promised Land
That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk;
But ’t was they won it, sword in hand,
Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk.[7]
235
We welcome back our bravest and our best;—
Ah me! not all! some come not with the rest,
Who went forth brave and bright as any here!
I strive to mix some gladness with my strain,
But the sad strings complain,
240
And will not please the ear:
I sweep them for a paean, but they wane
Again and yet again
Into a dirge, and die away in pain.
In these brave ranks I only see the gaps,
245
Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps,
Dark to the triumph which they died to gain:
Fitlier may others greet the living,
For me the past is unforgiving;
I with uncovered head
250
Salute the sacred dead,
Who went, and who return not.—Say not
so!
’Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay,[8]
But the high faith that failed not by the way;
Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave;[9]
255
No bar of endless night exiles the brave;
And to the saner mind
We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.
Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow!
For never shall their aureoled presence lack:
260
I see them muster in a gleaming row,
With ever-youthful brows that nobler show;
We find in our dull road their shining track;
In every nobler mood
[Footnote 7: See Shakespeare, King Henry IV. Pt. I Act II Sc. 3. “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”]
[Footnote 8: See the Book of Numbers, chapter xiii.]
[Footnote 9: Compare Gray’s line in Elegy in a Country Churchyard. “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”]
But is there hope to save
Even this ethereal essence from the grave?
What ever ’scaped Oblivion’s subtle
wrong
Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of
song 275
Before my musing eye
The mighty ones of old sweep by,
Disvoiced now and insubstantial things,
As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings,
Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust,
280
And many races, nameless long ago,
To darkness driven by that imperious gust
Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow:
O visionary world, condition strange,
Where naught abiding is but only Change,
285
Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift
and range!
Shall we to more continuance make pretence?
Renown builds tombs; a life-estate is Wit;
And, bit by bit,
The cunning years steal all from us but woe:
290
Leaves are we, whose decays no harvest sow.
But, when we vanish hence,
Shall they lie forceless in the dark below,
Save to make green their little length of sods,
Or deepen pansies for a year or two,
295
Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods?
Was dying all they had the skill to do?
That were not fruitless: but the Soul resents
Such short-lived service, as if blind events
Ruled without her, or earth could so endure;
300
She claims a more divine investiture
Of longer tenure than Fame’s airy rents;
Whate’er she touches doth her nature share;
Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air,
Gives eyes to mountains blind,
Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind,
305
And her clear trump sings succor everywhere
By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind,
For soul inherits all that soul could dare:
Yea, Manhood hath a wider span
And larger privilege of life than man.
310
The single deed, the private sacrifice,
So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears,
Is covered up ere long from mortal eyes
With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years;
But that high privilege that makes all men peers,
Who now shall sneer?
Who dare again to say we trace
Our lines to a plebeian race?
330
Roundhead and Cavalier!
Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud;
Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud,
They flit across the ear:
That is best blood that hath most iron in ’t.
335
To edge resolve with, pouring without stint
For what makes manhood dear.
Tell us not of Plantagenets,
Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods crawl
Down from some victor in a border-brawl!
340
How poor their outworn coronets,
Matched with one leaf of that plain civic wreath
Our brave for honor’s blazon shall bequeath,
Through whose desert a rescued Nation sets
Her heel on treason, and the trumpet hears
345
Shout victory, tingling Europe’s sullen
ears
With vain resentments and more vain regrets!
Not
in anger, not in pride,
Pure
from passion’s mixture rude,
Ever
to base earth allied,
350
But
with far-heard gratitude,
Still
with heart and voice renewed,
To heroes living
and dear martyrs dead,
The strain should close that
consecrates our brave.
Lift the heart
and lift the head! 355
Lofty
be its mood and grave,
Not
without a martial ring,
Not
without a prouder tread
And
a peal of exultation:
Little
right has he to sing
360
Through
whose heart in such an hour
Beats
no march of conscious power,
Sweeps
no tumult of elation!
’Tis
no Man we celebrate,
By
his country’s victories great,
365
A hero half, and
half the whim of Fate,
But
the pith and marrow of a Nation
Drawing
force from all her men,
Highest,
humblest, weakest, all,
For
her time of need, and then
370
Pulsing
it again through them,
Till the basest can no longer
cower,
Feeling his soul spring up
Bow down, dear Land, for thou
hast found release! 405
Thy God, in these
distempered days,
Hath taught thee
the sure wisdom of His ways,
And through thine enemies
hath wrought thy peace!
Bow
down in prayer and praise!
No poorest in thy borders
but may now 410
Lift to the juster skies a
man’s enfranchised brow,
O Beautiful! my Country! ours
once more!
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled
hair
O’er such sweet brows
as never other wore,
And
letting thy set lips,
415
Freed
from wrath’s pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile
lay bare,
What words divine of lover
or of poet
Could tell our love and make
thee know it,
Among the Nations bright beyond
compare? 420
What
were our lives without thee?
What
all our lives to save thee?
We
reck not what we gave thee;
We
will not dare to doubt thee,
But ask whatever else, and
we will dare! 425
ON BOARD THE ’76.
WRITTEN FOR MR. BRYANT’S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY.
NOVEMBER 3, 1864.
[After the disastrous battle of Bull Run, Congress authorized the creation of an army of 500,000, and the expenditure of $500,000,000. The affair of the Trent had partially indicated the temper of the English government, and the people of the United States were thoroughly roused to a sense of the great task which lay before them. Mr. Bryant, at this time, not only gave strong support to the Union through his paper The Evening Post of New York, but wrote two lyrics which had a profound effect. One of these, entitled Not Yet, was addressed to those of the Old World who were secretly or openly desiring the downfall of the republic. The other, Our Country’s Call, was a thrilling appeal for recruits. It is to this time and these two poems that Mr. Lowell refers in the lines that follow.]
Our ship lay tumbling in an
angry sea,
Her rudder gone,
her mainmast o’er the side;
Her scuppers, from the waves’
clutch staggering free,
Trailed threads
of priceless crimson through the tide;
Sails, shrouds, and spars
with pirate cannon torn, 5
We
lay, awaiting morn.
Awaiting morn, such morn as
mocks despair;
And she that bare
the promise of the world
Within her sides, now hopeless,
helmless, bare,
At random o’er
the wildering waters hurled;
10
The reek of battle drifting
slow alee
Not
sullener than we.
Morn came at last to peer
into our woe,
When lo, a sail!
Now surely help was nigh;
The red cross flames aloft,
Christ’s pledge; but no,[10] 15
Her black guns
grinning hate, she rushes by
And hails us:—“Gains
the leak! Ay, so we thought!
Sink,
then, with curses fraught!”
I leaned against my gun still
angry-hot,
And my lids tingled
with the tears held back; 20
This scorn methought was crueller
than shot:
The manly death-grip
in the battle-wrack,
Yard-arm to yard-arm, were
more friendly far
Than
such fear-smothered war.
There our foe wallowed, like
a wounded brute 25
The fiercer for
his hurt. What now were best?
Once more tug bravely at the
peril’s root,
Though death came
with it? Or evade the test
If right or wrong in this
God’s world of ours
Be
leagued with higher powers?
30
Some, faintly loyal, felt
their pulses lag
With the slow
beat that doubts and then despairs;
Some, caitiff, would have
struck the starry flag
That knits us
with our past, and makes us heirs
Of deeds high-hearted as were
ever done 35
’Neath
the all-seeing sun.
[Footnote 10: The red cross is the British flag.]
But there was one, the Singer
of our crew,
Upon whose head
Age waved his peaceful sign,
But whose red heart’s-blood
no surrender knew;
And couchant under
brows of massive line, 40
The eyes, like guns beneath
a parapet,
Watched,
charged with lightnings yet.
The voices of the hills did
his obey;
The torrents flashed
and tumbled in his song;
He brought our native fields
from far away, 45
Or set us ’mid
the innumerable throng
Of dateless woods, or where
we heard the calm
Old
homestead’s evening psalm.
But now he sang of faith to
things unseen,
Of freedom’s
birthright given to us in trust;
50
And words of doughty cheer
he spoke between,
That made all
earthly fortune seem as dust,
Matched with that duty, old
as Time and new,
Of
being brave and true.
We, listening, learned what
makes the might of words,— 55
Manhood to back
them, constant as a star;
His voice rammed home our
cannon, edged our swords,
And sent our boarders
shouting; shroud and spar
Heard him and stiffened; the
sails heard, and wooed
The
winds with loftier mood.
60
In our dark hours he manned
our guns again;
Remanned ourselves
from his own manhood’s stores;
Pride, honor, country, throbbed
through all his strain:
And shall we praise?
God’s praise was his before;
And on our futile laurels
he looks down, 65
Himself
our bravest crown.
[When Mr. Lowell wrote this poem he was living at Elmwood in Cambridge, at that time quite remote from town influences,—Cambridge itself being scarcely more than a village,—but now rapidly losing its rustic surroundings. The Charles River flowed near by, then a limpid stream, untroubled by factories or sewage. It is a tidal river and not far from Elmwood winds through broad salt marshes. Mr. Longfellow’s old home is a short stroll nearer town, and the two poets exchanged pleasant shots, as may be seen by Lowell’s To H.W.L., and Longfellow’s The Herons of Elmwood. In Under the Willows Mr. Lowell has, as it were, indulged in another reverie at a later period of his life, among the same familiar surroundings.]
What
visionary tints the year puts on,
When falling leaves
falter through motionless air
Or
numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the
low flats and pastures bare,
As
with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
5
The
bowl between me and those distant hills,
And smiles and shakes abroad
her misty, tremulous hair!
No more the landscape
holds its wealth apart,
Making me poorer in my poverty,
But
mingles with my senses and my heart;
10
My own projected
spirit seems to me
In
her own reverie the world to steep;
’Tis
she that waves to sympathetic sleep,
Moving, as she is moved, each
field and hill and tree.
How
fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
15
Clasped by the
faint horizon’s languid arms,
Each
into each, the hazy distances!
The softened season
all the landscape charms;
Those
hills, my native village that embay,
In
waves of dreamier purple roll away,
20
And floating in mirage seem
all the glimmering farms.
Far
distant sounds the hidden chickadee
Close at my side;
far distant sound the leaves;
The
fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
Wanders like gleaning
Ruth; and as the sheaves 25
Of
wheat and barley wavered in the eye
Of
Boaz as the maiden’s glow went by,
So tremble and seem remote
all things the sense receives.
The
cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
Passed breezily
on by all his flapping mates, 30
Faint
and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
Southward, perhaps
to far Magellan’s Straits;
Dimly
I catch the throb of distant flails;
Silently
overhead the hen-hawk sails,
34
With watchful, measuring eye,
and for his quarry waits.
The
sobered robin, hunger-silent now,
Seeks cedar-berries
blue, his autumn cheer;
The
squirrel, on the shingly shagbark’s bough,
Now saws, now
lists with downward eye and ear,
Then
drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound,
40
Whisks
to his winding fastness underground;
The clouds like swans drift
down the streaming atmosphere.
O’er
yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
Drowse on the
crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call
Creeps
faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;
45
The single crow
a single caw lets fall;
And
all around me every bush and tree
Says
Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be,
Who snows his soft, white
sleep and silence over all.
The
birch, most shy and ladylike of trees,
50
Her poverty, as
best she may, retrieves,
And
hints at her foregone gentilities
With some saved
relics of her wealth of leaves;
The
swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,
Glares
red as blood across the sinking sun,
55
As one who proudlier to a
falling fortune cleaves.
He
looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt,
Who, ’mid
some council of the sad-garbed whites,
Erect
and stern, in his own memories lapt,
With distant eye
broods over other sights, 60
Sees
the hushed wood the city’s flare replace,
The
wounded turf heal o’er the railway’s trace,
And roams the savage Past
of his undwindled rights.
The
red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,
And, with his
crumpled foliage stiff and dry,
65
After
the first betrayal of the frost,
Rebuffs the kiss
of the relenting sky;
The
chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,
To
the faint Summer, beggared now and old,
69
Pour back the sunshine hoarded
’neath her favoring eye.
The
ash her purple drops forgivingly
And sadly, breaking
not the general hush;
The
maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,
Each leaf a ripple
with its separate flush;
All
round the wood’s edge creeps the skirting blaze
75
Of
bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,
Ere the rain falls, the cautious
farmer burns his brush.
O’er
yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone,
Where vines and
weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine
Safe
from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone
80
Is massed to one
soft gray by lichens fine,
The
tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves
A
prickly network of ensanguined leaves;
Hard by, with coral beads,
the prim black-alders shine.
Pillaring
with flame this crumbling boundary,
85
Whose loose blocks
topple ’neath the ploughboy’s foot,
Who,
with each sense shut fast except the eye,
Creeps close and
scares the jay he hoped to shoot,
The
woodbine up the elm’s straight stem aspires,
Coiling
it, harmless, with autumnal fires;
90
In the ivy’s paler blaze
the martyr oak stands mute.
Below,
the Charles—a stripe of nether sky,
Now hid by rounded
apple-trees between,
Whose
gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by,
Now flickering
golden through a woodland screen,
95
Then
spreading out, at his next turn beyond,
A
silver circle like an inland pond—
Slips seaward silently through
marshes purple and green.
Dear
marshes! vain to him the gift of sight
Who cannot in
their various incomes share,
100
From
every season drawn, of shade and light,
Who sees in them
but levels brown and bare;
Each
change of storm or sunshine scatters free
On
them its largess of variety,
104
For Nature with cheap means
still works her wonders rare.
In
Spring they lie one broad expanse of green,
O’er which
the light winds run with glimmering feet:
Here,
yellower stripes track out the creek unseen,
There, darker
growths o’er hidden ditches meet;
And
purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd,
110
As
if the silent shadow of a cloud
Hung there becalmed, with
the next breath to fleet.
All
round, upon the river’s slippery edge,
Witching to deeper
calm the drowsy tide,
Whispers
and leans the breeze-entangling sedge;
115
Through emerald
glooms the lingering waters slide,
Or,
sometimes wavering, throw back the sun,
And
the stiff banks in eddies melt and run
Of dimpling light, and with
the current seem to glide.
In
Summer ’tis a blithesome sight to see,
120
As, step by step,
with measured swing, they pass,
The
wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee,
Their sharp scythes
panting through the thick-set grass;
Then,
stretched beneath a rick’s shade in a ring,
Their
nooning take, while one begins to sing
125
A stave that droops and dies
’neath the close sky of brass.
Meanwhile
that devil-may-care, the bobolink,
Remembering duty,
in mid-quaver stops
Just
ere he sweeps o’er rapture’s tremulous
brink,
And ’twixt
the winrows most demurely drops,
130
A
decorous bird of business, who provides
For
his brown mate and fledglings six besides,
And looks from right to left,
a farmer ’mid his crops.
Another
change subdues them in the Fall,
But saddens not;
they still show merrier tints, 135
Though
sober russet seems to cover all;
When the first
sunshine through their dewdrops glints.
Look
how the yellow clearness, streamed across,
Redeems
with rarer hues the season’s loss,
139
As Dawn’s feet there
had touched and left their rosy prints.
Or
come when sunset gives its freshened zest,
Lean o’er
the bridge and let the ruddy thrill,
While
the shorn sun swells down the hazy west,
Glow opposite;—the
marshes drink their fill
And
swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade
145
Through
pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade,
Lengthening with stealthy
creep, of Simond’s darkening hill.
Later,
and yet ere Winter wholly shuts,
Ere through the
first dry snow the runner grates,
And
the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts,
150
While firmer ice
the eager boy awaits,
Trying
each buckle and strap beside the fire,
And
until bedtime plays with his desire,
Twenty times putting on and
off his new-bought skates;—
Then,
every morn, the river’s banks shine bright
155
With smooth plate-armor,
treacherous and frail,
By
the frost’s clinking hammers forged at night,
’Gainst
which the lances of the sun prevail,
Giving
a pretty emblem of the day
When
guiltier arms in light shall melt away,
160
And states shall move free-limbed,
loosed from war’s cramping mail.
And
now those waterfalls the ebbing river
Twice every day
creates on either side
Tinkle,
as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver
In grass-arched
channels to the sun denied; 165
High
flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow,
The
silvered flats gleam frostily below,
Suddenly drops the gull and
breaks the glassy tide.
But
crowned in turn by vying seasons three,
Their winter halo
hath a fuller ring; 170
This
glory seems to rest immovably,—
The others were
too fleet and vanishing;
When
the hid tide is at its highest flow,
O’er
marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow
174
With brooding fulness awes
and hushes everything.
The
sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind,
As pale as formal
candles lit by day;
Gropes
to the sea the river dumb and blind;
The brown ricks,
snow-thatched by the storm in play,
Show
pearly breakers combing o’er their lee,
180
White
crests as of some just enchanted sea,
Checked in their maddest leap
and hanging poised midway.
But
when the eastern blow, with rain aslant,
From mid-sea’s
prairies green and rolling plains
Drives
in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt,
185
And the roused
Charles remembers in his veins
Old
Ocean’s blood and snaps his gyves of frost,
That
tyrannous silence on the shores is tost
In dreary wreck, and crumbling
desolation reigns.
Edgewise
or flat, in Druid-like device,
190
With leaden pools
between or gullies bare,
The
blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice;
No life, no sound,
to break the grim despair,
Save
sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff
Down
crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff,
195
Or when the close-wedged fields
of ice crunch here and there.
But
let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes
To that whose
pastoral calm before me lies:
Here
nothing harsh or rugged intervenes;
The early evening
with her misty dyes 200
Smooths
off the ravelled edges of the nigh,
Relieves
the distant with her cooler sky,
And tones the landscape down,
and soothes the wearied eyes.
There
gleams my native village, dear to me,
Though higher
change’s waves each day are seen,
205
Whelming
fields famed in boyhood’s history,
Sanding with houses
the diminished green;
There,
in red brick, which softening time defies,
Stand
square and stiff the Muses’ factories;—
209
How with my life knit up is
every well-known scene!
Flow
on, dear river! not alone you flow
To outward sight,
and through your marshes wind;
Fed
from the mystic springs of long-ago,
Your twin flows
silent through my world of mind;
Grow
dim, dear marshes, in the evening’s gray!
215
Before
my inner sight ye stretch away,
And will forever, though these
fleshly eyes grow blind.
Beyond
the hillock’s house-bespotted swell,
Where Gothic chapels
house the horse and chaise,
Where
quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell,
220
Where Coptic tombs
resound with prayer and praise,
Where
dust and mud the equal year divide,
There
gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,[11]
Transfiguring street and shop
with his illumined gaze.
[Footnote 11: In Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, which treats in prose of much the same period as this poem reproduces, Mr. Lowell has given more in detail his recollections of Washington Allston, the painter. The whole paper may be read as a prose counterpart to this poem. It is published in Fireside Travels.]
Virgilium
vidi tantum,—I have seen[12]
225
But as a boy,
who looks alike on all,
That
misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien,[13]
Tremulous as down
to feeling’s faintest call;—
Ah,
dear old homestead! count it to thy fame
That
thither many times the Painter came;—
230
One elm yet bears his name,
a feathery tree and tall.
Swiftly
the present fades in memory’s glow,—
Our only sure
possession is the past;
The
village blacksmith died a month ago,[14]
And dim to me
the forge’s roaring blast;
235
Soon
fire-new mediaevals we shall see
Oust
the black smithy from its chestnut-tree,
And that hewn down, perhaps,
the bee-hive green and vast.
How
many times, prouder than king on throne,
Loosed from the
village school-dame’s A’s and B’s,
240
Panting
have I the creaky bellows blown,
And watched the
pent volcano’s red increase,
Then
paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down
By
that hard arm voluminous and brown,
224
From the white iron swarm
its golden vanishing bees.
[Footnote 12: Virgilium vidi tantum, I barely saw Virgil, a Latin phrase applied to one who has merely had a glimpse of a great man.]
[Footnote 13: Undine is the heroine of a romantic tale by Baron De la Motte Fouque. She is represented as a water-nymph who wins a human soul only by a union with mortality which brings pain and sorrow.]
[Footnote 14: The village blacksmith of Longfellow’s well-known poem. The prophecy came true as regards the hewing-down of the chestnut-tree which was cut down in 1876.]
Dear
native town! whose choking elms each year
With eddying dust
before their time turn gray,
Pining
for rain,—to me thy dust is dear;
It glorifies the
eve of summer day,
And
when the westering sun half sunken burns,
250
The
mote-thick air to deepest orange turns,
The westward horseman rides
through clouds of gold away,
So
palpable, I’ve seen those unshorn few,
The six old willows
at the causey’s end
(Such
trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew),
255
Through this dry
mist their checkering shadows send,
Striped,
here and there, with many a long-drawn thread,
Where
streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red,
Past which, in one bright
trail, the hangbird’s flashes blend.
Yes,
dearer for thy dust than all that e’er,
260
Beneath the awarded
crown of victory,
Gilded
the blown Olympic charioteer;
Though lightly
prized the ribboned parchments three,
Yet
collegisse juvat, I am glad[15]
That
here what colleging was mine I had,—
265
It linked another tie, dear
native town, with thee!
[Footnote 15: Collegisse juvat. Horace in his first ode says, Curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat; that is: It’s a pleasure to have collected the dust of Olympus on your carriage-wheels. Mr. Lowell, helping himself to the words, says, “It’s a pleasure to have been at college;” for college in its first meaning is a collection of men, as in the phrase “The college of cardinals.”]
Nearer
art thou than simply native earth,
My dust with thine
concedes a deeper tie;
A
closer claim thy soil may well put forth,
Something of kindred
more than sympathy; 270
For
in thy bounds I reverently laid away
That
blinding anguish of forsaken clay,
That title I seemed to have
in earth and sea and sky,
That
portion of my life more choice to me
(Though brief,
yet in itself so round and whole)[16] 275
Than
all the imperfect residue can be;—
The Artist saw
his statue of the soul
Was
perfect; so, with one regretful stroke,
The
earthen model into fragments broke,
279
And without her the impoverished
seasons roll.
The snow had begun in the
gloaming,
And busily all
the night
Had been heaping field and
highway
With a silence
deep and white.
Every pine and fir and hemlock
5
Wore ermine too
dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the
elm-tree
Was ridged inch-deep
with pearl.
[Footnote 16: The volume containing this poem was reverently dedicated “To the ever fresh and happy memory of our little Blanche.”]
From sheds new-roofed with
Carrara[17]
Came Chanticleer’s
muffled crow, 10
The stiff rails were softened
to swan’s-down,
And still fluttered
down the snow.
I stood and watched by the
window
The noiseless
work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of
snow-birds, 15
Like brown leaves
whirling by.
I thought of a mound in sweet
Auburn
Where a little
headstone stood;
How the flakes were folding
it gently,
As did robins
the babes in the wood.
20
Up spoke our own little Mabel,
Saying, “Father,
who makes it snow?”
And I told of the good All-father
Who cares for
us here below.
Again I looked at the snow-fall,
25
And thought of
the leaden sky
That arched o’er our
first great sorrow,
When that mound
was heaped so high.
I remembered the gradual patience
That fell from
that cloud like snow,
30
Flake by flake, healing and
hiding
The scar of our
deep-plunged woe.
And again to the child I whispered,
“The snow
that husheth all,
Darling, the merciful Father
35
Alone can make
it fall!”
[Footnote 17: The marble of Carrara, Italy, is noted for its purity.]
Then, with eyes that saw not,
I kissed her;
And she, kissing
back, could not know
That my kiss was given
to her sister,
Folded close under
deepening snow. 40
What gnarled stretch, what
depth of shade, is his!
There needs no
crown to mark the forest’s king;
How in his leaves outshines
full summer’s bliss!
Sun, storm, rain,
dew, to him their tribute bring,
Which he with such benignant
royalty 5
Accepts, as overpayeth
what is lent;
All nature seems his vassal
proud to be,
And cunning only
for his ornament.
How towers he, too, amid the
billowed snows,
An unquelled exile
from the summer’s throne,
10
Whose plain, uncinctured front
more kingly shows,
Now that the obscuring
courtier leaves are flown.
His boughs make music of the
winter air,
Jewelled with
sleet, like some cathedral front
Where clinging snow-flakes
with quaint art repair 15
The dints and
furrows of time’s envious brunt.
How doth his patient strength
the rude March wind
Persuade to seem
glad breaths of summer breeze,
And win the soil that fain
would be unkind,
To swell his revenues
with proud increase! 20
He is the gem; and all the
landscape wide
(So doth his grandeur
isolate the sense)
Seems but the setting, worthless
all beside,
An empty socket,
were he fallen thence.
So, from oft converse with
life’s wintry gales, 25
Should man learn
how to clasp with tougher roots
The inspiring earth; how otherwise
avails
The leaf-creating
sap that sunward shoots?
So every year that falls with
noiseless flake
Should fill old
scars up on the stormward side, 30
And make hoar age revered
for age’s sake,
Not for traditions
of youth’s leafy pride.
So, from the pinched soil
of a churlish fate,
True hearts compel
the sap of sturdier growth,
So between earth and heaven
stand simply great, 35
That these shall
seem but their attendants both;
For nature’s forces
with obedient zeal
Wait on the rooted
faith and oaken will;
As quickly the pretender’s
cheat they feel,
And turn mad Pucks
to flout and mock him still.[18] 40
Lord! all Thy works are lessons;
each contains
Some emblem of
man’s all-containing soul;
Shall he make fruitless all
Thy glorious pains,
Delving within
Thy grace an eyeless mole?
Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove,[19]
45
Cause me some
message of thy truth to bring,
Speak but a word to me, nor
let thy love
Among my boughs
disdain to perch and sing.
[Footnote 18: See Shakspeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.]
[Footnote 19: A grove of oaks at Dodona, in ancient Greece, was the seat of a famous oracle.]
[The classic legend of Prometheus underwent various changes in successive periods of Greek thought. In its main outline the story is the same: that Prometheus, whose name signifies Forethought, stole fire from Zeus, or Jupiter, or Jove, and gave it as a gift to man. For this, the angry god bound him upon Mount Caucasus, and decreed that a vulture should prey upon his liver, destroying every day what was renewed in the night. The struggle of man’s thought to free itself from the tyranny of fear and superstition and all monsters of the imagination is illustrated in the myth. The myth is one which has been a favorite with modern poets, as witness Goethe, Shelley, Mrs. Browning, and Longfellow.]
One after one
the stars have risen and set,
Sparkling upon the hoarfrost
on my chain:
The Bear, that prowled all
night about the fold
Of the North-Star, hath shrunk
into his den,
Scared by the blithesome footsteps
of the Dawn, 5
Whose blushing smile floods
all the Orient;
And now bright Lucifer grows
less and less,
Into the heaven’s blue
quiet deep-withdrawn.
Sunless and starless all,
the desert sky
Arches above me, empty as
this heart 10
For ages hath been empty of
all joy,
Except to brood upon its silent
hope,
As o’er its hope of
day the sky doth now.
All night have I heard voices:
deeper yet
The deep low breathing of
the silence grew. 15
While all about, muffled in
awe, there stood
Shadows, or forms, or both,
clear-felt at heart,
But, when I turned to front
them, far along
Only a shudder through the
midnight ran,
And the dense stillness walled
me closer round. 20
But still I heard them wander
up and down
That solitude, and flappings
of dusk wings
Did mingle with them, whether
of those hags
Let slip upon me once from
Hades deep,
Or of yet direr torments,
if such be, 25
I could but guess; and then
toward me came
A shape as of a woman:
very pale
It was, and calm; its cold
eyes did not move,
And mine moved not, but only
stared on them.
Their fixed awe went through
my brain like ice; 30
A skeleton hand seemed clutching
at my heart,
And a sharp chill, as if a
dank night fog
Suddenly closed me in, was
all I felt:
And then, methought, I heard
a freezing sigh,
A long, deep, shivering sigh,
as from blue lips 35
Stiffening in death, close
to mine ear. I thought
Some doom was close upon me,
and I looked
And saw the red moon through
the heavy mist,
Just setting, and it seemed
as it were falling,
Or reeling to its fall, so
dim and dead 40
And palsy-struck it looked.
Then all sounds merged
Into the rising surges of
the pines,
Which, leagues below me, clothing
the gaunt loins
Of ancient Caucasus with hairy
strength,
Sent up a murmur in the morning
wind, 45
Sad as the wail that from
the populous earth
All day and night to high
Olympus soars,
Fit incense to thy wicked
throne, O Jove!
Thy hated name
is tossed once more in scorn
From off my lips, for I will
tell thy doom. 50
And are these tears?
Nay, do not triumph, Jove!
They are wrung from me but
by the agonies
Of prophecy, like those sparse
Yes, I am still
Prometheus, wiser grown 95
By years of solitude,—that
holds apart
The past and future, giving
the soul room
To search into itself,—and
long commune
With this eternal silence;—more
a god,
In my long-suffering and strength
to meet 100
With equal front the direst
shafts of fate,
Than thou in thy faint-hearted
despotism,
Girt with thy baby-toys of
force and wrath.
Yes, I am that Prometheus
who brought down
The light to man, which thou,
in selfish fear, 105
[Footnote 20: That is, Jove himself.]
And, wouldst thou
know of my supreme revenge,
Poor tyrant, even now dethroned
in heart,
Realmless in soul, as tyrants
ever are,
Listen! and tell me if this
bitter peak,
This never-glutted vulture,
and these chains 130
Shrink not before it; for
it shall befit
A sorrow-taught, unconquered
Titan-heart.
Men, when their death is on
them, seem to stand
On a precipitous crag that
overhangs
The abyss of doom, and in
that depth to see, 135
As in a glass, the features
dim and vast
Of things to come, the shadows,
as it seems,
Of what had been. Death
ever fronts the wise;
Not fearfully, but with clear
promises
Of larger life, on whose broad
vans upborne, 140
Their outlook widens, and
they see beyond
The horizon of the present
and the past,
Even to the very source and
end of things.
Such am I now: immortal
woe hath made
My heart a seer, and my soul
a judge 145
Between the substance and
the shadow of Truth.
The sure supremeness of the
Beautiful,
By all the martyrdoms made
doubly sure
Of such as I am, this is my
revenge,
Which of my wrongs builds
a triumphal arch, 150
Through which I see a sceptre
and a throne.
The pipings of glad shepherds
on the hills,
Tending the flocks no more
to bleed for thee,—
The songs of maidens pressing
with white feet
The vintage on thine altars
poured no more,— 155
The murmurous bliss of lovers,
underneath
Dim grapevine bowers, whose
rosy bunches press
Not that I feel
that hunger after fame,
Which souls of a half-greatness
are beset with;
But that the memory of noble
deeds
Cries shame upon the idle
and the vile, 190
And keeps the heart of Man
forever up
To the heroic level of old
time.
To be forgot at first is little
pain
To a heart conscious of such
high intent
As must be deathless on the
lips of men; 195
But, having been a name, to
sink and be
A something which the world
can do without,
Which, having been or not,
would never change
The lightest pulse of fate,—this
is indeed
A cup of bitterness the worst
to taste, 200
And this thy heart shall empty
to the dregs.
Endless despair shall be thy
Caucasus,
And memory thy vulture; thou
wilt find
Oblivion far lonelier than
this peak,—
Behold thy destiny! Thou
think’st it much 205
That I should brave thee,
miserable god!
But I have braved a mightier
than thou.
Even the tempting of this
soaring heart,
Which might have made me,
scarcely less than thou,
A god among my brethren weak
Thou and all strength
shall crumble, except Love,
By whom, and for whose glory,
ye shall cease: 225
And, when thou art but a dim
moaning heard
From out the pitiless gloom
of Chaos, I
Shall be a power and a memory,
A name to fright all tyrants
with, a light
Unsetting as the pole-star,
a great voice 230
Heard in the breathless pauses
of the fight
By truth and freedom ever
waged with wrong,
Clear as a silver trumpet,
to awake
Huge echoes that from age
to age live on
In kindred spirits, giving
them a sense 235
Of boundless power from boundless
suffering wrung:
And many a glazing eye shall
smile to see
The memory of my triumph (for
to meet
Wrong with endurance, and
to overcome
The present with a heart that
looks beyond, 240
Are triumph), like a prophet
eagle, perch
Upon the sacred banner of
the Right.
Evil springs up, and flowers,
and bears no seed,
And feeds the green earth
with its swift decay,
Leaving it richer for the
growth of truth; 245
But Good, once put in action
or in thought,
Like a strong oak, doth from
its boughs shed down
The ripe germs of a forest.
Thou, weak god,
Shalt fade and be forgotten!
but this soul,
Fresh-living still in the
serene abyss, 250
In every heaving shall partake,
that grows
From heart to heart among
the sons of men,—
As the ominous hum before
the earthquake runs
Far through the AEgean from
roused isle to isle,—
Foreboding wreck to palaces
and shrines, 255
And mighty rents in many a
cavernous error
That darkens the free light
to man:—This heart,
Unscarred by thy grim vulture,
as the truth
Grows but more lovely ’neath
the beaks and claws
Of Harpies blind that fain
would soil it, shall 260
In all the throbbing exultations
share
That wait on freedom’s
triumphs, and in all
Unleash thy crouching
thunders now, O Jove!
Free this high heart, which,
a poor captive long, 275
Doth knock to be let forth,
this heart which still,
In its invincible manhood,
overtops
Thy puny godship, as this
mountain doth
The pines that moss its roots.
Oh, even now,
While from my peak of suffering
I look down, 280
Beholding with a far-spread
gush of hope
The sunrise of that Beauty,
in whose face,
Shone all around with love,
no man shall look
But straightway like a god
he is uplift
Unto the throne long empty
for his sake, 285
And clearly oft foreshadowed
in wide dreams
By his free inward nature,
which nor thou,
Nor any anarch after thee,
can bind
From working its great doom,—now,
now set free
This essence, not to die,
but to become 290
Part of that awful Presence
which doth haunt
The palaces of tyrants, to
hunt off,
With its grim eyes and fearful
whisperings
And hideous sense of utter
loneliness,
All hope of safety, all desire
of peace, 295
All but the loathed forefeeling
of blank death,—
Part of that spirit which
doth ever brood
In patient calm on the unpilfered
nest
Of man’s deep heart,
till mighty thoughts grow fledged
To sail with darkening shadow
o’er the world, 300
Filling with dread such souls
as dare not trust
In the unfailing energy of
Good,
Until they swoop, and their
pale quarry make
Of some o’erbloated
wrong,—that spirit which
Scatters great hopes in the
seed-field of man, 305
Like acorns among grain, to
grow and be
A roof for freedom in all
coming time!
But no, this cannot be; for
ages yet,
In solitude unbroken, shall
I hear
The angry Caspian to the Euxine
shout, 310
And Euxine answer with a muffled
roar,
On either side storming the
giant walls
Of Caucasus with leagues of
climbing foam
(Less, from my height, than
flakes of downy snow),
That draw back baffled but
to hurl again, 315
[Footnote 21: Daughter of Heaven and Earth, and symbol of Nature.]
Year after year
will pass away and seem
To me, in mine eternal agony,
But as the shadows of dumb
summer clouds,
Which I have watched so often
darkening o’er 335
The vast Sarmatian plain,
league-wide at first,
But, with still swiftness,
lessening on and on
Till cloud and shadow meet
and mingle where
The gray horizon fades into
the sky,
Far, far to northward.
Yes, for ages yet 340
Must I lie here upon my altar
huge,
A sacrifice for man.
Sorrow will be,
As it hath been, his portion;
endless doom,
While the immortal with the
mortal linked
Dreams of its wings and pines
for what it dreams, 345
With upward yearn unceasing.
Better so:
For wisdom is meek sorrow’s
patient child,
And empire over self, and
all the deep
Strong charities that make
men seem like gods;
And love, that makes them
be gods, from her breasts 350
Sucks in the milk that makes
mankind one blood.
Good never comes unmixed,
or so it seems,
Having two faces, as some
images
Are carved, of foolish gods;
one face is ill;
But one heart lies beneath,
and that is good, 355
As are all hearts, when we
explore their depths.
Therefore, great heart, bear
up! thou art but type
Of what all lofty spirits
endure, that fain
Would win men back to strength
and peace through love:
Each hath his lonely peak,
and on each heart 360
Envy, or scorn, or hatred,
tears lifelong
With vulture beak; yet the
high soul is left;
And faith, which is but hope
grown wise; and love
And patience, which at last
shall overcome.
“Some time afterward, it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a few very insignificant persons of all colors.”—Letter of H.G. Otis.
In a small chamber, friendless
and unseen,
Toiled o’er
his types one poor, unlearned young man;
The place was dark, unfurnitured,
and mean;—
Yet there the
freedom of a race began.
Help came but slowly; surely
no man yet 5
Put lever to the
heavy world with less:[22]
What need of help? He
knew how types were set,
He had a dauntless
spirit, and a press.
Such earnest natures are the
fiery pith,
The compact nucleus,
round which systems grow! 10
Mass after mass becomes inspired
therewith,
And whirls impregnate
with the central glow,
O Truth! O Freedom! how
are ye still born
In the rude stable,
in the manger nursed!
What humble hands unbar those
gates of morn 15
Through which
the splendors of the New Day burst.
What! shall one monk, scarce
known beyond his cell,
Front Rome’s
far-reaching bolts, and scorn her frown?
Brave Luther answered YES;
that thunder’s swell
Rocked Europe,
and discharmed the triple crown.
20
[Footnote 22: Archimedes, a great philosopher of antiquity, used to say, “Only give me a place to stand on, and I will move the world with my lever.”]
Whatever can be known of earth
we know,
Sneered Europe’s
wise men, in their snail-shells curled;
No! said one man in Genoa,
and that No
Out of the dark
created this New World.
Who is it will not dare himself
to trust? 25
Who is it hath
not strength to stand alone?
Who is it thwarts and bilks
the inward MUST?
He and his works,
like sand, from earth are blown?
Men of a thousand shifts and
wiles, look here!
See one straightforward
conscience put in pawn 30
To win a world; see the obedient
sphere
By bravery’s
simple gravitation drawn!
Shall we not heed the lesson
taught of old,
And by the Present’s
lips repeated still,
In our own single manhood
to be bold, 35
Fortressed in
conscience and impregnable will?
We stride the river daily
at its spring,
Nor, in our childish
thoughtlessness, foresee,
What myriad vassal streams
shall tribute bring,
How like an equal
it shall greet the sea. 40
O small beginnings, ye are
great and strong,
Based on a faithful
heart and weariless brain!
Ye build the future fair,
ye conquer wrong,
Ye earn the crown,
and wear it not in vain.
He stood upon the world’s
broad threshold; wide
The din of battle and of slaughter
rose;
He saw God stand upon the
weaker side,
That sank in seeming loss
before its foes:
Many there were who made great
haste and sold 5
Unto the cunning enemy their
swords,
He scorned their gifts of
fame, and power, and gold,
And, underneath their soft
and flowery words,
Heard the cold serpent hiss;
therefore he went
And humbly joined him to the
weaker part, 10
Fanatic named, and fool, yet
well content
So he could be the nearer
to God’s heart,
And feel its solemn pulses
sending blood
Through all the widespread
veins of endless good.
MR. HOSEA BIGLOW TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
[When the Mexican war was under discussion, Mr. Lowell began the publication in a Boston newspaper of satirical poems, written in the Yankee dialect, and purporting to come for the most part from one Hosea Biglow. The poems were the sharpest political darts that were fired at the time, and when the verses were collected and set forth, with a paraphernalia of introductions and notes professedly prepared by an old-fashioned, scholarly parson, Rev. Homer Wilbur, the book gave Mr. Lowell a distinct place as a wit and satirist, and was read with delight in England and America after the circumstance which called it out had become a matter of history and no longer of politics.
When the war for the Union broke out, Mr. Lowell took up the same strain and contributed to the Atlantic Monthly a second series of Biglow Papers, and just before the close of the war, published the poem that follows.]
DEAR SIR,—Your
letter come to han’
Requestin’
me to please be funny;
But I ain’t made upon
a plan
Thet knows wut’s
comin’, gall or honey:
Ther’ ’s times
the world does look so queer,
5
Odd fancies come
afore I call ’em;
An’ then agin, for half
a year,
No preacher ’thout
a call ’s more solemn.
You’re ‘n want
o’ sunthin’ light an’ cute,
Rattlin’
an’ shrewd an’ kin’ o’ jingleish,
10
An’ wish, pervidin’
it ’ould suit,
I’d take
an’ citify my English.
I ken write long-tailed,
ef I please,—
But when I’m
jokin’, no, I thankee;
Then, ’fore I know it,
my idees 15
Run helter-skelter
into Yankee.
Sence I begun to scribble
rhyme,
I tell ye wut,
I hain’t ben foolin’;
The parson’s books,
life, death, an’ time
Hev took some
trouble with my schoolin’;
20
Nor th’ airth don’t
git put out with me,
Thet love her
’z though she wuz a woman;
Why, th’ ain’t
a bird upon the tree
But half forgives
my bein’ human.
An’ yit I love th’
unhighschooled way 25
Ol’ farmers
hed when I wuz younger;
Their talk wuz meatier, an’
’ould stay,
While book-froth
seems to whet your hunger;
For puttin’ in a downright
lick
‘Twixt Humbug’s
eyes, ther’ ’s few can metch it.
30
An’ then it helves my
thoughts ez slick
Ez stret-grained
hickory doos a hetchet.
But when I can’t, I
can’t, thet’s all,
For Natur’
won’t put up with gullin’;
Idees you hev to shove an’
haul 35
Like a druv pig
ain’t wuth a mullein:
Live thoughts ain’t
sent for; thru all rifts
O’ sense
they pour an’ resh ye onwards,
Like rivers when south-lyin’
drifts
Feel thet th’
old airth’s a-wheelin’ sunwards.
40
Time wuz, the rhymes come
crowdin’ thick
Ez office-seekers
arter ’lection,
An’ into ary place ’ould
stick
Without no bother
nor objection;
But sence the war my thoughts
hang back 45
Ez though I wanted
to enlist ’em,
An’ subs’tutes—they
don’t never lack,
But then they’ll
slope afore you’ve mist ’em.
Nothin’ don’t
seem like wut it wuz;
I can’t
see wut there is to hender,
50
An’ yit my brains jes’
go buzz, buzz,
Like bumblebees
agin a winder;
’Fore these times come,
in all airth’s row,
Ther’ wuz
one quiet place, my head in,
Where I could hide an’
think,—but now
55
It’s all
one teeter, hopin’, dreadin’.
Where’s Peace?
I start, some clear-blown night,
When gaunt stone
walls grow numb an’ number,
An’, creakin’
‘cross the snow-crus’ white,
Walk the col’
starlight into summer;
60
Up grows the moon, an’
swell by swell
Thru the pale
pasturs silvers dimmer
Than the last smile thet strives
to tell
O’ love
gone heavenward in its shimmer.
I hev ben gladder o’
sech things, 65
Than cocks o’
spring or bees o’ clover,
They filled my heart with
livin’ springs,
But now they seem
to freeze ’em over;
Sights innercent ez babes
on knee,
Peaceful ez eyes
o’ pastur’d cattle,
70
Jes’ coz they be so,
seem to me
To rile me more
with thoughts o’ battle.
In-doors an’ out by
spells I try;
Ma’am Natur’
keeps her spin-wheel goin’,
But leaves my natur’
stiff and dry 75
Ez fiel’s
o’ clover arter mowin’;
An’ her jes’ keepin’
on the same,
Calmer ‘n
a clock, an’ never carin’,
An’ findin’ nary
thing to blame,
Is wus than ef
she took to swearin’.
80
Snow-flakes come whisperin’
on the pane,
The charm makes
blazin’ logs so pleasant,
But I can’t hark to
wut they’re say’n’,
With Grant or
Sherman ollers present;
The chimbleys shudder in the
gale, 85
Thet lulls, then
suddin takes to flappin’
Like a shot hawk, but all’s
ez stale
To me ez so much
sperit rappin’.
Under the yaller-pines I house,
When sunshine
makes ’em all sweet-scented,
90
An’ hear among their
furry boughs
The baskin’
west-wind purr contented,
While ‘way o’erhead,
ez sweet an’ low
Ez distant bells
thet ring for meetin’,
The wedged wil’ geese
their bugles blow, 95
Further an’
further South retreatin’.
Or up the slippery knob I
strain
An’ see
a hundred hills like islan’s
Lift their blue woods in broken
chain
Out o’ the
sea o’ snowy silence;
100
The farm-smokes, sweetes’
sight on airth,
Slow thru the
winter air a-shrinkin’
Seem kin’ o’ sad,
an’ roun’ the hearth
Of empty places
set me thinkin’.
Beaver roars hoarse with meltin’
snows,[23] 105
An’ rattles
di’mon’s from his granite;
Time wuz, he snatched away
my prose,
An’ into
psalms or satires ran it;
But he, nor all the rest thet
once
Started my blood
to country-dances, 110
Can’t set me goin’
more ’n a dunce
Thet hain’t
no use for dreams an’ fancies.
[Footnote 23: Beaver Brook, a tributary of the Charles.]
Rat-tat-tat-tattle thru the
street
I hear the drummers
makin’ riot,
An’ I set thinkin’
o’ the feet
115
Thet follered
once an’ now are quiet,—
White feet ez snowdrops innercent,
Thet never knowed
the paths o’ Satan,
Whose comin’ step ther’
’s ears thet won’t,
No, not lifelong,
leave off awaitin’.
120
Why, hain’t I held ’em
on my knee?
Didn’t I
love to see ’em growin’,
Three likely lads ez wal could
be,
Hahnsome an’
brave an’ not tu knowin’?
I set an’ look into
the blaze 125
Whose natur’,
jes’ like theirn, keeps climbin’,
Ez long ‘z it lives,
in shinin’ ways,
An’ half
despise myself for rhymin’.
Wut’s words to them
whose faith an’ truth
On War’s
red techstone rang true metal,
130
Who ventered life an’
love an’ youth
For the gret prize
o’ death in battle?
To him who, deadly hurt, agen
Flashed on afore
the charge’s thunder,
Tippin’ with fire the
bolt of men 135
Thet rived the
Rebel line asunder?
’T ain’t right
to hev the young go fust,
All throbbin’
full o’ gifts an’ graces,
Leavin’ life’s
paupers dry ez dust
To try an’
make b’lieve fill their places:
140
Nothin’ but tells us
wut we miss,
Ther’ ’s
gaps our lives can’t never fay in,
An’ thet world
seems so fur from this
Lef’ for
us loafers to grow gray in!
My eyes cloud up for rain;
my mouth 145
Will take to twitchin’
roun’ the corners;
I pity mothers, tu, down South,
For all they sot
among the scorners:
I’d sooner take my chance
to stan’
At Jedgment where
your meanest slave is, 150
Than at God’s bar hol’
up a han’
Ez drippin’
red ez yourn, Jeff Davis!
Come, Peace! not like a mourner
bowed
For honor lost
an’ dear ones wasted,
But proud, to meet a people
proud, 155
With eyes thet
tell o’ triumph tasted!
Come, with han’ grippin’
on the hilt,
An’ step
thet proves ye Victory’s daughter!
Longin’ for you, our
sperits wilt
Like shipwrecked
men’s on raf’s for water.
160
Come, while our country feels
the lift
Of a gret instinct
shoutin’ forwards,
An’ knows thet freedom
ain’t a gift
Thet tarries long
in han’s o’ cowards!
Come, sech ez mothers prayed
for, when 165
They kissed their
cross with lips thet quivered,
An’ bring fair wages
for brave men,
A nation saved,
a race delivered!
[The battles of Magenta and Solferino, in the early summer of 1859, had given promise of a complete emancipation of Italy from the Austrian supremacy, when Napoleon III., who was acting in alliance with Victor Emmanuel, king of Sardinia, held a meeting with the emperor Francis Joseph of Austria at Villa Franca, and agreed to terms which were very far from including the unification of Italy. There was a general distrust of Napoleon, and the war continued with the final result of a united Italy. In the poem which follows Mr. Lowell gives expression to his want of faith in the French emperor.]
Wait a little: do we
not wait?
Louis Napoleon is not Fate,
Francis Joseph is not Time;
There’s One hath swifter
feet than Crime;
Cannon-parliaments settle
naught; 5
Venice is Austria’s,—whose
is Thought?
Minie is good, but, spite
of change,
Gutenberg’s gun has
the longest range.
Spin, spin, Clotho,
spin![24]
Lachesis, twist!
and, Atropos, sever! 10
In the shadow,
year out, year in,
The silent headsman
waits forever.
[Footnote 24: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos were the three Fates of the ancient mythology; Clotho spun the thread of human destiny, Lachesis twisted it, and Atropos with shears severed it.]
Wait, we say; our years are
long;
Men are weak, but Man is strong;
Since the stars first curved
their rings, 15
We have looked on many things;
Great wars come and great
wars go,
Wolf-tracks light on polar
snow;
We shall see him come and
gone,
This second-hand Napoleon.
20
Spin, spin, Clotho,
spin!
Lachesis, twist!
and, Atropos, sever!
In the shadow,
year out, year in,
The silent headsman
waits forever.
We saw the elder Corsican,
25
And Clotho muttered as she
span,
While crowned lackeys bore
the train,
Of the pinchbeck Charlemagne:
“Sister, stint not length
of thread!
Sister, stay the scissors
dread! 30
On Saint Helen’s granite
bleak,
Hark, the vulture whets his
beak!”
Spin, spin, Clotho,
spin!
Lachesis, twist!
and, Atropos, sever!
In the shadow,
year out, year in,
35
The silent headsman
waits forever.
The Bonapartes, we know their
bees
That wade in honey red to
the knees:
Their patent reaper, its sheaves
sleep sound
In dreamless garners underground:
40
We know false glory’s
spendthrift race
Pawning nations for feathers
and lace;
It may be short, it may be
long,
“’Tis reckoning-day!”
sneers unpaid Wrong.
Spin, spin, Clotho,
spin! 45
Lachesis, twist!
and, Atropos, sever!
In the shadow,
year out, year in,
The silent headsman
waits forever.
The Cock that wears the Eagle’s
skin
Can promise what he ne’er
could win; 50
Slavery reaped for fine words
sown,
System for all, and rights
for none,
Despots atop, a wild clan
below,
Such is the Gaul from long
ago;
Wash the black from the Ethiop’s
face, 55
Wash the past out of man or
race!
Spin, spin, Clotho,
spin!
Lachesis, twist!
and, Atropos, sever!
In the shadow,
year out, year in,
The silent headsman
waits forever. 60
’Neath Gregory’s
throne a spider swings,[25]
And snares the people for
the kings;
“Luther is dead; old
quarrels pass;
The stake’s black scars
are healed with grass;”
So dreamers prate; did man
e’er live 65
Saw priest or woman yet forgive;
[Footnote 25: There was more than one Pope Gregory, but Gregory VII in the eleventh century brought the papacy to its supreme power, when kings humbled themselves before the Pope.]
Smooth sails the ship of either
realm,
Kaiser and Jesuit at the helm;
We look down the depths, and
mark 75
Silent workers in the dark
Building slow the sharp-tusked
reefs,
Old instincts hardening to
new beliefs;
Patience a little; learn to
wait;
Hours are long on the clock
of Fate. 80
Spin, spin, Clotho,
spin!
Lachesis, twist!
and, Atropos, sever!
Darkness is strong,
and so is Sin,
But only God endures
forever!
“Come forth!”
my catbird calls to me,
“And hear
me sing a cavatina
That, in this old familiar
tree,
Shall hang a garden
of Alcina.
“These buttercups shall
brim with wine 5
Beyond all Lesbian
juice or Massic;
May not New England be divine?
My ode to ripening
summer classic?
“Or, if to me you will
not hark,
By Beaver Brook
a thrush is ringing 10
Till all the alder-coverts
dark
Seem sunshine-dappled
with his singing.
“Come out beneath the
unmastered sky,
With its emancipating
spaces,
And learn to sing as well
as I, 15
Without premeditated
graces.
“What boot your many-volumed
gains,
Those withered
leaves forever turning,
To win, at best, for all your
pains,
A nature mummy-wrapt
in learning? 20
“The leaves wherein
true wisdom lies
On living trees
the sun are drinking;
Those white clouds, drowsing
through the skies,
Grew not so beautiful
by thinking.
“Come out! with me the
oriole cries, 25
Escape the demon
that pursues you!
And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,
Still hiding,
farther onward wooes you.”
“Alas, dear friend,
that, all my days,
Has poured from
thy syringa thicket 30
The quaintly discontinuous
lays
To which I hold
a season-ticket,—
“A season-ticket cheaply
bought
With a dessert
of pilfered berries,
And who so oft my soul has
caught 35
With morn and
evening voluntaries,—
“Deem me not faithless,
if all day
Among my dusty
books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June
to play
With fancy-led,
half-conscious finger. 40
“A bird is singing in
my brain
And bubbling o’er
with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart
of Spain
Fed with the sap
of old romances.
“I ask no ampler skies
than those 45
His magic music
rears above me,
No falser friends, no truer
foes,—
And does not Dona
Clara love me?
“Cloaked shapes, a twanging
of guitars,
A rush of feet,
and rapiers clashing, 50
Then silence deep with breathless
stars,
And overhead a
white hand flashing.
“O music of all moods
and climes,
Vengeful, forgiving,
sensuous, saintly,
Where still, between the Christian
chimes, 55
The moorish cymbal
tinkles faintly!
“O life borne lightly
in the hand,
For friend or
foe with grace Castilian!
O valley safe in Fancy’s
land,
Not tramped to
mud yet by the million!
60
“Bird of to-day, thy
songs are stale
To his, my singer
of all weathers,
My Calderon, my nightingale,
My Arab soul in
Spanish feathers.
“Ah, friend, these singers
dead so long, 65
And still, God
knows, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to
all song,
To Nature’s
self her better glory.”
ALADDIN.
When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a
cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin’s
lamp;
When I could not sleep for
cold, 5
I had fire enough
in my brain,
And builded with roofs of
gold
My beautiful castles
in Spain!
Since then I have toiled day
and night,
I have money and
power good store, 10
But, I’d give all my
lamps of silver bright
For the one that
is mine no more;
Take, Fortune, whatever you
choose,
You gave, and
may snatch again;
I have nothing ’t would
pain me to lose, 15
For I own no more
castles in Spain!
Hushed with broad sunlight
lies the hill,
And, minuting the long day’s
loss,
The cedar’s shadow,
slow and still,
Creeps o’er its dial
of gray moss.
Warm noon brims full the valley’s
cup, 5
The aspen’s leaves are
scarce astir;
Only the little mill sends
up
Its busy, never-ceasing burr.
Climbing the loose-piled wall
that hems
The road along the mill-pond’s
brink, 10
From ’neath the arching
barberry-stems,
My footstep scares the shy
chewink.
Beneath a bony buttonwood
The mill’s red door
lets forth the din;
The whitened miller, dust-imbued,
15
Flits past the square of dark
within.
No mountain torrent’s
strength is here;
Sweet Beaver, child of forest
still,[26]
Heaps its small pitcher to
the ear,
And gently waits the miller’s
will. 20
Swift slips Undine along the
race
Unheard, and then, with flashing
bound,
Floods the dull wheel with
light and grace,
And, laughing, hunts the loath
drudge round.
The miller dreams not at what
cost 25
The quivering millstones hum
and whirl,
Nor how for every turn are
tost
Armfuls of diamond and of
pearl.
But Summer cleared my happier
eyes
With drops of some celestial
juice, 30
To see how Beauty underlies,
Forevermore each form of use.
And more; methought I saw
that flood,
Which now so dull and darkling
steals,
Thick, here and there, with
human blood, 35
To turn the world’s
laborious wheels.
[Footnote 26: Beaver Brook was within walking distance of the poet’s home. See The Nightingale in the Study.]
No more than doth the miller
there,
Shut in our several cells,
do we
Know with what waste of beauty
rare
Moves every day’s machinery.
40
Surely the wiser time shall
come
When this fine overplus of
might,
No longer sullen, slow, and
dumb,
Shall leap to music and to
light.
In that new childhood of the
Earth 45
Life of itself shall dance
and play,
Fresh blood in Time’s
shrunk veins make mirth,
And labor meet delight half
way.
There came a youth upon the
earth,
Some thousand
years ago,
Whose slender hands were nothing
worth,
Whether to plough, or reap,
or sow.
Upon an empty tortoise-shell
5
He stretched some
chords, and drew
Music that made men’s
bosoms swell
Fearless, or brimmed their
eyes with dew.
Then King Admetus, one who
had
Pure taste by
right divine,
10
Decreed his singing not too
bad
To hear between the cups of
wine:
And so, well pleased with
being soothed
Into a sweet half-sleep,
Three times his kingly beard
he smoothed, 15
And made him viceroy o’er
his sheep.
His words were simple words
enough,
And yet he used
them so,
That what in other mouths
was rough
In his seemed musical and
low. 20
Men called him but a shiftless
youth,
In whom no good
they saw;
And yet, unwittingly, in truth,
They made his careless words
their law.
They knew not how he learned
at all, 25
For idly, hour
by hour,
He sat and watched the dead
leaves fall,
Or mused upon a common flower.
It seemed the loveliness of
things
Did teach him
all their use,
30
For, in mere weeds, and stones,
and springs,
He found a healing power profuse.
Men granted that his speech
was wise,
But, when a glance
they caught
Of his slim grace and woman’s
eyes, 35
They laughed, and called him
good-for-naught.
Yet after he was dead and
gone,
And e’en
his memory dim,
Earth seemed more sweet to
live upon,
More full of love, because
of him. 40
And day by day more holy grew
Each spot where
he had trod,
Till after-poets only knew
Their first-born brother as
a god.
THE PRESENT CRISIS.
[In the year 1844, which is the date of the following poem, the question of the annexation of Texas was pending, and it was made an issue of the presidential campaign then taking place. The anti-slavery party feared and opposed annexation, on account of the added strength which it would give to slavery, and the South desired it for the same reason.]
When a deed is done for Freedom,
through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic,
trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er
he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood,
as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed
on the thorny stem of Time. 5
Through the walls of hut and
palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages
wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era,
with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation,
standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet
mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s
heart. 10
So the Evil’s triumph
sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent,
the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where’er
he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward,
to be drunk up by the sod,
Till a corpse crawls round
unburied, delving in the nobler clod. 15
For mankind are one in spirit,
and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric
circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;[27]
Whether conscious or unconscious,
yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered
fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—
In the gain or loss of one
race all the rest have equal claim. 20
[Footnote 27: This figure has special force from the fact that Morse’s telegraph was first put in operation a few months before the writing of this poem.]
Once to every man and nation
comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with
Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s
new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left
hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever
’twixt that darkness and that light. 25
Hast thou chosen, O my people,
on whose party thou shall stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn
sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper,
yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast
now, I see around her throng[28]
Troops of beautiful, tall
angels, to enshield her from all wrong. 30
Backward look across the ages
and the beacon-moments see,
That, like peaks of some sunk
continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
Not an ear in court or market
for the low foreboding cry
Of those Crises, God’s
stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff
must
fly;
Never shows the choice momentous
till the judgment hath passed by. 35
[Footnote 28: Compare:— “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again, The eternal years of God are hers.” BRYANT.]
Careless seems the great Avenger;
history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
’twixt old systems and the Word;[29]
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the
future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above his own. 40
We see dimly in the Present
what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an
arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular;
amid the market’s din,
List the ominous stern whisper
from the Delphic cave within,—
“They enslave their
children’s children who make compromise with
sin.” 45
[Footnote 29: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”]
Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops,
fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and
Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made
desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions
for his miserable prey;—
Shall we guide his gory fingers
where our helpless children play?[30] 50
Then to side with Truth is
noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and
profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses,
while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit,
till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue
of the faith they had denied. 55
Count me o’er earth’s
chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood
alone,
While the men they agonized
for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the
future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice,
mastered by their faith divine,
By one man’s plain truth
to manhood and to God’s supreme design. 60
[Footnote 30: For the full story of Cyclops, which runs in suggestive phrase through these five lines, see the ninth book of the Odyssey. The translation by G.H. Palmer will be found especially satisfactory.]
By the light of burning heretics
Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever
with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish
number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand
Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned[31]
Since the first man stood
God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned. 65
For Humanity sweeps onward:
where to-day the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas
with the silver in his hands;
Far in front the cross stands
ready and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday
in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered
ashes into History’s golden urn. 70
’Tis as easy to be heroes
as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved
upon our fathers’ graves,
Worshippers of light ancestral
make the present light a crime;—
Was the Mayflower launched
by cowards, steered by men behind their time?
Turn those tracks toward Past
or Future, that make Plymouth Rock sublime? 75
[Footnote 31: The creed is so named from the first word in the Latin form, credo, I believe.]
They were men of present valor,
stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet
that all virtue was the Past’s;
But we make their truth our
falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments,
while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great
Impulse which drove them across the sea. 80
They have rights who dare
maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes
Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires;
Shall we make their creed
our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old
prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots
round the prophets of to-day? 85
New occasions teach new duties;
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and
onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires!
we ourselves must Pilgrims be.
Launch our Mayflower, and
steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s
portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key. 90
The dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn; the drowsy
bee
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but
me:
Away, unfruitful lore of books,
5
For whose vain idiom we reject
The soul’s more native
dialect,
Aliens among the birds and
brooks,
Dull to interpret or conceive
What gospels lost the woods
retrieve! 10
Away, ye critics, city-bred,
Who springes set of thus and
so,
And in the first man’s
footsteps tread,
Like those who toil through
drifted snow!
Away, my poets, whose sweet
spell[32] 15
Can make a garden of a cell!
I need ye not, for I to-day
Will make one long sweet verse
of play.
[Footnote 32: There is a delightful pair of poems by Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply, and The Tables Turned, which show how another poet treats books and nature.]
Snap, chord of
manhood’s tenser strain!
To-day I will be a boy again;
20
The mind’s pursuing
element,
Like a bow slackened and unbent,
In some dark corner shall
be leant.
The robin sings, as of old,
from the limb!
The catbird croons in the
lilac bush! 25
Through the dim arbor, himself
more dim,
Silently hops the hermit-thrush,
The withered leaves keep dumb
for him;
The irreverent buccaneering
bee
Hath stormed and rifled the
nunnery 30
Of the lily, and scattered
the sacred floor
With haste-dropt gold from
shrine to door;
There, as of yore,
The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup
Its tiny polished urn holds
up, 35
Filled with ripe summer to
the edge,
The sun in his own wine to
pledge;
And our tall elm, this hundredth
year
Doge of our leafy Venice here,
Who, with an annual ring,
doth wed 40
The blue Adriatic overhead,
Shadows with his palatial
mass
The deep canals of flowing
grass.
O unestranged
birds and bees!
O face of Nature always true!
45
O never-unsympathizing trees!
O never-rejecting roof of
blue,
Whose rash disherison never
falls
On us unthinking prodigals,
Yet who convictest all our
ill, 50
So grand and unappeasable!
Methinks my heart from each
of these
Plucks part of childhood back
again,
Long there imprisoned, as
the breeze
Doth every hidden odor seize
55
Upon these elm-arched
solitudes
No hum of neighbor toil intrudes;
The only hammer that I hear
Is wielded by the woodpecker,
The single noisy calling his
65
In all our leaf-hid Sybaris;
The good old time, close-hidden
here,
Persists, a loyal cavalier,
While Roundheads prim, with
point of fox,
Probe wainscot-chink and empty
box; 70
Here no hoarse-voiced iconoclast
Insults thy statues, royal
Past;
Myself too prone the axe to
wield,
I touch the silver side of
the shield
With lance reversed, and challenge
peace, 75
A willing convert of the trees.
How chanced it
that so long I tost
A cable’s length from
this rich coast,
With foolish anchors hugging
close
The beckoning weeds and lazy
ooze, 80
Nor had the wit to wreck before
On this enchanted island’s
shore,
Whither the current of the
sea,
With wiser drift, persuaded
me?
O, might we but
of such rare days 85
Build up the spirit’s
dwelling-place!
A temple of so Parian stone
Would brook a marble god alone,
The statue of a perfect life,
Far-shrined from earth’s
bestaining strife. 90
Alas! though such felicity
In our vext world here may
not be,
Yet, as sometimes the peasant’s
hut
Shows stones which old religion
cut
With text inspired, or mystic
sign 95
Of the Eternal and Divine,
Torn from the consecration
deep
Of some fallen nunnery’s
mossy sleep,
So, from the ruins of this
day
Crumbling in golden dust away,
100
The soul one gracious block
may draw,
Carved with some fragment
of the law,
Which, set in life’s
prosaic wall,
Old benedictions may recall,
And lure some nunlike thoughts
to take 105
Their dwelling here for memory’s
sake.
It mounts athwart the windy
hill
Through sallow
slopes of upland bare,
And Fancy climbs with foot-fall
still
Its narrowing
curves that end in air.
By day, a warmer-hearted blue
5
Stoops softly
to that topmost swell;
Its thread-like windings seem
a clew
To gracious climes
where all is well.
By night, far yonder, I surmise
An ampler world
than clips my ken, 10
Where the great stars of happier
skies
Commingle nobler
fates of men.
I look and long, then haste
me home,
Still master of
my secret rare;
Once tried, the path would
end in Rome, 15
But now it leads
me everywhere.
Forever to the new it guides,
From former good,
old overmuch;
What Nature for her poets
hides,
’Tis wiser
to divine than clutch.
20
The bird I list hath never
come
Within the scope
of mortal ear;
My prying step would make
him dumb,
And the fair tree,
his shelter, sear.
Behind the hill, behind the
sky, 25
Behind my inmost
thought, he sings;
No feet avail; to hear it
nigh,
The song itself
must lend the wings.
Sing on, sweet bird, close
hid, and raise
Those angel stairways
in my brain, 30
That climb from these low-vaulted
days
To spacious sunshines
far from pain.
Sing when thou wilt, enchantment
fleet,
I leave thy covert
haunt untrod,
And envy Science not her feat
35
To make a twice-told
tale of God.
They said the fairies tript
no more,
And long ago that
Pan was dead;
’Twas but that fools
preferred to bore
Earth’s
rind inch-deep for truth instead.
40
Pan leaps and pipes all summer
long,
The fairies dance
each full-mooned night,
Would we but doff our lenses
strong,
And trust our
wiser eyes’ delight.
City of Elf-land, just without
45
Our seeing, marvel
ever new,
Glimpsed in fair weather,
a sweet doubt
Sketched-in, mirage-like,
on the blue.
I build thee in yon sunset
cloud,
Whose edge allures
to climb the height; 50
I hear thy drowned bells,
inly-loud,
From still pools
dusk with dreams of night.
Thy gates are shut to hardiest
will,
Thy countersign
of long-lost speech,—
Those fountained courts, those
chambers still, 55
Fronting Time’s
far East, who shall reach?
I know not, and will never
pry,
But trust our
human heart for all;
Wonders that from the seeker
fly
Into an open sense
may fall. 60
Hide in thine own soul, and
surprise
The password of
the unwary elves;
Seek it, thou canst not bribe
their spies;
Unsought, they
whisper it themselves.
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Also, bound in linen:
[Footnote 33: 25 cents.]
[Footnote 34: 11 and 63 in one vol., 40 cents; likewise 55 and 67, 57 and 58, 40 and 69, 70 and 71, 72 and 94.]
[Footnote 35: Also in one vol., 40 cents.]
[Footnote 36: Double Number, paper, 30 cents; linen, 40 cents.]
EXTRA NUMBERS.
A American Authors and their Birthdays. Programmes and Suggestions for the Celebration of the Birthdays of Authors. By A.S. ROE.
B Portraits and Biographies of 20 American Authors.
C A Longfellow Night. For Catholic Schools and Societies.
D Literature in School. Essays by HORACE E. SCUDDER.
E Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dialogues and Scenes.
F Longfellow Leaflets.} (Each a Double Number, 30 cents; linen, G Whittier Leaflets. } 40 cents.) Poems and Prose Passages H Holmes Leaflets. } for Reading and Recitation. O Lowell Leaflets. }
I The Riverside Manual for Teachers, containing Suggestions and Illustrative Lessons leading up to Primary Reading. By I.F. HALL.
K The Riverside Primer and Reader. (Special Number.) In paper covers, with cloth back, 25 cents; in strong linen binding, 30 cents.
L The Riverside Song Book. Containing Classic American Poems set to Standard Music. (Double Number, 30 cents; boards, 40 cents.)
M Lowells’ Fable for Critics. (Double Number, 30 cents.)