Poems pdf Ralph Waldo Emerson Free Download

The gentle deities

Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds,

The innumerable tenements of beauty,

The miracle of generative force,

Far-reaching concords of astronomy

Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;

Better, the linked purpose of the whole,

And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty

In the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave.

The polite found me impolite; the great

Would mortify me, but in vain; for still

I am a willow of the wilderness,

Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts

My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,

A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,

A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,

Salve my worst wounds.

For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:

‘Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?

Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like nature pass

Into the winter night's extinguished mood?

Canst thou shine now, then darkle,

And being latent, feel thyself no less?

As, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye,

The river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure,

Yet envies none, none are unenviable.’

DIRGE.
CONCORD, 1838.

I REACHED the middle of the mount

Up which the incarnate soul must climb,

And paused for them, and looked around,

With me who walked through space and time.

Five rosy boys with morning light

Had leaped from one fair mother's arms,

Fronted the sun with hope as bright,

And greeted God with childhood's psalms.

Knows he who tills this lonely field

To reap its scanty corn,

What mystic fruit his acres yield

At midnight and at morn?

In the long sunny afternoon

The plain was full of ghosts;

I wandered up, I wandered down,

Beset by pensive hosts.

The winding Concord gleamed below,

Pouring as wide a flood

As when my brothers, long ago,

Came with me to the wood.

But they are gone,—the holy ones

Who trod with me this lovely vale;

The strong, star-bright companions

Are silent, low and pale.

My good, my noble, in their prime,

Who made this world the feast it was,

Who learned with me the lore of time,

Who loved this dwelling-place!

They took this valley for their toy,

They played with it in every mood;

A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,—

They treated nature as they would.

They colored the horizon round;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade,

All echoes hearkened for their sound,—

They made the woodlands glad or mad.

I touch this flower of silken leaf,

Which once our childhood knew;

Its soft leaves wound me with a grief

Whose balsam never grew.

Hearken to yon pine-warbler

Singing aloft in the tree!

Hearest thou, O traveller,

What he singeth to me?

Not unless God made sharp thine ear

With sorrow such as mine,

Out of that delicate lay could'st thou

Its heavy tale divine.

‘Go, lonely man,’ it saith;

'They loved thee from their birth;

Their hands were pure, and pure their faith,—

There are no such hearts on earth.

‘Ye drew one mother's milk,

One chamber held ye all;

A very tender history

Did in your childhood fall.

‘You cannot unlock your heart,

The key is gone with them;

The silent organ loudest chants

The master's requiem,’

THRENODY.

THE South-wind brings

Life, sunshine and desire,

And on every mount and meadow

Breathes aromatic fire;

But over the dead he has no power,

The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;

And, looking over the hills, I mourn

The darling who shall not return.

I see my empty house,

I see my trees repair their boughs;

And he, the wondrous child,

Whose silver warble wild

Outvalued every pulsing sound

Within the air's cerulean round,—

The hyacinthine boy, for whom

Morn well might break and April bloom,

The gracious boy, who did adorn

The world whereinto he was born,

And by his countenance repay

The favor of the loving Day,—

Has disappeared from the Day's eye;

Far and wide she cannot find him;

My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.

Returned this day, the south wind searches,

And finds young pines and budding birches;

But finds not the budding man;

Nature, who lost, cannot remake him;

Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him;

Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,

O, whither tend thy feet?

I had the right, few days ago,

Thy steps to watch, thy place to know:

How have I forfeited the right?

Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?

I hearken for thy household cheer,

O eloquent child!

Whose voice, an equal messenger,

Conveyed thy meaning mild.

What though the pains and joys

Whereof it spoke were toys

Fitting his age and ken,

Yet fairest dames and bearded men,

Who heard the sweet request,

So gentle, wise and grave.

Bended with joy to his behest

And let the world's affairs go by,

A while to share his cordial game,

Or mend his wicker wagon-frame,

Still plotting how their hungry ear

That winsome voice again might hear;

For his lips could well pronounce

Words that were persuasions.

Gentlest guardians marked serene

His early hope, his liberal mien;

Took counsel from his guiding eyes

To make this wisdom earthly wise.

Ah, vainly do these eyes recall

The school-march, each day's festival,

When every morn my bosom glowed

To watch the convoy on the road;

The babe in willow wagon closed,

With rolling eyes and face composed;

With children forward and behind,

Like Cupids studiously inclined;

And he the chieftain paced beside,

The centre of the troop allied,

With sunny face of sweet repose,

To guard the babe from fancied foes.

The little captain innocent

Took the eye with him as he went;

Each village senior paused to scan

And speak the lovely caravan.

From the window I look out

To mark thy beautiful parade,

Stately marching in cap and coat

To some tune by fairies played;—

A music heard by thee alone

To works as noble led thee on.

Now Love and Pride, alas! in vain,

Up and down their glances strain.

The painted sled stands where it stood;

The kennel by the corded wood;

His gathered sticks to stanch the wall

Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall;

The ominous hole he dug in the sand,

And childhood's castles built or planned;

His daily haunts I well discern,—

The poultry-yard, the shed, the barn,—

And every inch of garden ground

Paced by the blessed feet around,

From the roadside to the brook

Whereinto he loved to look.

Step the meek fowls where erst they ranged;

The wintry garden lies unchanged;

The brook into the stream runs on;

But the deep-eyed boy is gone.

On that shaded day,

Dark with more clouds than tempests are,

When thou didst yield thy innocent breath

In birdlike heavings unto death,

Night came, and Nature had not thee;

I said, ‘We are mates in misery.’

The morrow dawned with needless glow;

Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;

Each tramper started; but the feet

Of the most beautiful and sweet

Of human youth had left the hill

And garden,—they were bound and still.

There's not a sparrow or a wren,

There's not a blade of autumn grain,

Which the four seasons do not tend

And tides of life and increase lend;

And every chick of every bird,

And weed and rock-moss is preferred.

O ostrich-like forgetfulness!

O loss of larger in the less!

Was there no star that could be sent,

No watcher in the firmament,

No angel from the countless host

That loiters round the crystal coast,

Could stoop to heal that only child,

Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,

And keep the blossom of the earth,

Which all her harvests were not worth?

Not mine,—I never called thee mine,

But Nature's heir,—if I repine,

And seeing rashly torn and moved

Not what I made, but what I loved,

Grow early old with grief that thou

Must to the wastes of Nature go,—

'T is because a general hope

Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope.

For flattering planets seemed to say

This child should ills of ages stay,

By wondrous tongue, and guided pen,

Bring the flown Muses back to men.

Perchance not he but Nature ailed,

The world and not the infant failed.

It was not ripe yet to sustain

A genius of so fine a strain,

Who gazed upon the sun and moon

As if he came unto his own,

And, pregnant with his grander thought,

Brought the old order into doubt.

His beauty once their beauty tried;

They could not feed him, and he died,

And wandered backward as in scorn,

To wait an æon to be born.

Ill day which made this beauty waste,

Plight broken, this high face defaced!

Some went and came about the dead;

And some in books of solace read;

Some to their friends the tidings say;

Some went to write, some went to pray;

One tarried here, there hurried one;

But their heart abode with none.

Covetous death bereaved us all,

To aggrandize one funeral.

The eager fate which carried thee

Took the largest part of me:

For this losing is true dying;

This is lordly man's down-lying,

This his slow but sure reclining,

Star by star his world resigning.

O child of paradise,

Boy who made dear his father's home,

In whose deep eyes

Men read the welfare of the times to come,

I am too much bereft.

The world dishonored thou hast left.

O truth's and nature's costly lie!

O trusted broken prophecy!

O richest fortune sourly crossed!

Born for the future, to the future lost!

The deep Heart answered, ‘Weepest thou?

Worthier cause for passion wild

If I had not taken the child.

And deemest thou as those who pore,

With aged eyes, short way before,—

Think'st Beauty vanished from the coast

Of matter, and thy darling lost?

Taught he not thee—the man of eld,

Whose eyes within his eyes beheld

Heaven's numerous hierarchy span

The mystic gulf from God to man?

To be alone wilt thou begin

When worlds of lovers hem thee in?

To-morrow, when the masks shall fall

That dizen Nature's carnival,

The pure shall see by their own will,

Which overflowing Love shall fill,

'T is not within the force of fate

The fate-conjoined to separate.

But thou, my votary, weepest thou?

I gave thee sight—where is it now?

I taught thy heart beyond the reach

Of ritual, bible, or of speech;

Wrote in thy mind's transparent table,

As far as the incommunicable;

Taught thee each private sign to raise

Lit by the supersolar blaze.

Past utterance, and past belief,

And past the blasphemy of grief,

The mysteries of Nature's heart;

And though no Muse can these impart,

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,

And all is clear from east to west.

‘I came to thee as to a friend;

Dearest, to thee I did not send

Tutors, but a joyful eye,

Innocence that matched the sky,

Lovely locks, a form of wonder,

Laughter rich as woodland thunder,

That thou might'st entertain apart

The richest flowering of all art;

And, as the great all-loving Day

Through smallest chambers takes its way,

That thou might'st break thy daily bread

With prophet, savior and head;

That thou might'st cherish for thine own

The riches of sweet Mary's Son,

Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon.

And thoughtest thou such guest

Would in thy hall take up his rest?

Would rushing life forget her laws,

Fate's glowing revolution pause?

High omens ask diviner guess;

Not to be conned to tediousness

And know my higher gifts unbind

The zone that girds the incarnate mind.

When the scanty shores are full

With Thought's perilous, whirling pool;

When frail Nature can no more,

Then the Spirit strikes the hour:

My servant Death, with solving rite,

Pours finite into infinite.

Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow,

Whose streams through nature circling go?

Nail the wild star to its track

On the half-climbed zodiac?

Light is light which radiates,

Blood is blood which circulates,

Life is life which generates,

And many-seeming life is one,—

Wilt thou transfix and make it none?

Its onward force too starkly pent

In figure, bone, and lineament?

Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,

Talker! the unreplying Fate?

Nor see the genius of the whole

Ascendant in the private soul,

Beckon it when to go and come,

Self-announced its hour of doom?

Fair the soul's recess and shrine,

Magic-built to last a season;

Masterpiece of love benign,

Fairer that expansive reason

Whose omen 't is, and sign.

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know

What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?

Verdict which accumulates

From lengthening scroll of human fates,

Voice of earth to earth returned,

Prayers of saints that inly burned,—

Saying, What is excellent,

As God lives, is permanent;

Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain;

Heart's love will meet thee again.

Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye

Up to his style, and manners of the sky.

Not of adamant and gold

Built he heaven stark and cold;

No, but a nest of bending reeds,

Flowering grass and scented weeds;

Or like a traveller's fleeing tent,

Or bow above the tempest bent;

Built of tears and sacred flames,

And virtue reaching to its aims;

Built of furtherance and pursuing,

Not of spent deeds, but of doing.

Silent rushes the swift Lord

Through ruined systems still restored,

Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless.

Plants with worlds the wilderness;

Waters with tears of ancient sorrow

Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.

House and tenant go to ground,

Lost in God, in Godhead found.'

CONCORD HYMN:
SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT, APRIL 19, 1836.

BY the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set to-day a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.

ii.

MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES.

MAY-DAY.

DAUGHTER of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,

With sudden passion languishing,

Teaching barren moors to smile,

Painting pictures mile on mile,

Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,

Whence a smokeless incense breathes.

The air is full of whistlings bland;

What was that I heard

Out of the hazy land?

Harp of the wind, or song of bird,

Or vagrant booming of the air,

Voice of a meteor lost in day?

Such tidings of the starry sphere

Can this elastic air convey.

Or haply 't was the cannonade

Of the pent and darkened lake,

Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade,

Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,

Afflicted moan, and latest hold

Even into May the iceberg cold.

Was it a squirrel's pettish bark,

Or clarionet of jay? or hark

Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,

Steering north with raucous cry

Through tracts and provinces of sky,

Every night alighting down

In new landscapes of romance,

Where darkling feed the clamorous elana

By lonely lakes to men unknown.

Come the tumult whence it will,

Voice of sport, or rush of wings,

It is a sound, it is a token

That the marble sleep is broken,

And a change has passed on things.

When late I walked, in earlier days,

All was stiff and stark;

Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,

In the sky no spark;

Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,

Struggling through the drifted roads;

The whited desert knew me not,

Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;

The summer dells, by genius haunted,

One arctic moon had disenchanted.

All the sweet secrets therein hid

By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.

Eldest mason, Frost, had piled

Swift cathedrals in the wild;

The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts

In the star-lit minster aisled.

I found no joy: the icy wind

Might rule the forest to his mind.

Who would freeze on frozen lakes?

Back to books and sheltered home,

And wood-fire flickering on the walls,

To hear, when, ‘mid our talk and games,

Without the baffled north-wind calls.

But soft! a sultry morning breaks;

The ground-pines wash their rusty green,

The maple-tops their crimson tint,

On the soft path each track is seen,

The girl's foot leaves its neater print.

The pebble loosened from the frost Asks of the urchin to be tost.

In flint and marble beats a heart,

The kind Earth takes her children's part,

The green lane is the school-boy's friend,

Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,

The fresh ground loves his top and ball,

The air rings jocund to his call,

The brimming brook invites a leap,

He dives the hollow, climbs the steep.

The eaged linnet in the spring

Hearkens for the choral glee,

When his fellows on the wing

Migrate from the Southern Sea;

When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,

And the new-born tendrils twine,

The old wine darkling in the cask

Feels the bloom on the living vine,

And bursts the hoops at hint of spring;

And so, perchance, in Adam's race,

Of Eden's bower some dream-like trace

Survived the Flight and swam the Flood,

And wakes the wish in youngest blood

To tread the forfeit Paradise,

And feed once more the exile's eyes;

And ever when the happy child

In May beholds the blooming wild,

And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,

“Onward,” he cries, “your baskets bring,—

In the next field is air more mild,

And o'er you hazy crest is Eden's balmier spring.”

Not for a regiment's parade,

Nor evil laws or rulers made,

Blue Walden rolls its cannonade,

But for a lofty sign

Which the Zodiac threw,

That the bondage-days are told,

And waters free as winds shall flow.

Lo! how all the tribes combine

To rout the flying foe.

See, every patriot oak-leaf throws

His elfin length upon the snows,

Not idle, since the leaf all day

Draws to the spot the solar ray,

Ere sunset quarrying inches down,

And half-way to the mosses brown;

While the grass beneath the rime

Has hints of the propitious time,

And upward pries and perforates

Through the cold slab a thousand gates,

Till green lances peering through

Bend happy in the welkin blue.

As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,

So Spring will not her time forerun,

Mix polar night with tropic glow,

Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,

Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,

But she has the temperance

Of the gods, whereof she is one,—

Masks her treasury of heat

Under east-winds crossed with sleet.

Plants and birds and humble creatures

Well accept her rule austere;

Titan-born, to hardy natures

Cold is genial and dear.

As Southern wrath to Northern right

Is but straw to anthracite;

As in the day of sacrifice,

When heroes piled the pyre,

The dismal Massachusetts ice

Burned more than others’ fire,

So Spring guards with surface cold

The garnered heat of ages old.

Hers to sow the seed of bread,

That man and all the kinds be fed;

And, when the sunlight fills the hours,

Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.

Beneath the calm, within the light,

A hid unruly appetite

Of swifter life, a surer hope,

Strains every sense to larger scope,

Impatient to anticipate

The halting steps of aged Fate.

Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:

When Nature falters, fain would zeal

Grasp the felloes of her wheel,

And grasping give the orbs another whirl.

Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!

And sun this frozen side.

Bring hither back the robin's call,

Bring back the tulip's pride.

Why chidest thou the tardy Spring?

The hardy bunting does not chide;

The blackbirds make the maples ring

With social cheer and jubilee;

The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,

The robins know the melting snow;

The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,

Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,

Secure the osier yet will hide

Her callow brood in mantling leaves,—

And thou, by science all undone,

Why only must thy reason fail

To see the southing of the sun?

The world rolls round,—mistrust it not,—

Befalls again what once befell;

All things return, both sphere and mote,

And I shall hear my bluebird's note,

And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

April cold with dropping rain

Willows and lilacs brings again,

The whistle of returning birds,

And trumpet-lowing of the herds.

The scarlet maple-keys betray

What potent blood hath modest May,

What fiery force the earth renews,

The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;

What joy in rosy waves outpoured

Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.

Hither rolls the storm of heat;

I feel its finer billows beat

Like a sea which me infolds;

Heat with viewless fingers moulds,

Swells, and mellows, and matures,

Paints, and flavors, and allures,

Bird and brier inly warms,

Still enriches and transforms,

Gives the reed and lily length,

Adds to oak and oxen strength,

Transforming what it doth infold,

Life out of death, new out of old,

Painting fawns' and leopards' fells,

Seethes the gulf-encrimsoning shells,

Fires gardens with a joyful blaze

Of tulips, in the morning's rays.

The dead log touched bursts into leaf,

The wheat-blade whispers of the sheaf.

What god is this imperial Heat,

Earth's prime secret, sculpture's seat?

Doth it bear hidden in its heart

Water-line patterns of all art?

Is it Dædalus? is it Love?

Or walks in mask almighty Jove,

And drops from Power's redundant horn

All seeds of beauty to be born?

Where shall we keep the holiday,

And duly greet the entering May?

Too strait and low our cottage doors,

And all unmeet our carpet floors;

Nor spacious court, nor monarch's hall,

Suffice to hold the festival

Up and away! where haughty woods

Front the liberated floods:

We will climb the broad-backed hills,

Hear the uproar of their joy;

We will mark the leaps and gleams

Of the new-delivered streams,

And the murmuring rivers of sap

Mount in the pipes of the trees,

Giddy with day, to the topmost spire,

Which for a spike of tender green

Bartered its powdery cap;

And the colors of joy in the bird,

And the love in its carol heard,

Frog and lizard in holiday coats,

And turtle brave in his golden spots;

While cheerful cries of crag and plain

Reply to the thunder of river and main.

As poured the flood of the ancient sea

Spilling over mountain chains,

Bending forests as bends the sedge,

Faster flowing o'er the plains,—

A world-wide wave with a foaming edga

That rims the running silver sheet,—

So pours the deluge of the heat

Broad northward o'er the land,

Fainting artless paradises,

Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,

Fanning secret fires which glow

In columbine and clover-blow,

Climbing the northern zones,

Where a thousand pallid towns

Lie like cockles by the main,

Or tented armies on a plain.

The million-handed sculptor moulds

Quaintest bud and blossom folds,

The million-handed painter pours

Opal hues and purple dye;

Azaleas flush the island floors,

And the tints of heaven reply.

Wreaths for the May! for happy Spring

To-day shall all her dowry bring,

The love of kind, the joy, the grace,

Hymen of element and race,

Knowing well to celebrate

With song and hue and star and state,

With tender light and youthful cheer,

The spousals of the new-born year.

Spring is strong and virtuous,

Broad-sowing, cheerful, plenteous,

Quickening underneath the mould

Grains beyond the price of gold.

So deep and large her bounties are,

That one broad, long midsummer day

Shall to the planet overpay

The ravage of a year of war.

Drug the cup, thou butler sweet,

And send the nectar round;

The feet that slid so long on sleet

Are glad to feel the ground.

Fill and saturate each kind

With good according to its mind,

Fill each kind and saturate

With good agreeing with its fate,

And soft perfection of its plan—

Willow and violet, maiden and man,

The bitter-sweet, the haunting air

Creepeth, bloweth everywhere;

It preys on all, all prey on it,

Blooms in beauty, thinks in wit,

Stings the strong with enterprise,

Hakes travellers long for Indian skies,

And where it comes this courier fleet

Fans in all hearts expectance sweet,

As if to-morrow should redeem

The vanished rose of evening's dream.

By houses lies a fresher green,

On men and maids a ruddier mien,

As if time brought a new relay

Of shining virgins every May,

And Summer came to ripen maids

To a beauty that not fades.

I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,

Stepping daily onward north

To greet staid ancient cavaliers

Filing single in stately train.

And who, and who are the travellers?

They were Night and Day, and Day and Night,

Pilgrims wight with step forthright.

I saw the Days deformed and low,

Short and bent by cold and snow;

The merry Spring threw wreaths on them,

Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell;

Many a flower and many a gem,

They were refreshed by the smell,

They shook the snow from hats and shoon,

They put their April raiment on;

And those eternal forms,

Unhurt by a thousand storms,

Shot up to the height of the sky again,

And danced as merrily as young men.

I saw them mask their awful glance

Sidewise meek in gossamer lids;

And to speak my thought if none forbids

It was as if the eternal gods,

Tired of their starry periods,

Hid their majesty in cloth

Woven of tulips and painted moth.

On carpets green the maskers march

Below May's well-appointed arch,

Each star, each god, each grace amain,

Every joy and virtue speed,

Marching duly in her train,

And fainting Nature at her need

Is made whole again.

'T was the vintage-day of field and wood,

When magic wine for bards is brewed;

Every tree and stem and chink

Gushed with syrup to the brink.

The air stole into the streets of towns,

Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns,

And betrayed the fund of joy

To the high-school and medalled boy:

On from hall to chamber ran,

From youth to maid, from boy to man,

To babes, and to old eyes as well.

‘Once more,’ the old man cried, ‘ye clouds,

Airy turrets purple-piled,

Which once my infancy beguiled,

Beguile me with the wonted spell.

I know ye skillful to convoy

The total freight of hope and joy

Into rude and homely nooks,

Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books,

On farmer's byre, on pasture rude,

And stony pathway to the wood.

I care not if the pomps you show

Be what they soothfast appear,

Or if yon realms in sunset glow

Be bubbles of the atmosphere.

And if it be to you allowed

To fool me with a shining cloud,

So only new griefs are consoled

By new delights, as old by old,

Frankly I will be your guest,

Count your change and cheer the best.

The world hath overmuch of pain,—

If Nature give me joy again,

Of such deceit I'll not complain.’

Ah! well I mind the calendar,

Faithful through a thousand years,

Of the painted race of flowers,

Exact to days, exact to hours,

Counted on the spacious dial

Yon broidered zodiac girds.

I know the trusty almanac

Of the punctual coming-back,

On their due days, of the birds.

I marked them yestermorn,

A flock of finches darting

Beneath the crystal arch,

Piping, as they flew, a march,—

Belike the one they used in parting

Last year from yon oak or larch;

Dusky sparrows in a crowd,

Diving, darting northward free,

Suddenly betook them all,

Every one to his hole in the wall,

Or to his niche in the apple-tree.

I greet with joy the choral trains

Fresh from palms and Cuba's canes.

Best gems of Nature's cabinet,

With dews of tropic morning wet,

Beloved of children, bards and Spring,

O birds, your perfect virtues bring,

Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,

Your manners for the heart's delight,

Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof,

Here weave your chamber weather-proof,

Forgive our harms, and condescend

To man, as to a lubber friend,

And, generous, teach his awkward race

Courage and probity and grace!

Poets praise that hidden wine

Hid in milk we drew

At the barrier of Time,

When our life was new.

We had eaten fairy fruit,

We were quick from head to foot,

All the forms we looked on shone

As with diamond dews thereon.

What cared we for costly joys,

The Museum's far-fetched toys?

Gleam of sunshine on the wall

Poured a deeper cheer than all

The revels of the Carnival.

We a pine-grove did prefer

To a marble theatre,

Could with gods on mallows dine,

Nor cared for spices or for wine.

Wreaths of mist and rainbow spanned,

Arch on arch, the grimmest land;

Whistle of a woodland bird

Made the pulses dance,

Note of horn in valleys heard

Filled the region with romance.

None can tell how sweet,

How virtuous, the morning air;

Every accent vibrates well;

Not alone the wood-bird's call,

Or shouting boys that chase their ball,

Pass the height of minstrel skill,

But the ploughman's thoughtless cry,

Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat,

And the joiner's hammer-beat,

Softened are above their will,

Take tones from groves they wandered through

Or flutes which passing angels blew.

All grating discords melt,

No dissonant note is dealt,

And though thy voice be shrill

Like rasping file on steel,

Such is the temper of the air,

Echo waits with art and care,

And will the faults of song repair.

So by remote Superior Lake,

And by resounding Mackinac,

When northern storms the forest shake,

And billows on the long beach break,

The artful Air will separate

Note by note all sounds that grate,

Smothering in her ample breast

All but godlike words,

Reporting to the happy ear

Only purified accords.

Strangely wrought from barking waves,

Soft music daunts the Indian braves,—

Convent-chanting which the child

Hears pealing from the panther's cave

And the impenetrable wild.

Soft on the south-wind sleeps the haze:

So on thy broad mystic van

Lie the opal-colored days,

And waft the miracle to man.

Soothsayer of the eldest gods,

Repairer of what harms betide,

Revealer of the inmost powers

Prometheus proffered, Jove denied;

Disclosing treasures more than true,

Or in what far to-morrow due;

Speaking by the tongues of flowers,

By the ten-tongued laurel speaking,

Singing by the oriole songs,

Heart of bird the man's heart seeking;

Whispering hints of treasure hid

Under Morn's unlifted lid,

Islands looming just beyond

The dim horizon's utmost bound;—

Who can, like thee, our rags upbraid,

Or taunt us with our hope decayed?

Or who like thee persuade,

Making the splendor of the air,

The morn and sparkling dew, a snare?

Or who resent

Thy genius, wiles and blandishment?

There is no orator prevails

To beckon or persuade

Like thee the youth or maid;

Thy birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,

Thy blooms, thy kinds,

Thy echoes in the wilderness,

Soothe pain, and age, and love's distress,

Fire fainting will, and build heroic minds.

For thou, O Spring! canst renovate

All that high God did first create.

Be still his arm and architect,

Rebuild the ruin, mend defect;

Chemist to vamp old worlds with new,

Coat sea and sky with heavenlier blue,

New tint the plumage of the birds,

And slough decay from grazing herds,

Sweep ruins from the scarped mountain,

Cleanse the torrent at the fountain,

Purge alpine air by towns defiled,

Bring to fair mother fairer child,

Not less renew the heart and brain,

Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,

Make the aged eye sun-clear,

To parting soul bring grandeur near.

Under gentle types, my Spring

Masks the might of Nature's king,

An energy that searches thorough

From Chaos to the dawning morrow;

Into all our human plight,

The soul's pilgrimage and flight;

In city or in solitude,

Step by step, lifts bad to good,

Without halting, without rest,

Lifting Better up to Best;

Planting seeds of knowledge pure,

Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

THE ADIRONDACS.
A JOURNAL.

dedicated to my fellow-travellers in august, 1858.

Wise and polite,—and if I drew

Their several portraits, you would own

Chancer had no such worthy crew,

Nor Boccace in Decameron.

WE crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends.

Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks

Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach

The Adirondac lakes. At Martin's Beach

We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,—

Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.

Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,

With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,

Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,

Taháwus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,

And other Titans without muse or name.

Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,

Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.

We made our distance wider, boat from boat,

As each would hear the oracle alone.

By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid

Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,

Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,

Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,

Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,

On through the Upper Saranac, and up

Père Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass

Winding through grassy shallows in and out,

Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,

To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.

Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,

Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge

Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.

A pause and council: then, where near the head

Due east a bay makes inward to the land

Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank,

And in the twilight of the forest noon

Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard.

We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,

Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,

Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.

The wood was sovran with centennial trees,—

Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,

Linden and spruce. In strict society

Three conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,

Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby.

Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,

The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

‘Welcome!’ the wood-god murmured through the leaves,—

‘Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.’

Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,

Which o'erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.

Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,

Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.

Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft

In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,

Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,

And greet unanimous the joyful change.

So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,

Though late returning to her pristine ways.

Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;

And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,

Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.

Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air

That circled freshly in their forest dress

Made them to boys again. Happier that they

Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,

At the first mounting of the giant stairs.

No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,

No door-bell heralded a visitor,

No courier waits, no letter came or went,

Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;

The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,

The falling rain will spoil no holiday.

We were made freemen of the forest laws,

All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,

Essaying nothing she cannot perform.

In Adirondac lakes,

At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:

Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make

His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,

He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:

A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,

And in the left, a gun, his needful arms.

By turns we praised the stature of our guides,

Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill

To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,

To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs

Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:

Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,

And wit to trap or take him in his lair.

Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,

In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;

Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired

Three times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.

Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!

No city airs or arts pass current here.

Tour rank is all reversed; let men of cloth

Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls:

They are the doctors of the wilderness,

And we the low-prized laymen.

In sooth, red flannel is a saucy test

Which few can put on with impunity.

What make you, master, fumbling at the oar?

Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.

The sallow knows the basket-maker's thumb;

The oar, the guide's. Dare you accept the tasks

He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,

Tell the sun's time, determine the true north,

Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods

To thread by night the nearest way to camp?

Ask you, how went the hours?

All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,

North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,

Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;

Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;

Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;

Or listening to the laughter of the loon;

Or, in the evening twilight's latest red,

Beholding the procession of the pines;

Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,

In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunter

Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds

Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.

Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods

Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck

Who stands astonished at the meteor light,

Then turns to bound away,—is it too late?

Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,

Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;

Sometimes their wits at sally and retort,

With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;

Or parties scaled the near acclivities

Competing seekers of a rumored lake,

Whose unauthenticated waves we named

Lake Probability,—our carbuncle,

Long sought, not found.

Two Doctors in the cam,

Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brai.

Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,

Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;

Insatiate skill in water or in air

Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;.

The while, one leaden pot of alcohol

Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.

Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,

Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,

Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride,

Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,

Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.

Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,

The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker

Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.

As water poured through hollows of the hills

To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,

So Nature shed all beauty lavishly

From her redundant horn.

Lords of this realm,

Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day

Rounded by hours where each outdid the last

In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,

As if associates of the sylvan gods.

We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,

So pure the Alpine element we breathed,

So light, so lofty pictures came and went.

We trode on air, contemned the distant town,

Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned

That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge

And how we should come hither with our sons,

Hereafter,—willing they, and more adroit.

Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery,—

The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito

Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:

But, on the second day, we heed them not,

Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,

Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.

For who defends our leafy tabernacle

From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,—

Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,

Which past endurance sting the tender cit,

But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,

Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

Our foaming ale we drank from hunters' pans,

Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave

Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;

All ate like abbots, and, if any missed

Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss

With hunters' appetite and peals of mirth.

And Stillman, our guides' guide, and Commodore,

Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Æneas, said aloud,

“Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating

Food indigestible”:—then murmured some,

Others applauded him who spoke the truth.

Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought

Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday

‘Mid all the hints and glories of the home.

For who can tell what sudden privacies

Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry

Of scholars furloughed from their tasks and let

Into this Oreads’ fended. Paradise,

As chapels in the city's thoroughfares,

Whither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his brow

And meditate a moment on Heaven's rest.

Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke

To each apart, lifting her lovely shows

To spiritual lessons pointed home,

And as through dreams in watches of the night,

So through all creatures in their form and ways

Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,

Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense

Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.

Hark to that petulant chirp! what aus the warbler?

Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.

Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,

Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,

Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?

And presently the sky is changed; O world!

What pictures and what harmonies are thine!

The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,

So like the soul of me, what if 't were me?

A melancholy better than all mirth.

Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,

Or at the foresight of obscurer years?

Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory.

Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty

Superior to all its gaudy skirts.

And, that no day of life may lack romance,

The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down

A private beam into each several heart.

Daily the bending skies solicit man,

The seasons chariot him from this exile,

The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,

The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,

Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights

Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

With a vermilion pencil mark the day

When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs

Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falla

Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront

Two of our mates returning with swift oars.

One held a printed journal waving high Caught from a late-arriving traveller,

Big with great news, and shouted the report

For which the world had waited, now firm fact,

Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,

And landed on our coast, and pulsating

With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries

From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,

Greet the glad miracle. Thought's new-found path

Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,

Match God's equator with a zone of art,

And lift man's public action to a height

Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,

When linkæd hemispheres attest his deed.

We have few moments in the longest life

Of such delight and wonder as there grew,—

Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:

A burst of joy, as if we told the fact

To ears intelligent; as if gray rock

And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know

This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;

As if we men were talking in a vein

Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,

And a prime end of the most subtle element

Were fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!

Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,

Let them hear well! 't is theirs as much as ours.

A spasm throbbing through the pedestals

Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,

Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill

To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.

The lightning has run masterless too long;

He must to school and learn his verb and noun

And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,

Spelling with guided tongue man's messages

Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.

And yet I marked, even in the manly joy

Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat

(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;

Or was it for mankind a generous shame,

As of a luck not quite legitimate,

Since fortune snatched from wit the lion's part?

Was it a college pique of town and gown,

As one within whose memory it burned

That not academicians, but some lout,

Found ten years since the Californian gold?

And now, again, a hungry company

Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,

Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools

Of science, not from the philosophers,

Had won the brightest laurel of all time.

'T was always thus, and will be; hand and head

Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift,

The other slow,—this the Prometheus,

And that the Jove,—yet, howsoever hid,

It was from Jove the other stole his fire,

And, without Jove, the good had never been,

It is not Iroquois or cannibals,

But ever the free race with front sublime,

And these instructed by their wisest too,

Who do the feat, and lift humanity.

Let not him mourn who best entitled was,

Nay, mourn not one: let him exult,

Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,

And water it with wine, nor watch askance

Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:

Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.

We flee away from cities, but we bring

The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,

Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts,

We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:

But will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore

Of books and arts and trained experiment,

Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?

O no, not we! Witness the shout that shook

Wild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hail

The joyful traveller gives, when on the verge

Of craggy Indian wilderness he hears

From a log-cabin stream Beethoven's notes

On the piano, played with master's hand.

‘Well done!’ he cries; ‘the bear is kept at bay,

The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;

All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,

This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,

This wild plantation will suffice to chase.

Now speed the gay celerities of art,

What in the desert was impossible

Within four walls is possible again,—

Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill,

Traditioned fame of masters, eager strife

Of keen competing youths, joined or alone

To outdo each other and extort applause.

Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.

Twirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,

On for a thousand years of genius more.’

The holidays were fruitful, but must end;

One August evening had a cooler breath;

Into each mind intruding duties crept;

Under the cinders burned the fires of home;

Nay, letters found us in our paradise:

So in the gladness of the new event

We struck our camp and left the happy hills.

The fortunate star that rose on us sank not;

The prodigal sunshine rested on the land,

The rivers gambolled onward to the sea,

And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,

Permitted on her infinite repose

Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,

As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

BRAHMA.

IF the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

FATE.

DEEP in the man sits fast his fate

To mould his fortunes mean or great;

Unknown to Cromwell as to me

Was Cromwell's measure or degree;

Unknown to him as to his horse,

If he than his groom be better or worse.

He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs,

With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares,

Till late he learned, through doubt and fear,

Broad England harbored not his peer:

Obeying Time, the last to own

The Genius from its cloudy throne.

For the prevision is allied

Unto the thing so signified;

Or say, the foresight that awaits

Is the same Genius that creates.

FREEDOM.

ONCE I wished I might rehearse

Freedom's pæan in my verse,

That the slave who caught the strain

Should throb until he snapped his chain,

But the Spirit said, ‘Not so;

Speak it not, or speak it low;

Name not lightly to be said,

Gift too precious to be prayed,

Passion not to be expressed

But by heaving of the breast:

Yet,—wouldst thou the mountain find

Where this deity is shrined,

Who gives to seas and sunset skies

Their unspent beauty of surprise,

And, when it lists him, waken can

Brute or savage into man;

Or, if in thy heart he shine,

Blends the starry fates with thine,

Draws angels nigh to dwell with thee.

And makes thy thoughts archangels be;

Freedom's secret wilt thou know?—

Counsel not with flesh and blood;

Loiter not for cloak or food;

Right thou feelest, rush to do.’

ODE.
SUNG IN THE TOWN HALL, CONCORD, JULY 4, 1857.

O TENDERLY the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire;

One morn is in the mighty heaven,

And one in our desire.

The cannon booms from town to town,

Our pulses beat not less,

The joy-bells chime their tidings down,

Which children's voices bless.

For He that flung the broad blue fold

O'er-mantling land and sea,

One third part of the sky unrolled

For the banner of the free.

The men are ripe of Saxon kind

To build an equal state,—

To take the statute from the mind

And make of duty fate.

United States! the ages plead,—

Present and Past in under-song,—

Go put your creed into your deed,

Nor speak with double tongue.

For sea and land don't understand,

Nor skies without a frown

See rights for which the one hand fights

By the other cloven down.

Be just at home; then write your scroll

Of honor o'er the sea,

And bid the broad Atlantic roll,

A ferry of the free.

And henceforth there shall be no chain,

Save underneath the sea

The wires shall murmur through the main

Sweet songs of liberty.

The conscious stars accord above,

The waters wild below,

And under, through the cable wove,

Her fiery errands go.

For He that worketh high and wise,

Nor pauses in his plan,

Will take the sun out of the skies

Ere freedom out of man.

BOSTON HYMN.
READ IN MUSIC HALL, JANUARY 1, 1863.

THE word of the Lord by night

To the watching Pilgrims came,

As they sat by the seaside,

And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings,

I suffer them no more;

Up to my ear the morning brings

The ontrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball

A field of havoc and war,

Where tyrants great and tyrants small

Might harry the weak and poor?

My angel,—his name is Freedom,—

Choose him to be your king;

He shall cut pathways east and west

And fend you with his wing.

Lo! I uncover the land

Which I hid of old time in the West,

As the sculptor uncovers the statue

When he has wrought his best;

I show Columbia, of the rocks

Which dip their foot in the seas

And soar to the air-borne flocks

Of clouds and the boreal fleece.

I will divide my goods;

Call in the wretch and slave:

None shall rule but the humble,

And none but Toil shall have.

I will have never a noble,

No lineage counted great;

Fishers and choppers and ploughmen

Shall constitute a state.

Go, cut down trees in the forest

And trim the straightest boughs;

Cut down trees in the forest

And build me a wooden house.

Call the people together,

The young men and the sires,

The digger in the harvest field,

Hireling and him that hires;

And here in a pine state-house

They shall choose men to rule

In every needful faculty,

In church and state and school.

Lo, now! if these poor men

Can govern the land and sea

And make just laws below the sun,

As planets faithful be.

And ye shall succor men;

'T is nobleness to serve;

Help them who cannot help again:

Beware from right to swerve.

I break your bonds and masterships,

And I unchain the slave:

Free be his heart and hand henceforth

As wind and wandering wave.

I cause from every creature

His proper good to flow:

As much as he is and doeth,

So much he shall bestow.

But, laying hands on another

To coin his labor and sweat,

He goes in pawn to his victim

For eternal years in debt.

To-day unbind the captive,

So only are ye unbound;

Lift up a people from the dust,

Trump of their rescue, sound!

Pay ransom to the owner

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.

O North! give him beauty for rags,

And honor, O South! for his shame;

Nevada! coin thy golden crags

With Freedom's image and name.

Up! and the dusky race

That sat in darkness long,—

Be swift their feet as antelopes,

And as behemoth strong.

Come, East and West and North,

By races, as snow-flakes,

And carry my purpose forth,

Which neither halts nor shakes.

My will fulfilled shall be,

For, in daylight or in dark,

My thunderbolt has eyes to see

His way home to the mark.

VOLUNTARIES

Low and mournful be the strain,

Haughty thought be far from me;

Tones of penitence and pain,

Meanings of the tropic sea;

Low and tender in the cell

Where a captive sits in chains,

Crooning ditties treasured well

From his Afric's torrid plains.

Sole estate his sire bequeathed,—

Hapless sire to hapless son,—

Was the wailing song he breathed,

And his chain when life was done.

What his fault, or what his crime?

Or what ill planet crossed his prime?

Heart too soft and will too weak

To front the fate that crouches near,—

Dove beneath the vulture's beak;—

Will song dissuade the thirsty spear?

Dragged from his mother's arms and breast,

Displaced, disfurnished here,

His wistful toil to do his best

Chilled by a ribald jeer.

Great men in the Senate sate,

Sage and hero, side by side,

Building for their sons the State,

Which they shall rule with pride.

They forbore to break the chain

Which bound the dusky tribe,

Checked by the owners' fierce disdain,

Lured by “Union” as the bribe.

Destiny sat by, and said,

‘Pang for pang your seed shall pay,

Hide in false peace your coward head,

I bring round the harvest day.’

ii.

FREEDOM all winged expands,

Nor perches in a narrow place;

Her broad van seeks unplanted lands;

She loves a poor and virtuous race.

Clinging to a colder zone

Whose dark sky sheds the snow-flake down,

The snow-flake is her banner's star,

Her stripes the boreal streamers are.

Long she loved the Northman well;

Now the iron age is done,

She will not refuse to dwell

With the offspring of the Sun;

Foundling of the desert far,

Where palms plume, siroccos blaze,

He roves unhurt the burning ways

In climates of the summer star.

He has avenues to God

Hid from men of Northern brain,

Far beholding, without cloud.

What these with slowest steps attain.

If once the generous chief arrive

To lead him willing to be led,

For freedom he will strike and strive,

And drain his heart till he be dead.

iii.

IN an age of fops and toys,

Wanting wisdom, void of right,

Who shall nerve heroic boys

To hazard all in Freedom's fight,—

Break sharply off their jolly games,

Forsake their comrades gay

And quit proud homes and youthful dames

For famine, toil and fray?

Yet on the nimble air benign

Speed nimbler messages,

That waft the breath of grace divine

To hearts in sloth and ease.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

The youth replies, I can.

iv.

O, WELL for the fortunate soul

Which Music's wings infold,

Stealing away the memory

Of sorrows new and old!

Yet happier he whose inward sight,

Stayed on his subtile thought,

Shuts his sense on toys of time,

To vacant bosoms brought.

But best befriended of the God

He who, in evil times,

Warned by an inward voice,

Heeds not the darkness and the dread,

Biding by his rule and choice,

Feeling only the fiery thread

Leading over heroic ground,

Walled with mortal terror round,

To the aim which him allures,

And the sweet heaven his deed secures.

Peril around, all else appalling,

Cannon in front and leaden rain

Him duty through the clarion calling

To the van called not in vain.

Stainless soldier on the walls,

Knowing this,—and knows no more,—

Whoever fights, whoever falls,

Justice conquers evermore,

Justice after as before,—

And he who battles on her side,

God, though he were ten times slain,

Crowns him victor glorified,

Victor over death and pain.

BLOOMS the laurel which belongs

To the valiant chief who fights;

I see the wreath, I hear the songs

Lauding the Eternal Rights,

Victors over daily wrongs:

Awful victors, they misguide

Whom they will destroy,

And their coming triumph hide

In our downfall, or our joy:

They reach no term, they never sleep,

In equal strength through space abide;

Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,

The strong they slay, the swift outstride:

Fate's grass grows rank in valley elods,

And rankly on the castled steep,—

Speak it firmly, these are gods,

All are ghosts beside.

BOSTON.
SICUT PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIB.
[READ IN FANEUIL HALL, ON DECEMBER 16, 1873, THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERARY AT THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEA IN ROSTON HARBOR.]

THE rocky nook with hill-tops three

Looked eastward from the farms,

And twice each day the flowing sea

Took Boston in its arms;

The men of yore were stout and poor,

And sailed for bread to every shore.

And where they went on trade intent

They did what freemen can,

Their dauntless ways did all men praise,

The merchant was a man.

The world was made for honest trade,—

To plant and eat be none afraid.

The waves that rocked them on the deep

To them their secret told;

Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep,

“Like us be free and bold!”

The honest waves refused to slaves

The empire of the ocean caves.

Old Europe groans with palaces,

Has lords enough and more;—

We plant and build by foaming seas

A city of the poor;—

For day by day could Boston Bay

Their honest labor overpay.

We grant no dukedoms to the few,

We hold like rights, and shall;—

Equal on Sunday in the pew,

On Monday in the mall,

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The noble craftsman we promote,

Disown the knave and fool;

Each honest man shall have his vote,

Each child shall have his school.

A union then of honest men,

Or union never more again.

The wild rose and the barberry thorn

Hung out their summer pride,

Where now on heated pavements worn

The feet of millions stride.

Fair rose the planted hills behind

The good town on the bay,

And where the western hills declined

The prairie stretched away.

What care though rival cities soar

Along the stormy coast,

Penn's town, New York and Baltimore,

If Boston knew the most!

They laughed to know the world so wide;

The mountains said, “Good-day!

We greet you well, you Saxon men,

Up with your towns and stay!”

The world was made for honest trade,—

To plant and eat be none afraid.

“For you,” they said, “no barriers be,

For you no sluggard rest;

Each street leads downward to the sea,

Or landward to the west.”

O happy town beside the sea,

Whose roads lead everywhere to all;

Than thine no deeper moat can be,

No stouter fence, no steeper wall!

Bad news from George on the English throne;

“You are thriving well,” said he;

“Now by these presents be it known

You shall pay us a tax on tea;

'T is very small,—no load at all,—

Honor enough that we send the call.”

“Not so,” said Boston, “good my lord,

We pay your governors here

Abundant for their bed and board,

Six thousand pounds a year.

(Your Highness knows our homely word,)

Millions for self-government,

But for tribute never a cent.”

The cargo came! and who could blame

If Indians seized the tea,

And, chest by chest, let down the same,

Into the laughing sea?

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The townsmen braved the English king,

Found friendship in the French,

And honor joined the patriot ring

Low on their wooden bench.

O bounteous seas that never fail!

O day remembered yet!

O happy port that spied the sail

Which wafted Lafayette!

Pole-star of light in Europe's night,

That never faltered from the right.

Kings shook with fear, old empires crave

The secret force to find

Which fired the little State to save

The rights of all mankind.

But right is might through all the world;

Province to province faithful clung,

Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled,

Till Freedom cheered and joy-bells rung.

The sea returning day by day

Restores the world-wide mart;

So let each dweller on the Bay

Fold Boston in his heart,

Till these echoes be choked with snows,

Or over the town blue ocean flows.

Let the blood of her hundred thousands

Throb in each manly vein;

And the wits of all her wisest,

Make sunshine in her brain.

For you can teach the lightning speech,

And round the globe your voices reach.

And each shall care for other,

And each to each shall bend,

To the poor a noble brother,

To the good an equal friend.

A blessing through the ages thus

Shield all thy roofs and towers!

GODWITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,

Thou darling town of ours!

This poem was begun several years before the War, but was not finished until the occasion of its delivery in 1873, the anniversary festival, when the piece was entirely remodelled.

Some of the suppressed stanzas are here given.

The poem began thus:—

The land that has no song

Shall have a song to-day

The granite ledge is dumb too long,

The vales have much to say:

For you can teach the lightning speech,

And round the globe your voices reach.

After the lines on Lafayette followed these stanzas:—

O pity that I pause!

The song disdaining shuns

To name the noble sires, because

Of the unworthy sons

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

But there was chaff within the flour,

And one was false in ten,

And reckless clerks in lust of power

Forgot the rights of men;

Cruel and blind did file their mind,

And sell the blood of human kind.

Your town is full of gentle names,

By patriots once were watchwords made;

Those war-cry names are muffled shames

On recreant sons mislaid.

What slave shall dare a name to wear

Once Freedom's passport everywhere?

O welaway' if this be so,

And man cannot afford the right,

And if the wage of love be woe,

And honest dealing yield despite.

For what avail or plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Hie to the woods, sleek citizen,

Back to the sea, go, landsman, down,

Clumb the White Hills, fat alderman,

And vacant leave the town,

Ere these echoes be choked with snows,

Or over the roofs blue Ocean flows.

LETTERS.

EVERY day brings a ship,

Every ship brings a word;

Well for those who have no fear,

Looking seaward well assured

That the word the vessel brings

Is the word they wish to hear.

RUBIES.

THEY brought me rubies from the mine,

And held them to the sun;

I said, they are drops of frozen wine

From Eden's vats that run.

I looked again,—I thought them hearts

Of friends to friends unknown;

Tides that should warm each neighboring life

Are locked in sparkling stone.

But fire to thaw that ruddy snow,

To break enchanted ice,

And give love's scarlet tides to flow,—

When shall that sun arise?

THE TEST.
(MUSA LOQUITUR.)

I HUNG my verses in the wind,

Time and tide their faults may find.

All were winnowed through and through,

Five lines lasted sound and true;

Five were smelted in a pot

Than the South more fierce and hot;

These the siroc could not melt,

Fire their fiercer flaming felt,

And the meaning was more white

Than July's meridian light.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,

Nor time unmake what poets know.

Have you eyes to find the five

Which five hundred did survive?

SOLUTION.

I AM the Muse who sung alway

By Jove, at dawn of the first day.

Star-crowned, sole-sitting, long I wrought

To fire the stagnant earth with thought:

On spawning slime my song prevails,

Wolves shed their fangs, and dragons scales;

Flushed in the sky the sweet May-morn,

Earth smiled with flowers, and man was born.

Then Asia yeaned her shepherd race,

And Nile substructs her granite base,—

Tented Tartary, columned Nile,—

And, under vines, on rocky isle,

Or on wind-blown sea-marge bleak,

Forward stepped the perfect Greek:

That wit and joy might find a tongue,

And earth grow civil, HOMER sung.

Flown to Italy from Greece,

I brooded long and held my peace,

For I am wont to sing uncalled,

And in days of evil plight

Unlock doors of new delight;

And sometimes mankind I appalled

With a bitter horoscope,

With spasms of terror for balm of hope.

Then by better thought I lead

Bards to speak what nations need;

So I folded me in fears,

And DANTE searched the triple spheres,

Moulding nature at his will,

So shaped, so colored, swift or still,

And, sculptor-like, his large design

Etched on Alp and Apennine.

Seethed in mists of Penmanmaur,

Taught by Plinlimmon's Druid power,

England's genius filled all measure

Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,

Gave to the mind its emperor,

And life was larger than before:

Nor sequent centuries could hit

Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE'S wit.

The men who lived with him became

Poets, for the air was fame.

Far in the North, where polar night

Holds in check the frolic light,

In trance upborne past mortal goal

The Swede EMANUEL leads the soul.

Through snows above, mines underground,

The inks of Erebus he found;

Rehearsed to men the damned wails

On which the seraph music sails.

In spirit-worlds he trod alone,

But walked the earth unmarked, unknown.

The near by-stander caught no sound,—

Yet they who listened far aloof

Heard readings of the skyey roof,

And felt, beneath, the quaking ground;

And his air-sown, unheeded words,

In the next age, are flaming swords.

In newer days of war and trade,

Romance forgot, and faith decayed,

When Science armed and guided war,

And clerks the Janus-gates unbar,

When France, where poet never grew,

Halved and dealt the globe anew,

GOETHE, raised o'er joy and strife,

Drew the firm lines of Fate and Life

And brought Olympian wisdom down

To court and mart, To gown and town

Stooping, his finger wrote in clay

The open secret of to-day.

So bloom the unfading petals five,

And verses that all verse outlive.

HYMN
SUNG AT THE SECOND CHURCH, BOSTON, AT THE ORDINATION OF REV. CHANDLER ROBBINS.

WE love the venerahle house

Our fathers built to God;—

In heaven are kept their grateful vows,

Their dust endears the sod.

Here holy thoughts a light have shed

From many a radiant face,

And prayers of humble virtue made

The perfume of the place.

And anxious hearts have pondered here

The mystery of life,

And prayed the eternal Light to clear

Their doubts, and aid their strife.

From humble tenements around

Came up the pensive train,

And in the church a blessing found

That filled their homes again;

For faith and peace and mighty love

That from the Godhead flow,

Showed them the life of Heaven above

Springs from the life below.

They live with God; their homes are dust;

Yet here their children pray,

And in this fleeting lifetime trust

To find the narrow way.

On him who by the altar stands,

On him thy blessing fall,

Speak through his lips thy pure commands,

Thou heart that lovest all.

NATURE.

WINTERS know

Easily to shed the snow,

And the untaught Spring is wise

In cowslips and anemonies.

Nature, hating art and pains,

Baulks and baffles plotting brains;

Casualty and Surprise

Are the apples of her eyes;

But she dearly loves the poor,

And, by marvel of her own,

Strikes the loud pretender down.

For Nature listens in the rose

And hearkens in the berry's bell

To help her friends, to plague her foes,

And like wise God she judges well.

Yet doth much her love excel

To the souls that never fell,

To swains that live in happiness

And do well because they please,

Who walk in ways that are unfamed,

And feats achieve before they're named.

NATURE.

ii.

SHE is gamesome and good,

But of mutable mood,—

No dreary repeater now and again,

She will be all things to all men.

She who is old, but nowise feeble,

Pours her power into the people,

Merry and manifold without bar,

Makes and moulds them what they are,

And what they call their city way

Is not their way, but hers,

And what they say they made to-day,

They learned of the oaks and firs.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh,

Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh;

She drugs her water and her wheat

With the flavors she finds meet,

And gives them what to drink and eat;

And having thus their bread and growth,

They do her bidding, nothing loath.

What's most theirs is not their own,

But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone,

And in their vaunted works of Art

The master-stroke is still her part.

THE ROMANY GIRL.

THE sun goes down, and with him takes

The coarseness of my poor attire;

The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame

Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher.

Pale Northern girls! you scorn our race;

You captives of your air-tight halls,

Wear out in-doors your sickly days,

But leave us the horizon walls.

And if I take you, dames, to task,

And say it frankly without guile,

Then you are Gypsies in a mask,

And I the lady all the while.

If on the heath, below the moon,

I court and play with paler blood,

Me false to mine dare whisper none,—

One sallow horseman knows me good.

Go, keep your cheek's rose from the rain,

For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;

My swarthy tint is in the grain,

The rocks and forest know it real.

The wild air bloweth in our lungs,

The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,

The birds gave us our wily tongues,

The panther in our dances flies.

Ton doubt we read the stars on high,

Nathless we read your fortunes true;

The stars may hide in the upper sky,

But without glass we fathom you.

DAYS.

DAUGHTERS of Time, the hypocritic Days,

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,

And marching single in an endless file,

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

To each they offer gifts after his will,

Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day

Turned and departed silent I, too late,

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT.

DAY! hast thou two faces,

Making one place two places?

One, by humble farmer seen,

Chill and wet, unlighted, mean,

Useful only, triste and damp,

Serving for a laborer's lamp?

Have the same mists another side,

To be the appanage of pride,

Gracing the rich man's wood and lake,

His park where amber mornings break,

And treacherously bright to show

His planted isle where roses glow?

O Day! and is your mightiness

A sycophant to smug success?

Will the sweet sky and ocean broad

Be fine accomplices to fraud?

O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray:

Back, back to chaos, harlot Day!

MY GARDEN.

IF I could put my woods in song

And tell what's there enjoyed,

All men would to my gardens throng,

And leave the cities void.

In my plot no tulips blow,—

Snow-loving pines and oaks instead;

And rank the savage maples grow

From Spring's faint flush to Autumn red.

My garden is a forest ledge

Which older forests bound;

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,

Then plunge to depths profound.

Here once the Deluge ploughed,

Laid the terraces, one by one;

Ebbing later whence it flowed,

They bleach and dry in the sun.

The sowers made haste to depart,—

The wind and the birds which sowed it;

Not for fame, nor by rules of art,

Planted these, and tempests flowed it.

Waters that wash my garden side

Play not in Nature's lawful web,

They heed not moon or solar tide,—

Five years elapse from flood to ebb.

Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,

And every god,—none did refuse;

And be sure at last came Love,

And after Love, the Muse.

Keen ears can catch a syllable,

As if one spake to another,

In the hemlocks tall, untamable,

And what the whispering grasses smother.

Æolian harps in the pine

Ring with the song of the Fates;

Infant Bacchus in the vine,—

Far distant yet his chorus waits.

Canst thou copy in verse one chime

Of the wood-bell's peal and cry,

Write in a book the morning's prime,

Or match with words that tender sky

Wonderful verse.of the gods,

Of one import, of varied tone;

They chant the bliss of their abodes

To man imprisoned in his own.

Ever the words of the gods resound;

But the porches of man's ear

Seldom in this low life's round

Are unsealed, that he may hear

Wandering voices in the air

And murmurs in the wold

Speak what I cannot declare,

Yet cannot all withhold.

When the shadow fell on the lake,

The whirlwind in ripples wrote

Air-bells of fortune that shine and break,

And omens above thought.

But the meanings cleave to the lake,

Cannot be carried in book or urn;

Go thy ways now, come later back,

On waves and hedges still they burn.

These the fates of men forecast,

Of better men than live to-day;

If who can read them comes at last

He will spell in the sculpture, ‘Stay.’

THE TITMOUSE.

You shall not be overbold

When you deal with arctic cold,

As late I found my lukewarm blood

Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.

How should I fight? my foeman fine

Has million arms to one of mine:

East, west, for aid I looked in vain,

East, west, north, south, are his domain.

Miles off, three dangerous miles, is home;

Must borrow his winds who there would coma

Up and away for life! be fleet!—

The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,

Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,

Curdles the blood to the marble bones,

Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,

And hems in life with narrowing fence.

Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,—

The punctual stars will vigil keep,—

Embalmed by purifying cold;

The winds shall sing their dead-march old,

The snow is no ignoble shroud,

The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

Softly,—but this way fate was pointing,

T was coming fast to such anointing,

When piped a tiny voice hard by,

Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,

Chic-chicadeedee! saucy note

Out of sound heart and merry throat,

As if it said, ‘Good day, good sir!

Fine afternoon, old passenger!

Happy to meet you in these places,

Where January brings few faces.’

This poet, though he live apart,

Moved by his hospitable heart,

Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,

To do the honors of his court,

As fits a feathered lord of land,

Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,

Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,

Prints his small impress on the snow,

Shows feats of his gymnastic play,

Head downward, clinging to the spray.

Here was this atom in full breath,

Hurling defiance at vast death;

This scrap of valor just for play

Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,

As if to shame my weak behavior;

I greeted loud my little savior,

‘You pet! what dost here? and what for?

In these woods, thy small Labrador,

At this pinch, wee San Salvador!

What fire burns in that little chest

So frolic, stout and self-possest?

Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;

Ashes and jet all hues outshine.

Why are not diamonds black and gray,

To ape thy dare-devil array?

And I affirm, the spacious North

Exists to draw thy virtue forth.

I think no virtue goes with size;

The reason of all cowardice

Is, that men are overgrown,

And, to be valiant, must come down

To the titmouse dimension,’

'T is good-will makes intelligence,

And I began to catch the sense

Of my bird's song: ‘Live out of doors

In the great woods, on prairie floors.

I dine in the sun; when he sinks in the sea,

I too have a hole in a hollow tree;

And I like less when Summer beats

With stifling beams on these retreats,

Than noontide twilights which snow makes

With tempest of the blinding flakes.

For well the soul, if stout within,

Can arm impregnably the skin;

And polar frost my frame defied,

Made of the air that blows outside.’

With glad remembrance of my debt,

I homeward turn; farewell, my pet!

When here again thy pilgrim comes,

He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs.

Doubt not, so long as earth has bread,

Thou first and foremost shalt be fed;

The Providence that is most large

Takes hearts like thine in special charge,

Helps who for their own need are strong,

And the sky doats on cheerful song.

Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant

O'er all that mass and minster vaunt;

For men mis-hear thy call in Spring,

As't would accost some frivolous wing,

Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be!

And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee!

I think old Cæsar must have heard

In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,

And, echoed in some frosty wold,

Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.

And I will write our annals new,

And thank thee for a better clew,

I, who dreamed not when I came here

To find the antidote of fear,

Now hear thee say in Roman key,

pœan! Veni, vidi, vici.

THE HARP.

ONE musician is sure,

His wisdom will not fail,

He has not tasted wine impure,

Nor bent to passion frail.

Age cannot cloud his memory,

Nor grief untune his voice,

Ranging down the ruled scale

From tone of joy to inward wail,

Tempering the pitch of all

In his windy cave.

He all the fables knows,

And in their causes tells,—

Knows Nature's rarest moods,

Ever on her secret broods.

The Muse of men is coy,

Oft courted will not come;

In palaces and market squares

Entreated, she is dumb;

But my minstrel knows and tells.

The counsel of the gods,

Knows of Holy Book the spells,

Knows the law of Night and Day,

And the heart of girl and boy,

The tragic and the gay,

And what is writ on Table Round

Of Arthur and his peers;

What sea and land discoursing say

In sidereal years.

He renders all his lore

In numbers wild as dreams,

Modulating all extremes,—

What the spangled meadow saith

To the children who have faith;

Only to children children sing,

Only to youth will spring be spring.

Who is the Bard thus magnified?

When did he sing? and where abide?

Chief of song where poets feast

Is the wind-harp which thou seest

In the casement at my side.

Æolian harp,

How strangely wise thy strain!

Gay for youth, gay for youth,

(Sweet is art, but sweeter truth,)

In the hall at summer eve

Fate and Beauty skilled to weave

From the eager opening strings

Rung loud and bold the song.

Who but loved the wind-harp's note?

How should not the poet doat

On its mystic tongue,

With its primeval memory,

Reporting what old minstrels told

Of Merlin locked the harp within,—

Merlin paying the pain of sin,

Pent in a dungeon made of air,—

And some attain his voice to hear,

Words of pain and cries of fear,

But pillowed all on melody,

As fits the griefs of bards to be.

And what if that all-echoing shell,

Which thus the buried Past can tell,

Should rive the Future, and reveal

What his dread folds would fain conceal?

It shares the secret of the earth,

And of the kinds that owe her birth.

Speaks not of self that mystic tone,

But of the Overgods alone:

It trembles to the cosmic breath,—

As it heareth, so it saith;

Obeying meek the primal Cause,

It is the tongue of mundane laws.

And this, at least, I dare affirm,

Since genius too has bound and term,

There is no bard in all the choir,

Not Homer's self, the poet sire,

Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,

Or Shakspeare, whom no mind can measure,

Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,

Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,

Scott, the delight of generous boys,

Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,—

Not one of all can put in verse,

Or to this presence could rehearse

The sights and voices ravishing

The boy knew on the hills in spring,

When pacing through the oaks he heard

Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,

The heavy grouse's sudden whir,

The rattle of the kingfisher;

Saw bonfires of the harlot flies

In the lowland, when day dies;

Or marked, benighted and forlorn,

The first far signal-fire of morn.

These syllables that Nature spoke,

And the thoughts that in him woke,

Can adequately utter none

Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.

Therein I hear the Pace reel

The threads of man at their humming wheel,

The threads of life and power and pain,

So sweet and mournful falls the strain.

And best can teach its Delphian chord

How Nature to the soul is moored,

If once again that silent string,

As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.

Not long ago at eventide,

It seemed, so listening, at my sid

A window rose, and, to say sooth,

I looked forth on the fields of youth:

I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,

I knew their forms in fancy weeds,

Long, long concealed by sundering fates,

Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates,

Stronger and bolder far than I,

With grace, with genius, well attired

And then as now from far admired,

Followed with love

They knew not of,

With passion cold and shy.

O joy, for what recoveries rare!

Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,

See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom,—

Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!

Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoil

Of life resurgent from the soil

Wherein was dropped the mortal spoil.

SEA-SHORE.

I HEARD or seemed to hear the chiding Sea

Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come?

Am I not always here, thy summer home?

Is not my voice thy music, morn and eve?

My breath thy healthful climate in the heats.

My touch thy antidote, my bay thy bath?

Was ever building like my terraces?

Was ever conch magnificent as mine?

Lie on the warm rock-ledges, and there learn

A little hut suffices like a town.

I make your sculptured architecture vain,

Vain beside mine. I drive my wedges home,

And carve the coastwise mountain into caves

Lo! here is Rome and Nineveh and Thebes,

Karnak and Pyramid and Giant's Stairs

Half piled or prostrate; and my newest slab

Older than all thy race.

Behold the Sea,

The opaline, the plentiful and strong,

Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,

Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;

Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,

Purger of earth, and medicine of men;

Creating a sweet climate by my breath,

Washing out harms and griefs from memory,

And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,

Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Rich are the sea-gods:—who gives gifts but they?

They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls:

They pluck Force thence, and give it to the wise.

For every wave is wealth to Dædalus,

Wealth to the cunning artist who can work

This matchless strength. Where shall he find, O waves!

A load your Atlas shoulders cannot lift?

I with my hammer pounding evermore

The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust

Strewing my bed, and, in another age,

Rebuild a continent of better men.

Then I unbar the doors: my paths lead out

The exodus of nations: I disperse

Men to all shores that front the hoary main.

I too have arts and sorceries;

Illusion dwells forever with the wave.

I know what spells are laid. Leave me to deal

With credulous and imaginative man;

For, though he scoop my water in his palm,

A few rods off he deems it gems and clouds.

Planting strange fruits and sunshine on the shore,

I make some coast alluring, some lone isle,

To distant men, who must go there, or die.

SONG OF NATURE.

MINE are the night and morning,

The pits of air, the gulf of space,

The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,

The innumerable days.

I hide in the solar glory,

I am dumb in the pealing song,

I rest on the pitch of the torrent,

In slumber I am strong.

No numbers have counted my tallies,

No tribes my house can fill,

I sit by the shining Fount of Life

And pour the deluge still;

And ever by delicate powers

Gathering along the centuries

From race on race the rarest flowers,

My wreath shall nothing miss.

And many a thousand summers

My gardens ripened well,

And light from meliorating stars

With firmer glory fell.

I wrote the past in characters

Of rock and fire the scroll,

The building in the coral sea,

The planting of the coal.

And thefts from satellites and rings

And broken stars I drew,

And out of spent and aged things

I formed the world anew;

What time the gods kept carnival,

Tricked out in star and flower,

And in cramp elf and saurian forms

They swathed their too much power.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,

They laid their courses well,

They boiled the sea, and piled the layers

Of granite, marl and shell.

But he, the man-child glorious,—

Where tarries he the while?

The rainbow shines his harbinger,

The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,

Forthright my planets roll,

And still the man-child is not born,

The summit of the whole.

Must time and tide forever run?

Will never my winds go sleep in the west?

Will never my wheels which whirl the sun

And satellites have rest?

Too much of donning and doffing,

Too slow the rainbow fades,

I weary of my robe of snow,

My leaves and my cascades;

I tire of globes and races,

Too long the game is played;

What without him is summer's pomp,

Or winter's frozen shade?

I travail in pain for him,

My creatures travail and wait;

His couriers come by squadrons,

He comes not to the gate.

Twice I have moulded an image,

And thrice outstretched my hand,

Made one of day and one of night

And one of the salt sea-sand.

One in a Judæan manger,

And one by Avon stream,

One over against the mouths of Nile,

And one in the Academe.

I moulded kings and saviors,

And bards o'er kings to rule;—

But fell the starry influence short,

The cup was never full.

Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,

And mix the bowl again;

Seethe, Fate! the ancient elements,

Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.

Let war and trade and creeds and song

Blend, ripen race on race,

The sunburnt world a man shall breed

Of all the zones and countless days.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,

My oldest force is good as new,

And the fresh rose on yonder thorn

Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

TWO RIVERS.

THY summer voice, Musketaquit,

Repeats the music of the rain;

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit

Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:

The stream I love unbounded goes

Through flood and sea and firmament;

Through light, through life, it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet.

I hear the spending of the stream

Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,

Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;

They lose their grief who hear his song,

And where he winds is the day of day.

So forth and brighter fares my stream,—

Who drink it shall not thirst again;

No darkness stains its equal gleam,

And ages drop in it like rain.

WALDEINSAMKEIT.

I DO not count the hours I spend

In wandering by the sea:

The forest is my loyal friend,

Like God it useth me.

In plains that room for shadows make

Of skirting hills to lie,

Bound in by streams which give and take

Their colors from the sky;

Or on the mountain-crest sublime,

Or down the oaken glade,

O what have I to do with time?

For this the day was made.

Cities of mortals woe-begone

Fantastic care derides,

But in the serious landscape lone

Stern benefit abides.

Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy,

And merry is only a mask of sad,

But, sober on a fund of joy,

The woods at heart are glad.

There the great Planter plants

Of fruitful worlds the grain,

And with a million spells enchants

The souls that walk in pain.

Still on the seeds of all he made

The rose of beauty burns;

Through times that wear and forms that fade,

Immortal youth returns.

The black ducks mouuting from the lake,

The pigeon in the pines,

The bittern's boom, a desert make

Which no false art refines.

Down in yon watery nook,

Where bearded mists divide,

The gray old gods whom Chaos knew,

The sires of Nature, hide.

Aloft, in secret veins of air,

Blows the sweet breath of song,

O, few to scale those uplands dare,

Though they to all belong!

See thou bring not to field or stone

The fancies found in books;

Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own,

To brave the landscape's looks.

Oblivion here thy wisdom is,

Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;

For a proud idleness like this

Crowns all thy mean affairs.

TERMINUS.

IT is time to be old,

To take in sail:—

The god of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: ‘No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There's not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Timely wise accept the terms,

Soften the fall with wary foot;

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And,—fault of novel germs,—

Mature the unfallen fruit.

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,

Bad husbands of their fires,

Who, when they gave thee breath,

Failed to bequeath

The needful sinew stark as once,

The Baresark marrow to thy bones,

But left a legacy of ebbing veins,

Inconstant beat and nerveless reins,—

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.’

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

And every wave is charmed.’

THE NUN'S ASPIRATION.

THE yesterday doth never smile,

The day goes drudging through the while,

Yet, in the name of Godhead, I

The morrow front, and can defy;

Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,

Cannot withhold his conquering aid.

Ah me! it was my childhood's thought,

If He should make my web a blot

On life's fair picture of delight,

My heart's content would find it right.

But O, these waves and leaves,—

When happy stoic Nature grieves,

No human speech so beautiful

As their murmurs mine to lull.

On this altar God hath built

I lay my vanity and guilt;

Nor me can Hope or Passion urge

Hearing as now the lofty dirge

Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,

Nature's funeral high and dim,—

Sable pageantry of clouds,

Mourning summer laid in shrouds.

Many a day shall dawn and die,

Many an angel wander by,

And passing, light my sunken turf

Moist perhaps by ocean surf,

Forgotten amid splendid tombs,

Yet wreathed and hid by summer blooms.

On earth I dream;—I die to be:

Time, shake not thy bald head at me.

I challenge thee to hurry past

Or for my turn to fly too fast.

Think me not numbed or halt with age,

Or cares that earth to earth engage,

Caught with love's cord of twisted beams,

Or mired by climate's gross extremes.

I tire of shams, I rush to be:

I pass with yonder comet free,—

Pass with the comet into space

Which mocks thy æons to embrace;

Æons which tardily unfold

Realm beyond realm,—extent untold;

No early morn, no evening late,—

Realms self-upheld, disdaining Fate,

Whose shining sons, too great for fame,

Never heard thy weary name;

Nor lives the tragic bard to say

How drear the part I held in one,

How lame the other limped away.

APRIL.

THE April winds are magical

And thrill our tuneful frames;

The garden walks are passional

To bachelors and dames.

The hedge is gemmed with diamonds,

The air with Cupids full.

The cobweb clues of Rosamond

Guide lovers to the pool.

Each dimple in the water,

Each leaf that shades the rock

Can cozen, pique and flatter,

Can parley and provoke.

Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,

Know more than any book.

Down with your doleful problems,

And court the sunny brook.

The south-winds are quick-witted,

The schools are sad and slow,

The masters quite omitted

The lore we care to know.

MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE ÆOLIAN HARP.

SOFT and softlier hold me, friends!

Thanks if your genial care

Unbind and give me to the air.

Keep your lips or finger-tips

For flute or spinet's dancing chips;

I await a tenderer touch,

I ask more or not so much:

Give me to the atmosphere,—

Where is the wind, my brother,—where?

Lift the sash, lay me within,

Lend me your ears, and I begin.

For gentle harp to gentle hearts

The secret of the world imparts;

And not to-day and not to-morrow

Can drain its wealth of hope and sorrow;

But day by day, to loving ear

Unlocks new sense and loftier cheer.

I've come to live with you, sweet friends,

This home my minstrel-journeyings ends.

Many and subtle are my lays,

The latest better than the first,

For I can mend the happiest days

And charm the anguish of the worst.

CUPIDO.

THE solid, solid universe

Is pervious to Love;

With bandaged eyes he never errs,

Around, below, above.

His blinding light

He flingeth white

On God's and Satan's brood,

And reconciles

By mystic wiles

The evil and the good.

THE PAST.

THE debt is paid,

The verdict said,

The Furies laid,

The plague is stayed,

All fortunes made;

Turn the key and bolt the door,

Sweet is death forevermore.

Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,

Nor murdering hate, can enter in.

All is now secure and fast;

Not the gods can shake the Past;

Flies-to the adamantine door

Bolted down forevermore.

None can re-enter there,—

No thief so politic,

No Satan with a royal trick

Steal in by window, chink, or hole,

To bind or unbind, add what lacked,

Insert a leaf, or forge a name,

New-face or finish what is packed,

Alter or mend eternal Fact.

THE LAST FAREWELL.
LINES WRITTEN BY THE AUTHOR'S BROTHER, EDWARD BLISS EMERSON, WHILST SAILING OUT OF BOSTON HARBOR, BOUND FOR THE ISLAND OF PORTO RICO, IN 1832.

FAREWELL, ye lofty spires

That cheered the holy light!

Farewell, domestic fires

That broke the gloom of night!

Too soon those spires are lost,

Too fast we leave the bay,

Too soon by ocean tost

From hearth and home away,

Far away, far away.

Farewell the busy town,

The wealthy and the wise,

Kind smile and honest frown

From bright, familiar eyes.

All these are fading now;

Our brig hastes on her way,

Her unremembering prow

Is leaping o'er the sea,

Far away, far away.

Farewell, my mother fond,

Too kind, too good to me;

Nor pearl nor diamond

Would pay my debt to thee.

But even thy kiss denies

Upon my cheek to stay;

The winged vessel flies,

And billows round her play,

Far away, far away.

Farewell, my brothers true,

My betters, yet my peers;

How desert without you

My few and evil years!

But though aye one in heart,

Together sad or gay,

Rude ocean doth us part;

We separate to-day,

Far away, far away.

Farewell I breathe again

To dim New England's shore;

My heart shall beat not when

I pant for thee no more.

In yon green palmy isle,

Beneath the tropic ray,

I murmur never while

For thee and thine I pray;

Far away, far away.

IN MEMORIAM.
EDWARD BLISS EMERSON.

I MOURN upon this battle-field,

But not for those who perished here.

Behold the river-bank

Whither the angry farmers came,

In sloven dress and broken rank,

Nor thought of fame.

Their deed of blood

All mankind praise;

Even the serene Reason says,

It was well done.

The wise and simple have one glance

To greet yon stern head-stone,

Which more of pride than pity gave

To mark the Briton's friendless grave.

Yet it is a stately tomb;

The grand return

Of eve and morn,

The year's fresh bloom,

The silver cloud,

Might grace the dust that is most proud.

Yet not of these I muse

In this ancestral place,

But of a kindred face

That never joy or hope shall here diffuse.

Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star:

What hast thou to do with these

Haunting this bank's historic trees?

Thou born for noblest life,

For action's field, for victor's car,

Thon living champion of the right?

To these their penalty belonged:

I grudge not these their bed of death,

But thine to thee, who never wronged

The poorest that drew breath.

All inborn power that could

Consist with homage to the good

Flamed from his martial eye;

He who seemed a soldier born,

He should have the helmet worn,

All friends to fend, all foes defy,

Fronting foes of God and man,

Frowning down the evil-doer,

Battling for the weak and poor.

His from youth the leader's look

Gave the law which others took,

And never poor beseeching glance

Shamed that sculptured countenance.

There is no record left on earth,

Save in tablets of the heart,

Of the rich inherent worth,

Of the grace that on him shone,

Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit:

He could not frame a word unfit,

An act unworthy to be done;

Honor prompted every glance,

Honor came and sat beside him,

In lowly cot or painful road,

And evermore the cruel god.

Cried, “Onward!” and the palm-crown showed.

Born for success he seemed,

With grace to win, with heart to hold,

With shining gifts that took all eyes,

With budding power in college-halls,

As pledged in coming days to forge

Weapons to guard the State, or scourge

Tyrants despite their guards or walls.

On his young promise Beauty smiled,

Drew his free homage unbeguiled,

And prosperous Age held out his hand,

And richly his large future planned,

And troops of friends enjoyed the tide,—

All, all was given, and only health denied.

I see him with superior smile

Hunted by Sorrow's grisly train

In lands remote, in toil and pain,

With angel patience labor on,

With the high port he wore erewhile,

When, foremost of the youthful band,

The prizes in all lists he won;

Nor bate one jot of heart or hope,

And, least of all, the loyal tie

Which holds to home ‘neath every sky,

The joy and pride the pilgrim feels

In hearts which round the hearth at home

Keep pulse for pulse with those who roam.

What generous beliefs console

The brave whom Fate denies the goal!

If others reach it, is content;

To Heaven's high will his will is bent.

Firm on his heart relied,

What lot soe'er betide,

Work of his hand

He nor repents nor grieves,

Pleads for itself the fact,

As unrepenting Nature leaves

Her every act.

Fell the bolt on the branching oak;

The rainbow of his hope was broke;

No craven cry, no secret tear,—

He told no pang, he knew no fear;

Its peace sublime his aspect kept,

His purpose woke, his features slept;

And yet between the spasms of pain

His genius beamed with joy again.

O'er thy rich dust the endless smile

Of Nature in thy Spanish isle

Hints never loss or cruel break

And sacrifice for love's dear sake,

Nor mourn the unalterable Days

That Genius goes and Folly stays.

What matters how, or from what ground,

The freed soul its Creator found?

Alike thy memory embalms

That orange-grove, that isle of palms,

And these loved banks, whose oak-boughs bold

Root in the blood of heroes old.

EXPERIENCE.

THE lords of life, the lords of life,—

I saw them pass

In their own guise,

Like and unlike,

Portly and grim,—

Use and Surprise,

Surface and Dream,

Succession swift and spectral Wrong,

Temperament without a tongue,

And the inventor of the game

Omnipresent without name;—

Some to see, some to be guessed,

They marched from east to west:

Little man, least of all,

Among the legs of his guardians tall,

Walked about with puzzled look.

Him by the hand dear Nature took,

Dearest Nature, strong and kind,

Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind!

To-morrow they will wear another face,

The founder thou; these are thy race!

COMPENSATION.

THE wings of Time are black and white,

Pied with morning and with night.

Mountain tall and ocean deep

Trembling balance duly keep.

In changing moon and tidal wave

Glows the feud of Want and Have.

Gauge of more and less through space,

Electric star or pencil plays,

The lonely Earth amid the balls

That hurry through the eternal halls,

A makeweight flying to the void,

Supplemental asteroid,

Or compensatory spark,

Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine;

Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:

Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,

None from its stock that vine can reave.

Fear not, then, thou child infirm,

There's no god dare wrong a worm;

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,

And power to him who power exerts.

Hast not thy share? On winged feet,

Lo! it rushes thee to meet;

And all that Nature made thy own,

Floating in air or pent in stone,

Will rive the hills and swim the sea,

And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

POLITICS.

GOLD and iron are good

To buy iron and gold;

All earth's fleece and food

For their like are sold.

Boded Merlin wise,

Proved Napoleon great,

Nor kind nor coinage buys

Aught above its rate.

Fear, Craft and Avarice

Cannot rear a State.

Out of dust to build

What is more than dust,—

Walls Amphion piled

Phoæbus stablish must.

When the Muses nine

With the Virtues meet,

Find to their design

An Atlantic seat,

By green orchard boughs

Fended from the heat,

Where the statesman ploughs

Furrow for the wheat,—

When the Church is social worth,

When the state-house is the hearth,

Then the perfect State is come,

The republican at home.

HEROISM.

RUBY wine is drunk by knaves,

Sugar spends to fatten slaves,

Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;

Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons,

Drooping oft in wreaths of dread,

Lightning-knotted round his head;

The hero is not fed on sweets,

Daily his own heart he eats;

Chambers of the great are jails,

And head-winds right for royal sails.

CHARACTER.

THE sun set, but set not his hope:

Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:

Fixed on the enormous galaxy,

Deeper and older seemed his eye;

And matched his sufferance sublime

The taciturnity of time.

He spoke, and words more soft than rain

Brought the Age of Gold again:

His action won such reverence sweet

As hid all measure of the feat.

CULTURE.

CAN rules or tutors educate

The semigod whom we await?

He must be musical,

Tremulous, impressional,

Alive to gentle influence

Of landscape and of sky,

And tender to the spirit-touch

Of man's or maiden's eye:

But, to his native centre fast,

Shall into Future fuse the Past,

And the world's flowing fates in his own mould recast.

FRIENDSHIP.

A RUDDY drop of manly blood

The surging sea outweighs,

The world uncertain comes and goes;

The lover rooted stays.

I fancied he was fled,—

And, after many a year,

Glowed unexhausted kindliness,

Like daily sunrise there.

My careful heart was free again,

O friend, my bosom said,

Through thee alone the sky is arched,

Through thee the rose is red;

All things through thee take nobler form,

And look beyond the earth,

The mill-round of our fate appears

A sun-path in thy worth.

Me too thy nobleness has taught

To master my despair;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendship fair.

BEAUTY.

WAS never form and never face

So sweet to SEYD as only grace

Which did not slumber like a stone,

But hovered gleaming and was gone.

Beauty chased he everywhere,

In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.

He smote the lake to feed his eye

With the beryl beam of the broken wave;

He flung in pebbles well to hear

The moment's music which they gave.

Oft pealed for him a lofty tone

From nodding pole and belting zone.

He heard a voice none else could hear

From centred and from errant sphere.

The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,

Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.

In dens of passion, and pits of woe,

He saw strong Eros struggling through,

To sun the dark and solve the curse,

And beam to the bounds of the universe.

While thus to love he gave his days

In loyal worship, scorning praise,

How spread their lures for him in vain

Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!

He thought it happier to be dead,

To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

MANNERS.

GRACE, Beauty and Caprice

Build this golden portal;

Graceful women, chosen men,

Dazzle every mortal.

Their sweet and lofty countenance

His enchanted food;

He need not go to them, their forms

Beset his solitude.

He looketh seldom in their face,

His eyes explore the ground,—

The green grass is a looking-glass

Whereon their traits are found.

Little and less he says to them,

So dances his heart in his breast:

Their tranquil mien bereaveth him

Of wit, of words, of rest.

Too weak to win, too fond to shun

The tyrants of his doom,

The much deceived Endymion

Slips behind a tomb.

ART.

GIVE to barrows, trays and pans

Grace and glimmer of romance;

Bring the moonlight into noon

Hid in gleaming piles of stone;

On the city's paved street

Plant gardens lined with lilacs sweet;

Let spouting fountains cool the air,

Singing in the sun-baked square;

Let statue, picture, park and hall,

Ballad, flag and festival,

The past restore, the day adorn,

And make to-morrow a new morn.

So shall the drudge in dusty frock

Spy behind the city clock

Retinues of airy kings.

Skirts of angels, starry wings,

His fathers shining in bright fables,

His children fed at heavenly tables.

'T is the privilege of Art

Thus to play its cheerful part,

Man on earth to acclimate

And bend the exile to his fate,

And, moulded of one element

With the days and firmament,

Teach him on these as stairs to climb.

And live on even terms with Time;

Whilst upper life the slender rill

Of human sense doth overfill.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

THE living Heaven thy prayers respect,

House at once and architect,

Quarrying man's rejected hours,

Builds therewith eternal towers;

Sole and self-commanded works,

Fears not undermining days,

Grows by decays,

And, by the famous might that lurks

In reaction and recoil,

Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;

Forging, through swart arms of Offence,

The silver seat of Innocence.

UNITY.

SPACE is ample, east and west,

But two cannot go abreast,

Cannot travel in it two:

Yonder masterful cuckoo

Crowds every egg out of the nest,

Quick or dead, except its own;

A spell is laid on sod and stone,

Night and Day were tampered with,

Every quality and pith

Surcharged and sultry with a power

That works its will on age and hour.

WORSHIP.

THIS is he, who, felled by foes,

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:

He to captivity was sold,

But him no prison-bars would hold:

Though they sealed him in a rock,

Mountain chains he can unlock:

Thrown to lions for their meat,

The crouching lion kissed his feet;

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,

But arched o'er him an honoring vault.

This is he men miscall Fate,

Threading dark ways, arriving late,

But ever coming in time to crown

The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.

He is the oldest, and best known,

More near than aught thou call'st thy own,

Yet, greeted in another's eyes,

Disconcerts with glad surprise.

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,

Floods with blessings unawares.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line

Severing rightly his from thine,

Which is human, which divine.

QUATRAINS.

a. h.

HIGH was her heart, and yet was well inclined,

Her manners made of bounty well refined;

Far capitals and marble courts, her eye still seemed to see,

Minstrels and kings and high-born dames, and of the best that be.

“suum cuique.”

WILT thou seal up the avenues of ill?

Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.

hush!

EVERY thought is public,

Every nook is wide;

Thy gossips spread each whisper,

And the gods from side to side.

orator.

HE who has no hands

Perforce must use his tongue;

Foxes are so cunning

Because they are not strong.

artist.

QUTT the hut, frequent the palace,

Reck not what the people say;

For still, where'er the trees grow biggest,

Huntsmen find the easiest way.

poet.

EVER the Poet from the land

Steers his bark and trims his sail;

Bight out to sea his courses stand,

New worlds to find in pinnace frail.

poet.

TO clothe the fiery thought

In simple words succeeds,

For still the craft of genius is

To mask a king in weeds.

botanist.

GO thou to thy learned task,

I stay with the flowers of spring;

Do thou of the ages ask

What me the hours will bring.

gardener.

TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,

Expound the Vedas of the violet,

Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,

See the plum redden, and the beurræ stoop.

forester.

HE took the color of his vest

From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast;

For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,

So walks the woodman, unespied.

northman.

THE gale that wrecked you on the sand.

It helped my rowers to row;

The storm is my best galley hand

And drives me where I go.

from alcuin.

THE sea is the road of the bold,

Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,

The pit wherein the streams are rolled

And fountain of the rains.

excelsior.

OVER his head were the maple buds,

And over the tree was the moon,

And over the moon were the starry studs

That drop from the angels’ shoon.

s. h.

WITH beams December planets dart

His cold eye truth and conduct scanned,

July was in his sunny heart,

October in his liberal hand.

borrowing.
from the french.

SOME of your hurts you have cured,

And the sharpest you still have survived,

But what torments of grief you endured

From evils which never arrived!

nature.

Boon Nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold,

And trains us on to slight the new, as if it were the old:

But blest is he, who, playing deep, yet haply asks not why,

Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

fate.

HER planted eye to-day controls,

Is in the morrow most at home,

And sternly calls to being souls

That corse her when they come.

horoscope.

ERE he was born, the stars of fate

Plotted to make him rich and great:

When from the womb the babe was loosed,

The gate of gifts behind him closed.

power.

CAST the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,

Wintered with the hawk and fox,

Power and speed be hands and feet.

climacteric.

I AM not wiser for my age,

Nor skilful by my grief;

Life loiters at the book's first page,—

Ah! could we turn the leaf.

heri, cras, hodie.

SHINES the last age, the next with hope is seen,

To-day slinks poorly off unmarked between:

Future or Past no richer secret folds,

O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds.

memory.

NIGHT-DREAMS trace on Memory's wall

Shadows of the thoughts of day,

And thy fortunes, as they fall,

The bias of the will betray.

love.

LOVE on his errand bound to go

Can swim the flood and wade through snow,

Where way is none, 't will creep and wind

And eat through Alps its home to find.

sacrifice.

THOUGH love repine, and reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply,—

“T is man's perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die.'

pericles.

WELL and wisely said the Greek,

Be thou faithful, but not fond;

To the altar's foot thy fellow seek,—

The Furies wait beyond.

casella.

TEST of the poet is knowledge of love,

For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;

Never was poet, of late or of yore,

Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

shakspeare.

I SEE all human wits

Are measured hut a few;

Unmeasured still my Shakspeare sits,

Lone as the blessed Jew.

hafiz.

HER passions the shy violet

From Hafiz never hides;

Love-longings of the raptured bird

The bird to him confides.

nature in leasts.

AS sings the pine-tree in the wind,

So sings in the wind a sprig of the pine;

Her strength and soul has laughing France

Shed in each drop of wine.

ΑΔΑΚΡΥΝ ΝΕΜΟΝΤΑΙ ΑΙΩΝΑ.

A NEW commandment,' said the smiling Muse,

‘I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach’;—

Lather, Fox, Behmen, Swedenborg, grew pale,

And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore

Hafiz and Shakspeare with their shining choirs.

TRANSLATIONS.

sonnet of michael angelo buonarotti.

NEVER did sculptor's dream unfold

A form which marble doth not hold

In its white block; yet it therein shall find

Only the hand secure and bold

Which still obeys the mind.

So hide in thee, thou heavenly dame,

The ill I shun, the good I claim;

I alas! not well alive,

Miss the aim whereto I strive.

Not love, nor beauty's pride,

Nor Fortune, nor thy coldness, can I chide,

If, whilst within thy heart abide

Both death and pity, my unequal skill

Fails of the life, but draws the death and ill.

the exile.
from the persian of kermani.

IN Farsistan the violet spreads

Its leaves to the rival sky;

I ask how far is the Tigris flood,

And the vine that grows thereby?

Except the amber morning wind,

Not one salutes me here;

There is no lover in all Bagdat

To offer the exile cheer.

I know that thou, O morning wind!

O'er Kernan's meadow blowest,

And thou, heart-warming nightingale!

My father's orchard knowest.

The merchant hath stuffs of price,

And gems from the sea-washed strand,

And princes offer me grace

To stay in the Syrian land;

But what is gold for, but for gifts?

And dark, without love, is the day;

And all that I see in Bagdat

Is the Tigris to float me away.

from hafiz.

I SAID to heaven that glowed above,

O hide yon sun-filled zone,

Hide all the stars you boast;

For, in the world of love

And estimation true,

The heaped-up harvest of the moon

Is worth one barley-corn at most,

The Pleiads' sheaf but two.

IF my darling should depart,

And search the skies for pronder friends,

God forbid my angry heart

In other love should seek amends.

When the blue horizon's hoop

Me a little pinches here,

Instant to my grave I stoop,

And go find thee in the sphere.

epitaph.

BETHINK, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest.

Mad Destiny this tender stripling played;

For a warm breast of maiden to his breast,

She laid a slab of marble on his head.

THEY say, through patience, chalk

Becomes a ruby stone;

Ah, yes! but by the true heart's blood

The chalk is crimson grown.

friendship.

THOU foolish Hafiz! Say, do churls

Know the worth of Oman's pearls?

Give the gem which dims the moon

To the noblest, or to none.

DEAREST, where thy shadow falls,

Beauty sits and Music calls;

Where thy form and favor come,

All good creatures have their home.

ON prince or bride no diamond stone

Half so gracious ever shone,

As the light of enterprise

Beaming from a young man's eyes.

from omar khayyam.

EACH spot where tulips prank their stats

Has drunk the life-blood of the great;

The violets yon field which stain

Are moles of beauties Time hath slain.

HE who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,

And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

ON two days it steads not to run from thy grave,

The appointed, and the unappointed day;

On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,

Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.

from ibn jemin.

TWO things thou shalt not long for, if thou love a mind serene;—

A woman to thy wife, though she were a crowned queen;

And the second, borrowed money,—though the smiling lender say

That he will not demand the debt until the Judgment Day.

the flute.
from hilali.

HARK what, now loud, now low, the pining flute complains,

Without tongue, yellow-cheeked, full of winds that wail and sigh;

Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,—

If I am I; thou, thou; or thou art I?

to the shah.
from hafiz.

THY foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down,

Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear.

to the shah.
from enweri.

NOT in their houses stand the stars,

But o'er the pinnacles of thine!

to the shah.
from enweri.

FROM thy worth and weight the stars gravitate,

And the equipoise of heaven is thy house's equipoise.

song of seyd nimtollah of kuhistan.
[Among the religious customs of the dervishes is an astronomical dance, in which the dervish imitates the movements of the heavenly bodies, by spinning on his own axis, whilst at the same time he revolves round the Sheikh in the centre, representing the sun; and, a he spins, he sings the Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan]

SPIN the ball! I reel, I burn,

Nor head from foot can I discern,

Nor my heart from love of mine,

Nor the wine-cup from the wine.

All my doing, all my leaving,

Beaches not to my perceiving;

Lost in whirling spheres I rove,

And know only that I love.

I am seeker of the stone,

Living gem of Solomon;

From the shore of souls arrived,

In the sea of sense I dived;

But what is land, or what is wave,

To me who only jewels crave?

Love is the air-fed fire intense,

And my heart the frankincense;

As the rich aloes flames, I glow,

Yet the censer cannot know.

I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing;

Stand not, pause not, in my going.

Ask not me, as Muftis can,

To recite the Alcoran;

Well I love the meaning sweet,—

I tread the book beneath my feet.

Lo! the God's love blazes higher,

Till all difference expire.

What are Moslems? what are Giaours?

All are Love's, and all are ours.

I embrace the true believers,

But I reck not of deceivers.

Firm to Heaven my bosom clings,

Heedless of inferior things;

Down on earth there, underfoot,

What men chatter know I not.

iii.

APPENDIX.

THE POET.

RIGHT upward on the road of fame

With sounding steps the poet came;

Born and nourished in miracles,

His feet were shod with golden bells,

Or where he stepped the soil did peal

As if the dust were glass and steel.

The gallant child where'er he came

Threw to each fact a tuneful name.

The things whereon he cast his eyes

Could not the nations rebaptize,

Nor Time's snows hide the names he set,

Nor last posterity forget.

Yet every scroll whereon he wrote

In latent fire his secret thought,

Fell unregarded to the ground,

Unseen by such as stood around.

The pious wind took it away,

The reverent darkness hid the lay.

Methought like water-haunting birds

Divers or dippers were his words,

And idle clowns beside the mere

At the new vision gape and jeer.

But when the noisy scorn was past,

Emerge the wingèd words in haste.

New-bathed, new-trimmed, on healthy wing,

Right to the heaven they steer and sing.

A Brother of the world, his song

Sounded like a tempest strong

Which tore from oaks their branches broad,

And stars from the ecliptic road.

Times wore he as his clothing-weeds,

He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.

As melts the iceberg in the seas,

As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,

As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,

The solid kingdoms like a dream

Resist in vain his motive strain,

They totter now and float amain.

For the Muse gave special charge

His learning should be deep and large,

And his training should not scant

The deepest lore of wealth or want:

His flesh should feel, his eyes should read

Every maxim of dreadful Need;

In its fulness he should taste

Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;

Full fed, but not intoxicated;

He should be loved; he should be hated

A blooming child to children dear,

His heart should palpitate with fear.

And well he loved to quit his home

And, Calmuck, in his wagon roam

To read new landscapes and old skies;—

But oh, to see his solar eyes

Like meteors which chose their way

And rived the dark like a new day!

Not lazy grazing on all they saw,

Each chimney-pot and cottage door,

Farm-gear and village picket-fence,

But, feeding on magnificence,

They bounded to the horizon's edge

And searched with the sun's privilege.

Landward they reached the mountains old

Where pastoral tribes their flocks infold,

Saw rivers run seaward by cities high

And the seas wash the low-hung sky;

Saw the endless rack of the firmament

And the sailing moon where the cloud was rent,

And through man and woman and sea and star

Saw the dance of Nature forward and far,

Through worlds and races and terms and times

Saw musical order and pairing rhymes.

ii.

The gods talk in the breath of the woods,

They talk in the shaken pine,

And fill the long reach of the old seashore

With dialogue divine;

And the poet who overhears

Some random word they say

Is the fated man of men

Whom the ages must obey:

One who having nectar drank

Into blissful orgies sank;

He takes no mark of night or day,

He cannot go, he cannot stay,

He would, yet would not, counsel keep,

But, like a walker in his sleep

With staring eye that seeth none,

Ridiculously up and down

Seeks how he may fitly tell

The heart-o'erlading miracle.

Not yet, not yet,

Impatient friend,—

A little while attend;

Not yet I sing: but I must wait,

My hand upon the silent string,

Fully until the end.

I see the coming light,

I see the scattered gleams,

Aloft, beneath, on left and right

The stars' own ether beams;

These are but seeds of days,

Not yet a steadfast morn,

An intermittent blaze,

An embryo god unborn.

How all things sparkle,

The dust is alive,

To the birth they arrive:

I snuff the breath of my morning afar,

I see the pale lustres condense to a star

The fading colors fix,

The vanishing are seen,

And the world that shall be

Twins the world that has been.

I know the appointed hour,

I greet my office well,

Never faster, never slower

Revolves the fatal wheel!

The Fairest enchants me,

The Mighty commands me,

Saying, ‘Stand in thy place;

Up and eastward turn thy face;

As mountains for the morning wait,

Coming early, coming late,

So thou attend the enriching Fate

Which none can stay, and none accelerate.

I am neither faint nor weary,

Fill thy will, O faultless heart!

Here from youth to age I tarry,—

Count it flight of bird or dart.

My heart at the heart of things

Heeds no longer lapse of time,

Rushing ages moult their wings,

Bathing in thy day sublime.

The sun set, but set not his hope:—

Stars rose, his faith was earlier up:

Fixed on the enormous galaxy,

Deeper and older seemed his eye,

And matched his sufferance sublime

The taciturnity of Time.

Beside his hut and shading oak,

Thus to himself the poet spoke,

‘I have supped to-night with gods,

I will not go under a wooden roof:

As I walked among the hills

In the love which nature fills,

The great stars did not shine aloof,

They hurried down from their deep abodes

And hemmed me in their glittering troop.

‘Divine Inviters! I accept

The courtesy ye have shown and kept

From ancient ages for the bard,

To modalate

With finer fate

A fortune harsh and hard.

With aim like yours

I watch your course,

Who never break your lawful dance

By error or intemperance.

O birds of ether without wings!

O heavenly ships without a sail!

O fire of fire! O best of things!

O mariners who never fail!

Sail swiftly through your amber vault,

An animated law, a presence to exalt.’

Ah, happy if a sun or star

Could chain the wheel of Fortune's car,

And give to hold an even state,

Neither dejected nor elate,

That haply man upraised might keep

The height of Fancy's far-eyed steep.

In vain: the stars are glowing wheels,

Giddy with motion Nature reels,

Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream,

The mountains flow, the solids seem,

Change acts, reacts; back, forward hurled,

And pause were palsy to the world.—

The morn is come: the starry crowds

Are hid behind the thrice-piled clouds;

The new day lowers, and equal odds

Have changed not less the guest of gods;

Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn,

The child of genius sits forlorn:

Between two sleeps a short day's stealth,

‘Mid many ails a brittle health,

A cripple of God, half true, half formed,

And by great sparks Promethean warmed,

Constrained by impotence to adjourn

To infinite time his eager turn,

His lot of action at the urn.

He by false usage pinned about

No breath therein, no passage out,

Cast wishful glances at the stars

And wishful saw the Ocean stream:—

Merge me in the brute universe,

Or lift to a diviner dream!’

Beside him sat enduring love,

Upon him noble eyes did rest,

Which, for the Genius that there strove,

The follies bore that it invest.

They spoke not, for their earnest sense

Outran the craft of eloquence.

He whom God had thus preferred,—

To whom sweet angels ministered,

Saluted him each morn as brother,

And bragged his virtues to each other,—

Alas! how were they so beguiled,

And they so pure? He, foolish child,

A facile, reckless, wandering will,

Eager for good, not hating ill,

Thanked Nature for each stroke she dealt;

On his tense chords all strokes were felt,

The good, the bad with equal zeal,

He asked, he only asked, to feel.

Timid, self-pleasing, sensitive,

With Gods, with fools, content to live.

Bended to fops who bent to him;

Surface with surfaces did swim.

‘Sorrow, sorrow!’ the angels cried,

‘Is this dear Nature's manly pride.’

Call hither thy mortal enemy,

Make him glad thy fall to see!

Yon waterflag, yon sighing osier,

A drop can shake, a breath can fan;

Maidens laugh and weep; Composure

Is the pudency of man.'

Again by night the poet went

From the lighted halls

Beneath the darkling firmament

To the seashore, to the old seawalls,

Forth paced a star beneath the cloud,

The constellation glittered soon,—

‘You have no lapse; so have ye glowed

But once in your dominion.

And yet, dear stars, I know ye shine

Only by needs and loves of mine,

Light-loving, light-asking life in me

Feeds those eternal lamps I see.

And I to whom your light has spoken.

I, pining to be one of you,

I fall, my faith is broken,

Ye scorn me from your deeps of blue.

Or if perchance, ye orbs of Fate.

Your ne'er averted glance

Beams with a will compassionate

On sons of time and chance,

Then clothe these hands with power

In just proportion.

Nor plant immense designs

Where equal means are none.’

chorus of spirits.

Means, dear brother, ask them not;

Soul's desire is means enow,

Pure content is angel's lot.

Thine own theatre art thou.

Gentler far than falls the snow

In the woodwalks still and low

Fell the lesson on his heart

And woke the fear lest angels part.

poet.

I see your forms with deep content,

I know that ye are excellent,

But will ye stay?

I hear the rustle of wings,

Ye meditate what to say

Ere ye go to quit me for ever and aye.

spirits.

Brother, we are no phantom band;

Brother, accept this fatal hand.

Aches thine unbelieving heart

With the fear that we must part?

See, all we are rooted here

By one thought to one same sphere;

From thyself thou canst not flee,—

From thyself no more can we.

poet.

Suns and stars their courses keep,

But not angels of the deep:

Day and night their turn observe,

But the day of day may swerve.

Is there warrant that the waves

Of thought in their mysterious caves

Will heap in me their highest tide,

In me therewith beatified?

Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,

The moon comes back,—the Spirit not.

spirits.

Brother, sweeter is the Law

Than all the grace Love ever saw;

We are its suppliants. By it, we

Draw the breath of Eternity;

Serve thou it not for daily bread,—

Serve it for pain and fear and need.

Love it, though it hide its light;

By love behold the sun at night.

If the Law should thee forget,

More enamoured serve it yet;

Though it hate thee, suffer long;

Put the Spirit in the wrong;

Brother, no decrepitude

Chills the limbs of Time;

As fleet his feet, his hands as good,

His vision as sublime:

On Nature's wheels there is no rust;

Nor less on man's enchanted dust

Beauty and Force alight.

FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT.

THERE are beggars in Iran and Araby,

SAID was hungrier than all;

Hafiz said he was a fly

That came to every festival.

He came a pilgrim to the Mosque

On trail of camel and caravan,

Knew every temple and kiosk

Out from Mecca to Ispahan;

Northward he went to the snowy hills,

At court he sat in the grave Divan.

His music was the south-wind's sigh,

His lamp, the maiden's downcast eye,

And ever the spell of beauty came

And turned the drowsy world to flame.

By lake and stream and gleaming hall

And modest copse and the forest tall,

Where'er he went, the magic guide

Kept its place by the poet's side.

Said melted the days like cups of pearl,

Served high and low, the lord and the churl,

Loved harebells nodding on a rock,

A cabin hung with curling smoke,

Ring of axe or hum of wheel

Or gleam which use can paint on steel,

And huts and tents; nor loved he less

Stately lords in palaces,

Princely women hard to please,

Fenced by form and ceremony,

Decked by courtly rites and dress

And etiquette of gentilesse.

But when the mate of the snow and wind,

He left each civil scale behind:

Him wood-gods fed with honey wild

And of his memory beguiled.

He loved to watch and wake

When the wing of the south-wind whipt the lake

And the glassy surface in ripples brake

And fled in pretty frowns away

Like the flitting boreal lights,

Rippling roses in northern nights,

Or like the thrill of Æolian strings

In which the sudden wind-god rings.

In caves and hollow trees he crept

And near the wolf and panther slept.

He came to the green ocean's brim

And saw the wheeling sea-birds skim.

Summer and winter, o'er the wave.

Like creatures of a skiey mould,

Impassible to heat or cold.

He stood before the tumbling main

With joy too tense for sober brain;

He shared the life of the element,

The tie of blood and home was rent:

As if in him the welkin walked,

The winds took flesh, the mountains talked,

And he the bard, a crystal soul

Sphered and concentric with the whole.

ii.

The Dervish whined to Said,

“Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.”

But Saadi answered,

“Once with manlike love and fear

I gave thee for an hour my ear,

I kept the sun and stars at bay,

And love, for words thy tongue could say.

I cannot sell my heaven again

For all that rattles in thy brain.”

iii.

Said Saadi, “When I stood before

Hassan the camel-driver's door,

I scorned the fame of Timour brave;

Timour, to Hassan, was a slave.

In every glance of Hassan's eye

I read great years of victory,

And I, who cower mean and small

In the frequent interval

When wisdom not with me resides,

Worship Toil's wisdom that abides.

I shunned his eyes, that faithful man's,

I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance.”

iv.

The civil world will much forgive

To bards who from its maxims live,

But if, grown bold, the poet dare

Bend his practice to his prayer

And following his mighty heart

Shame the times and live apart,—

Vœ soils! I found this,

That of goods I could not miss

If I fell within the line,

Once a member, all was mine,

Houses, banquets, gardens, fountains,

Fortune's delectable mountains;

But if I would walk alone,

Was neither cloak nor crumb my own.

And thus the high Muse treated me,

Directly never greeted me,

But when she spread her dearest spells,

Feigned to speak to some one else.

I was free to overhear,

Or I might at will forbear;

Yet mark me well, that idle word

Thus at random overheard

Was the symphony of spheres,

And proverb of a thousand years,

The light wherewith all planets shone,

The livery all events put on,

It fell in rain, it grew in grain,

It put on flesh in friendly form,

Frowned in my foe and growled in storm,

It spoke in Tullius Cicero,

In Milton and in Angelo:

I travelled and found it at Rome;

Eastward it filled all Heathendom

And it lay on my hearth when I came home.

Mask thy wisdom with delight,

Toy with the bow, yet hit the white,

As Jelaleddin old and gray;

He seemed to bask, to dream and play

Without remoter hope or fear

Than still to entertain his ear

And pass the burning summer-time

In the palm-grove with a rhyme;

Heedless that each cunning word

Tribes and ages overheard:

Those idle catches told the laws

Holding Nature to her cause.

God only knew how Saadi dined;

Roses he ate, and drank the wind;

He freelier breathed beside the pine,

In cities he was low and mean;

The mountain waters washed him clean

And by the sea-waves he was strong;

He heard their medicinal song,

Asked no physician but the wave,

No palace but his sea-beat cave.

Saadi held the Muse in awe,

She was his mistress and his law;

A twelvemonth he could silence hold,

Nor ran to speak till she him told;

He felt the flame, the fanning wings,

Nor offered words till they were things,

Glad when the solid mountain swims

In music and uplifting hymns.

Charmed from fagot and from steel,

Harvests grew upon his tongue,

Past and future must reveal

All their heart when Saadi sung;

Sun and moon must fall amain

Like sower's seeds into his brain,

There quickened to be born again.

The free winds told him what they knew,

Discoursed of fortune as they blew;

Omens and signs that filled the air

To him authentic witness bare;

The birds brought auguries on their wings,

And carolled undeceiving things

Him to beckon, him to warn;

Well might then the poet scorn

To learn of scribe or courier

Things writ in vaster character;

And on his mind at dawn of day

Soft shadows of the evening lay.

PALE genius roves alone,

No scout can track his way,

None credits him till he have shown

His diamonds to the day.

Not his the feaster's wine,

Nor land, nor gold, nor power,

By want and pain God screeneth him

Till his elected hour.

Go, speed the stars of thought

On to their shining goals:—

The sower scatters broad his seed,

The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

A DULL uncertain brain,

But gifted yet to know

That God has cherubim who go

Singing an immortal strain,

Immortal here below.

I know the mighty bards,

I listen when they sing,

And now I know

The secret store

Which these explore

When they with torch of genius pierce

The tenfold clouds that cover

The riches of the universe

From God's adoring lover.

And if to me it is not given

To fetch one ingot thence

Of that unfading gold of Heaven

His merchants may dispense,

Yet well I know the royal mine,

And know the sparkle of its ore,

Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,—

Explored they teach us to explore.

1831.

I GRIEVE that better souls than mine

Docile read my measured line:

High destined youths and holy maids

Hallow these my orchard shades;

Environ me and me baptize

With light that streams from gracious eyes.

I dare not be beloved and known,

I ungrateful, I alone.

Ever find me dim regards,

Love of ladies, love of bards,

Marked forbearance, compliments,

Tokens of benevolence.

What then, can I love myself?

Fame is profitless as pelf,

A good in Nature not allowed

They love me, as I love a cloud

Sailing falsely in the sphere,

Hated mist if it come near.

FOR thought, and not praise;

Thought is the wages

For which I sell days,

Will gladly sell ages

And willing grow old

Deaf and dumb and blind and cold,

Melting matter into dreams,

Panoramas which I saw

And whatever glows or seems

Into substance, into Law.

TRY the might the Muse affords

And the balm of thoughtful words

Bring music to the desolate;

Hang roses on the stony fate.

FOR Fancy's gift

Can mountains lift;

The Muse can knit

What is past, what is done,

With the web that's just begun;

Making free with time and size,

Dwindles here, there magnifies,

Swells a rain-drop to a tun;

So to repeat

No word or feat

Crowds in a day the sum of ages,

And blushing Love outwits the sages

BUT over all his crowning grace,

Wherefor thanks God his daily praise.

Is the purging of his eye

To see the people of the sky:

From blue mount and headland dim

Friendly hands stretch forth to him,

Him they beckon, him advise

Of heavenlier prosperities

And a more excelling grace

And a truer bosom-glow

Than the wine-fed feasters know.

They turn his heart from lovely maids,

And make the darlings of the earth

Swainish, coarse and nothing worth:

Teach him gladly to postpone

Pleasures to another stage

Beyond the scope of human age,

Freely as task at eve undone

Waits unblamed to-morrow's sun.

LET me go where'er I will

I hear a sky-born music still:

It sounds from all things old,

It sounds from all things young,

From all that's fair, from all that's foul,

Peals out a cheerful song.

It is not only in the rose,

It is not only in the bird,

Not only where the rainbow glows,

Nor in the song of woman heard,

But in the darkest, meanest things

There alway, alway something sings.

'T is not in the high stars alone,

Nor in the cups of budding flowers,

Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,

Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,

But in the mud and scum of things

There alway, alway something sings.

BY thoughts I lead

Bards to say what nations need;

What imports, what irks and what behooves.

Framed afar as Fates and Loves.

Those who lived with him became

Poets, for the air was fame.

SHUN passion, fold the hands of thrift,

Sit still and Truth is near:

Suddenly it will uplift

Your eyelids to the sphere:

Wait a little, you shall see

The portraiture of things to be.

THE rules to men made evident

By Him who built the day,

The columns of the firmament

Not firmer based than they.

I FRAMED his tongue to music,

I armed his hand with skill,

I moulded his face to beauty

And his heart the throne of Will.

FOR every God

Obeys the hymn, obeys the ode.

FOR art, for music over-thrilled,

The wine-cup shakes, the wine is spilled.

HOLD of the Maker, not the Made;

Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

THAT book is good

Which puts me in a working mood.

Unless to Thought is added Will,

Apollo is an imbecile.

What parts, what gems, what colors shine,—

Ah, but I miss the grand design.

LIKE vaulters in a circus round

Who leap from horse to horse, but never touch the ground.

FOR Genius made his cabin wide,

And Love led Gods therein to bide.

THE atom displaces all atoms beside,

And Genius unspheres all souls that abide.

TO transmute crime to wisdom, so to stem

The vice of Japhet by the thought of Shem.

FORBORE the ant-hill, shunned to tread,

In mercy, on one little head.

I HAVE no brothers and no peers,

And the dearest interferes:

When I would spend a lonely day,

Sun and moon are in my way.

THE brook sings on, but sings in vain

Wanting the echo in my brain.

ON bravely through the sunshine and the showers!

Time hath his work to do and we have ours.

HE planted where the deluge ploughed,

His hired hands were wind and cloud;

His eyes detect the Gods concealed

In the hummock of the field.

FOR what need I of book or priest,

Or sibyl from the mummied East,

When every star is Bethlehem star?

I count as many as there are

Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,

So many saints and saviours,

So many high behaviors

Salute the bard who is alive

And only sees what he doth give.

THOU shalt not try

To plant thy shrivelled pedantry

On the shoulders of the sky.

AH, not to me those dreams belong!

A better voice peals through my song.

TEACH me your mood, O patient stars!

Who climb each night the ancient sky.

Leaving on space no shade, no scars,

No trace of age, no fear to die.

THE Muse's hill by Fear is guarded,

A bolder foot is still rewarded.

HIS instant thought a poet spoke,

And filled the age his fame;

An inch of ground the lightning strook

Bat lit the sky with flame.

IF bright the sun, he tarries,

All day his song is heard;

And when he goes he carries

No more baggage than a bird.

THE Asmodean feat is mine,

To spin my sand-heap into swine.

SLIGHTED Minerva's learnèd tongue,

But leaped with joy when on the wind

The shell of Clio rung.

BEST boon of life is presence of a Muse

That does not wish to wander, comes by stealth,

Divulging to the heart she sets on flame

No popular tale or toy, no cheap renown.

When the wings grow that draw the gazing eye

Ofttimes poor Genius fluttering near the earth

Is wrecked upon the turrets of the town;

But lifted till he meets the steadfast gales

Calm blowing from the everlasting West.

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE.

NATURE.

DAILY the bending skies solicit man,

The seasons chariot him from this exile,

The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,

The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,

Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights

Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

FOR Nature, true and like in every place,

Will hint her secret in a garden patch,

Or in lone corners of a doleful heath,

As in the Andes watched by fleets at sea,

Or the sky-piercing horns of Himmaleh;

And, when I would recall the scenes I dreamed

On Adirondac steeps, I know

Small need have I of Turner or Daguerre,

Assured to find the token once again

In silver lakes that unexhausted gleam

And peaceful woods beside my cottage door.

THE patient Pan,

Drunken with nectar,

Sleeps or feigns slumber

Drowsily humming

Music to the march of time.

This poor tooting, creaking cricket,

Pan, half asleep, rolling over

His great body in the grass,

Tooting, creaking,

Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;

'T is his manner,

Well he knows his own affair,

Piling mountain chains of phlegm

On the nervous brain of man,

As he holds down central fires

Under Alps and Andes cold;

Haply else we could not live,

Life would be too wild an ode.

WHAT all the books of ages paint, I have.

What prayers and dreams of youthful genius feign,

I daily dwell in, and am not so blind

But I can see the elastic tent of day

Belike has wider hospitality

Than my few needs exhaust, and bids me read

The quaint devices on its mornings gay.

Yet Nature will not be in full possessed,

And they who truliest love her, heralds are

And harbingers of a majestic race,

Who, having more absorbed, more largely field,

And walk on earth as the sun walks in the sphere.

BUT never yet the man was found

Who could the mystery expound,

Though Adam, born when oaks were young,

Endured, the Bible says, as long;

But when at last the patriarch died

The Gordian noose was still untied.

He left, though goodly centuries old,

Meek Nature's secret still untold.

ATOM from atom yawns as far

As moon from earth, or star from star.

THE sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin

To use my land to put his rainbows in.

FOR joy and beauty planted it,

With faerie gardens cheered,

And boding Fancy haunted it

With men and women weird.

WHAT central flowing forces, say,

Make up thy splendor, matchless day?

DAY by day for her darlings to her much she added more;

In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door,

A door to something grander,—loftier walls, and vaster floor.

SAMSON stark at Dagon's knee,

Gropes for columns strong as he;

When his ringlets grew and curled,

Groped for axle of the world.

SHE paints with white and red the moors

To draw the nations out of doors.

A SCORE of airy miles will smooth

Rough Monadnoc to a gem.

THE mountain utters the same sense

Unchanged in its intelligence,

For ages sheds its walnut leaves,

One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.

the earth.

OUR eyeless bark sails free

Though with boom and spar

Andes, Alp or Himmalee,

Strikes never moon or star.

SEE yonder leafless trees against the sky,

How they diffuse themselves into the air,

And, ever subdividing, separate

Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,

As if they loved the element, and hasted

To dissipate their being into it.

PARKS and ponds are good by day;

I do not delight

In black acres of the night,

Nor my unseasoned step disturbs

The sleeps of trees or dreams of herbs.

THE low December vault in June be lifted high,

And largest clouds be flakes of down in that enormous sky.

SOLAR insect on the wing

In the garden murmuring,

Soothing with thy summer horn

Swains by winter pinched and worn.

birds.

DARLINGS of children and of bard,

Perfect kinds by vice unmarred,

All of worth and beauty set

Gems in Nature's cabinet;

These the fables she esteems

Reality most like to dreams.

Welcome back, you little nations,

Far-travelled in the south plantations,

Bring your music and rhythmic flight,

Your colors for our eyes' delight:

Freely nestle in our roof,

Weave your chamber weatherproof;

And your enchanting manners bring

And your autumnal gathering.

Exchange in conclave general

Greetings kind to each and all,

Conscious each of duty done

And unstainèd as the sun.

water.

THE water understands

Civilization well;

It wets my foot, but prettily

It chills my life, but wittily,

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy:

Ill used, it will destroy,

In perfect time and measure

With a face of golden pleasure

Elegantly destroy.

ALL day the waves assailed the rock,

I heard no church-bell chime,

The sea-beat scorns the minster clock

And breaks the glass of Time.

sunrise.

WOULD you know what joy is hid

In our green Musketaquid,

And for travelled eyes what charms

Draw us to these meadow farms,

Come and I will show you all

Makes each day a festival.

Stand upon this pasture hill,

Face the eastern star until

The slow eye of heaven shall show

The world above, the world below.

Behold the miracle!

Thou sawst but now the twilight sad

And stood beneath the firmament,

A watchman in a dark gray tent,

Waiting till God create the earth,—

Behold the new majestic birth!

The mottled clouds, like scraps of woof,

Steeped in the light are beautiful.

What majestic stillness broods

Over these colored solitudes.

Sleeps the vast East in pleasèd peace,

Up the far mountain walls the streams increase

Inundating the heaven

With spouting streams and waves of light

Which round the floating isles unite:—

See the world below

Baptized with the pure element,

A clear and glorious firmament

Touched with life by every beam.

I share the good with every flower,

I drink the necter of the hour:—

This is not the ancient earth

Whereof old chronicles relate

The tragic tales of crime and fate;

But rather, like its beads of dew

And dew-bent violets, fresh and new,

An exhalation of the time.

HE lives not who can refuse me;

All my force saith, Come and use me

A gleam of sun, a little rain,

And all is green again.

SEEMS, though the soft sheen all enchants,

Cheers the rough crag and mournful dell,

As if on such stern forms and haunts

A wintry storm more fitly fell.

ILLUSIONS like the tints of pearl,

Or changing colors of the sky,

Or ribbons of a dancing girl

That mend her beauty to the eye

THE cold gray down upon the quinces lieth

And the poor spinners weave their webs thereon

To share the sunshine that so spicy is.

PUT in, drive home the sightless wedges

And split to flakes the crystal ledges.

circles.

NATURE centres into balls,

And her proud ephemerals,

Fast to surface and outside,

Scan the profile of the sphere;

Knew they what that signified,

A new genesis were here.

BUT Nature whistled with all her winds,

Did as she pleased and went her way.

LIFE.

A TRAIN of gay and clouded days

Dappled with joy and grief and praise,

Beauty to fire us, saints to save,

Escort us to a little grave.

No fate, save by the victim's fault, is low,

For God hath writ all dooms magnificent,

So guilt not traverses his tender will.

AROUND the man who seeks a noble end,

Not angels bat divinities attend.

FROM high to higher forces

The scale of power uprears,

The heroes on their horses,

The gods upon their spheres.

THIS passing moment is an edifice

Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild.

ROOMY Eternity

Casts her schemes rarely,

And an æon allows

For each quality and part

Of the multitudinous

And many-chambered heart.

THE beggar begs by God's command,

And gifts awake when givers sleep,

Swords cannot cut the giving hand

Nor stab the love that orphans keep.

EASY to match what others do,

Perform the feat as well as they;

Hard to out-do the brave, the true,

And find a loftier way:

The school decays, the learning spoils

Because of the sons of wine;

How snatch the stripling from their toils?—

Yet can one ray of truth divine

The blaze of reveller's feasts outshine.

IN the chamber, on the stais,

Lurking dumb,

Go and come

Lemurs and Lars.

OF all wit's uses the main one

Is to live well with who has none.

THE tongue is prone to lose the way,

Not so the pen, for in a letter

We have not better things to say,

But surely say them better.

SHE walked in flowers around my field

As June herself around the sphere.

SUCH another peerless queen

Only could her mirror show.

I BEAR in youth the sad infirmities

That use to undo the limb and sense of age;

It hath pleased Heaven to break the dream of bliss

Which lit my onward way with bright presage,

And my unserviceable limbs forego

The sweet delight I found in fields and farms,

On windy hills, whose tops with morning glow,

And lakes, smooth mirrors of Aurora's charms.

Yet I think on them in the silent night,

Still breaks that morn, though dim, to Memory's eye,

And the firm soul does the pale train defy

Of grim Disease, that would her peace affright.

Please God, I'll wrap me in mine innocence

And bid each awful Muse drive the damned harpies hence.

Cambridge,

1827.

BE of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly

Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for know,

God hath a select family of sons

Now scattered wide thro' earth, and each alone,

Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one

By constant service to that inward law,

Is weaving the sublime proportions

Of a true monarch's soul. Beauty and strength,

The riches of a spotless memory,

The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got

By searching of a clear and loving eye

That seeth as God seeth.

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