Part 10 — THE WANDERER.

The throng of Earth’s slow struggles seek not here, Nor pomp, nor circumstance, nor moving tale; But whatsoever of that angelic scale, Whose feet are Earth-set, whose tops touch the Sphere, By its own splendours may be rendered clear, Shall show one soul, whether she rise or fail: Faith’s sympathetic vision will prevail To see more true things than to sense appear: The soul sees with the eye as through a glass, And, if God wills, without it; be it not said, “This,” or “that is,” or “is not;” shadows pass Before us: O! ere long may we be made To own the temporary things we see A mere penumbra of Eternity!

A barren heath, with bitter east-winds piping, A garden full of sunshine and of bees, A village school, a wandering home, a boyhood Perplexed and various, shot with sin and shame, A hot and wayward youth, led by false lights To sloughs and bogs of danger and contempt, A vague uneasiness, and ignorance— For knowledge opens but to one key, Love, The which I partly sought, but found it not— Such were the earlier hours of Life’s drear night.

Oft in the dumb hour that precedes the dawn, Before the cock crows to the waning stars, When men sleep soundest, and the world is still, A voice of strangest import came to me— A welcome, but an awful voice. It came From hills and green lanes, woods and dewy lawns; It breathed of innocent pleasures, now not known, Or, known, not loved; of feverish regret For things perchance but little valued then, Now lost for aye, and bitter to the heart; It was a moaning and a warning voice; A moan for Eden lost, a boding vague Of coldness coming on, as if it said, “God’s Spirit will not always strive with flesh.”

Fast fade the fields, yet not so fast as fade The memories of childhood; fades from me The misty distance of the Hampshire fields; England is lost already to my heart, And half the bitterness of death is past. The moon has made a path upon the waves Which will be mine to-morrow—toward the East— The land that bred me cannot nourish me, And I go forth. I will not mourn the chance.

We parted in the sunshine and the crowd, The inquisitive gaze of noon; the busy hum Of man about the port; with strangers by; And cold Convention, with her tyrant forms, Removed the solace, and drove home the sting. We should have sundered on a lonely shore, Where slowly broadened o’er a misty sea The shimmer of a large, low-lying moon; My vessel should have loomed against the night, Nor shown impatience but by one flapped sail, And in that hour we should have known a noise Of water crawling gently up the stones, And falling softly back with silver sound. Such noise I hear; not now, tho’ tones of night There are, which, in unquestioned diapason, Accompany the murmurs of my soul. By daylight nature jarred with jangling keys, But now, all mingles well, the sounds are sad, And I am sad to find myself alone. So, standing hand in hand upon the beach We should have parted, you gone back—ah me!— To your sweet home, to muse upon the past, I, to my Destiny beyond the sea, With a heart touched, not torn, beyond a cure.

I muse upon your lingering words of love In search of any comfort, as a child Might play with desperate hand on his own hurt. As “May the Eldorado that of old Haunted your lonely visions, and your speech, Be found a truth by you!” Or thus, “Alas! I cannot hope that you shall be exempt From the common lot;” or, “There is but one land Whereto we send our dearest in all hope, And doubt not that to follow them were bliss.” And in a bygone letter “A poet’s heart Is in your breast, though little uttered yet. When the Sun leaves the Earth at eventide, His glory-beams, which shone alike on all, Leave but the higher hills; slowly withdrawn, They linger long upon the peaks, till night Wraps all alike in irrespective darkness: And on the spirit of man there dwell at first Beams of his native Heaven, and deck the child. None but the higher natures keep those rays Till Death brings night to all;” and “O love Truth, But never deck her statuary limbs With the presumptuous garb of paradox.” Ah me! not even your partial words can cheer My burthened soul to-night—hark! the ship’s bell Marks the beginning of another day, The day on which I sail! Whate’er I do, Where’er I go, the world turns round the same, And the great Universe’s pulses beat, And He alone who is the Governor And Centre of the circle of all spheres, Knows what I am, or heeds; and when I die, The stars will shine, and the whole globe turn round, And the great Universe’s pulses beat, And He alone will heed. So runs the world— You there, I here, God only everywhere.

I am weary of the ocean, emblem of Eternity. Boundlessness is too ideal. Time and space suffice to me. Life at sea is but the shadow of the life we led on land, And the weary glass of Chronos hardly seems to drop a sand. Life at sea is life suspended in a Present evermore, All the Past is dim behind us, all the Future vague before. ’Tis an isthmus leading on from continent to continent, Where the spirit, worn with waiting, sometimes dreams it is content. For I dream, cast out from action, nothing more remains to do, Gazing at the sky and ocean, looking up from blue to blue. Watching in night’s constellations circles of the wheeling mast, Nourishing a moody fancy with the visions of the Past; Or if visions of the Future sometimes dimly glide between, ’Tis when memory shapes the To be, by reversing what has been; That which was was dark and gloomy, clouds of doubt, and storms of sin, Till I thought ‘Perchance the outer lends its shade to that within; But the country which is coming is the home of warmth and light, And the soul may spread her pinions there more beautifully bright.’ Still I erred; I know that change of climate is not change of soul; Every ship has care for cargo, wheresoe’er the billows roll, Where storms toss, or calms entrance her, from the line to either pole. Let what will be, there is nothing wherewithal I may not cope. Thus I sing between the lands of disappointment and of hope; Thus I sing, the night wind freshens in the rigging, loft and low, Fills the canvass, drives the light spray—on our destined path we go.

Oh, sought of old on misty mountain-tops, And by the well-heads of long reverenced streams— Places in which the cool air lapped men so, And the all-coloured wavings of the trees, And the soft, dark-blue distance, and the stir Of black and white upon the ancient stems, That they forgot their individual heats, Merging them in the universal; sought In frozen caves beneath the purple lights! Thee, not the sounds of timbrel or of yell In tropic palm-groves, lone among the waves Displease; Thou dost not shun the narrow faith That sees thee in misshapen human forms, Wrought by artificers from fire-wood trunk; Nor dost Thou hide Thee from the larger pomp Of stole and alb, and censer-swinging lads, And aged men who pray in alien tongues, And fluted swell of organ, when the vaults Reverberate the clamour, and the heavens Blush through the tinted oriel, and all else, Sight, sound, and deed, be ignorant or vain; And Thou art found by those, austere and hot, Who sunder from their brethren, and devote A simple and unsumptuous rite to Thee, In open field or tabernacle stern: With each and all I will believe thou art, Because with each the shrine is still the same, The matchless temple, made without hands—man. Life without Thee is life inanimate; And better far false gods than none at all; Yet, with them, is it but a fevered sleep With vague and unintelligible dreams. Come Thou to me, all lonely; Lo, my heart Is empty, swept, and garnished, and I bring There, to thine altar foot, my wingèd thoughts, My hornèd resolutions, fruits and flowers— Worthless, unless thy beams have quickened them: Lo! what I have I sacrifice to Thee.

The stars are clear in heaven, and all the slopes Are slumbering in the silence of the night; I hear a distant noise of waterfalls; Far to the northward the great hills of snow Thrust up their moon-kissed pinnacles; deep peace Is on the happy world—the peace of God. The peace of God! when comes there such to me? Yet life has changes; brothers, we know that, Even from the bygone lustre; did we dream (When first, amid the glimmer of the moon, And the unnumbered laughings of the sea, We launched our little vessel five years past)— Dream of the voyage before us? Ah, since then How many barks, as full of hope as ours, And tended by as favourable winds, Have perished from our knowledge; some gone down To darkness, bearing, to the last, the hues And beams of their destruction; some—ah, worse, Still drift among the breakers of despair, Without a compass—mastless, floating wrecks. While, thanks to God—for surely not of us The merit or the claim upon His love— Our path is still upon serener waves, Our rigging stout, our needle pointing true, And our eyes fixed upon the Polar Star.

And is it true? can such sweet dreams not lie? O true Egeria of a crownless lord! Not by cool waterfall and mossy grot, Beneath the mild light of a temperate sun, With nature for a temple, do we meet; But, as we parted, in a busy town, Among the selfish throng of commerce; here, Where alien schemers buy a chance of fortune With sacrifice of all; we meet again— And I who was the worst and least of those Learned life’s sweet lesson from thy lips of love, Young Alchemist, whose heaven-directed search Has found the great Magistrum, oft denied To wise men and to prophets of the world. “Thou didst not think to teach me.” What of that? Feeling is more than knowledge, thought than speech. The lesson much I needed, and do still; My life is not as I would; a dull round Of trivial cares, and sordid, worldly aims, Intrench’d by poverty, and sunder’d far From all my spirit values; I, God wot, To toil long years in this distemper’d clime, Cut off from art and sweet commerce of books, When, in the converse of congenial hearts, A glorious work had crown’d my sinking head. It was a dream; yet who is there can say, “I have awakened, and will dream no more”? Yet here is work too, though the end be far; And here, even in exile, is a home— For some short years a home; while yet I see The roses not all wither’d on your cheek, Our little ones still round their mother’s knee; The sunshine of a hearth, though mostly cold, And Love, that waits on Virtue—here is home.

Call not our mission exile; who shall dare To carp at independence, or to rail Because his fate suffers him not to share The nippings and the throngings of the mart, The wrestlings of our overcrowded home— That other far-off home beyond the seas? Oh, ’tis the poor man’s Paradise to know, That day succeeding day shall still provide Its never-failing sustenance for those His heart is knit to; and to feel that heart, Uncheck’d by old Convention, freely beat And thrill with generous thoughts that link mankind, And worship its own God, nor be coerced Hither and thither with prescriptions hard, And oft-resolved tenacious usages, That loosen’d cling again at every turn In that maternal isle. Oh, proudly swell, Thou breast of every free man—proudly rise, Thou voice—for none shall check thine utterance; And though thy hearers may seem few to thee, Know, that the aftertime may warm thy words, Till some of them shall ripen into deeds: Know this in faith, and it shall be to thee For an abiding sense of deathlessness. And yet one would not die here; none can be Without some vision of a cottage home, Or in the pastures of the fields, or where The tide of civilised life is eddying round Some quiet nook, where men of thought repose, Nursing the labours of their younger brains, In great, imperial London. Mine should be Some rural spot, whence I could see afar The cloud that rests for ever over her; And the black towers of that minster old, Where kings and poets (kings of their own souls), Sown by the sedulous hand of Goodman Death, Await the harvest-time HE will not see. And I would have the immemorial Thames To sparkle through my tall, surrounding trees; And I would have the village church hard by, That I might see the undulating green, Where I and some of those I loved should lie. Ah, foolish heart, that it should better thee To know, that when thy flutterings shall have still’d— The first repose that they shall ever know— Thou shouldst rot here or there; the time shall come (Ay, and is now), when thoughts like these shall be Less vivid, less important than the dreams Of long-forgotten slumbers, than the thoughts Of prememorial childhood—almost less Than the faint echoes of a former birth; And thou, O heart, shall be like one of these, Or as thou hadst been never—Peace, O Peace!