POEMS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it seemed as if New England air For his large lungs too parsimonious were, As if those empty rooms of dogma drear Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere Counting the horns o’er of the Beast, Still scaring those whose faith in it is least, As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere That sharpen all the needles of the East, Had been to him like death, Accustomed to draw Europe’s freer breath In a more stable element; Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose, Our practical horizon grimly pent, Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze, Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close, Our social monotone of level days, Might make our best seem banishment; But it was nothing so; Haply his instinct might divine, Beneath our drift of puritanic snow, The marvel sensitive and fine Of sanguinaria over-rash to blow And trust its shyness to an air malign; Well might he prize truth’s warranty and pledge In the grim outcrop of our granite edge, Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need In the gaunt sons of Calvin’s iron breed, As prompt to give as skilled to win and keep; But, though such intuitions might not cheer, Yet life was good to him, and, there or here, With that sufficing joy, the day was never cheap; Thereto his mind was its own ample sphere, And, like those buildings great that through the year Carry one temperature, his nature large Made its own climate, nor could any marge Traced by convention stay him from his bent: He had a habitude of mountain air; He brought wide outlook where he went, And could on sunny uplands dwell Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair High-hung of viny Neufchâtel; Nor, surely, did he miss Some pale, imaginary bliss Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss.

I cannot think he wished so soon to die With all his senses full of eager heat, And rosy years that stood expectant by To buckle the winged sandals on their feet, He that was friends with earth, and all her sweet Took with both hands unsparingly: Truly this life is precious to the root, And good the feel of grass beneath the foot; To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom, Tenants in common with the bees, And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees, Is better than long waiting in the tomb; Only once more to feel the coming spring As the birds feel it when it bids them sing, Only once more to see the moon Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms Curve her mild sickle in the West Sweet with the breath of hay-cocks, were a boon Worth any promise of soothsayer realms Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest; To take December by the beard And crush the creaking snow with springy foot, While overhead the North’s dumb streamers shoot, Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared, Then the long evening-ends Lingered by cosy chimney-nooks, With high companionship of books Or slippered talk of friends And sweet habitual looks, Is better than to stop the ears with dust: Too soon the spectre comes to say, “Thou must!”

When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast, They comfort us with sense of rest; They must be glad to lie forever still; Their work is ended with their day; Another fills their room; ’tis the World’s ancient way, Whether for good or ill; But the deft spinners of the brain, Who love each added day and find it gain, Them overtakes the doom To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom (Trophy that was to be of life-long pain), The thread no other skill can ever knit again. ’Twas so with him, for he was glad to live, ’Twas doubly so, for he left work begun; Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive Till all the allotted flax were spun? It matters not; for, go at night or noon, A friend, whene’er he dies, has died too soon, And, once we hear the hopeless He is dead, So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

I seem to see the black procession go: That crawling prose of death too well I know, The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe; I see it wind through that unsightly grove, Once beautiful, but long defaced With granite permanence of cockney taste And all those grim disfigurements we love: There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste Nature rebels at: and it is not true Of those most precious parts of him we knew: Could we be conscious but as dreamers be, ’Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity; Nay, to be mingled with the elements, The fellow-servant of creative powers, Partaker in the solemn year’s events, To share the work of busy-fingered hours, To be night’s silent almoner of dew, To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, To stream as tides the ocean caverns through, Or with the rapture of great winds to blow About earth’s shaken coignes, were not a fate To leave us all-disconsolate; Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod Of charitable earth That takes out all our mortal stains, And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod, Methinks were better worth Than the poor fruit of most men’s wakeful pains, The heart’s insatiable ache: But such was not his faith, Nor mine: it may be he had trod Outside the plain old path of God thus spake, But God to him was very God, And not a visionary wraith Skulking in murky corners of the mind, And he was sure to be Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, Not with His essence mystically combined, As some high spirits long, but whole and free, A perfected and conscious Agassiz. And such I figure him: the wise of old Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold, Not truly with the guild enrolled Of him who seeking inward guessed Diviner riddles than the rest, And groping in the darks of thought Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; Rather he shares the daily light, From reason’s charier fountains won, Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite, And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled The winning tongue; the forehead’s high-piled heap, A cairn which every science helped to build, Unvalued will its golden secrets keep: He knows at last if Life or Death be best: Wherever he be flown, whatever vest The being hath put on which lately here So many-friended was, so full of cheer To make men feel the Seeker’s noble zest, We have not lost him all; he is not gone To the dumb herd of them that wholly die; The beauty of his better self lives on In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye He trained to Truth’s exact severity; He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him Whose living word still stimulates the air? In endless file shall loving scholars come The glow of his transmitted touch to share, And trace his features with an eye less dim Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb. Florence, Italy, February, 1874.

Dear Wendell, why need count the years Since first your genius made me thrill, If what moved then to smiles or tears, Or both contending, move me still? What has the Calendar to do With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth With gay immortals such as you Whose years but emphasize your youth? One air gave both their lease of breath; The same paths lured our boyish feet; One earth will hold us safe in death, With dust of saints and scholars sweet. Our legends from one source were drawn, I scarce distinguish yours from mine, And don’t we make the Gentiles yawn With “You remembers?” o’er our wine! If I, with too senescent air, Invade your elder memory’s pale, You snub me with a pitying “Where Were you in the September Gale?” Both stared entranced at Lafayette, Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet As scarcely worth one’s while to see. Ten years my senior, when my name In Harvard’s entrance-book was writ, Her halls still echoed with the fame Of you, her poet and her wit. ’Tis fifty years from then to now: But your Last Leaf renews its green, Though, for the laurels on your brow (So thick they crowd), ’tis hardly seen. The oriole’s fledglings fifty times Have flown from our familiar elms; As many poets with their rhymes Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms. The birds are hushed, the poets gone Where no harsh critic’s lash can reach, And still your wingëd brood sing on To all who love our English speech. Nay, let the foolish records be That make believe you’re seventy-five: You’re the old Wendell still to me,— And that’s the youngest man alive. The gray-blue eyes, I see them still, The gallant front with brown o’erhung, The shape alert, the wit at will, The phrase that stuck, but never stung. You keep your youth as yon Scotch firs, Whose gaunt line my horizon hems, Though twilight all the lowland blurs, Hold sunset in their ruddy stems. You with the elders? Yes, ’tis true, But in no sadly literal sense, With elders and coevals too, Whose verb admits no preterite tense. Master alike in speech and song Of fame’s great antiseptic—Style, You with the classic few belong Who tempered wisdom with a smile. Outlive us all! Who else like you Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff, And make us with the pen we knew Deathless at least in epitaph? Wollaston, August 29, 1884.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread. Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue, When Contemplation tells her pensive beads Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new. Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you! The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel, Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl, Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

At length arrived, your book I take To read in for the author’s sake; Too gray for new sensations grown, Can charm to Art or Nature known This torpor from my senses shake? Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake? Is a thrush gurgling from the brake? Has Spring, on all the breezes blown, At length arrived? Long may you live such songs to make, And I to listen while you wake, With skill of late disused, each tone Of the Lesboum barbiton, At mastery, through long finger-ache, At length arrived.

As I read on, what changes steal O’er me and through, from head to heel? A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside, My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,— Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele! Down vistas long of clipt charmille Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel; Tabor and pipe the dancers guide As I read on. While in and out the verses wheel The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal, Lithe ankles that to music glide, But chastely and by chance descried; Art? Nature? Which do I most feel As I read on?

The pipe came safe, and welcome too, As anything must be from you; A meerschaum pure, ’twould float as light As she the girls call Amphitrite. Mixture divine of foam and clay, From both it stole the best away: Its foam is such as crowns the glow Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot; Its clay is but congested lymph Jove chose to make some choicer nymph; And here combined,—why, this must be The birth of some enchanted sea, Shaped to immortal form, the type And very Venus of a pipe. When high I heap it with the weed From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore And cast upon Virginia’s shore, I’ll think,—So fill the fairer bowl And wise alembic of thy soul, With herbs far-sought that shall distil, Not fumes to slacken thought and will, But bracing essences that nerve To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve. When curls the smoke in eddies soft, And hangs a shifting dream aloft, That gives and takes, though chance-designed, The impress of the dreamer’s mind, I’ll think,—So let the vapors bred By Passion, in the heart or head, Pass off and upward into space, Waving farewells of tenderest grace, Remembered in some happier time, To blend their beauty with my rhyme. While slowly o’er its candid bowl The color deepens (as the soul That burns in mortals leaves its trace Of bale or beauty on the face), I’ll think,—So let the essence rare Of years consuming make me fair; So, ’gainst the ills of life profuse, Steep me in some narcotic juice; And if my soul must part with all That whiteness which we greenness call, Smooth back, O Fortune, half thy frown, And make me beautifully brown! Dream-forger, I refill thy cup With reverie’s wasteful pittance up, And while the fire burns slow away, Hiding itself in ashes gray, I’ll think,—As inward Youth retreats, Compelled to spare his wasting heats, When Life’s Ash-Wednesday comes about, And my head’s gray with fires burnt out, While stays one spark to light the eye, With the last flash of memory, ’Twill leap to welcome C. F. B., Who sent my favorite pipe to me.

I christened you in happier days, before These gray forebodings on my brow were seen; You are still lovely in your new-leaved green; The brimming river soothes his grassy shore; The bridge is there; the rock with lichens hoar; And the same shadows on the water lean, Outlasting us. How many graves between That day and this! How many shadows more Darken my heart, their substance from these eyes Hidden forever! So our world is made Of life and death commingled; and the sighs Outweigh the smiles, in equal balance laid: What compensation? None, save that the All-wise So schools us to love things that cannot fade.

Thank God, he saw you last in pomp of May, Ere any leaf had felt the year’s regret; Your latest image in his memory set Was fair as when your landscape’s peaceful sway Charmed dearer eyes with his to make delay On Hope’s long prospect,—as if They forget The happy, They, the unspeakable Three, whose debt, Like the hawk’s shadow, blots our brightest day: Better it is that ye should look so fair, Slopes that he loved, and ever-murmuring pines That make a music out of silent air, And bloom-heaped orchard-trees in prosperous lines; In you the heart some sweeter hints divines, And wiser, than in winter’s dull despair.

Old Friend, farewell! Your kindly door again I enter, but the master’s hand in mine No more clasps welcome, and the temperate wine, That cheered our long nights, other lips must stain: All is unchanged, but I expect in vain The face alert, the manners free and fine, The seventy years borne lightly as the pine Wears its first down of snow in green disdain: Much did he, and much well; yet most of all I prized his skill in leisure and the ease Of a life flowing full without a plan; For most are idly busy; him I call Thrice fortunate who knew himself to please, Learned in those arts that make a gentleman.

Nor deem he lived unto himself alone; His was the public spirit of his sire, And in those eyes, soft with domestic fire, A quenchless light of fiercer temper shone What time about the world our shame was blown On every wind; his soul would not conspire With selfish men to soothe the mob’s desire, Veiling with garlands Moloch’s bloody stone; The high-bred instincts of a better day Ruled in his blood, when to be citizen Rang Roman yet, and a Free People’s sway Was not the exchequer of impoverished men, Nor statesmanship with loaded votes to play, Nor public office a tramps' boosing-ken.

Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient will Through years one hair’s-breadth on our Dark to gain, Who, from the stars he studied not in vain, Had learned their secret to be strong and still, Careless of fames that earth’s tin trumpets fill; Born under Leo, broad of build and brain, While others slept, he watched in that hushed fane Of Science, only witness of his skill: Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell, But inextinguishable his luminous trace In mind and heart of all that knew him well. Happy man’s doom! To him the Fates were known Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of space, Unprescient, through God’s mercy, of his own!

Unconscious as the sunshine, simply sweet And generous as that, thou dost not close Thyself in art, as life were but a rose To rumple bee-like with luxurious feet; Thy higher mind therein finds sure retreat, But not from care of common hopes and woes; Thee the dark chamber, thee the unfriended, knows, Although no babbling crowds thy praise repeat: Consummate artist, who life’s landscape bleak Hast brimmed with sun to many a clouded eye, Touched to a brighter hue the beggar’s cheek, Hung over orphaned lives a gracious sky, And traced for eyes, that else would vainly seek, Fair pictures of an angel drawing nigh! Florence, 1873.

The wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many, honored by the Few; To count as naught in World, or Church, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great; To feel mysterious Nature ever new; To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clew, And learn by each discovery how to wait. He widened knowledge and escaped the praise; He wisely taught, because more wise to learn; He toiled for Science, not to draw men’s gaze, But for her lore of self-denial stern. That such a man could spring from our decays Fans the soul’s nobler faith until it burn.

True as the sun’s own work, but more refined, It tells of love behind the artist’s eye, Of sweet companionships with earth and sky, And summers stored, the sunshine of the mind. What peace! Sure, ere you breathe, the fickle wind Will break its truce and bend that grass-plume high, Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly That flits a more luxurious perch to find. Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall, A serene moment, deftly caught and kept To make immortal summer on my wall. Had he who drew such gladness ever wept? Ask rather could he else have seen at all, Or grown in Nature’s mysteries an adept?

About the oak that framed this chair, of old The seasons danced their round; delighted wings Brought music to its boughs; shy woodland things Shared its broad roof, ’neath whose green glooms grown bold, Lovers, more shy than they, their secret told; The resurrection of a thousand springs Swelled in its veins, and dim imaginings Teased them, perchance, of life more manifold. Such shall it know when its proud arms enclose My Lady Goshawk, musing here at rest, Careless of him who into exile goes, Yet, while his gift by those fair limbs is prest, Through some fine sympathy of nature knows That, seas between us, she is still his guest.

Why should I seek her spell to decompose Or to its source each rill of influence trace That feeds the brimming river of her grace? The petals numbered but degrade to prose Summer’s triumphant poem of the rose: Enough for me to watch the wavering chase, Like wind o’er grass, of moods across her face, Fairest in motion, fairer in repose. Steeped in her sunshine, let me, while I may, Partake the bounty: I content should be That her mirth cheats my temples of their gray, Her charm makes years long spent seem yet to be. Wit, goodness, grace, swift flash from grave to gay,— All these are good, but better far is she.

Ship, blest to bear such freight across the blue, May stormless stars control thy horoscope; In keel and hull, in every spar and rope, Be night and day to thy dear office true! Ocean, men’s path and their divider too, No fairer shrine of memory and hope To the underworld adown thy westering slope E’er vanished, or whom such regrets pursue: Smooth all thy surges as when Jove to Crete Swam with less costly burthen, and prepare A pathway meet for her home-coming soon With golden undulations such as greet The printless summer-sandals of the moon And tempt the Nautilus his cruise to dare!

New England’s poet, rich in love as years, Her hills and valleys praise thee, her swift brooks Dance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooks Thy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hears As maids their lovers', and no treason fears; Through thee her Merrimacs and Agiochooks And many a name uncouth win gracious looks, Sweetly familiar to both Englands' ears: Peaceful by birthright as a virgin lake, The lily’s anchorage, which no eyes behold Save those of stars, yet for thy brother’s sake That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as bold As that wherewith the heart of Roland brake, Far heard across the New World and the Old.

Thanks to the artist, ever on my wall The sunset stays: that hill in glory rolled, Those trees and clouds in crimson and in gold, Burn on, nor cool when evening’s shadows fall. Not round these splendors Midnight wraps her pall; These leaves the flush of Autumn’s vintage hold In Winter’s spite, nor can the Northwind bold Deface my chapel’s western window small: On one, ah me! October struck his frost, But not repaid him with those Tyrian hues; His naked boughs but tell him what is lost, And parting comforts of the sun refuse: His heaven is bare,—ah, were its hollow crost Even with a cloud whose light were yet to lose! April, 1854.

As, cleansed of Tiber’s and Oblivion’s slime, Glow Farnesina’s vaults with shapes again That dreamed some exiled artist from his pain Back to his Athens and the Muse’s clime, So these world-orphaned waifs of Want and Crime, Purged by Art’s absolution from the stain Of the polluting city-flood, regain Ideal grace secure from taint of time. An Attic frieze you give, a pictured song; For as with words the poet paints, for you The happy pencil at its labor sings, Stealing his privilege, nor does him wrong, Beneath the false discovering the true, And Beauty’s best in unregarded things.

Leaves fit to have been poor Juliet’s cradle-rhyme, With gladness of a heart long quenched in mould They vibrate still, a nest not yet grown cold From its fledged burthen. The numb hand of Time Vainly his glass turns; here is endless prime; Here lips their roses keep and locks their gold; Here Love in pristine innocency bold Speaks what our grosser conscience makes a crime. Because it tells the dream that all have known Once in their lives, and to life’s end the few; Because its seeds o’er Memory’s desert blown Spring up in heartsease such as Eden knew; Because it hath a beauty all its own, Dear Friend, I plucked this herb of grace for you.

Who does his duty is a question Too complex to be solved by me, But he, I venture the suggestion, Does part of his that plants a tree. For after he is dead and buried, And epitaphed, and well forgot, Nay, even his shade by Charon ferried To—let us not inquire to what, His deed, its author long outliving, By Nature’s mother-care increased, Shall stand, his verdant almoner, giving A kindly dole to man and beast. The wayfarer, at noon reposing, Shall bless its shadow on the grass, Or sheep beneath it huddle, dozing Until the thundergust o’erpass. The owl, belated in his plundering, Shall here await the friendly night, Blinking whene’er he wakes, and wondering What fool it was invented light. Hither the busy birds shall flutter, With the light timber for their nests, And, pausing from their labor, utter The morning sunshine in their breasts. What though his memory shall have vanished, Since the good deed he did survives? It is not wholly to be banished Thus to be part of many lives. Grow, then, my foster-child, and strengthen, Bough over bough, a murmurous pile, And, as your stately stem shall lengthen, So may the statelier of Argyll! 1880.

“De prodome, Des qu’il s’atorne a grant bonte Ja n’iert tot dit ne tot conte, Que leingue ne puet pas retraire Tant d’enor com prodom set faire.” Crestien de Troies, Li Romans dou Chevalier au Lyon, 784-788.

Curtis, whose Wit, with Fancy arm in arm, Masks half its muscle in its skill to charm, And who so gently can the Wrong expose As sometimes to make converts, never foes, Or only such as good men must expect, Knaves sore with conscience of their own defect, I come with mild remonstrance. Ere I start, A kindlier errand interrupts my heart, And I must utter, though it vex your ears, The love, the honor, felt so many years. Curtis, skilled equally with voice and pen To stir the hearts or mould the minds of men,— That voice whose music, for I’ve heard you sing Sweet as Casella, can with passion ring, That pen whose rapid ease ne’er trips with haste, Nor scrapes nor sputters, pointed with good taste, First Steele’s, then Goldsmith’s, next it came to you, Whom Thackeray rated best of all our crew,— Had letters kept you, every wreath were yours; Had the World tempted, all its chariest doors Had swung on flattered hinges to admit Such high-bred manners, such good-natured wit; At courts, in senates, who so fit to serve? And both invited, but you would not swerve, All meaner prizes waiving that you might In civic duty spend your heat and light, Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain Refusing posts men grovel to attain. Good Man all own you; what is left me, then, To heighten praise with but Good Citizen? But why this praise to make you blush and stare, And give a backache to your Easy-Chair? Old Crestien rightly says no language can Express the worth of a true Gentleman, And I agree; but other thoughts deride My first intent, and lure my pen aside. Thinking of you, I see my firelight glow On other faces, loved from long ago, Dear to us both, and all these loves combine With this I send and crowd in every line; Fortune with me was in such generous mood That all my friends were yours, and all were good; Three generations come when one I call, And the fair grandame, youngest of them all, In her own Florida who found and sips The fount that fled from Ponce’s longing lips. How bright they rise and wreathe my hearthstone round, Divine my thoughts, reply without a sound, And with them many a shape that memory sees, As dear as they, but crowned with aureoles these! What wonder if, with protest in my thought, Arrived, I find ’twas only love I brought? I came with protest; Memory barred the road Till I repaid you half the debt I owed. No, ’twas not to bring laurels that I came, Nor would you wish it, daily seeing fame, (Or our cheap substitute, unknown of yore,) Dumped like a load of coal at every door, Mime and hetæra getting equal weight With him whose toils heroic saved the State. But praise can harm not who so calmly met Slander’s worst word, nor treasured up the debt, Knowing, what all experience serves to show, No mud can soil us but the mud we throw. You have heard harsher voices and more loud, As all must, not sworn liegemen of the crowd, And far aloof your silent mind could keep As when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep, The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can know What hounds her lucent calm drives mad below. But to my business, while you rub your eyes And wonder how you ever thought me wise. Dear friend and old, they say you shake your head And wish some bitter words of mine unsaid: I wish they might be,—there we are agreed; I hate to speak, still more what makes the need; But I must utter what the voice within Dictates, for acquiescence dumb were sin; I blurt ungrateful truths, if so they be, That none may need to say them after me. ’Twere my felicity could I attain The temperate zeal that balances your brain; But nature still o’erleaps reflection’s plan, And one must do his service as he can. Think you it were not pleasanter to speak Smooth words that leave unflushed the brow and cheek? To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseen In private box, spectator of the scene Where men the comedy of life rehearse, Idly to judge which better and which worse Each hireling actor spoiled his worthless part? Were it not sweeter with a careless heart, In happy commune with the untainted brooks, To dream all day, or, walled with silent books, To hear nor heed the World’s unmeaning noise, Safe in my fortress stored with lifelong joys? I love too well the pleasures of retreat Safe from the crowd and cloistered from the street; The fire that whispers its domestic joy, Flickering on walls that knew me still a boy, And knew my saintly father; the full days, Not careworn from the world’s soul-squandering ways, Calm days that loiter with snow-silent tread, Nor break my commune with the undying dead; Truants of Time, to-morrow like to-day, That come unbid, and claimless glide away By shelves that sun them in the indulgent Past, Where Spanish castles, even, were built to last, Where saint and sage their silent vigil keep, And wrong hath ceased or sung itself to sleep. Dear were my walks, too, gathering fragrant store Of Mother Nature’s simple-minded lore: I learned all weather-signs of day or night; No bird but I could name him by his flight, No distant tree but by his shape was known, Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone. This learning won by loving looks I hived As sweeter lore than all from books derived. I know the charm of hillside, field, and wood, Of lake and stream, and the sky’s downy brood, Of roads sequestered rimmed with sallow sod, But friends with hardhack, aster, goldenrod, Or succory keeping summer long its trust Of heaven-blue fleckless from the eddying dust: These were my earliest friends, and latest too, Still unestranged, whatever fate may do. For years I had these treasures, knew their worth, Estate most real man can have on earth. I sank too deep in this soft-stuffed repose That hears but rumors of earth’s wrongs and woes; Too well these Capuas could my muscles waste, Not void of toils, but toils of choice and taste; These still had kept me could I but have quelled The Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled. But there were times when silent were my books As jailers are, and gave me sullen looks, When verses palled, and even the woodland path, By innocent contrast, fed my heart with wrath, And I must twist my little gift of words Into a scourge of rough and knotted cords Unmusical, that whistle as they swing To leave on shameless backs their purple sting. How slow Time comes! Gone, who so swift as he? Add but a year, ’tis half a century Since the slave’s stifled moaning broke my sleep, Heard ’gainst my will in that seclusion deep, Haply heard louder for the silence there, And so my fancied safeguard made my snare. After that moan had sharpened to a cry, And the cloud, hand-broad then, heaped all our sky With its stored vengeance, and such thunders stirred As heaven’s and earth’s remotest chambers heard, I looked to see an ampler atmosphere By that electric passion-gust blown clear. I looked for this; consider what I see— But I forbear, ’twould please nor you nor me To check the items in the bitter list Of all I counted on and all I mist. Only three instances I choose from all, And each enough to stir a pigeon’s gall: Office a fund for ballot-brokers made To pay the drudges of their gainful trade; Our cities taught what conquered cities feel By ædiles chosen that they might safely steal; And gold, however got, a title fair To such respect as only gold can bear. I seem to see this; how shall I gainsay What all our journals tell me every day? Poured our young martyrs their high-hearted blood That we might trample to congenial mud The soil with such a legacy sublimed? Methinks an angry scorn is here well-timed: Where find retreat? How keep reproach at bay? Where’er I turn some scandal fouls the way. Dear friend, if any man I wished to please, ’Twere surely you whose humor’s honied ease Flows necked with gold of thought, whose generous mind Sees Paradise regained by all mankind, Whose brave example still to vanward shines, Checks the retreat, and spurs our lagging lines. Was I too bitter? Who his phrase can choose That sees the life-blood of his dearest ooze? I loved my Country so as only they Who love a mother fit to die for may; I loved her old renown, her stainless fame,— What better proof than that I loathed her shame? That many blamed me could not irk me long, But, if you doubted, must I not be wrong? ’Tis not for me to answer: this I know, That man or race so prosperously low Sunk in success that wrath they cannot feel, Shall taste the spurn of parting Fortune’s heel; For never land long lease of empire won Whose sons sate silent when base deeds were done.

Curtis, so wrote I thirteen years ago, Tost it unfinished by, and left it so; Found lately, I have pieced it out, or tried, Since time for callid juncture was denied. Some of the verses pleased me, it is true, And still were pertinent,—those honoring you. These now I offer: take them, if you will, Like the old hand-grasp, when at Shady Hill We met, or Staten Island, in the days When life was its own spur, nor needed praise. If once you thought me rash, no longer fear; Past my next milestone waits my seventieth year. I mount no longer when the trumpets call; My battle-harness idles on the wall, The spider’s castle, camping-ground of dust, Not without dints, and all in front, I trust. Shivering sometimes it calls me as it hears Afar the charge’s tramp and clash of spears; But ’tis such murmur only as might be The sea-shell’s lost tradition of the sea, That makes me muse and wonder Where? and When? While from my cliff I watch the waves of men That climb to break midway their seeming gain, And think it triumph if they shake their chain. Little I ask of Fate; will she refuse Some days of reconcilement with the Muse? I take my reed again and blow it free Of dusty silence, murmuring, “Sing to me!” And, as its stops my curious touch retries, The stir of earlier instincts I surprise,— Instincts, if less imperious, yet more strong, And happy in the toil that ends with song. Home am I come: not, as I hoped might be, To the old haunts, too full of ghosts for me, But to the olden dreams that time endears, And the loved books that younger grow with years; To country rambles, timing with my tread Some happier verse that carols in my head, Yet all with sense of something vainly mist, Of something lost, but when I never wist. How empty seems to me the populous street, One figure gone I daily loved to meet,— The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below! And, ah, what absence feel I at my side, Like Dante when he missed his laurelled guide, What sense of diminution in the air Once so inspiring, Emerson not there! But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet, And Death is beautiful as feet of friend Coming with welcome at our journey’s end; For me Fate gave, whate’er she else denied, A nature sloping to the southern side; I thank her for it, though when clouds arise Such natures double-darken gloomy skies. I muse upon the margin of the sea, Our common pathway to the new To Be, Watching the sails, that lessen more and more, Of good and beautiful embarked before; With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere, Whose friendly-peopled shore I sometimes see, By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me, Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun, My moorings to the past snap one by one.