JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (continued 4)

HEBE. I saw the twinkle of white feet, I saw the flash of robes descending; Before her ran an influence fleet, That bowed my heart like barley bending. As, in bare fields, the searching bees Pilot to blooms beyond our finding, It led me on, by sweet degrees, Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding. Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me; The long-sought Secret's golden gates On musical hinges swung before me. I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp Thrilling with godhood; like a lover I sprang the proffered life to clasp;— The beaker fell; the luck was over. The Earth has drunk the vintage up; What boots it patch the goblet's splinters? Can Summer fill the icy cup, Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's? O spendthrift, haste! await the Gods; Their nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods The immortal gift in vain libations. Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hands would seize upon her, Follow thy life, and she will sue To pour for thee the cup of honor.

THE SEARCH. I went to seek for Christ, And Nature seemed so fair That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And I was sure to find him there: The temple I forsook, And to the solitude Allegiance paid; but winter came and shook The crown and purple from my wood; His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift, Besieged the columned aisle and palace-gate; My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn rift, But epitaphed her own sepulchred state: Then I remembered whom I went to seek, And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak. Back to the world I turned, For Christ, I said, is king; So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, As far beneath his sojourning: Mid power and wealth I sought, But found no trace of him, And all the costly offerings I had brought With sudden rust and mould grew dim: I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, All must on stated days themselves imprison, Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws, Witless how long the life had thence arisen; Due sacrifice to this they set apart, Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart. So from my feet the dust Of the proud World I shook; Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust, And half my sorrow's burden took. After the World's soft bed, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head, His cheap food seemed as manna rare; Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet, Turned to the heedless city whence I came, Hard by I saw, and springs of worship sweet Gushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same; Love looked me in the face and spake no words, But straight I knew those foot-prints were the Lord's. I followed where they led And in a hovel rude, With naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for meekly stood A naked, hungry child Clung round his gracious knee, And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled To bless the smile that set him free; New miracles I saw his presence do,— No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, The gathered chips into a woodpile grew, The broken morsel swelled to goodly store; I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak.

THE PRESENT CRISIS. When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time. Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro; At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart. So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod, Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod. For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flush of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;— In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light. Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong. Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,— "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin." Slavery, the earthborn Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play? Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied. Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design. By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned. For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn. 'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;— Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth rock sublime? They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea. They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day? New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. December, 1845.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE. What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair! No more the landscape holds its wealth apart. Making me poorer in my poverty, But mingles with my senses and my heart; My own projected spirit seems to me In her own reverie the world to steep; 'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill, and tree. How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances! The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, In waves of dreamier purple roll away, And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms. Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives. The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the henhawk sails, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits. The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The squirrel on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound, Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere. O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn 's here, and Winter soon will be Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all. The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves. He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, With distant eye broods over other sights, Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights. The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky; The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye. The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush; The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush. O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines, and weeds, and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine. Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot, Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires. Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires; In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute. Below, the Charles—a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond— Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green. Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, From every season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare; Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free On them its largesse of variety, For nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare. In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green, O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet; Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen, There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet; And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd, As if the silent shadow of a cloud Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet. All round, upon the river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide. In Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see, As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the thick-set grass; Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of brass. Meanwhile the devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops. Another change subdues them in the Fall, But saddens not; they still show merrier tints, Though sober russet seems to cover all; When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints, Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across, Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss, As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints. Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest, Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill, While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west, Glow opposite;—the marshes drink their fill And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade, Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill. Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts, Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates, And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts, While firmer ice the eager boy awaits, Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire, And until bed-time plays with his desire, Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;— Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail, By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night, 'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail, Giving a pretty emblem of the day When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's cramping mail. And now those waterfalls the ebbing river Twice every day creates on either side Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver In grass-arched channels to the sun denied; High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow, The silvered flats gleam frostily below, Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide. But, crowned in turn by vying seasons three, Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; This glory seems to rest immovably,— The others were too fleet and vanishing; When the hid tide is at its highest flow, O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything. The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway. But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns. Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there. But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes; The early evening with her misty dyes Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes. There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green; There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories;— How with my life knit up is every well-known scene! Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow To outward sight, and through your marshes wind; Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago, Your twin flows silent through my world of mind: Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray! Before my inner sight ye stretch away, And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind. Beyond that hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise, Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died, Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze. Virgilium vidi tantum,—I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all, That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;— Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came;— One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall. Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,— Our only sure possession is the past; The village blacksmith died a month ago, And dim to me the forge's roaring blast; Soon fire-new mediævals we shall see Oust the black smithy from its chestnut tree, And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast. How many times, prouder than king on throne, Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's, Panting have I the creaky bellows blown, And watched the pent volcano's red increase, Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down By that hard arm voluminous and brown, From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees. Dear native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,—to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half-sunken burns, The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away, So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few, The six old willows at the causey's end, (Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew,) Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send, Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread, Where streamed through leafy chinks the trembling red, Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend. Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er, Beneath the awarded crown of victory, Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer; Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had,— It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee! Nearer art thou than simply native earth, My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie; A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, Something of kindred more than sympathy; For in thy bounds I reverently laid away That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky, That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be;— The Artist saw his statue of the soul Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the impoverished seasons roll.

THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND. A FRAGMENT. A legend that grew in the forest's hush Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush, When a word some poet chanced to say Ages ago, in his careless way, Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud Clearly as under yon thunder-cloud I see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew, From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue, Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vast Norwegian forests of the past; And it grew itself like a true Northern pine, First a little slender line, Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then anon A stem that a tower might rest upon, Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss, Its bony roots clutching around and across, As if they would tear up earth's heart in their grasp Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp; Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine, To shrunk snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine, Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor, Hearing waves moan again on the perilous shore Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way 'Twixt the frothy gnashed tusks of some ship-crunching bay. So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall, As the Gipsy child grows that eats crusts in the hall; It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the sky, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it supply; 'Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, A true part of the landscape as sea, land, and air; For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force up these wild births of the woods under glass, And so, if 'tis told as it should be told, Though 't were sung under Venice's moonlight of gold, You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sea-like and northern through every line, And the verses should hang, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody, Like the lithe sun-steeped limbs of the parent tree. Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood— The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing From Michael's white shoulder—is hewn and defaced By iconoclast axes in desperate waste, And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song? Then the legends go with them,—even yet on the sea A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree, And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor. Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in, Since the day of creation, the light and the din Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed From the midnight primeval its armful of shade, And has kept the weird Past with its sagas alive Mid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive, There the legend takes root in the age-gathered gloom, And its murmurous boughs for their tossing find room. Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes Groping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous snows; Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked white, When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost, As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires which throw Their own threatening shadows far round o'er the snow, When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear, When the wood's huge recesses, half-lighted, supply A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try, Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town, But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood Mid the Dark's creeping whispers that curdle the blood, When the eye, glanced in dread o'er the shoulder, may dream, Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire's companioning gleam, That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red Man crouch back To the shroud of the tree-trunk's invincible black;— There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-shadowed camp, Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground, While the border-tale's told and the canteen flits round.

A CONTRAST. Thy love thou sentest oft to me, And still as oft I thrust it back; Thy messengers I could not see In those who everything did lack,— The poor, the outcast, and the black. Pride held his hand before mine eyes, The world with flattery stuffed mine ears; I looked to see a monarch's guise, Nor dreamed thy love would knock for years, Poor, naked, fettered, full of tears. Yet, when I sent my love to thee, Thou with a smile didst take it in, And entertain'dst it royally, Though grimed with earth, with hunger thin, And leprous with the taint of sin. Now every day thy love I meet, As o'er the earth it wanders wide, With weary step and bleeding feet, Still knocking at the heart of pride And offering grace, though still denied.

EXTREME UNCTION. Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be Alone with the consoler, Death; Far sadder eyes than thine will see This crumbling clay yield up its breath; These shrivelled hands have deeper stains Than holy oil can cleanse away,— Hands that have plucked the world's coarse gains As erst they plucked the flowers of May. Call, if thou canst, to these gray eyes Some faith from youth's traditions wrung; This fruitless husk which dustward dries Has been a heart once, has been young; On this bowed head the awful Past Once laid its consecrating hands; The Future in its purpose vast Paused, waiting my supreme commands. But look! whose shadows block the door? Who are those two that stand aloof? See! on my hands this freshening gore Writes o'er again its crimson proof! My looked-for death-bed guests are met;— There my dead Youth doth wring its hands, And there, with eyes that goad me yet, The ghost of my Ideal stands! God bends from out the deep and says,— "I gave thee the great gift of life; Wast thou not called in many ways? Are not my earth and heaven at strife? I gave thee of my seed to sow, Bringest thou me my hundred-fold?" Can I look up with face aglow, And answer, "Father, here is gold?" I have been innocent; God knows When first this wasted life began, Not grape with grape more kindly grows, Than I with every brother-man: Now here I gasp; what lose my kind, When this fast-ebbing breath shall part? What bands of love and service bind This being to the world's sad heart? Christ still was wandering o'er the earth, Without a place to lay his head; He found free welcome at my hearth, He shared my cup and broke my bread: Now, when I hear those steps sublime, That bring the other world to this, My snake-turned nature, sunk in slime, Starts sideway with defiant hiss. Upon the hour when I was born, God said, "Another man shall be," And the great Maker did not scorn Out of himself to fashion me; He sunned me with his ripening looks, And Heaven's rich instincts in me grew, As effortless as woodland nooks Send violets up and paint them blue. Yes, I who now, with angry tears, Am exiled back to brutish clod, Have borne unquenched for fourscore years A spark of the eternal God; And to what end? How yield I back The trust for such high uses given? Heaven's light hath but revealed a track Whereby to crawl away from heaven. Men think it is an awful sight To see a soul just set adrift On that drear voyage from whose night The ominous shadows never lift; But 'tis more awful to behold A helpless infant, newly born, Whose little hands unconscious hold The keys of darkness and of morn. Mine held them once; I flung away Those keys that might have open set The golden sluices of the day, But clutch the keys of darkness yet;— I hear the reapers singing go Into God's harvest; I, that might With them have chosen, here below Grope shuddering at the gates of night. O glorious Youth, that once wast mine! O high ideal! all in vain Ye enter at this ruined shrine Whence worship ne'er shall rise again, The bat and owl inhabit here, The snake nests in the altar-stone, The sacred vessels moulder near, The image of the God is gone.

THE OAK. What gnarlèd stretch, what depth of shade, is his! There needs no crown to mark the forest's king; How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss! Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, Which he with such benignant royalty Accepts, as overpayeth what is lent; All nature seems his vassal proud to be, And cunning only for his ornament. How towers he, too, amid the billowed snows, An unquelled exile from the summer's throne, Whose plain, uncinctured front more kingly shows, Now that the obscuring courtier leaves are flown. His boughs make music of the winter air, Jewelled with sleet, like some cathedral front Where clinging snow-flakes with quaint art repair The dints and furrows of time's envious brunt. How doth his patient strength the rude March wind Persuade to seem glad breaths of summer breeze, And win the soil that fain would be unkind, To swell his revenues with proud increase! He is the gem; and all the landscape wide (So doth his grandeur isolate the sense) Seems but the setting, worthless all beside, An empty socket, were he fallen thence. So, from off converse with life's wintry gales, Should man learn how to clasp with tougher roots The inspiring earth;—how otherwise avails The leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots? So every year that falls with noiseless flake Should fill old scars upon the stormward side, And make hoar age revered for age's sake, Not for traditions of youth's leafy pride. So from the pinched soil of a churlish fate, True hearts compel the sap of sturdier growth, So between earth and heaven stand simply great, That these shall seem but their attendants both; For nature's forces with obedient zeal Wait on the rooted faith and oaken will; As quickly the pretender's cheat they feel, And turn mad Pucks to flout and mock him still. Lord! all thy works are lessons,—each contains Some emblem of man's all-containing soul; Shall he make fruitless all thy glorious pains, Delving within thy grace an eyeless mole? Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove, Cause me some message of thy truth to bring, Speak but a word through me, nor let thy love Among my boughs disdain to perch and sing.

AMBROSE. Never, surely, was holier man Than Ambrose, since the world began; With diet spare and raiment thin, He shielded himself from the father of sin; With bed of iron and scourgings oft, His heart to God's hand as wax made soft. Through earnest prayer and watchings long He sought to know 'twixt right and wrong, Much wrestling with the blessed Word To make it yield the sense of the Lord, That he might build a storm-proof creed To fold the flock in at their need. At last he builded a perfect faith, Fenced round about with The Lord thus saith; To himself he fitted the doorway's size, Meted the light to the need of his eyes, And knew, by a sure and inward sign, That the work of his fingers was divine. Then Ambrose said, "All those shall die The eternal death who believe not as I;" And some were boiled, some burned in fire, Some sawn in twain, that his heart's desire, For the good of men's souls, might be satisfied, By the drawing of all to the righteous side. One day, as Ambrose was seeking the truth In his lonely walk, he saw a youth Resting himself in the shade of a tree; It had never been given him to see So shining a face, and the good man thought 'T were pity he should not believe as he ought. So he set himself by the young man's side, And the state of his soul with questions tried; But the heart of the stranger was hardened indeed Nor received the stamp of the one true creed, And the spirit of Ambrose waxed sore to find Such face the porch of so narrow a mind. "As each beholds in cloud and fire The shape that answers his own desire, So each," said the youth, "in the Law shall find The figure and features of his mind; And to each in his mercy hath God allowed His several pillar of fire and cloud." The soul of Ambrose burned with zeal And holy wrath for the young man's weal: "Believest thou then, most wretched youth," Cried he, "a dividual essence in Truth? I fear me thy heart is too cramped with sin To take the Lord in his glory in." Now there bubbled beside them where they stood, A fountain of waters sweet and good; The youth to the streamlet's brink drew near Saying, "Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here!" Six vases of crystal then he took, And set them along the edge of the brook. "As into these vessels the water I pour, There shall one hold less, another more, And the water unchanged, in every case, Shall put on the figure of the vase; O thou, who wouldst unity make through strife, Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life?" When Ambrose looked up, he stood alone, The youth and the stream and the vases were gone; But he knew, by a sense of humbled grace, He had talked with an angel face to face, And felt his heart change inwardly, As he fell on his knees beneath the tree.

ABOVE AND BELOW. I. O dwellers in the valley-land, Who in deep twilight grope and cower, Till the slow mountain's dial-hand Shortens to noon's triumphal hour,— While ye sit idle, do ye think The Lord's great work sits idle too? That light dare not o'erleap the brink Of morn, because 'tis dark with you? Though yet your valleys skulk in night, In God's ripe fields the day is cried, And reapers with their sickles bright, Troop, singing, down the mountain side. Come up, and feel what health there is In the frank Dawn's delighted eyes, As, bending with a pitying kiss, The night-shed tears of Earth she dries! The Lord wants reapers: O, mount up, Before night comes, and says,—"Too late!" Stay not for taking scrip or cup, The Master hungers while ye wait; 'Tis from these heights alone your eyes The advancing spears of day can see, Which o'er the eastern hill-tops rise, To break your long captivity. II. Lone watcher on the mountain-height! It is right precious to behold The first long surf of climbing light Flood all the thirsty east with gold; But we, who in the shadow sit, Know also when the day is nigh, Seeing thy shining forehead lit With his inspiring prophecy. Thou hast thine office; we have ours; God lacks not early service here, But what are thine eleventh hours He counts with us for morning cheer Our day, for Him, is long enough, And when he giveth work to do, The bruisèd reed is amply tough To pierce the shield of error through. But not the less do thou aspire Light's earlier messages to preach; Keep back no syllable of fire,— Plunge deep the rowels of thy speech. Yet God deems not thine aëried sight More worthy than our twilight dim,— For meek Obedience, too, is Light, And following that is finding Him.

THE CAPTIVE. It was past the hour of trysting, But she lingered for him still; Like a child, the eager streamlet Leaped and laughed adown the hill, Happy to be free at twilight From its toiling at the mill. Then the great moon on a sudden Ominous, and red as blood, Startling as a new creation, O'er the eastern hill-top stood, Casting deep and deeper shadows Through the mystery of the wood. Dread closed huge and vague about her, And her thoughts turned fearfully To her heart, if there some shelter From the silence there might be, Like bare cedars leaning inland From the blighting of the sea. Yet he came not, and the stillness Dampened round her like a tomb; She could feel cold eyes of spirits Looking on her through the gloom, She could hear the groping footsteps Of some blind, gigantic doom. Suddenly the silence wavered Like a light mist in the wind, For a voice broke gently through it, Felt like sunshine by the blind, And the dread, like mist in sunshine, Furled serenely from her mind. "Once my love, my love forever,— Flesh or spirit still the same; If I missed the hour of trysting, Do not think my faith to blame. I, alas, was made a captive, As from Holy Land I came. "On a green spot in the desert, Gleaming like an emerald star, Where a palm-tree, in lone silence, Yearning for its mate afar, Droops above a silver runnel, Slender as a scimitar,— "There thou'lt find the humble postern To the castle of my foe; If thy love burn clear and faithful, Strike the gateway, green and low, Ask to enter, and the warder Surely will not say thee no." Slept again the aspen silence, But her loneliness was o'er; Round her heart a motherly patience Wrapt its arms for evermore; From her soul ebbed back the sorrow, Leaving smooth the golden shore. Donned she now the pilgrim scallop, Took the pilgrim staff in hand; Like a cloud-shade, flitting eastward, Wandered she o'er sea and land; And her footsteps in the desert Fell like cool rain on the sand. Soon, beneath the palm-tree's shadow, Knelt she at the postern low; And thereat she knocketh gently, Fearing much the warder's no; All her heart stood still and listened, As the door swung backward slow. There she saw no surly warder With an eye like bolt and bar; Through her soul a sense of music Throbbed,—and, like a guardian Lar, On the threshold stood an angel, Bright and silent as a star. Fairest seemed he of God's seraphs, And her spirit, lily-wise, Blossomed when he turned upon her The deep welcome of his eyes, Sending upward to that sunlight All its dew for sacrifice. Then she heard a voice come onward Singing with a rapture new, As Eve heard the songs in Eden, Dropping earthward with the dew; Well she knew the happy singer, Well the happy song she knew. Forward leaped she o'er the threshold, Eager as a glancing surf; Fell from her the spirit's languor, Fell from her the body's scurf;— 'Neath the palm next day some Arabs Found a corpse upon the turf.

THE BIRCH-TREE. Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine, Among thy leaves that palpitate forever; Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned, The soul once of some tremulous inland river, Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever! While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine, Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence, Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended,— I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands, And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence. Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadow Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet, Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Dryad. Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers; Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping; Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping. Thou art to me like my beloved maiden, So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences; Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o'er my senses, And Nature gives me all her summer confidences. Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble, Thou sympathizest still; wild and unquiet, I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river, Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it My heart is floated down into the land of quiet.

AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH. I sat one evening in my room, In that sweet hour of twilight When blended thoughts, half light, half gloom, Throng through the spirit's skylight; The flames by fits curled round the bars, Or up the chimney crinkled, While embers dropped like falling stars, And in the ashes tinkled. I sat and mused; the fire burned low, And, o'er my senses stealing, Crept something of the ruddy glow That bloomed on wall and ceiling; My pictures (they are very few,— The heads of ancient wise men) Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grew As rosy as excisemen. My antique high-backed Spanish chair Felt thrills through wood and leather, That had been strangers since whilere, Mid Andalusian heather, The oak that made its sturdy frame His happy arms stretched over The ox whose fortunate hide became The bottom's polished cover. It came out in that famous bark That brought our sires intrepid, Capacious as another ark For furniture decrepit;— For, as that saved of bird and beast A pair for propagation, So has the seed of these increased And furnished half the nation. Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats; But those slant precipices Of ice the northern voyager meets Less slippery are than this is; To cling therein would pass the wit Of royal man or woman, And whatsoe'er can stay in it Is more or less than human. I offer to all bores this perch, Dear well-intentioned people With heads as void as week-day church, Tongues longer than the steeple; To folks with missions, whose gaunt eyes See golden ages rising,— Salt of the earth! in what queer Guys Thou'rt fond of crystallizing! My wonder, then, was not unmixed With merciful suggestion, When, as my roving eyes grew fixed Upon the chair in question, I saw its trembling arms enclose A figure grim and rusty, Whose doublet plain and plainer hose Were something worn and dusty. Now even such men as Nature forms Merely to fill the street with, Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms, Are serious things to meet with; Your penitent spirits are no jokes, And, though I'm not averse to A quiet shade, even they are folks One cares not to speak first to. Who knows, thought I, but he has come, By Charon kindly ferried, To tell me of a mighty sum Behind my wainscot buried? There is a buccaneerish air About that garb outlandish—— Just then the ghost drew up his chair And said "My name is Standish. "I come from Plymouth, deadly bored With toasts, and songs, and speeches, As long and flat as my old sword, As threadbare as my breeches: They understand us Pilgrims! they, Smooth men with rosy faces, Strength's knots and gnarls all pared away, And varnish in their places! "We had some toughness in our grain, The eye to rightly see us is Not just the one that lights the brain Of drawing-room Tyrtæuses: They talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy!— A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy. "He had stiff knees, the Puritan, That were not good at bending; The homespun dignity of man He thought was worth defending; He did not, with his pinchbeck ore, His country's shame forgotten, Gild Freedom's coffin o'er and o'er, When all within was rotten. "These loud ancestral boasts of yours, How can they else than vex us? Where were your dinner orators When slavery grasped at Texas? Dumb on his knees was every one That now is bold as Cæsar,— Mere pegs to hang an office on Such stalwart men as these are." "Good Sir," I said, "you seem much stirred The sacred compromises——" "Now God confound the dastard word! My gall thereat arises: Northward it hath this sense alone, That you, your conscience blinding, Shall bow your fool's nose to the stone, When slavery feels like grinding. "'Tis shame to see such painted sticks In Vane's and Winthrop's places, To see your spirit of Seventy-six Drag humbly in the traces, With slavery's lash upon her back, And herds of office-holders To shout applause, as, with a crack, It peels her patient shoulders. "We forefathers to such a rout!— No, by my faith in God's word!" Half rose the ghost, and half drew out The ghost of his old broadsword, Then thrust it slowly back again, And said, with reverent gesture, "No, Freedom, no! blood should not stain The hem of thy white vesture. "I feel the soul in me draw near The mount of prophesying; In this bleak wilderness I hear A John the Baptist crying; Far in the east I see upleap The streaks of first forewarning, And they who sowed the light shall reap The golden sheaves of morning. "Child of our travail and our woe, Light in our day of sorrow, Through my rapt spirit I foreknow The glory of thy morrow; I hear great steps, that through the shade Draw nigher still and nigher, And voices call like that which bade The prophet come up higher." I looked, no form mine eyes could find, I heard the red cock crowing, And through my window-chinks the wind A dismal tune was blowing; Thought I, My neighbor Buckingham Hath somewhat in him gritty, Some Pilgrim-stuff that hates all sham, And he will print my ditty.

ON THE CAPTURE OF CERTAIN FUGITIVE SLAVES NEAR WASHINGTON. Look on who will in apathy, and stifle they who can, The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man; Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up with interest or with ease Consent to hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds like these! I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breast Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest; And if my words seem treason to the dullard and the tame, 'Tis but my Bay-State dialect,—our fathers spake the same! Shame on the costly mockery of piling stone on stone To those who won our liberty, the heroes dead and gone, While we look coldly on, and see law-shielded ruffians slay The men who fain would win their own, the heroes of to-day! Are we pledged to craven silence? O fling it to the wind, The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind,— That makes us cringe and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest, While Pity's burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast! Though we break our fathers' promise, we have nobler duties first; The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God! We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more, To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core;— Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men. He's true to God who's true to man; wherever wrong is done, To the humblest and the weakest, neath the all-beholding sun, That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base, Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race. God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of being free With parallels of latitude, with mountain-range or sea. Put golden padlocks on Truth's lips, be callous as ye will, From soul to soul o'er all the world, leaps one electric thrill. Chain down your slaves with ignorance, ye cannot keep apart, With all your craft of tyranny, the human heart from heart: When first the Pilgrims landed on the Bay-State's iron shore, The word went forth that slavery should one day be no more. Out from the land of bondage 'tis decreed our slaves shall go, And signs to us are offered, as erst to Pharaoh; If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel's of yore, Through a Red Sea is doomed to be, whose surges are of gore. 'Tis ours to save our brethren, with peace and love to win Their darkened hearts from error, ere they harden it to sin; But if before his duty man with listless spirit stands, Ere long the Great Avenger takes the work from out his hands.

TO THE DANDELION. Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold, High-hearted buccaneers, o'erjoyed that they An Eldorado in the grass have found, Which not the rich earth's ample round May match in wealth,—thou art more dear to me Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be. Gold such as thine ne'er drew the Spanish prow Through the primeval hush of Indian seas, Nor wrinkled the lean brow Of age, to rob the lover's heart of ease; 'Tis the spring's largess, which she scatters now To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, Though most hearts never understand To take it at God's value, but pass by The offered wealth with unrewarded eye. Thou art my tropics and mine Italy; To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime; The eyes thou givest me Are in the heart, and heed not space or time: Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee Feels a more summer-like warm ravishment In the white lily's breezy tent, His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when first From the dark green thy yellow circles burst. Then think I of deep shadows on the grass,— Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze, Where, as the breezes pass, The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways,— Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass, Or whiten in the wind,—of waters blue That from the distance sparkle through Some woodland gap,—and of a sky above, Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move. My childhood's earliest thoughts are linked with thee; The sight of thee calls back the robin's song, Who, from the dark old tree Beside the door, sang clearly all day long, And I, secure in childish piety, Listened as if I heard an angel sing With news from heaven, which he could bring Fresh every day to my untainted ears, When birds and flowers and I were happy peers. How like a prodigal doth nature seem, When thou, for all thy gold, so common art! Thou teachest me to deem More sacredly of every human heart, Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show Did we but pay the love we owe, And with a child's undoubting wisdom look On all these living pages of God's book.

THE GHOST-SEER. Ye who, passing graves by night, Glance not to the left or right, Lest a spirit should arise, Cold and white, to freeze your eyes, Some weak phantom, which your doubt Shapes upon the dark without From the dark within, a guess At the spirit's deathlessness, Which ye entertain with fear In your self-built dungeon here, Where ye sell your God-given lives Just for gold to buy you gyves,— Ye without a shudder meet In the city's noonday street, Spirits sadder and more dread Than from out the clay have fled, Buried, beyond hope of light, In the body's haunted night! See ye not that woman pale? There are bloodhounds on her trail! Bloodhounds two, all gaunt and lean,— For the soul their scent is keen,— Want and Sin, and Sin is last,— They have followed far and fast, Want gave tongue, and, at her howl, Sin awakened with a growl. Ah, poor girl! she had a right To a blessing from the light, Title-deeds to sky and earth God gave to her at her birth, But, before they were enjoyed, Poverty had made them void, And had drunk the sunshine up From all nature's ample cup, Leaving her a first-born's share In the dregs of darkness there. Often, on the sidewalk bleak, Hungry, all alone, and weak, She has seen, in night and storm, Rooms o'erflow with firelight warm, Which, outside the window-glass, Doubled all the cold, alas! Till each ray that on her fell Stabbed her like an icicle, And she almost loved the wail Of the bloodhounds on her trail. Till the floor becomes her bier, She shall feel their pantings near, Close upon her very heels, Spite of all the din of wheels; Shivering on her pallet poor, She shall hear them at the door Whine and scratch to be let in, Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin! Hark! that rustle of a dress, Stiff with lavish costliness! Here comes one whose cheek would flush But to have her garment brush 'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin Wove the weary broidery in, Bending backward from her toil, Lest her tears the silk might soil, And, in midnight's chill and murk, Stitched her life into the work, Shaping from her bitter thought Heart's-ease and forget-me-not, Satirizing her despair With the emblems woven there. Little doth the wearer heed Of the heart-break in the brede; A hyena by her side Skulks, down-looking,—it is Pride. He digs for her in the earth, Where lie all her claims of birth, With his foul paws rooting o'er Some long-buried ancestor, Who, perhaps, a statue won By the ill deeds he had done, By the innocent blood he shed, By the desolation spread Over happy villages, Blotting out the smile of peace. There walks Judas, he who sold Yesterday his Lord for gold, Sold God's presence in his heart For a proud step in the mart; He hath dealt in flesh and blood,— At the bank his name is good, At the bank, and only there, 'Tis a marketable ware. In his eyes that stealthy gleam Was not learned of sky or stream, But it has the cold, hard glint Of new dollars from the mint. Open now your spirit's eyes, Look through that poor clay disguise Which has thickened, day by day, Till it keeps all light at bay, And his soul in pitchy gloom Gropes about its narrow tomb, From whose dank and slimy walls Drop by drop the horror falls. Look! a serpent lank and cold Hugs his spirit fold on fold; From his heart, all day and night, It doth suck God's blessed light. Drink it will, and drink it must, Till the cup holds naught but dust; All day long he hears it hiss, Writhing in its fiendish bliss; All night long he sees its eyes Flicker with foul ecstasies, As the spirit ebbs away Into the absorbing clay. Who is he that skulks, afraid Of the trust he has betrayed, Shuddering if perchance a gleam Of old nobleness should stream Through the pent, unwholesome room, Where his shrunk soul cowers in gloom,— Spirit sad beyond the rest By more instinct for the best? 'Tis a poet who was sent For a bad world's punishment, By compelling it to see Golden glimpses of To Be, By compelling it to hear Songs that prove the angels near; Who was sent to be the tongue Of the weak and spirit-wrung, Whence the fiery-winged Despair In men's shrinking eyes might flare. 'Tis our hope doth fashion us To base use or glorious: He who might have been a lark Of Truth's morning, from the dark Raining down melodious hope Of a freer, broader scope, Aspirations, prophecies, Of the spirit's full sunrise, Chose to be a bird of night, Which with eyes refusing light, Hooted from some hollow tree Of the world's idolatry. 'Tis his punishment to hear Flutterings of pinions near, And his own vain wings to feel Drooping downward to his heel, All their grace and import lost, Burdening his weary ghost: Ever walking by his side He must see his angel guide, Who at intervals doth turn Looks on him so sadly stern, With such ever-new surprise Of hushed anguish in her eyes, That it seems the light of day From around him shrinks away, Or drops blunted from the wall Built around him by his fall. Then the mountains, whose white peaks Catch the morning's earliest streaks, He must see, where prophets sit, Turning east their faces lit, Whence, with footsteps beautiful, To the earth, yet dim and dull, They the gladsome tidings bring, Of the sunlight's hastening: Never can those hills of bliss Be o'erclimbed by feet like his! But enough! O, do not dare From the next the veil to tear, Woven of station, trade, or dress, More obscene than nakedness, Wherewith plausible culture drapes Fallen Nature's myriad shapes! Let us rather love to mark How the unextinguished spark Will shine through the thin disguise Of our customs, pomps, and lies, And, not seldom blown to flame, Vindicate its ancient claim. 1844.

STUDIES FOR TWO HEADS. I. Some sort of heart I know is hers,— I chanced to feel her pulse one night; A brain she has that never errs, And yet is never nobly right; It does not leap to great results, But in some corner out of sight, Suspects a spot of latent blight, And, o'er the impatient infinite, She bargains, haggles, and consults. Her eye,—it seems a chemic test And drops upon you like an acid; It bites you with unconscious zest, So clear and bright, so coldly placid; It holds you quietly aloof, It holds,—and yet it does not win you; It merely puts you to the proof And sorts what qualities are in you; It smiles, but never brings you nearer, It lights,—her nature draws not nigh; 'Tis but that yours is growing clearer To her assays;—yes, try and try, You'll get no deeper than her eye. There, you are classified: she's gone Far, far away into herself; Each with its Latin label on, Your poor components, one by one, Are laid upon their proper shelf In her compact and ordered mind, And what of you is left behind Is no more to her than the wind; In that clear brain, which, day and night, No movement of the heart e'er jostles, Her friends are ranged on left and right,— Here, silex, hornblende, sienite; There, animal remains and fossils. And yet, O subtile analyst, That canst each property detect Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect, And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare Each mental nerve more fine than air,— O brain exact, that in thy scales Canst weigh the sun and never err, For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art;— Thou never canst compute for her The distance and diameter Of any simple human heart. II. Hear him but speak, and you will feel The shadows of the Portico Over your tranquil spirit steal, To modulate all joy and woe To one subdued, subduing glow; Above our squabbling business-hours, Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers, His nature satirizes ours; A form and front of Attic grace, He shames the higgling market-place, And dwarfs our more mechanic powers. What throbbing verse can fitly render That face,—so pure, so trembling-tender? Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words, As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds; 'Tis likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs, White with the angel's coming gleam, And rippled with his fanning wings. Hear him unfold his plots and plans, And larger destinies seem man's; You conjure from his glowing face The omen of a fairer race; With one grand trope he boldly spans The gulf wherein so many fall, 'Twixt possible and actual; His first swift word, talaria-shod, Exuberant with conscious God, Out of the choir of planets blots The present earth with all its spots. Himself unshaken as the sky, His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high Systems and creeds pellmell together; 'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye, While trees uprooted splinter by, The dumb turmoil of stormy weather; Less of iconoclast than shaper, His spirit, safe behind the reach Of the tornado of his speech, Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper. So great in speech, but, ah! in act So overrun with vermin troubles, The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact Of life collapses all his bubbles: Had he but lived in Plato's day, He might, unless my fancy errs, Have shared that golden voice's sway O'er barefooted philosophers. Our nipping climate hardly suits The ripening of ideal fruits: His theories vanquish us all summer, But winter makes him dumb and dumber To see him mid life's needful things Is something painfully bewildering; He seems an angel with clipt wings Tied to a mortal wife and children, And by a brother seraph taken In the act of eating eggs and bacon. Like a clear fountain, his desire Exults and leaps toward the light, In every drop it says "Aspire!" Striving for more ideal height; And as the fountain, falling thence, Crawls baffled through the common gutter So, from his speech's eminence, He shrinks into the present tense, Unkinged by foolish bread and butter. Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds Not all of life that's brave and wise is; He strews an ampler future's seeds, 'Tis your fault if no harvest rises; Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught That all he is and has is Beauty's? By soul the soul's gains must be wrought, The Actual claims our coarser thought, The Ideal hath its higher duties.

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO. Can this be thou who, lean and pale, With such immitigable eye Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale, And note each vengeance, and pass by Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance Cast backward one forbidden glance, And saw Francesca, with child's glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee And with proud hands control its fiery prance? With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow, And eye remote, that inly sees Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now In some sea-lulled Hesperides, Thou movest through the jarring street, Secluded from the noise of feet By her gift-blossom in thy hand, Thy branch of palm from Holy Land;— No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet. Yet there is something round thy lips That prophesies the coming doom, The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse Notches the perfect disk with gloom; A something that would banish thee, And thine untamed pursuer be, From men and their unworthy fates, Though Florence had not shut her gates, And grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free. Ah! he who follows fearlessly The beckonings of a poet-heart Shall wander, and without the world's decree, A banished man in field and mart; Harder than Florence' walls the bar Which with deaf sternness holds him far From home and friends, till death's release, And makes his only prayer for peace, Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong war!

ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD. Death never came so nigh to me before, Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused Of calm and peace and deep forgetfulness, Of folded hands, closed eye, and heart at rest, And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf, Of faults forgotten, and an inner place Kept sacred for us in the heart of friends; But these were idle fancies, satisfied With the mere husk of this great mystery, And dwelling in the outward shows of things. Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams, Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom, With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content 'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. True is it that Death's face seems stern and cold, When he is sent to summon those we love, But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after other lift their frowning masks, And we behold the seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God. With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer; this was meant When Jesus touched the blind man's lids with clay. Life is the jailer, Death the angel sent To draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. He flings not ope the ivory gate of Rest,— Only the fallen spirit knocks at that,— But to benigner regions beckons us, To destinies of more rewarded toil. In the hushed chamber, sitting by the dead, It grates on us to hear the flood of life Whirl rustling onward, senseless of our loss. The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps; The locust's shrill alarum stings the ear; Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farm, His cheery brothers, telling of the sun, Answer, till far away the joyance dies: We never knew before how God had filled The summer air with happy living sounds; All round us seems an overplus of life, And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still. It is most strange, when the great miracle Hath for our sakes been done, when we have had Our inwardest experience of God, When with his presence still the room expands, And is awed after him, that naught is changed, That Nature's face looks unacknowledging, And the mad world still dances heedless on After its butterflies, and gives no sign. 'Tis hard at first to see it all aright; In vain Faith blows her trump to summon back Her scattered troop; yet, through the clouded glass Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look Undazzled on the kindness of God's face; Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through. It is no little thing, when a fresh soul And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scope For good, not gravitating earthward yet, But circling in diviner periods, Are sent into the world,—no little thing, When this unbounded possibility Into the outer silence is withdrawn. Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim! How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child's! He bends above thy cradle now, or holds His warning finger out to be thy guide; Thou art the nurseling now; he watches thee Slow learning, one by one, the secret things Which are to him used sights of every day; He smiles to see thy wondering glances con The grass and pebbles of the spirit world, To thee miraculous; and he will teach Thy knees their due observances of prayer. Children are God's apostles, day by day Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace, Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone. To me, at least, his going hence hath given Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies, And opened a new fountain in my heart For thee, my friend, and all: and, O, if Death More near approaches meditates, and clasps Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand, God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see That 'tis thine angel, who, with loving haste, Unto the service of the inner shrine Doth waken thy belovèd with a kiss! 1844.

EURYDICE. Heaven's cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye I suck the last drop of the sky; With each hot sense I draw to the lees The quickening out-door influences, And empty to each radiant comer A supernaculum of summer: Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice Could bring enchantment so profuse, Though for its press each grape-bunch had The white feet of an Oread. Through our coarse art gleam, now and then, The features of angelic men; 'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint; The dauber's botch no more obscures The mighty Master's portraitures. And who can say what luckier beam The hidden glory shall redeem, For what chance clod the soul may wait To stumble on its nobler fate, Or why, to his unwarned abode, Still by surprises comes the God? Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross, May mediate a whole youth's loss, Some windfall joy, we know not whence, Redeem a lifetime's rash expense, And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark, Stripped of their simulated dark, Mountains of gold that pierce the sky, Girdling its valleyed poverty. I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return, With olden heats my pulses burn,— Mine be the self-forgetting sweep, The torrent impulse swift and wild, Wherewith Taghkanic's rockborn child Dares gloriously the dangerous leap, And, in his sky-descended mood, Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood, By touch of bravery's simple wand, To amethyst and diamond, Proving himself no bastard slip, But the true granite-cradled one, Nursed with the rock's primeval drip, The cloud-embracing mountain's son! Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday; For plated wares of Sheffield stamp We gave the old Aladdin's lamp; 'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went That undesigned abandonment, That wise, unquestioning content, Which could erect its microcosm Out of a weed's neglected blossom, Could call up Arthur and his peers By a low moss's clump of spears, Or, in its shingle trireme launched, Where Charles in some green inlet branched, Could venture for the golden fleece And dragon-watched Hesperides, Or, from its ripple-shattered fate, Ulysses' chances recreate? When, heralding life's every phase, There glowed a goddess-veiling haze, A plenteous, forewarning grace, Like that more tender dawn that flies Before the full moon's ample rise? Methinks thy parting glory shines Through yonder grove of singing pines; At that elm-vista's end I trace Dimly thy sad leave-taking face, Eurydice! Eurydice! The tremulous leaves repeat to me Eurydice! Eurydice! No gloomier Orcus swallows thee Than the unclouded sunset's glow; Thine is at least Elysian woe; Thou hast Good's natural decay, And fadest like a star away Into an atmosphere whose shine With fuller day o'ermasters thine, Entering defeat as 't were a shrine; For us,—we turn life's diary o'er To find but one word,—Nevermore. 1845.

SHE CAME AND WENT. As a twig trembles, which a bird Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent, So is my memory thrilled and stirred;— I only know she came and went. As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, The blue dome's measureless content, So my soul held that moment's heaven;— I only know she came and went. As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps The orchards full of bloom and scent, So clove her May my wintry sleeps;— I only know she came and went. An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays;— I only know she came and went. O, when the room grows slowly dim, And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went.

THE CHANGELING. I had a little daughter, And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature, Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine. I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair; For it was as wavy and golden, And as many changes took, As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples On the yellow bed of a brook. To what can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover, How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, And dimpled her wholly over, Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her veins to me! She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth, And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cage-door My little bird used her wings. But they left in her stead a changeling, A little angel child, That seems like her bud in full blossom, And smiles as she never smiled: When I wake in the morning, I see it Where she always used to lie, And I feel as weak as a violet Alone 'neath the awful sky. As weak, yet as trustful also; For the whole year long I see All the wonders of faithful Nature Still worked for the love of me; Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, Rain falls, suns rise and set, Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet. This child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.

THE PIONEER. What man would live coffined with brick and stone, Imprisoned from the influences of air, And cramped with selfish land-marks everywhere, When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own? What man would read and read the selfsame faces, And, like the marbles which the windmill grinds, Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds, This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces, When there are woods and un-man-stifled places? What man o'er one old thought would pore and pore, Shut like a book between its covers thin For every fool to leave his dog's-ears in, When solitude is his, and God for evermore, Just for the opening of a paltry door? What man would watch life's oozy element Creep Letheward forever, when he might Down some great river drift beyond men's sight, To where the undethronèd forest's royal tent Broods with its hush o'er half a continent? What man with men would push and altercate, Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends, When he can have the skies and woods for friends, Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate, And in himself be ruler, church, and state? Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest, The wingèd brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan; The serf of his own Past is not a man; To change and change is life, to move and never rest;— Not what we are, but what we hope, is best. The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind; Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet, Patching one whole of many incomplete; The general preys upon the individual mind, And each alone is helpless as the wind. Each man is some man's servant; every soul Is by some other's presence quite discrowned; Each owes the next through all the imperfect round, Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal, And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll. Here, life the undiminished man demands; New faculties stretch out to meet new wants; What Nature asks, that Nature also grants; Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands, And to his life is knit with hourly bands. Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old ways, Before you harden to a crystal cold Which the new life can shatter, but not mould; Freedom for you still waits, still, looking backward, stays, But widens still the irretrievable space.

LONGING. Of all the myriad moods of mind That through the soul come thronging, Which one was e'er so dear, so kind, So beautiful as Longing? The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment, Before the Present poor and bare Can make its sneering comment. Still, through our paltry stir and strife, Glows down the wished Ideal, And Longing moulds in clay what Life Carves in the marble Real; To let the new life in, we know, Desire must ope the portal;— Perhaps the longing to be so Helps make the soul immortal. Longing is God's fresh heavenward will With our poor earthward striving; We quench it that we may be still Content with merely living; But, would we learn that heart's full scope Which we are hourly wronging, Our lives must climb from hope to hope And realize our longing. Ah! let us hope that to our praise Good God not only reckons The moments when we tread his ways, But when the spirit beckons,— That some slight good is also wrought Beyond self-satisfaction, When we are simply good in thought, Howe'er we fail in action.

ODE TO FRANCE. FEBRUARY, 1848. I. As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches Build up their imminent crags of noiseless snow, Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launches And the blind havoc leaps unwarned below, So grew and gathered through the silent years The madness of a People, wrong by wrong. There seemed no strength in the dumb toiler's tears,— No strength in suffering;—but the Past was strong: The brute despair of trampled centuries Leaped up with one hoarse yell and snapped its bands, Groped for its right with horny, callous hands, And stared around for God with bloodshot eyes. What wonder if those palms were all too hard For nice distinctions,—if that mænad throng— They whose thick atmosphere no bard Had shivered with the lightning of his song, Brutes with the memories and desires of men, Whose chronicles were writ with iron pen, In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low— Set wrong to balance wrong, And physicked woe with woe? II. They did as they were taught; not theirs the blame, If men who scattered firebrands reaped the flame: They trampled Peace beneath their savage feet, And by her golden tresses drew Mercy along the pavement of the street. O, Freedom! Freedom! is thy morning-dew So gory red? Alas, thy light had ne'er Shone in upon the chaos of their lair! They reared to thee such symbol as they knew, And worshipped it with flame and blood, A Vengeance, axe in hand, that stood Holding a tyrant's head up by the clotted hair. III. What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know; These have found piteous voice in song and prose; But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe, Their grinding centuries,—what Muse had those? Though hall and palace had nor eyes nor ears, Hardening a people's heart to senseless stone, Thou knowest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! They noted down their fetters, link by link; Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink; Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men,— Notched with a headman's axe upon a block: What marvel if, when came the avenging shock, 'Twas Ate, not Urania, held the pen? IV. With eye averted and an anguished frown, Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife, Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down, Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife; Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet Turn never backward: hers no bloody glare; Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, And where it enters there is no despair: Not first on palace and cathedral spire Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire; While these stand black against her morning skies, The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak Along his hills; the craftsman's burning eyes Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek; It lights the poet's heart up like a star;— Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar, And twined with golden threads his futile snare, That swift, convicting glow all round him ran; 'Twas close beside him there, Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man. V. O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit? A dynasty plucked out as 't were a weed Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed! Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root? But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain,— A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off, Thy race has ceased to reign, And thou become a fugitive and scoff: Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold, And weakest of all fences one of steel;— Go and keep school again like him of old, The Syracusan tyrant;—thou mayst feel Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal! VI. Not long can he be ruler who allows His time to run before him; thou wast naught Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows Was no more emblem of the People's thought: Vain were thy bayonets against the foe Thou hadst to cope with; thou didst wage War not with Frenchmen merely;—no, Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age, The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine Scattered thy frail endeavor, And, like poor last year's leaves, whirled thee and thine Into the Dark forever! VII. Is here no triumph? Nay, what though The yellow blood of Trade meanwhile should pour Along its arteries a shrunken flow, And the idle canvas droop around the shore? These do not make a state, Nor keep it great; I think God made The earth for man, not trade; And where each humblest human creature Can stand, no more suspicious or afraid, Erect and kingly in his right of nature, To heaven and earth knit with harmonious ties,— Where I behold the exultation Of manhood glowing in those eyes That had been dark for ages,— Or only lit with bestial loves and rages— There I behold a Nation: The France which lies Between the Pyrenees and Rhine Is the least part of France; I see her rather in the soul whose shine Burns through the craftsman's grimy countenance, In the new energy divine Of Toil's enfranchised glance. VIII. And if it be a dream,— If the great Future be the little Past 'Neath a new mask, which drops and shows at last The same weird, mocking face to balk and blast,— Yet, Muse, a gladder measure suits the theme, And the Tyrtæan harp Loves notes more resolute and sharp, Throbbing, as throbs the bosom, hot and fast: Such visions are of morning, Theirs is no vague forewarning, The dreams which nations dream come true, And shape the world anew; If this be a sleep, Make it long, make it deep, O Father, who sendest the harvests men reap! While Labor so sleepeth His sorrow is gone, No longer he weepeth, But smileth and steepeth His thoughts in the dawn; He heareth Hope yonder Rain, lark-like, her fancies, His dreaming hands wander Mid heart's-ease and pansies; "'Tis a dream! 'Tis a vision!" Shrieks Mammon aghast; "The day's broad derision Will chase it at last; Ye are mad, ye have taken, A slumbering kraken For firm land of the Past!" Ah! if he awaken, God shield us all then, If this dream rudely shaken Shall cheat him again! IX. Since first I heard our North wind blow, Since first I saw Atlantic throw On our fierce rocks his thunderous snow, I loved thee, Freedom; as a boy The rattle of thy shield at Marathon Did with a Grecian joy Through all my pulses run; But I have learned to love thee now Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow, A maiden mild and undefiled Like her who bore the world's redeeming child; And surely never did thy altars glance With purer fires than now in France; While, in their bright white flashes, Wrong's shadow, backward cast, Waves cowering o'er the ashes Of the dead, blaspheming Past, O'er the shapes of fallen giants, His own unburied brood, Whose dead hands clench defiance At the overpowering Good: And down the happy future runs a flood Of prophesying light; It shows an Earth no longer stained with blood, Blossom and fruit where now we see the bud Of Brotherhood and Right.

A PARABLE. Said Christ our Lord, "I will go and see How the men, my brethren, believe in me." He passed not again through the gate of birth, But made himself known to the children of earth. Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings, "Behold, now, the Giver of all good things; Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state Him who alone is mighty and great." With carpets of gold the ground they spread Wherever the Son of Man should tread, And in palace-chambers lofty and rare They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare. Great organs surged through arches dim Their jubilant floods in praise of him, And in church and palace, and judgment-hall, He saw his image high over all. But still, wherever his steps they led, The Lord in sorrow bent down his head, And from under the heavy foundation-stones, The son of Mary heard bitter groans. And in church and palace, and judgment-hall, He marked great fissures that rent the wall, And opened wider and yet more wide As the living foundation heaved and sighed. "Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then, On the bodies and souls of living men? And think ye that building shall endure, Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor? "With gates of silver and bars of gold, Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold: I have heard the dropping of their tears In heaven, these eighteen hundred years." "O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, We build but as our fathers built; Behold thine images, how they stand, Sovereign and sole, through all our land. "Our task is hard,—with sword and flame To hold thy earth forever the same, And with sharp crooks of steel to keep Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep." Then Christ sought out an artisan, A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin Pushed from her faintly want and sin. These set he in the midst of them, And as they drew back their garment-hem, For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he, "The images ye have made of me!"

ODE WRITTEN FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE INTRODUCTION OF THE COCHITUATE WATER INTO THE CITY OF BOSTON. My name is Water: I have sped Through strange, dark ways, untried before, By pure desire of friendship led, Cochituate's ambassador; He sends four royal gifts by me: Long life, health, peace, and purity. I'm Ceres' cup-bearer; I pour, For flowers and fruits and all their kin, Her crystal vintage, from of yore Stored in old Earth's selectest bin, Flora's Falernian ripe, since God The wine-press of the deluge trod. In that far isle whence, iron-willed, The New World's sires their bark unmoored, The fairies' acorn-cups I filled Upon the toadstool's silver board, And, 'neath Herne's oak, for Shakspeare's sight, Strewed moss and grass with diamonds bright. No fairies in the Mayflower came, And, lightsome as I sparkle here, For Mother Bay-State, busy dame, I've toiled and drudged this many a year, Throbbed in her engines' iron veins, Twirled myriad spindles for her gains. I, too, can weave; the warp I set Through which the sun his shuttle throws, And, bright as Noah saw it, yet For you the arching rainbow glows, A sight in Paradise denied To unfallen Adam and his bride. When Winter held me in his grip, You seized and sent me o'er the wave, Ungrateful! in a prison-ship; But I forgive, not long a slave, For, soon as summer south-winds blew, Homeward I fled, disguised as dew. For countless services I'm fit, Of use, of pleasure, and of gain, But lightly from all bonds I flit, Nor lose my mirth, nor feel a stain; From mill and wash-tub I escape, And take in heaven my proper shape. So, free myself, to-day, elate I come from far o'er hill and mead, And here, Cochituate's envoy, wait To be your blithesome Ganymede, And brim your cups with nectar true That never will make slaves of you.

LINES SUGGESTED BY THE GRAVES OF TWO ENGLISH SOLDIERS ON CONCORD BATTLE-GROUND. The same good blood that now refills The dotard Orient's shrunken veins, The same whose vigor westward thrills, Bursting Nevada's silver chains, Poured here upon the April grass, Freckled with red the herbage new; On reeled the battle's trampling mass, Back to the ash the bluebird new. Poured here in vain;—that sturdy blood Was meant to make the earth more green, But in a higher, gentler mood Than broke this April noon serene; Two graves are here; to mark the place, At head and foot, an unhewn stone, O'er which the herald lichens trace The blazon of Oblivion. These men were brave enough, and true To the hired soldier's bull-dog creed; What brought them here they never knew, They fought as suits the English breed; They came three thousand miles, and died, To keep the Past upon its throne; Unheard, beyond the ocean tide, Their English mother made her moan. The turf that covers them no thrill Sends up to fire the heart and brain; No stronger purpose nerves the will, No hope renews its youth again: From farm to farm the Concord glides, And trails my fancy with its flow; O'erhead the balanced henhawk slides, Twinned in the river's heaven below. But go, whose Bay-State bosom stirs, Proud of thy birth and neighbor's right, Where sleep the heroic villagers Borne red and stiff from Concord fight; Thought Reuben, snatching down his gun, Or Seth, as ebbed the life away, What earthquake rifts would shoot and run World-wide from that short April fray? What then? With heart and hand they wrought According to their village light; 'Twas for the Future that they fought, Their rustic faith in what was right. Upon earth's tragic stage they burst Unsummoned, in the humble sock; Theirs the fifth act; the curtain first Rose long ago on Charles's block. Their graves have voices; if they threw Dice charged with fates beyond their ken, Yet to their instincts they were true, And had the genius to be men. Fine privilege of Freedom's host, Of even foot-soldiers for the Right!— For centuries dead, ye are not lost, Your graves send courage forth, and might.

TO ——. We, too, have autumns, when our leaves Drop loosely through the dampened air, When all our good seems bound in sheaves, And we stand reaped and bare. Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go; At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow. But each day brings less summer cheer, Crimps more our ineffectual spring, And something earlier every year Our singing birds take wing. As less the olden glow abides, And less the chillier heart aspires, With drift-wood beached in past spring-tides We light our sullen fires. By the pinched rushlight's starving beam We cower and strain our wasted sight, To stitch youth's shroud up, seam by seam, In the long arctic night. It was not so—we once were young— When Spring, to womanly Summer turning, Her dew-drops on each grass-blade strung, In the red sunrise burning. We trusted then, aspired, believed That earth could be remade to-morrow;— Ah, why be ever undeceived? Why give up faith for sorrow? O thou, whose days are yet all spring, Faith, blighted once, is past retrieving; Experience is a dumb, dead thing; The victory's in believing.

FREEDOM. Are we, then, wholly fallen? Can it be That thou, North wind, that from thy mountains bringest Their spirit to our plains, and thou, blue sea, Who on our rocks thy wreaths of freedom flingest, As on an altar,—can it be that ye Have wasted inspiration on dead ears, Dulled with the too familiar clank of chains? The people's heart is like a harp for years Hung where some petrifying torrent rains Its slow-incrusting spray: the stiffened chords Faint and more faint make answer to the tears That drip upon them: idle are all words; Only a silver plectrum wakes the tone Deep buried 'neath that ever-thickening stone. We are not free: Freedom doth not consist In musing with our faces toward the Past, While petty cares, and crawling interests, twist Their spider-threads about us, which at last Grow strong as iron chains, to cramp and bind In formal narrowness heart, soul, and mind. Freedom is recreated year by year, In hearts wide open on the Godward side, In souls calm-cadenced as the whirling sphere, In minds that sway the future like a tide. No broadest creeds can hold her, and no codes; She chooses men for her august abodes, Building them fair and fronting to the dawn; Yet, when we seek her, we but find a few Light footprints, leading morn-ward through the dew; Before the day had risen, she was gone. And we must follow: swiftly runs she on, And, if our steps should slacken in despair, Half turns her face, half smiles through golden hair, Forever yielding, never wholly won: That is not love which pauses in the race Two close-linked names on fleeting sand to trace; Freedom gained yesterday is no more ours; Men gather but dry seeds of last year's flowers: Still there's a charm ungranted, still a grace, Still rosy Hope, the free, the unattained, Makes us Possession's languid hand let fall; 'Tis but a fragment of ourselves is gained,— The Future brings us more, but never all. And, as the finder of some unknown realm, Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see On either side of him the imprisoning sea, Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm The valley-land, peak after snowy peak Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak, And what he thought an island finds to be A continent to him first oped,—so we Can from our height of Freedom look along A boundless future, ours if we be strong; Or if we shrink, better remount our ships And, fleeing God's express design, trace back The hero-freighted Mayflower's prophet-track To Europe, entering her blood-red eclipse.