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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES,

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL
Aſ JD COMPANY
PUBLISHERS


gººgº.gººgº.gººgº.
ãº
v’
THE
EARLY POEMs
OF
Oliver Wendell Holmes
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Natham Haskell Dole
§§
§
T. Y. CROWELL & COMPANY
NEW YORK
CoPYRIGHT, 1901, 1903,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
- *
*, *. ... " ...” ; : " - | -
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, - - 1
ſyº (4 | º, - # s' 4. *
(ſū
CHARLES WENTWORTH UPHAM
THE FOLLOWING
METRICAL ESSAY
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
THE AUTHOR TO THE PUBLISHERS.
I THANK you for the pains you have taken to
bring together the poems now added to this
collection; one of them having been acciden-
tally omitted and the existence of the others for-
gotten. So many productions which bear the
plain marks of immaturity and inexperience have
been allowed to remain, because they were in the
earlier editions, that a few occasional and care-
less stanzas may be added to their company
without any apology. I have no doubt you are
right in thinking that there is no harm in allow-
ing a few crudities to keep their place among the
rest; for, as you suggest, the readers of a book
are of various ages and tastes, and what sounds
altogether schoolboy-like to the author may be
very author-like to the schoolboy. Some of the
more questionable extravagances to be found in
the earlier portion of the volume have, as I learn,
V.
Vi PREFACE.
pleased a good many young people; let us call
these, and all the others that we have outgrown,
Juvenile Poems, but keep them, lest some of the
smaller sort that were, or are, or are to be, should -
lament their absence. I thought of mentioning
the date at which the several poems were written,
which would explain some of their differences;
but the reader can judge them nearly enough,
perhaps, without this assistance. -
To save a question that is sometimes put, it is
proper to say that in naming two of the poems
after two of the Muses, nothing more was in-
tended than a suggestion of their general char-
acter and aim. In a former note of mine (which
you printed as a kind of preface to the last
edition), I made certain explanations which I
thought might be needed ; but as nobody seems
to have misinterpreted anything, we will trust our
book hereafter to itself, not doubting that what-
ever is good in it will redeem and justify the rest.
BOSTON, January 13, 1849.
CONTENTs.
PAGE
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES . o g © • XV
POETRY; A METRICAL ESSAY . & © o e I
Cambridge Churchyard . e $ • ... I 5
Old Ironsides . * e e ge © • 25
NOTES . * > © & tº © e © • 43
LYRICS.
THE LAST READER ſº © . . . • 49
OUR YANKEE GIRLS tº tº º © • * 52
LA GRISETTE . . . . . . . ge & • - 54
AN EVENING THOUGHT . g e G ſº • 56
A SOUVENIR . © o © & © © . 58
“QUI vive!” . * c º © © º • 61
THE WASP AND THE HORNET tº • • . 63
FROM A BACHELOR's PRIVATE Journal sº . 65
STANZAs . g © º º & ſº . . . . .67
THE PHILOSOPHER TO HIS LOVE . tº 6 . 69
L’INCONNUE . tº © e e tº tº • 7I
THE STAR AND THE WATER LILY . © e . 72
ILLUSTRATION OF A PICTURE . & © © • 75
THE DYING SENECA o ^ - © . tº 6 . 78
viii CONTENTS.
PAGE
A PORTRAIT . tº cº tº tº © ſº . 8o
A ROMAN AQUEDUCT . * de gº © . 82
THE LAST PROPHECY OF CASSANDRA . º . 84
TO A CAGED LION . * tº © te tº . 87
TO MY COMPANIONS * e tº © tº . 89
The Last Leaf . . tº º ſº • . 91
TO A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER o ſº . . 94
TO AN INSECT & . . . . . . 97
THE DILEMMA tº º o ; : e g • IOO
MY AUNT º ſº tº * dº Ç & . IO3
THE TOADSTOOL . & ſº se e tº . IO6
THE MEETING OF THE DRYADS © tº cº . IoS
THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR . e ſº e . I I2
THE SPECTRE PIG . d e º tº º . I 17
LINES BY A CLERK & & ſº & º . I23
REFLECTIONS OF A PROUD PEDESTRIAN . e . I25
THE POET’s LOT . gº Ç e tº º . I27
DAILY TRIALS . e & tº o tº tº . I29
EVENING. — BY A TAILOR & te tº e . I32
THE DORCHESTER GIANT * te ſe e . I35
TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A GENTLEMAN ?” * . I 38
TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A LADY" . & * . I4. I
The CoMet . e * º g o iº . I 43
A NOONTIDE LYRIC e sº e º sº • I47
THE BALLAD OF THE OYSTERMAN . g • • I49
THE MUSIC-GRINDERS . e iº Q te • I52
THE TREADMILL SONG . © tº o © . I 56
CONTENTS. ix
* PAGE
THE SEPTEMBER GALE . * • . . . I58
THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS . º gº . I61
THE Hot SEASON . . . . . . . 163
POEMS ADDED SINCE THE FIRST
EDITION. -
DEPARTED DAYS . tº * e tº e . I69
THE STEAMBOAT . . . tº º º tº . 170
THE PARTING WORD tº ge e c * > • I73
SONG tº º ſº © tº ſº tº tº e 177
LINES . e tº e ſº wº tº & . I79
VERSES FOR AFTER-DINNER . * > ſº * . 183
SONG tº g © © © e tº « » . 188
THE ONLY DAUGHTER . . . . . . . 190
LEXINGTON . e e e cº º © • I94
THE ISLAND HUNTING SONG . * ſº e . 198
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS • e G ſº • 200
SONG ę º º e e is © © • 202
TERPSICHORE . tº * º e tº º • 205
URANIA: A RHYMED LESSON . © G º . 218
NOTES tº * ſº g tº © tº • 258
THE PILGRIM'S VISION . tº o © Q . 261
A MODEST REQUEST e e * o * . 268
Nüx PostCGENATICA . . . . . . 28o
X CONTENTS.
ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOWL . e de e
THE STETHOSCOPE SONG .
ExTRACTS FROM A MEDICAL POEM . © . .
A SONG OF OTHER DAYS
A SENTIMENT . e - ſº
TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND e e gº
THE PLOUGHMAN
PITTSFIELD CEMETERY
ASTRAEA .
Reprinted from “The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table.”
ALBUM. VERSES e te • •
LATTER-DAY WARNINGS . e g & $º
YES, we KNow WE MUST LOSE HIM * e
SUN AND SHADOW . tº &
THIS IS IT o g • • e * •
HERE IT is, – witH THE Slight Alterations /
THE OLD MAN DREAMS . . . e
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS . ©
MARE RUBRUM
WHAT we ALL THINK
My LADY’s CHEEK CAN BOAST NO MORE
THE LAST BLossom
CALL HIM NOT OLD, WHOSE VISIONARY BRAIN
THE LIVING TEMPLE
AU BANQUET DE LA VIE, INFORTUNE CONvive
PAGE
287
292
297
3OI
3O4
306
308
3I2
319
363
365
368
37O
375
377
38o
382
385
387
388
. 39 I
392
395
CONTENTS.
xi
SPRING HAS COME . Q & o • e ſº
A GOOD TIME GOING ! . * > & e sº *
THE TWO ARMIES . © c º {} º
MUSA & º & tº º e º {e
THE DEACON's MASTERPIECE: OR, THE WONDERFUL
“ONE-HORSE-SHAY.” e * >
AESTIVATION . e & º {- * º
CoNTENTMENT .
PRELUDE . º e gº g * º
PARSON TURELL’s LEGACY : OR, THE PRESIDENT’s
OLD ARM-CHAIR
THE VOICELESS e He e & & e ©
A'eprinted from “The Professor at the
Breakfast-Table"
PAGE
396
399
4O3
406
4 IO
416
4.17
42 I
422
43O
DE SAUTY tº ſº g ſº dº gº c ©
THE BOYS tº © * º e & &
THE OPENING OF THE PIANO e wº º º
THE CROOKED FOOTPATH g Ç º o
A MOTHER’s SECRET © ſe ſº º * >
ROBINSON OF LEYDEN . e © gº e tº
SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER . e sº tº
MIDSUMMER . º ſº tº e tº º
IRIS, HER BOOK . e ge cº g º tº
UNDER THE VIOLETS e e tº o * tº
HYMN OF TRUST . e G e * e tº
A SUN-DAY HYMN . * tº o w © ©
435
439
443
446
448
454
457
459
461
465
468
469


Page Missing
in Original
Volume




Page Missing
in Original
Volume


OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
OLIVER WENDELL Holm Es, doctor, inventor, pro-
fessor, wit, autocrat, and poet, was born on Tuesday
the 29th of August, 1809. A sign of equality against
that date with the prophetic prediction — pleasant—
of the contemporary weather-prophet in an almanac
refers to an entry made by the Rev. Abiel Holmes at
the foot of the August page “= 29. Son b.” The
actual sands — not of time, but of the blotter — had
not up to within a few years been shaken off: as
Dr. Holmes wrote in a letter: “There the black
sand glitters still.”
He was a descendant of John Holmes who settled
in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1686, set up a sawmill
and fulling-mill and presented the town with its Com-
mon. His son was a deacon, and that is all that is
known of him; his grandson a captain in the “Old
French War” and a surgeon in the Revolutionary
War; his great-grandson Abiel was a graduate of
Yale, married a daughter of President Stiles, and was
settled over a parish in Georgia. In 1791 he became
minister of the First Congregational church in Cam-
bridge, and ten years later married for his second wife
XV
xvi LIFE OF
Sarah Wendell, daughter of the Hon. Oliver Wendell
of Boston. The Wendells were originally from Hol-
land; and Dr. Holmes, though he cared little for the
details of genealogy, was inclined to be proud of the
Dutch blood that flowed in his veins. Mrs. Holmes's
maternalancestry traced itself back through the Olivers
to the early New England poetess, Anne Bradstreet,
whose volume, “The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up
in America,” immortalized her by its title if not by its
contents. She was a daughter of Governor Thomas
Dudley. Dr. Holmes's mother was the daughter of
Dorothy Quincy, celebrated in the poem “Dorothy Q.,”
and her portrait, with the patched bayonet thrust made
by the British soldier, used to hang in the Beacon
Street dining-room — wretched as a work of art, but
interesting and pathetic as a memorial. Thus Dr.
Holmes had the imprescribable right to reckon himself
in what he jestingly called “the Brahmin Caste” of
New England. -
The old gambrel-roofed house in which he was born
became the property of Harvard University after the
death of Mrs. Sarah Holmes, and it was torn down, –
“a case of justifiable domicide,” said Dr. Holmes, but
to be deplored by all who love the memories of the
past. g
As a little boy he went to Mrs. Prentiss's school,
and always remembered her “long willow rod.”
From ten to fifteen he went to school to William
Biglow at Cambridgeport, and then was sent to
Phillips Andover Academy, probably with the hope
that he would return there to study theology. His
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. xvii
father's Connecticut Calvinism had been considerably
modified by contact with the liberal ministers in the
vicinity of Boston, and particularly by his marriage
into the Wendell family. Dr. Holmes says in a brief
autobiographical sketch that he had an old worn-out
catechism as his text-book on the one hand, and a
Unitarian atmosphere on the other as soon as he
stepped out of his door. Instead of going to his
father's college, he was sent to Harvard.
He gives an amusing account of his boyish reading.
He said he read few books through. One that he
successfully mastered stood out as a triumph of
thoroughness; but generally he browsed in books.
Rees’s “Encyclopaedia" formed a considerable part
of this; he declares that he never read one sermon of
his own accord, and though his father did his best to
keep books of questionable teaching from him, he had
“a kind of Indian sagacity in the discovery of con-
trabrand reading.” The narrowness and exclusive-
ness of the teaching he found in the Rev. Thomas
Scott's Family Bible waked him up more than any-
thing to “the enormities of the creed he represented,”
and “Pilgrim's Progress” “made the system of which
it was the exponent more unreasonable and more
repulsive instead of rendering it more attractive.”
A peep through the telescope on the Common also
early served to alter his whole notion of the universe.
He says all his human sentiments, all his religious
beliefs, all his conception of his relation in space,
seemed to undergo a change; and he came to the
conclusion that “this colony of the universe is an
\
xviii LIFE OF
educational institution so far as the human race is
concerned,” and on that theory henceforth he based
his hope for himself and his fellow-creatures.
He early began to “lisp in numbers,” in imitation
of Pope and Goldsmith, whose stately iambics always
appealed to him.
In one of his letters to his Andover classmate,
Barnes, written in 1828 when he was in college, he
describes himself as “a youth of low stature and an
exceedingly smooth face,” who wears his gills erect,
courts his hair a little more carefully, buttons his coat
a little tighter, who smokes “most devoutly,” whose
treble has broken down into a bass that he sings most
unmusically, and whose literary bantlings, – in other
words, his first poems, have been published in an
Annual. At that time he was not certain what pro-
fession he should choose, but was halting between
“law and physick,” since authorship seemed a trade
not quite adapted to that meridian. In another letter
to the same friend, he gives his height as five feet
three inches, and calls himself lazy, and though not
sedate, yet not dissipated. His rank placed him
seventeen in his class — in the famous class of which
he was the laureate for so many years. After Holmes
graduated in 1829, he entered the Law School, where
he spent a year without much advantage, but succeeded
in making a name for himself by his lyric protest
against the destruction of “Old Ironsides.” He wrote
the poem in lead pencil on a scrap of paper, and it
was published in the Daily Advertiser, and made such
a stir that the Secretary of the Navy rescinded his
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. xix
order and the frigate Constitution still floats to this
day, as a living proof of the power of poetry
It is rather amusing, and also pathetic, to find.
Holmes lamenting what most intellectual young men
have ever lamented, – that college was not giving
him what he expected. “I will tell you honestly,”
he wrote, “I am sick at heart of this place, and
almost everything connected with it.” He yearned
for “female companionship!” If only there was “a
cherry-cheeked kitchen-girl to romance with, occa-
sionally,” he cries; “but alas, nothing but vinegar-
faced old maids and drawing-room sentimentalists "
and he adds, “I do believe I never shall be contented
till I get the undisputable mastery of a petticoat l”
The undergraduates had started a monthly, called
The Collegian, and Dr. Holmes contributed several
articles to the early numbers, among them the poems
“The Dorchester Giant,” “The Spectre Pig,” and
“Reflections of a Proud Pedestrian,” all of which are
still treasured by readers of Holmes. The year at the
Law School was an experiment, and he was glad to
exchange that profession for medicine. He studied
for a time in the private school of Dr. James Jackson,
then went to Paris, where he saw little outside hos-
pitals and lecture-rooms. He afterward regretted
not having taken pains to meet the great writers of
the day. He regretted, also, that much of his time
was frittered away in ill-directed study: but he at
least learned “the uncertainties of medical observa-
tion,” and his mind was opened to every influence.
He felt that France was half a century in advance of
XX, LIFE OF º
England in science. He took a summer vacation in
England and Scotland, but his heart was back at his
work in the Paris hospitals.
It was only by a struggle that he gained permission
to complete his course. He rewarded himself for his
hard work by a trip to Italy, and in December, 1835,
after a long voyage of forty-three days landed in New
York.
He hung out his sign, and signified that the small-
est favors or fevers were to be thankfully received,
but he never succeeded in building up a large prac-
tice. He set up a horse and chaise, but even that
dignity did not offset his reputation as a wit and
poet. He published a volume of verses in 1836: it
contained “Old Ironsides " and “The Last Leaf,”
and also a lot of precious nonsense which was con-
sidered incompatible — Dr. Holmes would have spelt
it income-patible—with the gravity of a doctor's pre-
fession.
Nevertheless, he was appointed one of the physi-
cians at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and in
1838 was made Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth
College, and held the chair two years.
In 1836, he wrote an essay for the Boylston prize,
and won it. He was much pleased to have cut out
a fifty-dollar prize under the guns of two old blazers,
who had each swamped their competitors in preced.
ing trials.
The next year he got two more prizes; and his
“Essay on Intermittent Fever in New England,”
which summed up all that was then known of mala-
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. xxi
ria, is still valuable, while his essay on the conta-
giousness of puerperal fever 1 was epoch-making, and
placed Dr. Holmes in the front rank of those who
have benefited their fellow-men. He was bitterly
assailed by the leading obstetricians of the country,
but he did not lose his temper, and his behavior
under the bigoted attacks of this profession was noble
indeed. “No man,” he said, “makes a quarrel with
me over the counterpane that covers a mother with her
new-born infant at her breast.” And with delightful
wit, referring to the students that sided with their
instructors, he called them “babes in knowledge, not
yet able to tell the breast from the bottle, pumping
away for the milk of truth at all that offers, were it
nothing better than a professor's shrivelled forefinger.”
The necessity for isolating cases of this dreadful
disease at last was recognized, and this step forward
in the march of civilization was due to Dr. Holmes.
In 1838, he wrote his friend Barnes that he had
flirted and written poetry long enough, and wished he
were married. In June, 1840, he made his selection
from among “several very nice young women” whom
he “had in his eye,” and became what he called a
“hymeneal victim.” He married Amelia Lee Jack-
son, daughter of the Honorable Charles Jackson,
Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of
Boston. Her nephew gives her a most beautiful trib-
ute in his life of Dr. Holmes. He says she had every
estimable and attractive quality of mind and charac-
1 Published in 1843 under the title, “Puerperal Fever as a
Private Pestilence; ” republished in pamphlet in 1855.
xxii LIFE OF
ter; he calls her the kindest, gentlest, and tenderest
of women, and declares that by her executive ability
she contributed immensely to her husband's success.
giving him every day “the fullest and freest chance
to be always at his best, always able to do his work
amid cheerful surroundings.” -
He bought a house in Montgomery Place (now Bos-
worth Street), and lived there eighteen years; there his
three children were born. In 1858 he went to Charles
Street, and lived in a charming house on the “water-
side" till 1870, when he moved to a much larger and
handsomer house on Beacon Street, where, from his
library, he seemed, as he said, “to look out on all
creation — Bunker Hill and the spires of Cambridge
and Mount Auburn, and the wide estuary commonly
called Charles River.” He lived there the rest of
his life. He had also, for a time, a beautiful sum-
mer home at Pittsfield, situated on Canoe Meadows,
which, with nearly all the rest of the town, had once
belonged to his Wendell ancestors. Here he spent
seven of the happiest summers of his life, and planted
a multitude of trees, of which he was very proud.
In 1847 Dr. Holmes was appointed Parkman Pro-
fessor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Harvard
Medical School, and for thirty-five years held the
position, which, referring to its multiplicity of func-
tions, he called not a chair, but a whole settee. He
was somewhat relieved of the work in 1871, when
a separate chair of physiology was established. Dr.
David W. Cheever says that as a lecturer he was
accurate, punctual, precise, and unequalled in his
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. xxiii
wealth of illustration, comparison, and simile. His
wit was always flashing, but he could also be pathetic
and serious.
Dr. Holmes was one of the first American phy-
sicians to make use of the microscope. He brought
one home with him from Europe, and, as he had a nat-
ural bent toward everything ingenious, he delighted
in experimenting with it. It is rather odd that, with
his advanced notions, he should have sided with the
opponents of the measure to admit women to the
Harvard Medical School. At the same time, he
declared he was willing to teach women anatomy,
provided they were by themselves, and had their
own dissecting-room. And in 1871 he wrote that
he was in favor of women in “woman's diseases and
in midwifery.”
Dr. Holmes soon relinquished regular practice, and
divided his time between his professorship and litera-
ture. It was the day of the lyceum, and he was popu-
lar as a lecturer. The trials of this wandering Arab
life in these early days have been described by nearly
all its victims; only the hard necessity of earning
extra dollars would have driven Holmes to it. He
gave a course of twelve lectures on the English
poets, and at the end of each he read some verses of his
own. They were very kindly received. Dr. Holmes
was almost fifty when the Atlantic was founded by
Phillips, Samson, and Company, with James Rus-
sell Lowell as its first editor, one stipulation of
whose acceptance was that Dr. Holmes should be the
first contributor to be engaged. Dr. Holmes had
xxiv LIFE OF
published in the short-lived Mew England Magazine
of 1831–1835 two papers under the title of “The Auto-
crat of the Breakfast Table.” As he expresses it, he
determines to “shake the bough again and see if the
ripe fruit were better or worse than the early wind-
falls.”
It is rather remarkable that just as Dr. Holmes
remained a willing prisoner in Boston all the days of
his life — afraid of his enemy, asthma, which made
travel difficult for him—so also he remained true to his
allegiance to the Atlantic, and confined nearly all his
contributions to that monthly in spite of its transfer
from publisher to publisher.
His favorite poem, the one on which his reputation
as a serious poet will largely rest, — “The Chambered
Nautilus ”— appeared in the fourth paper of the “Au-
tocrat.” Whittier when he first read it exclaimed,
“Booked for immortality.” Most poets are remem-
bered by one or two fortunate inspirations. Immor-
tality hangs on a very tiny peg. -
But the fact that ninety-nine persons out of a hun-
dred would choose “The Last Leaf” as the “‘favor-
ite' in the race for ‘the Immortality Cup” as Mr.
Morse wittily puts it, shows that Holmes's repu-
tation must rest mainly on his supremacy as the writer
of what in default of a better term has been called
wers de société. -
Holmes was one of the early members of the famous
Saturday or Atlantic Club, which some disgruntled
outsider called “the Mutual Admiration Society.”
The list of members included Emerson, Hawthorne,
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. XXV
Longfellow, Lowell, Motley, Sumner, Whittier, and
some dozens of others, most of whom were frequent
or occasional contributors to the Atlantic. It is said
that Holmes talked better than he wrote. What then
must have been the brilliancy of his recluse brother
John, of whom it was said that he outshone the
autoCrat.
The “Autocrat” was followed in 1860 by the “Pro-
fessor of the Breakfast Table" and then, in 1871, after
a silence of eleven years, came the “Poet.” Mr.
Morse says, “When the doctor undertook to compete
with himself he met a formidable rival.” And he
adds with equal wisdom and humor, “The three
volumes stand as the Breakfast Table Series, like
the three successive pressings of the grapes from an
illustrious vineyard.” -
Dr. Holmes also wrote three novels: “Elsie Venner
(1861), a Romance of Destiny” with its—to many —
disagreeable snake-motif; “The Guardian Angel”
(1867), which was the best of the three; and “A Mortal
Antipathy,” written in 1884, when his inventive facul-
ties were on the wane. He also wrote three biogra-
phies, – of Motley, of Dr. Jeffreys, and of Emerson,
the last being the only one of real importance. His
occasional poems are almost innumerable; and rarely
was an event of local interest, such as an anniversary,
or a visit from a distinguished foreigner, allowed to
pass without the little doctor chirping out an improv-
isation, full of apt allusion and sparkling wit. Dr.
Holmes's attitude toward public questions is largely
explained in a long letter which he wrote in 1846 to
xxvi LIFE OF
Lowell. Lowell had reproached him for not taking
the right side regarding the Mexican War, Slavery,
Temperance, and Reform in general.
Dr. Holmes in reply declared that he could not shut
his eyes to the beauty of heroism and self-devotion
shown in battle, even in such a poor struggle as the
Mexican War, and yet he felt a growing hate and dis-
gust at that mode of settling national quarrels, and
was willing to condemn it as a barbarous custom;
slavery yielded in his mind to the danger of disunion,
and he desired to avert the catastrophe of civil war;
while he was ready enough to write convivial verses
on occasion, he called attention to the fact that he
was receiving a lower rent for a store on Long Wharf
than he might have got had he been willing to have it
used for a grocery where liquor would be sold.
Only in religion was he not conservative; in his
theology he took an almost ultra-radical stand, which
brought him after into controversy with his more
bigoted contemporaries.
But when the Civil War broke out, he quickly took
his stand on the right side, and contributed his in-
fluence and his eldest son to the crucial struggle. He
even became a pronounced antislavery man.
On December 3, 1879, occurred the celebration of
Dr. Holmes's arrival at the Scriptural limit of life, and
a brilliant breakfast at which Mr. W. D. Howells pre-
sided was given in his honor. The next year he was
made Doctor of Laws by Harvard. Three years later
(with a sense of relief though not without regret), he
resigned his professorship, after having held it for
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. xxvii
thirty-five years, and looked forward to a period of
leisure during which he might devote himself to his
literary pursuits. He was made professor emeritus.
After the death of Emerson, Dr. Holmes was se-
lected to write his biography for the American Men
of Letters series. It was an odd choice, because, al-
though, as Mr. Morse says, the two men were bred
from like stock, belonged to the same generation, lived
amid the same surroundings, were both “engaged in
knocking off the fetters of old thought and belief,” yet
they were a hemisphere apart from almost every point
of view. Though he did his best to study Emerson
dispassionately, and had known and respected him for
years, the biography is not regarded as a very notable
production, nor did it add to his reputation.
In April, 1886, Dr. Holmes, accompanied by his
daughter, Mrs. Turner Sargent, made a trip abroad
which he shortly afterward described in his book en-
titled “Our Hundred Days in Europe.” It was the
first time he had been in England since his student
days, and now he returned something like a conquerer.
Cambridge make him Doctor of Letters, Oxford made
him D.C.L., and Edinburgh doubled his LL.D.
Everywhere he was received with homage, and almost
murdered with social attentions.
On his return to Boston he began his new series of
papers, “Over the Tea-Cups,” the title of which had
occurred to him long before. It was most gratifyingly
received, for he had felt doubtful whether the wintry
products of his freezing wits, squeezed out “at three
score and twenty,” would meet acceptation. But the
xxviii LIFE OF
sap still flowed sweet and abundant and sparkling.
There is little doubt that “The Broomstick Train.”
which appeared in this series was up to the level of
the earlier whimsicalities-in-rime. In its book form it
sold twenty thousand copies in the course of a few
months.
In 1888 Mrs. Holmes died ; his dearest friend, the
Rev. James Freeman Clarke, passed away that same
year. The following April his daughter, Mrs. Sargent,
who had come to take care of him in his declining
days, also died. These bereavements were accom-
panied by a darkening of his vision, caused by a
slowly forming cataract which he himself discovered
while using his microscope; he called it “a cataract in
a kitten state of development.” He faced the infirm-
ity with characteristic cheerfulness, and while it affected
his vision, it did not gloom his spirits. He was also
growing deaf, but he wrote that “he took the labum-
tur anni without many eheus!” - -
He died on October 7, 1894, and as he had long
before expressed a desire to be buried from King's
Chapel, the funeral took place in that historic edifice.
Thus ended the career of one who had made the
world better and happier for his having lived in it.
He had proved brilliantly that seriousness and lively
humor were compatible in the same person, that the
physician was not rendered less successful because he
saw the comic side of life. He was local and provin-
cial, but yet he raised his native Boston to be, in a
very real sense, “the hub of the universe.”
He made the world happier and healthier by the
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. xxix
pure and unalloyed wit which no one could resist;
but his serious contributions to literature and to
science are scarcely less remarkable.
His industry was indefatigable. He was always
busy. His inventive mind, which so quickly saw the
value of the microscope, quickly applied its principles
to the little toy known as the stereoscope, which if he
had patented it would have brought him a fortune.
He knew the practical part of bookbinding; he was a
skilful photographer before the days when one had
only to press the button and let the kodak do the
rest; he was authority on botany and arboriculture,
and knew the dimensions of all the great trees of New
England. He was fond of music, was always seen at
the Symphony rehearsals, that weekly act of worship
of all good Bostonians, and he taught himself to play
the violin; he made his own anatomical charts, and
he was always ready to respond to all demands on his
time and energies.
Long will his memory be treasured by the English-
reading world, and there is much in his works that
will be read as literature when another century shall
have been garnered by Father Time.
NATHAN HASKELL DOLE.
POETRY;
A METRICAL ESSAY.
SCENES of my youth !” awake its slumbering
fire | -
Ye winds of Memory, sweep the silent lyre
Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,
Break through the clouds of Fancy’s waning
year; -
Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,
If leaf or blossom still is fresh below !
Long have I wandered; the returning tide
Brought back an exile to his cradle's side;
And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled,
To greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,
So, in remembrance of my boyhood’s time,
I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;—
1
2 POETRY;
O more than blest, that, all my wanderings
through,
My anchor falls where first my pennons flew
THE morning light, which rains its quivering
beams -
Wide o'er the plains, the summits, and the
Streams,
In one broad blaze expands its golden glow
On all that answers to its glance below;
Yet, changed on earth, each far reflected ray
Braids with fresh hues the shining brow of
day; . &
Now, clothed in blushes by the painted flowers,
Tracks on their cheeks the rosy-fingered hours;
Now, lost in shades, whose dark entangled
leaves
Drip at the noontide from their pendent eaves,
Fades into gloom, or gleams in light again
From every dew-drop on the jewelled plain.
We, like the leaf, the summit, or the wave,
Reflect the light our common nature gave,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 3
But every Sunbeam, falling from her throne,
Wears, on our hearts, some coloring of our own;
Chilled in the slave, and burning in the free,
Like the sealed cavern by the sparkling sea;
Lost, like the lightning in the sullen clod,
Or shedding radiance, like the smiles of God;
Pure, pale in Virtue, as the star above,
Or quivering roseate on the leaves of Love;
Glaring like noontide, where it glows upon
Ambition’s sands, – the desert in the sun;
Or soft suffusing o'er the varied scene
Life’s common. Coloring, — intellectual green.
Thus Heaven, repeating its material plan,
Arched over all the rainbow mind of man;
But he who, blind to universal laws,
Sees but effects, unconscious of their cause, –
Believes each image in itself is bright,
Not robed in drapery of reflected light, —
Is like the rustic who, amidst his toil,
Has found some crystal in his meagre soil,
And, lost in rapture, thinks for him alone
Earth worked her wonders on the sparkling
Stone, r
4 POETRY;
Nor dreams that Nature, with as nice a line,
Carved countless angles through the boundless
mine.
Thus err the many who, entranced to find
Unwonted lustre in some clearer mind,
Believe that Genius sets the laws at nought
Which chain the pinions of our wildest
thought;
Untaught to measure, with the eye of art,
The wandering fancy or the wayward heart;
Who match the little only with the less,
And gaze in rapture at its slight excess,
Proud of a pebble, as the brightest gem
Whose light might crown an emperor's diadem.
And, most of all, the pure ethereal fire,
Which seems to radiate from the poet's lyre,
Is to the world a mystery and a charm,
An AEgis wielded on a mortal’s arm,
While Reason turns her dazzled eye away,
And bows her sceptre to her subject's sway;
And thus the poet, clothed with godlike state,
Usurped his Maker's title — to create;
A METRICAL ESSAY. 5
He, whose thoughts differing not in shape,
but dress,
What others feel, more fitly can express,
Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,
Peeps through the bars, and calls the world
his own.
There breathes no being but has some pre-
tence
To that fine instinct called poetic sense;
The rudest Savage roaming through the wild,
The simplest rustic, bending o'er his child,
The infant listening to the warbling bird,
The mother smiling at its half-formed word;
The boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large,
The girl, turned matron to her babe-like
charge;
The freeman, casting witn unpurchased hand
The vote that shakes the turrets of the land;
The slave, who, slumbering on his rusted chain,
Dreams of the palm trees on his burning plain;
The hot-cheeked reveller, tossing down the
wine,
To join the chorus pealing “Auld lang syne”;
6 POETRY;
The gentle maid, whose azure eye grows dim,
While Heaven is listening to her evening
hymn;
The jewelled beauty, when her steps draw near
The circling dance and dazzling chandelier;
E’en trembling age, when Spring’s renewing
air
Waves the thin ringlets of his silvered hair; —
All, all are glowing with the inward flame,
Whose wider halo wreathes the poet's name,
While, unembalmed, the silent dreamer dies,
His memory passing with his smiles and sighs!
If glorious visions, born for all mankind,
The bright auroras of our twilight mind;
If fancies, varying as the shapes that lie
Stained on the windows of the sunset sky;
If hopes, that beckon with delusive gleams,
Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;
If passions, following with the winds that urge
Earth's wildest wanderer to her farthest
verge; —
If these on all some transient hours bestow
Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 7.
Then all are poets; and, if earth had rolled
Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told,
Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave
Would wail its requiem o'er a poet's grave?
If to embody in a breathing word
Tones that the spirit trembled when it heard;
To fix the image all unveiled and warm,
And carve in language its ethereal form,
So pure, so perfect, that the lines express
No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;
To feel that art, in living truth, has taught
Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought; —
If this alone bestow the right to claim
The deathless garland and the sacred name;
Then none are poets, save the saints on high,
Whose harps can murmur all that words denyl
But though to none is granted to reveal,
In perfect semblance, all that each may feel,
As withered flowers recall forgotten love,
So, warmed to life, our faded passions move
In every line, where kindling fancy throws
The gleam of pleasures, or the shade of woes.
8 POETRY; .
When, schooled by time, the stately queen
of art - -
Had smoothed the pathways leading to the
heart,
Assumed her measured tread, her solemn tone,
And round her courts the clouds of fable
thrown,
The wreaths of heaven descended on her shrine,
And wondering earth proclaimed the Muse
divine;
Yet, if her votaries had but dared profane
The mystic symbols of her sacred reign,
How had they smiled beneath the veil to find
What slender threads can chain the mighty
mind I
Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,
And verse bestows the varnish and the frame;
Our grating English, whose Teutonic jar
Shakes the racked axle of Art’s rattling car,
Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird
Fast in its place each many-angled word;
From Saxon lips Anacreon's numbers glide,
As once they melted on the Teian tide,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 9
And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again
From Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plain
The proud heroic, with its pulse-like beat,
Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet;
The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,
Sweeps gently onward to its dying close,
Where waves on waves in long sucession pour,
Till the ninth billow melts along the shore;
The lonely spirit of the mournful lay,
Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray,
In sable plumage slowly drifts along,
On eagle pinion, through the air of song;
The glittering lyric bounds elastic by,
With flashing ringlets and exulting eye,
While every image, in her airy whirl,
Gleams like a diamond on a dancing girl | *
Born with mankind, with man’s expanded
range
And varying fates the poet’s numbers change;
Thus in his history may we hope to find
Some clearer epochs of the poet's mind,
As from the cradle of its birth we trace,
Slow wandering forth, the patriarchal race.
10 POETRY;
I.
When the green earth, beneath the zephyr's
wing,
Wears on her breast the varnished buds of
Spring;
When the loosed current, as its folds uncoil,
Slides in the channels of the mellowed soil;
When the young hyacinth returns to seek
The air and sunshine with her emerald beak;
When the light snowdrops, starting from their
cells,
Hang each pagoda with its silver bells;
When the frail willow twines her trailing bow
With pallid leaves that sweep the soil below;
When the broad elm, sole empress of the plain,
Whose circling shadow speaks a century’s reign,
Wreathes in the clouds her regal diadem, -
A forest waving on a single stem; —
Then mark the poet; though to him unknown
The quaint-mouthed titles, such as scholars
Own,
See how his eye in ecstasy pursues
The steps of Nature tracked in radiant hues;
A METRICAL ESSAY. 11
Nay, in thyself, whate'er may be thy fate,
Pallid with toil, or surfeited with state,
Mark how thy fancies, with the vernal rose,
Awake, all sweetness, from their long repose;
Then turn to ponder o’er the classic page,
Traced with the idyls of a greener age,
And learn the instinct which arose to warm
Art's earliest essay, and her simplest form.
To themes like these her narrow path con-
fined
The first-born impulse moving in the mind;
In vales unshaken by the trumpet’s sound,
Where peaceful Labor tills his fertile ground,
The silent changes of the rolling years,
Marked on the soil, or dialled on the spheres,
The crested forests and the colored flowers,
The dewy grottos and the blushing bowers,
These, and their guardians, who, with liquid
names,
Strephons and Chloes, melt in mutual flames,
Woo the young Muses from their mountain
shade,
To make Arcadias in the lonely glade.
12 POETRY;
Nor think they visit only with their smiles
The fabled valleys and Elysian isles;
He who is wearied of his village plain
May roam the Edens of the world in vain.
'Tis not the star-crowned cliff, the cataract's
flow,
The softer foliage, or the greener glow,
The lake of sapphire, or the spar-hung cave,
The brighter sunset, or the broader wave,
Can warm his heart whom every wind has
blown
To every shore, forgetful of his own.
Home of our childhood l how affection clings
And hovers round thee with her seraph wings!
Dearer thy hills, though clad in autumn brown,
Than fairest summits which the cedars crown
Sweeter the fragrance of thy summer breeze
Than all Arabia breathes along the seas
The stranger's gale wafts home the exile's sigh,
For the heart's temple is its own blue sky!
O happiest they, whose early love unchanged,
Hopes undissolved, and friendship unestranged,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 13
Tired of their wanderings, still can deign to
See
Love, hopes, and friendship, centring all in
thee! -
And thou, my village 1 as again I tread
Amidst thy living, and above thy dead;
Though some fair playmates guard with chaster
fears
Their cheeks, grown holy with the lapse of
years; -
Though with the dust some reverend locks
may blend,
Where life’s last mile-stone marks the jour-
ney’s end;
On every bud the changing year recalls,
The brightening glance of morning memory
falls,
Still following onward as the months unclose
The balmy lilac or the bridal rose;
And still shall follow, till they sink once more
Beneath the snow-drifts of the frozen shore,
As when my bark, long tossing in the gale,
Furled in her port her tempest-rended saill
14 POETRY;
What shall I give thee? Can a simple lay,
Flung on thy bosom like a girl's bouquet,
Do more than deck thee for an idle hour,
Then fall unheeded, fading like the flower?
Yet, when I trod, with footsteps wild and free,
The crackling leaves beneath yon linden tree,
Panting from play, or dripping from the stream,
How bright the visions of my boyish dream!
Or, modest Charles, along thy broken edge,
Black with soft ooze and fringed with arrowy
Sedge,
As once I wandered in the morning sun,
With reeking sandal and superfluous gun;
How oft, as Fancy whispered in the gale,
Thou wast the Avon of her flattering tale !
Ye hills, whose foliage, fretted on the skies,
Prints shadowy arches on their evening dyes,
How should my song, with holiest charm, invest
Each dark ravine and forest-lifting crest!
How clothe in beauty each familiar scene.
Till all was classic on my native green 1
As the drained fountain, filled with autumn
leaves,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 15
The field swept naked of its garnered sheaves;
So wastes at noon the promise of our dawn,
The Springs all choking, and the harvest gone.
Yet hear the lay of one whose natal star
Still seemed the brightest when it shone afar;
Whose cheek, grown pallid with ungracious
toil,
Glows in the welcome of his parent soil;
And ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,
But take the leaflets gathered at your side.
OUR ancient church its lowly tower,
Beneath the loftier spire,
Is shadowed when the sunset hour
Clothes the tall shaft in fire;
It sinks beyond the distant eye,
Long ere the glittering vane,
High wheeling in the western sky,
Has faded o'er the plain.
Like Sentinel and Nun, they keep
Their vigil on the green;
16 POETRY;
One seems to guard, and one to weep,
The dead that lie between;
And both roll out, so full and near,
Their music’s mingling waves,
They shade the grass, whose pennoned speal
Leans on the narrow graves.
The stranger parts the flaunting weeds,
Whose seeds the winds have strown
So thick beneath the line he reads,
They shade the sculptured stone;
The child unveils his clustered brow,
And ponders for a while
The graven willow’s pendent bough,
Or rudest cherub's smile.
But what to them the dirge, the knell?
These were the mourner's share;—
The sullen clang, whose heavy swell
Throbbed through the beating air; —
The rattling cord, – the rolling stone, –
The shelving sand that slid,
And, far beneath, with hollow tone,
Rung on the coffin's lid.
A METRICAL ESSAY. 17
The slumberer's mound grows fresh and green,
Then slowly disappears;
The mosses creep, the gray stones lean,
Earth hides his date and years;
But, long before the once-loved name
Is sunk or worn away,
No lip the silent dust may claim,
That pressed the breathing clay
Go where the ancient pathway guides,
See where our sires laid down
Their smiling babes, their cherished brides,
The patriarchs of the town;
Hast thou a tear for buried love?
A sigh for transient power?
All that a century left above,
Go, read it in an hour !
The Indian’s shaft, the Briton's ball,
The sabre's thirsting edge,
The hot shell, shattering in its fall,
The bayonet's rending wedge, –
Here scattered death; yet, seek the spot,
No trace thine eye can see,
18
POETRY;
No altar, – and they need it not
Who leave their children free
Look where the turbid rain-drops stand
In many a chiselled square,
The knightly crest, the shield, the brand
Of honored names were there; —
Alas! for every tear is dried
Those blazoned tablets knew,
Save when the icy marble's side
Drips with the evening dew.
Or gaze upon yon pillared stone,”
The empty urn of pride;
There stand the Goblet and the Sun, –
What need of more beside?
Where lives the memory of the dead,
Who made their tomb a toy?
Whose ashes press that nameless bed?
Go, ask the village boy!
Lean o'er the slender western wall,
Ye ever roaming girls;
The breath that bids the blossom fall
May lift your floating curls,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 19
To sweep the simple lines that tell
An exile’s date and doom;
And sigh, for where his daughters dwell,
They wreathe the stranger's tomb.
And one amid these shades was born,
Beneath this turf who lies,
Once beaming as the summer's morn,
That closed her gentle eyes; —
If sinless angels love as we,
Who stood thy grave beside,
Three seraph welcomes waited thee,
The daughter, sister, bride
I wandered to thy buried mound
When earth was hid below
The level of the glaring ground,
Choked to its gates with snow,
And when the summer's flowery waves
The lake of verdure rolled,
As if a Sultan's white-robed slaves
Had scattered pearls and gold.
Nay, the soft pinions of the air,
That lift this trembling tone,
- 20 POETRY;
Its breath of love may almost bear,
To kiss thy funeral stone; —
And, now thy smiles have passed away,
For all the joy they gave,
May sweetest dews and warmest ray
Lie on thine early gravel
When damps beneath, and storms above,
Have bowed these fragile towers,
Still o'er the graves yon locust-grove
Shall swing its Orient flowers; —
And I would ask no mouldering bust,
If e'er this humble line,
Which breathed a sigh o'er other's dust,
Might call a tear on mine.
II.
But times were changed; the torch of terror
Came,
To light the summits with the beacon's flame;
The streams ran crimson, the tall mountain
pines
Rose a new forest o'er embattled lines;
A METRICAL ESSAY. 21
The bloodless sickle lent the warrior's steel,
The harvest bowed beneath his chariot wheel;
Where late the wood-dove sheltered her repose,
The raven waited for the conflict’s close;
The cuirassed sentry walked his sleepless round
Where Daphne smiled or Amaryllis frowned;
Where timid minstrels sung their blushing
charms,
Some wild Tyrtaeus called aloud, “To arms "
When Glory wakes, when fiery spirits leap,
Roused by her accents from their tranquil
sleep, -
The ray that flashes from the soldier's crest,
Lights, as it glances, in the poet’s breast; —
Not in pale dreamers, whose fantastic lay
Toys with smooth trifles like a child at play,
But men, who act the passions they inspire,
Who wave the sabre as they sweep the lyre
Ye mild enthusiasts, whose pacific frowns
Are lost like dew-drops caught in burning
towns, -
Pluck as ye will the radiant plumes of fame,
22 POETRY;
Break Caesar’s bust to make yourselves a name,
But, if your country bares the avenger’s blade
For wrongs unpunished, or for debts unpaid,
When the roused nation bids her armies form,
And Screams her eagle through the gathering
storm;
When from your ports the bannered frigate
rides,
Her black bows scowling to the crested tides,
Your hour has past; in vain your feeble cry,
As the babe's wailings to the thundering sky!
Scourge of mankind with all the dread
array, - -
That wraps in wrath thy desolating way,
As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
Thou only teachest all that man can be.
Alike thy tocsin has the power to charm
The toil-knit sinews of the rustic's arm,
Or swell the pulses in the poet's veins,
And bid the nations tremble at his strains.
The city slept beneath the moonbeam's
glance,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 23
Her white walls gleaming through the vines of
France,
And all was hushed, save where the footsteps
fell,
On some high tower, of midnight sentinel.
But one still watched; no self-encircled woes
Chased from his lids the angel of repose;
He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter
years .
Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears;
His country’s sufferings and her children's
shame
Streamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame;
Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong,
Rolled through his heart and kindled into song;
His taper faded; and the morning gales
Swept through the world the war-song of
Marseilles | *
Now, while around the smiles of Peace ex-
pand,
And Plenty’s wreaths festoon the laughing land;
While France ships outward her reluctant ore,
And half our navy basks upon the shore;
24 POETRY;
From ruder themes our meek-eyed Muses turn
To crown with roses their enamelled urn.
If e'er again return those awful days
Whose clouds were crimsoned with the bea.
con's blaze,
Whose grass was trampled by the soldier's
heel,
Whose tides were reddened round the rushing
keel,
God grant some lyre may wake a nobler strain,
To rend the silence of our tented plain
When Gallia's flag its triple fold displays,
Her marshalled legions peal the Marseillaise;
When round the German close the war clouds
dim,
Far through their shadows floats his battle-
hymn;
When, crowned with joy, the camps of England
ring, *
A thousand voices shout, “God save the
King!”
When victory follows with our eagle's glance,
Our nation's anthem is a country dancel"
A METRICAL ESSAY. 25
Some prouder muse, when comes the hour
at last, §
May shake our hill-sides with her bugle-blast;
Not ours the task; but since the lyric dress
Relieves the statelier with its sprightliness, -
Hear an old song, which some, perchance,
have seen -
In stale gazette, or cobwebbed magazine.
There was an hour when patriots dared profane
The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain;"
And one, who listened to the tale of shame,
Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,
Whose eye still followed o'er his country's
tides -
Thy glorious flag, our brave Old Ironsides
From yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,
Thus mocked the spoilers with his school-boy
SCOTI),
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
26
POETRY;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon's roar;--
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.
Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread,
Or know the conquered knee; –
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!
A METRICAL ESSAY. 27
III.
When florid Peace resumed her golden reign,
And arts revived, and valley bloomed again;
While War still panted on his broken blade,
Once more the Muse her heavenly wing essayed.
Rude was the Song; some ballad, stern and wild,
Lulled the light slumbers of the soldier's child;
Or young romancer with his threatening glance
And fearful fables of his bloodless lance,
Scared the soft fancy of the clinging girls,
Whose snowy fingers smoothed his raven curls.
But when long years the stately form had bent,
And faithless memory her illusions lent,
So vast the outlines of Tradition grew,
That History wondered at the shapes she drew,
And veiled at length their too ambitious hues
Beneath the pinions of the Epic Muse.
Far swept her wing; for stormier days had
brought
With darker passions deeper tides of thought.
The camp's harsh tumult and the conflict's
glow, .
28 POETRY;
The thrill of triumph and the gasp of woe,
The tender parting and the glad return,
The festal banquet and the funeral urn, –
And all the drama which at once uprears
Its spectral shadows through the clash of spears,
From camp and field to echoing verse trans-
ferred,
Swelled the proud song that listening nations
heard.
Why floats the amaranth in eternal bloom
O'er Ilium's turrets and Achilles' tomb?
Why lingers fancy, where the sunbeams smile
On Circe's gardens and Calypso's isle?
Why follows memory to the gate of Troy
Her plumed defender and his trembling boy?
Lo, the blind dreamer, kneeling on the sand,
To trace these records with his doubtful hand;
In fabled tones his own emotion flows,
And other lips repeat his silent woes;
In Hector’s infant see the babes that shun
Those deathlike eyes, unconscious of the sun,
Or in his hero hear himself implore,
“Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more l’”
A METRICAL ESSAY. 29
Thus live undying through the lapse of time
The solemn legends of the warrior's clime;
Like Egypt’s pyramid, or Paestum’s ‘fane,
They stand the heralds of the voiceless plain;
Yet, not like them, for Time, by slow degrees,
Saps the gray stone, and wears the chiselled
frieze, -
And Isis sleeps beneath her subject Nile,
And crumbled Neptune strews his Dorian pile;
But Art's fair fabric, strengthening as it rears
Its laurelled columns through the mist of years,
As the blue arches of the bending skies
Still gird the torrent, following as it flies,
Spreads, with the surges bearing on mankind,
Its starred pavilion o'er the tides of mind!
In vain the patriot asks some lofty lay
To dress in state our wars of yesterday.
The classic days, those mothers of romance,
That roused a nation for a woman’s glance;
The age of mystery with its hoarded power,
That girt the tyrant in his storied tower,
Have past and faded like a dream of youth,
And riper eras ask for history's truth.
30 POETRY;
On other shores, above their mouldering
towns,
In sullen pomp the tall cathedral frowns,
Pride in its aisles, and paupers at the door,
Which feeds the beggars whom it fleeced of
yore.
Simple and frail, our lowly temples throw
Their slender shadows on the paths below;
Scarce steal the winds, that sweep his wood-
land tracks,
The larch’s perfume from the settler's axe,
Ere, like a vision of the morning air,
His slight-framed steeple marks the house of
prayer;
Its planks all reeking, and its paint undried,
Its rafters sprouting on the shady side,
It sheds the raindrops from its shingled eaves,
Ere its green brothers once have changed their
leaves.
Yet Faith’s pure hymn, beneath its shelter
rude,
Breathes out as sweetly to the tangled wood,
As where the rays through blazing oriels pour
A METRICAL ESSAY. 31.
On marble shaft and tessellated floor; —
Heaven asks no surplice round the heart that
feels, -
And all is holy where devotion kneels.
Thus on the soil the patriot's knee should
bend,
Which holds the dust once living to defend;
Where'er the hireling shrinks before the free,
Each pass becomes “a new Thermopylae" |
Where'er the battles of the brave are won, º
There every mountain “looks on Marathon”!
Our fathers live; they guard in glory still
The grass-grown bastions of the fortressed hill;
Still ring the echoes of the trampled gorge,
With God and Freedom/ England and Sain,
George /
The royal cipher on the captured gun
Mocks the sharp night-dews and the blistering
sun 2.
The red-cross banner shades its captor’s bust,
Its folds still loaded with the conflict’s dust;
The drum, suspended by its tattered marge,
32 POETRY;
Once rolled and rattled to the Hessian's charge;
The stars have floated from Britannia’s mast,
The redcoat's trumpets blown the rebel's blast.
Point to the summits where the brave have
bled,
Where every village claims its glorious dead;
Say, when their bosoms met the bayonet
shock,
Their only corselet was the rustic frock;
Say, when they mustered to the gathering horn,
The titled chieftain curled his lip in scorn,
Yet, when their leader bade his lines advance,
No musket wavered in the lion’s glance;
Say, when they fainted in the forced retreat,
They tracked the snow-drifts with their bleed-
ing feet,
Yet still their banners, tossing in the blast,
Bore Ever Ready," faithful to the last,
Through storm and battle, till they waved again
On Yorktown's hills and Saratoga's plain!
Then, if so fierce the insatiate patriot’s
flame,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 33
Truth looks too pale, and history seems too
tame, |-
Bid him await some new Columbiad’s page,
To gild the tablets of an iron age,
And save his tears, which yet may fall upon
Some fabled field, some fancied Washington
IV.
But once again, from their AEolian cave,
The winds of Genius wandered on the wave.
Tired of the scenes the timid pencil drew,
Sick of the notes the sounding clarion blew;
Sated with heroes who had worn so long
The shadowy plumage of historic song;
The new-born poet left the beaten course,
To track the passions to their living source.
Then rose the Drama; — and the world ad-
mired
Her varied page with deeper thought inspired;
Bound to no clime, for Passion’s throb is one
In Greenland’s twilight or in India’s sun;
34 POETRY;
Born for no age, – for all the thoughts that
roll
In the dark vortex of the stormy soul,
Unchained in Song, no freezing years can
tame;
God gave them birth, and man is still the same.
So full on life her magic mirror shone,
Pier sister Arts paid tribute to her throne;
One reared her temple, one her canvas warmed,
And Music thrilled, while Eloquence informed.
The weary rustic left his stinted task
For smiles and tears, the dagger and the mask;
The sage, turned scholar, half forgot his lore,
To be the woman he despised before;
O'er sense and thought she threw her golden
chain,
And Time, the anarch, spares her deathless
reign.
Thus lives Medea, in our tamer age,
As when her buskin pressed the Grecian stage;
Not in the cells where frigid learning delves
In Aldine folios mouldering on their shelves;
A METRICAL ESSAY. 35
But breathing, burning in the glittering throng,
Whose thousand bravos roll untired along,
Circling and spreading through the gilded halls
From London's galleries to San Carlo's walls |
Thus shall he live whose more than mortal
Ila ſû6.
Mocks with its ray the pallid torch of Fame;
So proudly lifted, that it seems afar
No earthly Pharos, but a heavenly star;
Who, unconfined to Art’s diurnal bound,
Girds her whole zodiac in his flaming round,
And leads the passions, like the orb that
guides,
From pole to pole, the palpitating tides 1
V.
Though round the Muse the robe of song is
thrown, -
Think not the poet lives in verse alone.
Long ere the chisel of the sculptor taught
The lifeless stone to mock the living thought;
36 POETRY;
Long ere the painter bade the canvas glow
With every line the forms of beauty know;
Long ere the Iris of the Muses threw
On every leaf its own celestial hue;
In fable's dress the breath of genius poured,
And warmed the shapes that later times adored.
Untaught by Science how to forge the keys,
That loose the gates of Nature’s mysteries;
Unschooled by Faith, who, with her angel tread,
Leads through the labyrinth with a single thread,
His fancy, hovering round her guarded tower,
Rained through its bars like Danae's golden
shower.
He spoke; the sea-nymph answered from her
CaVC :
He called; the naiad left her mountain wave:
He dreamed of beauty; lo, amidst his dream,
Narcissus mirrored in the breathless stream;
And night's chaste empress, in her bridal play,
Laughed through the foliage where Endymion lay;
And ocean dimpled, as the languid swell
Kissed the red lip of Cytherea's shell:
A METRICAL ESSAY. 37
Of power, — Bellona swept the crimson field,
And blue-eyed Pallas shook her Gorgon shield;
O'er the hushed waves their mightier monarch
drove,
And Ida trembled to the tread of Jovel
So every grace, that plastic language knows,
To nameless poets its perfection owes.
The rough-hewn words to simplest thoughts
confined,
Were cut and polished in their nicer mind;
Caught on their edge, imagination’s ray
Splits into rainbows, shooting far away; —
From sense to soul, from Soul to sense, it flies,
And through all nature links analogies;
He who reads right will rarely look upon
A better poet than his lexicon |
There is a race, which cold, ungenial skies
Breed from decay, as fungous growths arise;
Though dying fast, yet springing fast again,
Which still usurps an unsubstantial reign.
With frames too languid for the charms of sense,
And minds worn down with action too intense;
38- POETRY;
Tired of a world whose joys they never knew,
Themselves deceived, yet thinking all untrue;
Scarce men without, and less than girls within,
Sick of their life before its cares begin; —
The dull disease, which drains their feeble
hearts,
To life's decay some hectic thrills imparts,
And lends a force which, like the maniac's
power,
Pays with blank years the frenzy of an hour.
And this is Genius! Say, does Heaven
degrade
The manly frame, for health, for action made?
Break down the sinews, rack the brow with
pains,
Blanch the bright cheek, and drain the purple
veins,
To clothe the mind with more extended sway,
Thus faintly struggling in degenerate clay?
No! gentle maid, too ready to admire,
Though false its notes, the pale enthusiast's
lyre;
A METRICAL ESSAY. 39
If this be genius, though its bitter springs
Glowed like the morn beneath Aurora's wings,
Seek not the source whose sullen bosom feeds
But fruitless flowers, and dark, envenomed
weeds.
But, if so bright the dear illusion seems,
Thou wouldst be partner of thy poet's dreams,
And hang in rapture on his bloodless charms,
Or die, like Raphael, in his angel arms;
Go, and enjoy thy blessed lot, — to share
In Cowper's gloom, or Chatterton's despairl
Not such were they whom, wandering o'er
the waves,
I looked to meet, but only found their graves;
If friendship's smile, the better part of fame,
Should lend my song the only wreath I claim,
Whose voice would greet me with a sweeter
tone,
Whose living hand more kindly press my
Own,
Than theirs, – could Memory, as her silent
tread
40 POETRY;
Prints the pale flowers that blossom o'er the
dead,
Those breathless lips, now closed in peace,
restore,
Or wake those pulses hushed to beat no more?
Thou calm, chaste scholar !” I can see thee
now,
The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down
In graceful folds the academic gown,
On thy curled lip the classic lines, that taught
How nice the mind that sculptured them with
thought,
And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
Too bright to live, – but oh, too fair to die!
And thou, dear friend,” whom Science still
deplores,
And love still mourns, on ocean-severed shores,
Though the bleak forest twice has bowed with
Snow, -
Since thou wast laid its budding leaves below,
Thine image mingles with my closing strain,
A METRICAL ESSAY. 41
As when we wandered by the turbid Seine,
Both blest with hopes, which revelled, bright
and free,
On all we longed, or all we dreamed to be;
To thee the amaranth and the cypress fell, -
And I was spared to breathe this last farewell!
But lived there one in unremembered days,
Or lives there still, who spurns the poet's
bays?
Whose fingers, dewy from Castalia's springs,
Rest on the lyre, yet scorn to touch the strings?
Who shakes the senate with the silver tone
The groves of Pindus might have sighed to
own?
Have such e'er been? Remember Canning's
name !
Do such still live? Let “Alaric's Dirge "pro-
claim! -
Immortal Art! where'er the rounded sky
Bends o'er the cradle where thy children lie,
Their home is earth, their herald every tongue
Whose accents echo to the voice that sung.
42 POETRY; A METRICAL ESSAY.
One leap of Ocean scatters on the sand.
The quarried bulwarks of the loosening land;
One thrill of earth dissolves a century's toil,
Strewed like the leaves that vanish in the soil;
One hill o'erflows, and cities sink below,
Their marbles splintering in the lava's glow;
But one sweet tone, scarce whispered to the
air,
From shore to shore the blasts of ages bear;
One humble name, which oft, perchance, has
borne
The tyrant’s mockery and the courtier's scorn,
Towers o'er the dust of earth's forgotten graves,
As once, emerging through the waste of waves,
The rocky Titan, round whose shattered spear
Coiled the last whirlpool of the drowning
sphere!
NOTES.
NOTE I. PAGE I.
“Scenes of my youth.”
This poem was commenced a few months subsequently
to the author's return to his native village, after an absence
of nearly three years.
NotE 2. PAGE 9.
A few lines, perhaps deficient in dignity, were introduced
at this point, in delivering the poem, and are appended in
this clandestine manner for the gratification of some of my
audience.
How many a stanza, blushing like the rose,
Would turn to fustian if resolved to prose 1
How many an epic, like a gilded crown,
If some cold critic dared to melt it down,
Roll in his crucible a shapeless mass,
A grain of gold-leaf to a pound of brass!
Shorn of their plumes, our moonstruck sonneteers
Would seem but jackdaws croaking to the spheres:
43
44 POETRY; A METRICAL ESSAY.
Our gay Lotharios, with their Byron curls,
Would pine like oysters cheated of their pearls!
Wo to the spectres of Parnassus' shade,
If truth should mingle in the masquerade.
Lo, as the songster’s pale creations pass,
Off come at once the “Dearest” and “Alas!”
Crack go the lines and levers used to prop
Top-heavy thoughts, and down at once they drop.
Flowers weep for hours; Love, shrieking for his dove,
Finds not the solace that he seeks—above.
Fast in the mire, through which in happier time
He ambled dryshod on the stilts of rhyme,
The prostrate poet finds at length a tongue
To curse in prose the thankless stars he sung.
And though, perchance, the haughty muse it shames,
How deep the magic of harmonious names 1
How sure the story of romance to please,
Whose rounded stanza ends with Heloise I
How rich and full our intonations ride
“On Torno's cliffs, or Pambamarca's side’” I
But were her name some vulgar “proper noun,”
And Pambamarca changed to Belchertown,
She might be pilloried for her doubtful fame,
And no enthusiast would arise to blame;
And he who outraged the poetic sense,
Might find a home at Belchertown's expense!
NOTES. 45
The harmless boys, scarce knowing right from wrong,
Who libel others and themselves in song,
When their first pothooks of poetic rage
Slant down the corners of an album's page,
(Where crippled couplets spread their sprawling charms,
As half-taught swimmers move their legs and arms,)
Will talk of “Hesper on the brow of eve,”
And call their cousins “lovely Genevieve"; —
While thus transformed, each dear deluded maid,
Pleased with herself in novel grace arrayed,
Smiles on the Paris who has come to crown
This new-born Helen in a gingham gown 1
NoTE 3. PAGE 18.
“Or gaze upon yon pillared stone.”
The tomb of the VASSALL family is marked by a free-
stone tablet, supported by five pillars, and bearing nothing
but the sculptured reliefs of the Goblet and the Sun, –
Vas– Sol—which designated a powerful family, now
almost forgotten.
The exile referred to in the next stanza was a native of
Honfleur in Normandy.
NOTE 4, PAGE 23.
“Swept through the zworld the war-song of Marseilles.”
The music and words of the Marseilles Hymn were com
posed in one night.
• 46 POETRY; A METRICAL ESSAY.
NoTE 5. PAGE 24.
“Our nation's anthem is a country dance /*
The popular air of “Yankee Doodle,” like the dagger of
Hudibras, serves a pacific as well as a martial purpose.
NoTE 6. PAGE 25.
* The masſ that Britain strove to bow in zaize.”
The lyric which follows was printed in the “Boston
Daily Advertiser,” at the time when it was proposed to
break up the frigate Constitution as unfit for service.
NoTE 7. PAGE 32.
* Bore Ever Ready, faith;ſul to the last.”
“Semper paratus,”—a motto of the revolutionary stand-
ards.
Note 8. PAGE 4o.
* Thou calm, chaste scholar.”
Charles Chauncy Emerson; died May 9th, 1836.
NoTE 9. PAGE 4o.
“And thou, dear friend.”
James Jackson, Jr., M.D.; died March 29th, 1834.
LYRICS.
LY RICS.
THE LAST READER.
I SOMETIMES sit beneath a tree,
And read my own sweet Songs;
Though naught they may to others be,
Each humble line prolongs
A tone that might have passed away,
But for that scarce remembered lay.
I keep them like a lock or leaf,
That some dear girl has given;
Frail record of an hour, as brief
As sunset clouds in heaven,
But spreading purple twilight still
High over memory's shadowed hill.
They lie upon my pathway bleak,
Those flowers that once ran wild,
49
50
THE LAST READER.
As on a father's care-worn cheek
The ringlets of his child;
The golden mingling with the gray,
And stealing half its Snows away.
What care I though the dust is spread
Around these yellow leaves,
Or o'er them his sarcastic thread
Oblivion's insect weaves;
Though weeds are tangled on the stream,
It still reflects my morning's beam.
And therefore love I such as smile
On these neglected songs,
Nor deem that flattery's needless wile
My opening bosom wrongs;
For who would trample, at my side,
A few pale buds, my garden's pride?
It may be that my scanty ore
Long years have washed away,
And where were golden sands before,
Is naught but common clay;
Still something sparkles in the sun
For Memory to look back upon.
THE LAST READER. 51
And when my name no more is heard,
My lyre no more is known,
Still let me, like a winter’s bird,
In silence and alone,
Fold over them the weary wing
Once flashing through the dews of spring,
Yes, let my fancy fondly wrap
My youth in its decline,
And riot in the rosy lap
Of thoughts that once were mine,
And give the worm my little store
When the last reader reads no more l
OUR YANKEE GIRLS.
LET greener lands and bluer skies,
If such the wide earth shows,
With fairer cheeks and brighter eyes,
Match us the star and rose ;
The winds that lift the Georgian’s veil,
Or wave Circassia’s curls, -
Waft to their shores the sultan’s sail, ,-
Who buys our Yankee girls?
The gay grisette, whose fingers touch
Love's thousand chords so well;
The dark Italian, loving much,
But more than one can tell;
And England's fair-haired, blue-eyed dame,
Who binds her brow with pearls; —
Ye who have seen them, can they shame
Our own sweet Yankee girls?
And what if court or castle vaunt
Its children loftier born ? —
52
OUR YANKEE GIRLS. 53
Who heeds the silken tassel's flaunt
Beside the golden corn?
They ask not for the dainty toil
Of ribboned knights and earls,
The daughters of the virgin soil,
Our free-born Yankee girls!
By every hill whose stately pines
Wave their dark arms above
The home where some fair being shines,
To warm the wilds with love,
From barest rock to bleakest shore
Where farthest sail unfurls,
That stars and stripes are streaming o'er, —
God bless our Yankee girls!
LA GRISETTE.
AH Clemence 1 when I saw thee last
Trip down the Rue de Seine,
And turning, when thy form had past,
I said, “We meet again,” —
I dreamed not in that idle glance
Thy latest image came,
And only left to memory's trance
A shadow and a name.
The few strange words my lips had taught
Thy timid voice to speak,
Their gentler signs, which often brought
Fresh roses to thy cheek,
The trailing of thy long loose hair
Bent o'er my couch of pain,
All, all returned, more sweet, more fair;
O had we met again!
I walked where saint and virgin keep
The vigil lights of heaven,
54
IA GRISETTE. 55
I knew that thou hadst woes to weep,
And sins to be forgiven;
I watched where Genevieve was laid,
I knelt by Mary's shrine,
Beside me low, soft voices prayed;
Alas! but where was thine?
And when the morning sun was bright,
When wind and wave were calm,
And flamed, in thousand-tinted light,
The rose of Notre Dame,
I wandered through the haunts of men,
From Boulevard to Quai.
Till, frowning o'er Saint Etienne,
The Pantheon's shadow lay.
In vain, in vain; we meet no more,
Nor dream what fates befall;
And long upon the stranger's shore
My voice on thee may call,
When years have clothed the line in mos,
That tells thy name and days,
And withered, on thy simple cross,
The wreaths of Père-la-Chaise!
AN EVENING THOUGHT.
WRITTEN AT SEA.
If sometimes in the dark blue eye,
Or in the deep réd wine,
Or soothed by gentlest melody,
Still warms this heart of mine,
Yet something colder in the blood,
And calmer in the brain,
Have whispered that my youth's bright flood
Ebbs, not to flow again.
If by Helvetia's azure lake,
Or Arno's yellow stream,
Each star of memory could awake,
As in my first young dream,
I know that when mine eye shall greet
The hill-sides bleak and bare,
That gird my home, it will not meet
My childhood's sunsets there.
56
AN EVENING THOUGHT. 57
Oh, when love's first, sweet, stolen kiss
Burned on my boyish brow,
Was that young forehead worn as this?
Was that flushed cheek as now?
Were that wild pulse and throbbing heart
Like these, which vainly strive,
In thankless strains of Soulless art,
To dream themselves alive?
Alas! the morning dew is gone,
Gone ere the full of day;
Life’s iron fetter still is on,
Its wreaths all torn away;
Happy if still some casual hour
Can warm the fading shrine,
Too soon to chill beyond the power
Of love, or song, or wine !
A SOUVENIR.
YES, lady! I can ne'er forget,
That once in other years we met;
Thy memory may perchance recall
A festal eve, a rose-wreathed hall,
Its tapers' blaze, its mirrors' glance,
Its melting song, its ringing dance;—
Why, in thy dream of virgin joy,
Shouldst thou recall a pallid boy?
Thine eye had other forms to seek,
Why rest upon his bashful cheek?
With other tones thy heart was stirred,
Why waste on him a gentle word?
We parted, lady, - all night long
Thine ear to thrill with dance and song, —
And I — to weep that I was born
A thing thou scarce wouldst deign to scorn.
**
And, lady! now that years have past,
My bark has reached the shore at last;
58
A SOUVENIR. 59
The gales that filled her ocean wing
Have chilled and shrunk thy hasty spring,
And eye to eye, and brow to brow,
I stand before thy presence now; —
Thy lip is smoothed, thy voice is sweet,
Thy warm hand offered when we meet.
Nay, lady! 'tis not now for me
To droop the lid or bend the knee.
I seek thee, – oh, thou dost not shun :
I speak, - thou listenest like a nun;
I ask thy Smile, – thy lip uncurls,
Too liberal of its flashing pearls;
Thy tears, – thy lashes sink again, –
My Hebe turns to Magdalen
O changing youth ! that evening hour
Look down on ours, – the bud — the flower:
Thine faded in its virgin soil,
And mine was nursed in tears and toil;
Thy leaves were withering, one by one,
While mine were opening to the sun; —
Which now can meet the cold and storm,
With freshest leaf and hardiest form P
60 A SOUVENIR.
Ay, lady! that once haughty glance
Still wanders through the glittering dance,
And asks in vain from others' pride,
The charity thine own denied;
And as thy fickle lips could learn
To smile and praise, – that used to spurn,
So the last offering on thy shrine
Shall be this flattering lay of mine !
“QUI VIVE!”
“QUI VIVE!” The sentry's musket rings,
The channelled bayonet gleams;
High o'er him, like a raven's wings
The broad tricolored banner flings
Its shadow, rustling as it swings
Pale in the moonlight beams;
Pass on 1 while steel-clad sentries keep
Their vigil o'er the monarch's sleep,
Thy bare, unguarded breast
Asks not the unbroken, bristling zone
That girds yon sceptred trembler's throne; —
Pass on, and take thy rest!
“Qui vive!” How oft the midnight air
That startling cry has borne !
How oft the evening breeze has fanned
The banner of this haughty land,
O'er mountain snow and desert sand,
Ere yet its folds were torn
61
62 “QUI VIVE."
Through Jena's carnage flying red,
Or tossing o'er Marengo's dead,
Or curling on the towers
Where Austria's eagle quivers yet,
And suns the ruffled plumage, wet
With battle’s crimson showers!
“Qui zive/" And is the sentry's cry, -
The sleepless soldier's hand, –
Are these, — the painted folds that fly
And lift their emblems, printed high,
On morning mist and sunset sky, -
The guardians of a land?
No! If the patriot's pulses sleep,
How vain the watch that hirelings keep, —
The idle flag that waves,
When Conquest, with his iron heel,
Treads down the standards and the steel
That belt the soil of slaves |
THE WASP AND THE HORNET.
THE two proud sisters of the sea,
In glory and in doom —
Well may the eternal waters be
Their broad, unsculptured tomb!
The wind that rings along, the wave,
The clear, unshadowed sun,
Are torch and trumpet o'er the brave,
Whose last green wreath is won 1
No stranger-hand their banners furled,
No victor's shout they heard;
Unseen, above them ocean curled,
Save by his own pale bird;
The gnashing billows heaved and fell;
Wild shrieked the midnight gale;
Far, far beneath the morning swell
Were pennon, spar, and sail.
The land of Freedom | Sea and shore
Are guarded now, as when
&3
64
THE WASP AND THE HORNET.
Her ebbing waves to victory bore
Fair barks and gallant men;
Oh, many a ship of prouder name
May wave her starry fold,
Nor trail, with deeper light of fame,
The paths they swept of old !
FROM A BACHELOR'S PRIVATE •
JOURNAL.
Sweet Mary, I have never breathed
The love it were in vain to name;
Though round my heart a serpent wreathed,
I smiled, or strove to smile, the same.
Once more the pulse of Nature glows
With faster throb and fresher fire,
While music round her pathway flows
Like echoes from a hidden lyre.
And is there none with me to share
The glories of the earth and sky?
The eagle through the pathless air
Is followed by one burning eye.
Ah, no! the cradled flowers may wake,
Again may flow the frozen sea,
From every cloud a star may break, -
There comes no second Spring to me.
65
66 FROM A BACHELOR'S PRIVATE JOURNAL.
Go, -ere the painted toys of youth
Are crushed beneath the tread of years;
Ere visions have been chilled to truth,
And hopes are washed away in tears.
Go, - for I will not bid thee weep, —
Too soon my sorrows will be thine,
And evening's troubled air shall sweep
The incense from the broken shrine.
If Heaven can hear the dying tone
Of chords that soon will cease to thrill,
The prayer that Heaven has heard alone,
May bless thee when those chords are still
STANZAS.
STRANGE that one lightly whispered tone
Is far, far sweeter unto me,
Than all the sounds that kiss the earth,
Or breathe along the sea;
But, lady, when thy voice I greet,
Not heavenly music seems so sweet,
I look upon the fair blue skies,
And naught but empty air I see;
But when I turn me to thine eyes,
It seemeth unto me
Ten thousand angels spread their wings
Within those little azure rings.
The lily hath the softest leaf
That ever western breeze hath fanned,
But thou shalt have the tender flower,
So I may take thy hand;
That little hand to me doth yield
More joy than all the broidered field.
67
68
STANZAS.
O lady! there be many things
That seem right fair, below, above;
But sure not one among them all
Is half so sweet as love; —
Let us not pay our vows alone,
But join two altars both in one.
THE PHILOSOPHER TO HIS LOVE.
DEAREST, a look is but a ray
Reflected in a certain way;
A word, whatever tone it wear,
Is but a trembling wave of air;
A touch, obedience to a clause
In nature's pure material laws.
The very flowers that bend and meet,
In Sweetening others, grow more sweet;
The clouds by day, the stars by night,
Inweave their floating locks of light;
The rainbow, Heaven's own forehead's braid,
Is but the embrace of sun and shade.
How few that love us have we found !
How wide the world that girds them round !
Like mountain streams we meet and part,
Each living in the other's heart,
Our course unknown, our hope to be
Yet mingled in the distant sea.
69
70 THE PHILOSOPHER TO HIS LOVE.
But Ocean coils and heaves in vain,
Bound in the subtle moonbeam’s chain;
And love and hope do but obey
Some cold, capricious planet's ray,
Which lights and leads the tide it charms,
To Death's dark caves and icy arms.
Alas! one narrow line is drawn,
That links our sunset with our dawn;
In mist and shade life’s morning rose,
And clouds are round it at its close;
But ah! no twilight beam ascends
To whisper where that evening ends.
Oh! in the hour when I shall feel
Those shadows round my senses steal,
When gentle eyes are weeping o'er
The clay that feels their tears no more,
Then let thy spirit with me be,
Or some sweet angel, likest thee!
L'INCONNUE.
Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?
Such should, methinks, its music be;
The sweetest name that mortals bear,
Were best befitting thee;
And she, to whom it once was given,
Was half of earth and half of heaven.
I hear thy voice, I see thy smile,
I look upon thy folded hair;
Ah! while we dream not they beguile,
Our hearts are in the snare;
And she, who chains a wild bird's wing,
Must start not if her captive sing.
So, lady, take the leaf that falls,
To all but thee unseen, unknown;
When evening shades thy silent walls,
Then read it all alone ;
In stillness read, in darkness seal,
Forget, despise, but not reveal I
71
THE STAR AND THE WATER-LILY.
THE sun stepped down from his golden throne,
And lay in the silent sea,
And the Lily had folded her satin leaves,
For a sleepy thing was she;
What is the Lily dreaming of?
Why crisp the waters blue?
See, see, she is lifting her varnished lid'
Her white leaves are glistening through
The Rose is cooling his burning cheek
In the lap of the breathless tide; —
The Lily hath sisters fresh and fair,
That would lie by the Rose's side;
He would love her better than all the rest,
And he would be fond and true; —
But the Lily unfolded her weary lids,
And looked at the sky so blue.
Remember, remember, thou silly one,
How fast will thy summer glide,
72
THE STAR AND THE WATER-LILY. 73
And wilt thou wither a virgin pale,
Or flourish a blooming bride?
“Oh, the Rose is old, and thorny, and cold,
And he lives on earth,” said she;
“But the Star is fair and he lives in the air,
And he shall my bridegroom be.”
But what if the stormy cloud should come
And ruffle the silver sea?
Would he turn his eye from the distant sky,
To smile on a thing like thee?
Oh, no, fair Lily, he will not send
One ray from his far-off throne;
The winds shall blow and the waves shall flow,
And thou wilt be left alone.
There is not a leaf on the mountain top,
Nor a drop of evening dew,
Nor a golden sand on the sparkling shore,
Nor a pearl in the waters blue,
That he has not cheered with his fickle smile,
And warmed with his faithless beam, -
And will he be true to a pallid flower,
That floats on the quiet stream?
74 THE STAR AND THE WATER-LILY.
Alas for the Lily she would not heed,
But turned to the skies afar,
And bared her breast to the trembling ray
That shot from the rising star;
The cloud came over the darkened sky,
And over the waters wide:
She looked in vain through the beating rain,
And sank in the stormy tide.
ILLUSTRATION OF A PICTURE.
“A SPANISH GIRL IN REVERY.” -
SHE twirled the string of golden beads,
That round her neck was hung, —
My grandsire's gift; the good old man
Loved girls when he was young;
And, bending lightly o'er the cord,
And turning half away,
With something" like a youthful sigh,
Thus spoke the maiden gray:
“Well, one may trail her silken robe,
And bind her locks with pearls,
And one may wreathe the woodland rose
Among her floating curls;
And one may tread the dewy grass,
And one the marble floor,
Nor half-hid bosom heave the less,
Nor broidered corset more I
75
76
ILLUSTRATION OF A PICTURE.
“Some years ago, a dark-eyed girl
Was sitting in the shade, –
There's something brings her to my mind
In that young dreaming maid, -
And in her hand she held a flower,
A flower, whose speaking hue
Said, in the language of the heart,
“Believe the giver true.”
“And, as she looked upon its leaves,
The maiden made a vow
To wear it when the bridal wreath
Was woven for her brow;
She watched the flower, as, day by day,
The leaflets curled and died; -
But he who gave it never came
To claim her for his bride.
“Oh, many a summer's morning glow
Has lent the rose its ray,
And many a winter's drifting snow
Has swept its bloom away;
But she has kept that faithless pledge
To this, her winter hour,
ILLUSTRATION OF A PFCTURE. 77
And keeps it still, herself alone,
And wasted like the flower.”
Her pale lip quivered, and the light
Gleamed in her moistening eyes; —
I asked her how she liked the tints
In those Castilian skies?
“She thought them misty, - 'twas perhaps
Because she stood too near;”
She turned away, and as she turned,
I saw her wipe a tear.
THE DYING SENECA.
He died not as the martyr dies
Wrapped in his living shroud of flame;
He fell not as the warrior falls,
Gasping upon the field of fame;
A gentler passage to the grave,
The murderer's softened fury gave.
Rome's slaughtered sons and blazing piles
Had tracked the purple demon's path,
And yet another victim lived
To fill the fiery scroll of wrath;
Could not imperial vengeance spare
His furrowed brow and silver hair?
The field was sown with noble blood,
The harvest reaped in burning tears,
When, rolling up its crimson flood,
Broke the long-gathering tide of years;
His diadem was rent away,
And beggars trampled on his clay.
78
THE DYING SENECA. 79
None wept, — none pitied;— they who knelt
At morning by the despot's throne,
At evening dashed the laurelled bust,
And spurned the wreaths themselves had
strewn; - -
The shout of triumph echoed wide,
The self-stung reptile writhed and died
A PORTRAIT.
A STILL, sweet, placid, moonlight face,
And slightly nonchalant,
Which seems to claim a middle place
Between one’s love and aunt,
Where childhood's star has left a ray
In woman's Sunniest sky,
As morning dew and blushing day
On fruit and blossom lie.
And yet, — and yet I cannot love
Those lovely lines on steel;
They beam too much of heaven above,
Earth's darker shades to feel;
Perchance some early weeds of care
Around my heart have grown,
And brows unfurrowed seem not fair,
Because they mock my own.
Alas! when Eden's gates were sealed,
How oft some sheltered flower
80
A PORTRAIT. 81
Breathed o'er the wanderers of the field,
Like their own bridal bower;
Yet, saddened by its loveliness,
And humbled by its pride,
Earth's fairest child they could not bless, –
It mocked them when they sighed.
A ROMAN AQUEDUCT.
THE sun-browned girl, whose limbs recline
When noon her languid hand has laid
Hot on the green flakes of the pine,
Beneath its narrow disk of shade;
As, through the flickering noontide glare,
She gazes on the rainbow chain
Of arches, lifting once in air
The rivers of the Roman's plain; —
Say, does her wandering eye recall
The mountain-current's icy wave, —
Or for the dead one tear let fall,
Whose founts are broken by their grave?
From stone to stone the ivy weaves
Her braided tracery's winding veil,
And lacing stalks and tangled leaves
Nod heavy in the drowsy gale.
82
A ROMAN AQUEDUCT. 83
And lightly floats the pendent vine,
That swings beneath her slender bow,
Arch answering arch, – whose rounded line
Seems mirrored in the wreath below.
How patient Nature smiles at Fame !
The weeds, that strewed the victor’s way,
Feed on his dust to shroud his name,
Green where his proudest towers decay.
See, through that channel, empty now,
The scanty rain its tribute pours, –
Which cooled the lip and laved the brow
Of conquerors from a hundred shores.
Thus bending o'er the nation's bier,
Whose wants the captive earth supplied,
The dew of Memory’s passing tear
Falls on the arches of her pride!
THE LAST PROPHECY OF CASSANDRA,
THE sun is fading in the skies
And evening shades are gathering fast;
Fair city, ere that sun shall rise,
Thy night hath come, — thy day is past!
Ye know not, — but the hour is nigh;
Ye will not heed the warning breath;
No vision strikes your clouded eye,
To break the sleep that wakes in death.
Go, age, and let thy withered cheek
Be wet once more with freezing tears;
And bid thy trembling sorrow speak,
In accents of departed years.
Go, child, and pour thy sinless prayer
Before the everlasting throne;
And He who sits in glory there,
May stoop to hear thy silver tone.
84
THE LAST PROPHECY OF CASSANDRA, 85
Go, warrior, in thy glittering steel,
And bow thee at the altar's side;
And bid thy frowning gods reveal
The doom their mystic counsels hide.
Go, maiden, in thy flowing veil, -
And bare thy brow, and bend thy knee;
When the last hopes of mercy fail,
Thy God may yet remember thee.
Go, as thou didst in happier hours,
And lay thine incense on the shrine;
And greener leaves, and fairer flowers,
Around the sacred image twine.
I saw them rise, – the buried dead, –
From marble tomb and grassy mound;
I heard the spirits' printless tread,
And voices not of earthly sound.
I looked upon the quivering stream,
And its cold wave was bright with flame;
And wild, as from a fearful dream,
The wasted forms of battle came.
86 THE LAST PROPHECY OF CASSANDRA.
Ye will not hear — ye will not know, -
Ye scorn the maniac's idle Song;
Ye care not but the voice of woe
Shall thunder loud, and echo long. .
Blood shall be in your marble halls, -
And spears shall glance, and fires shall
glow;
Ruin shall sit upon your walls,
But ye shall lie in death below.
Ay, none shall live to hear the storm
Around their blackened pillars sweep;
To shudder at the reptile’s form,
Or scare the wild bird from her sleep.
To A CAGED LION.
Poor conquered monarch 1 though that haughty
glance
Still speaks thy courage unsubdued by
time, - -
And in the grandeur of thy sullen tread
Lives the proud spirit of thy burning
clime;—
Fettered by things that shudder at thy roar,
Torn from thy pathless wilds to pace this
narrow floor l
Thou wast the victor, and all nature shrunk
Before the thunders of thine awful wrath;
The steel-armed hunter viewed thee from afar,
Fearless and trackless in thy lonely path !
The famished tiger closed his flaming eye,
And crouched and panted as thy step went by
Thou art the vanquished, and insulting man
Bars thy broad bosom as a sparrow's wing;
\
87
88 TO A CAGED LION.
His nerveless arms thine iron sinews bind,
And lead in chains the desert’s fallen
king;
Are these the beings that have dared to twine
Their feeble threads around those limbs of
thine?
So must it be; the weaker, wiser race,
That wields the tempest and that rides
the sea,
Even in the stillness of thy solitude .
Must teach the lesson of its power to thee;
And thou, the terror of the trembling wild,
Must bow thy savage strength, the mockery of
a child l
TO MY COMPANIONS.
MINE ancient Chair! thy wide-embracing arms
Have clasped around me even from a boy;
Hadst thou a voice to speak of years gone by,
Thine were a tale of sorrow and of joy,
Of fevered hopes and ill-foreboding fears,
And smile unseen, and unrecorded tears.
And thou, my Tablel though unwearied Time
Hath set his signet on thine altered brow
Still can I see thee in thy spotless prime,
And in my memory thou art living now;
Soon must thou slumber with forgotten things,
The peasant's ashes and the dust of kings.
Thou melancholy Mug! thy sober brown
Hath something pensive in its evening hue,
Not like the things that please the tasteless
clown, *-
With gaudy streaks of orange and of blue;
89
90 TO MY COMPANIONS.
And I must love thee, for thou art mine own,
Pressed by my lip, and pressed by mine alone.
My broken Mirror! faithless, yet beloved,
Thou who canst smile, and smile alike on all,
Oft do I leave thee, oft again return,
I scorn the siren, but obey the call;
I hate thy falsehood, while I fear thy truth,
But most I love thee, flattering friend of youth.
Primeval Carpet! every well-worn thread
Has slowly parted with its virgin dye;
I saw thee fade beneath the ceaseless tread,
Fainter and fainter in mine anxious eye;
So flies the color from the brightest flower,
And heaven’s own rainbow lives but for an hour.
I love you all ! there radiates from our own
A soul that lives in every shape we see;
There is a voice, to other ears unknown,
Like echoed music answering to its key.
The dungeoned captive hath a tale to tell,
Of every insect in his lonely cell;
And these poor frailties have a simple tone,
That breathes in accents sweet to me alone.
THE LAST LEAF.
I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o'er the ground
With his cane.
They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.
But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
“They are gone.”
91
92
THE LAST LEAF.
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
My grandmamma has said, –
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago, -
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow.
But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.
I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
THE LAST LEAF. 93
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer |
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.
TO A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER.
WAN-VISAGED thing! thy virgin leaf
To me looks more than deadly pale,
Unknowing what may stain thee yet, —
A poem or a tale.
Who can thy unborn meaning scan?
Can Seer or Sibyl read thee now?
No, - seek to trace the fate of man
Writ on his infant brow.
Love may light on thy snowy cheek,
And shake his Eden-breathing plumes;
Then shalt thou tell how Lelia smiles,
Or Angelina blooms.
Satire may lift his bearded lance,
Forestalling Time’s slow-moving scythe,
And, scattered on thy little field,
Disjointed bards may writhe.
94
TO A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER. 95
Perchance a vision of the night,
Some grizzled spectre, gaunt and thin,
Qr sheeted corpse, may stalk along,
Or skeleton may grin
If it should be in pensive hour
Some sorrow-moving theme I try,
Ah, maiden, how thy tears will fall,
For all I doom to die!
But if in merry mood I touch
Thy leaves, then shall the sight of thee
Sow smiles as thick on rosy lips
As ripples on the Sea.
The Weekly press shall gladly stoop
To bind thee up among its sheaves;
The Daily steal thy shining ore,
To gild its leaden leaves.
Thou hast no tongue, yet thou canst speak,
Till distant shores shall hear the sound;
Thou hast no life, yet thou canst breathe
Fresh life on all around.
96 TO A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER.
Thou art the arena of the wise,
The noiseless battle-ground of fame;
The sky where halos may be wreathed
Around the humblest name.
Take, then, this treasure to thy trust,
To win some idle reader's smile,
Then fade and moulder in the dust,
Or swell some bonfire's crackling pile !
TO AN INSECT.
I LOVE to hear thine earnest voice,
Wherever thou art hid,
Thou testy little dogmatist,
Thou pretty Katydid!
Thou mindest me of gentlefolks, –
Old gentlefolks are they, -
Thou say'st an undisputed thing
In such a solemn way.
Thou art a female, Katydid!
I know it by the trill
That quivers through thy piercing notes,
So petulant and shrill,
I think there is a knot of you
Beneath the hollow tree, –
A knot of spinster Katydids, –
Do Katydids drink tea?
Oh, tell me where did Katy live,
And what did Katy do?
97
98
TO AN INSECT.
And was she very fair and young,
And yet so wicked, too?
Did Katy love a naughty man,
Or kiss more cheeks than one?
I warrant Katy did no more
Than many a Kate has done.
Dear me! I'll tell you all about
My fuss with little Jane,
And Ann, with whom I used to walk
So often down the lane,
And all that tore their locks of black,
Or wet their eyes of blue, –
Pray tell me, sweetest Katydid,
What did poor Katy do?
Ah, no! the living oak shall crash,
That stood for ages still,
The rock shall rend its mossy base
And thunder down the hill,
Before the little Katydid
Shall add one word, to tell
The mystic story of the maid
Whose name she knows so well.
TO AN INSECT. 99
Peace to the ever murmuring race!
- And when the latest one
Shall fold in death her feeble wings
Beneath the autumn sun,
Then shall she raise her fainting voice
And lift her drooping lid,
And then the child of future years
Shall hear what Katy did.
THE DILEMMA.
Now, by the blessed Paphian queen,
Who heaves the breast of sweet sixteen:
By every name I cut on bark
Before my morning star grew dark;
By Hymen's torch, by Cupid's dart,
By all that thrills the beating heart;
The bright black eye, the melting blue, -
I cannot choose between the two.
I had a vision in my dreams; —
I saw a row of twenty beams;
From every beam a rope was hung,
In every rope a lover swung;
I asked the hue of every eye,
That bade each luckless lover die;
Ten shadowy lips said, heavenly blue,
And ten accused the darker hue.
I asked a matron, which she deemed
With fairest light of beauty beamed;
100 -
THE DILEMMA. 101
She answered, some thought both were fair, –
Give her blue eyes and golden hair.
I might have liked her judgment well,
But, as she spoke, she rung the bell,
And all her girls, nor Small nor few,
Came marching in, – their eyes were blue.
I asked a maiden; back she flung
The locks that round her forehead hung,
And turned her eye, a glorious one,
Bright as a diamond in the Sun,
On me, until beneath its rays
I felt as if my hair would blaze;
She liked all eyes but eyes of green;
She looked at me; what could she mean?
Ah! many lids Love lurks between,
Nor heeds the coloring of his screen;
And when his random arrows fly,
The victim falls, but knows not why.
Gaze not upon his shield of jet,
The shaft upon the string is set;
Look not beneath his azure veil,
Though every limb were cased in mail.
102 THE DILEMMA.
Well, both might make a martyr break
The chain that bound him to the stake;
And both, with but a single ray,
Can melt our very hearts away;
And both, when balanced, hardly seem
To stir the scales, or rock the beam;
But that is dearest, all the while,
That wears for us the sweetest smile.
MY AUNT.
My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt 1
Long years have o'er her flown;
Yet still she strains the aching clasp
That binds her virgin zone;
I know it hurts her, — though she looks
As cheerful as she can;
Her waist is ampler than her life,
For life is but a span.
My aunt! my poor deluded aunt!
Her hair is almost gray;
Why will she train that winter curl
In such a spring-like way?
How can she lay her glasses down,
And say she reads as well,
When, through a double convex lens,
She just makes out to spell?
Her father, — grandpapal forgive
This erring lip its smiles, –
103
104 MY AUNT,
Vowed she should make the finest girl
Within a hundred miles;
He sent her to a stylish school;
'Twas in her thirteenth June;
And with her, as the rules required,
“Two towels and a spoon.”
They braced my aunt against a board,
To make her straight and tall;
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small;
They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screwed it up with pins; —
Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins.
So, when my precious aunt was done,
My grandsire brought her back;
(By daylight, lest some rabid youth
Might follow on the track;)
“Ah!” said my grandsire, as he shook
Some powder in his pan,
“What could this lovely creature do
Against a desperate man!”
MY AUNT, 105
Alas! nor chariot, . nor barouche,
Nor bandit cavalcade,
Tore from the trembling father's arms
His all-accomplished maid.
For her how happy had it been 1
And Heaven had spared to me
To see one sad, ungathered rose
On my ancestral tree.
THE TOADSTOOL.
THERE's a thing that grows by the fainting
flower, *
And springs in the shade of the lady's bower;
The lily shrinks, and the rose turns pale,
When they feel its breath in the summer gale,
And the tulip curls its leaves in pride,
And the blue-eyed violet starts aside;
But the lily may flaunt, and the tulip stare,
For what does the honest toadstool care?
She does not glow in a painted vest,
And she never blooms on the maiden's breast;
But she comes, as the saintly sisters do,
In a modest suit of a Quaker hue.
And, when the stars in the evening skies
Are weeping dew from their gentle eyes,
The toad comes out from his hermit cell,
The tale of his faithful love to tell.
106
THE TOADS TOOL. 107
Oh, there is light in her lover's glance,
That flies to her heart like a silver lance;
His breeches are made of spotted skin,
His jacket is tight, and his pumps are thin;
In a cloudless night you may hear his song,
As its pensive melody floats along,
And, if you will look by the moonlight fair,
The trembling form of the toad is there.
And he twines his arms round her slender stem,
In the shade of her velvet diadem;
But she turns away in her maiden shame,
And will not breathe on the kindling flame;
He sings at her feet through the livelong night,
And creeps to his cave at the break of light;
And whenever he comes to the air above,
His throat is swelling with baffled love,
THE MEETING OF THE DRYADS.*
IT was not many centuries since,
When, gathered on the moonlit green,
Beneath the Tree of Liberty,
A ring of weeping sprites were seen.
The freshman's lamp had long been dim,
The voice of busy day was mute,
And tortured melody had ceased
Her sufferings on the evening flute.
They met not as they once had met,
To laugh o'er many a jocund tale;
But every pulse was beating low,
And every cheek was cold and pale.
There rose a fair but faded one,
Who oft had cheered them with her song;
She waved a mutilated arm,
And silence held the listening throng.
* Written after a general pruning of the trees around
Harvard College.
108
THE MEETING OF THE DRYADS. 109
“Sweet friends,” the gentle nymph began,
“From opening bud to withering leaf,
One common lot has bound us all,
In every change of joy and grief.
“While all around has felt decay,
We rose in ever living prime,
With broader shade and fresher green,
Beneath the crumbling step of Time.
“When often by our feet has past
Some biped, nature’s walking whim,
Say, have we trimmed one awkward shape,
Or lopped away one crooked limb P
“Go on, fair Science; soon to thee -
Shall Nature yield her idle boast;
Her vulgar fingers formed a tree,
But thou hast trained it to a post.
“Go paint the birch's silver rind,
And quilt the peach with softer down;
Up with the willow's trailing threads,
Off with the sunflower's radiant crown |
110 THE MEETING OF THE DRYADS.
“Go, plant the lily on the shore,
And set the rose among the waves,
And bid the tropic bud unbind
Its silken zone in arctic caves;
“Bring bellows for the panting winds,
Hang up a lantern by the moon,
And give the nightingale a fife,
And lend the eagle a balloon!
“I cannot smile, – the tide of scorn,
That rolled through every bleeding vein,
Comes kindling fiercer as it flows
Back to its burning source again.
“Again in every quivering leaf
That moment's agony I feel,
When limbs, that spurned the northern blast,
- Shrunk from the sacrilegious steel.
“A curse upon the wretch who dared
To crop us with his felon saw l
May every fruit his lip shall taste
Lie like a bullet in his maw.
THE MEETING OF THE DRYADS. 111
“In ever julep that he drinks,
May gout, and bile, and headache be;
And when he strives to calm his pain,
May colic mingle with his tea.
“May nightshade cluster round his path,
And thistles shoot, and brambles cling;
May blistering ivy scorch his veins,
And dogwood burn, and nettles sting.
“On him may never shadow fall,
When fever racks his throbbing brow,
And his last shilling buy a rope
To hang him on my highest boughl”
She spoke; — the morning's herald beam
Sprang from the bosom of the sea,
And every mangled sprite returned
In sadness to her wounded tree.*
* A little poem, on a similar occasion, may be found
in the works of Swift, from which, perhaps, the idea was
borrowed; although I was as much surprised as amused to
meet with it some time after writing the preceding lines.
THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR.
THERE was a sound of hurrying feet,
A tramp on echoing stairs,
There was a rush along the aisles, –
It was the hour of prayers.
And on, like Ocean's midnight wave,
The current rolled along,
When, suddenly, a stranger form
Was seen amidst the throng.
He was a dark and Swarthy man,
That uninvited guest;
A faded coat of bottle green
Was buttoned round his breast.
There was not one among them all
Could say from whence he came;
Nor beardless boy, nor ancient man,
Could tell that stranger's name.
112
THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 113
All silent as the sheeted dead,
In spite of sneer and frown,
Fast by a gray-haired senior's side
He sat him boldly down.
There was a look of horror flashed
From out the tutor's eyes;
When all around him rose to pray,
The stranger did not rise !
A murmur broke along the crowd,
The prayer was at an end;
With ringing heels and measured tread
A hundred forms descend.
Through sounding aisles, o'er grating stair,
The long procession poured,
Till all were gathered on the seats
Around the Commons board.
That fearful stranger! down he sat,
Unasked, yet undismayed;
And on his lip a rising smile
Of scorn or pleasure played.
114 THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR.
He took his hat and hung it up,
With slow but earnest air;
He stripped his coat from off his back,
And placed it on a chair.
Then from his nearest neighbor's side
A knife and plate he drew;
And, reaching out his hand again,
He took his teacup too.
How fled the sugar from the bowl |
How sunk the azure creaml
They vanished like the shapes that float
Upon a summer’s dream.
A long, long draught, — an outstretched hand,
And crackers, toast, and tea,
They faded from the stranger's touch
Like dew upon the sea.
Then clouds were dark on many a brow,
Fear sat upon their souls,
And, in a bitter agony,
They clasped their buttered rolls.
THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 115
A whisper trembled through the crowd, –
Who could the stranger be?
And some were silent, for they thought
A cannibal was he.
What if the creature should arise,
For he was stout and tall, -
And swallow down a Sophomore,
Coat, crow's-foot, cap, and all !
All sullenly the stranger rose;
They sat in mute despair;
He took his hat from off the peg,
His coat from off the chair.
Four freshmen fainted on the seat,
Six swooned upon the floor;
Yet on the fearful being passed,
And shut the chapel door.
There is full many a starving man,
That walks in bottle green,
But never more that hungry one
In Commons-hall was seen.
116 THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR.
Yet often at the sunset hour,
When tolls the evening bell,
The freshman lingers on the steps,
That frightful tale to tell.
THE SPECTRE PIG.
A BALLAD.
IT was the stalwart butcher man,
That knit his swarthy brow,
And said the gentle Pig must die,
And sealed it with a vow.
And oh! it was the gentle Pig
Lay stretched upon the ground,
And ah! it was the cruel knife
His little heart that found.
They took him then, those wicked men,
They trailed him all along;
They put a stick between his lips,
And through his heels a thong;
And round and round an oaken beam
A hempen cord they flung,
And, like a mighty pendulum,
All solemnly he swung I
117
118
THE SPECTRE PIG.
Now say thy prayers, thou sinful man,
And think what thou hast done,
And read thy catechism well,
Thou bloody-minded one;
For if his sprite should walk by night,
It better were for thee,
That thou wert mouldering in the ground,
Or bleaching in the sea.
It was the savage butcher then,
That made a mock of sin,
And swore a very wicked oath,
He did not care a pin.
It was the butcher's youngest son, —
His voice was broke with sighs,
And with his pocket handkerchief
He wiped his little eyes;
All young and ignorant was he,
But innocent and mild,
And, in his soft simplicity,
Out spoke the tender child;—
THE SPECTRE PIG. 119
“O father, father, list to me;
The Pig is deadly sick,
And men have hung him by his heels,
And fed him with a stick.”
It was the bloody butcher then,
That laughed as he would die,
Yet did he soothe the sorrowing child,
And bid him not to cry; —
“O Nathan, Nathan, what's a Pig,
That thou shouldst weep and wail?
Come, bear thee like a butcher’s child,
And thou shalt have his tail l’”
It was the butcher's daughter then,
So slender and so fair,
That sobbed as if her heart would break,
And tore her yellow hair;
And thus she spoke in thrilling tone, –
Fast fell the tear-drops big; —
“Ah! woe is me! Alas! Alas!
The Pig. The Pig. The Pigl”
120 THE SPECTRE PIG.
Then did her wicked father's lips
Make merry with her woe,
And call her many a naughty name,
Because she whimpered so.
Ye need not weep, ye gentle ones,
In vain your tears are shed,
Ye cannot wash his crimson hand,
Ye cannot soothe the dead.
The bright sun folded on his breast
His robes of rosy flame,
And softly over all the west
The shades of evening came.
He slept, and troops of murdered Pigs
Were busy with his dreams;
Loud rang their wild, unearthly shrieks,
Wide yawned their mortal seams.
The clock struck twelve; the Dead hath heard;
He opened both his eyes,
And sullenly he shook his tail
To lash the feeding flies.
THE SPECTRE PIG. 121
One quiver of the hempen cord, –
One struggle and one bound, -
With stiffened limb and leaden eye,
The Pig was on the ground !
And straight towards the sleeper's house
His fearful way he wended;
And hooting owl, and hovering bat,
On midnight wing attended.
Back flew the bolt, up rose the latch,
And open swung the door,
And little mincing feet were heard
Pat, pat along the floor.
Two hoofs upon the sanded floor,
And two upon the bed;
And they are breathing side by side,
The living and the dead!
“Now wake, now wake, thou butcher man!
What makes thy cheek so pale?
Take hold ! take hold thou dost not fear
To clasp a spectre's tail?”
122 THE SPECTRE PIG.
Untwisted every winding coil;
The shuddering wretch took hold,
All like an icicle it seemed,
So tapering and so cold.
“Thou com'st with me, thou butcher man!” –
He strives to loose his grasp,
But, faster than the clinging vine,
Those twining spirals clasp.
And open, open swung the door,
And, fleeter than the wind,
The shadowy spectre swept before,
The butcher trailed behind.
Fast fled the darkness of the night,
And morn rose faint and dim;
They called full loud, they knocked full long,
They did not waken him.
Straight, straight towards that oaken beam.
A trampled pathway ran;
A ghastly shape was swinging there, —
It was the butcher man.
LINES BY A CLERK.
OH ! I did love her dearly,
And gave her toys and rings,
And I thought she meant sincerely,
When she took my pretty things;
But her heart has grown as icy
As a fountain in the fall,
And her love, that was so spicy,
It did not last at all.
I gave her once a locket,
It was filled with my own hair,
And she put it in her pocket
With very special care.
But a jeweller has got it, —
He offered it to me,
And another that is not it
Around her neck I see.
For my cooings and my billings
I do not now complain,
128
124 LINES BY A CLERK.
But my dollars and my shillings
Will never come again;
They were earned with toil and sorrow,
But I never told her that,
And now I have to borrow,
And want another hat.
Think, think, thou cruel Emma,
When thou shalt hear my woe,
And know my sad dilemma,
That thou hast made it so.
See, see my beaver rusty,
Look, look upon this hole,
This coat is dim and dusty;
Oh, let it rend thy soul!
Before the gates of fashion
I daily bent my knee,
But I sought the shrine of passion,
And found my idol, -thee;
Though never love intenser
Had bowed a soul before it,
Thine eye was on the censer,
And not the hand that bore it.
REFLECTIONS OF A PROUD PEDES-
TRIAN.
I SAw the curl of his waving lash,
And the glance of his knowing eye,
And I knew that he thought he was cutting a
dash,
As his steed went thundering by.
And he may ride in the rattling gig,
Or flourish the Stanhope gay,
And dream that he looks exceeding big
To the people that walk in the way;
But he shall think, when the night is still,
On the stable-boy's gathering numbers,
And the ghost of many a veteran bill
Shall hover around his slumbers;
The ghastly dun shall worry his sleep,
And constables cluster around him,
And he shall creep from the wood-hole deep
Where their spectre eyes have found him!
125
126 REFLECTIONS OF A PROUD PEDESTRIAN:
Ay! gather your reins, and crack your thong,
And bid your steed go faster;
He does not know, as he scrambles along,
That he has a fool for his master;
And hurry away on your lonely ride,
Nor deign from the mire to save me;
I will paddle it stoutly at your side
With the tandem that nature gave me !
THE POET'S LOT.
WHAT is a poet’s love?—
To write a girl a sonnet,
To get a ring, or some such thing,
And fustianize upon it.
What is a poet's fame?—
Sad hints about his reason,
And sadder praise from garreteers,
To be returned in season.
Where go the poet's lines?—
Answer, ye evening tapers!
Ye auburn locks, ye golden curls,
Speak from your folded papers!
Child of the ploughshare, smile;
Boy of the counter, grieve not,
Though muses round thy trundle-bed
Their broidered tissue weave not.
127
128 THE POET'S LOT.
The poet's future holds
No civic wreath above him;
Nor slated roof, or varnished chaise,
Nor wife nor child to love him.
Maid of the village inn,
Who workest woe on satin
(The grass in black, the graves in green,
The epitaph in Latin),
Trust not to them who say,
In stanzas, they adore thee;
Oh rather sleep in churchyard clay,
With urns and cherubs o'er thee!
DAILY TRIALs.
BY A SENSITIVE MAN.
OH there are times
When all this fret and tumult that we hear
Do seem more stale than to the Sexton's ear
His own dull chimes.
Ding dong ! ding dong !
The world is in a simmer like a sea
Over a pent volcano, - woe is me
All the day long!
From crib to shroud!
Nurse o'er our cradles screameth lullaby,
And friends in boots tramp round us as we die,
Snuffling aloud.
At morning's call
The small-voiced pug-dog welcomes in the sun,
And flea-bit mongrels, wakening one by one,
Give answer all.
...”
129
130 DAILY TRIALS.
When evening dim
Draws round us, then the lonely caterwaul
Tart Solo, sour duet, and general squall, -
These are our hymn.
Women, with tongues
Like polar needles, ever on the jar, –
Men, plugless word-spouts, whose deep foun.
tains are
Within their lungs.
Children, with drums
Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass,
Peripatetics with a blade of grass
Between their thumbs.
Vagrants, whose arts
Have caged some devil in their mad machine,
Which grinding, squeaks, with husky groans
between, . -
Come out by starts.
Cockneys that kill
Thin horses of a Sunday, -men, with clams,
Hoarse as young bisons roaring for their dams
From hill to hill.
DAILY TRIALS. 131
Soldiers, with guns
Making a nuisance of the blessed air,
Child-crying bellmen, children in despair
Screeching for buns.
Storms, thunders, waves!
Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill;
Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still
But in their graves.
EVENING.
BY A TAILOR.
DAY hath put on his jacket, and around
His burning bosom buttoned it with stars.
Here will I lay me on the velvet grass,
That is like padding to earth's meagre ribs,
And hold communion with the things about me.
Ah me! how lovely is the golden braid,
That binds the skirt of night's descending robel
The thin leaves, quivering on their silken
threads,
Do make a music like to rustling satin,
As the light breezes smooth their downy nap.
Ha! what is this that rises to my touch,
So like a cushion? Can it be a cabbage?
It is, it is that deeply injured flower,
Which boys do flout us with; — but yet I love
thee,
182
EVENING. 133
Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout.
Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright
As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath
Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air;
But now thou seemest like a bankrupt beau,
Stripped of his gaudy hues and essences,
And growing portly in his sober garments.
Is that a swan that rides upon the water?
Oh, no, it is that other gentle bird,
Which is the patron of our noble calling.
I well remember, in my early years,
When these young hands first closed upon a
goose;
I have a scar upon my thimble finger,
Which chronicles the hour of young ambition.
My father was a tailor, and his father,
And my sire's grandsire, all of them were tailors;
They had an ancient goose, – it was an heir-
loom
From some remoter tailor of our race.
It happened I did see it on a time
When none was near, and I did deal with it,
And it did burn me, – oh, most fearfully
134 EVENING.
It is a joy to straighten out one's limbs,
And leap elastic from the level counter,
Leaving the petty grievances of earth,
The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears,
And all the needles that do wound the spirit,
For such a pensive hour of soothing silence.
Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress,
Lays bare her shady bosom; — I can feel
With all around me; — I can hail the flowers
That sprig earth’s mantle, – and yon quiet
bird,
That rides the stream, is to me as a brother.
The vulgar know not all the hidden pockets,
Where Nature stows away her loveliness.
But this unnatural posture of the legs
Cramps my extended calves, and I must go
Where I can coil them in their wonted fashion.
THE DORCHESTER GIANT.
THERE was a giant in time of old,
A mighty one was he ;
He had a wife, but she was a scold,
So he kept her shut in his mammoth fold;
And he had children three.
It happened to be an election day,
And the giants were choosing a king;
The people were not democrats then,
They did not talk of the rights of men,
And all that sort of thing.
Then the giant took his children three
And fastened them in the pen;
The children roared; quoth the giant, “Be
Still l’”
And Dorchester Heights and Milton Hill
Rolled back the sound again.
135
136 THE DORCHESTER GIANT.
Then he brought them a pudding stuffed with
plums,
As big as the State-House dome;
Quoth he, “There's something for you to eat;
So stop your mouths with your 'lection treat,
And wait till your dad comes home.”
So the giant pulled him a chestnut stout,
And whittled the boughs away;
The boys and their mother set up a shout,
Said he, “You’re in, and you can’t get out,
Bellow as loud as you may.”
Off he went, and he growled a tune
As he strode the fields along;
'Tis said a buffalo fainted away,
And fell as cold as a lump of clay,
When he heard the giant's song.
But whether the story's true or not,
It is not for me to show;
There's many a thing that's twice as queer
In somebody's lectures that we hear,
And those are true, you know.
THE DORCHESTER GIANT. 137
What are those lone ones doing now,
The wife and the children sad?
Oh! they are in a terrible rout,
Screaming, and throwing their pudding about,
Acting as they were mad.
They flung it over to Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;
They tumbled as thick as rain.
sº * sº $ * sº *
Giant and mammoth have passed away,
For ages have floated by;
The Suet is hard as a marrow bone,
And every plum is turned to a stone,
But there the puddings lie.
And if, some pleasant afternoon,
You'll ask me out to ride,
The whole of the story I will tell,
And you shall see where the puddings fell,
And pay for the punch beside.
TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A GENTLEMAN.”
IN THE ATHENAEUM GALLERY.
IT may be so, - perhaps thou hast
A warm and loving heart;
I will not blame thee for thy face,
Poor devil as thou art.
That thing, thou fondly deem'st a nose,
Unsightly though it be, –
In spite of all the cold world’s scorn,
It may be much to thee.
Those eyes, – among thine elder friends
Perhaps they pass for blue; —
No matter, — if a man can see,
What more have eyes to do?
Thy mouth, – that fissure in thy face
By something like a chin, –
May be a very useful place
To put thy victual in.
188
TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A GENTLEMAN.” 139
I know thou hast a wife at home,
I know thou hast a child,
By that subdued, domestic smile
Upon thy features mild.
That wife sits fearless by thy side,
That cherub on thy knee;
They do not shudder at thy looks,
They do not shrink from thee.
Above thy mantel is a hook, -
A portrait once was there;
It was thine only ornament, —
Alas! that hook is bare.
She begged thee not to let it go,
She begged thee all in vain;
She wept, — and breathed a trembling prayer
To meet it safe again.
It was a bitter sight to see
That picture torn away;
It was a solemn thought to think
What all her friends would say!
140 TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A GENTLEMAN.”
And often in her calmer hours,
And in her happy dreams,
Upon its long-deserted hook
The absent portrait seems.
Thy wretched infant turns his head
In melancholy wise,
And looks to meet the placid stare
Of those unbending eyes.
I never saw thee, lovely one, –
Perchance I never may;
It is not often that we cross
Such people in our way;
But if we meet in distant years,
Or on some foreign shore,
Sure I can take my Bible oath,
I’ve seen that face before.
TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A LADY.”
IN THE ATHENAEUM GALLERY.
WELL, Miss, I wonder where you live,
I wonder what’s your name,
I wonder how you came to be
In such a stylish frame;
Perhaps you were a favorite child,
Perhaps an only one;
Perhaps your friends were not aware
You had your portrait done l
Yet you must be a harmless soul;
I cannot think that Sin
Would care to throw his loaded dice,
With such a stake to win;
I cannot think you would provoke
The poet's wicked pen,
Or make young women bite their lips,
Or ruin fine young men.
141
142 TO THE PORTRAIT OF “A LADY.”
Pray, did you ever hear, my love,
Of boys that go about,
Who, for a very trifling sum
Will snip one's picture out?
I’m not averse to red and white,
But all things have their place,
I think a profile cut in black
Would suit your style of face
I love sweet features; I will own
That I should like myself
To see my portrait on a wall,
Or bust upon a shelf;
But nature sometimes makes one up
Of such sad odds and ends,
It really might be quite as well
Hushed up among one's friends!
THE COMET.
THE Comet! He is on his way,
And singing as he flies;
The whizzing planets shrink before
The spectre of the skies;
Ah! well may regal orbs burn blue,
And satellites turn pale,
Ten million cubic miles of head,
Ten billion leagues of taill
On, on by whistling spheres of light,
He flashes and he flames;
He turns not to the left nor right,
He asks them not their names;
One spurn from his demoniac heel, -
Away, away they fly,
Where darkness might be bottled up
And sold for “Tyrian dye.”
And what would happen to the land,
And how would look the sea,
143
144 THE COMET.
If in the bearded devil's path -
Our earth should chance to be?
Full hot and high the sea would boil,
Full red the forests gleam;
Methought I saw and heard it all
In a dyspeptic dream!
I saw a tutor take his tube
The Comet’s course to spy;
I heard a scream, - the gathered rays
Had stewed the tutor's eye;
I saw a fort, — the soldiers all
Were armed with goggles green;
Pop cracked the guns! whiz flew the balls!
Bang went the magazine !
I saw a poet dip a scroll
Each moment in a tub,
I read upon the warping back,
“The Dream of Beelzebub";
He could not see his verses burn,
Although his brain was fried,
And ever and anon he bent
To wet them as they dried.
THE COMET. 145
I saw the scalding pitch roll down
The crackling, sweating pines,
And streams of smoke, like water-spouts,
Burst through the rumbling mines;
I asked the firemen why they made
Such noise about the town;
They answered not, — but all the while
The brakes went up and down.
I saw a roasting pullet sit
Upon a baking egg;
I saw a cripple scorch his hand
Extinguishing his leg;
I saw nine geese upon the wing
Towards the frozen pole,
And every mother's gosling fell
Crisped to a crackling coal.
I saw the ox that browsed the grass
Writhe in the blistering rays,
The herbage in his shrinking jaws
Was all a fiery blaze;
I saw huge fishes, boiled to rags,
Bob through the bubbling brine;
146 THE COMET.
And thoughts of Supper crossed my soul;
I had been rash at mine.
Strange sights strange sounds ! O fearful dream
Its memory haunts me still,
The steaming sea, the crimson glare,
That wreathed each wooded hill;
Stranger l if through thy reeling brain,
| Such midnight visions sweep
Spare, spare, oh, spare thine evening meal,
And sweet shall be thy sleep!
A NOONTIDE LYRIC.
THE dinner-bell, the dinner-bell
Is ringing loud and clear;
Through hill and plain, through street and lane,
It echoes far and near;
From curtained hall, and whitewashed stall,
Wherever men can hide,
Like bursting waves from Ocean caves,
They float upon the tide.
I smell the smell of roasted meat!
I hear the hissing fry
The beggars know where they can go,
But where, oh, where shall I?
At twelve o'clock men took my hand,
At two they only stare,
And eye me with a fearful look,
As if I were a bear !
The poet lays his laurels down
And hastens to his greens;
147
148
A NOONTIDE LYRIC.
The happy tailor quits his goose,
To riot on his beans;
The weary cobbler snaps his thread,
The printer leaves his pi;
His very devil hath a home,
But what, oh, what have I?
Methinks I hear an angel voice,
That softly seems to say:
“Pale stranger, all may yet be well,
Then wipe thy tears away;
Erect thy head, and cock thy hat,
And follow me afar, -
And thou shalt have a jolly meal
And charge it at the bar.”
I hear the voice! I go! I go
Prepare your meat and wine!
They little heed their future need,
Who pay not when they dine.
Give me to-day the rosy bowl,
Give me one golden dream, -
To-morrow kick away the stool,
And dangle from the beam
THE BALLAD OF THE OYSTERMAN.
IT was a tall young oysterman lived by the
river-side, -
His shop was just upon the bank, his boat was
on the tide; -
The daughter of a fisherman, that was so
straight and slim,
Lived over on the other bank, right opposite
to him.
It was the pensive oysterman that saw a lovely
maid,
Upon a moonlight evening, a sitting in the
shade;
. He saw her wave her handkerchief, as much
as if to say, -
“I’m wide awake, young oysterman, and all
the folks away.”
149
150 THE BALLAD OF THE OYSTERMAN.
Then up arose the oysterman, and to himself
said he,
“I guess I’ll leave the skiff at home, for fear
that folks should see;
I read it in the story-book, that, for to kiss
his dear,
Leander swam the Hellespont, — and I will
swim this here.”
And he has leaped into the waves, and crossed
the shining stream,
And he has clambered up the bank, all in the
moonlight gleam;
Oh, there were kisses sweet as dew, and words
as soft as rain, –
But they have heard her father's step, and in
he leaps again!
Out spoke the ancient fisherman, – “Oh, what
was that, my daughter?”
“'Twas nothing but a pebble, sir, I threw into
the water; ”
“And what is that, pray tell me, love, that
paddles off so fast?”
“It’s nothing but a porpoise, sir, that’s been
a swimming past.”
THE BALLAD OF THE OYSTERMAN. 151
Out spoke the ancient fisherman, – “Now bring
me my harpoon
I’ll get into my fishing-boat, and fix the fellow
soon; ”
Down fell that pretty innocent, as falls a snow-
white lamb,
Her hair drooped round her pallid cheeks, like
sea-weed on a clam.
Alas for those two loving ones! she waked not
from her Swound,
And he was taken with the cramp, and in the
- waves was drowned;
But Fate has metamorphosed them, in pity of
their woe,
And now they keep an oyster-shop for mermaids
down below.
THE MUSIC-GRINDERS.
THERE are three ways in which men take
One’s money from his purse,
And very hard it is to tell
Which of the three is worse;
But all of them are bad enough
To make a body curse.
You're riding out some pleasant day,
And counting up your gains;
A fellow jumps from out a bush,
And takes your horse's reins,
Another hints some words about
A bullet in your brains.
It's hard to meet such pressing friends
In such a lonely spot;
It’s very hard to lose your cash,
But harder to be shot;
And so you take your wallet out,
Though you would rather not.
152
THE MUSIC-GRINDERS. 153
Perhaps you're going out to dine, –
Some filthy creature begs
You'll hear about the cannon-ball
That carried off his pegs,
And says it is a dreadful thing
For men to lose their legs.
He tells you of his starving wife,
His children to be fed,
Poor little, lovely innocents,
All clamorous for bread, –
And so you kindly help to put
A bachelor to bed.
You're sitting on your window-seat
Beneath a cloudless moon;
You hear a sound, that seems to wear
The semblance of a tune,
As if a broken fife should strive
To drown a cracked bassoon.
And nearer, nearer still, the tide
Of music seems to come,
There's something like a human voice,
And something like a drum;
154 THE MUSIC-GRINDERS.
You sit in speechless agony,
Until your ear is numb.
Poor “home, sweet home,” should seem to be
A very dismal place;
Your “auld acquaintance,” all at once,
Is altered in the face;
Their discords sting through Burns and Moore,
Like hedgehogs dressed in lace.
You think they are crusaders, sent
From some infernal clime,
To pluck the eyes of Sentiment,
And dock the tail of Rhyme,
To crack the voice of Melody,
And break the legs of Time.
But hark! the air again is still,
The music all is ground,
And silence, like a poultice, comes
To heal the blows of sound;
It cannot be, – it is, – it is, –
A hat is going round !
No! Pay the dentist when he leaves
A fracture in your jaw;
THE MUSIC-GRINDERS. 155
And pay the owner of the bear,
That stunned you with his paw,
And buy the lobster, that has had
Your knuckles in his claw;
But if you are a portly man,
Put on your fiercest frown,
And talk about a constable
To turn them out of town;
Then close your sentence with an oath,
And shut the window down
And if you are a slender man,
Not big enough for that,
Or, if you cannot make a speech,
Because you are a flat,
Go very quietly and drop
A button in the hat!
THE TREADMILL SONG.
THE stars are rolling in the sky,
The earth rolls on below,
And we can feel the rattling wheel
Revolving as we go.
Then tread away, my gallant boys,
And make the axle fly;
Why should not wheels go round about,
Like planets in the sky? -
Wake up, wake up, my duck-legged man,
And stir your solid pegs!
Arouse, arouse, my gawky friend,
And shake your spider legs;
What though you’re awkward at the trade,
There's time enough to learn, –
So lean upon the rail, my lad,
And take another turn.
They’ve built us up a noble wall,
To keep the vulgar out;
156
THE TREADMILL SONG. 157
We've nothing in the world to do,
But just to walk about;
So faster, now, you middle men,
And try to beat the ends, –
It's pleasant work to ramble round
- Among one’s honest friends.
Here, tread upon the long man's toes,
. He shan’t be lazy here, —
And punch the little fellow's ribs,
- And tweak that lubber's ear, –
He's lost them both, – don’t pull his hair,
Because he wears a scratch,
But poke him in the further eye,
That isn't in the patch.
Hark! fellows, there's the supper-bell,
And so our work is done;
It’s pretty sport, — suppose we take
A round or two for fun!
If ever they should turn me out,
When I have better grown,
Now hang me, but I mean to have
A treadmill of my own
THE SEPTEMBER GALE.
I'M not a chicken; I have seen
Full many a chill September,
And though I was a youngster then,
That gale I well remember;
The day before, my kite-string snapped,
And I, my kite pursuing,
The wind whisked off my palm-leaf hat; –
For me two storms were brewing !
It came as quarrels sometimes do,
When married folks get clashing;
There was a heavy sigh or two,
Before the fire was flashing, —
A little stir among the clouds,
Before they rent asunder, —
A little rocking of the trees,
And then came on the thunder.
Lord! how the ponds and rivers boiled,
And how the shingles rattled !
158
THE SEPTEMBER GALE. 159
And oaks were scattered on the ground
As if the Titans battled;
And all above was in a howl,
And all below a clatter, —
The earth was like a frying-pan,
Or some such hissing matter.
It chanced to be our washing-day,
And all our things were drying:
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the shirts and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept, —
I lost my Sunday breeches |
I saw them straddling through the air,
Alas! too late to win them;
I saw them chase the clouds as if
The devil had been in them;
They were my darlings and my pride,
My boyhood's only riches, –
“Farewell, farewell,” I faintly cried, -
“My breeches I O my breeches I’”
160 THE SEPTEMBER GALE.
That night I saw them in my dreams,
How changed from what I knew them."
The dews had steeped their faded threads,
The winds had whistled through them;
I saw the wide and ghastly rents
Where demon claws had torn them;
A hole was in their amplest part,
As if an imp had worn them.
I have had many happy years,
And tailors kind and clever,
But those young pantaloons have gone
Forever and forever ! -
And not till fate has cut the last
Of all my earthly stitches,
This aching heart shall cease to mourn
My loved, my long-lost breeches
THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS,
I wroTE some lines once on a time
In wondrous merry mood,
And thought, as usual, men would say
They were exceeding good.
They were so queer, so very queer,
I laughed as I would die;
Albeit, in the general way,
A sober man am I.
I called my servant, and he came;
How kind it was of him,
To mind a slender man like me,
He of the mighty limb!
“These to the printer,” I exclaimed,
And, in my humorous way,
I added (as a trifling jest),
“There'll be the devil to pay.”
161
162 THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS.
He took the paper, and I watched,
And saw him peep within;
At the first line he read, his face
Was all upon the grin.
He read the next; the grin grew broad,
And shot from ear to ear;
He read the third; a chuckling noise
I now began to hear.
The fourth; he broke into a roar;
The fifth; his waistband split;
The sixth; he burst five buttons off,
And tumbled in a fit.
Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,
I watched that wretched man,
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
THE HOT SEASON.
THE folks, that on the first of May
Wore winter-coats and hose,
Began to say, the first of June,
“Good Lord! how hot it grows.”
At last two Fahrenheits blew up,
And killed two children small,
And one barometer shot dead
A tutor with its ball !
Now all day long the locusts.sang
Among the leafless trees :
Three new hotels warped inside out,
The pumps could only wheeze;
And ripe old wine, that twenty years
Had cobwebbed o'er in vain,
Came spouting through the rotten corks,
Like Jolys' best Champagne !
The Worcester locomotives did
Their trip in half an hour;
163
164 THE HOT SEASON.
The Lowell cars ran forty miles
Before they checked the power;
Roll brimstone soon became a drug,
And loco-focos fell;
All asked for ice, but everywhere
Saltpetre was to sell.
Plump men of mornings ordered tights,
But, ere the scorching noons,
Their candle-moulds had grown as loose
As Cossack pantaloons!
The dogs ran mad, - men could not try
If water they would choose;
A horse fell dead, – he only left
Four red-hot, rusty shoes!
But soon the people could not bear
The slightest hint of fire;
Allusions to caloric drew
A flood of savage ire;
The leaves on heat were all torn out
From every book at school,
And many blackguards kicked and caned,
Because they said, -“Keep cool!”
THE HOT SEASON. - 165
The gas-light companies were mobbed,
The bakers all were shot,
The penny press began to talk
Of Lynching Doctor Nott;
And all about the warehouse steps
Were angry men in droves,
Crashing and splintering through the doors
To smash the patent stoves |
The abolition men and maids
Were tanned to such a hue,
You scarce could tell them from their friends
Unless their eyes were blue;
And, when I left, society
Had burst its ancient guards,
And Brattle Street and Temple Place
Were interchanging cards.
PO E M S
ADDED SINCE THE FIRST EDITION
DEPARTED DAYS.
YES, dear departed, cherished days,
Could Memory's hand restore
Your morning light, your evening rays,
From Time's gray urn once more, —
Then might this restless heart be still,
This straining eye might close,
And Hope her fainting pinions fold,
While the fair phantoms rose.
But, like a child in ocean's arms,
We strive against the stream,
Each moment farther from the shore
Where life's young fountains gleam; —
Each moment fainter wave the fields,
And wider rolls the sea;
The mist grows dark, - the sun goes down, –
Day breaks, – and where are we?
169
THE STEAMBOAT.
SEE how yon flaming herald treads
The ridged and rolling waves,
As, crashing o'er their crested heads,
She bows her surly slaves |
With foam before and fire behind,
She rends the clinging sea,
That flies before the roaring wind,
Beneath her hissing lee.
The morning spray, like sea-born flowers,
With heaped and glistening bells,
Falls round her fast, in ringing showers,
With every wave that swells;
And, burning o'er the midnight deep,
In lurid fringes thrown,
The living gems of ocean sweep
Along her flashing zone.
With clashing wheel, and lifting keel,
And smoking torch on high,
170 -
THE STEAMBOAT, 171
When winds are loud, and billows reel,
She thunders foaming by;
When seas are silent and serene,
With even beam she glides,
The sunshine glimmering through the green
That skirts her gleaming sides.
Now, like a wild nymph, far apart
She veils her shadowy form,
The beating of her restless heart
Still sounding through the storm;
Now answers, like a courtly dame,
The reddening surges o'er,
With flying scarf of spangled flame,
The Pharos of the shore.
To-night yon pilot shall not sleep,
Who trims his narrowed sail;
To-night yon frigate scarce shall keep
Her broad breast to the gale;
And many a foresail, scooped and strained,
Shall break from yard and stay,
Before this smoky wreath has stained
The rising mist of day.
172 THE STEAMBOAT,
Hark! hark I hear yon whistling shroud,
I see yon quivering mast;
The black throat of the hunted cloud
Is panting forth the blast!
An hour, and, whirled like winnowing chaff,
The giant surge shall fling
His tresses o'er yon pennon staff,
White as the sea-bird's wing!
Yet rest, ye wanderers of the deep;
Nor wind nor wave shall tire
Those fleshless arms, whose pulses leap
With floods of living fire; -
Sleep on, —and, when the morning light
Streams o'er the shining bay,
Oh, think of those for whom the night
Shall never wake in day !
THE PARTING WORD.
I MUST leave thee, lady sweet!
Months shall waste before we meet 5
Winds are fair, and sails are spread,
Anchors leave their ocean bed 5
Ere this shining day grow dark,
Skies shall gird my shoreless bark;
Through thy tears, O lady mine,
Read thy lover's parting line.
When the first sad sun shall set,
Thou shalt tear thy locks of jet;
When the morning star shall rise
Thou shalt wake with weeping eyes;
When the second sun goes down,
Thou more tranquil shalt be grown,
Taught too well that wild despair
Dims thine eyes, and spoils thy hair.
All the first unquiet week
Thou shalt wear a smileless cheek;
173
174
THE PARTING WORD.
In the first month's second half
Thou shalt once attempt to laugh;
Then in Pickwick thou shalt dip,
Slightly puckering round the lip,
Till at last, in sorrow's spite,
Samuel makes thee laugh outright.
While the first seven mornings last,
Round thy chamber bolted fast,
Many a youth shall fume and pout,
“Hang the girl, she's always out!”
While the second week goes round,
Vainly shall they ring and pound;
When the third week shall begin,
“Martha, let the creature in.”
Now once more the flattering throng
Round thee flock with smile and song,
But thy lips, unweaned as yet,
Lisp, “Oh, how can I forget!”
Men and devils both contrive
Traps for catching girls alive;
Eve was duped, and Helen kissed, -
How, 'oh, how can you resist?
THE PARTING WORD. 175
First be careful of your fan,
Trust it not to youth or man;
Love has filled a pirate's sail
Often with its perfumed gale.
Mind your kerchief most of all,
Fingers touch when kerchiefs fall;
Shorter ell than mercers clip,
Is the space from hand to lip.
Trust not such as talk in tropes,
Full of pistols, daggers, ropes;
All the hemp that Russia bears
Scarce would answer lovers’ prayers;
Never thread was spun so fine,
Never spider stretched the line,
Would not hold the lovers true
That would really swing for you.
Fiercely some shall storm and swear,
Beating breasts in black despair;
Others murmur with a sigh,
You must melt or they will die;
Painted words on empty lies,
Grubs with wings like butterflies;
176
THE PARTING WORD.
Let them die, and welcome, too;
Pray what better could they do?
Fare thee well, if years efface
From thy heart love's burning trace,
Keep, oh keep that hallowed seat
From the tread of vulgar feet;
If the blue lips of the sea
Wait with icy kiss for me,
Let not thine forget the vow,
Sealed how often, Love, as now !
SONG,
WRITTEN FOR THE DINNER GIVEN TO CHARLES
DICKENS, BY THE YOUNG MEN OF BOSTON, FEB-
RUARY I, I842.
THE stars their early vigils keep,
The silent hours are near
When drooping eyes forget to weep, —
Yet still we linger here;
And what, — the passing churl may ask, -
Can claim such wondrous power,
That Toil forgets his wonted task,
And Love his promised hour?
The Irish harp no longer thrills,
Or breathes a fainter tone;
The clarion blast from Scotland’s hills
Alas! no more is blown;
And Passion's burning lip bewails
Her Harold's wasted fire,
Still lingering o'er the dust that veils
The Lord of England’s lyre.
177
178 SONG.
But grieve not o'er its broken strings,
Nor think its soul hath died,
While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings
As once o'er Avon's side; —
While gentle summer sheds her bloom,
And dewy blossoms wave,
Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb
And Nelly's nameless grave.
Thou glorious island of the sea!
Though wide the wasting flood
That parts our distant land from thee,
We claim thy generous blood;
Nor o'er thy far horizon springs
One hallowed star of fame,
But kindles, like an angel's wings,
Our western skies in flame !
LINES
RECITED AT THE BERKSHIRE FESTIVAL,
COME back to your mother, ye children, for
shame,
Who have wandered like truants, for riches or
fame !
With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap,
She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap.
Come out from your alleys, your courts, and
your lanes,
And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our
plains;
Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent
wives
Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives.
Come you of the law, who can talk, if you
please, -
Till the man in the moon will allow it’s a
cheese,
179
180 LINES.
And leave “the old lady, that never tells lies,”
To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes.
Ye healers of men, for a moment decline
Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line;
While you shut up your turnpike, your neigh-
bors can go
The old roundabout road, to the regions below.
You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens,
And whose head is an ant-hill of units and
tens;
Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still
As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill.
Poor drudge of the city how happy he feels,
With the burs on his legs, and the grass at his
heels |
No dodger behind, his bandannas to share,
No constable grumbling, “You mustn't walk
there ! ”
In yonder green meadow, to memory dear,
He skaps a mosquito and brushes a tear;
LINES. 181
The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms.
and shoots,
He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his
boots.
There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the
old church;
That tree at its side had the flavor of birch;
Oh, sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks,
Though the prairie of youth had so many “big
licks.”
By the side of yon river he weeps and he
slumps,
The boots fill with water, as if they were
pumps;
Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed,
With a glow in his heart and a cold in his
head.
'Tis past, — he is dreaming, — I see him again;
The ledger returns as by legerdemain;
His neckcloth is damp with an easterly flaw,
And he holds in his fingers an omnibus straw.
182 LINES.
He dreams the chill gust is a blossomy gale,
That the straw is a rose from his dear native
vale; - - -
And murmurs, unconscious of space and of
time,
“A I. Extra-super. Ah, isn't it PRIME!”
Oh, what are the prizes we perish to win
To the first little “shiner” we caught with a
pin -
No soil upon earth is so dear to our eyes
As the soil we first stirred in terrestrial pies!
Then come from all parties, and parts, to our
feast;
Though not at the “Astor,” we'll give you at
least
A bite at an apple, a seat on the grass,
And the best of old — water — at nothing a
glass. ,-
VERSES FOR AFTER-DINNER.
36. B. k SOCIETY, 1844.
I was thinking last night, as I sat in the cars,
With the charmingest prospect of cinders and
stars,
Next Thursday is — bless me !—how hard it
will be,
If that cannibal president calls upon me !
There is nothing on earth that he will not
devour,
From a tutor in seed to a freshman in flower;
No sage is too gray, and no youth is too
green,
And you can’t be too plump, though you’re
never too lean.
While others enlarge on the boiled and the
roast,
He serves a raw clergyman up with a toast,
183
184 VERSES FOR AFTER-DINNER.
Or catches some doctor, quite tender and
young,
And basely insists on a bit of his tongue.
Poor victim, prepared for his classical spit,
With a stuffing of praise, and a basting of
wit,
‘You may twitch at your collar, and wrinkle
your brow,
But you’re up on your legs, and you’re in for
it now. - - -
Oh, think of your friends, – they are waiting
to hear
Those jokes that are thought so remarkably
queer;
And all the Jack Horners of metrical buns
Are prying and fingering to pick out the puns.
Those thoughts which, like chickens, will
always thrive best
When reared by the heat of the natural nest,
Will perish if hatched from their embryo
dream
In the mist and the glow of convivial steam.
VERSES FOR AFTER-DINNER. 185
Oh pardon me, then, if I meekly retire,
With a very small flash of ethereal fire;
No rubbing will kindle your Lucifer match,
If the fiz does not follow the primitive scratch.
Dear friends, who are listening so sweetly the
while,
With your lips double reefed in a snug little
smile, –
I leave you two fables, both drawn from the
deep, —
The shells you can drop, but the pearls you
may keep. *
$ $ Sk $ $ $ #
The fish called the FLOUNDER, perhaps you may
know,
Has one side for use and another for show;
One side for the public, a delicate brown,
And one that is white, which he always keeps
down.
A very young flounder, the flattest of flats
(And they’re none of them thicker than opera
hats),
186 VERSES FOR AFTER-DINNER.
Was speaking more freely than charity taught
Of a friend and relation that just had been
caught.
“My what an exposure just see what a sight!
I blush for my race, — he is showing his white
Such spinning and wriggling, — why, what does
he wish?
How painfully small to respectable fish l’”
Then said an old SCULPIN, - “My freedom:
excuse,
But you're playing the cobbler with holes in
your shoes;
Your brown side is up, — but just wait till
you're tried, -
And you'll find that all flounders are white on
one side.”
:* $ $ * * $ *
There’s a slice near the PICKEREL's pectoral
fins,
Where the thorax leaves off and the venter
begins;
VERSES FOR AFTER-DINNER. 187
Which his brother, survivor of fish-hooks and
lines,
Though fond of his family, never declines.
He loves his relations; he feels they'll be
missed;
But that one little tit-bit he cannot resist ;
So your bait may be swallowed, no matter how
fast, -
For you catch your next fish with a piece of
the last.
And thus, O survivor, whose merciless fate
Is to take the next hook with the president’s
bait,
You are lost while you snatch from the end of
his line
The morsel he rent from this bosom of mine !
SONG,
FOR A TEMPERANCE DINNER TO WHICH LADIES
WERE INVITED. (NEW YORK MERCANTILE LI-
BRARY ASSOCIATION, NOVEMBER, 1842.)
A HEALTH to dear woman She bids us un-
twine,
From the cup it encircles, the fast-clinging
vine; -
But her cheek in its crystal with pleasure will
glow, -
And mirror its bloom in the bright wave below.
A health to sweet woman The days are no
more
When she watched for her lord till the revel
was o'er,
And smoothed the white pillow, and blushed
when he came,
As she pressed her cold lips on his forehead
of flame.
188
SONG. 189
Alas for the loved one ! too spotless and fair
The joys of his banquet to chasten and share;
Her eye lost its light that his goblet might
shine,
And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his
wine.
Joy smiles in the fountain, health flows in the
rills,
As their ribands of silver unwind from the
hills;
They breathe not the mist of the bacchanal’s
dream,
But the lilies of innocence float on their
Stream. -
Then a health and a welcome to woman once
more l -
She brings us a passport that laughs at our
door;
It is written on crimson, — its letters are
pearls, —
It is countersigned Mature. So, room for
the Girls :
THE ONLY DAUGHTER.
(ILLUSTRATION OF A PICTURE.)
THEY bid me strike the idle strings,
As if my summer days
Had shaken sunbeams from their wings,
To warm my autumn lays;
They bring to me their painted urn,
As if it were not time
To lift my gauntlet and to spurn
The lists of boyish rhyme;
And, were it not that I have still
Some weakness in my heart
That clings around my stronger will
And pleads for gentler art,
Perchance I had not turned away
The thoughts grown tame with toil,
To cheat this lone and pallid ray,
That wastes the midnight oil.
Alas! with every year I feel
Some roses leave my brow;
190
- THE ONLY DAUGHTER. 191
Too young for wisdom's tardy seal,
Too old for garlands now;
Yet, while the dewy breath of spring
Steals o'er the tingling air,
And spreads and fans each emerald wing
The forest soon shall wear,
How bright the opening year would seem,
Had I one look like thine,
To meet me when the morning beam
Unseals these lids of mine !
Too long I bear this lonely lot,
That bids my heart run wild
To press the lips that love me not,
To clasp the stranger's child.
How oft beyond the dashing seas,
Amidst those royal bowers,
Where danced the lilacs in the breeze,
And swung the chestnut flowers,
I wandered like a wearied slave
Whose morning task is done,
To watch the little hands that gave
Their whiteness to the sun;
To revel in the bright young eyes,
192 THE ONLY DAUGHTER,
Whose lustre sparkled through
The sable fringe of southern skies,
Or gleamed in Saxon blue !
How oft I heard another's name
Called in some truant’s tone;
Sweet accents which I longed to claim,
To learn and lisp my own
Too soon the gentle hands, that pressed
The ringlets of the child,
Are folded on the faithful breast
Where first he breathed and smiled;
Too oft the clinging arms untwine,
The melting lips forget,
And darkness veils the bridal shrine
Where wreaths and torches met;
If Heaven but leaves a single thread
Of Hope's dissolving chain,
Even when her parting plumes are spread,
It bids them fold again;
The cradle rocks beside the tomb;
The cheek now changed and chill,
Smiles on us in the morning bloom
Of one that loves us still.
THE ONLY DAUGHTER. 193
-
Sweet image | I have done thee wrong
To claim this destined lay;
The leaf that asked an idle song
Must bear my tears away.
Yet, in thy memory shouldst thou keep
This else forgotten strain,
Till years have taught thine eyes to weep
And flattery's voice is vain;
Oh, then, thou fledgling of the nest,
Like the long-wandering dove,
Thy weary heart may faint for rest,
As mine, on changeless love;
And, while these sculptured lines retrace
The hours now dancing by,
This vision of thy girlish grace
May cost thee, too, a sigh.
LEXINGTON.
SLowLY the mist o'er the meadow was creeping,
Bright on the dewy buds glistened the sun,
When from his couch, while his children were
sleeping,
Rose the bold rebel and shouldered his gun.
Waving her golden veil
Over the silent dale,
Blithe looked the morning on cottage and
spire;
Hushed was his parting sigh,
While from his noble eye
Flashed the last sparkle of liberty’s fire.
On the smooth green where the fresh leaf is
springing
Calmly the first-born of glory have met;
Hark! the death-volley around them is ringing !
Look! with their life-blood the young grass
is wet !
194
I.EXINGTON. 195
Faint is the feeble breath,
Murmuring low in death,
“Tell to our sons how their fathers have died; ”
Nerveless the iron hand,
Raised for its native land,
Lies by the weapon that gleams at its side.
Over the hillsides the wild knell is tolling,
From their far hamlets the yeomanry come;
As through the storm-clouds the thunder-burst
rolling, i.
Circles the beat of the mustering drum.
Fast on the soldier's path
Darken the waves of wrath,
Long have they gathered and loud shall they
fall;
Red glares the musket's flash,
Sharp rings the rifle’s crash,
Blazing and clanging from thicket and wall.
Gayly the plume of the horseman was dancing,
Never to shadow his cold brow again;
Proudly at morning the war-steed was prancing,
Reeking and panting he droops on the rein;
196 LEXINGTON.
Pale is the lip of scorn,
Voiceless the trumpet horn,
Torn is the silken-fringed red cross on high;
Many a belted breast
Ilow on the turf shall rest,
Ere the dark hunters the herd have past by.
Snow-girdled crags where the hoarse wind is
raving,
Rocks where the weary floods murmur and
wail,
Wilds where the fern by the furrow is waving,
Reeled with the echoes that rode on the gale;
Far as the tempest thrills
Over the darkened hills,
Far as the Sunshine streams over the plain,
Roused by the tyrant band,
Woke all the mighty land,
Girded for battle, from mountain to main.
Green be the graves where her martyrs are
lying !
Shroudless and tombless they sunk to their
rest, —
LEXINGTON. 197
While o'er their ashes the starry fold flying
Wraps the proud eagle they roused from his
neSt.
Borne on her northern pine,
Long o'er the foaming brine
Spread her broad banner to storm and to sun;
Heaven keep her ever free,
Wide as o'er land and sea
Floats the fair emblem her heroes have won.
THE ISLAND HUNTING SONG.
No more the summer floweret charms,
The leaves will soon be sere,
And Autumn folds his jewelled arms
Around the dying year;
So, ere the waning seasons claim
Our leafless groves awhile,
With golden wine and glowing flame
We’ll crown our lonely isle.
Once more the merry voices sound
Within the antlered hall,
And long and loud the baying hounds
Return the hunter's call;
And through the woods, and o'er the hill
And far along the bay,
The driver's horn is sounding shrill, -
Up, sportsmen, and away!
No bars of steel, or walls of stone,
Our little empire bound,
198
THE ISLAND HUNTING SONG. 199
But, circling with his azure zone,
The sea runs foaming round;
The whitening wave, the purpled skies,
The blue and lifted shore,
Braid with their dim and blending dyes
Our wide horizon o’er.
And who will leave the grave debate
That shakes the smoky town,
To rule amid our island-state,
And wear our oak-leaf crown?
And who will be awhile content
To hunt our woodland game,
And leave the vulgar pack that scent
The reeking track of fame?
Ah, who that shares in toils like these
Will sigh not to prolong
Our days beneath the broad-leaved trees,
Our nights of mirth and song?
Then leave the dust of noisy streets,
Ye outlaws of the wood,
And follow through his green retreats
Your noble Robin Hood.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.
WHERE, oh where are the visions of morning,
Fresh as the dews of our prime?
Gone, like tenants that quit without warning,
Down the back entry of time.
Where, oh where are life's lilies and roses,
Nursed in the golden dawn's smile?
Dead as the bulrushes round little Moses,
On the old banks of the Nile.
Where are the Marys, and Anns, and Elizas,
Loving and lovely of yore?
Look in the columns of old Advertisers, –
Married and dead by the score.
Where the gray colts and the ten-year-old fillies,
Saturday's triumph and joy?
Gone like our friend tróðas dºcus Achilles,
Homer's ferocious old boy.
200
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. 201
Die-away dreams of ecstatic emotion,
Hopes like young eagles at play,
Vows of unheard-of and endless devotion,
How ye have faded away!
Yet, though the ebbing of Time's mighty river
Leave our young blossoms to die,
Let him roll smooth in his current forever,
Till the last pebble is dry.
A SONG,
FOR THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF HARVARD
COLLEGE, 1836.
WHEN the Puritans came over,
Our hills and swamps to clear,
The woods were full of catamounts,
And Indians red as deer,
With tomahawks and scalping-knives,
That make folks' heads look queer; —
Oh, the ship from England used to bring
A hundred wigs a year!
The crows came cawing through the air
To pluck the pilgrims' corn,
The bears came snuffing round the door
Whene'er a babe was born,
The rattlesnakes were bigger round
Than the butt of the old rams' horn
The deacon blew at meeting time
On every “Sabbath” morn.
20%
A SONG. 203
But soon they knocked the wigwams down,
And pine-tree trunk and limb
Began to sprout among the leaves
In shape of steeples slim;
And out the little wharves were stretched
Along the ocean's rim,
And up the little schoolhouse shot
To keep the boys in trim.
And when, at length, the College rose,
The Sachem cocked his eye
At every tutor’s meagre ribs
Whose coat-tails whistled by;
But, when the Greek and Hebrew words
Came tumbling from their jaws,
The copper-colored children all
Ran screaming to the squaws.
And who was on the Catalogue
When college was begun?
Two nephews of the President,
And the Professor's son,
(They turned a little Indian by,
As brown as any bun);
204 A SONG.
Lord! how the seniors knocked about
The freshman class of one !
They had not then the dainty things
That commons now afford,
But succotash and hominy
Were smoking on the board;
They did not rattle round in gigs,
Or dash in long-tail blues,
But always on Commencement Days
The tutors blacked their shoes.
God bless the ancient Puritans!
Their lot was hard enough;
But honest hearts make iron arms,
And tender maids are tough;
So love and faith have formed and fed
Our true-born Yankee stuff,
And keep the kernel in the shell
The British found so rough I
TERPSICHORE.”
IN narrowest girdle, O reluctant Muse,
In closest frock and Cinderella shoes,
Bound to the foot-lights for thy brief display,
One zephyr step, and then dissolve away!
SHORT is the space that gods and men can spare
To Song's twin brother when she is not there.
Let others water every lusty line,
As Homer's heroes did their purple wine;
Pierian revellers! Known in strains like these
The native juice, the real honest squeeze, –
Strains that, diluted to the twentieth power,
In yon grave temple f might have filled an
hour.
* Read at the Annual Dinner of the P. B. K. Society, at
Cambridge, August 24, 1843.
# The Annual Poem is always delivered in the neigh
boring church.
205
206 TERPSICHORE,
Small room for Fancy's many-chorded lyre,
For Wit's bright rockets with their trains of
fire,
For Pathos, struggling vainly to surprise
The iron tutor's tear-denying eyes,
For Mirth, whose finger with delusive wile
Turns the grim key of many a rusty Smile,
For Satire, emptying his corrosive flood
On hissing Folly's gas-exhaling brood,
The pun, the fun, the moral and the joke,
The hit, the thrust, the pugilistic poke, –
Small space for these, so pressed by niggard
Time,
Like that false matron, known to nursery
rhyme, –
Insidious Morey, - scarce her tale begun,
Ere listening infants weep the story done.
O had we room to rip the mighty bags
That Time, the harlequin, has stuffed with rags!
Grant us one moment to unloose the strings,
While the old gray-beard shuts his leather wings.
But what a heap of motley trash appears
Crammed in the bundles of successive years!
TERPSICHORE. 207
As the lost rustic on some festal day
Stares through the concourse in its vast array, —
Where in one cake a throng of faces runs,
All stuck together like a sheet of buns, –
And throws the bait of some unheeded name,
Or shoots a wink with most uncertain aim,
So roams my vision, wandering over all,
And strives to choose, but knows not where to
fall.
Skins of flayed authors, – husks of dead re-
views, -
The turn-coat's clothes, – the office-seeker's
shoes, –
Scraps from cold feasts, where conversation runs
Through mouldy toasts to oxidated puns,
And grating songs a listening crowd enduras,
Rasped from the throats of bellowing ama-
teurs; —
Sermons, whose writers played such dangerous
tricks
Their own heresiarchs called them heretics
(Strange that one term such distant poles
should link,
208 TERPSICHORE.
The Priestleyan’s copper and the Puseyan's
zinc); — -
Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs
A blindfold minuet over addled eggs,
Where all the syllables that end in éd,
Like old dragoons, have cuts across the head; —
Essays so dark Champollion might despair
To guess what mummy of a thought was there,
Where our poor English, striped with foreign
phrase,
Looks like a Zebra in a parson's chaise; —
Lectures that cut our dinners down to roots,
Or prove (by monkeys) men should stick to
fruits;
Delusive error, – as at trifling charge
Professor Gripes will certify at large; —
Mesmeric pamphlets, which to facts appeal,
Each fact as slippery as a fresh-caught eel; —
And figured heads, whose hieroglyphs invite
To wandering knaves that discount fools at
sight; —
Such things as these, with heaps of unpaid
bills, f
And candy puffs and homoeopathic pills,
TERPSICHORE 209
And ancient bell-crowns with contracted rim,
And bonnets hideous with expanded brim,
And coats whose memory turns the Sartor pale,
Their sequels tapering like a lizard's tail; —
How might we spread them to the Smiling day,
And toss them, fluttering like the new-mown
hay,
To laughter's light or sorrow's pitying shower,
Were these brief minutes lengthened to an hour.
The narrow moments fit like Sunday shoes,
How vast the heap, how quickly must we
choose;
A few small scraps from out his mountain mass
We snatch in haste, and let the vagrant pass.
This shrunken CRUST that Cerberus could not
bite,
Stamped (in one corner) “Pickwick copyright,”
Kneaded by youngsters, raised by flattery’s
yeast,
Was once a loaf, and helped to make a feast.
He for whose sake the glittering show appears
Has sown the world with laughter and with
tears,
210 TERPSICHORE,
And they whose welcome wets the bumper's
brim
Have wit and wisdom, - for they all quote him.
So, many a tongue the evening hour prolongs
With spangled speeches, – let alone the songs, –
Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh,
And weak teetotals warm to half and half,
And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes,
Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens,
And wits stand ready for impromptu claps,
With loaded barrels and percussion caps,
And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys,
Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze;
While the great Feasted views with silent glee
His scattered limbs in Yankee fricassee.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship
plays
The pleasing game of interchanging praise;
Self-love, grimalkin of the human heart,
Is ever pliant to the master's art;
Soothed with a word, she peacefully with
draws -
And sheathes in velvet her obnoxious claws,
TERPSICHORE. 211
And thrills the hand that smooths her glossy
fur
With the light tremor of her grateful purr.
But what sad music fills the quiet hall,
If on her back a feline rival fall;
And oh, what noises shake the tranquil house,
If old Self-interest cheats her of a mouse !
Thou, O my country, hast thy foolish ways,
Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise;
But, if the stranger touch thy modes or laws,
Off goes the velvet and out come the claws!
And thou, Illustrious ! but too poorly paid
In toasts from Pickwick for thy great crusade,
Though, while the echoes labored with thy
name, -
The public trap denied thy little game,
Let other lips our jealous laws revile, —
The marble Talfourd or the rude Carlyle, –
But on thy lids, that Heaven forbids to close
Where'er the light of kindly nature glows,
Let not the dollars that a churl denies
Weigh like the shillings on a dead man's eyes!
212 TERPSICHORE.
Or, if thou wilt, be more discreetly blind,
Nor ask to see all wide extremes combined.
Not in our wastes the dainty blossoms smile,
That crowd the gardens of thy scanty isle.
There white-cheeked Luxury weaves a thousand
charms; —
Here sun-browned Labor swings his naked arms.
Long are the furrows he must trace between
The ocean’s azure and the prairie's green;
Full many a blank his destined realm displays,
Yet see the promise of his riper days:
Far through yon depths the panting engine
moves, - -
His chariots ringing in their steel-shod grooves;
And Erie's naiad flings her diamond wave
O'er the wild sea-nymph in her distant cave
While tasks like these employ his anxious
hours,
What if his corn-fields are not edged with
flowers?
Though bright as silver the meridian beams
Shine through the crystal of thine English
Streams,
TERPSICHORE. 213
Turbid and dark the mighty wave is whirled
That drains our Andes and divides a world !
But lo! a PARCHMENT I Surely it would seem
The sculptured impress speaks of power su-
preme;
Some grave design the Solemn page must claim
That shows so broadly an emblazoned name;
A sovereign's promise ! Look, the lines afford
All Honor gives when Caution asks his word;
There sacred Faith has laid her snow-white
hands,
And awful Justice knit her iron bands;
Yet every leaf is stained with treachery's dye,
And every letter crusted with a lie.
Alas! no treason has degraded yet
The Arab's salt, the Indian’s calumet;
A simple rite, that bears the wanderer's pledge,
Blunts the keen shaft and turns the dagger's
- ‘edge; —
While jockeying senates stop to sign and seal,
And freeborn statesmen legislate to steal.
Rise, Europe, tottering with thine Atlas load,
Turn thy proud eye to Freedom's blest abode,
214 TERPSICHORE.
And round her forehead, wreathed with heavenly
flame,
Bind the dark garland of her daughter's shame!
Ye ocean clouds, that wrap the angry blast,
Coil her stained ensign round its haughty mast,
Or tear the fold that wears so foul a scar,
And drive a bolt through every blackened star!
Once more, — once only, - we must stop so
soon, –
What have we here? A GERMAN-SILVER SPOON;
A cheap utensil, which we often see
Used by the dabblers in aesthetic tea;
Of slender fabric, somewhat light and thin,
Made of mixed metal, chiefly lead and tin;
The bowl is shallow, and the handle small
Marked in large letters with the name JEAN
PAUL.
Small as it is, its powers are passing strange,
For all who use it show a wondrous change;
And first, a fact to make the barbers stare,
It beats Macassar for the growth of hair;
See those small youngsters whose expansive ears
Maternal kindness grazed with frequent shears;
*
TERPSICHORE. 215
Each bristling crop a dangling mass becomes,
And all the spoonies turn to Absaloms'
Nor this alone its magic power displays,
It alters strangely all their works and ways;
With uncouth words they tire their tender lungs,
The same bald phrases on their hundred
tongues;
“Ever” “The Ages” in their page appear,
“Alway” the bedlamite is called a “Seer”;
On every leaf the “earnest” sage may scan,
Portentous bore their “many-sided ” man, –
A weak eclectic, groping vague and dim,
Whose every angle is a half-starved whim,
Blind as a mole and curious as a lynx,
Who rides a beetle, which he calls a “Sphinx.”
And oh what questions asked in club-foot rhyme
Of Earth the tongueless and the deaf-mute
Time !
Here babbling “Insight” shouts in Nature's
€arS `
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,
With “Whence am I?” and “Wherefore did I
come?” e
216 TERPSICHORE.
Deluded infants! will they ever know
Some doubts must darken o'er the world below,
Though all the Platos of the nursery trail
Their “clouds of glory” at the go-cart's tail?
O might these couplets their attention claim,
That gain their author the Philistine's name;
(A stubborn race, that, spurning foreign law,
Was much belabored with an ass's jawl)
Melodious Laura ! From the sad retreats
That hold thee, smothered with excess of
sweets,
Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream,
Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream
The slip-shod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls,
The sophist’s cobwebs hang thy roseate walls,
And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes
The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked
“runes.”
Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful hordes
That candied thoughts in amber-colored words,
And in the precincts of thy late abodes
The clattering verse-wright hammers Orphic
odes.
TERPSICHORE. 217
Thou, soft as zephyr, wast content to fly
On the gilt pinions of a balmy sigh;
He, vast as Phoebus on his burning wheels,
Would stride through ether at Orion's heels;
Thy emblem, Laura, was a perfume-jar,
And thine, young Orpheus, is a pewter star;
The balance trembles, – be its verdict told
When the new jargon slumbers with the old ! .
Cease, playful goddess! From thine airy bound
Drop like a feather softly to the ground;
This light bolero grows a ticklish dance,
And there is mischief in thy kindling glance.
To-morrow bids thee, with rebuking frown,
Change thy gauze tunic for a home-made gown,
Too blest by fortune, if the passing day
Adorn thy bosom with its frail bouquet,
But oh still happier if the next forgets
Thy daring steps and dangerous pirouettes!
URANIA:
A RHYMED LESSON.”
YES, dear Enchantress, – wandering far and
long,
In realms unperfumed by the breath of song,
Where flowers ill-flavored shed their sweets
around, -
And bitterest roots invade the ungenial ground,
Whose gems are crystals from the Epsom mine,
Whose vineyards flow with antimonial wine,
whose gates admit no mirthful feature in,
Save one gaunt mocker, the Sardonic grin,
Whose pangs are real, not the woes of rhyme
That blue-eyed misses warble out of time;—
Truant, not recreant to thy sacred claim,
Older by reckoning, but in heart the same,
Freed for a moment from the chains of toil,
I tread once more thy consecrated soil;
* This poem was delivered before the Boston Mercantile
Library Association, October 14, 1846.
218
ORANIA : A RHYMED LESSON. 219
Here at thy feet my old allegiance own,
Thy subject still, and loyal to thy throne !
My dazzled glance explores the crowded
hall;
Alas, how vain to hope the smiles of all !
I know my audience. All the gay and young
Love the light antics of a playful tongue;
And these, remembering some expansive line
My lips let loose among the nuts and wine,
Are all impatience till the opening pun
Proclaim the witty shamfight is begun.
Two fifths at least, if not the total half,
Have come infuriate for an earthquake laugh;
I know full well what alderman has tied
His red bandanna tight about his 'side;
I see the, mother, who, aware that boys
Perform their laughter with superfluous noise,
Besides her kerchief, brought an extra one
To stop the explosions of her bursting son;
I know a tailor, once a friend of mine,
Expects great doings in the button line; —
For mirth’s concussions rip the outward case,
And plant the stitches in a tenderer place.
220 URANIA :
I know my audience;— these shall have their due;
A smile awaits them ere my song is through !
I know myself. Not servile for applause,
My Muse permits no deprecating clause;
Modest or vain, she will not be denied
One bold confession, due to honest pride;
And well she knows, the drooping veil of song
Shall save her boldness from the caviller’s wrong.
Her sweeter voice the Heavenly Maid imparts
To tell the secrets of our aching hearts;
For this, a suppliant, captive, prostrate, bound,
She kneels imploring at the feet of sound;
For this, convulsed in thought’s maternal pains,
She loads her arms with rhyme's resounding
chains; -
Faint though the music of her fetters be,
It lends one charm; — her lips are ever free
Think not I come, in manhood’s fiery noon,
To steal his laurels from the stage buffoon;
His sword of lath the harlequin may wield;
Behold the star upon my lifted shield !
Though the just critic pass my humble name,
And sweeter lips have drained the cup of fame,
A RHYMED LESSON, 221
While my gay stanza pleased the banquet's
lords,
The soul within was tuned to deeper chords!
Say, shall my arms, in other conflicts taught
To swing aloft the ponderous mace of thought,
Lift, in obedience to a school-girl’s law
Mirth's tinsel wand or laughter's tickling straw?
Say, shall I wound with satire's rankling spear
The pure, warm hearts that bid me welcome
here? sº
No! while I wander through the land of dreams
To strive with great and play with trifling
themes,
Let some kind meaning fill the varied line;
You have your judgment; will you trust to
mine?
BETweFN two breaths what crowded mys-
teries lie, –
The first short gasp, the last and long-drawn
sigh!
Like phantoms painted on the magic slide,
Forth from the darkness of the past we glide,
222 URANIA :
As living shadows for a moment seen
In airy pageant on the eternal screen,
Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame,
Then seek the dust and stillness whence we
Ca11162.
But whence and why, our trembling souls
inquire,
Caught these dim visions their awakening fire?
Oh, who forgets when first the piercing thought
Through childhood's musings found its way
unsought.
I AM; — I LIVE. The mystery and the fear
When the dread question — WHAT HAS BROUGHT
ME HEREP
Burst through life’s twilight, as before the sun
Roll the deep thunders of the morning gunſ
Are angel faces, silent and serene,
Bent on the conflicts of this little scene,
Whose dreamlike efforts, whose unreal strife,
Are but the preludes to a larger life?
Or does life's summer see the end of all,
These leaves of being mouldering as they fall,
A RHYMED LESSON. 223
As the old poet vaguely used to deem,
As WESLEY questioned in his youthful dream?"
O could such mockery reach our souls indeed,
Give back the Pharaohs' or the Athenian's creed;
Better than this a heaven of man's device, —
The Indian's sports, the Moslem's paradise!
Or is our being's only end and aim
To add new glories to our Maker's name,
As the poor insect, shrivelling in the blaze,
Lends a faint sparkle to its streaming rays?
Does earth send upwards to the Eternal's ear
The mingled discords of her jarring sphere
To swell his anthem, while Creation rings
With notes of anguish from its shattered strings?
Is it for this the immortal Artist means
These conscious, throbbing, agonized machines?
Dark is the soul whose sullen creed can bind
In chains like these the all-embracing Mind;
No! two-faced bigot, thou dost ill reprove
The sensual, selfish, yet benignant Jove,
And praise. a tyrant throned in lonely pride,
Who loves himself, and cares for naught beside;
224 URANIA :
Who gave thee, summoned from primeval night
A thousand laws, and not a single right;
A heart to feel and quivering nerves to thrill,
The sense of wrong, the death-defying will;
Who girt thy senses with this goodly frame,
Its earthly glories and its orbs of flame,
Not for thyself, unworthy of a thought,
Poor helpless victim of a life unsought,
But all for him, unchanging and Supreme,
The heartless centre of thy frozen scheme !
Trust not the teacher with his lying scroll,
Who tears the charter of thy shuddering soul;
The God of love, who gave the breath that
War IYYS -
All living dust in all its varied forms,
Asks not the tribute of a world like this
To fill the measure of his perfect bliss.
Though winged with life through all its radi-
ant shores,
Creation flowed with unexhausted stores
Cherub and seraph had not yet enjoyed;
For this he called thee from the quickening
void
A RHYMED LESSON, 225
Nor this alone; a larger gift was thine,
A mightier purpose swelled his vast design;
Thought, — conscience, — will, - to make them
all thine own, -
He rent a pillar from the eternal throne !
Made in his image, thou must nobly dare
The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
With eye uplifted it is thine to view, -
From thine own centre, heaven's o'er-arching
blue;
So round thy heart a beaming circle lies
No fiend can blot, no hypocrite disguise;
From all its orbs one cheering voice is heard,
Full to thine ear it bears the Father’s word,
Now, as in Eden where his first-born trod:
“Seek thine own welfare, true to man and
God!”
Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create
Remember whose the sacred lips that tell,
Angels approve thee when thy choice is well;
Remember, One, a judge of righteous men,
Swore to spare Sodom if she held but ten
226 URANIA :
Use well the freedom which thy Master gave,
(Think'st thou that Heaven can tolerate a
slave?)
And He who made thee to be just and true
Will bless thee, love thee, –ay, respect thee
too !
Nature has placed thee on a changeful tide,
To breast its waves, but not without a guide;
Yet, as the needle will forget its aim,
Jarred by the fury of the electric flame,
As the true current it will falsely feel,
Warped from its axis by a freight of steel;
So will thy CONSCIENCE lose its balanced truth,
If passion's lightning fall upon thy youth;
So the pure effluence quit its sacred hold,
Girt round too deeply with magnetic gold.
Go to yon tower, where busy science plies
Her vast antennae, feeling through the skies; .
That little vernier on whose slender lines
The midnight taper trembles as it shines,
A silent index, tracks the planet's march
In all their wanderings through the ethereal arch.
A RHYMED LESSON. 227
Tells through the mist where dazzled Mercury
burns,
And marks the spot where Uranus returns.
So, till by wrong or negligence effaced,
The living index which thy Maker traced
Repeats the line each starry Virtue draws
Through the wide circuit of creation's laws;
Still tracks unchanged the everlasting ray
Where the dark shadows of temptation stray;
But, once defaced, forgets the orbs of light,
And leaves thee wandering o'er the expanse of
night!
“What is thy creed?” a hundred lips in-
quire;
“Thou seekest God beneath what Christian
spire?”
Nor ask they idly, for uncounted lies
Float upward on the smoke of sacrifice;
When man’s first incense rose above the plain,
Jf earth's two altars one was built by Cain
Uncursed by doubt, our earliest creed we
take;
We love the precepts for the teacher's sake;
228 URANIA:
The simple lessons which the nursery taught
Fell soft and stainless on the buds of thought,
And the full blossom owes its fairest hue
To those sweet tear-drops of affection's dew.
Too oft the light that led our earlier hours
Fades with the perfume of our cradle flowers;
The clear, cold question chills to frozen doubt;
Tired of beliefs, we dread to live without;
Oh, then, if reason waver at thy side,
Let humbler Memory be thy gentle guide;
Go to thy birth-place, and, if faith was there,
Repeat thy father's creed, thy mother's prayer
Faith loves to lean on Time's destroying arm,
And age, like distance, lends a double charm;
In dim cathedrals, dark with vaulted gloom,
What holy awe invests the saintly tomb
There pride will bow, and anxious care expand,
And creeping avarice come with open hand;
The gay can weep, the impious can adore,
From morn's first glimmerings on the chancel
floor
Till dying sunset sheds his crimson stains
Through the faint halos of the irised panes.
A RHYMED LESSON. 229
Yet there are graves, whose rudely shapen sod
Bears the fresh footprints where the sexton trod;
Graves where the verdure has not dared to
shoot,
Where the chance wild-flower has not fixed its
root,
Whose slumbering tenants, dead without a
Iname,
The eternal record shall at length proclaim
Pure as the holiest in the long array
Of hooded, mitred, or tiaraed clay !
Come, seek the air; some pictures we may
gain
Whose passing shadows shall not be in vain;
Not from the scenes that crowd the stranger's
soil,
Not from our own amidst the stir of toil,
But when the Sabbath brings its kind release,
And Care lies slumbering on the lap of Peace.
The air is hushed; the street is holy ground;
Hark! The sweet bells renew their welcome
sound ;
230 URANIA :
As one by one awakes each silent tongue,
It tells the turret whence its voice is flung.”
The Chapel, last of sublunary things
That shocks our echoes with the name of
Kings, -
Whose bell, just glistening from the font and
forge,
Rolled its proud requiem for the second George,
Solemn and swelling, as of old it rang,
Flings to the wind its deep, sonorous clang; —
The simpler pile, that, mindful of the hour
When Howe's artillery shook its half-built
tower, - - -
Wears on its bosom, as a bride might do,
The iron breastpin which the “Rebels” threw,
Wakes the sharp echoes with the quivering
thrill -
Of keen vibrations, tremulous and shrill; —
Aloft, suspended in the morning's fire,
Crash the vast cymbals from the Southern
spire; —
The Giant, standing by the elm-clad green,
His white lance lifted o'er the silent scene,
A RHYMED LESSON. 231
Whirling in air his brazen goblet round,
Swings from its brim the swollen floods of
sound; —
While, sad with memories of the olden time,
The Northern Minstrel pours her tender chime,
Faint, single tones, that spell their ancient song,
But tears still follow as they breathe along.
Child of the soil, whom fortune sends to
range
Where man and nature, faith and customs
change,
Borne in thy memory, each familiar tone
Mourns on the winds that sigh in every zone.
When Ceylon sweeps thee with her perfumed
breeze
Through the warm billows of the Indian seas;
When, – ship and shadow blended both in
One, —
Flames o'er thy mast the equatorial sun,
From sparkling midnight to refulgent noon
Thy canvas swelling with the still monsoon;
When through thy shrouds the wild tornado
sings,
232 URANIA : -
And thy poor seabird folds her tattered wings,
Oft will delusion o'er thy senses steal,
And airy echoes ring the Sabbath peal |
Then, dim with grateful tears, in long array
Rise the fair town, the island-studded bay, -
Home, with its smiling board, its cheering
fire, -
The half-choked welcome of the expecting
sire,
The mother’s kiss, and, still if aught remain,
Our whispering hearts shall aid the silent
strain. —
Ah, let the dreamer o'er the taffrail lean
To muse unheeded, and to weep unseen;
Fear not the tropic's dews, the evening's chills,
His heart lies warm among his triple hills 1
Turned from her path by this deceitful
gleam,
My wayward fancy half forgets her theme;
See through the streets that slumbered in repose
The living current of devotion flows;
Its varied forms in one harmonious band,
Age leading childhood by its dimpled hand,
A RHYMED LESSON. 233
Want, in the robe whose faded edges fall
To tell of rags beneath the tartan shawl,
And wealth, in silks that, fluttering to appear,
Lift the deep borders of the proud cashmere.
See, but glance briefly, sorrow-worn and pale,
Those sunken cheeks beneath the widow's
veil;
Alone she wanders where with him she trod,
No arm to stay her, but she leans on God.
While other doublets deviate here and there
What secret handcuff binds that pretty pair?
Compactest couple ! pressing side to side, —
Ah, the white bonnet that reveals the bride 1
By the white neckcloth, with its straitened
tie,
The sober hat, the Sabbath-speaking eye,
Severe and smileless, he that runs may read
. The stern disciple of Geneva's creed;
Decent and slow, behold his solemn march ;
Silent he enters through yon crowded arch.
A livelier bearing of the outward man,
The light-hued gloves, the undevout rattan,
234 URANIA:
Now smartly raised or half-profanely twirled, -
A bright, fresh twinkle from the week-day
world, -
Tell their plain story; —yes, thine eyes behold
A cheerful Christian from the liberal fold.
Down the chill street that curves in gloomi-
est shade, -
What marks betray yon solitary maid?
The cheek's red rose, that speaks of balmier
air;
The Celtic blackness of her braided hair;”
The gilded missal in her kerchief tied ;
Poor Nora, exile from Killarney's side
Sister in toil, though blanched by colder
- skies,
That left their azure in her downcast eyes,
See pallid Margaret, Labor's patient child,
Scarce weaned from home, the nursling of the
wild
Where white Katahdin o'er the horizon shines,
And broad Penobscot dashes through the pines;
Still, as she hastes, her careful fingers hold
The unfailing hymn-book in its cambric fold.
A RHYMED LESSON. 235
Six days at drudgery's heavy wheel she stands,
The seventh sweet morning folds her weary
hands;
Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be
SUlre
He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor
This weekly picture faithful memory draws,
Nor claims the noisy tribute of applause;
Faint is the glow such barren hopes can lend,
And frail the line that asks no loftier end.
Trust me, kind listener, I will yet beguile
Thy saddened features of the promised smile;
This magic mantle thou must well divide,
It has its sable and its ermine side;
Yet, ere the lining of the robe ‘appears,
Take thou in silence, what I give in tears.
Dear listening soul, this transitory scene
Of murmuring stillness, busily serene;
This solemn pause, the breathing-space of man,
The halt of toil's exhausted caravan,
Comes sweet with music to thy wearied ear;
Rise with its anthems to a holier sphere !
236 . URANIA :
Deal meekly, gently, with the hopes that
guide -
The lowliest brother straying from thy side;
If right, they bid thee tremble for thine own,
If wrong, the verdict is for God alonel
What though the champions of thy faith
eSteem - *
The sprinkled fountain or baptismal stream;
Shall jealous passions in unseemly strife
Cross their dark weapons o'er the waves of life?
Let my free Soul, expanding as it can,
Leave to his scheme the thoughtful Puritan;
But Calvin's dogma shall my lips deride?
In that stern faith my angel Mary died;—
Or ask if mercy's milder creed can save,
Sweet sister, risen from thy new-made grave?
True, the harsh founders of thy church
reviled p
That ancient faith, the trust of Erin's child;
Must thou be raking in the crumbled past
For racks and fagots in her teeth to cast?
A RHYMED LESSON, 237
See from the ashes of Helvetia's pile
The whitened skull of old Servetus smile !
Round her young heart thy “Romish Upas”
threw -
Its firm, deep fibres, strengthening as she grew;
Thy sneering voice may call them “Popish
tricks,” —
Her Latin prayers, her dangling crucifix, —
But De Profundis blessed her father's grave;
That “idol’ cross her dying mother gave
What if some angel looks with equal eyes
On her and thee, the simple and the wise,
Writes each dark fault against thy brighter
creed,
And drops a tear with every foolish bead
Grieve, as thou must, o'er history's reeking
page;
Blush for the wrongs that stain thy happier age;
Strive with the wanderer from the better path,
Bearing thy message meekly, not in wrath;
Weep for the frail that err, the weak that fall,
Have thine own faith, – but hope and pray
for all !
238 • URANIA :
Faith; Conscience; Love. A meaner task
remains,
And humbler thoughts must creep in lowlier
strains; º -
Shalt thou be honest? Ask the worldly schools,
And all will tell thee knaves are busier fools;
Prudent? Industrious? Let not modern pens
Instruct “Poor Richard’s ” fellow-citizens.
Be firm ' one constant element in luck
Is genuine, solid, old Teutonic pluck;
See yon tall shaft; it felt the earthquake's
thrill,
Clung to its base, and greets the sunrise still.
Stick to your aim; the mongrel's hold will
slip, -
But only crowbars loose the bulldog's grip;
Small as he looks, the jaw that never yields
Drags down the bellowing monarch of the
fields !
Yet in opinions look not always back;
Your wake is nothing, mind the coming track;
A RHYMED LESSON, 239
Leave what you’ve done for what you have to do;
Don't be “consistent,” but be simply true.
Don't catch the fidgets; you have found
your place *
Just in the focus of a nervous race,
Fretful to change, and rabid to discuss,
Full of excitements, always in a fuss; —
Think of the patriarchs; then compare as men
These lean-cheeked maniacs of the tongue and
pen
Run, if you like, but try to keep your breath;
Work like a man, but don't be worked to
death;
And with new notions, – let me change the
rule, –
Don’t strike the iron till it's slightly cool.
Choose well your set; our feeble nature seeks
The aid of clubs, the countenance of cliques;
And with this object settle first of all
Your weight of metal and your size of ball.
Track not the steps of such as hold you cheap,
Too mean to prize, though good enough to
keep;
240 URANIA :
The “real, genuine, no-mistake Tom Thumbs"
Are little people fed on great men's crumbs.
Yet keep no followers of that hateful brood
That basely mingles with its wholesome food
The tumid reptile, which, the poet said,
Doth wear a precious jewel in his head.
If the wild filly, “Progress,” thou would'st
ride,
Have young companions ever at thy side;
But, would'st thou stride the stanch old mare,
“Success,”
Go with thine elders, though they please thee less.
Shun such as lounge through afternoons and
eves,
And on thy dial write “Beware of thieves 1"
Felon of minutes, never taught to feel
The worth of treasures which thy fingers steal,
Pick my left pocket of its silver dime,
But spare the right, — it holds my golden time !
Does praise delight thee? Choose some
ultra side;
A sure old recipe, and often tried;
A RHYMED LESSON. 241
Be its apostle, congressman, or bard,
Spokesman, or jokesman, only drive it hard;
But know the forfeit which thy choice abides
For on two wheels the poor reformer rides,
One black with epithets the anti throws,
One white with flattery, painted by the pros.
Though books on MANNERS are not out of
print, -
An honest tongue may drop a harmless hint.
Stop not, unthinking, every friend you meet,
To spin your wordy fabric in the street;
While you are emptying your colloquial pack,
The fiend Zumbago jumps upon his back.
Nor cloud his features with the unwelcome tale
Of how he looks, if haply thin and pale;
Health is a subject for his child, his wife,
And the rude office that insures his life.
Look in his face, to meet thy neighbor's soul,
Not on his garments, to detect a hole;
“How to observe,” is what thy pages show,
Pride of thy sex, Miss Harriet Martineau !
Oh, what a precious book the one would be
That taught observers what they’re not to see!
242 URANIA :
I tell in verse, – ’twere better done in
prose, – -
One curious trick that everybody knows;
Once form this habit, and it's very strange
How long it sticks, how hard it is to change.
Two friendly people, both disposed to smile,
Who meet, like others, every little while,
Instead of passing with a pleasant bow,
And “How d'ye do?” or “How's your uncle
now P’’
Impelled by feelings in their nature kind,
But slightly weak, and somewhat undefined,
Rush at each other, make a sudden stand,
Begin to talk, expatiate, and expand;
Each looks quite radiant, seems extremely
struck,
Their meeting so was such a piece of luck;
Each thinks the other thinks he's greatly pleased
To screw the vice in which they both are
squeezed;
So there they talk, in dust, or mud, or snow,
Both bored to death, and both afraid to go!
Your hat once lifted, do not hang your fire,
Nor, like slow Ajax, fighting still, retire; -
A RHYMED LESSON. 243
When your old castor on your crown you clap,
Go off; you’ve mounted your percussion cap !
Some words on LANGUAGE may be well applied,
And take them kindly, though they touch your
pride;
Words lead to things; a scale is more precise, –
Coarse speech, bad grammar, swearing, drink-
ing, vice. -
Our cold Northeaster's icy fetter clips
The native freedom of the Saxon lips;
See the brown peasant of the plastic South,
How all his passions play about his mouth !
With us, the feature that transmits the soul,
A frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.
The crampy shackles of the ploughboy's walk •
Tie the small muscles when he strives to talk;
Not all the pumice of the polished town
Can smooth this roughness of the barnyard down;
Rich, honored, titled, he betrays his race
By this one mark, - he's awkward in the
face; —
Nature's rude impress, long before he knew
The sunny street that holds the sifted few.
244 URANIA :
It can’t be helped, though, if we’re taken
young, 4.
We gain some freedom of the lips and tongue;
But school and college often try in vain
To break the padlock of our boyhood’s chain;
One stubborn word will prove this axiom
true; —
No quondam rustic can enunciate view.
A few brief stanzas may be well employed
To speak of errors we can all avoid.
Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope
The careless lips that speak of Söap for soap;
Her edict exiles from her fair abode
The clownish voice that utters rôad for rôad;
Less stern to him who calls his coat a céat,
And steers his boat, believing it a bóat, -
She pardoned one, our classic city’s boast,
Who said at Cambridge, mêst instead of most,
But knit her brows and stamped her angry foot
To hear a Teacher call a root a röot.
Once more; speak clearly, if you speak at
all;
Carve every word before you let it fall;
A RHYMED LESSON. 245
Don’t, like a lecturer or dramatic star,
Try over hard to roll the British R;
Do put your accents in the proper spot;
Don't, —let me beg you, - don’t say “How?”
for “What?” -
And, when you stick on conversation’s burs,
Don’t strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.
From little matters let us pass to less,
And lightly touch the mysteries of DRESS;
The outward forms the inner man reveal,—
We guess the pulp before we cut the peel.
I leave the broadcloth, – coats and all the
rest, —
The dangerous waistcoat, called by cockneys
“vest,” . - -
The things named “pants” in certain docu-
ments,
A word not made for gentlemen, but “gents”;
One single precept might the whole condense:
Be sure your tailor is a man of sense;
But add a little care, a decent pride,
And always err upon the Sober side.
246 URANIA :
Three pairs of boots one pair of feet de
mands, -
If polished daily by the owner's hands;
If the dark menial’s visit save from this,
Have twice the number, for he'll sometimes
miss.
One pair for critics of the nicer sex,
Close in the instep's clinging circumflex,
Long, narrow, light; the Gallic boot of love,
A kind of cross between a boot and glove.
But, not to tread on everlasting thorns,
And sow in suffering what is reaped in
COrns,
Compact, but easy, strong, substantial, square,
Let native art compile the medium pair.
The third remains, and let your tasteful skill
Here show some relics of affection still;
Let no stiff cowhide, reeking from the tan,
No rough caoutchouc, no deformed brogan,
Disgrace the tapering outline of your feet,
Though yellow torrents gurgle through the
street;
But the patched calfskin arm against the flood
In neat, light shoes, impervious to the mud.
A RHYMED LESSON. 247
Wear seemly gloves; not black, nor yet too
light,
And least of all the pair that once was white;
Let the dead party where you told your loves
Bury in peace its dead bouquets and gloves;
Shave like the goat, if so your fancy bids,
But be a parent, — don't neglect your kids.
Have a good hat; the secret of your looks
Lives with the beaver in Canadian brooks;
Virtue may flourish in an old cravat,
But man and nature scorn the shocking hat.
Does beauty slight you from her gay abodes?
Like bright Apollo, you must take to Rhoades,
Mount the new castor, – ice itself will melt;
Boots, gloves may fail; the hat is always felt!
Be shy of breast-pins; plain, well-ironed white,
With small pearl buttons, – two of them in
sight, —
Is always genuine, while your gems may pass,
Though real diamonds, for ignoble glass;
But spurn those paltry cis-Atlantic lies,
That round his breast the shabby rustic ties;
248 URANIA :
Breathe not the name, profaned to hallow
things
The indignant laundress blushes when she
brings! -
Our freeborn race, averse to every check,
Has tossed the yoke of Europe from its neck;
From the green prairie to the sea-girt town,
The whole wide nation turns its collars down.
The stately neck is manhood's manliest part;
It takes the life-blood freshest from the heart;
With short, curled ringlets close around it
spread,
How light and strong it lifts the Grecian head!
Thine, fair Erectheus of Minerva’s wall; —
Or thine, young athlete of the Louvre's hall,
Smooth as the pillar flashing in the sun
That filled the arena where thy wreaths were
won, —
Firm as the band that clasps the antlered spoil
Strained in the winding anaconda's coill
I spare the contrast; it were only kind
To be a little, nay, intensely blind:
A RHYMED LESSON. 249
Choose for yourself: I know it cuts your ear;
I know the points will sometimes interfere;
I know that often, like the filial John,
Whom sleep surprised with half his drapery on,
You show your features to the astonished town
With one side standing and the other down; —
But, O my friend my favorite fellow-man
If Nature made you on her modern plan,
Sooner than wander with your windpipe bare, —
The fruit of Eden ripening in the air, –
With that lean head-stalk, that protruding chin,
Wear standing collars, were they made of tin
And have a neck-cloth, – by the throat of Jovel
Cut from the funnel of a rusty stovel
The long-drawn lesson narrows to its close,
Chill, slender, slow, the dwindled current flows;
Tired of the ripples on its feeble springs,
Once more the Muse unfolds her upward wings.
Land of my birth, with this unhallowed
tongue,
Thy hopes, thy dangers, I perchance had
Sung;
250 URANIA :
But who shall sing, in brutal disregard
Of all the essentials of the “native bard ”?
Lake, sea, shore, prairie, forest, mountain,
fall,
His eye omnivorous must devour them all;
The tallest summits and the broadest tides
His foot must compass with its giant strides,
Where Ocean thunders, where Missouri rolls,
And tread at once the tropics and the poles;
His food all forms of earth, fire, water, air,
His home all space, his birth-place everywhere.
Some grave compatriot, having seen perhap
The pictured page that goes in Worcester's
Maps,
And read in earnest what was said in jest,
“Who drives fat oxen”— please to add the
rest, —
Sprung the odd notion that the poet's dreams
Grow in the ratio of his hills and streams;
And hence insisted that the aforesaid “bard ”
Pink of the future — fancy's pattern-card, –
The babe of Nature in the “giant West,”
Must be of course her biggest and her best.
A RHYMED LESSON. 251
But, were it true that Nature's fostering sun
Saves all its daylight for that favorite one,
If for his forehead every wreath she means,
And we, poor children, must not touch the
greens;
Since rocks and rivers cannot take the road
To seek the elected in his own abode,
Some voice must answer, for her precious heir,
One solemn question: – Who shall pay his
fare?
Oh, when at length the expected bard shall
- come,
Land of our pride, to strike thine echoes
dumb
(And many a voice exclaims in prose and
rhyme -
It's getting late, and he's behind his time),
When all thy mountains clap their hands in
joy,
And all thy cataracts thunder “That's the
boy,” —
Say if with him the reign of Song shall end,
And Heaven declare its final dividend?
252 URANIA :
Be calm, dear brother! whose impassioned
strain
Comes from an alley watered by a drain;
The little Mincio, dribbling to the Po,
Beats all the epics of the Hoang Ho;
If loved in earnest by the tuneful maid,
Don't mind their nonsense, – never be afraid!
The nurse of poets feeds her winged brood
By common firesides, on familiar food;
In a low hamlet, by a narrow stream,
Where bovine rustics used to doze and dream,
She filled young William's fiery fancy full,
While old John Shakespeare talked of beeves
and wool
No Alpine needle, with its climbing spire,
Brings down for mortals the Promethean fire,
If careless Nature have forgot to frame
An altar worthy of the sacred flame.
Unblest by any save the goat-herd's lines,
& 4
Mont Blanc rose soaring through his “sea of
º 73 .
plnes “;
A RHYMED LESSON. 253
In vain the Arve and Arveiron dash,
No hymn salutes them but the Ranz des Vaches,
Till lazy Coleridge, by the morning's light,
Gazed for a moment on the fields of white,
And lo, the glaciers found at length a tongue,
Mont Blanc was vocal, and Chamouni sung !
Children of wealth or want, to each is given
One spot of green, and all the blue of heaven
Enough, if these their outward shows impart;
The rest is thine, – the scenery of the heart.
If passion's hectic in thy stanzas glow
Thy heart's best life-blood ebbing as they flow,
If with thy verse thy strength and bloom distil,
Drained by the pulses of the fevered thrill;
If sound's sweet effluence polarize thy brain,
And thoughts turn crystals in thy fluid strain, –
Nor rolling ocean, nor the prairie's bloom,
Nor streaming cliffs, nor rayless cavern's gloom,
Need'st thou, young poet, to inform thy line;
Thy own broad signet stamps thy song divine !
Let others gaze where silvery streams are
rolled, gº
And chase the rainbow for its cup of gold;
254 URANIA :
To thee all landscapes wear a heavenly dye,
Changed in the glance of thy prismatic eye;
Nature evoked thee in sublimer throes,
For thee her inmost Arethusa flows, –
The mighty mother's living depths are stirred, –
Thou art the starred Osiris of the herd I
A few brief lines; they touch on solemn
chords,
And hearts may leap to hear their honest
words;
Yet, ere the jarring bugle-blast is blown,
The softer lyre shall breathe its soothing tone.
New England 1 proudly may thy children
claim
Their honored birthright by its humblest name !
Cold are thy skies, but, ever fresh and clear,
No rank malaria stains thine atmosphere;
No fungous weeds invade thy scanty soil,
Scarred by the ploughshares of unslumbering toil,
Long may the doctrines by thy sages taught,
Raised from the quarries where their sires
have wrought,
A RHYMED LESSON. 255
Be like the granite of thy rock-ribbed land, –
As slow to rear, as obdurate to stand;
And as the ice, that leaves thy crystal mine,
Chills the fierce alcohol in the Creole’s wine,
So may the doctrines of thy sober school
Keep the hot theories of thy neighbors cool
If ever, trampling on her ancient path,
Cankered by treachery, or inflamed by wrath,
With smooth “Resolves,” or with discordant
cries,
The mad Briareus of disunion rise,
Chiefs of New England by your sires' renown,
Dash the red torches of the rebel down
Flood his black hearth-stone till its flames
expire,
Though your old Sachem fanned his council-
fire
But if at last, — her fading cycle run, –
The tongue must forfeit what the arm has
Won,
Then rise, wild Ocean' roll thy surging shock
Full on old Plymouth's desecrated rock!
256 URANIA :
Scale the proud shaft degenerate hands have
hewn,
Where bleeding Valor stained the flowers of
June 1
Sweep in one tide her spires and turrets down,
And howl her dirge above Monadnoc's crown
List not the tale; the Pilgrim's hallowed
shore,
Though strewn with weeds, is granite at the
core; &
Oh, rather trust that He who made her free
Will keep her true, as long as faith shall be
Farewell! yet lingering through the destined
hour,
Leave, sweet Enchantress, one memorial flower!
An Angel, floating o'er the waste of snow
That clad our western desert, long ago
(The same fair spirit who, unseen by day,
Shone as a star along the Mayflower’s way),
Sent, the first herald of the Heavenly plan,
To choose on earth a resting-place for man, –
A RHYMED LESSON. 257
Tired with his flight along the unvaried field,
Turned to Soar upwards, when his glance re-
vealed
A calm, bright bay, enclosed in rocky bounds,
And at its entrance stood three sister mounds.
The Angel spake: “This threefold hill shall be
The home of Arts, the nurse of Liberty
One stately summit from its shaft shall pour
Its deep-red blaze, along the darkened shore;
Emblem of thoughts that, kindling far and
wide,
In danger’s night shall be a nation's guide.
One swelling crest the citadel shall crown,
Its slanted bastions black with battle's frown,
And bid the sons that tread its Scowling
heights
Bare their strong arms for man and all his
rights |
One silent steep along the northern wave
Shall hold the patriarch’s and the hero’s grave;
When fades the torch, when o'er the peaceful
SCene
The embattled fortress Smiles in living green,
258 URANIA :
The cross of Faith, the anchor staff of Hope,
Shall stand eternal on its grassy slope;
There through all time shall faithful Memory
tell:
“Here Virtue toiled, and Patriot Valor fell;
Thy free, proud fathers slumber at thy side,
Live as they lived, or perish as they died l’”
NOTES.
NOTE I. PAGE 223.
Olm rep pºwv Yeve?), rowhāe kal divöpóv.
Iliad VI., 146.
Wesley quotes this line in his account of his early doubts
and perplexities. See Southey's Life of Wesley, vol. ii.,
p. 185.
NotE 2. PAGE 230.
The churches referred to in the lines which follow are —
I. “King's Chapel,” the foundation of which was laid
by Governor Shirley in 1749.
2. The church in Brattle Square, consecrated in 1773.
The completion of this edifice, the design of which in-
cluded a spire, was prevented by the troubles of the
Revolution, and its plain square tower presents nothing
more attractive than its massive simplicity. In the front
A RHYMED LESSON. 259
of this tower is still seen, half embedded in the brick-
work, a cannon-ball, which was thrown from the Ameri-
can fortifications at Cambridge, during the bombardment
of the city, then occupied by the British troops.
3. The “Old South,” first occupied for public worship
in I730. .
4. Park Street Church, built in 1809, the tall, white
steeple of which is the most conspicuous of all the Boston
spires. .*
5. Christ Church, opened for public worship in 1723,
and containing a set of eight bells, the only chime in
Boston.
NOTE 3. PAGE 234.
For the propriety of the term “Celtic blackness,” see
Laurence’s Zectures (Salem, 1828), pp: 452, 453. But
the ancient Celts appear to have been a xanthous, or fair-
haired race. See Pritchard's AWat. Hist, of Man (London,
1843), pp. 183, 193, 196.
NoTE 4. PAGE 257.
The name first given by the English to Boston was TRI-
MoUNTAIN. The three hills upon and around which the
city is built are Beacon Hill, Fort Hill, and Copp's Hill.
In the early records of the colony, it is mentioned,
under date of May 6, 1635, that “A BEACON is to be set
on the Sentry hill, at Boston, to give notice, to the country
of any danger; to be guarded by one man stationed near,
260 . URANIA : A RHYMED LESSON.
and fired as occasion may be.” The last beacon was blown
down in 1789.
The eastern side of Fort Hill was formerly “a ragged
cliff, that seemed placed by nature in front of the entrance
to the harbor for the purposes of defence, to which it was
very soon applied, and from which it obtained its present
name.” Its summit is now a beautiful green enclosure.
Copp's Hill was used as a burial-ground from a very
early period. The part of it employed for this purpose
slopes toward the water upon the northern side. From
its many interesting records of the dead, I select the fol-
lowing, which may serve to show what kind of dust it
holds : —
66 Here lies buried in a
Stone Grave Io feet deep,
Cap DANIEL MALCOLM. Mercht
who departed this Life
October 23d, 1769,
Aged 44 years,
a true son of Liberty,
a Friend to the Publick,
an Enemy to oppression,
and one of the foremost
in opposing the Revenue Acts
on America.”
The gravestone from which I copied this inscription is
bruised and splintered by the bullets of the British soldiers.
THE PILGRIM'S VISION.
IN the hour of twilight shadows
The Puritan looked out;
He thought of the “bloudy Salvages”
That lurked all round about,
Of Wituwamet's pictured knife
And Pecksuot's whooping shout;
For the baby's limbs were feeble,
Though his father’s arms were stout.
His home was a freezing cabin
Too bare for the hungry rat,
Its roof was thatched with ragged grass
And bald enough of that;
The hole that served for casement "
Was glazed with an ancient hat;
And the ice was gently thawing
From the log whereon he sat.
Along the dreary landscape
His eyes went to and fro,
261
262
THE PILGRIM'S VISION.
The trees all clad in icicles,
The streams that did not flow;
A sudden thought flashed o'er him, -
A dream of long ago, -
He smote his leathern jerkin
And murmured “Even so I’’
“Come hither, God-be-Glorified,
And sit upon my knee,
Behold the dream unfolding,
Whereof I spake to thee
By the winter's hearth in Leyden
And on the stormy sea;
True is the dream's beginning, —
So may its ending bel
“I saw in the naked forest
Our scattered remnant cast,
A screen of shivering branches
Between them and the blast;
The snow was falling round them,
The dying fell as fast;
I looked to see them perish,
When lo, the vision passed.
THE PILGRIM'S VISION. 263
“Again mine eyes were opened;—
The feeble had waxed strong,
The babes had grown to sturdy men,
The remnant was a throng;
By shadowed lake and winding stream
And all the shores along,
The howling demons quaked to hear
The Christian's godly song.
“They slept, — the village fathers, –
By river, lake, and shore,
When far adown the steep of Time
The vision rose once more;
I saw along the winter snow
A spectral column pour,
And high above their broken ranks
A tattered flag they bore.
“Their Leader rode before them,
Of bearing calm and high,
The light of Heaven's own kindling
Throned in his awful eye;
These were a Nation’s champions
Her dread appeal to try;
264 THE PILGRIM'S VISION.
God for the right! I faltered,
And lo, the train passed by.
“Once more; — the strife is ended,
The solemn issue tried,
The Lord of Hosts, His mighty arm
Has helped our Israel’s side;
Gray stone and grassy hillock
Tell where our martyrs died,
But peaeeful smiles the harvest,
And stainless flows the tide.
“A crash, – as when some swollen cloud
Cracks o'er the tangled trees
With side to side, and spar to spar,
Whose smoking decks are these?
I know Saint George's blood-red cross,
Thou Mistress of the Seas, –
But what is she, whose streaming bars .
Roll out before the breeze?
“Ah, well her iron ribs are knit,
Whose thunders strive to quell
The bellowing throats, the blazing lips,
That pealed the Armada's knell!
THE PILGRIM'S VISION. 265
The mist was cleared, – a wreath of stars
Rose o'er the crimsoned swell,
And, wavering from its haughty peak,
The cross of England fell I
“O trembling Faith ! though dark the morn,
A heavenly torch is thine;
While feebler races melt away,
And paler orbs decline,
Still shall the fiery pillar's ray
Along thy pathway shine,
To light the chosen tribe. that sought
This Western Palestine !
“I see the living tide roll on;
It crowns with flaming towers
The icy capes of Labrador,
The Spaniard’s ‘land of flowers'!
It streams beyond the splintered ridge
That parts the Northern showers;
From eastern rock to sunset wave
The Continent is ours!”
He ceased, - the grim old Puritan, –
Then softly bent to cheer
266 THE PILGRIM'S VISION.
The pilgrim-child, whose wasting face
Was meekly turned to hear;
And drew his toil-worn sleeve across,
To brush the manly tear
From cheeks that never changed in woe,
And never blanched in fear.
The weary pilgrim slumbers,
His resting-place unknown; *
His hands were crossed, his lids were closed,
The dust was o'er him strown;
The drifting soil, the mouldering leaf,
Along the sod were blown;
His mound has melted into earth,
His memory lives alone.
So let it live unfading,
The memory of the dead,
Long as the pale anemone
Springs where their tears were shed,
Or, raining in the summer's wind
In flakes of burning red,
The wild rose sprinkles with its leaves
The turf where once they bled !
THE PILGRIM'S VISION. 267
Yea, when the frowning bulwarks
That guard this holy strand
Have sunk beneath the trampling surge
In beds of sparkling sand,
While in the waste of ocean
One hoary rock shall stand
Be this its latest legend, -
HERE was THE PILGRIM's LAND1
A MODEST REQUEST.
COMPLIED WITH AFTER THE DINNER AT PRESIDENT
EVERETT'S INAUGURATION.
SCENE, - a back parlor in a certain square,
Or court, or lane, – in short no matter where;
Time, – early morning, dear to simple souls
Who love its sunshine, and its fresh-baked
rolls;
Persons, – take pity on this telltale blush,
That, like the AEthiop, whispers “Hush, oh
hush ''
Delightful scene ! where smiling comfort broods,
Nor business frets, nor anxious care intrudes;
O şi săc omnia / were it ever so I
But what is stable in this world below !
Medio e fonte, – Virtue has her faults, –
The clearest fountains taste of Epsom salts;
We snatch the cup and lift to drain it dry, -
Its central dimple holds a drowning fly!
268
A MODEST REQUEST. 269
Strong is the pine by Maine's ambrosial
Streams,
But stronger augers pierce its thickest beams;
No iron gate, no spiked and panelled door,
Can keep out death, the postman, or the
bore; —
O for a world where peace and silence reign,
And blunted dulness terebrates in vain
— The door bell jingles, – enter Richard Fox,
And takes this letter from his leathern box.
“Dear Sir,
In writing on a former day,
One little matter I forgot to say;
I now inform you in a single line,
On Thursday next our purpose is to dine.
The act of feeding, as you understand,
Is but a fraction of the work in hand;
Its nobler half is that ethereal meat
The papers call ‘the intellectual treat';
Songs, speeches, toasts, around the festive
board,
Drowned in the juice the College pumps afford;
For only water flanks our knives and forks,
270 A MODEST REQUEST.
So, sink or float, we swim without the corks.
Yours is the art, by native genius taught,
To clothe in eloquence the naked thought;
Yours is the skill its music to prolong
Through the sweet effluence of mellifluous
Song;
Yours the quaint trick to cram the pithy line
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine;
And since success your various gifts attends,
We, – that is I and all your numerous
friends, –
Expect from you, -your single self a host, —
A speech, a song, excuse me, and a toast;
Nay, not to haggle on so small a claim,
A few of each, or several of the same.
99
(Signed) Yours, most truly, -
No! my sight must fail, -
If that ain't Judas on the largest scale !
Well, this is modest; — nothing else than that?
My coat? my boots? my pantaloons? my hat?
My stick? my gloves? as well as all my wits,
Learning and linen, – everything that fits!
A MODEST REQUEST. 271
Jack, said my lady, is it grog you'll try,
Or punch, or toddy, if perhaps you’re dry?
Ah, said the sailor, though I can’t refuse,
You know, my lady, 'tain't for me to choose; —
I’ll take the grog to finish off my lunch,
And drink the toddy while you mix the punch.
THE SPEECH. (The speaker, rising to be seen,
Looks very red, because so very green.)
I rise — I rise — with unaffected fear,
(Louder' — speak louder' — who the deuce can
hear?)
I rise — I said — with undisguised dismay —
— Such are my feelings as I rise, I say!
Quite unprepared to face this learned throng,
Already gorged with eloquence and song;
Around my view are ranged on either hand
The genius, wisdom, virtue of the land;
“Hands that the rod of empire might have
swayed ”
Close at my elbow stir their lemonade;
Would you like Homer learn to write and
speak,
272 A MODEST REQUEST.
That bench is groaning with its weight of
Greek;
Behold the naturalist that in his teens
Found six new species in a dish of greens;
And lo, the master in a statelier walk,
Whose annual ciphering takes a ton of chalk;
And there the linguist, that by common roots
Through all their nurseries tracks old Noah's
shoots, – .
How Shem's proud children reared the As.
Syrian piles,
While Ham's were scattered through the Sand-
wich Isles |
— Fired at the thought of all the present
shows, -
My kindling fancy down the future flows;
I see the glory of the coming days
O'er Time's horizon shoot its streaming rays;
Near and more near the radiant morning
draws
In living lustre (rapturous applause);
From east to west the blazing heralds run,
Loosed from the chariot of the ascending sun,
A MODEST REQUEST. 273
Through the long vista of uncounted years
In cloudless splendor (three tremendous cheers).
My eye prophetic, as the depths unfold,
Sees a new advent of the age of gold;
While o'er the scene new generations press,
New heroes rise the coming time to bless, –
Not such as Homer's, who, we read in Pope,
Dined without forks and never heard of
Soap, —
Not such as May to Marlborough Chapel
brings,
Lean, hungry, savage, anti-everythings,
Copies of Luther in the pasteboard style, –
But genuine articles, – the true Carlyle;
While far on high the blazing orb shall shed
Its central light on Harvard’s holy head,
And Learning's ensigns ever float unfurled
Here in the focus of the new-born world !
The speaker stops, and, trampling down the
pause,
Roars through the hall the thunder of applause,
One stormy gust of long suspended Ahs
One whirlwind chaos of insane hurrahs
274 A MODEST REQUEST.
THE SONG. But this demands a briefer line, –
A shorter muse and not the old long Nine; —
Long metre answers for a common song,
Though common metre does not answer long,
She came beneath the forest dome
To seek its peaceful shade,
An exile from her ancient home, –
A poor forsaken maid;
No banner, flaunting high above,
No blazoned cross, she bore;
One holy book of light and love
Was all her worldly store.
The dark brown shadows passed away,
And wider spread the green,
And, where the savage used to stray,
The rising mart was seen; t
So, when the laden winds had brought
Their showers of golden rain,
Her lap some precious gleanings caught,
Like Ruth’s amid the grain.
But wrath soon gathered uncontrolled
Among the baser churls,
A MODEST REQUEST. 275
*
To see her ankles red with gold,
Her forehead white with pearls;
“Who gave to thee the glittering bands
That lace thine azure veins?
Who bade thee lift those snow-white hands
We bound in gilded chains?”
These are the gems my children gave,
The stately dame replied;
The wise, the gentle, and the brave,
I nurtured at my side;
If envy still your bosom stings,
Take back their rims of gold;
My sons will melt their wedding rings,
And give a hundred fold !
THE TOAST. — Oh, tell me, ye who thoughtless
ask
Exhausted nature for a threefold task,
In wit and pathos if one share remains,
A safe investment for an ounce of brains?
Hard is the job to launch the desperate pun,
A pun-job dangerous as the Indian one.
Turned by the current of some stronger wit
276 A MODEST REQUEST.
Back from the object that you mean to hit,
Like the strange missile which the Australian
throws,
Your verbal boomerang slaps you on the nose.
One vague inflection spoils the whole with
doubt,
One trivial letter ruins all, left out;
A knot can choke a felon into clay,
A not will save him, spelt without the k;
The smallest word has some unguarded spot,
And danger lurks in i without a dot.
Thus great Achilles, who had shown his zeal
In healing wounds, died of a wounded heel;
Unhappy chief, who, when in childhood doused,
Had saved his bacon, had his feet been soused
Accursed heel that killed a hero stout!
Oh, had your mother known that you were out,
Death had not entered at the trifling part
That still defies the small chirurgeon's art
With corns and bunions, – not the glorious John
Who wrote the book we all have pondered on, —
But other bunions, bound in fleecy hose,
To “Pilgrim's Progress” unrelenting foes I
A MODEST REQUEST. 277
A health, unmingled with the reveller's wine,
To him whose title is indeed divine;
Truth's sleepless watchman on her midnight
tower,
Whose lamp burns brightest when the tempests
lower.
Oh, who can tell with what a leaden flight
Drag the long watches of his weary night;
While at his feet the hoarse and blinding gale
Strews the torn wreck and bursts the fragile
sail,
When stars have faded, when the wave is dark,
When rocks and sands embrace the foundering
bark,
And still he pleads with unavailing cry,
Behold the light, O wanderer, look or die!
A health, fair Themis I Would the enchanted
vine
Wreathed its green tendrils round this cup of
thine; -
If Learning's radiance fill thy modern court, .
Its glorious sunshine streams through Black-
stone's port!
278 A MODEST REQUEST.
Lawyers are thirsty, and their clients too,
Witness at least, if memory serve me true,
Those old tribunals, famed for dusty suits,
Where men sought justice ere they brushed
their boots; —
And what can match, to solve a learned doubt,
The warmth within that comes from “cold
without "P
Health to the art whose glory is to give
The crowning boon that makes it life to live.
Ask not her home; — the rock where Nature
flings
Her arctic lichen, last of living things,
The gardens, fragrant with the Orient's balm,
From the low jasmine to the star-like palm,
Hail her as mistress o'er the distant waves,
And yield their tribute to her wandering slaves.
Wherever, moistening the ungrateful soil,
The tear of suffering tracks the path of toil,
There, in the anguish of his fevered hours,
Her gracious finger points to healing flowers;
Where the lost felon steals away to die,
Her soft hand waves before his closing eye;
A MODEST REQUEST. 279
Where hunted misery finds his darkest lair,
The midnight taper shows her kneeling there !
VIRTUE, - the guide that men and nations own;
And LAw, the bulwark that protects her throne;
And HEALTH, - to all its happiest charm that
lends;
These and their servants, man's untiring
friends;
Pour the bright lymph that Heaven itself lets
fall, -
In one fair bumper let us toast them all !
NUX POSTCOENATICA.
I was sitting with my microscope, upon my
parlor rug,
With a very heavy quarto and a very lively
bug;
The true bug had been organized with only two
antennae,
But the humbug in the copperplate would have
them twice as many.
And I thought, like Dr. Faustus, of the empti-
ness of art,
How we take a fragment for the whole, and
call the whole a part,
When I heard a heavy footstep that was loud
enough for two,
And a man of forty entered, exclaiming, —
“How d'ye do?”
280
NUX POSTCOENATICA. 281
He was not a ghost, my visitor, but solid flesh
and bone;
He wore a Palo Alto hat, his weight was
twenty stone;
(It's odd how hats expand their brims as riper
years invade,
As if when life had reached its noon, it wanted
them for shadeſ)
I lost my focus, – dropped my book, - the
bug, who was a flea,
At once exploded, and commenced experiments
OI) IQC.
They have a certain heartiness that frequently
appalls, —
Those mediaeval gentlemen in semilunar smalls!
“My boy,” he said — (colloquial ways, – the
vast, broad-hatted man),
“Come dine with us on Thursday next, — you
must, you know you can;
We're going to have a roaring time, with lots
of fun and noise,
Distinguished guests, et cetera, the JUDGE, and
all the boys.”
282 NUX POSTCOENATICA.
Not so, - I said, -my temporal bones are
showing pretty clear
It's time to stop, — just look and see that hair
above this ear;
My golden days are more than spent, — and,
what is very strange,
If these are real silver hairs, I’m getting lots
of change.
Besides — my prospects — don't you know that
people won't employ
A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing
like a boy?
And suspect the azure blossom that unfolds
upon a shoot,
As if wisdom's old potato could not flourish at
its root!
It's a very fine reflection, when you're etching
out a smile
On a copper plate of faces that would stretch
at least a mile,
That, what with sneers from enemies, and
cheapening shrugs of friends,
It will cost you all the earnings that a month
of labor lends !
NUX POSTCOENATICA. 283
It's a vastly pleasing prospect, when you're
screwing out a laugh,
That your very next year's income is dimin-
ished by a half,
And a little boy trips barefoot that Pegasus
may go,
And the baby's milk is watered that your Heli-
con may flow !
No; — the joke has been a good one, – but
I’m getting fond of quiet,
And I don't like deviations from my customary
diet;
So I think I will not go with you to hear the
toasts and speeches,
But stick to old Montgomery Place, and have
some pig and peaches.
The fat man answered:—Shut your mouth,
and hear the genuine creed;
The true essentials of a feast are only fun and
feed;
The force that wheels the planets round de-
lights in spinning tops,
And that young earthquake t'other day was
great at shaking props.
284 NUX POSTCOENATICA,
I tell you what, philosopher, if all the longest
heads
That ever knocked their sinciputs in stretching
on their beds
Were round one great mahogany, I'd beat
those fine old folks
With twenty dishes, twenty fools, and twenty
clever jokes
Why, if Columbus should be there, the company
would beg
He’d show that little trick of his of balancing
the egg!
Milton to Stilton would give in, and Solomon
to Salmon,
And Roger Bacon be a bore, and Francis
Bacon gammon |
And as for all the “patronage” of all the
clowns and boors
That squint their little narrow eyes at any freak
of yours,
Do leave them to your prosier friends, – such
fellows ought to die
When rhubarb is so very scarce and ipecac so
high I
NUX POSTCOENATICA. 285
And so I come, – like Lochinvar, to tread a
single measure, -
To purchase with a loaf of bread a sugar-plum
of pleasure,
To enter for the cup of glass that's run for
after dinner,
Which yields a single sparkling draught, then
breaks and cuts the winner.
Ah, that's the way delusion comes, – a glass
of old Madeira,
A pair of visual diaphragms revolved by Jane
or Sarah, -
And down go vows and promises without the
slightest question
If eating words won’t compromise the organs
of digestion!
And yet, among my native shades, beside my
nursing mother,
Where every stranger seems a friend, and every
friend a brother,
I feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er
me stealing, —
The warm, champagny, old-particular, brandy-
punchy feeling.
286 NUX POSTCOENATICA.
We're all alike; — Vesuvius flings the scoriae
from his fountain,
But down they come in volleying rain back to
the burning mountain;
We leave, like those volcanic stones, our
precious Alma Mater,
But will keep dropping in again to see the
dear old crater.
ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOWL.
THIS aneient silver bowl of mine, – it tells of
good old times,
Of joyous days, and jolly nights, and merry
Christmas chimes;
They were a free and jovial race, but honest,
brave, and true,
That dipped their ladle in the punch when
this old bowl was new.
A Spanish galleon brought the bar, — so runs
the ancient tale;
'Twas hammered by an Antwerp Smith, whose
arm was like a flail;
And now and then between the strokes, for
fear his strength should fail,
He wiped his brow, and quaffed a cup of good
old Flemish ale.
287
288 ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOW/L.
‘Twas purchased by an English Squire to please
his loving dame,
Who saw the cherubs, and conceived a longing
for the same;
And oft, as on the ancient stock another twig
was found,
'Twas filled with caudle spiced and hot, and
handed Smoking round.
But, changing hands, it reached at length a
Puritan divine, -
Who used to follow Timothy, and take a little
wine, -
But hated punch and prelacy; and so it was,
perhaps, -
He went to Leyden, where he found conven-
ticles and Schnapps.
And then, of course, you know what’s next,
— it left the Dutchman's shore
With those that in the Mayflower came, – a
hundred souls and more, —
Along with all the furniture, to fill their new
abodes, –
To judge by what is still on, hand, at least a
hundred loads.
ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOW/L. 289
'Twas on a dreary winter's eve, the night was
closing dim,
When old Miles Standish took the bowl, and
filled it to the brim;
The little Captain stood and stirred the posset
with his sword,
And all his sturdy men at arms were ranged
about the board.
He poured the fiery Hollands in, – the man
that never feared, – *
He took a long and solemn draught, and wiped
his yellow beard;
And one by one the musketeers, – the men that
fought and prayed, –
All drank as 'twere their mother's milk, and
not a man afraid.
That night, affrighted from his nest, the scream-
ing eagle flew,
He heard the Pequot's ringing whoop, the
soldier's wild halloo;
And there the sachem learned the rule he taught
to kith and kin,
“Run from the white man when you find he
smells of Hollands gin l’’
290 ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOW/L.
A hundred years, and fifty more, had spread
their leaves and snows,
A thousand rubs had flattened down each little
cherub's nose; *
When once again the bowl was filled, but not
in mirth or joy,
'Twas mingled by a mother's hand to cheer
her parting boy.
Drink, John, she said, 'twill do you good, –
poor child, you’ll never bear
This working in the dismal trench, out in the
midnight air;
And if, - God bless me, – you were hurt,
'twould keep away the chill;
Su John did drink, - and well he wrought that
night at Bunker’s Hill !
I tell you, there was generous warmth in good
old English cheer;
I tell you, 'twas a pleasant thought to bring
its symbol here.
'Tis but the fool that loves excess; — hast thou
a drunken soul?
Thy bane is in thy shallow skull, not in my
silver bowl |
ON LENDING A PUNCH-BOWL. 291
I love the memory of the past, — its pressed
yet fragrant flowers, –
The moss that clothes its broken walls, — the
ivy on its towers, –
Nay, this poor bauble it bequeathed, - my eyes
grow moist and dim,
To think of all the vanished joys that danced
around its brim.
Then fill a fair and honest cup, and bear it
straight to me;
The goblet hallows all it holds, whate'er the
liquid be;
And may the cherubs on its face protect me
from the sin,
That dooms one to those dreadful words, –
“My dear, where have you been?”
THE STETHOSCOPE SONG.
A PROFESSIONAL BALLAD.
THERE was a young man in Boston town
He bought him a STEthoscoPE nice and new,
All mounted and finished and polished down,
With an ivory cap and a stopper too.
It happened a spider within did crawl,
And spun him a web of ample size,
Wherein there chanced one day to fall
A couple of very imprudent flies.
The first was a bottle-fly, big and blue,
The second was smaller, and thin and long;
So there was a concert between the two,
Like an octave flute and a tavern gong.
Now being from Paris but recently,
This fine young man would show his skill;
And so they gave him, his hand to try,
A hospital patient extremely ill.
292
THE STETHOSCOPE SONG. 293
Some said that his liver was short of bile,
And some that his heart was over size,
While some kept arguing all the while
He was crammed with tubercles up to his
eyes.
This fine young man then up stepped he,
And all the doctors made a pause;
Said he, – The man must die, you see,
By the fifty-seventh of Louis's laws.
But, since the case is a desperate one,
To explore his chest it may be well;
For, if he should die and it were not done,
You know the autopsy would not tell.
Then out his stethoscope he took,
And on it placed his curious ear;
Mon Dieu/ said he, with a knowing look,
Why, here is a sound that's mighty queer!
The bourdonnement is very clear, –
Amphoric buzzing, as I'm alive!
Five doctors took their turn to hear;
Amphoric buzzing, said all the five.
294 THE STETHOSCOPE SONG.
There's empyema beyond a doubt;
We’ll plunge a trocar in his side. —
The diagnosis was made out,
They tapped the patient; so he died.
Now such as hate new-fashioned toys
Began to look extremely glum;
They said that rattles were made for boys,
And vowed that his buzzing was all a hum.
There was an old lady had long been sick,
And what was the matter none did know;
Her pulse was slow, though her tongue was
quick; -
To her this knowing youth must go.
So there the nice old lady sat,
With phials and boxes all in a row;
She asked the young doctor what he was at,
To thump her and tumble her ruffles so.
Now, when the stethoscope came out,
The flies began to buzz and whiz; —
O hol the matter is clear, no doubt;
An aneurism there plainly is."
THE STE THOSCOPE SONG. 295
The bruit de rape and the bruit de scie
And the bruit de diable are all combined;
How happy Bouillaud would be,
If he a case like this could find
Now, when the neighboring doctors found
A case so rare had been descried,
They every day her ribs did pound
In squads of twenty; so she died.
Then six young damsels, slight and frail,
Received this kind young doctor's cares;
They all were getting slim and pale,
And short of breath on mounting stairs.
They all made rhymes with “sighs” and “skies,”
And loathed their puddings and buttered
rolls,
And dieted, much to their friends' surprise,
On pickles and pencils and chalk and coals.
So fast their little hearts did bound,
The frightened insects buzzed the more;
So over all their chests he found
The ràle siftamt, and rále sonore.
296 THE STE THOSCOPE SONG.
He shook his head; — there's grave disease, –
I greatly fear you all must die;
A slight post-mortem, if you please,
Surviving friends would gratify.
The six young damsels wept aloud,
Which so prevailed on six young men,
That each his honest love avowed,
Whereat they all got well again.
This poor young man was all aghast;
The price of stethoscopes came down;
And so he was reduced at last
To practise in a country town.
The doctors being very sore,
A stethoscope they did devise,
That had a rammer to clear the bore,
With a knob at the end to kill the flies.
Now use your ears, all you that can,
But don't forget to mind your eyes,
Or you may be cheated, like this young man,
By a couple of silly, abnormal flies.
EXTRACTS FROM A MEDICAL POEM.
THE STABILITY OF SCIENCE.
THE feeble seabirds, blinded in the storms,
On some tall lighthouse dash their little forms,
And the rude granite scatters for their pains
Those small deposits that were meant for brains.
Yet the proud fabric in the morning's sun
Stands all unconscious of the mischief done;
Still the red beacon pours its evening rays
For the lost pilot with as full a blaze,
Nay, shines, all radiance, o'er the scattered fleet
Of gulls and boobies brainless at its feet.
I tell their fate, though courtesy disclaims
To call our kind by such ungentle names;
Yet, if your rashness bid you vainly dare,
Think of their doom, ye simple, and beware l
See where aloft its hoary forehead rears
The towering pride of twice a thousand years!
297
298 EXTRACTS FROM A ; MEDICAL POEM.
Far, far below the vast incumbent pile
Sleeps the gray rock from art's AEgean isle,
Its massive courses, circling as they rise,
Swell from the waves to mingle with the skies;
There every quarry lends its marble spoil,
And clustering ages blend their common toil 5
The Greek, the Roman, reared its ancient
walls, -
The silent Arab arched its mystic halls; *
In that fair niche, by countless billows laved,
Trace the deep lines that Sydenham engraved;
On yon broad front that breasts the changing
swell,
Mark where the ponderous sledge of Hunter
fell;
By that square buttress look where Louis stands,
The stone yet warm from his uplifted hands;
And say, O Science, shall thy life-blood freeze
When fluttering folly flaps on walls like these?
A PORTRAIT,
SIMPLE in youth, but not austere in age;
Calm, but not cold, and cheerful though a sage;
ExTRACTS FROM A MEDICAL POEM. 299
Too true to flatter, and too kind to sneer,
And only just when seemingly severe;
So gently blending courtesy and art,
That wisdom's lips seemed borrowing friend-
ship's heart; -
Taught by the sorrows that his age had known
In others' trials to forget his own,
As hour by hour his lengthened day declined,
The sweeter radiance lingered o'er his mind.
Cold were the lisp that spoke his early praise,
And hushed the voices of his morning days,
Yet the same accents dwelt on every tongue,
And love renewing kept him ever young.
A SENTIMENT.
'O Bios 8paxus — life is but a song—
‘H texvil pakpm — art is wondrous long;
Yet to the wise her paths are ever fair,
And Patience smiles, though Genius may
despair.
Give us but knowledge, though by slow degrees,
And blend our toil with moments bright as
these;
300 EXTRACTS FROM A MEDICAL POEM.
*
Let Friendship's accents cheer our doubtful
way,
And Love's pure planet lend its guiding ray, -
Our tardy Art shall wear an angel's wings,
And life shall lengthen with the joy it brings!
A SONG OF OTHER DAYS.
As o'er the glacier's frozen sheet
Breathes soft the Alpine rose,
So, through life's desert springing sweet,
The flower of friendship grows;
And as, where'er the roses grow,
Some rain or dew descends,
'Tis nature's law that wine should flow
To wet the lips of friends.
Then once again, before we part,
My empty glass shall ring;
And he that has the warmest heart
Shall loudest laugh and sing.
They say we were not born to eat;
But gray-haired sages think
It means, – Be moderate in your meat,
And partly live to drink;
301
302 A SONG OF OTHER DAYS.
For baser tribes the rivers flow
That know not wine or song;
Man wants but little drink below,
But wants that little strong.
Then once again, etc.
If one bright drop is like the gem
That decks a monarch's crown,
One goblet holds a diadem
Of rubies melted down |
A fig for Caesar's blazing brow,
But, like the Egyptian queen,
Bid each dissolving jewel glow
My thirsty lips between.
Then once again, etc.
The Grecian’s mound, the Roman’s urn,
Are silent when we call,
Yet still the purple grapes return
To cluster on the wall;
It was a bright Immortal's head
They circled with the vine,
A SONG OF OTHER DAYS. 303
And o'er their best and bravest dead
They poured the dark-red wine.
Then once again, etc.
Methinks o'er every sparkling glass
Young Eros waves his wings,
And echoes o'er its dimples pass
From dead Anacreon's strings;
And, tossing round its beaded brim
Their locks of floating gold,
With bacchant dance and choral hymn
Return the nymphs of old.
Then once again, etc.
A welcome then to joy and mirth,
From hearts as fresh as ours,
To scatter o'er the dust of earth
Their sweetly mingled flowers;
'Tis Wisdom's self the cup that fills
In spite of Folly's frown,
And Nature, from her vine-clad hills,
That rains her life-blood downl
Then once again, etc.
A SENTIMENT.
THE pledge of Friendship ! it is still divine,
Though watery floods have quenched its burn-
ing wine;
Whatever vase the sacred drops may hold,
The gourd, the shell, the cup of beaten gold,
Around its brim the hand of Nature throws
A garland sweeter than the banquet's rose.
Bright are the blushes of the vine-wreathed
bowl,
Warm with the sunshine of Anacreon's soul,
But dearer memories gild the tasteless wave
That fainting Sidney perished as he gave.
'Tis the heart’s current lends the cup its glow,
Whate'er the fountain whence the draught may
flow, - *
The diamond dew-drops sparkling through the
Sand, *
Scooped by the Arab in his sunburnt hand,
Or the dark streamlet oozing from the snow,
304
A SENTIMENT. 305
Where creep and crouch the shuddering Es.
quimaux; —
Ay, in the stream that ere again we meet,
Shall burst the pavement, glistening at our feet,
And, stealing silent from its leafy hills,
Thread all our alleys with its thousand rills, —
In each pale draught if generous feeling blend,
And o'er the goblet friend shall smile on
friend, -
Even cold Cochituate every heart shall warm,
And genial Nature still defy reform 1
TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND.
THE seed that wasteful Autumn cast
To waver on its stormy blast,
Long o'er the wintry desert tost,
Its living germ has never lost;
Dropped by the weary tempest's wing,
It feels the kindling ray of spring,
And starting from its dream of death,
Pours on the air its perfumed breath.
So, parted by the rolling flood,
The love that springs from common blood
Needs but a single sunlit hour
Of mingling smiles to bud and flower;
Unharmed its slumbering life has flown
From shore to shore, from zone to zone,
Where summer's falling roses stain
The tepid waves of Pontchartrain,
Or where the lichen creeps below
Katahdin's wreaths of whirling snow !
306
TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND. 307
Though fiery sun and stiffening cold
May warp the fair ancestral mould,
No winter chills, no summer drains
The life-blood drawn from English veins, –
Still bearing, wheresoe'er it flows,
The love that with its fountain rose,
Unchanged by space, unwronged by time,
From age to age, from clime to clime !
THE PLOUGHMAN.
(ANNIVERSARY OF THE BERKSHIRE AGRICULTURAL
SOCIETY, OCT. 4TH, 1849.)
CLEAR the brown path, to meet his coulter's
gleam |
Lo! on he comes, behind his smoking team,
With toil's bright dew-drops on his sun-burnt
brow,
The lord of earth, the hero of the plough
First in the field before the reddening sum,
Last in the shadows when the day is done,
Line after line, along the bursting sod,
Marks the broad acres where his feet have
trod;
Still, where he treads the stubborn clods
divide,
The smooth fresh furrow opens deep and wide;
Matted and dense the tangled turf upheaves,
Mellow and dark the ridgy cornfield cleaves;
308
THE PLOUGHMAN. 309
Up the steep hill-side, where the laboring train
Slants the long track that scores the level plain;
Through the moist valley, clogged with oozing
clay,
The patient convoy breaks its destined way;
At every turn the loosening chains resound,
The swinging ploughshare circles glistening
round,
Till the wide field one billowy waste appears,
And wearied hands unbind the panting steers.
These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings
The peasant’s food, the golden pomp of kings:
This is the page, whose letters shall be seen
Changed by the sun to words of living green;
This is the scholar, whose immortal pen
Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men;
These are the lines, O heaven-commanded toil,
That fill thy deed, - the charter of the soill
O gracious Mother, whose benignant breast
Wakes us to life, and lulls us all to rest,
How thy sweet features, kind to every clime,
Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of time!
310 THE PLOUGHMAW,
We stain thy flowers, – they blossom o'er the
dead;
We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread;
O'er the red field that trampling strife has
torn,
Waves the green plumage of thy tasselled corn;
Our maddening conflicts scar thy fairest plain,
Still thy soft answer is the growing grain.
Yet, O our Mother, while uncounted charms
Round the fresh clasp of thine embracing
arms,
Let not our virtues in thy love decay,
And thy fond weakness waste our strength away.
No! by these hills, whose banners now dis-
played,
In blazing cohorts Autumn has arrayed:
By yon twin crest, amid the sinking sphere
Last to dissolve, and first to reappear;
By these fair plains the mountain circle screens,
And feeds in silence from its dark ravines;
True to their home, these faithful arms shall
toil
To crown with peace their own untainted soil;
THE PLOUGHMAN. 311
And, true to God, to freedom, to mankind,
If her chained bandogs Faction shall unbind,
These stately forms, that bending even now
Bowed their strong manhood to the humble
plough,
Shall rise erect, the guardians of the land,
The same stern iron in the same right hand,
Till Graylock thunders to the parting sun,
The sword has rescued what the ploughshare
won 1
A POEM
DELIVERED AT THE DEDICATION OF THE
PITTSFIELD CEMETERY.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1850.
ANGEL of Death! extend thy silent reign!
Stretch thy dark sceptre o'er this new domain
No sable car along the winding road
Has borne to earth its unresisting load;
No sudden mound has risen yot to show
Where the pale slumberer folds his arms below;
No marble gleams to bid his memory live
In the brief lines that hurrying Time can give;
Yet, O Destroyerſ from thy shrouded throne
Look on our gift; this realm is all thine own
Fair is the scene; its sweetness oft beguiled
From their dim paths the children of the
wild;
812
PITTSFIELD CEMETERY. 313
The dark-haired maiden loved its grassy dells,
The feathered warrior claimed its wooded
swells,
Still on its slopes the ploughman's ridges show
The pointed flints that left his fatal bow,
Chipped with rough art and slow barbarian
toil, -
Last of his wrecks that strews the alien soil
Here spread the fields that waved the ripened
Store
Till the brown arms of Labor held no more;
The scythe's broad meadow with its dusky
blush;
The sickle's harvest with its velvet flush;
The green-haired maize, her silken tresses laid,
In soft luxuriance, on her harsh brocade;
The gourd that swells beneath her tossing
plume 5 -
The coarser wheat that rolls in lakes of bloom, -
Its coral stems and milk-white flowers alive
With the wide murmurs of the scattered hive;
The glossy apple with the pencilled streak
Of morning painted on its southern cheek;
314 PITTSFIELD CEMETERY.
The pear's long necklace strung with golden
drops,
Arched, like the banyan, o'er its hasty props;
The humble roots that paid the laborer's care
With the cheap luxuries wealth consents to
spare;
The healing herbs whose virtues could not save
The hand that reared them from the neighbor-
ing grave.
Yet all its varied charms, forever free
From task and tribute, Labor yields to thee;
No more when April sheds her fitful rain
The Sower's hand shall cast its flying grain;
No more when Autumn strews the flaming
leaves
The reaper's band shall gird its yellow sheaves;
For thee alike the circling seasons flow
Till the first blossoms heave the latest snow.
In the stiff clod below the whirling drifts,
In the loose soil the springing herbage lifts,
In the hot dust beneath the parching weeds
Life's wilting flower shall drop its shrivelled
seeds;
PITTSFIELD CEMETERY. 315
Its germ entranced in thy unbreathing sleep
Till what thou sowest mightier angels reap !
Spirit of Beauty let thy graces blend
With loveliest Nature all that Art can lend.
Come from the bowers where Summer's life.
blood flows
Through the red lips of June's half-open rose,
Dressed in bright hues, the loving sunshine's
dower;
For tranquil Nature owns no mourning flower.
Come from the forest where the beech's
SCIſeen
Bars the fierce noonbeam with its flakes of
green ;
Stay the rude axe that bares the shadowy
plains,
Stanch the deep wound that dries the maple's
veins.
Come with the stream whose silver-braided
rills
Fling their unclasping bracelets from the hills,
Till in one gleam, beneath the forest's wings,
Melts the white glitter of a hundred springs.
316 PITTSFIELD CEMETERY.
Come from the steeps where look majestic
forth -
From their twin thrones the Giants of the North
On the huge shapes that, crouching at their
knees,
Stretch their broad shoulders, rough with shaggy
treeS. -
Through the wide waste of ether, not in vain,
Their softened gaze shall reach our distant
plain;
There, while the mourner turns his aching eyes
On the blue mounds that print the bluer skies,
Nature shall whisper that the fading view
Of mightiest grief may wear a heavenly hue.
Cherub of Wisdom I let thy marble page
Leave its sad lesson, new to every age;
Teach us to live, not grudging every breath
To the chill winds that waſt us on to death,
But ruling calmly every pulse it warms,
And tempering gently every word it forms.
Seraph of Love! in heaven's adoring zone,
Nearest of all around the central throne,
PITTSFIELD CEMETERY. 317
While with soft hands the pillowed turf we
spread
That soon shall hold us in its dreamless bed,
With the low whisper — Who shall first be laid
In the dark chamber's yet unbroken shade? —
Let thy sweet radiance shine rekindled here,
And all we cherish grow more truly dear.
Here in the gates of Death's o'erhanging vault,
Oh, teach us kindness for our brother's fault;
Lay all our wrongs beneath this peaceful sod,
And lead our hearts to Mercy and its God.
FATHER of all ! in Death's relentless claim
We read Thy mercy by its sterner name;
In the bright flower that decks the solemn
bier,
We see Thy glory in its narrowed sphere;
In the deep lessons that affliction draws,
We trace the curves of Thy encircling laws;
In the long sigh that sets our spirits free,
We own the love that calls us back to Thee!
Through the hushed street, along the silent
plain,
318 PITTSFIELD CEMETERY.
The spectral future leads its mourning train,
Dark with the shadows of uncounted bands,
Where man’s white lips and woman’s wringing
hands
Track the still burden, rolling slow before,
That love and kindness can protect no more;
The smiling babe that, called to mortal strife,
Shuts its meek eyes and drops its little life;
The drooping child that prays in vain to live,
And pleads for help its parent cannot give;
The pride of beauty stricken in its flower;
The strength of manhood broken in an hour;
Age in its weakness, bowed by toil and care,
Traced in sad lines beneath its silvered hair.
The sun shall set, and heaven's resplendent
spheres *
Gild the smooth turf unhallowed yet by tears,
But ah, how soon the evening stars will shed
Their sleepless light around the slumbering dead!
Take them, O Father, in immortal trustſ
Ashes to ashes, dust to kindred dust,
Till the last angel rolls the stone away,
And a new morning brings eternal day !
ASTRAEA:
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS.*
WHAT Secret charm, long whispering in mine
ear,
Allures, attracts, compels, and chains me here,
Where murmuring echoes call me to resign
Their sacred haunts to sweeter lips than mine;
Where silent pathways pierce the solemn shade,
In whose still depths my feet have never
strayed;
Here, in the home where grateful children meet,
And I, half alien, take the stranger's seat,
Doubting, yet hoping that the gift I bear
May keep its bloom in this unwonted air?
Hush, idle fancy, with thy needless art,
Speak from thy fountains, O my throbbing
heart!
* A poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
of Yale College, August 14, 1850.
319
320 ASTRAEA :
Say, shall I trust these trembling lips to tell
The fireside tale that memory knows so well?
How, in the days of Freedom’s dread campaign,
A home-bred school-boy left his village plain,
Slow faring southward, till his wearied feet
Pressed the worn threshold of this fair retreat;
How, with his comely face and gracious mien,
He joined the concourse of the classic green,
Nameless, unfriended, yet by Nature blest
With the rich tokens that she loves the best;
The flowing locks, his youth's redundant crown,
Smoothed o'er a brow unfurrowed by a frown;
The untaught Smile that speaks so passing
plain
A world all hope, a past without a stain;
The clear-hued cheek, whose burning current
glows -
Crimson in action, carmine in repose;
Gifts such as purchase, with unminted gold,
Smiles from the young and blessings from the
old.
Say, shall my hand with pious love restore
The faint, far pictures time beholds no more?
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 321
How the grave Senior, he whose later fame
Stamps on our laws his own undying name,
Saw from on high, with half-paternal joy,
Some spark of promise in the studious boy,
And bade him enter, with benignant tone,
Those stately precincts which he called his
OWn,
Where the fresh student and the youthful sage
Read by one taper from the common page;
How the true comrade, whose maturer date
Graced the large honors of his ancient State,
Sought his young friendship, which through
every change
No time could weaken, no remove estrange;
How the great MASTER, reverend, solemn, wise,
Fixed on his face those calm, majestic eyes,
Full of grave meaning, where a child might
read
The Hebraist’s patience and the Pilgrim's
creed,
But warm with flashes of parental fire
That drew the stripling to his second sire;
How kindness ripened, till the youth might dare
Take the low seat beside his sacred chair,
322 ASTRAEA :
While the gray scholar, bending o'er the young
Spelled the square types of Abraham’s ancient
tongue,
Or with mild rapture stooped devoutly o’er
His small coarse leaf, alive with curious lore;
Tales of grim judges, at whose awful beck
Flashed the broad blade across a royal neck
Or learned dreams of Israel’s long-lost child
Found in the wanderer of the western wild.
Dear to his age were memories such as these,
Leaves of his June in life’s autumnal breeze;
Such were the tales that won my boyish ear,
Told in low tones that evening loves to hear.
Thus in the scene I pass so lightly o'er,
Trod for a moment, then beheld no more,
Strange shapes and dim, unseen by other eyes,
Through the dark portals of the past arise;
I see no more the fair embracing throng,
I hear no echo to my saddened song,
No more I heed the kind or curious gaze,
The voice of blame, the rustling thrill of
praise;
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 323
Alone, alone, the awful past I tread
White with the marbles of the slumbering
dead;
One shadowy form my dreaming eyes behold
That leads my footsteps as it led of old,
One floating voice, amid the silence heard,
Breathes in my ear love's long unspoken
word; —
These are the scenes thy youthful eyes have
known; &
My heart’s warm pulses claim them as its own
The sapling compassed in thy fingers' clasp,
My arms scarce circle in their twice-told grasp,
Yet in each leaf of yon o’ershadowing tree
I read a legend that was traced by thee.
Year after year the living wave has beat
These smooth-worn channels with its trampling
feet,
Yet in each line that scores the grassy sod
I see the pathway where thy feet have trod.
Though from the scene that hears my faltering
lay,
The few that loved thee long have passed
away, Nº.
324 ASTRAEA :
Thy sacred presence all the landscape fills,
Its groves and plains and adamantine hills l
Ye who have known the sudden tears that
flow, -
Sad tears, yet sweet, the dews of twilight
woe, –
When, led by chance, your wandering eye has
crossed
Some poor memorial of the loved and lost,
Bear with my weakness as I look around
On the dear relics of this holy ground,
These bowery cloisters, shadowed and serene,
My dreams have pictured ere mine eyes have
SCCI).
And oh, forgive me, if the flower I brought
Droops in my hand beside this burning thought;
The hopes and fears that marked this destined
hour,
The chill of doubt, the startled throb of power,
The flush of pride, the trembling glow of
shame,
All fade away and leave my FATHER's name
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS, 325
WINTER is past; the heart of Nature warms
Beneath the wrecks of unresisted storms;
Doubtful at first, suspected more than seen,
The southern slopes are fringed with tender
green;
On sheltered banks, beneath the dripping eaves,
Spring's earliest nurslings spread their glowing
leaves,
Bright with the hues from wider pictures won,
White, azure, golden, – drift, or sky, or Sun; —
The Snowdrop, bearing on her patient breast
The frozen trophy torn from winter’s crest;
The violet, gazing on the arch of blue
Till her own iris wears its deepened hue;
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the
mould
Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.
Swelled with new life, the darkening elm on
high
Prints her thick buds against the spotted sky;
On all her boughs the stately chestnut cleaves
The gummy shroud that wraps her embryo leaves;
The housefly, stealing from his narrow grave,
Drugged with the opiate that November gave,
326 ASTRAEA :
Beats with faint wing against the Sunny pane,
Or crawls, tenacious, o'er its lucid plain;
From shaded chinks of lichen-crusted walls,
In languid curves, the gliding serpent crawls;
The bog's green harper, thawing from his sleep,
Twangs a hoarse note and tries a shortened
leap;
On floating rails that face the softening noons
The still shy turtles range their dark platoons,
Or toiling, aimless, o'er the mellowing fields,
Trail through the grass their tessellated shields.
At last young April, ever frail and fair,
Wooed by her playmate with the golden hair,
Chased to the margin of receding floods
O'er the soft meadows starred with opening
buds,
In tears and blushes sighs herself away,
And hides her cheek beneath the flowers of
May.
Then the proud tulip lights her beacon
blaze,
Her clustering curls the hyacinth displays,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 327
O'er her tall blades the crested fleur-de-lis,
Like blue-eyed Pallas, towers erect and free;
With yellower flames the lengthened sunshine
glows,
And love lays bare the passion-breathing rose;
Queen of the lake, along its reedy verge
The rival lily hastens to emerge,
Her snowy shoulders glistening as she strips,
Till morn is sultan of her parted lips.
Then bursts the song from every leafy glade,
The yielding season's bridal serenade;
Then flash the wings returning summer calls
Through the deep arches of her forest halls;
The bluebird breathing from his azure plumes
The fragrance borrowed where the myrtle
blooms;
The thrush, poor wanderer, dropping meekly
down,
Clad in his remnant of autumnal brown;
The oriole, drifting like a flake of fire
Rent by the whirlwind from a blazing spire;
The robin, jerking his spasmodic throat,
Repeats, staccato, his peremptory note;
328 . ASTRAEA :
The crackbrained bobolink courts his crazy
mate,
Poised on a bulrush tipsy with his weight;
Nay, in his cage the lone canary sings,
Feels the soft air and spreads his idle wings; —
Why dream I here within these caging walls,
Deaf to her voice while blooming Nature calls;
Peering and gazing with insatiate looks
Through blinding lenses, or in wearying books?
Off, gloomy spectres of the shrivelled past,
Fly with the leaves that filled the Autumn
blast !
Ye imps of Science, whose relentless chains
Lock the warm tides within these living veins,
Close your dim cavern, while its captive strays
Dazzled and giddy in the morning’s blazel
What life is this, that spreads in sudden
birth
Its plumes of light around a new-born earth?
Is this the sun that brought the unwelcome
day,
Pallid and glimmering with his lifeless ray,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 329
Or through the sash that bars yon narrow cage
Slanted, intrusive, on the opened page?
Is this soft breath the same complaining gale
That filled my slumbers with its murmuring
wail?
Is this green mantle of elastic sod
The same brown desert with its frozen clod,
Where the last ridges of the dingy snow
Lie till the windflower blooms unstained below?
Thus to my heart its wonted tides return
When sullen Winter breaks his crystal urn,
And o'er the turf in wild profusion showers
Its dewy leaflets and ambrosial flowers.
In vacant rapture for a while I range
Through the wide scene of universal change,
Till, as the statue in its nerves of stone
Felt the new senses wakening one by one,
Each long-closed inlet finds its destined ray
Through the dark curtain Spring has rent away.
I crush the buds the clustering lilacs bear;
The same sweet fragrance that I loved is there;
The same fresh hues each opening disk reveals;
Soft as of old each silken petal feels;
330 ASTRAEA :
The birch's rind its flavor still retains,
Its boughs still ringing with the selfsame strains;
Above, around, rekindling Nature claims
Her glorious altars wreathed in living flames;
Undimmed, unshadowed, far as morning shines,
Feeds with fresh incense her eternal shrines.
Lost in her arms, her burning life I share,
Breathe the wild freedom of her perfumed air,
From Heaven’s fair face the long-drawn shad- *
ows roll,
And all its sunshine floods my opening soul!
Yet in the darksome crypt I left so late,
Whose only altar is its rusted grate, –
Sepulchral, rayless, joyless, as it seems,
Shamed by the glare of May's refulgent
bealms, –
While the dim seasons dragged their shrouded
train,
Its paler splendors were not quite in vain.
From these dull bars the cheerful firelight's
glow
Streamed through the casement o'er the spec-
tral snow ;
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 331
Here, while the night-wind wreaked its frantic
will
On the loose ocean and the rock-bound hill,
Rent the cracked topsail from its quivering
yard,
And rived the oak a thousand storms had
scarred,
. Fenced by these walls the peaceful taper shone,
Nor felt a breath to swerve its trembling cone.
Not all unblest the mild interior scene
When the red curtain spread its folded screen;
O'er some light task the lonely hours were
past,
And the long evening only flew too fast;
Or the wide chair its leathern arms would
lend,
In genial welcome to some easy friend,
Stretched on its bosom with relaxing nerves,
Slow moulding, plastic, to its hollow curves;
Perchance indulging, if of generous creed,
In brave Sir Walter's dream-compelling weed.
Or, happier still, the evening hour would bring
To the round table its expected ring,
332 A ASTRAEA:
And while the punch bowl's sounding depths
were stirred, –
Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard, –
O'er caution's head the blinding hood was
flung,
And friendship loosed the jesses of the tongue.
Such the warm life this dim retreat has
known,
Not quite deserted when its guests were flown;
Nay, filled with friends, an unobtrusive set,
Guiltless of calls and cards and etiquette,
Ready to answer, never known to ask,
Claiming no service, prompt for every task.
On those dark shelves no housewife tool
profanes,
O'er his mute files the monarch folio reigns;
A mingled race, the wreck of chance and time,
That talk all tongues and breathe of every
clime;
Each knows his place, and each may claim his
part
In some quaint corner of his master's heart.
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 333
This old Decretal, won from Kloss's hoards,
Thick-leafed, brass-cornered, ribbed with oaken
boards,
Stands the gray patriarch of the graver rows,
Its fourth ripe century narrowing to its close;
Not daily conned, but glorious still to view
With glistening letters wrought in red and blue.
There towers Stagira's all-embracing sage,
The Aldine anchor on his opening page;
There sleep the births of Plato's heavenly
mind
In yon dark tome by jealous clasps confined,
“Olim e libris" — (dare I call it mine?)
Of Yale’s great Head and Killingworth's divine !
In those square sheets the songs of Maro fill
The silvery types of smooth-leafed Baskerville;
High over all, in compact close array,
Their classic wealth the Elzevirs display.
In lower regions of the sacred space
Range the dense volumes of a humbler race;
There grim chirurgeons all their mysteries
- teach
In spectral pictures, or in crabbed speech;
Harvey and Haller, fresh from Nature's page,
334 - ASTRAEA :
Shoulder the dreamers of an earlier age,
Lully and Geber, and the learned crew
That loved to talk of all they could not do.
Why count the rest, — those names of later
days
That many love, and all agree to praise, –
Or point the titles, where a glance may read
The dangerous lines of party or of creed?
Too well, perchance, the chosen list would
show
What few may care and none can claim to
know.
Each has his features, whose. exterior seal
A brush may copy, or a sunbeam steal;
Go to his study, -on the nearest shelf
Stands the mosaic portrait of himself.
What though for months the tranquil dust
descends,
Whitening the heads of these mine ancient
friends,
While the damp offspring of the modern press
Flaunts on my table with its pictured dress;
Not less I love each dull familiar face,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 335
Not less should miss it from the appointed place;
I snatch the book, along whose burning leaves
His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves,
Yet, while proud Hester’s fiery pangs I share,
My old MAGNALIA must be standing there/
See, while I speak my fireside joys return,
The lamp rekindles and the ashes burn,
The dream of summer fades before their ray,
As in red firelight sunshine dies away.
A twofold picture; ere the first was gone,
The deepening outline of the next was drawn,
And wavering fancy hardly dares to choose
The first or last of her dissolving views.
No Delphic sage is wanted to divine
The shape of Truth beneath my gauzy line;
Yet there are truths, – like Schoolmates, once
well known,
But half remembered, not enough to own, –
That lost from sight in life’s bewildering train,
May be, like strangers, introduced again,
Dressed in new feathers, as from time to time
May please our friends, the milliners of rhyme.
336 ASTRAEA :
Trust not, it says, the momentary hue
Whose false complexion paints the present
view;
Red, yellow, violet, stain the rainbow’s light,
The prism dissolves, and all again is white.
When o'er the street the morning peal is
flung
From yon tall belfry with the brazen tongue,
Its wide vibrations, wafted by the gale,
To each far listener tell a different tale.
The Sexton, stooping to the quivering floor
Till the great caldron spills its brassy roar,
Whirls the hot axle, counting, one by one,
Each dull concussion, till his task is done. .
Toil's patient daughter, when the welcome
note
Clangs through the silence from the steeple's
throat,
Streams, a white unit, to the checkered street,
Demure, but guessing whom she soon shall
meet; -
The bell, responsive to her secret flame,
With every note repeats her lover's name.
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 337
The lover, tenant of the neighboring lane,
Sighing, and fearing lest he sigh in vain,
Hears the stern accents, as they come and go,
Their only burden one despairing No!
Ocean's rough child, whom many a shore
has known
Ere homeward breezes swept him to his own,
Starts at the echo as it circles round,
A thousand memories kindling with the sound;
The early favorite's unforgotten charms,
Whose blue initials stain his tawny arms;
His first farewell, the flapping canvas spread,
The seaward streamers crackling o'er his head,
His kind, pale mother, not ashamed to weep
Her first-born's bridal with the haggard deep,
While the brave father stood with tearless eye,
Smiling and choking with his last good-by.
'Tis but a wave, whose spreading circle
beats,
With the same impulse, every nerve it meets,
Yet who shall count the varied shapes that
ride -
On the round surge of that aerial tide I
338 ASTRAEA:
O child of earth! If floating sounds like
these - l
Steal from thyself their power to wound or please,
If here of there thy changing will inclines,
As the bright zodiac shifts its rolling signs,
Look at thy heart, and when its depths are
known, -
Then try thy brother's, judging by thine own,
But keep thy wisdom to the narrower range,
While its own standards are the sport of change,
Nor ask mankind to tremble, and obey
The passing breath that holds thy passion's
Sway.
But how, alas! among our eager race,
Shall smiling candor show her girlish face?
What place is secret to the meddling crew,
Whose trade is settling what we all shall do?
What verdict sacred from the busy fools,
That sell the jargon of their outlaw schools?
What pulpit certain to be never vexed.
With libels sanctioned by a holy text?
Where, O my country, is the spot that yields
The freedom fought for on a hundred fields?
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS, 339
Not one strong tyrant holds the servile
chain,
Where all may vote, and each may hope to
reign;
One sturdy cord a single limb may bind,
And leave the captive only half confined,
But the free spirit finds its legs and wings
Tied with unnumbered Liliputian strings,
Which, like the spider's undiscovered fold,
In countless meshes round the prisoner rolled,
With silken pressure that he scarce can feel,
Clamp every fibre as in bands of steel !
Hard is the task to point in civil phrase
One’s own dear people's foolish works or
ways;
Woe to the friend that marks a touchy fault,
Himself obnoxious to the world’s assault!
Think what an earthquake is a nation's hiss,
That takes its circuit through a land like this;
Count with the census, would you be precise,
From sea to sea, from Oranges to ice;
A thousand myriads are its virile lungs,
A thousand myriads its contralto tongues!
340 ASTRAEA :
And oh, remember the indignant press;
Honey is bitter to its fond caress,
But the black venom that its hate lets fall
Would shame to sweetness the hyena's gall !
Briefly and gently let the task be tried
To touch some frailties on their tender side;
Not to dilate on each imagined wrong,
And spoil at once our temper and our song,
But once or twice a passing gleam to throw
On some rank failings ripe enough to show,
Patterns of others, – made of common stuff, -
The world will furnish parallels enough, –
Such as bewilder their contracted view,
Who make one pupil do the work of two;
Who following Nature, where her tracks divide,
Drive all their passions on the narrower side,
And pour the phials of their virtuous wrath
On half mankind that take the wider path.
Nature is liberal to her inmost soul,
She loves alike the tropic and the pole,
The storm's wild anthem, and the sunshine's
calm,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 341
The arctic fungus, and the desert palm;
Loves them alike, and wills that each maintain
Its destined share of her divided reign;
No creeping moss refuse her crystal gem,
No soaring pine her cloudy diadem
Alas! her children, borrowing but in part
The flowing pulses of her generous heart,
Shame their kind mother with eternal strife
At all the crossings of their mingled life;
Each age, each people, finds its ready shifts
To quarrel stoutly o'er her choicest gifts.
History can tell of early ages dim,
When man's chief glory was in strength of
limb;
Then the best patriot gave the hardest knocks,
The height of virtue was to fell an ox;
Ill fared the babe of questionable mould,
Whom its stern father happened to behold;
In vain the mother with her ample vest
Hid the poor nursling on her throbbing breast;
No tears could save him from the kitten's fate,
To live an insult to the warlike state.
342 ASTRAEA :
This weakness passed, and nations owned
Once more,
Man was still human, measuring five feet four,
The anti-cripples ceased to domineer,
And owned Napleon worth a grenadier.
In these mild times the ancient bully's sport
Would lead its hero to a well-known court;
Olympian athletes, though the pride of Greece,
Must face the Justice if they broke the peace,
And valor find some inconvenient checks,
If strolling Theseus met Policeman X.
Perhaps too far in these considerate days
Has Patience carried her submissive ways;
Wisdom has taught us to be calm and meek,
To take one blow and turn the other cheek;
It is not written what a man shall do,
If the rude caitiff strike the other too !
Land of our fathers, in thine hour of need
God help thee, guarded by the passive creed
As the lone pilgrim trusts to beads and cowl,
When through the forest rings the gray wolf’s
howl;
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 343
As the deep galleon trusts her gilded prow
When the black corsair slants athwart her bow;
As the poor pheasant, with his peaceful mien,
Trusts to his feathers, shining golden-green,
When the dark plumage with the crimson beak
Has rustled shadowy from its splintered peak;
So trust thy friends, whose idle tongues would
charm
The lifted sabre from thy foeman's arm,
Thy torches ready for the answering peal
From bellowing fort and thunder-freighted keelſ
Yet when thy champion's stormy task is done,
The frigate silenced and the fortress won,
When toil-worn valor claims his laurel wreath,
His reeking cutlass slumbering in its sheath,
The fierce declaimer shall be heard once more,
Whose twang was smothered by the conflict's
roar;
Heroes shall fall that strode unharmed away
Through the red heaps of many a doubtful day,
Hacked in his sermons, riddled in his prayers,
The broadcloth slashing what the broadsword
spares |
344 ASTRAEA :
Untaught by trial, ignorance might suppose
That all our fighting must be done with blows;
Alas! not so; between the lips and brain
A dread artillery masks its loaded train;
The smooth portcullis of the smiling face
Veils the grim battery with deceptive grace,
But in the flashes of its opened fire,
Truth, Honor, Justice, Peace, and Love expire.
Yon whey-faced brother, who delights to wear
A weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair,
Seems of the sort that in a crowded place
One elbows freely into smallest space;
A timid creature, lax of knee and hip,
Whom small disturbance whitens round the lip;
One of those harmless spectacled machines,
Ignored by waiters when they call for greens,
Whom schoolboys question if their walk tran-
scends
The last advices of maternal friends,
Whom John, obedient to his master's sign,
Conducts, laborious, up to ninety-nine,
While Peter, glistening with luxurious scorn,
Husks his white ivories like an ear of corn;
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 345
Dark in the brow and bilious in the cheek,
Whose yellowish linen flowers but once a week,
Conspicuous, annual, in their threadbare suits,
And the laced high-lows which they call their
boots.
Well mayst thou shun that dingy front severe,
But him, O stranger, him thou canst not fear.
Be slow to judge, and slower to despise,
Man of broad shoulders and heroic size
The tiger, writhing from the boa's rings,
Drops at the fountain where the cobra stings.
. In that lean phantom, whose extended glove
Points to the text of universal love,
Behold the master that can tame thee down
To crouch, the vassal of his Sunday frown;
His velvet throat against thy corded wrist,
His loosened tongue against thy doubled fist
The MoRAL BULLY, though he never swears,
Nor kicks intruders down his entry stairs,
Though meekness plants his backward sloping
hat,
And non-resistance ties his white cravat,
346 ASTRAEA :
Though his black broadcloth glories to be seen
In the same plight with Shylock’s gabardine,
Hugs the same passion to his narrow breast,
That heaves the cuirass on the trooper’s chest,
Hears the same hell-hounds yelling in his rear,
That chase from port the maddened buccaneer,
Feels the same comfort while his acrid words
Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds,
Or with grim logic prove, beyond debate,
That all we love is worthiest of our hate,
As the scarred ruffian of the pirates' deck,
When his long swivel rakes the staggering
wreck!
Heaven keep us all! Is every rascal clown,
Whose arm is stronger, free to knock us down?
Has every scarecrow, whose cachectic soul
Seems fresh from Bedlam, airing on parole,
Who, though he carries but a doubtful trace
Of angel visits on his hungry face,
From lack of marrow or the coins to pay,
Has dodged some vices in a shabby way,
The right to stick us with his cut-throat terms,
And bait his homilies with his brother worms?
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 347
If generous fortune give me leave to choose
My saucy neighbors barefoot or in shoes,
I leave the hero blustering while he dares
On platforms furnished with posterior stairs,
Till prudence drives him to his “earnest” legs
With large bequest of disappointed eggs,
And take the brawler whose unstudied dress
Becomes him better, and protects him less;
Give me the bullying of the scoundrel crew,
If Swaggering virtue wont insult me too!
Come, let us breathe; a something not divine
Has mingled, bitter, with the flowing line.
Pause for a moment, while our soul forgets
The noisy tribe in panta-loons or -lets;
Nor pass, ungrateful, by the debt we owe
To those who teach us half of all we know,
Not in rude license, or unchristian scorn,
But hoping, loving, pitying, while they warn
Sweep out the pieces! Round a careless
IOOIſ)
The feather duster follows up the broom;
If the last target took a round of grape
To knock its beauty something out of shape,
348 ASTRAEA :
The next asks only, if the listener please,
A schoolboy's blowpipe and a gill of peas.
This creeping object, caught upon the brink.
Of an old teacup, filled with muddy ink,
Lives on a leaf that buds from time to time
In certain districts of a temperate clime.
O'er this he toils in silent corners snug,
And leaves a track behind him, like a slug;
The leaves he stains a humbler tribe devours,
Thrown off in monthly or in weekly showers;
Himself kept savage on a starving fare,
Of such exuviae as his friends can spare.
Let the bug drop, and view him if we can
In his true aspect as a quasi man.
The little wretch, whose terebrating powers
Would bore a Paixhan in a dozen hours,
Is called a CRITIC by the heavy friends
That help to pay his minus dividends.
The pseudo-critic-editorial race
Owns no allegiance but the law of place;
Each to his region sticks through thick and
thin,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 349
Stiff as a beetle spiked upon a pin.
Plant him in Boston, and his sheet he fills
With all the slipslop of his threefold hills,
Talks as if Nature kept her choicest smiles
Within his radius of a dozen miles,
And nations waited till his next Review
Had made it plain what Providence must do.
Would you believe him, water is not damp
Except in buckets with the Hingham stamp,
And Heaven should build the walls of Paradise
Of Quincy granite lined with Wenham ice.
But Hudson's banks, with more congenial
skies
Swell the small creature to alarming size;
A gayer pattern wraps his flowery chest,
A sham more brilliant sparkles on his breast,
An eyeglass, hanging from a gilded chain,
Taps the white leg that tips his rakish cane;
Strings of new names, the glories of the age,
Hang up to dry on his exterior page,
Titanic pygmies, shining lights obscure,
His favored sheets have managed to secure,
Whose wide renown beyond their own abode
350 ASTRAEA :
Extends for miles along the Harlaem road;
New radiance lights his patronizing smile,
New airs distinguish his patrician style,
New Sounds are mingled with his fatal hiss,
Oftenest, “provincial” and “metropolis.”
He cry “provincial,” with imperious brow!
The half-bred rogue, that groomed his mother's
cow !
Fed on coarse tubers and Æolian beans
Till clownish manhood crept among his teens,
When, after washing and unheard-of pains
To lard with phrases his refractory brains,
A third-rate college licked him to the shape,
Not of the scholar, but the scholar’s apel
God bless Manhattan Let her fairly claim,
With all the honors due her ancient name,
Worth, wisdom, wealth, abounding and to spare,
Rags, riots, rogues, at least her honest share;
But not presume, because, by sad mischance,
The mobs of Paris wring the neck of France,
Fortune has ordered she shall turn the poise
Of thirty Empires with her Bowery boys!
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 351
The poorest hamlet on the mountain's side
Looks on her glories with a sister’s pride;
When the first babes her fruitful ship-yards
wean,
Play round the breasts of Ocean’s conquered
queen,
The shout of millions, borne on every breeze,
Sweeps with ExCELSIOR o'er the enfranchised
Seas |
Yet not too rashly let her think to bind
Beneath her circlet all the nation’s mind;
Our star-crowned mother, whose informing soul
Clings to no fragment, but pervades the whole,
Views with a smile the clerk of Maiden Lane,
Who takes her ventral ganglion for her brain
No fables tell us of Minervas born
From bags of cotton or from sacks of corn;
The halls of Leyden Science used to cram,
While dulness snored in purse-proud Amster-
dam |
But those old burghers had a foggy clime,
And better luck may come the second time;
352 ASTRAEA :
What though some churls of doubtful sense
declare
That poison lurks in her commercial air,
Her buds of genius dying premature,
From some malaria draining cannot cure;
Nay, that so dangerous is her golden Soil,
Whate'er she borrows, she contrives to spoil;
That drooping minstrels in a few brief
years
Lose their sweet voice, the gift of other
spheres;
That wafted singing from their native shore,
They touch the Battery, and are heard no
more; —
By those twinned waves that wear the varied
gleams
Beryl or Sapphire mingles in their streams,
Till the fair sisters o'er her yellow sands,
Clasping their soft and snowy ruffled hands,
Lay on her footstool with their silver keys
Strength from the mountains, freedom from the
Seas, –
Some future day may see her rise sublime
Above her counters, – only give her time !
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 353
When our first Soldiers' swords of honor gild
The stately mansions that her tradesmen build;
When our first Statesmen take the Broadway
track,
Our first Historians following at their back;
When our first Painters, dying, leave behind
On her proud walls the shadows of their
mind;
When our first Poets flock from farthest scenes
To take in hand her pictured Magazines;
When our first Scholars are content to dwell
Where their own printers teach them how to
spell;
When world-known Science crowds toward
her gates,
Then shall the children of our hundred States
Hail her a true METROPOLIs of men,
The nation’s centre. Then, and not till then
The song is failing. Yonder changing tower
Shakes in its cup the more than brimming
hour;
The full-length gallery which the fates deny,
A colored Moral briefly must supply.
354 ASTRAEA :
No life worth naming ever comes to good
If always nourished on the selfsame food;
The creeping mite may live so if he please,
And feed on Stilton till he turns to cheese,
But cool Magendie proves beyond a doubt,
If mammals try it, that their eyes drop out.
No reasoning natures find it safe to feed
For their sole diet on a single creed;
It chills their hearts, alas! it fills their lungs,
And spoils their eyeballs while it spares their
tongues.
When the first larvae on the elm are seen,
The crawling wretches, like its leaves, are
green;
Ere chill October shakes the latest down,
They, like the foliage, change their tint to
brown;
On the blue flower a bluer flower you spy,
You stretch to pluck it — 'tis a butterfly;
The flattened tree-toads so resemble bark,
They're hard to find as Ethiops in the dark;
The woodcock, stiffening to fictitious mud,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 355
Cheats the young sportsman thirsting for his
blood.
So by long living on a single lie,
Nay, on one truth, will creatures get its dye;
Red, yellow, green, they take their subject's
hue, –
Except when squabbling turns them black and
blue !
The song is passing. Let its meaning rise
To loftier notes before its echo dies,
Nor leave, ungracious, in its parting train
A trivial flourish or discordant strain.
These lines may teach, rough-spoken though
they be,
Thy gentle creed, divinest Charity!
Truth is at heart not always as she seems,
Judged by our sleeping or our waking dreams.
We trust and doubt, we question and believe,
From life's dark threads a trembling faith to
weave,
Frail as the web that misty night has spun,
356 ASTRAEA :
Whose dew-gemmed awnings glitter in the sun.
Though Sovereign Wisdom, at His creatures' call,
Has taught us much, He has not taught us all;
When Sinai’s summit was Jehovah's throne,
The chosen Prophet knew His voice alone;
When Pilate's hall that awful question heard,
The Heavenly Captive answered not a word.
Eternal Truth! Beyond our hopes and fears
Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres'
From age to age while History carves sublime
On her waste rock the flaming curves of time,
How the wild swayings of our planet show
That worlds unseen surround the world we
know ! -
The song is hushed. Another moment parts
This breathing zone, this belt of living hearts;
Ah, think not thus the parting moment ends
The soul’s embrace of new-discovered friends.
Sleep on my heart, thou long-expected hour,
Time's new-born daughter, with thine infant
dower,
THE BALANCE OF ILLUSIONS. 357
One sad, sweet look from those expiring
charms
The clasping centuries strangle in their arms,
Dreams of old halls, and shadowy arches green,
And kindly faces loved as soon as seen!
Sleep, till the fires of manhood fade away,
The sprinkled locks have saddened into gray,
And age, oblivious, blends thy memories old
With hoary legends that his sire has told !
REPRINTED FROM
“THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.”
POEMS
REPRINTED FROM “THE AUTOCRAT OF THE
BREAKFAST-TABLE.”
—º-
ALBUM VERSES.
WHEN Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another
To cheat the cunning tempter's art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.
A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.
361
362
ALBUM VERSES.
On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from redding dawn
Till western skies are burning.
Alas ! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.
But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown,
The lips of lying lovers,
They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavor
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.
LATTER—DAY WARNINGS.
WHEN legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle — rasp — and straw —
Grow bigger downwards through the box, —
When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light, —
When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean,—
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean,—
When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take, –
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience' sake,—
363
364 LATTER—DAY WARNINGS.
When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof, -
When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair, –
When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harbor not
Such dimples as would hold your fist, —
When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before, —
When the first locomotive's wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore ;-
Till then let Cumming blaze away,
And Miller's saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
Zhen order your ascension robe.
YES, WE KNEW WE MUST LOSE HIM.
YES, we knew we must lose him, - though friend-
ship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of
fame ;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
'Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has
blown.
As the rider that rests with the spur on his
heel, -
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of
steel, -
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the
string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties
shall bloom.
365
366 YES, WE KNEW WE MUST LOSE HIM.
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their
skies
In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and
crime,
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs
unsung,
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his
tongue.
Let us hear the proud story which time has
bequeathed
From lips that are warm with the freedom they
breathed
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their
doom,
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp
with his broom |
% 3% 3% $ 34 3% $º
The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
YES, WE KNEW WE MUST LOSE HIM. 367
So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
When the dead summer's jewels were trampled
and crushed :
THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING, - the world
holds him dear, —
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his
career |
SUN AND SHADOW.
As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail ;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.
Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, –
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him that gaze from the shore
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
368
SUN AND SHADOW/. 369
Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade ;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow
dark,
We'll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore
THIS IS IT.
A PROLOGUE P. Well, of course the ladies know ; —
I have my doubts. No matter, — here we go
What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach :
Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech.
'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings,
The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; —
Prologues in metre are to other pros
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.
“The world's a stage,” — as Shakspeare said,
one day; *
The stage a world — was what he meant to say.
The outside world's a blunder, that is clear;
The real world that Nature meant is here.
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid,
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
370
THIS IS IT. 371
One after one the troubles all are past
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and
all,
Join hands, so happy at the curtain's fall.
— Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
— When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
Cries, “Help, kyind Heaven l’’ and drops upon
her knees
On the green — baize, – beneath the (canvas)
trees, –
See to her side avenging Valor fly : —
“Ha! Villain Draw . Now, Terraitorr, yield
or die ' ''
— When the poor hero flounders in despair,
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire, —
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
Sobs on his neck, “My boy / MY BOY | | MY
BOY | | | "
Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
Of love that conquers in disaster's spite.
372 THIS IS IT.
Ladies, attend | While woful cares and doubt
Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain : Love will triumph here !
Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule, –
The world's great masters, when you're out of
school, -
Learn the brief moral of our evening's play:
Man has his will, - but woman has her way !
While man's dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
Woman's swift instinct threads the electric wire, —
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
But that one rebel, -woman's wilful heart.
All foes you master; but a woman's wit
Lets daylight through you ere you know you're
hit.
So, just to picture what her art can do,
Hear an old story made as good as new.
Rudolph, professor of the headsman's trade,
Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
THIS IS IT. 373
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
Knelt at the block to test the artist's skill.
Bare-armed, Swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy.
browed,
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
As the pike's armor flashes in the stream.
He sheathed his blade ; he turned as if to go ;
The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
“Why strikest not ? Perform thy murderous
act,”
The prisoner said. (His voice was slightly
cracked.)
“Friend, I have struck,” the artist straight
replied;
“Wait but one moment, and yourself decide.”
He held his snuff-box, —“Now then, if you
please l’”
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing
Sneeze,
Off his head tumbled, - bowled along the
floor, —
Bounced down the steps; — the prisoner said
no more l
374 THIS IS IT.
Woman thy falchion is a glittering eye;
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die l
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
We die with love, and never dream we're dead Î
HERE IT IS, - WITH THE SLIGHT
AZZTERAZYOAWS /
CoME 1 fill a fresh bumper, — for why should we go
logwood
While the neetas still reddens our cups as they flow P
decoction
Pour out the rich—juiees still bright with the sun,
dye-stuff
Till o'er the brimmed crystal the rubies shall run.

half-ripened apples
The purple—globed—eltisters their life-dews have
bled;
taste sugar of lead
How sweet is the breath of the flagraaee they shed!
rank poisons wiates / / /
For summer's last—reses lie hid in the wines
stable-boys smoking long-nines.
That were garnered by maidens—whe-laughed
threugh-the-vines.
375
376 HERE IT IS, WITH SLIGHT ALTERATIONS.
scowl howl scoff
Then a smile, and a glass, and a teast, and a
sneer.
£heer,
strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer
For all the good-winerand-we’ve-sehae-eſ-it-here l
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
Down, down, with the tyrant that masters us all!




THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
O FOR one hour of youthful joy
Give back my twentieth spring !
I’d rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king !
Off with the wrinkled spoils of age 1
Away with learning's crown
Tear out life's wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down |
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood's fount of flame !
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame !
— My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
377
378 THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
“But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
— Ah, truest soul of womankind
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind :
I'll take — my — precious — wife I
—The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
“The man would be a boy again,
• And be a husband too ! ”
—“And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears P
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years 1”
Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys ;
I could not bear to leave them all ;
I'll take — my — girl — and — boys |
THE OLD MAN DREAMS. 379
The smiling angel dropped his pen, –
“Why, this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father"too !”
And so I laughed,— my laughter woke
The household with its noise, –
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUs.
THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main, –
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their stream-
ing hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed, -
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed !
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
380
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. 381
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the
old no more. •.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by
thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice
that sings : — -
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll !
Leave thy low-vaulted past !
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting
sea |
MARE RUBRUM.
FLASH out a stream of blood-red wine ! —
For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine,
Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade ;
But every ghost of boyhood's dream
By Nature's magic power is laid
To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.
It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer's cloudless day
Is mirrored in the broad Garonne ;
It pictures still the bacchant shapes
That saw their hoarded sunlight shed, -
The maidens dancing on the grapes, –
Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.
Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
382
MARE RUBRUM. 383
Those flitting shapes that never die,
The swift-winged visions of the past.
Kiss but the crystal’s mystic rim,
Each shadow rends its flowery chain,
Springs in a bubble from its brim
And walks the chambers of the brain.
Poor Beauty time and fortune's wrong
No form nor feature may withstand, –
Thy wrecks are scattered all along,
Like emptied sea-shells on the sand ; —
Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,
The dust restores each blooming girl,
As if the sea-shells moved again
Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.
Here lies the home of schoolboy life,
With creaking stair and wind-swept hall,
And, scarred by many a truant knife,
Our old initials on the wall;
Here rest— their keen vibrations mute—
The shout of voices known so well,
The ringing laugh, the wailing flute,
The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.
384 MARE RUBRUM.
Here, clad in burning robes, are laid
Life's blossomed joys, untimely shed;
And here those cherished forms have strayed
We miss awhile, and call them dead.
What wizard fills the maddening glass?
What soil the enchanted clusters grew,
That buried passions wake and pass
In beaded drops of fiery dew P
Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine, –
Our hearts can boast a warmer glow,
Filled from a vintage more divine, –
Calmed, but not chilled by winter's snow !
To-night the palest wave we sip
Rich as the priceless draught shall be
That wet the bride of Cana's lip, —
The wedding wine of Galilee
WHAT WE ALL THINK.
THAT age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.
That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those “good old days,”
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.
That — mother, sister, wife, or child—
The “best of women” each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown.
That but for this our souls were free,
And but for that our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.
385
386 WHAT WE ALL THINK.
Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race, —
Though doctors think the matter plain, –
That ours is “a peculiar case.”
That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.
That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.
That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
“Ah, had I but one thousand more /*
That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.
WHAT WE ALL THINK. 387
Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truths eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with zeyhat we think,
Their echoes dumb to what we know ;
That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it: GOD IS LOVE |
MY LADY'S CHEEK CAN BOAST NO
MORE.
My lady's cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore ;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide—
wº
THE LAST BLOSSOM.
THOUGH young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty's dear deluding wiles; --
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.
Who knows a woman's wild caprice?
It played with Goethe's silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father's “niece”
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.
When sixty bids us sigh in vain -
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.
We see the Patriarch's wintry face,
The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.
388
THE LAST BLOSSOM.
389
Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies, –
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.
Might we but share one wild caress.
Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all !
My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.
Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.
Thou com’st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long !
Dove that would seek the poet's cage
Lured by the magic breath of song !
390 THE LAST BIOSSOM.
She blushes | Ah, reluctant maid,
Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told !
O'er girlhood's yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold !
Come to my arms 1 – love heeds not years ;
No frost the bud of passion knows. –
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered, - Rose !
Sweet was her smile, – but not for me ;
Alas, when woman looks too kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see, –
Some youth is walking close behind
CALL HIM NOT OLD, WHOSE VISION.—
ARY BRAIN.
CALL him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, —
Turn to the record where his years are told, -
Count his gray hairs, – they cannot make him
old !
391
THE LIVING TEMPLE.
Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built His blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker's glory seen :
Look in upon thy wondrous frame, –
Eternal wisdom still the same !
The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves,
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature's flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.
No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o'er his task,
392
THE LIVING TEMPLE. 393
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
But warmed with that unchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason's guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master's own.
See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.
394 THE LIVING TEMPLE.
Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thought in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation's faintest thrill
And flashes forth the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells :
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads !
O Father I grant Thy love divine
To make these mystic temples Thine !
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust Thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms 1
AU BANQUET DE LA VIE, INFORTUNÉ
CONVIVE.
* AU banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J'apparus un jour, et je meurs ;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j'arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."
At life's gay banquet placed, a poor, unhappy
guest,
One day I pass, then disappear ;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall
reSt
No friend shall come to shed a tear.
895
SPRING HAS COME.
Intra Muros.
THE sunbeams, lost for half a year,
Slant through my pane their morning rays;
For dry Northwesters, cold and clear,
The East blows in its thin blue haze.
And first the snowdrop's bells are seen,
Then close against the sheltering wall
The tulip's horn of dusky green,
The peony's dark unfolding ball.
The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
The long narcissus-blades appear;
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.
The willow's whistling lashes, wrung
By the wild winds of gusty March,
With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
Are swaying by the tufted larch.
396
SPRING HAS COME. 397
The elms have robed their slender spray
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
Wide o'er the clasping arch of day
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.
—[See the proud tulip's flaunting cup,
That flames in glory for an hour, –
Behold it withering, — then look up, —
How meek the forest-monarch's flower —
When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near ;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
“Bud, little roses Spring is here !”]
The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink as Aurora's finger-tips.
Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty's changed coroila-shades, –
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.
398- SPRING HAS COME.
The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.
Here comes the dealer's awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot, —
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.
— Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills
I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
Oh for one spot of living green, –
One little spot where leaves can grow, -
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above. to sleep below !
A GOOD TIME GOING !
BRAVE singer of the coming time,
Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant,
Good-bye | Good-bye!—Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
Cry, God be with him, till he stands
His feet among the English daisies
'Tis here we part; — for other eyes
The busy deck, the fluttering streamer,
The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
The cloudy pillar gliding o'er him.
The deep blue desert, lone and-drear,
With heaven above and home before him
399
400 A GOOD TIME GOING.
His home !—the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it; —
This little speck the British Isles?
'Tis but a freckle, – never mind it !—
He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
And ridges stretched from pole to pole
Heave till they crack their iron knuckles 1
But memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant: —
“An islet is a world,” she said,
“When glory with its dust has blended,
And Britain keeps her noble dead
Till earth and seas and skies are rended !”
Beneath each swinging forest-bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes, –
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valor's life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
A GOOD TIME GOING. 401
One-half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages
Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp,
From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together ; —
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between, –
Our little mother isle, God bless her
In earth's broad temple where we stand,
Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
We hold the missal in our hand,
Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
Where'er its blazoned page betrays
The glistening links of gilded fetters,
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
Her rubric stained in crimson letters
Enough To speed a parting friend
'Tis vain alike to speak and listen ; —
Yet stay, - these feeble accents blend
With rays of light from eyes that glisten,
402 A GOOD TIME GOING.
Good-bye | once more, — and kindly tell
In words of peace the young world's story,+
And say, besides, – we love too well
Our mother's soil, our father's glory !
THE TWO ARMIES.
As Life's unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen, –
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.
One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
The wide-mouthéd clarion's bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
“Our glory' is to slay.”
One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet’s gleam
That walks the clouded skies.
Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave ;
Its banner bears the single line,
“Our duty is to save.”
403
404
THE TWO ARMIES.
For those no death-bed's lingering shade ;
At Honor's trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory's arms they fall.
For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night, —
Each answers, “Here am I ?”
For those the sculptor's laurelled bust,
The builder's marble piles,
The anthems pealing o'er their dust
Through long cathedral aisles.
For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
In flowery-foaming waves.
Two paths lead upward from below,
And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop's flow,
Each falling tear of Love.
THE TWO ARMIES. 405
Though from the Hero's bleeding breast
Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
Sprang from that Scarlet dew, -
While Valor's haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
To sit beside the Throne ! ar
MUSA.
O My lost Beauty – hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
To chill our fiery dreams,
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy
streams?
Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
Whose flowers are silvered hair —
Have I not loved thee long,
Though my young lips have often done thee
wrong
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless
song? *...
Ah, wilt thou yet return,
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar
burn?
406
MUSA. 407
Come to me ! — I will flood thy silent shrine
With my soul's sacred wine,
And heap thy marble floors
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
In leafy islands walled with madrepores
And lapped in Orient seas,
When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in
the breeze.
Come to me ! — thou shalt feed on honied words,
Sweeter than song of birds; —
No wailing bulbul’s throat,
No melting dulcimer's melodious note,
When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
Thy ravished sense might soothe
With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-
smooth.
Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
Sought in those bowers of green
Where loop the clustered vines
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines, –
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight
shines,
408 MUSA.
And Summer's fruited gems,
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried
StemS.
Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves, –
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll dis-
owns,
Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones
Still slumbering where they lay
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf
away.
Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing !
Still let me dream and sing, —
Dream of that winding shore
Where scarlet cardinals bloom, - for me no
more, —
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced
StarS
MUSA. 409
Come while their balms the linden-blossoms
shed —
Come while the rose is red, -
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
On the green ripples round yon sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian
isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men
in prayer
Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild sweet pain —
On life's autumnal blast,
Like shrivelled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are
Cast, —
Once loving thee, we love thee to the last !—
Behold thy new-decked shrine,
And hear once more the voice that breathed
“ Forever thine !”
THE DEACON'S MASTER PIECE :
OR THE wonDERFUL “ONE-HORSE-SHAY.”
A Zogical Story.
HAVE you heard of the wonderful one-hoss-shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it—ah, but stay,
I'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, –
Have you ever heard of that, I say?
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
Georgius Secundus was then alive, –
Snuffy old drone from the German hive l
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock's army was done so brown,
Left without a scalp to its crown.
410
THE DEA CON'S MASTERPIECE. 411
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.
Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
There is always somewhere a weakest spot, —
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, — lurking still
Find it somewhere you must and will, -
Above or below, or within or without, —
And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise breaks dozen, but doesn’t wear out.
But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an “I dew vum,” or an “I tell yeou,”)
He would build one shay to beat the taown
'n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun';
It should be so built that it couldn’ break daown :
—“Fur,” said the Deacon, “’t's mighty plain
Thut the weakes' place mus' stan' the strain;
'n' the way tº fix it, uz I maintain
Is only jest
Tº make that place uz strong uz the rest.”
412 THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE.
So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke, –
That was for spokes and floor and sills;
He sent for lancewood to make the thills ;
The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
But lasts like iron for things like these ;
The hubs of logs from the “Settler's ellum,” —
Last of its timber, — they couldn't sell 'em,
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace, bison-skin, thick and wide ;
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died.
That was the way he “put her through.” —
“There !” said the Deacon, “naow she'll dew l’”
Do I tell you, I rather guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less!
THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE. 413
Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grand-children — where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day !
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED ; — it came and found
The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten ; —
“Hahnsum kerridge " they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came ; —
Running as usual ; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.
Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large ;
Take it. — You're welcome. — No extra charge.)
FIRST of November, — the Earthquake-day. —
There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay,
414 THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE.
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn't be, – for the Deacon's art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn’t a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
And the panels just as strong as the floor,
And the whippletree neither less nor more,
And the back crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub encore.
And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be worn out /
First of November, 'Fifty-five
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way !
Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay,
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
“Huddup !” said the parson. — Off went they.
The parson was working his Sunday's text, —
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the – Moses — was coming next.
THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE. 415
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill.
– First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill,—
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house clock, --
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
—What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around P
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground !
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, —
All at once and nothing first, —
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.
AESTIVATION.
An Unpublished Poem by my late Latin Tutor.
IN candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine !
To me, alas ! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-Scum, -
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue !
Me wretched Let me curr to quercine shades
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids !
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, —
Depart, — be off, - excede, – evade, – erump !
416
CONTENTMENT.
“Man wants but little here below.”
LITTLE I ask; my wants are few ;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own ; —
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.
Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten ; —
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank Heaven for three. Amen
I always thought cold victual nice;—
My choice would be vanilla-ice.
I care not much for gold or land; —
Give me a mortgage here and there, —
Some good bank-stock, -some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share ;-
417
418 CONTENTMENT.
1 only ask that Fortune send
A little more than I shall spend.
Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names; —
I would, perhaps, be Plenipo, -
But only near St. James;—
I’m very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.
Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things;–
One good-sized diamond in a pin, –
Some not so large, in rings, –
A ruby, and a pearl, or so, •
Will do for me ; — I laugh at show.
My dame should dress, in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)
I own perhaps I might desire
Some shawls of true cashmere, —
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.
CONTENTMENT. 419
I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare;
An easy gait —two, forty-five—
Suits me ; I do not care ; —
Perhaps for just a single spurt,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.
Of pictures I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four, –
I love so much their style and tone, –
One Turner, and no more, —
(A landscape, — foreground golden dirt,
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)
Of books but few, -some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor; —
Some little luxury there
Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.
Busts, cameos, gems, – such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride ; —
420 CONTENTMENT.
One Stradivarius, I confess,
Zwo Meerschaums, I would fain possess.
Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; —
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But all must be of buhl P
Give grasping pomp its double share, —
I ask but one recumbent chair.
Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them much, –
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and minds content l
PRELUDE.
I'm the fellah that tole one day
The tale of the won'erful one-hoss-shay.
Wan' to hear another? Say.
— Funny, wasn’ it P Made me laugh, –
I am too modest, I am, by half, -
Made me laugh’s though / sh’d split, —
Cahn' a fellah like fellah's own wit?
— Fellahs keep sayin', - “Well, now, that's
nice ;
Did it once, but cahn’ do it twice.”—
Dön' you b'lieve the'z no more fat;
Lots in the kitch'n 'z good 'z that.
Fus'-rate throw, 'n' no mistake, –
Han’ us the props for another shake;—
Know I'll try, 'n' guess I'll win;
Here sh’ goes for hit 'm ag’in 1
421
PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY :
OR, THE PRESIDENT'S OLD ARM-CHAIR.
A Mathematical Story.
FACTS respecting an old arm-chair.
At Cambridge. Is kept in the College there.
Seems but little the worse for wear.
That's remarkable when I say
It was old in President Holyoke's day.
(One of his boys, perhaps you know,
Died, at one hundred, years ago.)
He took lodging for rain or shine
Under green bed-clothes in '69.
Know old Cambridge? Hope you do. —
Born there? Don't say so ! I was, too.
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, -
Standing still, if you must have proof. —
“Gambrel P-Gambrel?”— Let me beg
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg,
422
PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY. 423
First great angle above the hoof, -
That's the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.)
— Nicest place that ever was seen, –
Colleges red and Common green,
Sidewalks brownish with trees between.
Sweetest spot beneath the skies
When the canker-worms don't rise, –
When the dust, that sometimes flies
Into your mouth and ears and eyes,
In a quiet slumber lies,
Mot in the shape of unbaked pies
Such as barefoot children prize.
A kind of harbor it seems to be,
Facing the flow of a boundless sea.
Rows of gray old Tutors stand
Ranged like rocks above the sand ;
Rolling beneath them, soft and green,
Breaks the tide of bright sixteen, –
One wave, two waves, three waves, four,
Sliding up the sparkling floor;
Then it ebbs to flow no more,
Wandering off from shore to shore
With its freight of golden ore I
424 PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY.
— Pleasant place for boys to play; —
Better keep your girls away;
Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
Which countless fingering waves pursue,
And every classic beach is strown
With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.
But this is neither here nor there ; –
I’m talking about an old arm-chair.
You've heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELLP
Over at Medford he used to dwell;
Married one of the Mathers' folk;
Got with his wife a chair of oak, -
Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge, –
One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings, –
But heavy and wide, and deep, and grand, –
Fit for the worthies of the land, -
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in,
Or Cotton Mather to sit—and lie — in.
— Parson Turell bequeathed the same
To a certain student, — SMITH by name;
These were the terms, as we are told :
PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY. 425
“Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde;
When he doth graduate, then to passe
To y” oldest Youth in yº Senior Classe.
On Payment of" – (naming a certain sum) —
“By him to whom yº Chaire shall come ;
He to yº oldest Senior next,
And soe forever,”—(thus runs the text,) —
“But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime,
That being his Debte for use of same.”
Smith transferred it to one of the BROWNS,
And took his money, - five silver crowns.
Brown delivered it up to MooRE,
Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four.
Moore made over the chair to LEE,
Who gave him crowns of silver three.
Lee conveyed it unto DREW,
And now the payment, of course, was two.
Drew gave up the chair to DUNN, -
All he got, as you see, was one.
Dunn released the chair to HALL,
And got by the bargain no crown at all.
— And now it passed to a second BROWN,
Who took it and likewise claimed a crown.
426 PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY.
When Brown conveyed it unto WARE,
Having had one crown, to make it fair,
He paid him two crowns to take the chair;
And Ware being honest, (as all Wares be,)
He paid one POTTER, who took it, three.
Four got ROBINSON; five got Dix;
JoHNSON primus demanded six ;
And so the sun kept gathering still
Till after the battle of Bunker’s Hill.
—When paper money became so cheap,
Folks wouldn't count it, but said “a heap,”
A certain RICHARDs, the books declare,
(A. M. in ’90? I’ve looked with care
Through the Triennial,— name not there.)
This person, Richards, was offered then
Eight score pounds, but would have ten ;
Nine, I think, was the sum he took, -
Not quite certain, – but see the book.
— By and by the wars were still,
But nothing had altered the Parson's will.
The old arm-chair was solid yet,
But saddled with such a monstrous debt
Things grew quite too bad to bear,
Paying such sums to get rid of the chair
PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY. 427
But dead men's fingers hold awful tight,
And there was the will in black and white,
Plain enough for a child to spell.
What should be done no man could tell,
For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse,
And every season but made it worse.
As a last resort to clear the doubt,
They got old GoverNOR HANCOCK out.
The Governor came, with his Light-horse
Troop
And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop ;
Halberds glittered and colors flew,
French horns whinnied and trumpets blew,
The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth
And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed be-
neath;
So he rode with all his band,
Till the President met him, cap in hand.
—The Governor “hefted ” the crowns, and
said, –
“A will is a will, and the Parson's dead.”
The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he, –
“There is your p'int. And here's my fee.
428 PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY.
These are the terms you must fulfil, -
On such conditions I BREAK THE will !”
The Governor mentioned what these should be.
(Just wait a minute and then you'll see.)
The President prayed. Then all was still,
And the Governor rose and BROKE THE will !
—“About those conditions?” Well, now, you
go
And do as I tell you, and then you’ll know.
Once a year, on Commencement-day,
If you'll only take the pains to stay,
You'll see the President in the CHAIR,
Likewise the Governor sitting there.
The President rises; both old and young
May hear his speech in a foreign tongue,
The meaning whereof, as lawyers swear,
Is this : Can I keep this old arm-chair?
And then his Excellency bows,
As much as to say that he allows.
The Vice-Gub. next is called by name ;
He bows like t'other, which means the same.
And all the officers round 'em bow,
As much as to say that they allow.
And a lot of parchments about the chair
PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY. 429
Are handed to witnesses then and there,
And then the lawyers hold it clear
That the chair is safe for another year.
God bless you, Gentlemen Learn to give
Money to colleges while you live.
Don't be silly and think you'll try
To bother the colleges, when you die,
With codicil this, and codicil that,
That Knowledge may starve while Law grows
fat;
For there never was pitcher that wouldn't spill,
And there's always a flaw in a donkey's will !
THE VOICELESS.
WE count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, -
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them; —
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them |
Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their hearts' sad story, -
Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory !
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.
430
THE VOICELESS. 431
O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death pours out his cordial wine
Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven
REPRINTED FROM “THE PROFESSOR
AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.”
DE SAUTY.
AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
Arofessor. Blue-AWose.
PROFESSOR.
TELL me, O Provincial speak, Ceruleo-Nasal
Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you,
Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
Holding talk with nations?
Is there a De Sauty ambulant on Tellus,
Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
Three times daily patent?
Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
Or is he a mythus, ancient word for “humbug,”— ,
Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
Romulus and Remus?
435
436 IXE SAUTY.
Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
Or a living product of galvanic action,
Like the acarus bred in Crosse's flint-solution?
Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal
BLUE-NOSE.
Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing
Stranger,
Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-
waster |
Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap
toward me,
Thou shalt hear them answered.
When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
At the polar focus of the wire electric -
Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us :
Called himself." De Sauty.”
As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mam-
malia,
So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
Sucking in the current.
DE SAUTY. 437
When the current strengthened, bloomed the
pale-faced stranger, —
Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,+
And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
Said, “All right / DE SAUTY.”
From the lonely station passed the utterance,
spreading
Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves
of steeples,
Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
Of “All right / DE SAUTY.”
When the current slackened, drooped the mystic
stranger, —
Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
Wasted to a shadow with a hartshorn odor
Of disintegration.
Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
Till one Monday morning, when the flow sus-
pended,
There was no De Sauty.
438 DE SAUTY.
Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor. Flu. Sil. Potassa,
Calc. Sod. Phosph. Mag. Sulphur, Mang. (?)
Alumin. (?) Cuprum, (?)
Such as man is made of.
Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished
There is no De Sauty now there is no current
Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
Cry, “All right / DE SAUTY.”
THE BOYS.
HAs there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise !
Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's
spite
Old Time is a liar ! We're twenty to-night !
We're twenty We're twenty Who says we are
more?
He's tipsy, -young jackanapes – show him the
door —
“Gray temples at twenty?”— Yes! white, if we
please ;
Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's noth-
ing can freeze 1
Was it snowing I spoke of P Excuse the mistake
Look close, – you will see not a sign of a flake;
We want some new garlands for those we have
shed, -
And these are white roses in place of the red 1
439
440 THE BOYS,
We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have
been told,
Of talking (in public) as if we were old;—
That boy we call “Doctor,” and this we call
“Judge’’;— *
It's a meat little fiction, — of course it's all fudge.
That fellow's the “ Speaker,” — the one on the
right;
“Mr. Mayor,” my young one, how are you to-
night?
That's our “Member of Congress,” we say when
we chaff;
There's the “Reverend ’’ What's his name?—
don’t make me laugh
That boy with the grave mathematical look
Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
And the Royal SocIETY thought it was true /
So they chose him right in ; a good joke it was, too !
There's a boy, - we pretend, – with a three-
decker-brain,
That could harness a team with a logical chain;
THE BOYS. 441
When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
We called him “The Justice,” — but now he's
“The Squire.”
And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith, –
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith, –
But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,_
— Just read on his medal, - “My country, - of
thee . "
You hear that boy laughing? — you think he's all
fun, –
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has
done ;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest
of all !
Yes, we're boys, – always playing with tongue or
with pen, –
And I sometimes have asked, - Shall we ever be
men?
Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
442 THE BOYS,
Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray !
The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May
And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
Dear Father, take care of thy children the Boys
THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
IN the little southern parlor of the house you may
have seen
With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking
westward to the green,
At the side toward the sunset, with the window
on its right,
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of
to-night.
Ah me ! how I remember the evening when i.
came !
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks
in flame,
When the wondrous box was opened that had
come from over seas,
With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of
ivory keys
Then the children all grew fretful in the restless-
ness of joy,
443
444 THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
For the boy would push his sister, and the sister
crowd the boy,
Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal
way,
But the mother hushed the tumult with the words,
“Now, Mary, play.”
For the dear soul knew that music was a very
sovereign balm;
She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its
brow grow, calm, . º,
In the days of slender harpsichords with tappin
tinkling quills,
Or carolling to her spinet with its thin metallic
thrills.
So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved
to please, º
Sat down to the new “Clementi,” and struck the
glittering keys.
Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye
grew dim,
As, floating from lip and finger, arose the “Vesper
Hymn.”
THE OPENING OF THE PIANO. 445
— Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-
red,
(Wedded since, and a widow, -something like
ten years dead,)
Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at
the open door.
Just as the “Jubilate" in threaded whisper dies,
—“Open it ! open it, lady 1" the little maiden
cries,
(For she thought 'twas a singing creature caged
in a box she heard,) *
“Open it ! open it, lady and let me see the
Ærø ſ”
THE CROOKED FOOTPATH.
AH, here it is the sliding rail
That marks the old remembered spot, —
The gap that struck our schoolboy trail, -
The crooked path across the lot.
It left the road by school and church,
A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
That parted from the silver birch
And ended at the farmhouse door.
No line or compass traced its plan;
With frequent bends to left or right,
In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
But always kept the door in sight.
The gabled porch, with woodbine green, –
The broken millstone at the sill, -
Though many a rood might stretch between,
The truant child could see them still.
446
THE CROOKED FOOTPATH. 447
No rocks across the pathway lie, –
No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown, –
And yet it winds, we know not why,
Andeturns as if for tree or stone.
Perhaps some lover trod the way
With shaking knees and leaping heart, —
And so it often runs astray
With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
From some unholy banquet reeled,—
And since, our devious steps maintain
His track across the trodden field.
Nay, deem not thus, – no earthborn will
Could ever trace a faultless line ;
Our truest steps are human still, -
To walk unswerving were divine !
Truants from love, we dream of wrath; —
Oh, rather let us trust the more
Through all the wanderings of the path,
We still can see our Father's door l
Q
A MOTHER'S SECRET.
How sweet the sacred legend — if unblamed
In my slight verse such holy things are named —
Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy
Ave, Maria / Pardon if I wrong
Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song !
The choral host had closed the angel's strain
Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain ;
And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay. A.
They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled
o'er, — &
They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
And some remembered how the holy scribe,
Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
Traced the warm blood of Jesse’s royal son
448
A MOTHER'S SECRET. 449
To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
So fared they on to seek the promised sign
That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
No pomp was there, no glory shone around
On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking
ground;
One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed, –
In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid
The wondering shepherds told their breathless
tale
Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed ;
Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
“Joy, joy to earth ! Behold the hallowed morn
In David's city Christ the Lord is born
* Glory to God ' ' let angels shout on high, –
* Good-will to men l’ the listening Earth reply l’’
They spoke with hurried words and accents
wild;
Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
No trembling word the mother's joy revealed, –
One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
450 A MOTHER'S SECRET.
Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
Twelve years had passed ; the boy was fair and
tall,
Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill, -
The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
Spoke in soft words of Joseph’s quiet son.
No voice had reached the Galilean vale
Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
In the meek, studious child they only saw
The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
When at the holy place the tribes appear.
Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering
bands,
A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering
West.
A MOTHER'S SECRET. 451
Then Joseph spake : “Thy boy hath largely
grown,
Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown ;
Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest :
Goes he not with us to the holy feast?”
And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white ;
Till eve she spun ; she spun till morning light;
The thread was twined ; its parting meshes through
From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
Till the full web was wound upon the beam, -
Love's curious toil, - a vest without a seam :
They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
All day the dusky caravan has flowed
In devious trails along the winding road, –
(For many a step their homeward path attends,
And all the sons of Abraham are as friends).
Evening has come, – the hour of rest and joy; —
Hush hush —that whisper, “Where is Mary's
boy?”
O weary hour ! O aching days that passed
Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last :
452 A MOTHER'S SECRET.
The soldier's lance, — the fierce centurion's
sword, –
The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman
lord, –
The midnight crypt that sucks the captive's
breath, –
The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death !
Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning
light,
Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
Crouched by some porphyry column's shining
plinth,
Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
At last, in desperate mood, they sought once
II].OTC
The Temple's porches, searched in vain before ;
They found him seated with the ancient men, –
The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen, –
Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near,
Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
And Mary said, - as one who, tried too long,
Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong, —
A MOTHER'S SECRET. 453
“What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast
done?
Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son l’”
Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone, –
Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
Then turned with them and left the holy hill, .
To all their mild commands obedient still.
The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
The maids retold it at the fountain's side ;
The youthful shepherds doubted or denied ;
It passed around among the listening friends,
With all that fancy adds and fiction lends,
Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
Of Joseph's son who talked the Rabbis down.
But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous
tale.
Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friend-
ship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
HE sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
His wandering flock had gone before,
But he, the shepherd, might not share
Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
The pastor spake, and thus he said: —
“Men, brethren, sisters, children dear !
God calls you hence from over sea;
Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
“Ye go to bear the saving word
To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
Heed well the lessons ye have heard
From those old teachers taught of God.
454
ROBINSON OF LEYDEN. 455
“Yet think not unto them was lent
All light for all the coming days,
And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
In making straight the ancient ways.
“The living fountain overflows
For every flock, for every lamb,
Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam.”
He spake ; with lingering, long embrace,
With tears of love and partings fond,
They floated down the creeping Maas,
Along the isle of Ysselmond.
They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
The “Hook of Holland’s ” shelf of sand,
And grated soon with lifting keel
The sullen shores of Fatherland.
No home for these !— too well they knew
The mitred king behind the throne;—
The sails were set, the pennons flew,
And westward ho ! for worlds unknown.
456 ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
— And these were they who gave us birth,
The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
Who won for us this virgin earth,
And freedom with the soil they gave.
The pastor slumbers by the Rhine, –
In alien earth the exiles lie, –
Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
His words our noblest battle-cry !
Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea l
Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee
SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
HIS TEMPTATION.
No fear lest praise should make us proud
We know how cheaply that is won;
The idle homage of the crowd
Is proof of tasks as idly done.
A surface-smile may pay the toil
That follows still the conquering Right,
With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
Sing the sweet song of other days,
Serenely placid, safely true,
And o'er the present’s parching ways
Thy verse distils like evening dew.
But speak in words of living power, —
They fall like drops of scalding rain
That plashed before the burning shower
Swept o'er the cities of the plain
457
458 SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale, –
Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
And, smitten through their leprous mail,
Strike right and left in hope to sting.
If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love, –
Too kind for bitter words to grieve, *
Too firm for clamor to dismay,
When Faith forbids thee to believe,
And Meekness calls to disobey, -
Ah, then beware of mortal pride
The smiling pride that calmly scorns
Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
In laboring on thy crown of thorns !
MIDSUMMER.
HERE sweep these foolish leaves away, -
I will not crush my brains to-day !—
Look are the southern curtains drawn?
Fetch me a fan, and so begone :
Not that, — the palm-tree's rustling leaf
Brought from a parching coral-reef
Its breath is heated ; — I would swing
The broad gray plumes, – the eagle's wing.
I hate these roses' feverish blood —
Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
Cold as a coiling water-snake.
Rain me sweet odors on the air,
And wheel me up my Indian chair,
And spread some book not overwise
Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
459
460 MIDSUMMER.
— Who knows it not, — this dead recoil
Of weary fibres stretched with toil, -
The pulse that flutters faint and low
When Summer's seething breezes blow?
O Nature I bare thy loving breast
And give thy child one hour of rest, —
One little hour to lie unseen
Beneath thy scarf of leafy green
So, curtained by a singing pine,
Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
In sweeter music dies away.
IRIS, HER BOOK.
I PRAy thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee
For Iris had no mother to infold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told
her.
She had not learned the mystery of awaking
Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were
breaking.
Yet lived, wrought, suffered. Lo, the pictured
token
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
461
462 IRIS, HER BOOK.
She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies, –
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
And talked strange tongues with angels in her
tranceS.
Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wear-
ing, —
Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore
lent her?
Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
And then all tears and anguish : Queen of Heaven,
Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
Save me ! oh, save me ! Shall I die forgiven?
And then — Ah, God | But nay, it little matters:
Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters
If she had — Well ! She longed, and knew not
wherefore.
IRIS, HER BOOK. 463
Had the world nothing she might live to care
for P
No second self to say her evening prayer for?
She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
Vain? Let it be so | Nature was her teacher.
What if a lonely and unsistered creature
Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
Saying, unsaddened, -This shall soon be faded,
And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
—This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed
glances
May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
464 IRIS, HER BOOK.
Sweet sister Iris, who shall never name thee,
Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
Spare her, I pray thee If the maid is sleeping,
Peace with her 1 she has had her hour of weeping.
No more | She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
|UNDER THE WIOLETS.
HER hands are cold ; her face is white ;
No more her pulses come and go ;
Her eyes are shut to life and light; —
Fold the white vesture, snow on Snow,
And lay her where the violets blow.
But not beneath a graven stone,
To plead for tears with alien eyes;
A slender cross of wood alone
Shall say, that here a maiden lies
In peace beneath the peaceful skies. . . .
And gray old trees of hugest limb
Shall wheel their circling shadows round
To make the scorching sunlight dim
That drinks the greenness from the ground,
And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
465 * -
466 UNDER THE VIOLETS.
When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
And through their leaves the robins call,
And, ripening in the autumn sun,
The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
Doubt not that she will heed them all.
For her the morning choir shall sing
Its matins from the branches high,
And every minstrel-voice of spring,
That trills beneath the April sky,
Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,
The crickets, sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
At last the rootlets of the trees
Shall find the prison where she lies,
And bear the buried dust they seize
In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
So may the soul that warmed it rise !
UNDER THE VIOLETS. 467
If any, born of kindlier blood,
Should ask, What maiden lies below?
Say only this: A tender bud,
That tried to blossom in the snow,
Lies withered where the violets blow.
HYMN OF TRUST.
O LovE Divine, that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
On Thee we cast each earth-born care,
We smile at pain while Thou art near !
Though long the weary way we tread,
And sorrow crown each lingering year,
No path we shun, no darkness dread,
Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near.
When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
And trembling faith is changed to fear,
The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf,
Shall softly tell us, Thou art near !
On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
O Love Divine, forever dear,
Content to suffer, while we know,
Living and dying, Thou art near !
468
A SUN-DAY HYMN.
LORD of all being ! throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star;
Centre and Soul of every sphere,
Yet to each loving heart how near !
Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
Sheds on our path the glow of day;
Star of our hope, thy softened light
Cheers the long watches of the night.
Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
All, save the clouds of sin, are thine !
Lord of all life, below, above,
Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
Before thy ever-blazing throne
We ask no lustre of our own.
469
470
A SUN-DAY HYMN.
Grant us thy truth to make us free,
And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
Till all thy living altars claim
One holy light, one heavenly flame !
a
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