265

NEDL, TRANSFER
|
HN E E 7 (º.


D 6-1222
The gift of -
RICHARDSON MORRIS
—





-


JANUARY 1, 1847.
A LIST OF B00KS
RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY
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Por:TRY, &c.
Is
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. PoEMs. In one vol-
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CHARLES T. BROOKS. Hom(AGE of THE ARTs, with
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JOHN S. DWIGHT. Select Minor PoEMs. Trans-
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P 0 E M S.
BY
R. W. E M E R S 0 N.
B O S T ON :
J AM ES MUN R O E A N D COMPANY.
1 S 4 7.


Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1846, by
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY.,
in the Clerk’s office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
STEREOTYPED AT THE
BOST ON TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.
C. A. M. B. R. I D G E :
M ET C A L F A N D co M P A N Y,
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.


– FATE, . . . . . . . .
r
-*
THE SPHINX, . .
*Each AND ALL,
~ THE PROBLEM, .
º,
7~To RHEA, . . . .
C O N T E N T S.
THE VISIT, . . . . .
URIEL, . . . . . . . . .
_THE worlD-soul,
ALPHONSO OF CASTILE,
MITHRIDATES, . . .
--TO J. W., . . . .
... GUY. . . . . . . .
-TACT, . . . . . . .
HAMATREYA, . . .
EARTH-song,
GooD-BYE, . . . .
f
PAGE.
. 30
. . 36
. 43


4 CONTENTS.
PAGE.
THE RHODORA, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
THE HUMBLE-BEE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
BERRYING, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
THE SNOW-STORM, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
wooDNOTES, I., . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
—— II., . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
MONADNOC, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
FABLE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
ODE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
ASTRAEA, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
ETIENNE DE LA BošCE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
SUUM CUIQUE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
COMPENSATION, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
FORBEARANCE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
THE PARK, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
FORERUNNERS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
SURSUM CORDA, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
ODE TO BEAUTY, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
GIVE ALL TO LOVE, . . . . . . . . . . . . .
TO ELLEN, . . . . . . . . . . .
TO EVA, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147


CONTENTS.
THE AMULET, . . . . . . . . . . . .
THINE EYES STILL SHINED, . . . .
EROS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
HERMIONE, . . . . . . . . . . . .
INITIAL, DEMONIC, AND CELESTIAL
THE APOLOGY, . . . . . . .
MERLIN, I., . . . . . . . . . .
II. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BACCHUS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
L0SS AND GAIN, . . . . . . . . .
MEROPS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE HOUSE, . . . . . . . . . . . .
SAADI, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
HOLIDAYS, . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PAINTING AND SCULPTURE, . . . . . .
FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIz,
GHASELLE, . . . . . . . - - - - - -
XENOPHANES, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE DAY'S RATION, . . .
BLIGHT, . . . . . . . . . .
MUSKETAQUID, . . . . . .
PAGE.
. 148
. 149
. 206


6 CONTENTS.
PAGE.
DIRGE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
THRENODY, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
HYMN, sung AT THE compleTION OF THE CONCORD
MonumENT, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 250


P 0 E M S.
T H E S P H IN X.
THE Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled;
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
“Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept 1–
I awaited the seer,
While they slumbered and slept; —
“The fate of the man-child;
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown ;
Daedalian plan;
7


THE SPHINX.
Out of sleeping a waking,
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep
“Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm ;
In beautiful motion
The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
Your silence he sings.
“The waves, unashamed,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.


THE SPHINx. 9
“Sea, earth, air, sound, silence,
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred, –
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still ;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.
“The babe by its mother
Lies bathed in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted, –
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.
“But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;


10
THE SPHINX.
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.
“Outspoke the great mother,
Beholding his fear; —
At the sound of her accents
Cold shuddered the sphere : —
‘Who has drugged my boy's cup 7
Who has mixed my boy's bread?
Who, with sadness and madness,
Has turned the man-child's head 2'''
I heard a poet answer,
Aloud and cheerfully,
“Say on, sweet Sphinx thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me. -
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.


THE SPHINX. 11
“The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.
“Profounder, profounder,
Man's spirit must dive;
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found, - for new heavens
He spurneth the old.
“Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame them restores;
And the joy that is sweetest
Lurks in stings of remorse.


12
THE SPHINX.
Have I a lover w
Who is noble and free ? —
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.
“Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure, —
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.
“Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits'
Thy sight is growing blear;
Rue, myrrh, and cummin for the Sphinx–
Her muddy eyes to clear !” —
The old Sphinx bit her thick lip, —
Said, “Who taught thee me to name 7
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,
Of thine eye I am eyebeam.


THE SPHINX. 13
“Thou art the unanswered question ;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh ;
And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply.”
Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon ;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave;
She stood Monadnoc's head.
Thorough a thousand voices
• Spoke the universal dame:
“Who telleth one of my meanings,
ls master of all I am.”


14
E A C H AND A LL.
LITTLE thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm ;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Not knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,


EACH AND ALL. 15
For I did not bring home the river and sky; —
He sang to my ear, – they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; —
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, ‘I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;


EACH AND ALL.
I leave it behind with the games of youth.”—
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground,
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;—
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.


17
T H E P R O B L E M.
*
I LIKE a church; I like a cowl ;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure ?
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
2


18
THE PROBLEM.
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below, -
The canticles of love and woe ;
The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew ; —
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast !
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone;


THE PROBLEM.
19
And Morning opes with haste her lids,
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For, out of Thought's interior sphere,
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.
These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned;
And the same power that reared the shrine,
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost
Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind inspires.


20
THE PROBLEM.
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken ;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the fathers wise, –
The Book itself before me lies,
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,
Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines.
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowled portrait dear;
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.


21
TO R. H. E. A.
THEE, dear friend, a brother soothes,
Not with flatteries, but truths,
Which tarnish not, but purify
To light which dims the morning's eye.
I have come from the spring-woods,
From the fragrant solitudes;–
Listen what the poplar-tree
And murmuring waters counselled me.
If with love thy heart has burned;
If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed;
For when love has once departed
From the eyes of the false-hearted,


TO RHEA.
And one by one has torn off quite
The bandages of purple light;
Though thou wert the loveliest
Form the soul had ever dressed,
Thou shalt seem, in each reply,
A vixen to his altered eye;
Thy softest pleadings seem too bold,
Thy praying lute will seem to scold;
Though thou kept the straightest road,
Yet thou errest far and broad.
But thou shalt do as do the gods
In their cloudless periods;
For of this lore be thou sure, —
Though thou forget, the gods, secure,
Forget never their command,
But make the statute of this land.
As they lead, so follow all,
Ever have done, ever shall.
Warning to the blind and deaf,
'Tis written on the iron leaf,


TO RHEA. 23
Who drinks of Cupid’s nectar cup
Loveth downward, and not up ;
Therefore, who loves, of gods or men,
Shall not by the same be loved again;
His sweetheart's idolatry
Falls, in turn, a new degree.
When a god is once beguiled
By beauty of a mortal child,
And by her radiant youth delighted,
He is not fooled, but warily knoweth
His love shall never be requited.
And thus the wise Immortal doeth. —
'Tis his study and delight
To bless that creature day and night;
From all evils to defend her;
In her lap to pour all splendor;
To ransack earth for riches rare,
And fetch her stars to deck her hair :
He mixes music with her thoughts,
And saddens her with heavenly doubts:
All grace, all good his great heart knows,
Profuse in love, the king bestows:


24
TO RHEA.
Saying, “Hearken' Earth, Sea, Airl
This monument of my despair
Build I to the All-Good, All-Fair.
Not for a private good,
But I, from my beatitude,
Albeit scorned as none was scorned,
Adorn her as was none adorned.
I make this maiden an ensample
To Nature, through her kingdoms ample,
Whereby to model newer races,
Statelier forms, and fairer faces;
To carry man to new degrees
Of power, and of comeliness.
These presents be the hostages
Which I pawn for my release.
See to thyself, O Universe
Thou art better, and not worse.” –
And the god, having given all,
Is freed forever from his thrall.


T H E WIS IT.
AskEst, ‘How long thou shalt stay,’
Devastator of the day ?
Know, each substance, and relation,
Thorough nature's operation,
Hath its unit, bound, and metre;
And every new compound
Is some product and repeater, —
Product of the early found.
But the unit of the visit,
The encounter of the wise, –
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature.
Riding on the ray of sight,
More fleet than waves or whirlwinds go,


26
THE VISIT.
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show,
Sum their long experience,
And import intelligence.
Single look has drained the breast;
Single moment years confessed.
The duration of a glance
Is the term of convenance,
And, though thy rede be church or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt;
Linger, — thou shalt rue the fault;
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.


27
U R. I E L.
IT fell in the ancient periods,
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
SAID overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.


28
URIEL.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirred the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a line.
‘Line in nature is not found ;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads;
The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.
A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell
On the beauty of Uriel;


URIEL. 29
In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;
Whether doomed to long gyration
In the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.
Straightway, a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.
But now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.


30
T H E W OR L D – S O U L.
THANKs to the morning light,
Thanks to the foaming sea,
To the uplands of New Hampshire,
To the green-haired forest free;
Thanks to each man of courage,
To the maids of holy mind;
To the boy with his games undaunted,
Who never looks behind.
Cities of proud hotels,
Houses of rich and great,
Vice nestles in your chambers,
Beneath your roofs of slate.


THE WORLD-SOUL. 31
It cannot conquer folly,
Time-and-space-conquering steam
And the light-outspeeding telegraph
Bears nothing on its beam.
The politics are base;
The letters do not cheer;
And 'tis far in the deeps of history,
The voice that speaketh clear.
Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.
Yet there in the parlor sits
Some figure of noble guise, –
Our angel, in a stranger's form,
Or woman's pleading eyes;
Or only a flashing sunbeam
In at the window-pane;
Or Music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.


THE WORLD-SOUL.
The inevitable morning
Finds them who in cellars be ;
And be sure the all-loving Nature
Will smile in a factory.
Yon ridge of purple landscape,
Yon sky between the walls,
Hold all the hidden wonders,
In scanty intervals.
Alas ! the Sprite that haunts us
Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious gods,
And leaves us in the mire.
We cannot learn the cipher
That's writ upon our cell;
Stars help us by a mystery
Which we could never spell.
If but one hero knew it,
The world would blush in flame;
The sage, till he hit the secret,
Would hang his head for shame.


THE WORLD-SOUL.
But our brothers have not read it,
Not one has found the key;
And henceforth we are comforted, -
We are but such as they.
Still, still the secret presses,
The nearing clouds draw down;
The crimson morning flames into
The fopperies of the town.
Within, without the idle earth,
Stars weave eternal rings;
The sun himself shines heartily,
And shares the joy he brings.
And what if Trade sow cities
Like shells along the shore,
And thatch with towns the prairie broad,
With railways ironed o'er 7 —
They are but sailing foam-bells
Along Thought's causing stream,
And take their shape and sun-color
From him that sends the dream.
3


the world-socil.
For Destiny does not like
To yield to men the helm ;
And shoots his thought, by hidden nerves,
Throughout the solid realm.
The patient Daemon sits,
With roses and a shroud;
He has his way, and deals his gifts, –
But ours is not allowed.
He is no churl nor trifler,
And his viceroy is none, –
Love-without-weakness, –
Of Genius sire and son.
And his will is not thwarted;
The seeds of land and sea
Are the atoms of his body bright,
And his behest obey.
He serveth the servant,
The brave he loves amain;
He kills the cripple and the sick,
And straight begins again.


THE WORLD-SOUL.
For gods delight in gods,
And thrust the weak aside;
To him who scorns their charities,
Their arms fly open wide.
When the old world is sterile,
And the ages are effete,
He will from wrecks and sediment
The fairer world complete.
He forbids to despair;
His cheeks mantle with mirth ;
And the unimagined good of men
Is yeaning at the birth.
Spring still makes spring in the mind,
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old.
Over the winter glaciers,
I see the summer glow,
And, through the wild-piled snowdrift,
The warm rosebuds below.


36
A LP H O N S O OF CAS TIL E.
I, ALPHoNso, live and learn,
Seeing Nature go astern.
Things deteriorate in kind;
Lemons run to leaves and rind;
Meagre crop of figs and limes;
Shorter days and harder times.
Flowering April cools and dies
In the insufficient skies.
Imps, at high midsummer, blot
Half the sun's disk with a spot:
'Twill not now avail to tan
Orange cheek or skin of man.
Roses bleach, the goats are dry,
Lisbon quakes, the people cry.
Yon pale, scrawny fisher fools,
Gaunt as bitterns in the pools,


ALPHONSO OF CASTILE. 37
Are no brothers of my blood; —
They discredit Adamhood.
Eyes of gods ! ye must have seen,
O'er your ramparts as ye lean,
The general debility;
Of genius the sterility;
Mighty projects countermanded;
Rash ambition, brokenhanded;
Puny man and scentless rose
Tormenting Pan to double the dose.
Rebuild or ruin: either fill
Of vital force the wasted rill,
Or tumble all again in heap
To weltering chaos and to sleep.
Say, Seigniors, are the old Niles dry,
Which fed the veins of earth and sky,
That mortals miss the loyal heats,
Which drove them erst to social feats;
Now, to a savage selfness grown,
Think nature barely serves for one;


ALPHONSO OF CASTILE.
With science poorly mask their hurt,
And vex the gods with question pert,
Immensely curious whether you
Still are rulers, or mildew
Masters, I am in pain with you;
Masters, I'll be plain with you;
In my palace of Castile,
I, a king, for kings can feel.
There my thoughts the matter roll,
And solve and oft resolve the whole.
And, for I’m styled Alphonse the Wise,
Ye shall not fail for sound advice.
Before ye want a drop of rain,
Hear the sentiment of Spain.
You have tried famine: no more try it;
Ply us now with a full diet;
Teach your pupils now with plenty;
For one sun supply us twenty.
I have thought it thoroughly over, —
State of hermit, state of lover;


ALPHONSO OF CASTILE. 39
We must have society,
We cannot spare variety.
Hear you, then, celestial fellows
Fits not to be overzealous;
Steads not to work on the clean jump,
Nor wine nor brains perpetual pump.
Men and gods are too extense;
Could you slacken and condense 7
Your rank overgrowths reduce
Till your kinds abound with juice
Earth, crowded, cries, ‘Too many men l'
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.
Add their nine lives to this cat;
Stuff their nine brains in his hat;
Make his frame and forces square
With the labors he must dare;
Thatch his flesh, and even his years
With the marble which he rears.
There, growing slowly old at ease,
No faster than his planted trees,


40
ALPHONSO OF CASTILE.
He may, by warrant of his age,
In schemes of broader scope engage.
So shall ye have a man of the sphere,
Fit to grace the solar year.


41
M IT H R ID A T E S.
I CANNOT spare water or wine,
Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;
From the earth-poles to the line,
All between that works or grows,
Every thing is kin of mine.
Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes; —
From all natures, sharp and slimy,
Salt and basalt, wild and tame:
Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
Bird, and reptile, be my game.


42
MITHRIDATES.
Ivy for my fillet band;
Blinding dog-wood in my hand;
Hemlock for my sherbet cull me,
And the prussic juice to lull me;
Swing me in the upas boughs,
Vampyre-fanned, when I carouse.
Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry
O all you virtues, methods, mights,
Means, appliances, delights,
Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,
Smug routine, and things allowed,
Minorities, things under cloud 1
Hither take me, use me, fill me,
Wein and artery, though ye kill me !
God I will not be an owl,
But sun me in the Capitol.


43
TO J. W.
SET not thy foot on graves:
Hear what wine and rosés say
The mountain chase, the summer waves,
The crowded town, thy feet may well delay.
Set not thy foot on graves;
Nor seek to unwind the shroud
Which charitable Time
And Nature have allowed
To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.
Set not thy foot on graves:
Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament,
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,


44
TO J. W.
His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried :
Go, get them where he earned them when alive ;
. As resolutely dig or dive.
Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand :
'Twill soon be dark ;
Up, heed thine own aim, and
God speed the mark


FA T E.
THAT you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strofig, or rich, or generous;
You must have also the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose.
There is a melody born of melody,
Which melts the world into a sea:
Toil could never compass it;
Art its height could never hit;
It came never out of wit ;
But a music music-born
Well may Jove and Juno scorn.
Thy beauty, if it lack the fire
Which drives me mad with sweet desire,
What boots it ! what the soldier's mail,
Unless he conquer and prevail?


46
FATE.
What all the goods thy pride which lift,
If thou pine for another's gift
Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight:
When thou lookest on his face,
Thy heart saith, ‘Brother, go thy ways!
None shall ask thee what thou doest,
Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden;’
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten.
Surely he carries a talisman
Under his tongue;
Broad are his shoulders and strong;
And his eye is scornful,
Threatening, and young.
I hold it of little matter
Whether your jewel be of pure water,
A rose diamond or a white,
But whether it dazzle me with light.


FAte. 47
I care not how you are dressed,
In the coarsest or in the best;
Nor whether your name is base or brave;
Nor for the fashion of your behavior;
But whether you charm me,
Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me,
And dress up Nature in your favor
One thing is forever good;
That one thing is Success, –
Dear to the Eumenides,
And to all the heavenly brood.
Who bides at home, nor looks abroad,
Carries the eagles, and masters the sword.


G U Y.
MoRTAL mixed of middle clay,
Attempered to the night and day,
Interchangeable with things,
Needs no amulets nor rings.
Guy possessed the talisman
That all things from him began;
And as, of old, Polycrates
Chained the sunshine and the breeze,
So did Guy betimes discover
Fortune was his guard and lover;
In strange junctures, felt, with awe,
His own symmetry with law;
So that no mixture could withstand
The virtue of his lucky hand.
He gold or jewel could not lose,
Nor not receive his ample dues.


Guy. 49
In the street, if he turned round,
His eye the eye ’twas seeking found.
It seemed his Genius discreet
Worked on the Maker's own receipt,
And made each tide and element
Stewards of stipend and of rent;
So that the common waters fell
As costly wine into his well.
He had so sped his wise affairs
That he caught Nature in his snares:
Early or late, the falling rain
Arrived in time to swell his grain;
Stream could not so perversely wind
But corn of Guy's was there to grind;
The siroc found it on its way,
To speed his sails, to dry his hay; -
And the world's sun seemed to rise,
To drudge all day for Guy the wise.
In his rich nurseries, timely skill
Strong crab with nobler blood did fill;
The zephyr in his garden rolled
From plum-trees vegetable gold;
4


50
GUY.
And all the hours of the year
With their own harvest honored were.
There was no frost but welcome came,
Nor freshet, nor midsummer flame.
Belonged to wind and world the toil
And venture, and to Guy the oil.


51
T ACT.
WHAT boots it, thy virtue,
What profit thy parts,
While one thing thou lackest, —
The art of all arts :
The only credentials,
Passport to success;
Opens castle and parlor, —
Address, man, Address.
The maiden in danger
Was saved by the swain;
His stout arm restored her
To Broadway again.


52
TACT.
The maid would reward him, -
Gay company come;
They laugh, she laughs with them;
He is moonstruck and dumb.
This clinches the bargain;
Sails out of the bay;
Gets the vote in the senate,
Spite of Webster and Clay;
Has for genius no mercy,
For speeches no heed; -
It lurks in the eyebeam,
It leaps to its deed.
Church, market, and tavern,
Bed and board, it will sway.
It has no to-morrow ;
It ends with to-day.


53
H A M A T R. E. Y.A.
MINoTT, Lee, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood.
Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,
Saying, ‘’Tis mine, my children's, and my name's :
How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees |
How graceful climb those shadows on my hill !
I fancy these pure waters and the flags
Know me, as does my dog : we sympathize;
And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.’
Where are these men 7 Asleep beneath their grounds;
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.


54 HAMATREYA.
They added ridge to valley, brook to pond,
And sighed for all that bounded their domain.
‘This suits me for a pasture; that's my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat.
The land is well, - lies fairly to the south.
'Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back,
To find the sitfast acres where you left them.'
Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds
Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.
Hear what the Earth says: —
E A R T H – S O N G .
‘Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours.
Earth endures;
Stars abide —
Shine down in the old sea;
Old are the shores;
But where are old men 7


HAMATREYA.
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen.
“The lawyer's deed
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.
‘Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound, and flood.
But the heritors 7
Fled like the flood's foam, -
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.


56
HAMATREYA.
“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone.
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them 7”
When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled -
Like lust in the chill of the grave.


57
G O O D – BY E.
Good-Bye, proud world! I'm going home :
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,
Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam;
But now, proud world ! I’m going home.
Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;
To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go, and those who come;
Good-bye, proud world ! I'm going home.


GOOD-BYE.
I am going to my own hearth-stone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone, –
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.
O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet 7


59
T H E R H OD OR A :
ON BEING ASKED, whenCE Is THE FLow ER 2
IN May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay :
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.


60
T H E H U M B L E – B E E.
BURLY, dozing, humble-bee,
Where thou art is clime for me.
Let them sail for Porto Rique,
Far-off heats through seas to seek;
I will follow thee alone,
Thou animated torrid-zone !
Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines;
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.
Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion 1
Sailor of the atmosphere;
Swimmer through the waves of air;


THE HUMBLE-BEE. 61
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June;
Wait, I prithee, till I come
Within earshot of thy hum,-
All without is martyrdom.
When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze
Silvers the horizon wall,
And, with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And, infusing subtle heats,
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou, in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass.
Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone


62
THE HUMIBLE-BEE.
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers;
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wildernesses found;
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.
Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen;
But violets and bilberry bells,
Maple-sap, and daffodels,
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern, and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's tongue,
And brier roses, dwelt among ;
All beside was unknown waste,
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher


THE HUMBLE-Bee.
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
When the fierce north-western blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous.


64
B E R. R. Y IN G.
‘MAY be true what I had heard, –
Earth's a howling wilderness,
Truculent with fraud and force,’
Said I, strolling through the pastures,
And along the river-side.
Caught among the blackberry vines,
Feeding on the Ethiops sweet,
Pleasant fancies overtook me.
I said, ‘What influence me preferred,
Elect, to dreams thus beautiful ?”
The vines replied, “And didst thou deem
No wisdom to our berries went?”


65
T H E S N O W – S T O R. M.
ANNounced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
5


º
66 THE SNOW-STORM.
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.


67
W OOD NOT E S.
1.
For this present, hard
Is the fortune of the bard,
Born out of time;
All his accomplishment,
From Nature's utmost treasure spent,
Booteth not him.
When the pine tosses its cones
To the song of its waterfall tones,
He speeds to the woodland walks,
To birds and trees he talks :
Caesar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side, –
Not hook nor line hath he:


WOODNOTES.
He stands in the meadows wide, –
Nor gun nor scythe to see;
With none has he to do,
And none seek him,
Nor men below,
Nor spirits dim. -
Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.
In the wood he travels glad,
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.
Planter of celestial plants, 2
What he knows nobody wants; ~\
What he knows he hides, not vaunts.
Knowledge this man prizes best
Seems fantastic to the rest:
Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,
Grass-buds, and caterpillar-shrouds,
Boughs on which the wild bees settle,
Tints that spot the violets' petal,
Why Nature loves the number five,
And why the star-form she repeats:


WOODNOTES. 69
Lover of all things alive,
Wonderer at all he meets,
Wonderer chiefly at himself, -
Who can tell him what he is 7
Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities 7
2.
And such I knew, a forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year,
Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,
A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart;
It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks,
In damp fields known to bird and fox
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,


70
WOODNOTES.
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.
It seemed as if the breezes brought him;
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him;
As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in far fields, the orchis grew.
Many haps fall in the field
Seldom seen by wishful eyes,
But all her shows did Nature yield,
To please and win this pilgrim wise.
He saw the partridge drum in the woods;
He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrush's broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him;
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
Was showed to this philosopher,
And at his bidding seemed to come.
3.
In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang,
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;


WOODNOTES. 71
He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,
And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern
bowers.
He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls, —
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century.
Low lies the plant to whose creation went
Sweet influence from every element;
Whose living towers the years conspired to build,
Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild.
Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,
He roamed, content alike with man and beast.
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roved at will the boundless shade.


72 WOODNOTES.
The timid it concerns to ask their way,
And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray,
To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, – his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road,
By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.
4.
'Twas one of the charmed days,
When the genius of God doth flow,
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear. -
The musing peasant lowly great
Beside the forest water sate ;


WOODNOTES. 73
The rope-like pine roots crosswise grown
Composed the network of his throne;
The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,
Was burnished to a floor of glass,
Painted with shadows green and proud
Of the tree and of the cloud.
He was the heart of all the scene;
On him the sun looked more serene ;
To hill and cloud his face was known, –
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy
The public child of earth and sky.
‘You ask,’ he said, ‘what guide
Me through trackless thickets led,
Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide 1
I found the water's bed.
The watercourses were my guide;
I travelled grateful by their side,
Or through their channel dry;
They led me through the thicket damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp,


74
WOODNOTES.
Through beds of granite cut my road,
And their resistless friendship showed;
The falling waters led me,
The foodful waters fed me,
And brought me to the lowest land,
Unerring to the ocean sand.
The moss upon the forest bark
Was polestar when the night was dark;
The purple berries in the wood
Supplied me necessary food;
For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
'Twill be time enough to die;
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.


75
WOOD NOT E S.
II.
As sunbeams stream through liberal space,
And nothing jostle or displace,
So waved the pine-tree through my thought,
And fanned the dreams it never brought.
‘Whether is better the gift or the donor 7
Come to me,’
Quoth the pine-tree,
‘I am the giver of honor.
My garden is the cloven rock,
And my manure the snow;
And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,
In summer's scorching glow.
Ancient or curious,
Who knoweth aught of us?


76
WOODNOTES.
Old as Jove,
Old as Love,
Who of me
Tells the pedigree?
Only the mountains old,
Only the waters cold,
Only moon and star
My coevals are.
Ere the first fowl sung
My relenting boughs among;
Ere Adam wived,
Ere Adam lived,
Ere the duck dived,
Ere the bees hived,
Ere the lion roared,
Ere the eagle soared,
Light and heat, land and sea,
Spake unto the oldest tree.
Glad in the sweet and secret aid
Which matter unto matter paid,
The water flowed, the breezes fanned,
The tree confined the roving sand,


WOODNOTES. 77
The sunbeam gave me to the sight,
The tree adorned the formless light,
And once again
O'er the grave of men
We shall talk to each other again
Of the old age behind,
Of the time out of mind,
Which shall come again.
‘Whether is better the gift or the donor
Come to me,’
Quoth the pine-tree,
‘I am the giver of honor.
He is great who can live by me.
The rough and bearded forester
Is better than the lord;
God fills the scrip and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.
The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be;
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry, and one the living tree.


78
WOODNOTES.
Genius with my boughs shall flourish,
Want and cold our roots shall nourish.
Who liveth by the ragged pine
Foundeth a heroic line;
Who liveth in the palace hall
Waneth fast and spendeth all.
He goes to my savage haunts,
With his chariot and his care;
My twilight realm he disenchants,
And finds his prison there.
‘What prizes the town and the tower?
Only what the pine-tree yields;
Sinew that subdued the fields;
The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods
Chants his hymn to hills and floods,
Whom the city's poisoning spleen
Made not pale, or fat, or lean;
Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,
Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,
In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth,
In whose feet the lion rusheth,


wooDNOTES. 79
Iron arms, and iron mould,
That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.
I give my rafters to his boat,
My billets to his boiler's throat;
And I will swim the ancient sea,
To float my child to victory,
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.
Westward I ope the forest gates,
The train along the railroad skates;
It leaves the land behind like ages past,
The foreland flows to it in river fast;
Missouri I have made a mart,
I teach Iowa Saxon art.
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem
Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.


WooDNOTES.
Whoso walketh in solitude,
And inhabiteth the wood,
Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass,
From these companions, power and grace. ) -
Clean shall he be, without, within,
From the old adhering sin.
Love shall he, but not adulate
The all-fair, the all-embracing Fate;
All ill dissolving in the light
Of his triumphant piercing sight.
Not vain, sour, nor frivolous;
Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous;
Grave, chaste, contented, though retired,
And of all other men desired.
On him the light of star and moon
Shall fall with purer radiance down;
All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;


WOODNOTES. 81
The mounting sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones, his helpers be ;
He shall never be old ;
Nor his fate shall be foretold ;
He shall see the speeding year,
Without wailing, without fear;
He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;
He shall be happy whilst he woos,
Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse.
But if with gold she bind her hair,
And deck her breast with diamond,
Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,
Though thou lie alone on the ground.
The robe of silk in which she shines,
It was woven of many sins;
And the shreds
Which she sheds
In the wearing of the same,
Shall be grief on grief,
And shame on shame.


WOODNOTES.
“Heed the old oracles,
Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows, shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.
Hearken Hearken
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.
Aloft, abroad, the papan swells;
O wise man' hear'st thou half it tells 7
O wise man hear'st thou the least part
'Tis the chronicle of art.
To the open ear it sings
The early genesis of things,
Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old flood's subsiding slime,


WOODNOTES. 83
Of chemic matter, force, and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm :
The rushing metamorphosis,
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.
O, listen to the undersong —
The ever old, the ever young;
And, far within those cadent pauses,
The chorus of the ancient Causes 1
Delights the dreadful Destiny
To fling his voice into the tree,
And shock thy weak ear with a note
Breathed from the everlasting throat.
In music he repeats the pang
Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang.
O mortall thy ears are stones;
These echoes are laden with tones
Which only the pure can hear;
Thou canst not catch what they recite
Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right,


WOODNOTES.
Of man to come, of human life,
Of Death, and Fortune, Growth, and Strife.’
Once again the pine-tree sung : —
‘Speak not thy speech my boughs annong;
Put off thy years, wash in the breeze;
My hours are peaceful centuries.
Talk no more with feeble tongue;
No more the fool of space and time,
Come weave with mine a nobler rhyme.
Only thy Americans
Can read thy line, can meet thy glance,
But the runes that I rehearse
Understands the universe;
The least breath my boughs which tossed
Brings again the Pentecost,
To every soul it soundeth clear
In a voice of solemn cheer, —
“Am I not thine? Are not these thine?”
And they reply, “Forever mine !”
My branches speak Italian,
English, German, Basque, Castilian,


WOODNOTES.
Mountain speech to Highlanders,
Ocean tongues to islanders,
To Fin, and Lap, and swart Malay,
To each his bosom secret say.
Come learn with me the fatal song
Which knits the world in music strong,
Whereto every bosom dances,
Kindled with courageous fancies.
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid,
The land reflected in the flood,
Body with shadow still pursued.
For Nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.


86
WOODNOTES.
The wood is wiser far than thou;
The wood and wave each other know.
Not unrelated, unaffied,
But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect Nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty Heart.
But thou, poor child ! unbound, unrhymed,
Whence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed !
Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded ?
Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded ?
Who thee divorced, deceived, and left
Thee of thy faith who hath bereft,
And torn the ensigns from thy brow,
And sunk the immortal eye so low !
Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender,
Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender
For royal man; — they thee confess
An exile from the wilderness, –
The hills where health with health agrees,
And the wise soul expels disease.
Hark! in thy ear I will tell the sign
By which thy hurt thou may’st divine.


WOODNOTES.
87
When thou shalt climb the mountain cliff,
Or see the wide shore from thy skiff,
To thee the horizon shall express
Only emptiness and emptiness;
There is no man of Nature's worth
In the circle of the earth;
And to thine eye the vast skies fall,
Dire and satirical,
On clucking hens, and prating fools,
On thieves, on drudges, and on dolls.
And thou shalt say to the Most High,
“Godhead all this astronomy,
And fate, and practice, and invention,
Strong art, and beautiful pretension,
This radiant pomp of sun and star,
Throes that were, and worlds that are,
Behold ! were in vain and in vain; —
It cannot be, – I will look again;
Surely now will the curtain rise,
And earth's fit tenant me surprise; —
But the curtain doth not rise,


WOODNOTES.
And Nature has miscarried wholly
Into failure, into folly.”
‘Alas! thine is the bankruptcy,
Blessed Nature so to see.
Come, lay thee in my soothing shade,
And heal the hurts which sin has made.
I will teach the bright parable
Older than time,
Things undeclarable,
Visions sublime.
I see thee in the crowd alone;
I will be thy companion.
Let thy friends be as the dead in doom,
And build to them a final tomb ;
Let the starred shade that nightly falls
Still celebrate their funerals,
And the bell of beetle and of bee
Knell their melodious memory.
Behind thee leave thy merchandise,
Thy churches, and thy charities;


WOODNOTES. 89
And leave thy peacock wit behind;
Enough for thee the primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.
Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns,
And gives them all who all renounce.
The rain comes when the wind calls;
The river knows the way to the sea;
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity;
The sea tosses and foams to find
Its way up to the cloud and wind;
The shadow sits close to the flying ball;
The date fails not on the palm-tree tall;
And thou, - go burn thy wormy pages, –
Shalt outsee seers, and outwit sages.
Oft didst thou thread the woods in vain
To find what bird had piped the strain; –
Seek not, and the little eremite
Flies gayly forth and sings in sight.


90
WOODNOTES.
* Hearken once more
I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot;
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant time behoves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse, and sound, and light was none;
And God said, “Throb!” and there was motion,
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,
But forever doth escape,


WOODNOTES. 91
Like wave or flame, into new forms
Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms.
I, that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine,
Pouring of his power the wine
To every age, to every race;
Unto every race and age
He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each, and unto all,
Maker and original.
The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are and think.
He giveth little or giveth much,
To make them several or such.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the second a special nature;
The third adds heat's indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light which eats the dark ;


WOODNOTES.
In the fifth drop himself he flings,
And conscious Law is King of kings.
Pleaseth him, the Eternal Child,
To play his sweet will, glad and wild;
As the bee through the garden ranges,
From world to world the godhead changes;
As the sheep go feeding in the waste,
From form to form he maketh haste;
This vault which glows immense with light
Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What recks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity?
Alike to him the better, the worse, —
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.


WOODNOTES. 93
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky,
Than all it holds more deep, more high.'


94
M O N A D NO C.
THousAND minstrels woke within me,
‘Our music's in the hills;” —
Gayest pictures rose to win me,
Leopard-colored rills.
“Up!—If thou knew'st who calls
To twilight parks of beech and pine,
High over the river intervals,
Above the ploughman's highest line,
Over the owner's farthest walls!
Up! where the airy citadel
O'erlooks the surging landscape's swell !
Let not unto the stones the Day
Her lily and rose, her sea and land display.
Read the celestial sign
Lo! the south answers to the north;
Bookworm, break this sloth urbane;


MONADNOC. 95
A greater spirit bids thee forth
Than the gray dreams which thee detain.
Mark how the climbing Oreads
Beckon thee to their arcades 1
Youth, for a moment free as they,
Teach thy feet to feel the ground,
Ere yet arrives the wintry day
When Time thy feet has bound.
Accept the bounty of thy birth,
Taste the lordship of the earth.”
I heard, and I obeyed, -
Assured that he who made the claim,
Well known, but loving not a name,
Was not to be gainsaid.
Ere yet the summoning voice was still,
I turned to Cheshire's haughty hill.
From the fixed cone the cloud-rack flowed,
Like ample banner flung abroad
To all the dwellers in the plains


MONADNOC.
Round about, a hundred miles,
With invitation to the sea, and to the border-
ing isles.
In his own loom's garment dressed,
By his own bounty blessed,
Fast abides this constant giver,
Pouring many a cheerful river;
To far eyes, an aerial isle
Unploughed, which finer spirits pile,
Which morn and crimson evening paint
For bard, for lover, and for saint;
The country's core,
Inspirer, prophet evermore;
Pillar which God aloft had set
- 'so that men might it not forget;
It should be their life's ornament,
And mix itself with each event;
Their calendar and dial,
Barometer and chemic phial,
Garden of berries, perch of birds,
Pasture of pool-haunting herds,


MONADNOC. 97
Graced by each change of sum untold,
Earth-baking heat, stone-cleaving cold.
The Titan heeds his own affairs,
Wide rents and high alliance shares;
Mysteries of color daily laid
By the great sun in light and shade;
And sweet varieties of chance
And the mystic seasons' dance;
And thief-like step of liberal hours
Thawing snow-drift into flowers.
O, wondrous craft of plant and stone
By eldest science done and shown 1.
‘Happy,” I said, ‘whose home is here !
Fair fortunes to the mountaineer
Boon Nature to his poorest shed
Has royal pleasure-grounds outspread.’
Intent, I searched the region round,
And in low hut my monarch found
He was no eagle, and no earl; —
Alas! my foundling was a churl,
7


98
Mon ADNOC.
With heart of cat and eyes of bug,
Dull victim of his pipe and mug.
Wo is me for my hope's downfall !
Lord l is yon squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed
For God's vicegerency and stead?
Time out of mind, this forge of ores;
Quarry of spars in mountain pores;
Old cradle, hunting-ground, and bier
Of wolf and otter, bear and deer;
Well-built abode of many a race;
Tower of observance searching space;
Factory of river and of rain;
Link in the alps' globe-girding chain;
By million changes skilled to tell
What in the Eternal standeth well,
And what obedient Nature can; —
Is this colossal talisman
Kindly to creature, blood, and kind,
And speechless to the master's mind 7
I thought to find the patriots
In whom the stock of freedom roots:


MONADNOC. 99
To myself I of recount
The tale of many a famous mount, —
Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary's dells;
Roys, and Scanderbegs, and Tells.
Here Nature shall condense her powers,
Her music, and her meteors,
And lifting man to the blue deep
Where stars their perfect courses keep,
Like wise preceptor, lure his eye
To sound the science of the sky,
And carry learning to its height
Of untried power and sane delight:
The Indian cheer, the frosty skies,
Rear purer wits, inventive eyes, –
Eyes that frame cities where none be,
And hands that stablish what these see; -
And by the moral of his place
Hint summits of heroic grace;
Man in these crags a fastness find
To fight pollution of the mind;
In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,
Adhere like this foundation strong,


100
MONADNOC.
The insanity of towns to stem
With simpleness for stratagem.
But if the brave old mould is broke,
And end in churls the mountain folk,
In tavern cheer and tavern joke,
Sink, O mountain, in the swamp!
Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp !
Perish like leaves, the highland breed
No sire survive, no son succeed
Soft let not the offended muse
Toil's hard hap with scorn accuse.
Many hamlets sought I then,
Many farms of mountain men;
X
Found I not a minstrel seed,
But men of bone, and good at need.
Rallying round a parish steeple
Nestle warm the highland people,
Coarse and boisterous, yet mild,
Strong as giant, slow as child,
Smoking in a squalid room –
Where yet the westland breezes come.


MONADNOC. 101
Close hid in those rough guises lurk
Western magians, – here they work.
Sweat and season are their arts,
Their talismans are ploughs and carts; .
And well the youngest can command
Honey from the frozen land;
With sweet hay the wild swamp adorn,
Change the running sand to corn;
For wolves and foxes, lowing herds,
And for cold mosses, cream and curds;
Weave wood to canisters and mats;
Drain sweet maple juice in vats.
- No bird is safe that cuts the air
From their rifle or their snare;
No fish, in river or in lake, -
But their long hands it thence will take;
And the country's iron face, -
Like wax, their fashioning skill betrays,
To fill the hollows, sink the hills,
Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,
And fit the bleak and howling place
* For gardens of a finer race.


102
MONADNOC.
*
, The World-soul knows his own affair,
Forelooking, when he would prepare
For the next ages, men of mould
Well embodied, well ensouled,
He cools the present’s fiery glow,
Sets the life-pulse strong but slow:
Bitter winds and fasts austere
His quarantines and grottos, where
He slowly cures decrepit flesh,
And brings it infantile and fresh.
These exercises are the toys
And games with which he breathes his boys:
They bide their time, and well can prove,
If need were, their line from Jove;
Of the same stuff, and so allayed,
As that whereof the sun is made,
And of that fibre, quick and strong,
Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.
Now in sordid weeds they sleep,
Their secret now in dulness keep ;


MONADNOC. 103
Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
These the masters who can teach.
Fourscore or a hundred words
All their vocal muse affords;
These they turn in other fashion
Than the writer or the parson.
I can spare the college bell,
And the learned lecture, well;
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For that hardy English root
Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground, and never soars,
While Jake retorts, and Reuben roars;
Tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
Goes like bullet to its mark;
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear.
To student ears keen relished jokes
On truck, and stock, and farming folks,—


104
MONADNOC.
Nought the mountain yields thereof,
But savage health and sinews tough.
On the summit as I stood,
o'er the wide floor of plain and flood
Seemed to me, the towering hill
Was not altogether still,
But a quiet sense conveyed;
If I err not, thus it said : —
‘Many feet in summer seek,
Betimes, my far-appearing peak;
In the dreaded winter time,
None save dappling shadows climb,
Under clouds, my lonely head,
Old as the sun, old almost as the shade.
And comest thou
To see strange forests and new snow,
And tread uplifted land 7
And leavest thou thy lowland race,
Here amid clouds to stand?
And wouldst be mv companion,


MONADNOC.
105.
Where I gaze,
And shall gaze,
When forests fall, and man is gone,
Over tribes and over times,
At the burning Lyre,
Nearing me,
With its stars of northern fire,
In many a thousand years?
“Ah! welcome, if thou bring
My secret in thy brain ;
To mountain-top may Muse's wing
With good allowance strain.
Gentle pilgrim, if thou know
The gamut old of Pan,
And how the hills began,
The frank blessings of the hill
Fall on thee, as fall they will.
'Tis the law of bush and stone,
Each can only take his own.


106
MONADNOC.
& Le him heed who can and will;
Enchantment fixed me here
To stand the hurts of time, until
In mightier chant I disappear.
“If thou trowest
How the chemic eddies play,
Pole to pole, and what they say;
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming,
Seest the smile of Reason beaming:-
Can thy style-discerning eye
The hidden-working Builder spy,
Who builds, yet makes no chips, no.din,
With hammer soft as snowflake's flight; —
Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.


MONADNOC. 107
‘For the world was built in order,
And the atoms march in tune;
Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
Cannot forget the sun, the moon.
Orb and atom forth they prance,
When they hear from far the rune;
None so backward in the troop,
When the music and the dance
Reach his place and circumstance,
But knows the sun-creating sound,
And, though a pyramid, will bound.
‘Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can
Measure with a perfect man.
For it is on temples writ,
Adamant is soft to wit:
And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,
I shall pass, as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.


108
MONADNOC.
“Through all time,
I hear the approaching feet
Along the flinty pathway beat
Of him that cometh, and shall come;
Of him who shall as lightly bear
My daily load of woods and streams,
As now the round sky-cleaving boat
Which never strains its rocky beams;
Whose timbers, as they silent float, -
Alps and Caucasus uprear,
And the long Alleghanies here,
And all town-sprinkled lands that be,
Sailing through stars with all their history.
“Every morn I lift my head,
Gaze o'er New England underspread,
South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,
From Katskill east to the sea-bound.
Anchored fast for many an age,
I await the bard and sage,
Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.


MONADNOC. 109
Comes that cheerful troubadour,
This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,
It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil.
There's a berry blue and gold,—
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold
Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem’s heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,
Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight.
I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan's immortal meat,
Bread to eat, and juice to drink;
So the thoughts that he shall think
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.


110
MONADNOC.
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath, –
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow;
Open the daunting map beneath, –
All his county, sea and land,
Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city tops a glimmering haze.
I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding:
“See there the grim gray rounding
Of the bullet of the earth
Whereon ye sail,
Tumbling steep
In the uncontinented deep.”
He looks on that, and he turns pale.


MONADNOC. 111
- 'Tis even so; this treacherous kite,
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on forever;
And he, poor parasite,
Cooped in a ship he cannot steer, —
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not, —
Risk or ruin he must share.
I scowl on him with my cloud,
With my north wind chill his blood ;
I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.
Then, at last, I let him down
Once more into his dapper town,
To chatter, frightened, to his clan,
And forget me if he can.”
As in the old poetic fame
The gods are blind and lame,
And the simular despite
Betrays the more abounding might,


112
MONADNOC.
So call not waste that barren cone
Above the floral zone,
Where forests starve :
It is pure use; —
What sheaves like those which here we glean
and bind
Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?
Ages are thy days,
Thou grand expresser of the present tense,
And type of permanence 1
Firm ensign of the fatal Being,
Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief,
That will not bide the seeing !
Hither we bring
Our insect miseries to the rocks;
And the whole flight, with pestering wing,
Vanish, and end their murmuring, —
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which who can tell what mason laid!
Spoils of a front none need restore,


MONADNOC. 113
Replacing frieze and architrave;—
Yet flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;
Still is the haughty pile erect
Of the old building Intellect.
Complement of human kind,
Having us at vantage still,
Our sumptuous indigence,
O barren mound, thy plenties fill !
We fool and prate;
Thou art silent and sedate.
To myriad kinds and times one sense
The constant mountain doth dispense;
Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
Thou seest, O watchman tall,
Our towns and races grow and fall,
And imagest the stable good
For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind,
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.
8


114 MONADNOC.
Thou, in our astronomy
An opaker star,
Seen haply from afar,
Above the horizon's hoop,
A moment, by the railway troop, -
As o'er some bolder height they speed, –
By circumspect ambition,
By errant gain,
By feasters and the frivolous, –
Recallest us,
And makest sane.
Mute orator well skilled to plead,
And send conviction without phrase,
Thou dost supply
The shortness of our days,
And promise, on thy Founder's truth,
Long morrow to this mortal youth.


115
F A B L E.
THE mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter ‘Little Prig.’
Bun replied,
‘You are doubtless very big ;
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together,
To make up a year
And a sphere.
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry. -
I'll not deny you make


116 FABLE.
A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.'


117
ODE,
INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING.
Though loath to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honied thought
* For the priest's cant,
Or statesman's rant.
If I refuse
My study for their politique,
Which at the best is trick,
The angry Muse
Puts confusion in my brain.
But who is he that prates
Of the culture of mankind,


I 18
ODE.
Of better arts and life?
Go, blindworm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife
Or who, with accent bolder,
Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer
I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook 1
And in thy valleys, Agiochook
The jackals of the negro-holder.
The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men; –
Small bat and wren -
House in the oak: —
If earth-fire cleave
The upheaved land, and bury the folk,
The southern crocodile would grieve.


ODE. 119
Virtue palters; Right is hence;
, Freedom praised, but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid.
What boots thy zeal,
O glowing friend,
That would indignant rend
The northland from the south
Wherefore ? to what good end ?
Boston Bay and Bunker Hill
Would serve things still; —
Things are of the snake.
The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'Tis the day of the chattel, C.
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.


120
ODE.
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled, -
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
'Tis fit the forest fall,
The steep be graded,
The mountain tunnelled,
The sand shaded,
The orchard planted,
The glebe tilled,
The prairie granted,
The steamer built.
Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth's and harmony's behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.


ODE. 121
. Yet do not I invite
The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods,
Nor bid the unwilling senator
Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes.
Every one to his chosen work; —
Foolish hands may mix and mar;
Wise and sure the issues are.
Round they roll till dark is light,
Sex to sex, and even to odd;—
The over-god
Who marries Right to Might,
Who peoples, unpeoples, –
He who exterminates
Races by stronger races,
Black by white faces, –
Knows to bring honey
Out of the lion;
Grafts gentlest scion
On pirate and Turk.
The Cossack eats Poland,
Like stolen fruit;


122 ODE.
Her last noble is ruined,
Her last poet mute:
Straight, into double band
The victors divide;
Half for freedom strike and stand; —
The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.


123
A S T R AE A.
HIMSELF it was who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate ;
Each to all is venerable,
Cap-a-pie invulnerable,
Until he write, where all eyes rest,
Slave or master on his breast.
I saw men go up and down,
In the country and the town,
With this prayer upon their neck, -
“Judgment and a judge we seek.’
Not to monarchs they repair,
Nor to learned jurist's chair;
But they hurry to their peers,
To their kinsfolk and their dears;


124 ASTRAEA.
Louder than with speech they pray, -
‘What am I? companion, say.”
And the friend not hesitates
To assign just place and mates;
Answers not in word or letter,
Yet is understood the better;
Is to his friend a looking-glass,
Reflects his figure that doth pass.
Every wayfarer he meets
What himself declared repeats,
What himself confessed records,
Sentences him in his words;
The form is his own corporal form,
And his thought the penal worm.
Yet shine forever virgin minds,
Loved by stars and purest winds,
- Which, o'er passion throned sedate,
Have not hazarded their state;
Disconcert the searching spy,
Rendering to a curious eye


ASTRAEA. 125
The durance of a granite ledge
To those who gaze from the sea's edge.
It is there for benefit;
It is there for purging light;
There for purifying storms;
And its depths reflect all forms;
It cannot parley with the mean,—
Pure by impure is not seen.
For there's no sequestered grot,
Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot,
But Justice, journeying in the sphere,
Daily stoops to harbor there.


126
ETIENNE DE LA B O FC E.
I serve you not, if you I follow,
Shadowlike, o'er hill and hollow;
And bend my fancy to your leading,
All too nimble for my treading.
When the pilgrimage is done,
And we've the landscape overrun,
I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,
And your heart is unsupported.
Wainly valiant, you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist, —
Its complement; but if I could,
In severe or cordial mood,
Lead you rightly to my altar,
Where the wisest Muses falter,
And worship that world-warming spark
Which dazzles me in midnight dark,


ETIENNE DE LA BoécE. 127
Equalizing small and large,
While the soul it doth surcharge,
That the poor is wealthy grown,
And the hermit never alone, —
The traveller and the road seem one
With the errand to be done, –
That were a man's and lover's part,
That were Freedom's whitest chart.


128
S U U M C UIQ U E.
THE rain has spoiled the farmer's day;
Shall sorrow put my books away?
Thereby are two days lost :
Nature shall mind her own affairs;
I will attend my proper cares,
In rain, or sun, or frost.


129
C O M P E N S A TI ON.
WHY should I keep holiday
When other men have none 7
Why but because, when these are gay,
I sit and mourn alone?
And why, when mirth unseals all tongues,
Should mine alone be dumb 2
Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,
And now their hour is come.


130
F OR B E A R A N C F. .
HAST thou named all the birds without a gun ?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk 7
At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse?
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust 7
And loved so well a high behavior,
In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,
Nobility more nobly to repay?
O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine !


131
T H E PA. R. K.
THE prosperous and beautiful
To me seem not to wear
The yoke of conscience masterful,
Which galls me everywhere.
I cannot shake off the god;
On my neck he makes his seat;
I look at my face in the glass, –
My eyes his eyeballs meet.
Enchanters enchantresses
Your gold makes you seem wise;
The morning mist within your grounds
More proudly rolls, more softly lies.


132 THE PARK.
Yet spake yon purple mountain,
Yet said yon ancient wood,
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime,
Leads all souls to the Good.
*


133
FO R. E. R. UN N E R S .
LoNG I followed happy guides,
I could never reach their sides ;
Their step is forth, and, ere the day,
Breaks up their leaguer, and away.
"Keen my sense, my heart was young,
Right good-will my sinews strung,
But no speed of mine avails
To hunt upon their shining trails.
On and away, their hasting feet
Make the morning proud and sweet;
Flowers they strew, -I catch the scent;
Or tone of silver instrument
Leaves on the wind melodious trace;
Yet I could never see their face.
On eastern hills I see their smokes,
Mixed with mist by distant lochs.


134
FORERUNNERS.
I met many travellers
Who the road had surely kept;
They saw not my fine revellers, –
These had crossed them while they slept.
Some had heard their fair report,
In the country or the court.
Fleetest couriers alive
Never yet could once arrive,
As they went or they returned,
At the house where these sojourned.
Sometimes their strong speed they slacken,
Though they are not overtaken;
In sleep their jubilant troop is near, –
I tuneful voices overhear;
It may be in wood or waste, –
At unawares 'tis come and past.
Their near camp my spirit knows
By signs gracious as rainbows.
I thenceforward, and long after,
Listen for their harp-like laughter,
And carry in my heart, for days,
Peace that hallows rudest ways.


135
S U R S U M C OR D A.
SEEK not the spirit, if it hide
Inexorable to thy zeal:
Baby, do not whine and chide:
Art thou not also real?
Why shouldst thou stoop to poor excuse?
Turn on the accuser roundly; say,
‘Here am I, here will I remain
Forever to myself soothfast;
Go thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure stay !'
Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast,
For only it can absolutely deal.


136
O DE TO B E AUT Y.
Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast, —
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest ?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old 7
Or what was the service
For which I was sold 7
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all !
I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst ;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and first


ODE TO BEAUTY. 137
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men;
New-born, we are melting
Into nature again.
Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err
Guest of million painted forms,
Which in turn thy glory warms
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn's cup, the raindrop's arc,
The swinging spider's silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond,
In thy momentary play,
Would bankrupt nature to repay.
Ah, what avails it
To hide or to shun
Whom the Infinite One
Hath granted his throne 7


133
olde to BEAUTr.
The heaven high over
Is the deep's lover;
The sun and sea,
Informed by thee,
Before me run,
And draw me on,
Yet fly me still,
As Fate refuses
To me the heart Fate for me chooses.
Is it that my opulent soul
Was mingled from the generous whole;
Sea-valleys and the deep of skies
Furnished several supplies;
And the sands whereof I’m made
Draw me to them, self-betrayed 2
I turn the proud portfolios
Which hold the grand designs
Of Salvator, of Guercino,
And Piranesi's lines.
I hear the lofty paans
Of the masters of the shell,
Who heard the starry music


ODE TO BEAUTY. 189
And recount the numbers well;
Olympian bards who sung
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
Oft, in streets or humblest places,
I detect far-wandered graces,
Which, from Eden wide astray,
In lowly homes have lost their way.
Thee gliding through the sea of form,
Like the lightning through the storm,
Somewhat not to be possessed,
Somewhat not to be caressed,
No feet so fleet could ever find,
No perfect form could ever bind.
Thou eternal fugitive,
Hovering over all that live,
Quick and skilful to inspire
Sweet, extravagant desire,
Starry space and lily-bell
Filling with thy roseate smell,


140
ODE TO BEAUTY.
Wilt not give the lips to taste
Of the nectar which thou hast.
All that's good and great with thee
Works in close conspiracy;
Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely
To report thy features only,
And the cold and purple morning
Itself with thoughts of thee adorning;
The leafy dell, the city mart,
Equal trophies of thine art;
E’en the flowing azure air
Thou hast touched for my despair;
And, if I languish into dreams,
Again I meet the ardent beams.
Queen of things I dare not die
In Being's deeps past ear and eye;
Lest there I find the same deceiver,
And be the sport of Fate forever.
Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,
Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me !


141
GIW E A L L T O LOW E.
give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit, and the Muse, –
Nothing refuse.
'Tis a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope :
High and more high
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;


142 - GIVE ALL TO LOWE.
But it is a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
It was not for the mean ;
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such 'twill reward, –
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.
Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor, –
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.


GIVE ALL TO LOVE. 143
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture's hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.


144
TO ELLEN,
AT THE SOUTH.
THE green grass is bowing,
The morning wind is in it;
'Tis a tune worth thy knowing,
Though it change every minute.
'Tis a tune of the spring;
Every year plays it over
To the robin on the wing,
And to the pausing lover.
O'er ten thousand, thousand acres,
Goes light the nimble zephyr;
The Flowers — tiny sect of Shakers —
Worship him ever.


TO ELLEN. 145
Hark to the winning sound !
They summon thee, dearest, —
Saying, ‘We have dressed for thee the ground,
Nor yet thou appearest.
“O hasten ; ’tis our time,
Ere yet the red Summer
Scorch our delicate prime,
Loved of bee, – the tawny hummer.
‘O pride of thy race |
Sad, in sooth, it were to ours,
If our brief tribe miss thy face,
We poor New England flowers.
‘Fairest, choose the fairest members
Of our lithe society;
June's glories and September's
Show our love and piety.
“Thou shalt command us all, -
April's cowslip, summer's clover,
10


146 TO ELLEN.
To the gentian in the fall,
Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover.
“O come, then, quickly come!
We are budding, we are blowing;
And the wind that we perfume
Sings a tune that's worth the knowing.’


147
TO E. W. A.
O FAIR and stately maid, whose eyes
Were kindled in the upper skies
At the same torch that lighted mine;
For so I must interpret still
Thy sweet dominion o'er my will,
A sympathy divine.
Ah! let me blameless gaze upon
Features that seem at heart my own;
Nor fear those watchful sentinels,
Who charm the more their glance forbids,
Chaste-glowing, underneath their lids,
With fire that draws while it repels.


148
T H E A M U L E T.
Your picture smiles as first it smiled;
The ring you gave is still the same;
Your letter tells, O changing child !
No tidings since it came.
Give me an amulet
That keeps intelligence with you, -
Red when you love, and rosier red,
And when you love not, pale and blue.
Alas ! that neither bonds nor vows
Can certify possession;
Torments me still the fear that love
Died in its last expression.


149
TH IN E E YES STILL S H IN E D .
Thine eyes still shined for me, though far
I lonely roved the land or sea:
As I behold yon evening star,
Which yet beholds not me.
This morn I climbed the misty hill,
And roamed the pastures through;
How danced thy form before my path
Amidst the deep-eyed dew
When the redbird spread his sable wing,
And showed his side of flame;
When the rosebud ripened to the rose,
In both I read thy name.


150
E R O S.
THE sense of the world is short, — »
Long and various the report, —
To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not outlearned it ;
And, how oft Soe'er they’ve turned it,
'Tis not to be improved.


151
H E R M I O N E .
ON a mound an Arab lay,
And sung his sweet regrets,
And told his amulets:
The summer bird
His sorrow heard,
And, when he heaved a sigh profound,
The sympathetic swallow swept the ground.
“If it be, as they said, she was not fair,
Beauty 's not beautiful to me,
But sceptred genius, aye inorbed,
Culminating in her sphere.
This Hermione absorbed
The lustre of the land and ocean,
Hills and islands, cloud and tree,
In her form and motion.


HERMIONE.
‘I ask no bawble miniature,
Nor ringlets dead
Shorn from her comely head,
Now that morning not disdains
Mountains and the misty plains
Her colossal portraiture;
They her heralds be,
Steeped in her quality,
And singers of her fame
Who is their Muse and dame.
“Higher, dear swallows! mind not what I say.
Ah! heedless how the weak are strong,
Say, was it just,
In thee to frame, in me to trust,
Thou to the Syrian couldst belong
I am of a lineage
That each for each doth fast engage;
In old Bassora's schools, I seemed
Hermit vowed to books and gloom,-


HERMIONE. 153
Ill-bested for gay bridegroom.
I was by thy touch redeemed;
When thy meteor glances came,
We talked at large of worldly fate,
And drew truly every trait.
Once I dwelt apart,
Now I live with all;
As shepherd's lamp on far hill-side
Seems, by the traveller espied,
A door into the mountain heart,
So didst thou quarry and unlock
Highways for me through the rock.
Now, deceived, thou wanderest
In strange lands unblest;
And my kindred come to soothe me.
Southwind is my next of blood;
He is come through fragrant wood,
Drugged with spice from climates warm,
And in every twinkling glade,


154
HERMIONE.
And twilight nook,
Unveils thy form.
Out of the forest way
Forth paced it yesterday;
And when I sat by the watercourse,
Watching the daylight fade,
It throbbed up from the brook.
‘River, and rose, and crag, and bird,
Frost, and sun, and eldest night,
To me their aid preferred,
To me their comfort plight; —
“Courage we are thine allies,
And with this hint be wise, –
The chains of kind
The distant bind;
Deed thou doest she must do,
Above her will, be true;
And, in her strict resort
To winds and waterfalls,
And autumn's sunlit festivals,
To music, and to music's thought,


HERMIONE.
Inextricably bound,
She shall find thee, and be found.
Follow not her flying feet;
Come to us herself to meet.” "


156
INITIAL, DAE MONIC, AND
C E L E S TIAL LOW E.
THE INITIAL LOVE.
VENUs, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks, –
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.
This befell long ago.
Time and tide are strangely changed,
Men and manners much deranged:
None will now find Cupid latent
By this foolish antique patent.
He came late along the waste,
Shod like a traveller for haste;


THE INITIAL LOVE. 157
With malice dared me to proclaim him,
That the maids and boys might name him.
Boy no more, he wears all coats,
Frocks, and blouses, capes, capotes;
He bears no bow, or quiver, or wand,
Nor chaplet on his head or hand.
Leave his weeds and heed his eyes, –
All the rest he can disguise.
In the pit of his eye's a spark
Would bring back day if it were dark;
And, if I tell you all my thought,
Though I comprehend it not,
In those unfathomable orbs
Every function he absorbs.
He doth eat, and drink, and fish, and shoot,
And write, and reason, and compute,
And ride, and run, and have, and hold,
And whine, and flatter, and regret,
And kiss, and couple, and beget,
By those roving eyeballs bold.


158
THE INITIAL LOVE.
Undaunted are their courages,
Right Cossacks in their forages;
Fleeter they than any creature, —
They are his steeds, and not his feature;
Inquisitive, and fierce, and fasting,
Restless, predatory, hasting;
And they pounce on other eyes
As lions on their prey;
And round their circles is writ,
Plainer than the day,
Underneath, within, above, –
Love — love —love — love.
He lives in his eyes;
There doth digest, and work, and spin,
And buy, and sell, and lose, and win;
He rolls them with delighted motion,
Joy-tides swell their mimic ocean.
Yet holds he them with tortest rein,
That they may seize and entertain
The glance that to their glance opposes,
Like fiery honey sucked from roses.


THE INITIAL LOVE. 159
He palmistry can understand,
Imbibing virtue by his hand
As if it were a living root;
The pulse of hands will make him mute;
With all his force he gathers balms
Into those wise, thrilling palms.
Cupid is a casuist,
A mystic, and a cabalist, —
Can your lurking thought surprise,
And interpret your device.
He is versed in occult science,
In magic, and in clairvoyance;
Oft he keeps his fine ear strained,
And Reason on her tiptoe pained
For ačry intelligence,
And for strange coincidence.
But it touches his quick heart
When Fate by omens takes his part,
And chance-dropped hints from Nature's sphere
Deeply soothe his anxious ear.


160
THE INITIAL LOVE.
Heralds high before him run;
He has ushers many a one ;
He spreads his welcome where he goes,
And touches all things with his rose.
All things wait for and divine him, -
How shall I dare to malign him,
Or accuse the god of sport?
I must end my true report,
Painting him from head to foot,
In as far as I took note,
Trusting well the matchless power
Of this young-eyed emperor
Will clear his fame from every cloud,
With the bards and with the crowd.
He is wilful, mutable,
Shy, untamed, inscrutable,
Swifter-fashioned than the fairies,
Substance mixed of pure contraries;
His vice some elder virtue's token,
And his good is evil-spoken.


THE INITIAL LOVE. 161
Failing sometimes of his own,
He is headstrong and alone;
He affects the wood and wild,
Like a flower-hunting child;
Buries himself in summer waves,
In trees, with beasts, in mines, and caves;
Loves nature like a horned cow,
Bird, or deer, or caribou.
Shun him, nymphs, on the fleet horses!
He has a total world of wit;
O how wise are his discourses
But he is the arch-hypocrite,
And, through all science and all art,
Seeks alone his counterpart.
He is a Pundit of the East,
He is an augur and a priest,
And his soul will melt in prayer,
But word and wisdom is a snare ;
Corrupted by the present toy
He follows joy, and only joy.
11


162
THE INITIAL LOVE.
There is no mask but he will wear; -
He invented oaths to swear;
He paints, he carves, he chants, he prays,
And holds all stars in his embrace,
Godlike, — but 'tis for his fine pelf,
The social quintessence of self.
Well said I he is hypocrite,
And folly the end of his subtle wit
He takes a sovran privilege
Not allowed to any liege;
For he does go behind all law,
And right into himself does draw ;
For he is sovereignly allied, -
Heaven's oldest blood flows in his side, –
And interchangeably at One
With every king on every throne,
That no god dare say him nay,
Or see the fault, or seen betray :
He has the Muses by the heart,
And the Parce all are of his part.


THE INITIAL LOWE. 163
His many signs cannot be told;
He has not one mode, but manifold, -
Many fashions and addresses,
Piques, reproaches, hurts, caresses,
Arguments, lore, poetry,
Action, service, badinage;
He will preach like a friar,
And jump like Harlequin;
He will read like a crier,
And fight like a Paladin.
Boundless is his memory;
Plans immense his term prolong;
He is not of counted age,
Meaning always to be young.
And his wish is intimacy,
Intimater intimacy,
And a stricter privacy;
The impossible shall yet be done,
And, being two, shall still be one.
As the wave breaks to foam on shelves,
Then runs into a wave again,


164 The DAEMONIC AND
So lovers melt their sundered selves,
Yet melted would be twain.
II.
THE DAEMONIC AND THE CELESTIAL LOVE.
MAN was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth,
Tethered by a liquid cord
Of blood through veins of kindred poured.
Next his heart the fireside band
Of mother, father, sister, stand:
These, like strong amulets preferred,
Throbs of a wild religion stirred; —
Virtue, to love, to hate them, vice;
Till dangerous Beauty came, at last,
Till Beauty came to snap all ties;
The maid, abolishing the past,


THE CELESTIAL, LOVE. 165
With lotus wine obliterates
Dear memory's stone-incarved traits,
And, by herself, supplants alone
Friends year by year more inly known.
When her calm eyes opened bright,
All were foreign in their light.
It was ever the self-same tale,
The first experience will not fail;
Only two in the garden walked,
And with snake and seraph talked.
But God said,
‘I will have a purer gift;
There is smoke in the flame;
New flowerets bring, new prayers uplift,
And love without a name.
Fond children, ye desire
To please each other well;
Another round, a higher,
Ye shall climb on the heavenly stair,
And selfish preference forbear;


166
THE DAEMONIC AND
And in right deserving,
And without a swerving
Each from your proper state,
Weave roses for your mate.
“Deep, deep are loving eyes,
Flowed with naphtha fiery sweet;
And the point is paradise,
Where their glances meet:
Their reach shall yet be more profound,
And a vision without bound ;
The axis of those eyes sun-clear
Be the axis of the sphere :
So shall the lights ye pour amain
Go, without check or intervals,
Through from the empyrean walls
Unto the same again.'
Close, close to men,
Like undulating layer of air,
Right above their heads,
The potent plain of Daemons spreads.


THE CELESTIAL LOWE. 167
Stands to each human soul its own,
For watch, and ward, and furtherance,
In the snares of Nature's dance;
And the lustre and the grace
Which fascinate each youthful heart,
Beaming from [its counterpart,
Translucent through the mortal covers,
Is the Demon's form and face.
To and fro the Genius hies, –
A gleam which plays and hovers
Over the maiden's head,
And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes.
Unknown, albeit lying near,
To men, the path to the Daemon sphere;
And they that swiftly come and go
Leave no track on the heavenly snow.
Sometimes the airy synod bends,
And the mighty choir descends,
And the brains of men thenceforth,
In crowded and in still resorts,
Teem with unwonted thoughts:


168
THE DAEMONIC AND
As, when a shower of meteors
Cross the orbit of the earth,
And, lit by fringent air,
Blaze near and far,
Mortals deem the planets bright
Have slipped their sacred bars,
And the lone seaman all the night
Sails, astonished, amid stars.
Beauty of a richer vein,
Graces of a subtler strain,
Unto men these moonmen lend,
And our shrinking sky extend.
So is man's narrow path
By strength and terror skirted;
Also, (from the song the wrath
Of the Genii be averted
The Muse the truth uncolored speaking,)
The Daemons are self-seeking:
Their fierce and limitary will
Draws men to their likeness still.


THE CELESTIAL LOVE. 169
The erring painter made Love blind, –
Highest Love who shines on all;
Him, radiant, sharpest-sighted god,
None can bewilder;
Whose eyes pierce
The universe,
Path-finder, road-builder,
Mediator, royal giver;
Rightly seeing, rightly seen,
Of joyful and transparent mien.
'Tis a sparkle passing
From each to each, from thee to me,
To and fro perpetually;
Sharing all, daring all,
Levelling, displacing
Each obstruction, it unites
Equals remote, and seeming opposites.
And ever and forever Love
Delights to build a road:
Unheeded Danger near him strides,
Love laughs, and on a lion rides.


170
THE DAEMONIC AND
But Cupid wears another face,
Born into Daemons less divine:
His roses bleach apace,
His nectar smacks of wine.
The Daemon ever builds a wall,
Himself encloses and includes,
Solitude in solitudes:
In like sort his love doth fall.
He is an oligarch;
He prizes wonder, fame, and mark;
He loveth crowns;
He scorneth drones;
He doth elect
The beautiful and fortunate,
And the sons of intellect,
And the souls of ample fate,
Who the Future's gates unbar, –
Minions of the Morning Star.
In his prowess he exults,
And the multitude insults.
His impatient looks devour
Oft the humble and the poor;


THE CELESTIAL LOVE: 171
And, seeing his eye glare,
They drop their few pale flowers,
Gathered with hope to please,
Along the mountain towers, –
Lose courage, and despair.
He will never be gainsaid, –
Pitiless, will not be stayed;
His hot tyranny
Burns up every other tie.
Therefore comes an hour from Jove
Which his ruthless will defies,
And the dogs of Fate unties.
Shiver the palaces of glass;
Shrivel the rainbow-colored walls,
Where in bright Art each god and sibyl dwelt,
Secure as in the zodiac's belt;
And the galleries and halls,
Wherein every siren sung,
Like a meteor pass.
For this fortune wanted root
In the core of God's abysm, -
Was a weed of self and schism;


172
THE DAEMONIC And
And ever the Daemonic Love .
Is the ancestor of wars,
And the parent of remorse.
III.
HIGHER far, -
Upward into the pure realm,
Over sun and star,
Over the flickering Daemon film,
Thou must mount for love;
Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred, eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term ;
Where unlike things are like;
Where good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.


THE CELESTIAL, LOWE. 173
There Past, Present, Future shoot
Triple blossoms from one root;
substances at base divided
In their summits are united ;
There the holy essence rolls,
One through separated souls;
And the sunny AEon sleeps
Folding Nature in its deeps:
And every fair and every good,
Known in part, or known impure,
* To men below,
In their archetypes endure.
The race of gods,
Or those we erring own,
Are shadows flitting up and down
In the still abodes.
The circles of that sea are laws
Which publish and which hide the cause.
Pray for a beam
Out of that sphere,
Thee to guide and to redeem.


174
THE CELESTIAL LOWE.
O, what a load
Of care and toil,
By lying use bestowed,
From his shoulders falls who sees
The true astronomy,
The period of peace.
Counsel which the ages kept
Shall the well-born soul accept.
As the overhanging trees
Fill the lake with images, –
As garment draws the garment's hem,
Men their fortunes bring with them.
By right or wrong,
Lands and goods go to the strong.
Property will brutely draw
Still to the proprietor;
Silver to silver creep and wind,
And kind to kind.
Nor less the eternal poles
Of tendency distribute souls.


THE CELESTIAL LOVE. 175
There need no vows to bind
Whom not each other seek, but find.
They give and take no pledge or oath, –
Nature is the bond of both :
No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns, –
Their noble meanings are their pawns.
Plain and cold is their address,
Power have they for tenderness;
And, so thoroughly is known
Each other's counsel by his own,
They can parley without meeting;
Need is none of forms of greeting;
They can well communicate
In their innermost estate;
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Not with scarfs or perfumed gloves
Do these celebrate their loves;
Not by jewels, feasts, and savors,
Not by ribbons or by favors,


176
THE CELESTIAL LOWE.
But by the sun-spark on the sea,
And the cloud-shadow on the lea,
The soothing lapse of morn to mirk,
And the cheerful round of work.
Their cords of love so public are,
They intertwine the farthest star:
The throbbing sea, the quaking earth,
Yield sympathy and signs of mirth;
Is none so high, so mean is none,
But feels and seals this union;
Even the fell Furies are appeased,
The good applaud, the lost are eased.
Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond,
Bound for the just, but not beyond;
Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred,
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind.
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly,


THE CELESTIAL LOVE. 177
Without a false humility;
For this is Love's nobility, -
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold;
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand, and body, and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good.
For he that feeds men serveth few ;
He serves all who dares be true.
12


178
T H E A POL O G Y .
THINK me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.
Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.


THE APOLOGY. 179
There was never mystery
But 'tis figured in the flowers;
Was never secret history
But birds tell it in the bowers.
One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.


180
M E R LIN.
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze;
Free, peremptory, clear. -
No jingling serenader's art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,


MERLIN. 181
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
Merlin's blows are strokes of fate,
Chiming with the forest tone,
When boughs buffet boughs in the wood;
Chiming with the gasp and moan
Of the ice-imprisoned flood;
With the pulse of manly hearts;
With the voice of orators;
..With the din of city arts;
With the cannonade of wars;
With the marches of the brave;
And prayers of might from martyrs' cave.
Great is the art,
Great be the manners, of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
“Pass in, pass in,’ the angels say,


182
MERLIN.
In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.
Blameless master of the games,
King of sport that never shames,
He shall daily joy dispense
Hid in song's sweet influence.
Things more cheerly live and go,
What time the subtle mind
Sings aloud the tune whereto
Their pulses beat,
And march their feet,
And their members are combined.
By Sybarites beguiled,
He shall no task decline;
Merlin's mighty line
Extremes of nature reconciled, -
Bereaved a tyrant of his will,
And made the lion mild.


MERLIN. - - 183
Songs can the tempest still,
Scattered on the stormy air,
Mould the year to fair increase,
And bring in poetic peace.
He shall not seek to weave,
In weak, unhappy times,
Efficacious rhymes;
Wait his returning strength.
Bird, that from the nadir's floor
To the zenith's top can soar,
The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that
journey's length.
Nor profane affect to hit
Or compass that, by meddling wit,
Which only the propitious mind
Publishes when 'tis inclined.
There are open hours
When the God’s will sallies free,
And the dull idiot might see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years; —


184
MERLIN.
Sudden, at unawares,
Self-moved, fly-to the doors
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.


185
M E R LIN.
II.
The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs;
Balance-loving Nature
Made all things in pairs.
To every foot its antipode;
Each color with its counter glowed;
To every tone beat answering tones,
Higher or graver;
Flavor gladly blends with flavor;
Leaf answers leaf upon the bough;
And match the paired cotyledons.
Hands to hands, and feet to feet,
Coeval grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal meet.


186
MERLIN.
Light's far furnace shines,
Smelting balls and bars,
Forging double stars,
Glittering twins and trines.
The animals are sick with love,
Lovesick with rhyme;
Each with all propitious time
Into chorus wove.
Like the dancers' ordered band,
Thoughts come also hand in hand;
In equal couples mated,
Or else alternated;
Adding by their mutual gage,
One to other, health and age.
Solitary fancies go
Short-lived wandering to and fro,
Most like to bachelors,
Or an ungiven maid,
Not ancestors,
With no posterity to make the lie afraid,
Or keep truth undecayed.


MERLIN. 187
Perfect-paired as eagle's wings,
Justice is the rhyme of things;
Trade and counting use
The self-same tuneful muse;
And Nemesis,
Who with even matches odd,
Who athwart space redresses
The partial wrong,
Fills the just period,
And finishes the song.
Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,
Murmur in the house of life,
Sung by the Sisters as they spin; ,
In perfect time and measure they
Build and unbuild our echoing clay,
As the two twilights of the day
Fold us music-drunken in.


ISS
B A C C H U S.
BRING me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching
through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffered no savor of the earth to scape.
Let its grapes the morn salute
From a nocturnal root,
Which feels the acrid juice,
Of Styx and Erebus;
And turns the woe of Night,
By its own craft, to a more rich delight.
We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true, –


BACCHUS. 189
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled
Among the silver hills of heaven,
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well.
Wine that is shed
Like the torrents of the sun
Up the horizon walls,
Or like the Atlantic streams, which run
When the South Sea calls.
Water and bread,
Food which needs no transmuting,
Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting


190
BACCHUS.
Wine which is already man,
Food which teach and reason can.
Wine which Music is, –
Music and wine are one, –
That I, drinking this,
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;
Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.
Quickened so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.
I thank the joyful juice
For all I know; —
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow,
And seeming-solid walls of use
Open and flow.
Pour, Bacchus ! the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine !


BACCHUS. 191
Wine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lotel
Haste to cure the old despair, –
Reason in Nature's lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints, -
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.


192
Loss AND GAIN.
VIRTUE runs before the Muse,
And defies her skill ;
She is rapt, and doth refuse
To wait a painter's will.
Star-adoring, occupied,
Virtue cannot bend her
Just to please a poet's pride,
To parade her splendor.
The bard must be with good intent
No more his, but hers;
Must throw away his pen and paint,
Kneel with worshippers.


LOSS AND GAIN. 193
Then, perchance, a sunny ray
From the heaven of fire,
His lost tools may overpay,
And better his desire.
13


194
M E R O PS.
WHAT care I, so they stand the same, –
Things of the heavenly mind, -
How long the power to give them name
Tarries yet behind 7
Thus far to-day your favors reach,
O fair, appeasing presences !
Ye taught my lips a single speech,
And a thousand silences.
Space grants beyond his fated road
No inch to the god of day;
And copious language still bestowed
One word, no more, to say.


195
T H E H O U S E.
THERE is no architect
Can build as the Muse can ;
She is skilful to select
Materials for her plan;
Slow and warily to choose
Rafters of immortal pine,
Or cedar incorruptible,
Worthy her design.
She threads dark Alpine forests,
Or valleys by the sea,
In many lands, with painful steps,
Ere she can find a tree.


196
THE HOUSE.
She ransacks mines and ledges,
And quarries every rock,
To hew the famous adamant
For each eternal block.
She lays her beams in music,
In music every one,
To the cadence of the whirling world
Which dances round the sun;
That so they shall not be displaced
By lapses or by wars,
But, for the love of happy souls,
Outlive the newest stars.


197
SAA DI.
TREEs in groves,
Kine in droves,
In ocean sport the scaly herds,
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds,
To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks,
Browse the mountain sheep in flocks,
Men consort in camp and town,
But the poet dwells alone.
God, who gave to him the lyre,
Of all mortals the desire,
For all breathing men's behoof,
Straitly charged him, “Sit aloof;’
Annexed a warning, poets say,
To the bright premium, -
Ever, when twain together play,
Shall the harp be dumb.


198
SAADI.
Many may come,
But one shall sing;
Two touch the string,
The harp is dumb.
Though there come a million,
Wise Saadi dwells alone.
Yet Saadi loved the race of men, –
No churl, immured in cave or den;
In bower and hall
He wants them all,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for his audience;
They must give ear,
Grow red with joy and white with fear;
But he has no companion;
Come ten, or come a million,
Good Saadi dwells alone.
Be thou ware where Saadi dwells;
Wisdom of the gods is he, –
Entertain it reverently.


SAADI. 199
Gladly round that golden lamp
Sylvan deities encamp,
And simple maids and noble youth
Are welcome to the man of truth.
Most welcome they who need him most,
They feed the spring which they exhaust;
For greater need
Draws better deed :
But, critic, spare thy vanity,
Nor show thy pompous parts,
To vex with odious midely
The cheerer of men's hearts.
Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say
Endless dirges to decay,
Never in the blaze of light
Lose the shudder of midnight;
Pale at overflowing noon
Hear wolves barking at the moon;
In the bower of dalliance sweet
Hear the far Avenger's feet;


200
SAADI.
And shake before those awful Powers,
Who in their pride forgive not ours.
Thus the sad-eyed Fakirs preach:
‘Bard, when thee would Allah teach,
And lift thee to his holy mount,
He sends thee from his bitter fount
Wormwood, – saying, “Go thy ways,
Drink not the Malaga of praise,
But do the deed thy fellows hate,
And compromise thy peaceful state;
Smite the white breasts which thee fed;
Stuff sharp thorns beneath the head
Of them thou shouldst have comforted;
For out of woe and out of crime
Draws the heart a lore sublime.””
And yet it seemeth not to me
That the high gods love tragedy;
For Saadi sat in the sun,
And thanks was his contrition;
For haircloth and for bloody whips,
Had active hands and smiling lips;


SAADI.
201
And yet his runes he rightly read,
And to his folk his message sped.
Sunshine in his heart transferred
Lighted each transparent word,
And well could honoring Persia learn
What Saadi wished to say;
For Saadi's nightly stars did burn
Brighter than Dschami's day.
Whispered the Muse in Saadi's cot:
“O gentle Saadi, listen not,
Tempted by thy praise of wit,
Or by thirst and appetite
For the talents not thine own,
To sons of contradiction.
Never, son of eastern morning,
Follow falsehood, follow scorning.
Denounce who will, who will deny,
And pile the hills to scale the sky;
Let theist, atheist, pantheist,
Define and wrangle how they list,


202
SAADI.
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer, —
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer,
Unknowing war, unknowing crime,
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme;
Heed not what the brawlers say,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
‘Let the great world bustle on
With war and trade, with camp and town:
A thousand men shall dig and eat;
At forge and furnace thousands sweat;
And thousands sail the purple sea,
And give or take the stroke of war,
Or crowd the market and bazaar;
Oft shall war end, and peace return,
And cities rise where cities burn,
Ere one man my hill shall climb,
Who can turn the golden rhyme.
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
Seek the living among the dead, –
Man in man is imprisoned;


SAADI. 203
Barefooted Dervish is not poor,
If fate unlock his bosom's door,
So that what his eye hath seen
His tongue can paint as bright, as keen;
And what his tender heart hath felt
With equal fire thy heart shall melt.
For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh nature veritable;
And though he speak in midnight dark, -
In heaven no star, on earth no spark, -
Yet before the listener's eye
Swims the world in ecstasy,
The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Saadi, so far thy words shall reach :
Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech'


204
SAADI
And thus to Saadi said the Muse:
‘Eat thou the bread which men refuse;
Flee from the goods which from thee flee;
Seek nothing, — Fortune seeketh thee.
Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep
The midway of the eternal deep.
Wish not to fill the isles with eyes
To fetch thee birds of paradise:
On thine orchard's edge belong
All the brags of plume and song;
Wise Ali's sunbright sayings pass
For proverbs in the market-place;
Through mountains bored by regal art,
Toil whistles as he drives his cart.
Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find:
Behold, he watches at the door
Behold his shadow on the floor
Open innumerable doors
The heaven where unveiled Allah pours
The flood of truth, the flood of good,
The Seraph's and the Cherub's food :


SAADI. 205
Those doors are men: the Pariah hind
Admits thee to the perfect Mind.
Seek not beyond thy cottage wall
Redeemers that can yield thee all:
While thou sittest at thy door
On the desert's yellow floor,
Listening to the gray-haired crones,
Foolish gossips, ancient drones,
Saadi, see they rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed, -
That blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks.”


206
H O L ID AY S.
FROM fall to spring the russet acorn,
Fruit beloved of maid and boy,
Lent itself beneath the forest,
To be the children's toy.
Pluck it now ! In vain, – thou canst not;
Its root has pierced yon shady mound;
Toy no longer—it has duties;
It is anchored in the ground.
Year by year the rose-lipped maiden,
Playfellow of young and old,
Was frolic sunshine, dear to all men,
More dear to one than mines of gold.


HOLIDAYS. 207
Whither went the lovely hoyden
Disappeared in blessed wife;
Servant to a wooden cradle,
Living in a baby's life.
Still thou playest; —short vacation
Fate grants each to stand aside;
Now must thou be man and artist, —
'Tis the turning of the tide.


208
PAINT IN G AND S C U L PTU R. E.
The sinful painter drapes his goddess warm,
Because she still is naked, being dressed:
The godlike sculptor will not so deform
Beauty, which limbs and flesh enough invest.


209
F. R O M T H E P E R SIAN OF H A F I Z.
The poems of Hafiz are held by the Persians to be alle-
goric and mystical. His German editor, Von Hammer,
remarks on the following poem, that, “though in appear-
ance anacreontic, it may be regarded as one of the best
of those compositions which earned for Hafiz the honor-
able title of “Tongue of the Secret.” "
BUTLER, fetch the ruby wine
Which with sudden greatness fills us;
Pour for me, who in my spirit
Fail in courage and performance.
Bring this philosophic stone,
Karun's treasure, Noah's age;
Haste, that by thy means I open
All the doors of luck and life.
Bring to me the liquid fire
Zoroaster sought in dust:
14


210
FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIz.
To Hafiz, revelling, 'tis allowed
To pray to Matter and to Fire.
Bring the wine of Jamschid's glass,
Which glowed, ere time was, in the Néant;
Bring it me, that through its force
I, as Jamschid, see through worlds.
Wisely said the Kaisar Jamschid,
“The world's not worth a barleycorn :'
Let flute and lyre lordly speak;
Lees of wine outvalue crowns.
Bring me, boy, the veiled beauty,
Who in ill-famed houses sits:
Bring her forth; my honest name
Freely barter I for wine.
Bring me, boy, the fire-water ; —
Drinks the lion, the woods burn;
Give it me, that I storm heaven,
And tear the net from the archwolf.
Wine wherewith the Houris teach
Souls the ways of paradise !
On the living coals I’ll set it,
And therewith my brain perfume.


FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIZ. 211
Bring me wine, through whose effulgence
Jam and Chosroes yielded light;
Wine, that to the flute I sing
Where is Jam, and where is Kauss. .
Bring the blessing of old times, –
Bless the old, departed shahs
Bring me wine which spendeth lordship,
Wine whose pureness searcheth hearts;
Bring it me, the shah of hearts
Give me wine to wash me clean
Of the weather-stains of cares,
See the countenance of luck.
Whilst I dwell in spirit-gardens,
Wherefore stand I shackled here?
Lo, this mirror shows me all !
Drunk, I speak of purity,
Beggar, I of lordship speak;
When Hafiz in his revel sings,
Shouteth Sohra in her sphere.
Fear the changes of a day:
Bring wine which increases life.


212 FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIz.
Since the world is all untrue,
Let the trumpets thee, remind
How the crown of Kobad vanished.
Be not certain of the world,—
'Twill not spare to shed thy blood.
Desperate of the world's affair
Came I running to the wine-house.
Bring me wine which maketh glad,
That I may my steed bestride,
Through the course career with Rustem,-
Gallop to my heart's content;
That I reason quite expunge,
And plant banners on the worlds.
Let us make our glasses kiss;
Let us quench the sorrow-cinders.
To-day let us drink together;
Now and then will never agree.
Whoso has arranged a banquet
Is with glad mind satisfied,
'Scaping from the snares of Dews.
Woe for youth ! 'tis gone in the wind:
Happy he who spent it well !


FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIZ. 213
Bring wine, that I overspring
Both worlds at a single leap.
Stole, at dawn, from glowing spheres
Call of Houris to my sense: —
“O lovely bird, delicious soul,
Spread thy pinions, break thy cage;
Sit on the roof of seven domes,
Where the spirits take their rest.”
In the time of Bisurdschimihr,
Menutscheher's beauty shined.
On the beaker of Nushirvan,
Wrote they once in elder times,
* Hear the counsel; learn from us
Sample of the course of things:
The earth — it is a place of sorrow,
Scanty joys are here below;
Who has nothing has no sorrow.’
Where is Jam, and where his cup !
Solomon and his mirror, where?
Which of the wise masters knows
What time Kauss and Jam existed 7


214
FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIz.
When those heroes left this world,
Left they nothing but their names.
Bind thy heart not to the earth;
When thou goest, come not back;
Fools squander on the world their hearts, –
League with it is feud with heaven:
Never gives it what thou wishest.
A cup of wine imparts the sight
Of the five heaven-domes with nine steps:
Whoso can himself renounce
Without support shall walk thereon; —
Who discreet is is not wise.
Give me, boy, the Kaisar cup,
Which rejoices heart. and soul.
Under wine and under cup
Signify we purest love.
Youth like lightning disappears;
Life goes by us as the wind.
Leave the dwelling with six doors,
And the serpent with nine heads;


FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIZ. 21.5
Life and silver spend thou freely
If thou honorest the soul.
Haste into the other life;
All is vain save God alone.
Give me, boy, this toy of Daemons:
When the cup of Jam was lost,
Him availed the world no more.
Fetch the wineglass made of ice;
Wake the torpid heart with wine.
Every clod of loam beneath us
Is a skull of Alexander;
Oceans are the blood of princes;
Desert sands the dust of beauties.
More than one Darius was there
Who the whole world overcame ;
But, since these gave up the ghost,
Thinkest thou they never were?
Boy, go from me to the shah;
Say to him, ‘Shah, crowned as Jam,
Win thou first the poor man's heart,
Then the glass; so know the world.


216
FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIZ.
Empty sorrows from the earth
Canst thou drive away with wine.
Now in thy throne's recent beauty,
In the flowing tide of power,
Moon of fortune, mighty king,
Whose tiara sheddeth lustre,
Peace secure to fish and fowl,
Heart and eye-sparkle to saints; —
Shoreless is the sea of praise;
I content me with a prayer: —
From Nisami's lyric page,
Fairest ornament of speech,
Here a verse will I recite,
Verse more beautiful than pearls:
“More kingdoms wait thy diadem
Than are known to thee by name;
Thee may sovran Destiny
* Lead to victory day by day!”


217
G H A S E L L E :
FROM THE PERSIAN OF HAFIZ.
OF Paradise, O hermit wise,
Let us renounce the thought;
Of old therein our names of sin
Allah recorded not.
Who dear to God on earthly sod
No corn-grain plants,
The same is glad that life is had,
Though corn he wants.
O just fakir, with brow austere,
Forbid me not the vine;
On the first day, poor Hafiz' clay
Was kneaded up with wine.


218
GHASELLE.
Thy mind the mosque and cool kiosk,
Spare fast and orisons;
Mine me allows the drinking-house,
And sweet chase of the nuns.
He is no dervise, Heaven slights his service,
Who shall refuse
There in the banquet to pawn his blanket
For Schiraz' juice.
Who his friend's skirt or hem of his shirt
Shall spare to pledge,
To him Eden's bliss and angel's kiss
Shall want their edge.
Up! Hafiz, grace from high God's face
Beams on thee pure;
Shy thou not hell, and trust thou well,
Heaven is secure.


219
X E N O PH AN E S.
By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave
One scent to hyson and to wall-flower,
One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls,
One aspect to the desert and the lake.
It was her stern necessity : all things
Are of one pattern made ; bird, beat, and flower,
Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character,
Deceive us, seeming to be many things,
And are but one. Beheld far off, they differ
As God and devil; bring them to the mind,
They dull its edge with their monotony.
To know one element, explore another,
And in the second reappears the first.
The specious panorama of a year
But multiplies the image of a day, -


220
XENOPHANES. |
A belt of mirrors round a taper's flame;
And universal Nature, through her vast
And crowded whole, an infinite paroquet,
Repeats one note.


221
T H E D A Y " S R A TION. |
WHEN I was born,
From all the seas of strength Fate filled a chalice,
Saying, ‘This be thy portion, child; this chalice,
Less than a lily's, thou shalt daily draw
From my great arteries, – nor less, nor more.’
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life, –
Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty, and disgust.
And whether I am angry or content,
Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt,
All he distils into sidereal wine
And brims my little cup; heedless, alas !
Of all he sheds how little it will hold,
How much runs over on the desert sands.
If a new Muse draw me with splendid ray,
And I uplift myself into its heaven,


222 THE DAY's RATION
The needs of the first sight absorb my blood,
And all the following hours of the day
Drag a ridiculous age.
To-day, when friends approach, and every hour
Brings book, or starbright scroll of genius,
The little cup will hold not a bead more,
And all the costly liquor runs to waste;
Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond drop
So to be husbanded for poorer days.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught
After the master's sketch fills and o'erfills
My apprehension ? why seek Italy,
Who cannot circumnavigate the sea
Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn
The nearest matters for a thousand days?


223
B L I G H T.
GIVE me truths;
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and agrimony,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes, and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
Driving the foe and stablishing the friend, -
O, that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun
And planted world, and full executor


224 BLIGHT.
Of their imperfect functions.
But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, ‘Not in us; ”
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral say, ‘Not in us,’
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain;
We devastate them unreligiously,


BLIGHT. 225
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due ;
But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;
And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes,
The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay,
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term;
And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe;
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal, like a beggar's child;
With most unhandsome calculation taught,'
/ Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
15


226 * BLIGHT.
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison
Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.


227
MU S K E T A Q. UID.
BECAUSE I was content with these poor fields,
Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And through my rock-like, solitary wont
Shot million rays of thought and tenderness.
For me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the spring
Visits the valley; —break away the clouds, –
I bathe in the morn's soft and silvered air,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
Sparrows far off, and nearer, April's bird,
Blue-coated,—flying before from tree to tree,


228 MUSKETAQUID.
Courageous, sing a delicate overture
To lead the tardy concert of the year.
Onward and nearer rides the sun of May;
And wide around, the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain
The surge of summer's beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hill-side, and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.
Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
whºse pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here in pine houses built of new fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.
Traveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road,
Or, it may be, a picture; to these men,
The landscape is an armory of powers,
Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.
They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;
They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,


MUSKETAQUID. 229
And, like the chemist mid his loaded jars,
Draw from each stratum its adapted use
To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.
They turn the frost upon their chemic heap,
They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,
They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,
And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow,
Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods
O'er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,
They fight the elements with elements,
(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,
Transmuted in these men to rule their like,)
And by the order in the field disclose
The order regnant in the yeoman's brain.
What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,
I followed in small copy in my acre;
For there's no rood has not a star above it;
The cordial quality of pear or plum
Ascends as gladly in a single tree
As in broad orchards resonant with bees;


230 MUSKETAQUID.
And every atom poises for itself,
And for the whole. The gentle deities
Showed me the lore of colors, and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty,
The miracle of generative force,
Far-reaching concords of astronomy
Felt in the plants, and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linked purpose of the whole,
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty
In the glad home plain-dealing nature gave.
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.
For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:
“Dost love our manners ? Canst thou silent lie?
Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like nature pass


MUSKETAQUID. 231
Into the winter night's extinguished mood?
Canst thou shine now, then darkle,
And being latent feel thyself no less?
As, when the all-worsnipped moon attracts the eye,
The river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure,
Yet envies none, none are unenviable.’


232
D I R. G. E.
KNows he who tills this lonely field,
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?
In the long sunny afternoon,
The plain was full of ghosts;
I wandered up, I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
The winding Concord gleamed below,
Pouring as wide a flood
As when my brothers, long ago,
Came with me to the wood.


DIRGE. 233
But they are gone, – the holy ones
Who trod with me this lovely vale;
The strong, star-bright companions
Are silent, low, and pale.
My good, my noble, in their prime,
Who made this world the feast it was,
Who learned with me the lore of time, .
Who loved this dwelling-place
They took this valley for their toy,
They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy, -
They treated nature as they would.
They colored the horizon round;
Stars flamed and faded as they bade;
All echoes hearkened for their sound, –
They made the woodlands glad or mad.
I touch this flower of silken leaf,
Which once our childhood knew;


234
DIRGE.
Its soft leaves wound me with a grief
Whose balsam never grew.
Hearken to yon pine-warbler
Singing aloft in the treel
Hearest thou, O traveller,
What he singeth to me?
Not unless God made sharp thine ear
With sorrow such as mine,
Out of that delicate lay could'st thou
Its heavy tale divine.
‘Go, lonely man,’ it saith;
“They loved thee from their birth;
Their hands were pure, and pure their faith, –
There are no such hearts on earth.
‘Ye drew one mother's milk,
One chamber held ye all;
A very tender history
Did in your childhood fall.


DIRGE. 23.5
‘Ye cannot unlock your heart,
The key is gone with them;
The silent organ loudest chants
The master's requiem.”


236
T H R EN O D Y .
THE South-wind brings
Life, sunshine, and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
/
I see my empty house,
I see my trees repair their boughs;
And he, the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air's cerulean round, –


THRENODY. 237
The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break and April bloom, -
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day, -
Has disappeared from the Day's eye;
Far and wide she cannot find him;
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.
Returned this day, the south wind searches,
And finds young pines and budding birches;
But finds not the budding man;
Nature, who lost him, cannot remake him;
Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him;
Nature, Fate, Men, him seek in vain.
And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,
O, whither tend thy feet?
I had the right, few days ago,
Thy steps to watch, thy place to know;
How have I forfeited the right?
Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?


238
THRENODY.
I hearken for thy household cheer,
O eloquent child!
Whose voice, an equal messenger,
Conveyed thy meaning mild.
What though the pains and joys
Whereof it spoke were toys
Fitting his age and ken,
Yet fairest dames and bearded men,
Who heard the sweet request,
So gentle, wise, and grave,
Bended with joy to his behest,
And let the world's affairs go by,
Awhile to share his cordial game,
Or mend his wicker wagon-frame,
Still plotting how their hungry ear
That winsome voice again might hear;
For his lips could well pronounce
Words that were persuasions.
Gentlest guardians marked serene
His early hope, his liberal mien ;


THRENODY. 239
Took counsel from his guiding eyes
To make this wisdom earthly wise.
Ah, vainly do these eyes recall
The school-march, each day's festival,
When every morn my bosom glowed
To watch the convoy 'on the road;
The babe in willow wagon closed,
With rolling eyes and face composed;
With children forward and behind,
Like Cupids studiously inclined;
And he the chieftain paced beside,
The centre of the troop allied,
With sunny face of sweet repose,
To guard the babe from fancied foes.
The little captain innocent
Took the eye with him as he went;
Each village senior paused to scan
And speak the lovely caravan.
From the window I look out
To mark thy beautiful parade,
Stately marching in cap and coat
To some tune by fairies played; —


240
THRENODY.
A music heard by thee alone
To works as noble led thee on.
Now Love and Pride, alas ! in vain,
Up and down their glances strain.
The painted sled stands where it stood;
The kennel by the corded wood;
The gathered sticks to stanch the wall
Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall;
The ominous hole he dug in the sand,
And childhood's castles built or planned;
His daily haunts I well discern, –
The poultry-yard, the shed, the barn, –
And every inch of garden ground
Paced by the blessed feet around,
From the roadside to the brook
Whereinto he loved to look.
Step the meek birds where erst they ranged;
The wintry garden lies unchanged;
The brook into the stream runs on;
But the deep-eyed boy is gone.


THRENODY. 241
On that shaded day,
Dark with more clouds than tempests are,
When thou didst yield thy innocent breath
In birdlike heavings unto death,
Night came, and Nature had not thee;
I said, “We are mates in misery.'
The morrow dawned with needless glow;
Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;
Each tramper started; but the feet
Of the most beautiful and sweet
Of human youth had left the hill
And garden, - they were bound and still.
There's not a sparrow or a wren,
There's not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend,
And tides of life and increase lend ;
And every chick of every bird,
And weed and rock-moss is preferred.
O ostrich-like forgetfulness!
O loss of larger in the less!
Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
16


THE ExoDY.
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth 2
Not mine, — I never called thee mine,
But Nature's heir, – if I repine,
And seeing rashly torn and moved
Not what I made, but what I loved,
Grow early old with grief that thou
Must to the wastes of Nature go, -
'Tis because a general hope
Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope.
For flattering planets seemed to say
This child should ills of ages stay,
By wondrous tongue, and guided pen,
Bring the flown Muses back to men.
Perchance not he but Nature ailed,
The world and not the infant failed.
It was not ripe yet to sustain
A genius of so fine a strain,


THRENODY. 243
Who gazed upon the sun and moon
As if he came unto his own,
And, pregnant with his grander thought,
Brought the old order into doubt.
, His beauty once their beauty tried;
They could not feed him, and he died,
And wandered backward as in scorn,
To wait an aeon to be born.
Ill day which made this beauty waste,
Plight broken, this high face defaced
Some went and came about the dead ;
And some in books of solace read;
Some to their friends the tidings say;
Some went to write, some went to pray;
One tarried here, there hurried one ;
But their heart abode with none.
Covetous death bereaved us all,
To aggrandize one funeral.
The eager fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me:
For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying,


THRENODY.
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.
O child of paradise,
Boy who made dear his father's home,
In whose deep eyes
Men read the welfare of the times to come,
I am too much bereñ.
The world dishonored thou hast left.
O truth’s and nature's costly lie
O trusted broken prophecy!
/ O richest fortune sourly crossed
Born for the future, to the future lost!
The deep Heart answered, ‘Weepest thou ?
Worthier cause for passion wild
If I had not taken the child.
And deemest thou as those who pore,
With aged eyes, short way before, —
Think'st Beauty vanished from the coast
Of matter, and thy darling lost?


THRENODY.
245
Taught he not thee — the man of eld,
Whose eyes within his eyes beheld -
Heaven's numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?
To be alone wilt thou begin
When worlds of lovers hem thee in 7
To-morrow, when the masks shall fall
That dizen Nature's carnival,
The pure shall see by their own will,
Which overflowing Love shall fill,
'Tis not within the force of fate
The fate-conjoined to separate.
But thou, my votary, weepest thou?
I gave thee sight—where is it now?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, bible, or of speech;
Wrote in thy mind's transparent table,
As far as the incommunicable;
Taught thee each private sign to raise,
Lit by the supersolar blaze.
Past utterance, and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,


246
THRENODY.
The mysteries of Nature's heart;
And though no Muse can these impart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
‘I came to thee as to a friend ;
Dearest, to thee I did not send
Tutors, but a joyful eye,
Innocence that matched the sky,
Lovely locks, a form of wonder,
Laughter rich as woodland thunder,
That thou might'st entertain apart
The richest flowering of all art:
And, as the great all-loving Day
Through smallest chambers takes its way,
That thou might'st break thy daily bread
With prophet, Savior, and head;
That thou might'st cherish for thine own
The riches of sweet Mary's Son,
Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon.
And thoughtest thou such guest
Would in thy hall take up his rest?


THRENODY. 247
Would rushing life forget her laws,
Fate's glowing revolution pause !
High omens ask diviner guess;
Not to be conned to tediousness.
And know my higher gifts unbind
The zone that girds the incarnate mind.
When the scanty shores are full
With Thought's perilous, whirling pool;
When frail Nature can no more,
Then the Spirit strikes the hour:
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
‘Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow,
Whose streams through nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the half-climbed zodiac 2
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one, –
Wilt thou transfix and make it none 7


the ENOLY.
Its onward force too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineament 1
Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,
Talker' the unreplying Fate?
Nor see the genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul,
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom 2
Fair the soul's recess and shrine,
Magic-built to last a season;
Masterpiece of love benign ;
Fairer that expansive reason
Whose omen 'tis, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show'?
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthening scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of saints that inly burned, –
Saying, What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;


THRENODY. 249
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
Heart's love will meet thee again.
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold ;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass, and scented weeds;
Or like a traveller's fleeing tent,
Or bow above the tempest bent;
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.’


250
HY MIN:
sung AT THE completion of THE concord MonuMENT,
April 19, 1836.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept ;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.


HYMN. 251
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, or leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.








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THE BORROWER WILL BE CHARGED
ANOVERDUEFEE IF THIS BOOKIS NOT
RETURNED TO THE LIBRARY ON OR
BEFORE THE LAST DATE STAMPED
BELOW. NON-RECEIPT OF OVERDUE
NOTICES DOES NOT EXEMPT THE
BORROWER FROM OVERDUE FEES.
Fº:
i
tºok ºut:
y^y


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