Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne :: :: University of Virginia Library

I cannot tell when first I saw her face;
Was it athwart a sunset on the sea,
When the huge billows heaved tumultuously,
Or in the quiet of some woodland place,
Wrapped by the shadowy boon
Of breezeless verdures from the summer noon?
Or likelier still, in a rock-girdled dell
Between vast mountains, while the midnight hour
Blossomed above me like a shining flower,
Whose star-wrought petals turned the fields of space
To one great garden of mysterious light?

Vain! vain! I cannot tell
When first the beauty and majestic might
Of her calm presence, bore my soul apart
From all low issues of the grovelling world;—
About me their own peace and grandeur furled,—
Filling the conscious heart
With vague, sweet wisdom drawn from earth or sky,—
Secrets that glance towards eternity,
Visions divine, and thoughts ineffable!

But ever since that immemorial day,
A steadfast flame hath burned in brain and blood,
Urging me onward in the perilous search
For sacred haunts our queenly mother loves;
By field and flood,
Thro' neighboring realms, and regions far away,
Have I not followed, followed where she led,
Tracking wild rivers to their fountain head,
And wilder desert spaces, mournful, vast,
Where Nature, fronting her inscrutable past,
Holds bleak communion only with the dead;
Yearning meanwhile, for pinions like a dove's,
To waft me further still,
Beyond the compass of the unwinged will;
Yea; waft me northward, southward, east, or west,
By fabled isles, and undiscovered lands,
To where enthroned upon his mountain-perch,
The sovereign eagle stands,
Guarding the unfledged eaglets in their nest,
Above the thunders of the sea and storm?

Oh! sometimes by the fire
Of holy passion, in me, all subdued,
And melted to a mortal woman's mood,
Tender and warm,—
She, from her goddess height,
In gracious answer to my soul's desire,

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Descending softly, lifts her Isis veil,
To bend on me the untranslated light
Of fathomless eyes, and brow divinely pale:
She lays on mine her firm, immortal hand;
And I, encompassed by a magical mist,
Feel that her lips have kissed
Mine eyes and forehead;—how the influence fine
Of her deep life runs like Arcadian wine
Through all my being! How a moment pressed
To the large fountains of her opulent breast,
A rapture smites me, half akin to pain;
A sun-flash quivering through white chords of rain!

Thenceforth, I walked
The earth all-seeing;—not her stateliest forms
Alone engrossed me, nor her sounds of power;
Mountains and oceans, and the rage of storms;
Fierce cataracts hurled from awful steep to steep,
Or, the gray water-spouts, that whirling tower
Along the darkened bosom of the deep;
But all fair, fairy forms; all vital things,
That breathe or blossom 'midst our bounteous springs;
In sylvan nooks rejoicingly I met
The wild rose and the violet;
On dewy hill-slopes pausing, fondly talked
With the coy wind-flower, and the grasses brown,
That in a subtle language of their own
(Caught from the spirits of the wandering breeze),
Quaintly responded; while the heavens looked down
As graciously on these
Titania growths, as on sublimer shapes
Of century-moulded continents, that bemock
Alike the earthquake's and the billows' shock
By Orient inlands and cold ocean capes!

The giant constellations rose and set:
I knew them all, and worshipped all I knew;
Yet, from their empire in the pregnant blue,
Sweeping from planet-orbits to faint bars
Of nebulous cloud, beyond the range of stars,
I turned to worship with a heart as true,
Long mosses drooping from the cypress-tree;
The virginal vines that stretched remotely dim,
From forest limb to limb;
Network of golden ferns, whose tracery weaves
In lingering twilights of warm August eves,
Ethereal frescoes, pictures fugitive.
Drawn on the flickering and fair-foliaged wall
Of the dense forest, ere the night shades fall:
Rushes rock-tangled, whose mixed colors live
In the pure moisture by a fountain's brim:
The sylph-like reeds, wave-born, that to and fro
Move ever to the waters' rhythmic flow,
Blent with the humming of the wild-wood bee,
And the winds' under thrills of mystery;
The twinkling “ground-stars,” full of modest cheer,
Each her cerulean cup
In humble supplication lifting up,
To catch whate'er the kindly heavens may give

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Of flooded sunshine, or celestial dew;
And even when, self-poised in airy grace,
Their phantom lightness stirs
Through glistening shadows of a secret place
The silvery-tinted gossamers;
For thus hath Nature taught amid her All,—
The complex miracles of land and sea,
And infinite marvels of the infinite air,
No life is trivial, no creation small!
Ever I walk the earth,
As one whose spiritual ear
Is strangely purged and purified to hear
Its multitudinous voices; from the shore
Whereon the savage Arctic surges roar,
And the stupendous bass of choral waves
Thunders o'er “wandering graves,”
From warrior-winds whose viewless cohorts charge
The banded mists through Cloudland's vaporous dearth,
Pealing their battle bugles round the marge
Of dreary fen and desolated moor;
Down to the ripple of shy woodland rills
Chanting their delicate treble 'mid the hills,
And ancient hollows of the enchanted ground,—
I pass with reverent thought,
Attuned to every tiniest trill of sound,
Whether by brook or bird
The perfumed air be stirred.
But most, because the unwearied strains are fraught
With Nature's freedom in her happiest moods,
I love the mock-bird's, and brown thrush's lay,
The melted soul of May.
Beneath those matchless notes,
From jocund hearts upwelled to fervid throats,
In gushes of clear harmony,
I seem, oft-times I seem
To find remoter meanings; the far tone
Of ante-natal music faintly blown
From out the misted realms of memory;
The pathos and the passion of a dream;
Or, broken fugues of a diviner tongue

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That e'er hath chanted, since our earth was young,
And o'er her peace-enamored solitudes
The stars of morning sung!

MUSCADINES.

Sober September, robed in gray and dun,
Smiled from the forest in half-pensive wise;
A misty sweetness shone in her mild eyes,
And on her cheek a shy flush went and came,
As flashing warm between
The autumnal leaves of slowly dying green,
The sovereign sun
Tenderly kissed her; then (in ruthful mood
For the vague fears of modest maiden-hood)
Behold him gently, lovingly retire;
Beneath the foliaged screen,
Veiling his swift desire—
Even as a king, wed to some virgin queen,
Might doom his sight to blissful, brief eclipse,
After his tender lips
Had touched the maiden's trembling soul to flame.

Through shine and shade,
Thoughtful I trod the tranquil forest glade,
Up-glancing oft
To watch the rainless cloudlets, white and soft,
Sail o'er the placid ocean of the sky.
The breeze was like a sleeping infant's sigh,
Measured and low, or, in quick, palpitant thrills
An instant swept the sylvan depths apart
To pass and die
Far off, far off, within the shrouded heart
Of immemorial hills,

Through shade and shine
I wandered, as one wanders in a dream,
Till, near the borders of a beauteous stream
O'erhung by flower and vine,
I pushed the dense, perplexing boughs aside,
To mark the temperate tide
Purpled by shadows of the Muscadine.

Reclining there at languid length I sank,
One idle hand outstretched beyond the bank,
With careless grasp
The sumptuous globes of these rare grapes to clasp.
Ah! how the ripened wild fruit of the South
Melted upon my mouth!
Its magic juices through each captured vein
Rose to the yielding brain,
Till, like the hero of an old romance,
Caught by the fays, my spirit lapsed away,
Lost to the sights and sounds of mortal day.

Lost to all earthly sights and sounds was I,
But blithesomely,
As stirred by some new being's wondrous dawn,
I heard about me, swift though gently drawn,
The footsteps of light creatures on the grass.
Mine eyelids seemed to open, and I saw,
With joyance checked by awe,
A multitudinous company
Of such strange forms and faces, quaint, or bright
With true Elysian light,
As once in fairy fantasies of eld

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High-hearted poets through the wilds beheld
Of shadowy dales and lone sea beaches pass,
At spring-tide morn or holy hush of night.

Then to an airy measure,
Low as the sea winds when the night at noon
Clasps the frail beauty of an April moon,
Through woven paces at soft-circling leisure,
They glided with elusive grace adown
The forest coverts—all live woodland things,
Black-eyed or brown.
Firm-footed or up-poised on changeful wings,
Glinting about them 'mid the indolent motion
Of billowy verdures rippling slow
As the long, languid underflow
Of some star-tranced, voluptuous Southern ocean.

The circle widened, and as flower-wrought bands,
Stretched by incautious hands,
Break in the midst with noiseless wrench asunder.
So brake the dancers now to form in line
Down the deep glade—above the shifting lights,
Through massive tree-boles, on majestic heights;
The blossoming turf thereunder,
Whence, fair and fine,
Twinkling like stars that hasten to be drawn
Close to the breast of dawn,
Shone, with their blue veins pulsing fleet,
Innumerable feet,
White as the splendors of the milky way,
Yet rosy warm as opening tropic day,
With lithe, free limbs of curvature divine,
And dazzling bosoms of unveilèd glow,
Save where the long, ethereal tresses stray
Across their unimaginable snow.

One after one,
By sun-rays kissed or fugitive shades o'errun,
All vision-like they passed me. First there came
A Dryad coy, her sweet head bowed in shame,
And o'er her neck and half-averted face
The faintest delicate trace
Of the charmed life-blood pulsing softly pure.
Next, with bold footsteps, sure,
And proudly set, from her untrammelled hills,
Fair-haired, blue-eyed, upon her lofty head
A fragrant crown of leaves, purple and red,
Chanting a lay clear as the mountain rills,
A frank-faced Oread turned on me
Her cloudless glances, laughter-lit and free
As the large gestures and the liberal air
With which I viewed her fare
Down the lone valley land,—
Pausing betimes to wave her happy hand
As in farewell; but ere her presence died Wholly away,
Her voice of golden swell
Breathed also a farewell.
Farewell, farewell, the sylvan echoes sighed,
From rock-bound summit to rich blossoming bay—
Farewell, farewell!

Fauns, satyrs flitted past me—the whole race
Of woodland births uncouth—
Until I seemed, in sooth,
Far from the garish track

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Of these loud days to have wandered, joyful, back
Along the paths, beneath the crystal sky
Of long, long-perished Arcady.
But last of all, filling the haunted space
With odors of the flower-enamored tide,
Whose wavelets love through many a secret place
Of the deep dell and breezeless bosk to glide,
Stole by, lightsome and slim
As Dian's self in each swift, sinuous limb,
Her arms outstretched, as if in act to swim
The air, as erst the waters of her home,
A naiad, sparkling as the fleckless foam
Of the cool fountain-head whereby she dwells.

O'er her sloped shoulders and the pure pink bud
Of either virginal breast is richly rolled
(O rare, miraculous flood!)
The torrent of her freed locks' shimmering gold,
Through which the gleams of rainbow-colored shells,
And pearls of moon-like radiance flash and float
Round her immaculate throat.

Clothed in her beauty only wandered she,
'Mid the moist herbage to the streamlet's edge,
Where, girt by silvery rushes and brown sedge,
She faded slowly, slowly, as a star
Fades in the gloaming, on the bosom bowed
Of some half-luminous cloud,
Above the wan, waste waters of the sea.

Then, sense and spirit fading inward too,
I slept oblivious; through the dim, dumb hours,
Safely encouched on autumn leaves and flowers,
I slept as sleep the unperturbèd dead.
At length the wind of evening, keenly chill,
Swept round the darkening hill;
Then throbbed the rush of hurried wings o'erhead,
Blent with aerial murmurs of the pine,
Just whispering twilight. On my brow the dew
Dropped softly, and I woke to all the low,
Strange sounds of twilight woods that come and go
So fitfully; and o'er the sun's decline,
Through the green foliage flickering high,
Beheld, with dreamy eye,
Sweet Venus glittering in the stainless blue.
[OMITTED]
Thus the day closed whereon I drank the wine—
The liquid magic of the Muscadine.

IN A SPRING GARDEN.

When Heaven was stormy, Earth was cold,
And sunlight shunned the wold and wave,—
Thought burrowed in the churchyard mould,
And fed on dreams that haunt the grave:—

But now that Heaven is freed from strife,
And Earth's full heart with rapture swells,
Thought soars the realms of endless life
Above the shining asphodels!

What flower that drinks the south wind's breath,
What sparkling leaf, what Hebe-Morn,
But flouts the sullen graybeard, Death,
And laughs our Arctic doubts to scorn?

Pale scientist! scant of healthful blood,
Your ghostly tomes, one moment, close;
Pluck freshness with a spring-time bud,
Find wisdom in the opening rose:

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From toil which, blindly delving, gropes
When time but plays a juggler's part,
Ah go! and breathe the dew-lit hopes
That cluster round a violet's heart:

Mark the white lily whose sweet core
Hath many a wild-bee swarm enticed,
And draw therefrom a honeyed lore
Pure as the tender creed of Christ:

Yea! even the weed which upward holds
Its tiny ear, past bower and lawn,
A lovelier faith than yours enfolds,
Caught from the whispering lips of dawn!

IN DEGREE.

Thy life is full of motion, perfume, grace;
Mine, a low blossom in a shaded place,
Whereto the zephyrs whisper, only they,
Through the long lapses of the lonesome day.

Thy lordly genius blooms for all to see
On the clear heights of calm supremacy;
My humbler dower they only find who pass
With eyes that seek for violets mid the grass.

THE SKELETON WITNESS.

Rooted in soil dull as a dead man's eye,
Dank with decay, yon ghastly oak aspires,
As if in mockery, to the alien sky,
Frowning afar through clouded sunset fires.

No garb of summer greenery girds it now:
Stripped as some naked soul at Judgment-morn,
It rears its blasted arms, its sullen brow,
Defiant still, though wasted, scarred, forlorn!

Not all its ruin came through storm or time;
Ages ago, 'mid winter's dreariest blight,
It saw and strove to shroud an awful crime,
But slowly withered from that fateful night!

An evil charm its many-centuried rings
Robbed of their pith; no more with healthful start
Its lusty life-sap, nursed by countless springs,
Coursed through great veins, and warmed its giant heart.

Now all men shun the gaunt accursèd thing—
Only the raven with monotonous croak,
Tortures the silence, staining with black wing
The leprous whiteness of the rotting oak!

STORM-FRAGMENTS.

The storm had raved its furious soul away;
O'er its wild ruins Twilight, spectral, gray,

Stole like a nun, 'midst wounded men and slain,
Walking the bounds of some fierce battle-plain.

The ghost of thunder muttered faintly by;
While down the uttermost spaces of the sky,

Just where the sunset's glimmering verge grew pale,
The baffled winds outbreathed their dying wail!

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The sombre clouds that thronged a shadowy west
Writhed, as if tortured monsters of unrest,

Whose depths the keen sheet-lightnings rent apart,
To show what fiery torment throbbed at heart!

Where raged of late the war of elements dread,
Brooded a solemn silence overhead,

Through which, beyond the cloud-strewn, heavenly field,
The moon shone gory as a warrior's shield,

Dipped in the veins of many a vanquished foe;
Blood-red, I marked the wandering vapors flow

Vaguely about her, while her lurid light
Scared the vague vanguard of the shades of night;

Their banded hosts retreating, wild and dim,
In shattered cohorts o'er the horizon's rim:

Yet, the broad empire of those baleful beams
Heaved with strange shapes and hues of nightmare dreams!

Here, as from cloud-born Himalayas rolled,
I saw what seemed a cataract's rush of gold,

Hurled between shores of darkness, dense and dire,
Down to a seething mountain-lake of fire;

There, dismal catacombs, whose nether glooms
Yawned, to reveal their loathsome place of tombs:

Caverns of mystic depth, whence bubbling came
The blue-tinged horror of sulphureous flame;

Fragments of castles, with fresh blood besprent,
Gaunt, ruined tower, and blasted battlement—

On which, flame-clad, and tottering to their fall.
Dark eyes of frenzy flashed o'er cope and wall!

With awful ocean-spaces, limitless, grand.
Where spectral billows lashed a viewless land;

Their mountainous floods a frowning zenith kissed,
But glimpsed, at times, 'twixt folds of phantom-mist,

I viewed, as faintly touched by muffled stars,
The semblance of dead forms, on ship-wrecked spars

Whirled upward, and dead faces, a white spume
Smote to false life against that turbulent gloom,

Where mournful birds, on pinions gray or dun,
Circled, methought, o'er some half-perished sun,

Whose feeble lustre, faltering upward, flings
A sad-hued radiance round their pallid wings;

Yea! all fantastic shapes of terror, wrought
'Twixt errant fancy and dream-haunted thought,

Until I seemed with Dante's soul to fly,
Through new Infernos, shifted to—the sky!

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ABOVE THE STORM.

The winds of the winter have breathed their dirges
Far over the wood and the leaf-strown plain;
They have passed, forlorn, by the mountain verges
Down to the shores of the moaning main;
And the breast of the smitten sea divides,
Till the voice of winds and the voice of tides
Seem blent with the roar of the central surges,
Whose fruitless furrows are sown with rain.

The pines look down, and their branches shiver
On the misty slopes of the mountain wall,
And I hear the shout of a mountain river
Through the gloom of the ghostly gorges call;
While from drifting depths of the troubled sky
Outringeth the eagle's wild reply,
So shrill that the startled echoes quiver;
And the veil of the tempest is over all.

O groaning forest! O wind that rushes
Unfettered and fierce as a doom malign!
How the pulses leap, how the heart-tide flushes
The temples and brow like the flush of wine,
As I pause, as I hearken the vast commotion
Of the air, of the earth, of the wakened ocean;
And my soul goes forth with the storm that crushes,
With the battling foam and the blinding brine.

Yea, my soul is rent by a tempest stronger
Than ever was Nature's, with ruin rife,
And the flame of its lightnings can bide no longer,
Ensheathed at the core of a clouded life;
And its pent-up thunders, unloosed at last,
Keep time to the rhythmic rage of the blast,
For my spirit, half-maddened by Fates that wrong her,
Is shaken by passion, and hot with strife!

Ah, God! for the wings of the eagle above me,
With their steadfast vigor and royal might;
Ah, God! for an impulse like theirs to move me
In endless courses of upward flight;
The clouds may billow, the vapors heave,
But still his pinions the darkness cleave;
And proudly serene, in those realms above me
He is soaring from conquered height to height:

Till at length, his great, broad vans at even
And stately poise on the airy stream,
I mark, through the rifts of the turbid heaven
His form outflashed like a wingèd beam;
And I ask, “Shall my spirit soar like his?
Shall it ever soar in the peace and bliss
Of the shining heights and the glory given
To the will unvanquished, the faith supreme?”

UNDERGROUND—A FANTASY.

Majestic dreams of heavenly calms,
Bright visions of unfading palms,
Wherewith the brows of saints are crowned,—

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A while my soul resigns them all,
Content to rest death's dreamless thrall,
Safe underground!

Rest! rest! oblivious rest I crave,
Though narrowed to a pine-clad grave,
With sylvan shadows shimmering round;
The peace of Heaven, if fair and deep,
Scarce wooes me like Earth's ebon sleep,
Far underground.

By infinite weariness oppressed
Of soul and senses, blood and breast,
Where can such Gilead balm be found
As that which breathes from out the sod
Baptized by rain and dews of God,
Deep underground?

A century's space I yearn to be
Untroubled, slumbering tranquilly,
There, by the haunted woodlands bound;
What suns shall set, what planets rise
O'er pulseless brain and curtained eyes,
Dark underground!

A century's sleep might bring redress
To these dull wounds of weariness,
Till the soothed spirit, hale and sound,
Grow conscious of the sacred trust
Which holds immortal bloom in dust,
Safe underground.

Yea! conscious grow of rustling wings,
And keen, mysterious whisperings,
Blown flame-like o'er the burial-mound:
My soul would feel thy Orient kiss,
Angel of Palingenesis,
Thrilled underground!

THE DRYAD OF THE PINE.

Ah, forest sweetheart! over land and sea
I come once more, once more to stand by thee;
My sylvan darling! set 'twixt shade and sheen,
Soft as a maid, yet stately as a queen!

Thy loyal head, crowned by one lonely star,
Flickers thro' twilight, coldly fine, and far;
But thy earth-yearning branches bend to greet
The lowliest wood-grass tangled round my feet.

Leaning on thee, I feel the subtlest thrill
Stir thy dusk limbs, tho' all the heavens are still;
And 'neath thy rings of rugged fretwork, mark
What seems a heart-throb muffled in the dark!

Here lingering long, amid the shadowy gleams,
Faintly I catch (yet scarce as one that dreams)
Low words of alien music, softly sung,
And rhythmic sighs in some sweet unknown tongue.

And something rare, I cannot clasp or see,
Flits vaguely out from this mysterious tree—
A viewless glory, and ethereal grace,
Which make Elysian all the haunted place!

Ethereal! viewless! yet divinely drear!
Ah me! what strange enchantment hovers near.
What breaths of love the old, old dreams renew!
What kisses fall, like charmed Thessalian dew!

My Dryad-Love hath slipped the imprisoning bark,
Her heart on mine, unmuffled by the dark.

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WELCOME TO FROST.

O Spirit! at whose wafts of chilling breath
Autumn unbinds her zone, to rest in death;
Touched by whose blight the light of cordial days
Is lost in sombre browns and sullen grays;
Thou seemest of all sad things a mournful part:
Yet now we greet thee with exultant heart.
Now as a thief, at night-time bearing doom,
But a brave messenger of grace and bloom;
Thy flickering robe and footsteps soft we mark
Down the dim borders of the tremulous Dark;
And though before thee flowers and foliage wane,
Thou layest a magic hand on human pain.

Red Fever, soothed by thy cool finger-tips,
Ebbs from hot cheek and wildly-muttering lips;
Delirious dreams and frenzied fancies fade
Into fine landscapes of enchanted shade,
With low of kine and lapse of lyric rills
Through the cleft channel of Arcadian hills;
Till the worn patient feels his languid eyes
Flushed with what seems an earthly Paradise,
And life's old blissful tide, with lustier strain,
Revels in music through each ransomed vein.

Therefore, O monarch of all cold device,
Wrought in strange temples of Siberian ice!
Lord of fair realms and watery worlds grotesque!
Majestic afreet of weird Arabesque!
We hail thee sovereign in these fevered lands.
No more with alien hearts and folded hands,
But as an angel from the fadeless palms,
And the great River of God's central calms,
Whose silent charm must work benign release,
Whose touch is healing, and whose breath is—peace!

THE PINE'S MYSTERY.

I.

Listen! the sombre foliage of the Pine,
A swart Gitana of the woodland trees,
Is answering what we may but half divine,
To those soft whispers of the twilight breeze!

II.

Passion and mystery murmur through the leaves,
Passion and mystery, touched by deathless pain.
Whose monotone of long, low anguish grieves
For something lost that shall not live again!

TO A BEE.

Small epicurean, would to heaven that I
Could borrow your lithe body and swift wing
To speed, a lightning atom through the sky,
The blithest courier on the winds of spring!

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O blissful mite! native of light and air!
In eager zeal you haste your spoils to win;
From half-blown bud to flower all matron-fair,
Sucking the nectared sweetness shrined within!

The jonquil wooes you with her golden blush,
And blossoming quince (each flower a fairy Mars,
That tints its heaven of green with crimsoned flush),
While the pure “white-rod” blooms in silvery stars,

Open to yield their delicate richness up.
But most you love on vernal noons, to dart
'Mid jasmines bowers, and drain each petalled cup
With fervid lip and warm voluptuous heart.

There, safely couched, you hum a low refrain,
Of such supreme and rare contentment born,
Its happy monotone mocks our human pain,
And subtly stings us with unconscious scorn.

Thence, honey-freighted, you steal lazily out,
Pausing a moment on some leafy brink,
As if enmeshed by viewless webs of doubt
From what next fount of luscious life to drink—

A moment only. Soon your matchless flight
Cleaves the far blue; your elfin thunder booms
In elfin echoes from yon glimmering height,
To fall and die amid these ravished blooms.

Gone, like a vision! Yet, be sure that he
Hath only flown through lovelier flowers to stray,
Anacreon's soul, thus prisoned in a bee,
Still sips and sings the springtide hours away!

THE FIRST MOCKING-BIRD IN SPRING.

Winged poet of vernal ethers!
Ah! where hast thou lingered long?
I have missed thy passionate, skyward flights
And the trills of thy changeful song.
Hast thou been in the hearts of woodlands old,
Half dreaming, and, drowsed by the winter's cold,
Just crooning the ghost of thy springtide lay
To the listless shadows, benumbed and gray?
Or hast thou strayed by a tropic shore,
And lavished, O sylvan troubadour!
The boundless wealth of thy music free
On the dimpling waves of the Southland sea?
What matter? Thou comest with magic strain,
To the morning haunts of thy life again,
And thy melodies fall in a rhythmic rain.

The wren and the field-lark listen
To the gush from their laureate's throat;
And the blue-bird stops on the oak to catch
Each rounded and perfect note.
The sparrow, his pert head reared aloft,
Has ceased to chirp in the grassy croft,
And is bending the curves of his tiny ear
In the pose of a critic wise, to hear.
A blackbird, perched on a glistening gum,
Seems lost in a rapture, deep and dumb;
And as eagerly still in his trancèd hush,

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'Mid the copse beneath, is a clear-eyed thrush.
No longer the dove by the thorn-tree root
Moans sad and soft as a far-off flute.
All Nature is hearkening, charmed and mute.

We scarce can deem it a marvel,
For the songs our nightingale sings,
Throb warm and sweet with the rhythmic beat
Of the fervors of countless springs.
All beautiful measures of sky and earth
Out pour in a second and rarer birth
From that mellow throat. When the winds are whist,
And he follows his mate to their sunset tryst,
Where the wedded myrtles and jasmine twine,
Oh! the swell of his music is half divine!
And I vaguely wonder, O bird! can it be
That a human spirit hath part in thee?
Some Lesbian singer's, who died perchance
Too soon in the summer of Greek romance,
But the rich reserves of whose broken lay,
In some mystical, wild, undreamed-of way,
Find voice in thy bountiful strains today!

THE RED AND THE WHITE ROSE.

The Red Rose bowed one golden summer's night,
The Red Rose bent, low whispering to the White,

“Thou pallid shadow of a beauteous flower,
Unchanged from purpling dawn to sunset hour;

Whose calm, cold heart beneath all lights that beam,
Seems centred always in an Arctic dream;

Prim, puritanic, passionless, austere,
What would'st thou give my opulent life to share?

To every breeze—the daintiest breeze that blows,
Each petalled curve of mine more richly glows;—

And all the countless tints of heaven-born grace
But touch to make more bright my Hebe face!”

“Ah! well, fulfil thy fate!” the White Rose said;
“List to the wooing winds! uplift thy head

In sovereign pride through every radiant phase
Of star-illumined nights and cloudless days;

Let wingèd lovers thy warm leaves dispart,
To find voluptuous shelter next thy heart.

Fulfill thy fate, O Queen! but leave to me
My stainless calm and cloistral sanctity;

Those passionate airs that trembling round thee meet,
Sink in soft worship at my veilèd feet;

The reverent sun-rays shimmering gently down,
Weave o'er my brows a halo for a crown;

And while I muse in star, or moonshine faint,
The flowers seem murmuring, ‘Lo! our garden saint!’”

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The Red Rose heard, but ere she spoke, her mouth
Thralled by the light, quick kisses of the South,

Passed from arch wonder, blent with gay disdain,
Back to its dimpled mirthfulness again;

And she,—the garden's empress—proud yet fond,—
Of summer flowers, the matchless Rosamond,—

Looked at her pale-hued sister, dew-impearled,
As that fair marvel of the island world,

Might, in her ruddier nature's Tropic glow,
Have viewed a calm St. Agnes' brow of snow,

With some dim sense of mystic space between
The heaven-bound votaress and the earthly queen!

BEFORE THE MIRROR.

Where in her chamber by the Southern sea,
Her taper's light shone soft and silvery,
Fair as a planet mirrored in the main,
Fresh as a blossom bathed by April rain,
A maiden robed for restful sleep aright,
Stood in her musing sweetness, pure and white
As some shy spirit in a haunted place:
Her dew-bright eyes and faintly flushing face
Viewed in the glass their delicate beauty beam,
Strange as a shadowy “dream within a dream”
With fingers hovering like a white dove's wings,
'Mid little, tender sighs and murmurings
(Joy's scarce articulate speech), her eager hands
Loosed the light coif, the ringlet's golden bands,
Till, by their luminous loveliness embraced,
From lily-head to lithe and lissome waist,
Poured the free tresses like a cascade's fall.
Her image answered from the shimmering wall,
Answered and deepened, while the gracious charms
Of brow and cheek, bared breast and dimpling arms,
To innocent worship stirred her happy heart:
Her lips—twin rosebud petals blown apart—
Quivered, half breathless; then, subdued but warm,
Around her perfect face, her pliant form
A subtler air seemed gathering, touched with fire
By many a fervid thought and swift desire,
With dreams of love, that, bee-like, came and went,
To feed the honeyed core of life's content!
Closer toward her mirrored self she pressed,
With large child-eyes, and gently panting breast,
Bowed as a flower when May-time breezes pass,
And kissed her own dear Image in the glass!

TWO EPOCHS.

Lovers by a dim sea strand
Looking wave-ward, hand in hand;
Silent, trembling with the bliss
Of their first betrothal kiss:

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Lovers still, tho' wedded long!
(Time true love can never wrong!
Gazing—faithful hand in hand,
O'er a darker sea and strand:
Ah! one lover's face is wan
As a wave the moon shines on;
But those strange tides stretched afar
Know not sun, nor moon, nor star!

WIND FROM THE EAST.

The Spring, so fair in her young incompleteness.
Of late the very type of tender sweetness;
Now, through frail leaves and misty branches brown,
Looks forth, the dreary shadow of a frown
Chasing the frank smile from her innocent face;
What marvel this? for the East Wind's disgrace
Smites, like a buffet, April's tingling cheek,
Whence the swift, outraged blood doth ebb to seek
The affrighted heart!
The Earth, herself so gay,
Buoyant, and happy, at the dawn of day,
Thrills, shivering low with every flaw increased,
And fraught with salt-sea coldness from the East!

O masterful wind and cruel! at thy sweep,
From the bold hill-top to the valley-deep,
Surprise and fear through all the woodlands run,
Till the coy nestling-places of the sun
Are ruffled up, from shine to shade, as when
At the first note of storm the moorland hen
Ruffles her wings ere yet their warmth be spread
About each tremulous nestling's dusky head.

On the tall trees the foremost buds, half bare,
Stared, as wild-eyed, on the keen, rasping air;

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Then shook—but not with softly-palpitant thrills,
As when, o'erlooking the freed mountain-rills,
They felt their life by loving arms caressed—
Warm, viewless arms of zephyrs of the West—
But with the sense, the cold and shivery stress
Of utter and forlornest nakedness.
The twigs that bore them flattened upward, lost
To all but rigid consciousness of frost;
And their full-foliaged branches which so blindly
Bowed in meek homage when the winds were kindly
Strained upward, too, in stiff, rebellions fashion,
With throes of anguish and deep moans of passion,
Wrung from them by wild beatings of the gale!

Then many a tiny leaf, though waxing pale,
Cloud-shadowed; all unfrayed, yet quivering, shrunk
Behind the mosses of some giant trunk,
To wait till the shrewd tempest hurtling by
Left Spring once more empress of earth and sky—
While many a large leaf, almost riven apart,
Piped a sad dirge from out its fluted heart,
And knowing what sombre selvage must be seen—
Alas, too soon!—to film its glow of green,
Bewailed the hour whose treacherous brightness came
To warm its life-blood into genial flame
Only to send the blissful-flowing tide
Back through the baffled veins unsatisfied,
Its nascent joy nipped by the arctic breath
And merciless waftage of this Wind of Death!

This piece is (for the most party) a rhymed version of an exceedingly graphic description of the East wind, which occurs in Mr. Blackmore's admirable novel, “Cripps, the Carrier.” Mr. Blackmore is a poet, although he writes in prose.

PEACH BLOOMS.

O! tenderly beautiful, beyond compare,
Flushed from pale pink to deepest rosebud hue—
Nurslings of tranquil sunshine and mild air.
Of shadowless dawn, and silvery twilight dew—
Ye blush and burn, as if your flickering grace
Were love's own tint on Spring's enamored face!

And day by day—yea, golden hour by hour
Your subtle fragrance and rich beauty tell
(Each fairy blossom rounded into flower),
How matchless once that lost Arcadian spell,
Which dwelt in leafy bowers and vernal dyes
Whence coyly peeped the Dryad's fawn-like eyes!

And yet, while all so fair and bounteous seems,
While the birds carol—each his daintiest part,
Veiled in soft brightness, and like musical dreams
In some blithe soul—the bee-swarms haunt your heart.
Lo! severed slowly from yon roseate crown,
A scarlet snowdrift, silent, falters down.

The reign of these rich blooms is almost done;
Soon to the languid Zephyr's feeblest breath,
Their loosened petals, yielding one by one,

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Must find the Lethe of unwakening death.
Ah me! of all the bourgeoned buds that shoot
Even to full flower, how few shall bear us fruit!

Their little day is closing fast in gloom;
Nor will they reck—poor wilted waifs, and blind!
What germs of richness wax from faded bloom,
To charm the pampered taste of human kind;
Forever dropped from off their parent stem,
What have man's thoughts or tastes to do with them?

So let them rest, I pray you, let them rest,
Small, perishing sweethearts of the sun and rain:
O! mother-earth, thou hast a ruthful breast,
Which yearns to fold thy humblest child from pain.
Men fall like flowers; both claim the self-same balm,
The equal peace of thy majestic calm!

THE AWAKENING.

From day to day the dreary heaven
Out poured its hopeless heart in rain;
The conscious pines, half shuddering, heard
The secret of the East wind's pain.

Mist veiled the sun—the sombre land,
In floating cloud-wracks densely furled,
Seemed shut forever from the bloom
And gladness of the living world.

From week to week the changeless heaven
Wept on—and still its secret pain
To the bent pine-trees sobbed the wind,
In hollow truces of the rain.

Till in a sunset hour, whose light
Pale hints of radiance pulsed o'erhead,
Afar the moaning East wind died,
And the mild West wind breathed instead.

Then the clouds broke, and ceased the rain;
The sunset many a kindling shaft
Shot to the wood's heart; nature rose,
And through her soft-lipped verdures laughed.

Low to the breeze; as some fair maid,
Love wakes from troublous dreams, might rise,
Half dazed, yet happy—mists of sleep
Still hovering in her haunted eyes.

LOVE'S AUTUMN.

[To My Wife.]

I would not lose a single silvery ray
Of those white locks which like a milky way
Streak the dusk midnight of thy raven hair;

I would not lose, O sweet! the misty shine
Of those half-saddened, thoughtful eyes of thine,
Whence Love looks forth, touched by the shadow of care;

I would not miss the droop of thy dear mouth,
The lips less dewy-red than when the South,—
The young South wind of passion sighed o'er them;

I would not miss each delicate flower that blows
On thy wan cheeks, soft as September's rose
Blushing but faintly on its faltering stem;

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I would not miss the air of chastened grace
Which breathed divinely from thy patient face,
Tells of love's watchful anguish, merged in rest;

Naught would I miss of all thou hast, or art,
O! friend supreme, whose constant, stainless heart,
Doth house unknowing, many an angel guest;

Their presence keeps thy spiritual chambers pure;
While the flesh fails, strong love grows more and more
Divinely beautiful with perished years;

Thus, at each slow, but surely deepening sign
Of life's decay, we will not, Sweet! repine,
Nor greet its mellowing close with thankless tears;

Love's spring was fair, love's summer brave and bland,
But through love's autumn mist I view the land,
The land of deathless summers yet to be;

There, I behold thee, young again and bright,
In a great flood of rare transfiguring light,
But there as here, thou smilest, Love! on me!

THE SPIREA.

[_]

[This exquisite plant blooms in the Southern States as early as the middle of February.]

Of all the subtle fires of earth
Which rise in form of spring-time flowers,
Oh, say if aught of purer birth
Is nursed by suns and showers

Than this fair plant, whose stems are bowed
In such lithe curves of maiden grace,
Veiled in white blossoms like a cloud
Of daintiest bridal lace?

So rare, so soft, its blossoms seem
Half woven of moonshine's misty bars,
And tremulous as the tender gleam
Of the far Southland stars.

Perchance—who knows?—some virgin bright,
Some loveliest of the Dryad race,
Pours through these flowers the kindling light
Of her Arcadian face.

Nor would I marvel overmuch
If from yon pines a wool-god came.
And with a bridegroom's lips should touch
Her conscious heart to flame;

While she, revealed at that strange tryst,
In all her mystic beauty glows.
Lifting the cheek her Love had kissed,
Paled like a bridal rose.

COQUETTE.

[Among the family portraits.]

I.

Yes! there from out the gallery gloom,
Retaining still a flush of bloom,
I mark our bright ancestress glow—
The maiden Rose of long ago.
She lived in times of sumptuous dress,
And rich colonial stateliness;
But through the strong restraints of art
I seem to view her heaving heart,
As if a protest warm it made
'Gainst that stiff bodice of brocade,
While in her fair cheeks' deepening dyes,
Her lifted brows and roguish eyes,
Her swan-like neck and dimpled chin—
Cleft for small Loves to ambush in—

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I can not fail (who could?) to see
All potent charms of coquetry—
The wiles whose glamour, swift and sure,
Smote hapless victims by the score;
And even now (although they be
Discerned in pictured phantasy)
Not all innocuous, but possessed
Of power to pierce the manly breast,
If frosted to its shivering core
By forty arctic years or more.

II.

Ah! many a gallant loved her well
In those old days! Her features tell
The world-wide story o'er again,
Of others' passion, her disdain;
Of hearts that spent their best to make
Her own more tender for love's sake,
Only in time to find, perchance,
Dull ending to a life's romance,
Since trivial natures are not stirred
Save by the lightly trivial word;
And much I fear, despite the fine
Rare beauty of each faultless line—
Her face, of gay insouciance, shows
No golden gulfs of pure repose
Deep in her inmost being shrined—
But shallow thoughts and purpose blind.
And yet who knows? My erring sight
May not have read its meanings right,
And something of ethereal grace
May lurk beneath that careless face,
Which masks with inconsiderate mirth
A soul not wholly wed to earth!

III.

Therefore, sweet flesh and blood, I trust
That, ere ye passed to senseless dust,
Your beauty played a worthier part—
The love-rôle of the loyal heart.
[OMITTED]
No answer comes; for time doth mar
Our records. Only, like a star
Scarce touched by vapors vague and chill,
Your gracious image haunts us still.
But none, alas! may truly guess
What fate befell your loveliness.

SKATING.

I chased the maid with rapid feet,
Where ice and sunbeam quiver;
But still beyond me, shyly fleet,
She flashed far down the river.

Sometimes, blown backward in the chase,
With balmy, soft caresses,
I felt across my glowing face
The waft of perfumed tresses.

Sometimes a glance she shot behind,
O'er graceful shoulders turning
A cheek whose tints the eager wind
Had set like sunrise burning.

Then, in a sudden onward glide,
She rushed with even motion,
As a long wave the restless tide
Drives shoreward fast from ocean;

And swift as some winged creature sped
Far down the crystal river,
Until the shining form that fled
I dreamed might fly forever.

THE WORLD WITHIN US.

A FANTASY.

Perchance our inward world may partly be
But outward Nature's fine epitome;

Now, o'er it floats some cloud of tender pain
Too frail to hold the sad reserves of rain;

And now behold some breezy impulse run
O'er Thought's bright surface, glittering in the sun;

Whereon, like birds, the flocks of fancy throng,
And all is peace and sweetness, light and song:

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Anon, dim moods like shadowy woodlands rise
As 'twere between the spirit's earth and skies:

All fair suggestions, hints of twilight grace,
Safe harborage seek within the spellbound space;

Music is there, low laughter, and the sound
Of fairy voices, echoing gently round

The cool recesses of the veilèd mind:
While on the surge of memory's phantom wind,

Ghosts of dead loves, swathed in a silvery mist
Pass by us; and the lips our lips had kissed,

In youth's glad prime, unutterable things
Whisper, through wafts of visionary wings.

Ah, yes! our inward world but mirrors true,
This outward world of sense;—it hath its dew,

Its sunshine, and fresh roses, white and red:
It holds a tender moonlight over head;

The dews of yearning, mild, or fiery-bright,
The flowers of peace, or passion; the calm light

Of reasoning thought, and retrospection fine.
All merged in subtlest beauty—half divine!

It hath its mounts of vision, and its vales
Of contemplation, where fond nightingales,

Born of the brain, and 'gainst some thorns of woe,
Setting their breasts—but sing more sweetly so:

Fountains it owns of shyest fantasie;
Glad streams of inspiration, swift and free,

Rolling toward Thought's central ocean vast
Wherein all lesser forms of thought, at last

Sink, as the rivulets perish in a sea;—
Thus, rounded, whole, our spirit-landscapes be,

Our spirit-world thus perfect; over all,
No clouds of doubt hang, stifling as a pall;

But if the soul be healthful, noble, high,
God's promise lights it, like a sleepless eye!

FOREST QUIET.

[In the South.]

So deep this sylvan silence, strange and sweet,
Its dryad-guardian, virginal Peace, can hear
The pulses of her own pure bosom beat;

And her low voice echoed by elfin rills.
And far-off forest fountains, sparkling clear
'Mid haunted hollows of the hoary hills;

No breeze, nor wraith of any breeze that blows,
Stirs the charmed calm; not even yon gossamer-chain,
Dew-born, and swung 'twixt violet and wild rose,

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Thrills to the airy elements' subtlest breath;
Such marvellous stillness almost broods like pain
O'er the hushed sense, holding dim hints of death!

What shadows of sound survive, the waves' far sigh,
Drowsed cricket's chirp, or mock-bird's croon in sleep,
But touch this sacred, soft tranquillity

To yet diviner quiet: the fair land
Breathes like an infant lulled from deep to deep
Of dreamless rest, on some wave-whispering strand!

THE MOCKING-BIRD.

[At night.]

A golden pallor of voluptuous light
Filled the warm southern night:
The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene
Moved like a stately queen,
So rife with conscious beauty all the while,
What could she do but smile
At her own perfect loveliness below,
Glassed in the tranquil flow
Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams?
Half lost in waking dreams,
As down the loneliest forest dell I strayed,
Lo! from a neighboring glade,
Flashed through the drifts of moonshine, swiftly came
A fairy shape of flame.
It rose in dazzling spirals overhead,
Whence to wild sweetness wed,
Poured marvellous melodies, silvery trill on trill;
The very leaves grew still
On the charmed trees to hearken; while for me,
Heart-trilled to ecstasy,
I followed—followed the bright shape that flew,
Still circling up the blue,
Till as a fountain that has reached its height,
Falls back in sprays of light
Slowly dissolved, so that enrapturing lay,
Divinely melts away
Through tremulous spaces to a music-mist,
Soon by the fitful breeze
How gently kissed
Into remote and tender silences.

A STORM IN THE DISTANCE.

[Among the Georgian Hills.]

I see the cloud-born squadrons of the gale,
Their lines of rain like glittering spears deprest
(While all the affrighted land grows darkly pale),
In flashing charge on earth's half-shielded breast;

Sounds like the rush of trampling columns float
From that fierce conflict; volleyed thunders peal,
Blent with the maddened wind's wild bugle-note;
The lightnings flash, the solid woodlands reel!

Ha! many a foliaged guardian of the height,
Majestic pine or chestnut, riven and bare,
Falls in the rage of that aerial fight,
Led by the Prince of all the powers of air!

Vast boughs, like shattered banners hurtling fly
Down the thick tumult: while, like emerald snow,

240

Millions of orphaned leaves make wild the sky,
Or drift in shuddering helplessness below.

Still, still, the levelled lances of the rain
At earth's half-shielded breast take glittering aim;
All space is rife with fury, racked with pain,
Earth bathed in vapor, and heaven rent by flame!

At last the cloud-battalions through long rifts
Of luminous mists retire; ... the strife is done;
And earth once more her wounded beauty lifts,
To meet the healing kisses of the sun.

THE VISION BY THE SEA.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

I.

A haunting face! with strange, ethereal eyes,
Deep as unfathomed gulfs of tranquil skies
When o'er their brightness a vague mist is drawn,
Breathed from the half-veiled lips of melting dawn;
A mouth whose passionate love and sweetness seem
But just released from kisses in a dream;
A brow like Psyche's, pensive, broad, and low
And white as winter's whitest wreath of snow;
While round that gracious forehead, calmly fair,
Ripples an April rain of golden hair.

II.

For some rapt moments, on the ocean strand,
Unconscious, beautiful, I saw her stand,
As tremulous wave on wave, with freightage sweet
Of murmured music, fawned about her feet,
Then died in one divine, harmonious sigh;
The breeze bewitched, could only falter nigh,
And in shy delicate wafts of homage play
With her rare tresses; like inearnate May,
She seemed the earth, the tides, the heaven, to bless:
For once I gazed on Beauty's perfectness.

III.

I gazed for some rapt moments, but no more;
Then lowered mine eyes and slowly left the shore
Made marvellous by that vision of delight;
Yet evermore its beauty, day and night,
Standing between the blue sky and the sea,
Shines like a star of immortality
Through all my being; it becomes a part
Of the deep life that quickens soul and heart
To sense of things ideal and supreme—
A palpable bliss, yet wedded to a dream.

THE VISIONARY FACE.

I am happy with her I love,
In a circle of charmed repose;
My soul leaps up to follow her feet
Wherever my darling goes;
Whether to roam through the garden walks,
Or pace the sands by the sea;—
There's never a shadow of doubt or fear
Brooding 'twixt her and me:—
But through memory's twilight mists,
Sometimes, I own, in sooth,
Falters the face of one I loved
In the fervent years of youth;—

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The soft pathetic brow is there,
With its glimmer and glance of golden hair,
And scarcely shadowed by death's eclipse
The delicate curve of the faultless lips,
The tremulous, tender lips I kissed,
So coyly raised at the sunset tryst,
As we stood from the restless world apart,
'Mid the whispering foliage, heart to heart,
In the fair, far years of youth.
Yet, the vision is pure as heaven,
Untouched by a hint of strife
From the passion that moved itself to sleep,
On the morning strand of life;
And I know that my living Love would feel
The tremor of ruthful tears,
If I told of the sweetness and hope that drooped,
So soon in the vanished years:
She would not banish the phantom sad
Of a beauty discrowned and low;—
Can jealousy rest in the rose's breast
Of a lily under the snow?
Can the passion so warm and strong to-day
Envy a ghost from the cypress shades
For an hour astray?
Or, the love that wanted like a blighted May,
In the dead days, long ago,
Ah! long, how long ago!

THE ROSE AND THORN.

She's loveliest of the festal throng
In delicate form and Grecian face;
A beautiful, incarnate song:
A marvel of harmonious grace;
And yet I know the truth I speak:
From those gay groups she stands apart,
A rose upon her tender cheek,
A thorn within her heart.

Though bright her eyes' bewildering gleams,
Fair tremulous lips and shining hair,
A something born of mournful dreams,
Breathes round her sad enchanted air;
No blithesome thoughts at hide and seek
From out her dimples smiling start;
If still the rose be on her cheek,
A thorn is in her heart.

Young lover, tossed 'twixt hope and fear,
Your whispered vow and yearning eyes
Yon marble Clytie pillared near
Could move as soon to soft replies;
Or, if she thrill at words you speak,
Love's memory prompts the sudden start;
The rose has paled upon her cheek,
The thorn has pierced her heart.

THE RED LILY.

I call her the Red Lily, Lo! she stands
From all her milder sister flowers apart;
A conscious grace in those fair-folded hands,
Pressed on the guileful throbbings of her heart!

I call her the Red Lily. As all airs
Of North or South, the Lily's leaves that stir,
Seem lost in languorous sweetness that despairs
Of blissful life or hope, except through her;

So this Red Lily of maids, this human flower,
Yielding no love, all sweets of love doth take,
Twining such spells of passion's secret power
As, woven once, what lordliest will can break?

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LAKE WINNIPISEOGEE.

One day the River of Life flowed o'er
The verge of heaven's enchanted shore,
And falling without lapse or break.
Its waters formed this wondrous lake.

Hence the far sheen of Eden palms
Is mirrored in its silvery calms,
And all its rich cerulean dyes
Are deep as Raphael's splendid eyes.

And hence the unimagined grace
Which sanctifies this lonely place,—
A subtle, soft, ethereal spell
Of light and sound ineffable.

Surely such tempered glory paints
The mystic City of the Saints;
Such music breathes its dying falls
Above the heavenly palace walls.

O lake of peace! whose still expanse
Gleams through a golden-misted trance,
Earth holds thee sacred and apart,
The cloistered darling of her heart.

LAKE MISTS.

[Composed near Lake Winnipiseogee.]

As I gazed on the prospect enchanted,
On waves the sun-glory had kissed,
There slowly swept down from the distance,
The phantom-like bands of the mist.

On their feet that were spectrally soundless,
They glided fantastic and chill,
While a prescient pallor crept over
The beauty of lake-side and hill!

All nature grew cold at their advent!
Like Thugs of the air, demon-born,
With their coils of blue vapor they strangled
The virgin effulgence of morn.

By that ambush of darkness was girdled
Each bright beam in dreary embrace,
Till the fairest young dawn of September
Lay wan on her death-shadowed face.

When wildly and weirdly from sea-ward,
A low wind how mournfully stole!
Like an anthem outbreathed for the morning,
Thus sternly divorced from her soul!

THE INEVITABLE CALM.

The sombre wings of the tempest,
In fetterless force unfurled,
Buffet the face of beauty,
And scar the grace of the world;

But they fade at length with the darkness,
And softly from sky to sod
Peace falls like the dew of Eden,
From the opened palm of God!

Earthquake, the angered Titan,
A continent cleaves apart;
Yet soon the glamour of quiet heals
Earth's smitten and tortured heart.

And soon o'er the ruin of cities
The sun-bright virginal grass
Courtesies and curves into dimples,
At the kiss of the winds that pass.

One lesson all nature teaches,
As balm to the troubled breast,
That after the turmoil of passion
There cometh a time of rest.

For the anguish of life wanes downward
Like fire unfanned by a breath;
And deep is the ashen stillness
On the hearthstone cold of death!

THE DEAD LOOK.

Lo! in its still, soft-shrouded place,
The pathos of a death-pale face!

I view the marks of mortal care
Time's hopeless sorrows branded there.

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Waning beneath the noiseless glide
Of Lethe's dim, ethereal tide,

As furrows on some twilight lea
Fade in calm wave-sweeps of the sea!

Across that bare, unbended brow
The chrism of peace has fallen now,

And, lightening life's austere eclipse,
A star-soft smile hath touched the lips:

Though his sealed sight the death-mists mar,
He hath a strange look, fixed afar:—

As if wan folds of curtained eyes
Trembled almost in act to rise,

And show where each cold-lidded sheath
Now veils the wide, weird orbs beneath,

The mirrored glow, the blest surprise
Of some first glimpse of Paradise!

JETSAM.

Beside the coast for many a rood
Were fragments of a shipwreck strewn;
And there in sad and sombre mood
I walked the sands alone.

Torn bales and broken boxes lay,
Heaped high 'mid shattered sails and spar,
While grimly down the moonlit bay
The wrecked hull gleamed from far.

Well had the storm its mission wrought,
With thunder crash and billowy roar;
For not one precious waif was brought
Safe to the rugged shore.

Yet stay! what tiny sparkling thing
Shines faintly in the moonbeams cold?
I stooped, and wondering, grasped a ring,
A fairy ring of gold.

Of great and small, of rich and rare,
Of all yon stranded vessel bore,
Only this gem the waves would spare
To cast unharmed ashore.

With what a deep and tender thrill
I put the modest gem away,
And while the silvery vapors chill
Crept ghost-like up the bay,

244

I dreamed of shivering human lives
Wrecked on Fate's cold and cruel lee,
Trusting that some small hope survives,
Spared to them from the sea!

FAMELESS GRAVES.

I walked the ancient graveyard's ample round.
Yet found therein not one illustrious name
Wedded by Death to Fame.

The sea-winds moaned by each deserted mound,
Where mouldering marbles shed their pungent must
O'er that worn human dust.

Thin cloudlets passed, with purpled skirts of rain
Grazing the sentinel pine-trees, gaunt and tall;
Some trembling to their fall.

From out the misty marsh-lands next the main,
Long lines of curlews in the sunset flame,
With dissonant noises came;

O'erswept the tombs in slow, high-wheeling flight,
And while the sunset verged on evening's gray,
Faded, ghostlike, away.

Yet down the dusky, shimmering, weird twilight
(Though lost their forms beyond the outmost hill),
Their strange cries sounded still;—

Prolonged by elfin echoes, 'mid the rocks,
Or lapsing in sad, plaintive wails to die
'Twixt darkling wave and sky.

The garrulous sparrows, in home-wending flocks,
Sought their rude nests among those shattered tombs,
Veiled now in vesper glooms;

Till o'er the scene a mystic influence stole;
The wave-enamored winds their pinions furled;
Pale Silence clasped the world.

Beside a grave, the lowliest of the whole
Obscure republic of the fameless dead,
Pausing, I mused, and said:—

All graves are equal! His, the laurelled, great,
Miraculous Shakspeare's, some far day shall rest
As level on Earth's breast,—

And all unknown—through stern behests of Fate—
As this, round which the rustling dock-leaves meet
Here, tangled at my feet.

All graves are equal to all-conquering Time;
Scornful, he laughs at monumental stones,—
Wasting a great man's bones,

A great man's sepulchre, though reared sublime
Toward heaven, until both stone and record pass,
Mocked by the flippant grass;

The feeblest weeds in Nature flaunting high
Above a Shakespeare's or a Dante's dust:—
Just then a gentle gust

Breathed from beyond the gloaming: Night's first sigh
Of conscious life touched the awakened trees,
And blended with the sea's

245

Monotonous murmur, seemed to whisper low:
“I rise, and sink, am born, and lose my breath,
Yet am not held by Death.

“For since the world began—when sunset's glow
Melts in the western tides—my air of balm
Rises, if earth be calm.

“My spell is sacred, wheresoe'er it falls;
The dreariest graves grow brighter at my voice,
And human hearts rejoice,

“Because that I, winged from these twilight halls,
In this, my life renewed, would subtly seem
A sweet, half-uttered dream

“Of immortality, made bright by love:
That love which binds the humblest human clod
Fast to the throne of God.”

I left the graves; but now my gaze above
Ranged through the heavenly spaces, clear and far;
I marked the vesper star

Silver the edges of the wavering mist,
And centred in an air-wrought, luminous isle
Of lambent glory, smile;—

Smile like an angel whom the Lord hath kissed,
And fred from arms divine, in soft release,
To bless our earth with peace.

What dweller by the ocean can have failed to remark the almost invariable rising, just after sunset on quiet evenings, of this gentle air, a very sigh of tranquillity, a breath, as it were, from God?

WINTER ROSE.

God's benison upon each happy day
Dead now and gone!—its gentle ghost our feet
Doth follow, singing faintly; and how sweet—
Tenderly sweet, as through a luminous mist—
Its shadowy lips draw near us, to be kissed!
And though they melt upon the yearning mouth
Like fairy balm from some phantasmal south,
Their touch is magic; and we feel the start
As of an unsealed fountain, close at heart—
Till, warmed, restored, breathing a fine repose,
Our innermost nature, wakening, glows anew;
While, gemmed by sunset memory's radiant dew,
Lo! the heart blossoms, like a Winter Rose!

TRISTRAM OF THE WOOD.

Once, when the autumn fields were dim and wet,
The trumpets rang; the tide of battle set
Toward gray Broceliande, by the western sea.

In the fore-front of conflict grimly stood,
Clothed in dark armor, Tristram of the Wood,
And round him ranged his knights of Brittany.

Of lordlier frame than even the lordliest there,
Firm as a tower, upon his vast destrere,
He looked as one whose soul was steeped in trance.

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Ne'er spake nor stirred he, though the trumpet's sound
Echoed abroad, and all the glittering ground
Shook to the steel-clad warriors' swift advance;

Ne'er spake nor stirred he, for the mystic hour
Closed o'er him then; the glamour of its power
Dream-wrought, and sadly beautiful with love—

Love of the lost Iseult. In marvellous stead
Of thronging faces, with looks stern and dread,
Through the dense dust, the hostile plumes above,

He saw his fair, lost Iseult's passionate eyes,
And o'er the crash of lances heard her cries,
Shrill with despair, when last they twain did part.

While others thrilled to strife, he, thrilled with woe,
Felt his life-currents shuddering cold and low
Round the worn bastions of his broken heart.

Then rolled his way the battle's furious flood;
Squadrons charged on him blindly; blows and blood
Showered down like hall and water; vainly drew

The whole war round him; still his broadsword's gleam
Flashed in death's front, and still, as wrapped in dream,
He fought and slew, witting not whom he slew,

Nor knew whose arm had smitten him deep and sore—
So deep that Tristram never, never more
Shone in the van of conflict; but the smart

Of his fierce wound tortured him night and day,
Till, through God's grace, his life-blood ebbed away,
And death's sweet quiet healed his broken heart.

HINTS OF SPRING.

[COMPOSED IN SICKNESS.]

“When the hill-side breaks into green, every hollow of blue shade, every curve of tuft, and plume and tendril, every broken sunbeam on spray of young leaves is new! No spring is a representation of any former spring!—

Goethe.

A softening of the misty heaven,
A subtle murmur in the air;
The electric flash through coverts old
Of many a shy wing, touched with gold;
The stream's unmuffled voice, that calls,
Now shrill and clear, now silvery low,
As if a fairy flute did blow
Above the sylvan waterfalls;
Each mellowed sound, each quivering wing
Heralds the happy-hearted Spring:
Earth's best beloved is drawing near.

Amid the deepest woodland dells,
So late forlornly cold and drear,
Wafts of mild fervor, procreant breaths
Of gentle heat, unclose the sheaths
Of fresh-formed buds on bower and tree;
A spirit of soft revival looks
Coyly from out the young-leaved nooks,
Just dimpling into greenery;
Through flashes of faint primrose bloom,
Through delicate gleam and golden gloom,
The wonder of the world draws near.

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On some dew-sprinkled, cloudless morn,
She, in her full-blown joyance rare,
Will pass beyond her Orient gate,
Smiling, serene, calmly elate,
All garmented in light and grace:
Her footsteps on the hills shall shine
In beauty, and her matchless face
Make the fair vales of earth divine.
O goddess of the azure eyes,
The deep, deep charm that never dies,
Delay not long, delay not long!
Come clad in perfume, glad with song,
Breathe on me from thy perfect lips,
Lest mine be closed, and death's eclipse
Rise dark between
Me and thine advent, tender queen,
Albeit thou art so near, so near!

THE HAWK.

Ambushed in yonder cloud of white,
Far-glittering from its azure height,
He shrouds his swiftness and his might!

But oft across the echoing sky,
Long-drawn, though uttered suddenly,
We hear his strange, shrill, bodeful cry.

Winged robber! in his vaporous tower
Secure in craft, as strong in power,
Coolly he bides the fated hour,

When thro' cloud-rifts of shadowy rise,
Earthward are bent his ruthless eyes,
Where, blind to doom, the quarry lies!

And from dense cloud to noontide glow,
(His fiery gaze still fixed below),
He sails on pinions proud and slow!

Till, like a fierce, embodied ray,
He hurtles down the dazzling day,—
A death-flash on his startled prey;

And where but now a nest was found,
Voiceful, beside its grassy mound,
A few brown feathers strew the ground!

OVER THE WATERS.

I.

Over the crystal waters
She leans in careless grace,
Smiling to view within them
Her own fair happy face.

II.

The waves that glass her beauty
No tiniest ripple stirs:
What human heart thus coldly
Could mirror grace like hers?

THE TRUE HEAVEN.

The bliss for which our spirits pine,
That bliss we feel shall yet be given,
Somehow, in some far realm divine,
Some marvellous state we call a heaven.

Is not the bliss of languorous hours
A glory of calm, measured range,
But life which feeds our noblest powers
On wonders of eternal change?

A heaven of action, freed from strife,
With ampler ether for the scope
Of an immeasurable life
And an unbaffled, boundless hope.

A heaven wherein all discords cease,
Self-torment, doubt, distress, turmoil,
The core of whose majestic peace
Is godlike power of tireless toil.

Toil, without tumult, strain or jar,
With grandest reach of range endued,
Unchecked by even the farthest star
That trembles thro' infinitude;

In which to soar to higher heights
Through widening ethers stretched abroad,
Till in our onward, upward flights
We touch at last the feet of God.

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Time swallowed in eternity!
No future evermore; no past,
But one unending NOW, to be
A boundless circle round us cast!

THE BREEZES OF JUNE.

Oh! sweet and soft,
Returning oft,
As oft they pass benignly,
The warm June breezes come and go,
Through golden rounds of murmurous flow,
At length to sigh,
Wax faint and die,
Far down the panting primrose sky,
Divinely!

Though soft and low
These breezes blow,
Their voice is passion's wholly;
And ah! our hearts go forth to meet
The burden of their music sweet,
Ere yet it sighs,
Faints, falters, dies,
Down the rich path of sunset skies—
Half glad, half melancholy!

Bend, bend thine ear!
Oh! hark and hear
What vows each blithe new-comer,
Each warm June breeze that comes and goes,
Is whispering to the royal rose,
And star-pale lily, trembling nigh,
Ere yet in subtlest harmony
Its murmurs die,
Wax faint and die,
On thy flushed bosom, passionate sky,
Of youthful summer!

A MOUNTAIN FANCY.

[Respectfully inscribed to Mrs. R. S. Storrs.]

Close to each mountain's towering peak
A white cloud leans its tearful cheek,
Till all its soul of mystic pain
Dissolves in slow, soft, vaporous rain.

Thus, when our heart-griefs seek aright
Some heavenly Thought's majestic height,
Their passion, touched by loftier air,
Dissolves in tender mists of prayer!

Jefferson Hill House, White Mountains, N. H., September, 1879.

ABSENCE AND LOVE.

We need the clasp of hand in hand,
The light flashed warm from neighboring eyes:
Or else as weary seasons pass—
Alas! alas!
Our tenderest love grows wan and dies.

The fatal years like seas expand
'Twixt souls that long have dwelt apart,
Till, broadening o'er our being's verge,
The ruthless surge
Love's memory sweeps from out the heart.

O Absence! thou unreverenced Death!
Thy dense, unconsecrated clay
Inurns affection past regret;
No hint is set
Thereon of Resurrection Day.

THE FALLEN PINE-CONE.

I lift thee, thus, thou brown and rugged cone,
Well poised and high,
Between the flowering grasses and the sky;
And, as sea-voices dwell
In the fine chambers of the ocean-shell,
So fancy's ear
Within thy numberless, dim complexities
Hath seemed ofttimes to hear
The imprisoned spirits of all winds that blow;
Winds of late autumn that lamenting moan

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Across the wild sea-surges' ebb and flow;
Storm-winds of winter mellowed to a sigh,
Long-drawn and plaintive; or—how lingeringly!—
Soft echoes of the spring-tide's jocund breeze,
Blent with the summer south wind, murmuring low!

What wonder, fairy cone, that thou should'st hold
The semblance of these voices? day and night,
Proudly enthroned upon the wavering height
Of yon monarchal pine, thou did'st absorb
The elemental virtues of all airs,
Timid or bold.
Measures of gentle joys and wild despairs,
Breathed from all quarters of our changeful orb;
Whether with mildness freighted or with might,
Into thy form they entered, to remain
Each the strange phantom of a perished tone,
An eerie, marvellous strain
Pent in this tiny Hades made to fold
Ghosts of the heavenly couriers long ago,
Sunk as men dreamed by ocean and by shore,
Into the void of silence evermore!

STERN TRUTHS TRANSFIGURED.

Those mountain forms of giant girth
Are rooted deep in moveless earth;
But lo! their yearning heights withdrawn,
Are melting in soft seas of dawn.

What golden lights and shadows kiss
Brown ledge and Titan precipice!
Till all the rock-bound, sullen space
Glows like a visionary face:

Thus frowning truths whose roots are furled
Round bases of some granite world,
May lift their mellowed light afar,
Transfigured by love's morning-star.

DISTANCE.

Why is it that yon far-off, mellowed horn
Sounds like an antique story, half-forlorn,
Half-sweet, with iterance of rare echoes sent
Up the serenely listening firmament?

I thrill, soul-smitten by each melting tone
About the golden distant spaces blown,
As if soft pathos came on rhythmic sighs
From out the heart of vanished centuries.

Distance is magic! in its fairy hold
Are alchemies that change even dross to gold,—
While beauty's nymph, too closely seen or pressed,
Melts to mere shadow from the enamored quest!

HORIZONS.

I love to gaze along the horizon's verge—
To strain my sight where steeped in golden-gray
The sun-illumined vapors gently surge,
To melt in measureless distances away.

I gaze and gaze, till tears bedim my eyes,
And tongueless fancies haunt me, vague and fond;
Ethereal boundary! blending earth and skies,
Ah! dost thou veil some marvellous realm beyond?

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Deep spirit of mine! thou, too, art strangely bound
By far horizons, vaporous, dim, and vast;
Beyond the range of whose enchanted round,
Not even the genii of weird dreams have passed!

IN THE GRAY OF THE EVENING.

AUTUMN.

When o'er yon forest solitudes
The sky of autumn evening broods—
A heaven whose warp, but palely bright,
Shot through with woofs of crimson light,
So slowly wanes with waning day—
Whatever thoughts, pathetic, sweet
Are wont to fawn round Memory's feet,
Pleading with soft and sacred stress
To be upcaught in tenderness;
Whatever thoughts like these there are,
Choose the weird hour 'twixt sun and star,
Of failing breeze, and whisperous sea,
And that still heaven o'er leaf and lea,
To come—each thought a temperate bliss—
Embracing the calmed soul, to kiss
The pallor of old cares away.

O twilight sky of mellow gray,
Flushed with faint hues! O voiceful trees,
Lilting low ballads to the breeze!
O all ye mild amenities
Wherewith the solemn eve is rife,
At this strange hour 'twixt death and life;
The death of beauteous day, whose last
Dim tints are almost overpast,
Who lives alone in odors blent
Of every subtlest element,
Borne on a fairy rain-like dew,
Exhaled, not dropped from out the blue;
The life of stars that one by one
Are mustering o'er the sunken sun,
And wafts of vague earth-perfume blown
Up to the pine-tree's quivering cone,
From heath-flowers hidden in cool grass,—
Like spells of delicate balm, ye pass
Into my wearied heart and brain.

What room for any sordid pain
Within me now? Ah! Nature seems
Through something sweeter than all dreams.
To woo me; yea, she seems to speak
How closely, kindly, her fond cheek
Rested on mine, her mystic blood
Pulsing in tender neighborhood,
And soft as any mortal maid,
Half veilèd in the twilight shade,
Who leans above her love to tell
Secrets almost ineffable!

THE VISION AT TWILIGHT.

[To E. R., October, 1879.]

Without the squares of misted pane,
I saw the wan autumnal rain.
And heard, o'er tufts of churchyard grass,
The wind's low miserere pass.

Within, more bright for outward gloom,
I saw her wild-rose cheeks abloom,
And, deep as stars in uppermost skies,
The lustre of dark Syrian eyes!

Within, still drearier grew the sigh
Of the chill east wind shuddering by,
Wilder the sad, strange moaning made
Beneath the elm-trees' rayless shade.

Within, as if the embodied south
Had opened her enchanted mouth,
I caught, through twilight's gray eclipse,
The music from her gracious lips.

It breathed such sweetness, purely deep,
On my dull pain it dropped like sleep.
“How vain,” I thought, “this gathering gloom;
Some heavenly presence fills the room!”

251

And when her warm hand, pulsing youth,
On mine she pressed in guileless ruth,
One moment, charmed through blood and brain,
I felt my own lost youth again!

With quickened heart and lifted head
I viewed the vision near my bed,
But lovelier for that envious gloom,
Her heavenly presence blessed the room!

AN HOUR TOO LATE.

I have loved you, oh, how madly!
I have wooed you softly, sadly,
As the changeful years went by;
Yet you kept your haughty distance,
Yet you scorned my brave persistence,
While the long, long years went by.

Now that colder lovers leave you,
Now that Fate and Time bereave you
(For the cruel years will fly),
In your beauty's pale declension
You would grace with condescension
The love that touched you never
When your bloom and hopes were high.

Ah! but what if I discover
That too long in antique fashion
I have nursed a fruitless passion,
Whose rage and reign (thank Heaven!)
Are passed at length and over—
That fate hath locked forever love's golden Eden gate?
There's a wrong beyond redressing,
There's a prize not worth possessing,
And a lady's condescension
May come an hour too late!

“TOO LOW AND YET TOO HIGH!”

He came in velvet and in gold;
He wooed her with a careless grace;
A confidence too rashly bold
Breathed in his language and his face.
While she—a simple maid—replied:
“No more of love 'twixt thee and me!
These tricks of passion I deride,
Nor trust thy boasted verity.
Thy suit, with artful smile and sigh,
Resign, resign:
No mate am I for thee or thine,
Being too low, and yet too high!”

His spirit changed; his heart grew warm
With genuine passion; morn by morn
More perfect seemed the virgin charm
That crowned her 'mid the ripening corn.
And now he wooed with fervent mien,
With soul intense, and words of fire,
But reverence-fraught, as if a queen
Were hearkening to his heart's desire.
She brightly blushed, she gently sighed,
Yet still the village maid replied
(Though in sad accents, wearily):
“Thy suit resign,
Resign, resign!
Lord Hugh, I never can be thine.
Too low am I, and yet too high!”

THE LORDSHIP OF CORFU.

A LEGEND OF 1516.

What time o'er gory lands and threatening seas
Fair fortune, wearied, fled the Genoese—
What time from many a realm the waters woo
In the warm south, “Who now shall rule Corfu?”
Rose with the eager passion and fierce greed
Of those who preyed on every empire's need,—
There fell upon that isle's disheartened brave
A wild despair, such as in one dark grave
Might well have whelmed the prostrate nation's pride,
Her honor, strength, traditions—all beside

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Which crowns a race with sovereignty. Sublime
Above the reckless purpose of his time
Their Patriarch stood, and such wise words he spake
The basest souls are thrilled, the feeblest wake
To some high aim, some passion grand and free,
Some cordial grace of magnanimity:
By such unwonted power they yield their all
To him that came, as if at Godhead's call,
To save the state, whose stricken pillars reel.

How works the Patriarch for his people's weal?
Calmly he bids them launch their stanchest keel—
A gorgeous galley: on her decks they raise
Great golden altars, girt by lights that blaze
Divinely, and by music's mystic rain,
Blent of soft spells, half sweetness and half pain,
Fallen from out the highest heaven of song.

And there, to purify all souls of wrong
And latent sin, he calls from far and near
Nobles and priests and people. Every where
The paths are full, which, sloping steeply down
From the green pasture and the wallèd town,
Lead oceanward, where, anchored near the quay,
That sacred galley heaved along the sea—
Her captain no rude mariner, with soul
Tough as the cordage his brown hands control,
But the gray Patriarch, lifting eyes of prayer,
While o'er the reverent thousands, calm in air,
The sacred host shone like an awful star.

“Children!” the Patriarch cried, “If strong ye are
To trust in heaven—albeit heaven's message sent
This day through me, seem strange, and strangely blent
With chance-fed issues—swear, whate'er betide,
When once our unmoored bark doth fleetly glide
O'er the blue spaces of the midland sea—
What flag soe'er first greets our eager view,
Our own to veil, and humbly yield thereto
The faith and sovereign claims of fair Corfu.”

They vowed a vow methinks ne'er vowed before,
The while their galley, strangely laden, bore
Down the south wind, which freshly blew from shore.

Past Vido and San Salvador they sped,
Past stormy heights and capes whose rock-strewn head
Baffled the surges; still no ship they met,
Till, sailing far beyond the rush and fret
Of shifting sand-locked bars, at last they gain
The open and illimitable main.

There in one line two gallant vessels rode;
From this the lurid Crescent banner glowed,
From that the rampant Lion of St. Mark's!

253

Much, much they wondered when athwart them drew,
With glittering decks, the galley from Corfu,
Lighted by tapers tall of myriad dyes,
And echoing chants of holy litanies.

Soon unto both the self-same message came;
For loud o'er antique hymn and altar flame
Thrilled the chief's voice, “Hearken, ye rival powers!
Whichever first may touch our armèd towers
Thenceforth shall be the lords of fair Corfu!”

Changed was the wind, and landward now it blew;
Smiting the waves to foam-flakes wild and white.
All sails were braced, the rowers rowed with might,
But soon the island men turned pale to see
The Turk's prow surging vanward steadily.
Till five full lengths ahead, careering fast,
With flaunting flag and backward-swooping mast,
And scores of laboring rowers bent as one
Toward oars which made cool lightnings in the sun,
The Paynim craft—unless some marvellous thing
Should hap to crush her crew or clip her wing—
Seemed sure as that black Fate which urged her on
Victor to prove, and that proud island race
To load with sickening burdens of disgrace!
And now on crowded decks and crowded shore
Naught but the freshening sea wind's hollow roar
Was heard, with flap of rope and clang of sail,
Veering a point to catch the changing gale,
Or furious lashes of the buffeting oar!

Just then the tall Venetian strangely changed
Her steadfast course, with open portholes ranged
'Gainst the far town. Across the sea-waste came,
First, a sharp flash and lurid cloud of flame,
Then the dull boom of the on-speeding ball,
Followed by sounds which to the islemen seem
Sweet as the wakening from some nightmare dream—
The sounds of splintered tower and crashing wall!
Then rose a shrill cry to the shivering heaven—
“Thus, thus to us your island realm is given!”
Burst as one voice from out the conquering crew:
“Thus Venice claims the lordship of Corfu!”

These “Towers,” we must remember, were built in with the substance of the city walls, which rose abruptly out of the waters of the sea.

TALLULAH FALLS.

Alone with nature, where her passionate mood
Deepens and deepens, till from shadowy wood,
And sombre shore the blended voices sound
Of five infuriate torrents, wanly crowned
With such pale-misted foam as that which starts
To whitening lips from frenzied human hearts!

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Echo repeats the thunderous roll and boom
Of these vexed waters through the foliaged gloom
So wildly, in their grand reverberant swell
Borne from dim hillside to rock-bounded dell,
That oft the tumult seems
The vast fantastic dissonance of dreams;
A roar of adverse elements, torn and riven
In dark recesses of some billowy hell,
But sending ever through the tremulous air,
Defiance laden with august despair
Up to the calm and pitiful face of heaven!

From ledge to ledge the impetuous current sweeps
Forever tortured, tameless, unsubdued,
Amid the darkly humid solitude,
Through waste and turbulent deeps
It cleaves a terrible pathway, overrun
Only by doubtful flickerings of the sun,
To meet with swift cross-eddies, whirlpools set
On verges of some measureless abyss,
Above the stir and fret,
The lion's hollow roar, or serpent hiss
Of whose unceasing conflict waged below
The gorges of the giant precipice,
Shines the mild splendor of a heavenly bow.

But blinded to the rainbow's glory shed
Fair as the aureole 'round an angel's head
Still with dark vapors all about it furled
The demon spirit of this watery world,
Through many a maddened curve, and stormy throe,
Speeds to its last tumultuous overflow,
When downward hurled, from 'wildering shock to shock,
Its wild heart breaks upon the outmost rock
That guards the empire of this rule of wrath!
Henceforth, beyond the shattered cataract's path,
The tempered spirit of a gentler guide
Enters, methinks the unperturbèd tide;
Its current sparkling in the blest release
From wasting passion, glides through shores of peace,—
O'er brightened spaces and clear confluent calms,
Float the hale breathings of near meadow balms,
And still by silent cove and silvery reach,
The murmurous wavelets pass;
Lip the green tendrils of the delicate grass,
And tranquil hour by hour,
Uplift a crystal glass,
Wherein each lithe Narcissus-flower,
May mark its slender frame and beauteous face
Mirrored in softly visionary grace,
And still, by fairy-bight and shelving beach,
The fair waves whisper low as leaves in June
(Small gossips lisping in their woodland bower),
And still, the ever-lessening tide
Lapses, as glides some once imperious life
From haughty summits of demoniac pride,
Hatred and vengeful strife,
Down through time's twilight-valleys purified;
Yearning, alone, to keep
A long-predestined tryst with night and sleep,
Beneath the dew-soft kisses of the moon!

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DIVIDED.

As not a bud that burgeons 'mid the bowers;
As not a leaf on any tree that grows,
But to its neighbor some unlikeness shows,
Made clearer still through all the blossoming hours.

Thus hath it chanced that, since the world began,
No soul hath found its fellow; fates may blend
In the close ties of lover, husband, friend,
Yet through some subtle difference, man from man

Severed, sees not his brother's innermost life;
The lover his sweet mistress knows in part,
And each to other half revealed in heart,
Pass deathward, the true husband and true wife.

Shall heaven make all things plain? Nay, who can tell?
Only, sick heart! like the sore-wounded dove
Seeking her distant nest, hold fast to love,
Till death's deep curfew tolls its vesper bell.

THE MEADOW BROOK.

Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle,
Over ledge and stone;
How I'm going, flowing,
Westward, all alone;
All alone, but happy,
Happy and hale am I,
Clasped by the emerald meadows,
Flushed by the golden sky!

No kindred brook is calling,
To woo these tides in glee;
I hear no neighboring voices
Of inland rill, or sea;
But the sedges thrill above me,
And where I blithely pass,
Coy winds, like nymphs in ambush,
Seem whispering through the grass.

Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle;
Hark! the tiny swell
Of wavelets softly, silverly
Toned like a fairy bell,
Whose every note, dropped sweetly
In mellowed glamour round,
Echo hath caught and harvested
In airy sheaves of sound!

256

THE VALLEY OF ANOSTAN.

[_]

[In Ælian's “Various History,” book iii., chapter xviii., the following legend, or parable, will be found. How vividly it recalls to us the words of the Master: “Unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven!”]

An Orient legend, which hath all the light
And fragrance of the asphodels of heaven,
Smiles on us from old Ælian's mellowed page;
And thus it runs, smooth as the stream of joy
Whereof it tells, yet with some discord blent,
Which, hearkened rightly, makes the music true
To man's mysterious instincts and his fate:

In the strange valley of Anostan dwelt
The far Meropes, through whose murmurous realm
Two mighty rivers—one a stream of joy,
Divine and perfect; one a stream of bale—
Flowed side by side, 'twixt forest shades and flowers
(Bright shades and sombre, poison flowers and pure),
Down to a distant and an unknown sea.

On either bank were fruit-trees and ripe fruit,
Whereof men plucked and ate; but whoso ate
Of the wan fruitage of the stream of bale
Went ever after weeping gall for tears,
Till death should find him; but whoe'er partook
Of the rare fruitage of the stream of joy
Straightway was lapped in such ecstatic peace,
Such fond oblivion of all base desires,
His soul grew fresh, dew-like, and sweet again,
And through his past, his golden yesterdays,
He wandered back and back, till youth, regained,
Shone in the candid radiance of his eyes,
That still waxed larger, holier, crystal-clear,
With resurrection of life's tenderest dawn
Of childlike faith; by which illumed and warmed,
He walks, himself a dream within a dream,
Yearning for infancy. This found at last,
Gently he passes upward unto God,
Not through death's portal, wrapped in storms and wrath,
But the fair archway of the gates of birth!

TWO SONGS.

FIRST SONG.

Let me die by the sea!
When his billows are haughty and high,
And the storm-wind's abroad,—
When his dark passion grasps at the sky
With the power of a god,—
When all his fierce forces are free—
Let me die by the sea.

Let me die by the sea!
To his rhythms of tempest and rain,
I would pass from the earth,
Through death that is travail and pain,
Through death that is travail and pain,
Through death that is birth;
'Mid the thunders of waves and of lea,
Let me die by the sea.

Let me die by the sea!
When the great deeps are sundered and stirred,
And the night cometh fast,
Let my spirit mount up like a bird,
On the wings of the blast.

257

O'er the tumults of wave and of lea,
O'er their ravage and roar,
She would soar, she would soar,
Where peace waits her at last:
Oh! Fate, let me die by the sea.

SECOND SONG.

Ah, no! Ah, no! I would not go
While earth and heaven are black:—
When all is wildly drear and dark,
Guard, guard, O God! this vital spark!

But I would go when winds are low,
And distant, dreamy rills
Are heard to lapse with lingering flow,
Between the twilight hills:
With earth, and wave, and heaven at peace,
Then let these outworn pulses cease.

SONNETS.

ON VARIOUS THEMES.

I.
FRESHNESS OF POETIC PERCEPTION.

Day followed day; years perish; still mine eyes
Are opened on the self-same round of space;
Yon fadeless forests in their Titan grace,
And the large splendors of those opulent skies.
I watch, unwearied, the miraculous dyes
Of dawn or sunset; the soft boughs which lace
Round some coy dryad in a lonely place,
Thrilled with low whispering and strange sylvan sighs:
Weary? the poet's mind is fresh as dew,
And oft re-filled as fountains of the light.
His clear child's soul finds something sweet and new
Even in a weed's heart, the carved leaves of corn.
The spear-like grass, the silvery rim of morn,
A cloud rose-edged, and fleeting stars at night!

II.
LAOCOON.

A gnarled and massive oak log, shapeless, old,
Hewed down of late from yonder hillside gray,
Grotesquely curved, across our hearthstone lay;
About it, serpent-wise, the red flames rolled
In writhing convolutions; fold on fold
They crept and clung with slow portentous sway
Of deadly coils; or in malignant play,
Keen tongues outflashed, 'twixt vaporous gloom and gold.
Lo! as I gazed, from out that flaming gyre
There loomed a wild, weird image, all astrain
With strangled limbs, hot brow, and eyeballs dire,
Big with the anguish of the bursting brain:
Laocoon's form, Laocoon's fateful pain,
A frescoed dream on flickering walls of fire!

III.
AT LAST.

In youth, when blood was warm and fancy high,
I mocked at death. How many a quaint conceit
I wove about his veilèd head and feet.
Vaunting aloud. Why need we dread to die?
But now, enthralled by deep solemnity.
Death's pale phantasmal shade I darkly greet:
Ghostlike it haunts the hearth, it haunts the street,
Or drearier makes drear midnight's mystery.

258

Ah, soul-perplexing vision! oft I deem
That antique myth is true which pictured death
A masked and hideous form all shrank to see;
But at the last slow ebb of mortal breath,
Death, his mask melting like a nightmare dream,
Smiled,—heaven's high-priest of Immortality!

IV.
A PHANTOM IN THE CLOUDS.

All day the blast, with furious ramp and roar,
Sweeps the gaunt hill-tops, piles the vapors high,
Thro' infinite distance, up the tortured sky—
Till to one nurtured on the ocean-shore,
It seems—with eyes half-shut to hill and moor—
The anguished sea waves' multitudinous cry—
It changes! deepening .. Christ! what agony
Doth some doomed spirit on these wild winds outpour!
At last a lull! stirred by slow wafts of air!
When lo! o'er dismal wastes of stormy wreck,
Cloud-wrought, an awful form and face abhorred!
Thine, thine, Iscariot! smitten by mad despair,
With lurid eyeballs strained, and writhing neck,
Round which is coiled a blood-red phantom cord!

V.
JAPONICAS.

Beneath the sullen slope of shadowy skies,
Midmost this flowerless, wind-bewildered space
(Once a fair garden, now a desert-place)
Ah! what voluptuous hues are these that rise
In sudden lustre, on my startled eyes?
They glow like roses on an orient face,
Glimpsed in swift flashes of enchanting grace,
'Twixt the shy harem's gold-wrought tapestries!
Ye bright Japonicas! your glorious gleam
Tints with strange light the enamored waves of air,
And wafts of such coy fragrance round you float
Fancy transcends these boundaries blanched and bare,
For beauty lures her in a ravishing dream
Of roseate lips, dark locks, and swanwhite throat!

VI.
THE USURPER.

For weeks the languid southern wind had blown,
Fraught with Floridian balm; thro' winter skies
We seemed to catch the smile of April's eyes;
A queenly waif, from her far temperate zone
Wayfaring—half bewildered and alone,
Yet, by the delicate fervor of her grace,
And the arch beauty of her changeful face,
Making an alien empire all her own,
So day by day that sweet usurper's reign
Gladdened the world. One eve the south wind sighed
Her soft soul out; the north wind raved instead;
All night he raved; when morning dawned again,
Winter, rethroned, looked down with scornful pride
Where April, dying, bowed her golden head!

259

VII.
DECEMBER SONNET.

Round the December heights the clouds are gray—
Gray, and wind-driven toward the stormy west,
They fly, like phantoms of malign unrest,
To fade in sombre distances away.
A flickering brightness o'er the wreck of day,
Twilight, like some sad maiden, grief-oppressed,
Broods wanly on the farthest mountain crest;
All nature breathes of darkness and decay
Now from low meadow land and drowsy stream.
From deep recesses of the silent vale,
Night-wandering vapors rise formless and chill,
When, lo! o'er shrouded wood and shadowy hill,
I mark the eve's victorious planet beam,
Fair as an angel clad in silver mail!

VIII.
A COMPARISON.

I think, ofttimes, that lives of men may be
Likened to wandering winds that come and go,
Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow
O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.
Some lives are buoyant zephyrs sporting free
In tropic sunshine; some long winds of woe
That shun the day, wailing with murmurs low,
Through haunted twilights, by the unresting sea;
Others are ruthless, stormful, drunk with might,
Born of deep passion or malign desire:
They rave 'mid thunder-peals and clouds of fire.
Wild, reckless all, save that some power unknown
Guides each blind force till life be overblown,
Lost in vague hollows of the fathomless night.

IX.
FATE, OR GOD?

Beyond the record of all eldest things,
Beyond the rule and regions of past time,
From out Antiquity's hoary-headed rime,
Looms the dread phantom of a King of kings:
Round His vast brows the glittering circlet clings
Of a thrice royal crown; behind Him climb,
O'er Atlantean limbs and breast sublime
The sombre splendors of mysterious wings;
Deep calms of measureless power, in awful state,
Gird and uphold Him; a miraculous rod,
To heal or smite, arms His infallible hands:
Known in all ages, worshipped in all lands,
Doubt names this half-embodied mystery—Fate,
While Faith, with lowliest reverence, whispers—God!

X.
SONNET.

Written on a fly-leaf of “The Rubaiyat” of Omar Kháyyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia.

Who deems the soul to endless death is thrall,
That no life breathes beyond that moment dire,
When every sense seems lost as outblown fire;—

260

Must walk, clothed round with darkness like a pall,
Or on false gods of sensual rapture call;
Pluck the rich rose-leaves! lift the wine cup higher!
Wed delicate Instinct to malign Desire,
(Like some Greek girl clasped by a barbarous Gaul!)
Thus Omar preached, thus practised, centuries since;
Wine, beauty, idlesse, orgies crowned by lust;
All these he chanted in voluptuous song;
Yet who shall vow, deep Thinker! poet Prince!
Thy rhythmic creed the unnatural voice of wrong,
If man, dust-born, shall still return to dust?

XI.
EARTH ODORS—AFTER RAIN.

Life-yielding fragrance of our mother earth!
Benignant breath exhaled from summer showers!—
All Nature dimples into smiles of flowers,
From unclosed woodland, to trim garden girth;—
These perfumes softening the harsh soul of dearth,
Are older than old Shinar's arrogant towers,—
And touched with visions of rain-freshened hours,
On Syrian hill-slopes 'ere the patriarch's birth!
Nay! the charmed fancy plays a subtler part!—
Lo! banished Adam, his large, wondering eyes
Fixed on the trouble of the first dark cloud!
Lo! tremulous Eve,—a pace behind, how bowed,—
Not dreaming, 'midst her painful pants of heart,
What balm shall fall from yonder ominous cloud!

XII.
SONNET.

I lay in dusky solitude reclined,
The shadow of sleep just hovering o'er mine eyes,
When from the cloudland in the western skies
Rose the strange breathings of a tremulous wind.
As sound upborne o'er water, through some blind.
Mysterious forest, so this wind did rise.
Laden, methought, with half-articulate sighs.
Wafted like spirit-memories o'er the mind.
Then the night deepened; through my window-bars
I saw the gray clouds billowing fast and free.
Smit by the splendor of the solemn stars.
Then the night deepened; wind and cloud became
A blended tumult, crossed by spears of flame,
While the great pines moaned like a moaning sea.

XIII.
POVERTY.

Once I beheld thee, a lithe mountain maid,
Embrowned by wholesome toils in lusty air;
Whose clear blood, nurtured by strong, primitive cheer,
Through Amazonian veins, flowed unafraid.
Broad-breasted, pearly-teethed, thy pure breath strayed,
Sweet as deep-uddered kine's curled in the rare
Bright spaces of thy lofty atmosphere,
O'er some rude cottage in a fir-grown glade.
Now, of each brave ideal virtue stripped,
O Poverty! I behold thee as thou art,

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A ruthless hag, the image of woeful dearth
Or brute despair, gnawing its own starved heart.
Thou ravening wretch! fierce-eyed and monster-lipped,
Why scourge forevermore God's beauteteous earth?

XIV.
WASTE.

How many a budding plant is born to fade!
How many a May bloom wilt with quick decay!
Ofttimes the ruddiest rose holds briefest sway,
While heart and sense are evermore betrayed
Alike in nature's shine and nature's shade.
Vainly earth-tendered seeds have sought the day,
And countless threads of rivulets wind astray,
For one that joins the vast main unembayed.
O prodigal nature, why this spendthrift waste
Of light, strength, beauty given to earth or man?
Thy richest realm may lie in trackless seas,
Thy tenderest loves, perchance, die unembraced;
While faith and reason watch thy 'wildering plan,
The baffled soul's cloud-compassed Hyades!

XV.
A MORNING AFTER STORM.

All night the north wind blew; the harsh north rain
Lashed like a spiteful whip at roof and sill.
Now the pale morning lowers, bewildered, chill,
Leaning her cheek against the misted pane,
Like some worn outcast, sick in heart and brain.
The wind that raved all night, though muttering still,
Moans fitfully, with faint, irresolute will,
Through dreary interludes, its low refrain.
In desolate mood I turn to rest once more,
Closing my senses to this hopeless morn,
This dismal wind. Still must the morning gloom,
Still the low sighing pass sleep's muffled door,
Till her veiled life is filled with dreams forlorn,
With hollow sounds and bodeful shapes of doom.

XVI.
DEAD LOVES.

Whene'er I think of old loves wan and dead,
Of passion's wine outpoured in senseless dust,
Of doomed affection's and long-buried trust,
Through all my soul an arctic gloom is shed;
And ah! I walk the world disquieted.
Thou, my own love! white lily of April! must
Thy beauty, perfume, radiance, all be thrust
Earthward, to crumble in a grass-grown bed?
Yea, sweet, 'tis even so! How long, how long
The dust of her who once was tender Ruth,
Hath mouldered dumbly! And how oft the clod,
Which binds, like hers, all perished love and truth,

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Strives with pale weeds to veil death's hopeless wrong,
Or through chill lips of flowers appeals to God!

XVII.
NATURE AT EASE.

I feel the kisses of this lingering breeze,
Warm, close, and ardent as the lips of love,
I quaff the sunshine streaming from above,
Like mellow wine of antique vintages;
Now, serene nature, at luxurious ease,
Her deep toils perfected, and richly rife
With subtlest meanings—all her opulent life
Reveals in tremulous brakes and whispering seas.
If, then, the reverent soul doth lean aright,
Close to those voices of wood, wind, and wave,
What wondrous secrets bless the spiritual ear,
Born, as it were, of music winged with light,
Sweeter than those strange songs which Orpheus gave
To earth and heaven, while both grew dumb to hear!

XVIII.
THE CNYDIAN ORACLE.

“What though the Isthmus lacks an ocean-gate,
Delve not the soil! If Jove had willed it so,
His watchful power had opened long ago
The channelled pathways of a billowy strait.”
Thus spake the Cnydian Oracle but too late;
For men are blinder than blind winds that blow
Round midnight waves, yet idly dream they know
Some Hermes' trick to steal the goods of fate.
Fools! trench your Isthmus, delving fast and deep;
And as ye toil uplift your boastful breath
O'er swift inrushings of the turbulent sea—
Too swift, by heaven! for, lo! its treacherous sweep
O'erwhelms the graded dykes, the opposing lea,
While ye that mocked at fate, fate whirls to death!

XIX.
THE HYACINTH.

Here in this wrecked storm-wasted garden-close
The grave of infinite generations fled
Of flowers that now lay lustreless and dead,
As the gray dust of Eden's earliest rose.
What bloom is this, whose classical beauty glows
Radiantly chaste, with the mild splendor shed
Round a Greek virgin's poised and perfect head,
By Phidias wrought 'twixt rapture and repose?
Mark the sweet lines whose matchless ovals curl
Above the fragile stem's half shrinking grace,
And say if this pure hyacinth doth not seem
(Touched by enchantments of an antique dream)
A flower no more, but the low drooping face
Of some love-laden, fair Athenian girl?

XX.
THE WOOD FAR INLAND.

I close mine eyes in this lone inland place,
This wood, far inland, thronged with sombrous trees—

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Our southland pines—in whose dark boughs the breeze
Mourns like a spirit shorn of joy and grace;
The same wild genius whose half-veilèd face
Dawns on the barren brink of wave-washed leas,
Fraught with the ancient mystery of the seas,
Whose hoary brow bears many a storm-bolt's trace;
I close mine eyes; but lo! a spiritual light
Steals round me: I behold through foam and mist
A dreary reach of wan, slow-shifting sand,
By transient glints of flickering starbeams kissed,
And hear upborne athwart the desolate strand
Voices of ghostly billows of the night.

[XXI. A moment since his breath dissolved in air]

[_]

[Composed just after midnight on the 31st of December, 1878.]

A moment since his breath dissolved in air!
And now divorced from life's last hectic glow,
He joins the old ghostly years of long ago,
In some cloud-folded realm of vague despair;
Ah me! the unsceptred years that wander there!
With cold, wan hands, and faces white as snow,
And echoes of dead voices quavering low
The phantom-burden of long-perished care!
Perchance all unsubstantialized and gray,
Time's earliest year now greets his last, deceased;
Or he that dumbly gazed on Adam's fall,
Palely emerging from the shadowy east,
With flickering semblance of cold crown and pall,
Clothes the dim ghost of him just passed away!

XXII.
MAGNOLIA GARDENS.

Yes, found at last,—the earthly paradise!
Here by slow currents of the silvery stream
It smiles, a shining wonder, a fair dream,
A matchless miracle to mortal eyes:
What whorls of dazzling color flash and rise
From rich azalean flowers, whose petals teem
With such harmonious tints as brightly gleam
In sunset rainbows arched o'er perfect skies!
But see! beyond those blended blooms of fire,
Vast tier on tier the lordly foliage tower
Which crowns the centuried oaks' broad crested calm:
Thus on bold beauty falls the shade of power;
Yet beauty still unquelled, fulfils desire,
Unfolds her blossoms, and outbreathes her balm!

XXIII.
ENGLAND.

Cloud-girded land, brave land beyond the sea!
Land of my father's love! how oft I yearn
Toward thy famed ancestral shores to turn,
Roaming thy glorious realm in liberty;
All English growths would sacred seem to me,
From opulent oak to flickering wayside fern;
Much form her delicate daisies could I learn,
And all her home-bred flowers by lake or lea.

264

But most I dream of Shropshire's meadow grass,
Its grazing herds, and sweet hay-scented air;
An ancient hall near a slow rivulet's mouth;
A church vine-clad; a graveyard glooming south;
These are the scenes through which I fain would pass;
There lived my sires, whose sacred dust is there.

XXIV.
DISAPPOINTMENT.

Ah! phantom pale, why hast thou come with pace
Thus slow, and such sad deprecating eyes?
What! dost thou dream thy presence could surprise
One the born vassal of thy realm and race?
I looked in boyhood on thy clouded face;
In youth dissevered from all cordial ties,
Heard the deep echoes of thy murmured sighs
In many a shadowy, grief-enshrouded place;
Therefore, O sombre Genius, be not coy!
When have we dwelt so alien and apart
I could not faintly feel thy muffled heart?
Till even should hope's fruition softly shine,
I well might deem beneath the mask of joy
Lurked that sad brow, those twilight eyes of thine!

XXV.
THE LAST OF THE ROSES.

A royal rose! A rose how darkly red!
A proud, voluptuous, full blown flower, that sways
Her sceptre o'er the wind-swept garden-ways,
With mantling cheek and bold, imperious head!
Alone she lifts above yon desolate bed
A beauty past all terms of raptured praise,
The statelier that she rules in autumn days,
When every rival flower is dimmed or dead!
A haughty Cleopatra! there she smiles,
Unwitting that her sovereign love is lost—
Her Antony! a gorgeous sunflower bloom!
Ah! vain henceforth her beauty and sweet wiles!
Queen! art thou blind? Thy lord hath met his doom;
His Actium came with winter's vanguard—Frost!

XXVI.
THE AXE AND PINE.

All day, on bole and limb the axes ring,
And every stroke upon my startled brain
Falls with the power of sympathetic pain;
I shrink to view each glorious forest-king
Descend to earth, a wan, discrownèd thing.
Ah, Heaven! beside these foliaged giants slain.
How small the human dwarfs, whose lust for gain
Hath edged their brutal steel to smite and sting!
Hark! to those long-drawn murmurings, strange and drear!
The wail of Dryads in their last distress;
O'er ruined haunts and ravished loveliness
Still tower those brawny arms; tones coarsely loud
Rise still beyond the greenery's waning cloud,
While falls the insatiate steel, sharp, cold and sheer!

265

XXVII.
BETROTHAL NIGHT.

Through golden languors of low glimmering light,
Deep eyes, o'erbrimmed with passion's sacred wine,
Heart-perfumed tears—yearning towards me, shine
Like stars made lovelier by faint mists at night;
Her cheeks, sweet lilies change to roses bright,
Blown in love's realm, fed by his breath divine;
And even those virginal tremors seem the sign
Of perfect joy through love's unchallenged right:
O happy breast, that heavest soft and fair
Through silvery clouds of luminous silk and lace!
O, gracious hands, O flower-enwoven head,
O'er which hope's charm its delicate warmth has shed!
While smiles and blushes wreathe her dimpling face,
Set in the splendor of dark Orient hair!

XXVIII.
“THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA.”

Grievous, in sooth, was luckless Sindbad's plight,
Saddled with that foul monster of the sea;
But who of some soul-harrowing weight is free?
And though we veil our woe from public sight,
Full many a weary day and dismal night,
It chafes our spirits sorely! Yet, for thee,
Whate'er, O friend, thy special grief may be,
Range thou against it all thy manhood's might.
Thus, though thou may'st not smite on brow or breast
That irksome incubus, be sure some day
The load that blights shall droop and fall away,
And thou, because of torture borne so well,
Shall pass from out thy long, malign unrest
And walk thy future paths invincible!

XXIX.
TWO PICTURES.

She stood beneath the vine-leaves flushed and fair;
The dimpling smiles around her tender mouth,
Seemed born of mellow sunshine of the South;
A light breeze trembled in her unbound hair;
No young Greek goddess, in the violet air
Of vales immortal, shone with purer grace;
A delicate glory touched her form and face,
Whence the sweet soul looked on us, nobly bare,—
As Heaven itself, unclouded:—thus she stood,
But when I saw her next (O God! the woe!)
Love, mirth, and life had fled forever more;
Prostrate she lay, about her a dark wood,
And many a helpless mourner, wailing low;
The cruel waves which drowned her lapped the shore.

XXX.
THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

Once in the twilight hour there stole on me
A strange, sweet spirit! In her tender eyes

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Shone a far beauty, like the morning skies,
And tranquil was she as a summer sea;
An air of large, divine benignity
Breathed, like a living garb of spiritual dyes
About her—with the gentle fall and rise
Of her heart pulses tuned to mystery—
But, as I gazed, a sadness deep as death
Crept o'er the beauty of her brow serene
And a faint tremor stirred her shadowy lips;
“Thou know'st me not, “she sighed, with mournful breath;
“How can'st thou know me? Lo, through Fate's eclipse,
Thou seest, too late, too late, thy Might Have Been!”

XXXI.
NIGHT-WINDS IN WINTER.

Winds! are they winds?—or myriad ghosts, that shriek?
Ghosts of poor mariners, drowned in Northern seas,
Beside the surf-tormented Hebrides,
Whose voices now of tide-born terror speak
In tones to blanch the boldest listener's cheek?
Hark! how they thunder down the far-off leas,
Sweep the scourged hills, and smite the woodland trees,
To die where towers yon glittering mountain-peak!
A moment's stillness! Then with lustier might
Of wing and voice, these marvellous wraiths of air
Fill with dread sound the ominous heights of night.
Athwart their stormful breath the star-throngs fade:
How dimmed is Cassiopæia's radiant chair,
While Perseus droops, touched by transfiguring shade!

XXXII.
TO THE QUERULOUS POETS.

Throw by the trappings of your tinsel rhyme!
Hush the crude voice, whose never-ending wail
Blights the sweet song of thrush, or nightingale,—
Set to the treble of our querulous time;
Is earth grown dim? Hath heaven her grace sublime,
Her pomp of clouds, and winds, and sunset showers
Merged in the twilight of funereal hours,
And Time's death-signal struck its iron chime?
O! false, frail dreamer! not one tiniest note
From yonder green-girt copse, but whispers “shame!”—
Love, beauty, rapture, swell the warbler's throat.—
The self-same joy, the passion blithe and young.
Thrilled by the force of whose immaculate flame,
The first glad stars, the stars of morning, sung!

XXXIII.
IN THE PORCH.

In this old porch, fast mouldering to decay,
But wreathed in vines and girt by shadowy trees,
All day I hear the dreamful hum of bees,
Soft-rustling foliage, and the fragrant sway
Of breezes borne from some far ocean bay;
And oft with half-closed eyelids, stretched at ease—
The pines above me voiced like distant seas—
I seem to mark a coy young Dryad stray
Out from the tangled greenery overhead,

267

Her brow leaf-crowned, her eyes of twilight fire
Deep with Arcadian mysteries softly shed;
And near her, wafted from the ambrosial South,
A white-limbed Nereid, round whose balmy mouth
Breathe the wave's freshness and the wind's desire.

XXXIV.
THE PHANTOM—SONG.

In museful hours, when thoughts of grace divine
Roll wave-like up the stormless strand of dreams;—
When that which is grows vague as that which seems,—
I mark, far-off, a radiant shade incline
From heaven to earth,—whose face of marvelous shine,
(Half veiled in mystic beauty), softly beams
With delicate lustres, and elusive gleams,
Caught from some viewless Eden—hyaline:—
Ethereal, as the wavering hues that start
From chorded rainbows;—lingering scarce so long
As the last sun-ray flashed in twilight's eye,
I hail this phantom of a perfect song;—
And I, some day, shall pass the phantom by,—
To feel the embodied music next my heart!

XXXV.
SMALL GRIEFS AND GREAT.

How oft by trivial griefs our spirits tossed
Drift vague and restless round this changeful world!
Yet when great sorrows on our lives are hurled,
And fate on us has wreaked his uttermost,
O'er wounded breasts our steadfast arms are crossed;
We front the blast, silent, with unbowed head
And stoic mien; for fear with hope is dead;
And calm the voice which whispers: “All is lost!”
Thence to the end, our being, stripped and bare
Of love, and peace, and gracious joys of of earth,
Like some storm-shattered tree, its withered might
May lift defiant, dauntless in its dearth,
Seeming Death's bolt, that final stroke, to dare,
A dreary watcher on a blasted height!

XXXVI.
THE SHALLOW HEART!

“Pity her,” say'st thou, “pity her!” nay, not I!
Her heart is shallow as yon garrulous rill
That froths o'er pebbles: grief, true grief is still,
Deathfully solemn as eternity
Thro' whose dread realm its silent fancies fly
Seeking the lost and loved; sorrows that kill
Life's hope, are like those poisons which distil
Their noiseless dews beneath the midnight sky:—
Their venom works in secret! gnaws the heart,
And withers the worn spirit, albeit no sign
Shows the sad inward havoc, till some day,
(Pledging our calm friend o'er the purpling wine),
Sudden, he falls amongst us, and we start
At a low whisper, “He has passed away!”

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XXXVII.
THE STORMY NIGHT.

[Written on a stormy Christmas night (1873).]

How roars this wintry tempest, fierce and loud,
Borne from far passes of the ice-locked hills!
How raves this desolate rain, whose tumult fills
The whole dark heaven up-piled with cloud on cloud;
While yonder quivering pine-trees, drenched and bowed,
Blend their strange moaning with the noise of rills,
And one swift stream, whose angry clarion shrills,
Piercing the mists which o'er it cling and crowd!
Roar, mighty wind! rave on, thou merciless rain!
Uproot, and madly ravage—whilst ye may;
Your furious voices smite mine ears in vain,
For, housed and warmed by this bright fireside cheer,—
Safe as on some calm springtide's calmest day,
I mock your ire, nor heed your wild despair.

PERSONAL SONNETS.

I.
TO HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

I think earth's noblest, most pathetic sight
Is some old poet, round whose laurel-crown
The long gray locks are streaming softly down;—
Whose evening, touched by prescient shades of night,
Grows tranquillized, in calm, ethereal light:—
Such, such art thou, O master! worthier grown
In the fair sunset of thy full renown,—
Poising, perchance, thy spiritual wings for flight!
Ah, heaven! why shouldst thou from thy place depart?
God's court is thronged with minstrels rich with song:
Even now, a new notes wells the immaculate choir,—
But thou, whose strains have filled our lives so long,
Still from the altar of thy reverent heart
Let golden dreams ascend, and thoughts of fire!

II.
TO GEORGE H. BOKER.

[_]

Addressed to George H. Boker, of Philadelphia—after the perusal of Sonnets contained in his “Plays and Poems.”

It hath been thine to prove what use and power,
What sweetness, and what glorious strength belong
To the brief compass of that slandered song
We term the Sonnet. Thine hath been the dower
Whereby its richly fruitful, fairy shower
Of poesy hath flooded o'er our hearts;
And thine the dominant magic which imparts
Life to its thrilling music. Hour by hour,
My soul from this small fountain, in whose deep
The sunshine of thy passionate genius plays,
Doth drink delight, till fancy melts in sleep,
Charmed by the witchery of thy perfect lays,—
Not dreamless, but flushed through with joys that keep
Some fervent gleam of youth's voluptuous days.

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III.
TO ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

Not since proud Marlowe poured his potent song
Through fadeless meadows to a marvellous main,
Has England hearkened to so sweet a strain—
So sweet as thine, and ah! so subtly strong!
Whether sad love it mourns, or wreaks on wrong
The rhythmic rage of measureless disdain,
Dallies with joy, or swells in fiery pain,
What ravished souls the entrancing notes prolong!
At thy charmed breath pale histories blush once more:
See! Rosamond's smile! drink love from Mary's eyes;
Quail at the foul Medici's midnight frown.
Or hark to black Bartholomew's anguished cries!
Blent with far horns of Calydon widely blown
O'er the grim death-growl of the ensanguined boar!

But crowned by hope, winged with august desire,
Thy muse soars loftiest, when her breath is drawn
In stainless liberty's ethereal dawn,
And “songs of sunrise” her warm lips suspire:
High in auroral radiance, high and higher,
She buoys thee up, till, earth's gross vapors gone,
Thy proud, flame-girdled spirit gazes on
The unveiled fount of freedom's crystal fire.
When thou hast drained deep draughts divinely nurst
'Mid lucid lustres, and hale haunts of morn,
On lightning thoughts thy choral thunders burst
Of rapturous song! Apollo's self, new-born,
Might thus have sung from his Olympian sphere;
All hearts are thrilled; all nations hushed to hear!

IV.
TO EDGAR FAWCETT.

Art thou some reckless poet, fiercely free,
Singing vague songs an errant brain inspires?
Mad with the ravening force of inward fires,
Whose floods o'erwhelm him like a masterless sea?
No! art and nature wisely blend in thee!
Thy soul has learned from lays of loftiest lyres
What laws should bind weird fancy's wild desires,
Rounded to rhythmic immortality!
Thus golden thoughts in golden harmonies meet:
Thy fairy conceptions reel not with false glow,
Through frenzied realms by metrical motley swayed;
But passion-curbed, with voices strong and sweet,
Born of regret or rapture, love or woe,
Pass from rich sunshine to dew-haunted shade!

V.
CARLYLE.

O granite nature; like a mountain height
Which pierces heaven! yet with foundations deep,
Rooted where earth's majestic forces sleep,
In quiet breathing on the breast of night:—

270

Proud thoughts were his that scaled the infinite
Of loftiest grasp, and calm Elysian sweep;
Fierce thoughts were his that burnt the donjon keep
Of ancient wrong, to flood its crypts with light:
Yet o'er his genius, firm as Ailsa's rock,
Large, Atlantean, with grim grandeur dowered,—
Love bloomed, and buds of tender beauty flowered:—
Yet down his rugged massiveness of will
Unscarred by alien passion's fiery shock,
Mercy flowed melting like an Alpine rill!

VI.
TO JEAN INGELOW.

Brave lyrist! like the sky-lark, heaven-possessed,
Thy glance is sunward; and thy soul grown wise,
Fronts the full splendor of Apollo's eyes,
While following still thy muse's high behest:
Strength, sweetness, subtlety, are all expressed
In thy clear lays,—whether they dare the skies,
O'ertopping radiant dawns, or rill-like rise,
To thread with rhythmic pulse earth's pastoral breast!
Proud inspiration, hand in hand with act
Hath made thy winged feet beautiful along
The haloed heights of thine eternal song:
So near our human love, though born afar,
Its mellow concord on the listener's heart
Melts with the softness of a falling star!

VII.
TO M. I. P.

Your gracious words steal o'er like the breeze
That blows from far-off southland isles benign,—
All steeped in perfume, sweet as fairy wine,
Yet touched with salt keen breathings of the seas!
What smiling thoughts of tender ministries
Passionless service, and strong faith divine,
Rest with this pictured sister's face of thine,
And sister's love:—(blent fire and balms of ease!)
O love! a two-faced shield of light thou art,
Whose golden-sided glamour long hath shone,
In wedded bliss and affluence on my life;
A sister's love—the fair shield's silvery zone,
Turns on me now!—thy deathless fervor, wife,
Blends with the sweetness of this new found heart!

271

MACDONALD'S RAID.—A. D. 1780.

AS NARRATED MANY YEARS AFTER BY A VETERAN OF “MARION'S BRIGADE.”

[_]

[The hero of the following ballad, though a Scotchman by birth, was a determined, enthusiastic Whig. Marion's men, among whom he served during the whole of the war for Independence, regarded him with an admiration bordering sometimes upon awe. His gigantic size and strength, and a species of “Berserker rage” which came over him in battle, were the means by which he performed many a feat of “derring-do,” characteristic rather of the Middle Ages than the times of practical “Farmer George.” Of all his desperate escapades, the raid through Georgetown, South Carolina, with a force of only four troopers (Georgetown being a fortified post, defended by a garrison of three hundred English regulars), proved, naturally enough, the most notorious. Authorities differ as to the origin and details of this remarkable affair. Some inform us that Sergeant Macdonald had been commanded by Marion to take a small party of his men and merely reconnoitre the enemy's lines, and that he chose to exceed his orders; while others affirm that Macdonald himself, acting independently, as he often did, proposed the mad scheme of “bearding the British lion in his den,” as a charming relief to the ennui of camp life. The latter authorities have furnished the groundwork of our ballad. “Nothing,” observes Horry, in his Life of General Marion, “ever so mortified the British as did this mad frolic. ‘That half a dozen d---d young rebels,’ they exclaimed, ‘should thus dash in among us, in open daylight, and fall to cutting and slashing the king's troops at this rate! And after all, to gallop away without the least harm in hair and hide! 'Tis high time to turn our bayonets into pitchforks, and go to foddering the cows.’”]

I remember it well; 'twas a morn dull and gray,
And the legion lay idle and listless that day,
A thin drizzle of rain piercing chill to the soul,
And with not a spare bumper to brighten the bowl,
When Macdonald arose, and unsheathing his blade,
Cried. “Who'll back me, brave comrades? I'm hot for a raid.
Let the carbines be loaded, the war harness ring,
Then swift death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!”

We leaped up at his summons, all eager and bright,
To our finger-tips thrilling to join him in fight;
Yet he chose from our numbers four men and no more.
“Stalwart brothers,” quoth he, “you'll be strong as fourscore,
If you follow me fast wheresoever I lead,
With keen sword and true pistol, stanch heart and bold steed.
Let the weapons be loaded, the bridle-bits ring,
Then swift death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!”

In a trice we were mounted; Macdonald's tall form
Seated firm in the saddle, his face like a storm
When the clouds on Ben Lomond hang heavy and stark,
And the red veins of lightning pulse hot through the dark;
His left hand on his sword-belt, his right lifted free,
With a prick from the spurred heel, a touch from the knee,
His lithe Arab was off like an eagle on wing—
Ha! death, death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!

272

'Twas three leagues to the town, where, in insolent pride,
Of their disciplined numbers, their works strong and wide,
The big Britons, oblivious of warfare and arms,
A soft dolce were wrapped in, not dreaming of harms,
When fierce yells, as if borne on some fiend-ridden rout,
With strange cheer after cheer, are heard echoing without,
Over which, like the blast of ten trumpeters, ring,
“Death, death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!”

Such a tumult we raised with steel, hoof-stroke, and shout,
That the foemen made straight for their inmost redoubt,
And therein, with pale lips and cowed spirits, quoth they,
“Lord, the whole rebel army assaults us to-day.
Are the works, think you, strong? God of heaven, what a din!
'Tis the front wall besieged—have the rebels rushed in?
It must be; for, hark! hark to that jubilant ring
Of ‘death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!’”

Meanwhile, through the town like a whirlwind we sped,
And ere long be assured that our broadswords were red;
And the ground here and there by an ominous stain
Showed how the stark soldier beside it was slain:
A fat sergeant-major, who yawed like a goose,
With his waddling bow-legs, and his trappings all loose,
By one back-handed blow the Macdonald cuts down,
To the shoulder-blade cleaving him sheer through the crown,
And the last words that greet his dim consciousness ring
With “Death, death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!”

Having cleared all the streets, not an enemy left
Whose heart was unpierced, or whose headpiece uncleft,
What should we do next, but—as careless and calm
As if we were scenting a summer morn's balm
'Mid a land of pure peace—just serenely drop down
On the few constant friends who still stopped in the town.
What a welcome they gave us! One dear little thing,
As I kissed her sweet lips, did I dream of the King?—

Of the King or his minions? No; war and its scars
Seemed as distant just then as the fierce front of Mars
From a love-girdled earth; but, alack! on our bliss,
On the close clasp of arms and kiss showering on kiss,
Broke the rude bruit of battle, the rush thick and fast
Of the Britons made 'ware of our rash ruse at last;
So we haste to our coursers, yet flying, we fling
The old watch-words abroad, “Down with Redcoats and King!”

273

As we scampered pell-mell o'er the hard-beaten track
We had traversed that morn, we glanced momently back,
And beheld their long earth-works all compassed in flame:
With a vile plunge and hiss the huge musket-balls came,
And the soil was ploughed up, and the space 'twixt the trees
Seemed to hum with the war-song of Brobdingnag bees;
Yet above them, beyond them, victoriously ring
The shouts, “Death to the Redcoats, and down with the King!

Ah! that was a feat, lads, to boast of! What men
Like you weaklings to-day had durst cope with us then?
Though I say it who should not, I am ready to vow
I'd o'ermatch a half score of your fops even now—
The poor puny prigs, mincing up, mincing down,
Through the whole wasted day the thronged streets of the town:
Why, their dainty white necks 'twere but pastime to wring—
Ay! my muscles are firm still; I fought 'gainst the King!

Dare you doubt it? well, give me the weightiest of all
The sheathed sabres that hang there, unlooped on the wall;
Hurl the scabbard aside; yield the blade to my clasp;
Do you see, with one hand how I poise it and grasp
The rough iron-bound hilt? With this long hissing sweep
I have smitten full many a foeman with sleep—
That forlorn, final sleep! God! what memories cling
To those gallant old times when we fought 'gainst the King.

Macdonald owned a magnificent horse, named Selim, of pure Arabian blood, which he obtained possession of through a cunning trick played at the expense of a certain wealthy Carolina Tory.

274

THE BATTLE OF KING'S MOUNTAIN.

[_]

Supposed to have been narrated by an aged volunteer, who had taken part in the fight, to certain of his friends and neighbors, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict, viz. Oct. 7, 1830.

[Written for the Centennial Celebration of the battle on Oct. 7, 1880.]

Ofttimes an old man's yesterdays o'er his frail vision pass,
Dim as the twilight tints that touch a dusk-enshrouded glass;
But, ah! youth's time and manhood's prime but grow more brave, more bright,
As still the lengthening shadows steal toward the rayless night.

So deem it not a marvel, friends, if, gathering fair and fast,
I now behold the gallant forms that graced our glorious past,
And down the winds of memory hear those battle bugles blow,
Of strifeful breath, or wails of death, just fifty years ago.

Yes, fifty years this self-same morn, and yet to me it seems
As if time's interval were spanned by a vague bridge of dreams,
Whose cloud-like arches form and fade, then form and fade again,
Until a beardless youth once more, 'mid stern, thick-bearded men,

I ride on Rhoderic's bounding back, all thrilled at heart to feel
My trusty “smooth-bore's” deadly round, and touch of stainless steel—
And quivering with heroic rage—that rush of patriot ire
Which makes our lives from head to heel, one seething flood of fire.

There are some wrongs so blackly base, the tiger strain that runs,
And sometimes maddens thro' the veins, of Adam's fallen sons,
Must mount and mount to furious height, which only blood can quell,
Who smite with hellish hate must look for hate as hot from hell!

And hide it as we may with words, its awful need confessed,
War is a death's-head thinly veiled, even warfare at its best;
But we—heaven help us!—strove with those by lust and greed accurst,
And learned what untold horrors wait on warfare at its worst.

You well may deem my soul in youth dwelt not on thoughts like these;
Timed to strong Rhoderic's tramp my pulse grew tuneful as the breeze,
The hale October breeze, whose voice, borne from far ocean's marge,
Pealed with the trumpet's resonance, which sounds “To horse, and charge!”

A mist from recent rains was spread about the glimmering hills;
Far off, far off, we heard the lapse of streams and swollen rills,
While mingling with them, or beyond, from depths of changeful sky,
Rose savage, sullen, dissonant, the eagle's famished cry.

We marched in four firm columns, nine hundred men and more,
Men of the mountain fortresses, men of the sea-girt shore;

275

Rough as their centuried oaks were these, those fierce as ocean's shocks,
When mad September breaks her heart across the Hatteras rocks.

We marched in four firm columns, till now the evening light
Glinted through rifting cloud and fog athwart the embattled height,
Whereon, deep-lined, in dense array of scarlet, buff or dun,
The haughtiest British “regulars” outflashed the doubtful sun.

Horsemen and footmen centred there, unflinching rank on rank,
And the base Tories circled near, to guard each threatened flank;
But, pale, determined, sternly calm, our men, dismounting, stood,
And at their leader's cautious sign, crouched in the sheltering wood.

What scenes come back of ruin and wrack, before those ranks abhorred!
The cottage floor all fouled with gore, the axe, the brand, the cord;
A hundred craven deeds revived, of insult, injury, shame—
Deeds earth nor wave nor fire could hide, and crimes without a name.

Such thoughts but hardened soul and hand. Ha! “dour as death” were we,
Waiting to catch the voice which set our unleashed passion free.
At last it came deep, ominous, when all the mountain ways
Burst from awed silence into sound, and every bush ablaze,

Sent forth long jets of wavering blue, wherefrom, with fatal dart,
The red-hot Deckhard bullets flew, each hungering for a heart;
And swift as if our fingers held strange magic at their tips,
Our guns, reloaded, spake again from their death-dealing lips,

Again, again, and yet again, till in a moment's hush,
We heard the order, “Bay'nets charge!” when, with o'ermastering rush,
Their “regulars” against us stormed, so strong, so swift of pace,
They hurled us backward bodily for full three furlongs' space.

But, bless you, lads, we scattered, dodged, and when the charge was o'er,
Felt fiercer, pluckier, madder far, than e'er we had felt before;
From guardian tree to tree we crept, while upward, with proud tramp,
The British lines had slowly wheeled to gain their 'leaguered camp.

Too late; for ere they topped the height, Hambright and Williams strode
With all their armèd foresters, across the foeman's road,
What time from right to left there rang the Indian war-whoop wild,
Where Sevier's tall Waturga boys through the dim dells defiled.

“Now, by God's grace.” cried Cleaveland (my noble colonel he)
Resting (to pick a Tory off) quite coolly on his knee—
“Now, by God's grace, we have them! the snare is subtly set;
The game is bagged; we hold them safe as pheasants in a net.”

276

And thus it proved; for galled and pressed more closely hour by hour,
Their army shrank and withered fast, like a storm-smitten flower;
Blank-eyed, wan-browed, their bravest lay along the ensanguined land,
While of the living, few had 'scaped the bite of ball or brand.

Yet sturdier knave than Ferguson ne'er ruled a desperate fray:
By heaven! you should have seen him ride, rally, and rave that day.
His fleet horse scoured the stormy ground from rock-bound wall to wall,
And o'er the rout shrilled wildly out his silvery signal call.

“That man must die before they fly, or yield to us the field.”
Thus spake I to three comrades true beneath our oak-tree shield;
And when in furious haste again the scarlet soldiers came
Beside our fastness like a fiend, hurtling through dust and flame,

Their sharp demurrers on the wind our steadfast rifles hurled,
And one bold life was stricken then from out the living world.
But, almost sped, he reared his head, grasping his silver call,
And one long blast, the faintest, last, wailed round the mountain wall.

Ah, then the white flags fluttered high; then shrieks and curses poured
From the hot throats of Tory hounds beneath the avenger's sword—
Those lawless brutes who long had lost all claims of Christian men,
Whereof by sunset we had hanged the worst and vilest ten.

We slept upon the field that night, 'midmost our captured store,
That seemed in gloating eyes to spread and heighten more and more.
Truly the viands ravished us; our clamorous stomachs turned
Eager toward the provender for which they sorely yearned.

Apicius! what a feast was there blended of strong and sweet,
Cured venison hams, Falstaffian pies, and fat pigs' pickled feet:
While here and there, with cunning leer, and sly Silenus wink,
A stoutish demijohn peered out, and seemed to gurgle, “Drink!”

Be sure we revelled merrily, till eyes and faces shone;
Our lowliest felt more lifted up than any king on throne;
Our singers trolled; our jesters' tongues were neither stiff nor dumb;
And, by Lord Bacchus! how we quaffed that old Jamaica rum!

Perchance (oh, still, through good and ill, his honest name I bless!)—
Perchance my brother marked in me some symptoms of excess;
For gently on my head he laid his stalwart hand and true,
And gently led me forth below the eternal tent of blue;

He led me to a dewy nook, a soft, sweet, tranquil place,
And there I saw, upturned and pale, how many a pulseless face!

277

Our comrades dead—they scarce seemed fled, despite their ghastly scars.
But wrapped in deep, pure folds of sleep beneath the undying stars.

My blood was calmed; all being grew exalted as the night,
Whence solemn thoughts sailed weirdly down, like heavenly swans of white,
With herald strains ineffable, whose billowy organ-roll—
Thrilled to the loftiest mountain peaks and summits of my soul.

Then voices rose (or seemed to rise) close to the raptured ear,
Yet fraught with music marvellous of some transcendent sphere,
While fancy whispered: These are tones of heroes, saved and shriven,
Who long have swept the harps of God by stormless seas in heaven!

Heroes who fought for right and law, but, purged from selfish dross,
Above whose conquering banners waved a shadowy Christian cross:
Whose mightiest deed no ruthless greed had smirched with sad mistrust,
And whose majestic honors scorn all taint of earthly dust.

Doubt, doubt who may! but, as I live, on the calm mountain height
Those voices soared, and sank, and soared up to the mystic night.
A dream! perhaps; but, ah! such dreams in ardent years of youth
Transcend, as heaven transcends the earth, your sordid daylight truth.

The voices soared, and sank, and soared, till, past the cloud-built bars,
They fainted on the utmost strand and silvery surge of stars.
Then something spoke: Your friends who strove the battle tide to stem,
Who died in striving, have passed up beyond the stars with them.

What, lads! you think the old man crazed to talk in this high strain,
Or deem the punch of years gone by still buzzes in his brain?
Down with such carnal fantasy! nor let your folly send
Its blunted shafts to smite the truth you may not comprehend.

Would ye be worthy of your sires who on King's Mountain side
Welcomed dark death for freedom's sake as bridegrooms clasp a bride?
Then must your faith be winged above the world, the worm, the clod,
To own the veiled infinitudes and plumbless depths of God!

The roughest rider of my day shrank from the atheist's sneer,
As if Iscariot's self were crouched and whispering at his ear;
The stormiest souls that ever led our mountain forays wild
Would ofttimes show the trust, the credence, of a child.

True faith goes hand in hand with power—faith in a holier charm
Than fires the subtlest mortal brain, the mightiest mortal arm;
And though 'tis right in stress of fight “to keep one's powder dry,”
What strength to feel, beyond our steel, burns the great Captain's eye!

278

THE HANGING OF BLACK CUDJO.

A DIALECT BALLAD.

(1780.)

[_]

The incidents of this Ballad are literally true. Our readers will find them circumstantially recorded in Horry's “Life of Marion.” Captain Snipes (Phoebus! what a name) was a notable patriot during the Revolutionary war, but is likely to be known to the future, rather as the master of Cudjo, than as an active member of a Partisan Band.

He resided in the low country of South Carolina; and Cudjo's quaint patois is an exact representation of the broken English spoken by the slaves of that section in the ante bellum times:

“Well, Maussa! if you wants to heer, I'll tell you 'bout um 'true.
Doh de berry taut ob dat bad time is fit to tun me blue;
A sort ob brimstone blue on black, wid jist a stare o' wite,
As when dem cussed Tory come fur wuck deir hate dat nite!

“Mass Tom and me was born, I tink, 'bout de same year and day,
And we was boys togedder, Boss! in ebbery sport and play—
Ole missis gib me to Mass Tom wid her las' failin bret:
Aud so I boun'—in conscience boun', fur stick to him till det.

“At las' ole Maussa, he teck sick wid chill and feber high,
And de good Dokter shake 'e head, and say he surfur die,
And so true 'nuff de sickness bun' and freeze out all he life,
And soon ole Maussa sleep in peace long side e' fateful wife.

“Den ebbery ting de lan' could show, de crap, de hoss, de cows.
Wid all dem nigger in de fiel', and all dem in de house,
Dey b'long to my Mass Tom fur true, and so dat berry year,
He pick me out from all de folks to meck me Obersheer!

“I done my bes', but niggars, sir—dey seems a lazy pack,
One buckra man will do mo' wuck dan five and twenty black,
I jeered dem and I wolloped dem, and cussed dem too—but law!
De Debble self could nebber keep dem rascal up to tau!

“But still we done as good as mose, wid cotton, rice and corn,
Till in de year dat ‘Nuttin' tall’ (my oldest chile) was born,
De Tory war, de bloody war, 'bout which you've heerd dem tell,
Come down on all de country yeh, as black and hot as hell!

“Mass Tom he jine de Whig, you know; in course I follow him,
And Gor' a mighty! how he slash dem Tory limb from limb,
When fust I heer the war-cry shout and see de flow ob blood'—
I long fur hide this woolly head like cootah in de mud!

279

“But Lawd! I soon git n'used to blood, de broadswed and de strife,
And nebber care a pig tail eend fur 'tudder folks's life;
Only, I heerd my Maussa yell thro' all dem battle-call,
And sneaked dis big fat karkiss up betwixt him and de ball!

“Well, sir! one day Mass Tom come home, 'e close and hoss blood red,
And say sense all dem Tory kill, he gwine dat once to bed;
‘I needs a long fine snooze,’ sez he, ‘so don't you wake me soon,
‘But Cudjo! let me snore oncalled till late to-morrow noon!’;

“Somehow, my mine misgib me dem; so by de kitchin light,
I sot and smoked, with open ears, a listenen' true de nite:
And when de fus cock crow, I heer a fur soun, down de road,
And knowed ‘um fur de hosses’ trot, and de clash ob spur and sword:

“Quick I run outside in de yad, and quick outside de gate—,
And there I see de Tory come as fas' and sho' as fate;
I run back to my Maussa room, and den wid pull and push
I shub 'um by de side way out, and hide 'um in de bush!

“He only hab he nite shut on, and how he rabe and cuss!
‘But Maussa! hush,’ sez I, ‘before you meck dis matter wuss;’
I tun to fin' some hidin' too, but de moon shine bright as sun,
And de d---d Tory ride so swif', dey ketch me on de run.

“Den, dey all screech togedder, loud, ‘Boy, is your Boss widin?
‘Say where he hide, or by de Lawd! your life not wut a pin!’
I trembled at dese horrid tret, but sweer my Boss was fled,
Yet when, or where, poor Cudjo knowed no better dan de dead.

“One Tory debble teck my head, another teck my foot
To drag me like a Christmass hog to de ole oak tree root;
Dey fling a tick rope roun' my neck, dey drawed me quick and high,
I seed a tousan' million star a-flashin' from de sky.

“And den I choke, and all de blood keep rushin' to my head
I tried to yell, but only groaned, and guggled low enstead;
Till ebbery ting growed black as nite, and my last taut was, sho,
Dis nigger is a gone coon now, he'll see de wuld no mo'!

“But, Boss! I was a hale man den, and tough as tough could be;
Dey loose de rope and let me down quite safely from de tree;
But when I seed and heered agen, come de same furious cry,
‘Say where your Maussa hide, you dog, quick, quick, or else you die!’

“I gib dem de same answer still, and so, dey hang me higher;
I feel de same hot chokin' sob; see de same starry fire;
Dey heng me twice, tree time dey heng; but de good Lawd was dere,
And Jesus self, he bring me safe from all de pain and fear.

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“Mose dead dey lef' me, stiff and cole, stretched on de swashy groun'
While all de house, big house and small, was blazin', fallin' roun'.
When pore Mass Tom from out de briar creep in he half-torn shut,
To bless and ring me by bote han' dere in de damp and dut!

“And when de war was ober, Boss, Mass Tom, he come to me,
And say, I sabe he life dat time, and so he meck me free;
‘I'll gib you house and lan’ (sez he,) ‘and wid dem plough and mule,’
I tenk him kind, ‘but Boss,’ (says I,) ‘wha’ meck you tink me fool?’

“‘If you, Mass Tom, was like,” (sez I,) some buckra dat I know,
Cudjo bin run and hug de swamp—Lawd bless you!—long ago,
But I got all ting dat I want, wid not one tax to pay;
Now go long, Maussa! why you wish for dribe ole Cuj away?

“‘I nebber see free nigger yet, but what he lie and steal,
Lie to 'e boss, 'e wife, 'e chile, in de cabin, and de fiel'—
And as for tieffin', dem free cuss is all like ‘lightfoot Jack,’
Who carry de lass blanket off from he sick mudder back!

“‘I stays wid you, (sez I again,) I meck de nigger wuck,
I wuck myself, and may be, Boss, we'll bring back de ole luck;
But don't you pizen me no more wid talk ob “freedom sweet,”
But sabe dat gab to stuff de years of de next fool you meet!’”

The negro is a humorous creature. We have credibly heard of a negro father whose son being abnormally small, at birth, coolly had the ebony youngster christened, “Nuttin' Tall (Nothing at all). We have borrowed so characteristic a name, and bestowed it upon Cudjo's supposititious “son and heir.”

This is the single touch of fancy in the whole ballad.

CHARLESTON RETAKEN.

Dec. 14, 1782.

As some half-vanquished lion,
Who long hath kept at bay
A band of sturdy foresters
Barring his blood-stained way—
Sore-smitten, weak and wounded—
Glares forth on either hand;
Then, cowed with fear, his cavernous lair
Seeks in the mountain land:

So when their stern Cornwallis,
On Yorktown heights resigned,
His sword to our great leader,
Of the stalwart arm and mind—
So when both fleet and army
At one grand stroke went down
And Freedom's heart beat high once more
In hamlet, camp and town;—

Through wasted Carolina,
Where'er from plain to hill
The Briton's guarded fortresses
Uprose defiant still,
Passed a keen shock of terror,
And the breasts of war-steeled men
Quailed in the sudden blast of doom
That smote their spirits then.

“Our cause is lost!” they muttered,
Pale browed, with trembling lips;
“Our strength is sapped, our hope o'erwhelmed,
In final, fierce eclipse;
And what to us remaineth
But to blow our earthworks high,
And hurl our useless batteries
In wild fire to the sky?”

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'Twas done! each deadly fastness
In flaming fragments driven
Farther than e'er their souls could climb
Along the path to heaven—
Coastward the Britons hurried,
In reckless throngs that flee
Wild as December's scattered clouds
Storm-whirled toward the sea.

In Charleston streets they gathered,
Each dazed wiseacre's head
Wagging, perchance in prophecy,
Or more perchance in dread.
Horsemen and footmen mingled,
They talked with bated breath
Of the shameful fate that stormed the gate,
Of wrack, and strife, and death!

Meanwhile our squadrons hastened,
Keen as a sleuth-hound pack
That near their destined quarry
By some drear wild-wood track,
Ah, Christ! what desolation
Before us grimly frowned!
The roadways trenched and furrowed,
The gore-ensanguined ground,
With many a mark (oh! deep and dark!)
Made ghastlier by the star-white frost,
'Twixt broken close and thorn-hedgerow,
Of desperate charge and mortal blow
In conflicts won or lost!

Proud manors once the centre
Of jubilant life and mirth,
Now silent as the sepulchre,
Begirt by ruin and dearth;
Their broad domains all blackened
With taint of fire and smoke,
And corpses vile with a death's-head smile,
Swung high on the gnarlèd oak.

No sportive flocks in the pasture,
No aftermath on the lea;
No laugh of the slaves at labors
No chant of birds on the tree;
But all things bodeful, dreary,
As a realm by the Stygian flood,
With odors of death on the uplands,
And a taste in the air of blood!

On, on our squadrons hastened,
Sick with the noisome fumes
From man and beast unburied,
Through the dull funeral gloom

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Till in unsullied sunshine
One glorious morn we came
Where far aloof, o'er tower and roof,
We viewed our brave St. Michael's spire
Flushed in the noontide flame!

Without their ruined ramparts,
Beyond their shattered lines,
Just where the soil, bent seaward,
In one long slope declines,
The foe had sent their messengers,
Who vowed the vanquished host
Would leave unscathed our city,
Would leave unscathed our coast!

Only due time they prayed for
(Meek, meek our lords had grown)
To range their broken legions,
And rear ranks overthrown—
So that, though smirched and tainted
Their martial fame might be,
In order meet their stately fleet
Should bear them safe to sea.

Who win, may well be gracious;
We did not stint their boon,
Though the white 'kerchiefs of our wives
Were fluttered in the noon,
On house-top and on parapet
Each token fair and far
Shone through the golden atmosphere
Like some enchanted star!

Next morn their signal-cannon
Roared from the vanward wall,
And to the ranks right gleefully
We gathered, one and all,
Our banners scarred in many a fight,
Could still flash back the winter light,
And proud as knights of old renown,
With sunburnt hands and faces brown,

Borne through the joyous, deepening hum,
'Mid ring of fife and beat of drum,
'Mid purpling silk and flowery arch,
Our long, unwavering columns march;
And yet (good sooth!) we almost seem
Like weird battalions of a dream;
Our souls bewildered scarce can deem
We tread once more,
Released, secure,
With fetterless footsteps as of yore,
The pathways of the ancient town!

And still, as borne through dreamland,
We glanced from side to side,
While mothers, wives and daughters rushed
To greet us, tender-eyed;
Each hoary patriot proudly
Lifted his brave, gray head,
And the forms of careworn captives rose
Like spectres from the dead—

Like spectres whom the trumpets
Of freedom's cohorts call
To burst their grave-like dungeon,
And spurn their despot's thrall;
To take once more the image
Of manhood's loftier grace,
And, chainless now, the universe
Look boldly in the face!

And the young girls scattered flowers,
And the lovely dames were bright
With something more than beauty,
In their faithful hearts' delight;
The very babes were crowing
Shrill welcome to our bands,
And, perched on matron shoulders, clapped
Blithely their dimpled hands:

And naught but benedictions
Lightened that sacred air,
Freed from the awful burden
Of two long years' despair—
Two years so thronged with anguish,
So fraught with bitter wrong,
They seemed in mournful retrospect
Well nigh a century long.

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But if years of mortal being
Trebled threescore and ten,
At the last, our souls exultant,
Would recall that scene again,
With its soft “God bless you, gentlemen?”
Its greetings warm and true,
And the tears of bliss our lips did kiss
From dear eyes black or blue.

Nathless, despite our rapture,
Down to the harbor-mouth
We dogged the Britons doomed to fly
Forever from our South!
They left as some foul vulture
Might leave his mangled prey,
And pass with clotted beak and wing
Reluctantly away.

Three hundred noble vessels
Rose on the rising flood.
Wherein with sullen apathy
Embarked those men of blood;
Then streamed their admiral's pennant—
The northwest breeze blew free;
With sloping mast, and current fast,
Out swept their fleet to sea.

We strained our vision waveward,
Watching the white-winged ships,
Till the vague clouds of distance
Wrapped them in half eclipse:
And still we strained our vision
Till, dimmer and more dim,
The rearmost sail, a phantom pale,
Died down the horizon's rim.

Thus, o'er the soul's horizon,
Did thoughts of blood and war,
Through time's enchanted distances
Receding, fade afar,
Thus o'er the soul's horizon,
Our strife's last ghastly fear,
Like all the rest, down memory's west
Did slowly disappear.

The precise period of the British occupation of Charleston was two years, seven months and two days.

TO THE AUTHOR OF “THE VICTORIAN POETS.”

So keen, so clear thy genius, that no mist
Of subtlest phrase can baffle or delay
The lance-like, swift illuminating ray,
Wherewith, O art-enamored annalist,
Thy lightning logic cleaves the elusive gist
Of thoughts Protean; or, in lowlier play,
Smites tinselled weakness to a red dismay—
As swordsmen smite by one deft turn of wrist.
Yet oft that glittering and remorseless blade
Thy logic wields is dropped that thou may'st take
Some gracious lyre, and sing with liquid breath
By many a haunted dell and shadowy lake,
Where faun and naiad wander undismayed,
Lays of Arcadian love, or painless death.

HERA.

(IN THE HERAEUM.)

Once between Argos and Mycaenæ shone
Half-veiled in myrtle and mysterious pine,
The ivory splendors of that holy shrine,
Wherein embowered, majestic, and alone
Her sculptured brow with wavering locks o'erblown,
As if by airs ethereal and divine,
Smiled the calm goddess of Olympian line,
Girt by awed silence, like a sacred zone:

Save that mild murmurings sounding vague and far,
From suppliant women—through frail-hearted dread
Touched the shy pulses of that strange repose,
Till the last petal dropped from sunset's rose,

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And gleamed through twilight, like a flawless star,
The chastened glory of proud Hera's head!

BELOW AND ABOVE.

I see in the forest coverts
The sheen of shimmering lights;
They gleam from the dusky shadows,
They flash from the ghostly heights:

No lights of the tranquil homestead
Or the hostel warm are they;
But warring flames of the Titan fire
Which stormed through the woods today.

Each darts with an aimless passion,
Or sinks into lurid rest
Like the crest of a wounded serpent drooped
On the scales of its treacherous breast.

Let them idly dart and quiver,
Or sink into lurid rest—
Above, like a child-saint's face in heaven,
There's a sole, sweet star in the west.

Ah! slowly the earth-lights wither;
But the star, like a saintly face,
Shines on, with the steadfast strength of peace,
In its God-appointed place.

THE WOODLAND GRAVE.

We roam, my love and I.
'Mid the rich woodland grasses,
Where, through dense clouds of greenery,
The softened sunshine passes;
But near a rivulet's lonely wave
We come half startled, on—a grave!

We pause, my love and I,
Each thinking, “Who reposes
Here, in the forest tranquilly,
Beneath these sylvan roses?”
When, 'twixt the wild flowers' tangled flame,
Wind-parted, we beheld—a name.

We mark, my love and I,
With thoughts that swiftly vary,
Of doubt, surprise, solemnity,
The flickering name of “Mary;”
My love's own name!—but flickering there,
Each letter burns a hint of fear.

We shrink, my love and I,
Pierced by prescient sorrow,
“To think, my sweet! that thou may'st die
To-night or else to-morrow!”
Each murmurs sadly, under breath:
“O love, malignly watched by death!”

We turn, my love and I,
From that strange grave together,
And o'er our spirits' darkened sky
Roll mists of mournful weather;
With boding grief our hearts are rife—
Death's shadow steals 'twixt love and life!

A CHARACTER.

“The most impenetrable mask for a malicious design is—well-acted candor.”—

From the French of De Larrimère.

Yes, madame, I know you better, far better than those can know
Whose plummet of judgment never is dropped to the depths below;

Whose test is a surface-seeming, the glitter of lights that gleam
With a moment's rainbow lustre on the shifting face of the stream.

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Because you have bold, blunt manners, because you can broadly smile,
With the devil's own art in veiling your infinite gulfs of guile,

There are some who bring you homage, who vow your nature is free
And frank as the life of summer, when fullest on land and sea:

And yet your soul is a charnel where many a ruined name
Rots, festering vile and loathsome in burial-shrouds of shame;

A sepulchre dark, that's crowded with ashes of old and young,
Dead fames you have foully poisoned with your pitiless serpent's tongue!

Beware! by the God above us, who parteth the false from true,
There's a curse in the future, somewhere—an ambushed curse for you.

It will burst from the wayside fiercely, when least you dream of a blow.
A tigerish fate in its fury, to rend, and to lay you low!

But ere it has sucked your heart's blood, and stifled your latest breath,
The thought of your victims, woman! will sharpen the sting of death!

LYRIC OF ACTION.

'Tis the part of a coward to brood
O'er the past that is withered and dead:
What though the heart's roses are ashes and dust?
What though the heart's music be fled?
Still shine the grand heavens o'erhead,
Whence the voice of an angel thrills clear on the soul,
“Gird about thee thine armor, press on to the goal!”

If the faults or the crimes of thy youth
Are a burden too heavy to bear,
What hope can rebloom on the desolate waste
Of a jealous and craven despair
Down, down with the fetters of fear!
In the strength of thy valor and manhood arise,
With the faith that illumes and the will that defies.

“Too late!” through God's infinite world,
From his throne to life's nethermost fires,
“Too late!” is a phantom that flies at the dawn
Of the soul that repents and aspires.
If pure thou hast made thy desires.
There's no height the strong wings of immortals may gain
Which in striving to reach thou shalt strive for in vain.

Then, up to the contest with fate,
Unbound by the past, which is dead!
What though the heart's roses are ashes and dust?
What though the heart's music be fled?
Still shine the fair heavens o'erhead;
And sublime as the seraph who rules in the sun
Beams the promise of joy when the conflict is won!

BY A GRAVE.

IN SPRING.

Ah, mother! canst thou feel her? ... spring has come!
Birds sing, brooks murmur, woods no more are dumb;

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And for each grief that vexed thine earthly hour,
Nature has kissed thy grave! and lo! .. a flower.

Here wails no nightingale against her thorn,
But like the incarnate soul of May-flushed morn,
The mocking-bird above thy splendor sings,
With rapturous throat, and upraised quivering wings;

Half drowsed between brief glooms and mellowed gleams,
The sun smiles gently, like a god in dreams;
His sacred light across thy place of rest,
Steals with the softness of a hand that blessed!

Thro' magic ministers of spring-tide grace,
Thy grave transfigured lifts a radiant face,
O'er which elusive golden shadows run,
A waft of wind-wrought dimples in the sun;

Ah! if thy soul, that loved all beauty here,
May yet look earthward from her holier sphere,
'Twill joy to mark, from even those heights august,
In what a mantle Nature wraps thy dust.

And still the brown bird rears of his poet-head,
And pours his matchless music o'er the dead,
'Till touched and wakened by the marvellous flow,
I seem to hear a thrilled heart throb below!

SEVERANCE.

Ah! who can tell how strong the tie
Which subtly binds us, heart to heart,
Till the dark master, Death, comes nigh,
To wrench our kindred lives apart?

Then, pondering on the sombre bed,
Where one we cherished dumbly lies,
With pulseless hands, low-smitten head,
And the wan droop of curtained eyes,

The torpor of the death-sleep cold,
The mystic quiet's awful spell,
Whose fathomless silence seems to hold
Such pathos of supreme farewell,

Our clouded spirits throb and reel,
As if some viewless power in air
Had driven a keen ethereal steel
Through quivering heart-depths of despair!

Paled is the dream of heavenly grace,
The jasper sea, the unwaning calms;
We can but mark that breathless face,
Those sightless orbs and folded palms!

A moment since, she softly spake,
Her soul looked forth still hale and clear;
Now, who her wondrous sleep can break?
And she! where hath she vanished,—where?

Ah, Christ! yon shape of ice-locked clay,
Yon fading image, frail and thin,
Touched, as we gaze, by swift decay,
Shrivelled without, and wan within,

What is it but an empty husk,
O'er which (at Death's mysterious kiss)
Freed Psyche soars from doubt and dusk
Beyond earth's crumbling chrysalis?

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Ay! “dust to dust!”—the soil she trod
Claims soon her outworn fleshly dress;
But her true life puts forth, with God,
Fresh blooms of everlastingness!

TWO GRAVES.

I.

It glooms forlornly 'mid wan ocean dunes,
A desolate grave-mound on a dreary lea,
Touched by sad splendors of gray-misted moons,
Or veiled by shivering spray-drifts from the sea.

There, all unmarked, the dim days come and go;
No tender hand renews its crumbling turf,
On which the o'erwearied sea-winds faintly blow,
Blent with far murmurings of the mournful surf.

Vaguely the uncompanioned hours flit by,
Wrapped in pale clouds that sometimes mutely weep
Some ghost of Lethe haunts that hollow sky,
Where even the doubtful noontides seem asleep,

Save when autumnal tempests fiercely rise,
Baring the harbor-mouth's black teeth of rocks,
And like a Maenad, with wild hair and eyes,
Raves from the North the infuriate Equinox.

II.

Here, peace divine, o'er glimmering grove and grass,
Hallows the sunshine in the noon's warm lull;
Ethereal shadows gently pause, or pass,
Flecking with gold the hill-slope beautiful.

This grave, all wreathed with flowers and glad with spring
Looks skyward like a half-veiled, museful eye,
Which answers subtly while the wood-birds sing
Heaven's smile of forecast immortality.

Can deathly dust pervade a spot so sweet?
Or hath the form it guarded stolen away,
And ere its hour of ransom, gone to meet
The unborn soul of Resurrection Day?

THE WORLD.

QUATRAINS.

The world is older than our earliest dates;
All thoughts, all feelings, all desires, all fates,
Were known and tested, long ere Adam's crime
Set the keen sword of flame at Eden-gates!

Billions of years on billions more have fled,
Since first love's kiss a maiden cheek turned red;
Since the first mother nursed her innocent babe—
The first wild mourner wept above his dead.

These ancient clods our vagrant feet displace,
May once have held the loftiest soul of grace;

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This dateless dust that dims our garden flowers,
May once have smiled—a beauteous woman's face!

Older than all man's wisdom and his dreams,
Older than all which is, than all which seems,
Our world rolls on, where wrapped in cloud-like fire,
Phantasmal, pale, her awful death-morn gleams!

THE MAY SKY.

O sky! O lucid sky of May!
O'er which the fleecy clouds have stolen,
In bands snow-white, and glimmering-gray,
Or heart-steeped in a lustre golden.

O sky! that tak'st a thousand moods,
Enshadowed now, and now out-beaming,
Swept by low winds like interludes
Of music 'twist soft spells of dreaming,

Type of the poet's soul thou art
In spring-time of his teeming fancies,
When heavenly glamours brim his heart,
And heavenly glory lights his glances;

As morning's dubious vapors form
In wavering lines and circlets tender,
Pure as an infant's brow, or warm
With tintings of a primrose splendor;

Thus o'er the poet's soul his thought
Pale first as mist-wreaths scarce created,
With fire-keen breaths of ardor fraught,
From radiance born, to beauty mated,

Takes shape like yonder cloud out-spanned
Above the murmurous woodland spaces,
Whose brightening rifts, methinks, are grand
With mystic lights and marvellous faces;

Or, merges in some fancy vain,
Yet rare beyond the worldling's measure;
Some delicate cloudlet of the brain
That melts far up its quivering azure!

A LYRICAL PICTURE.

COMPOSED NEAR THE SEA-COAST.

See! see!
How the shadows steal along,
Blending in a golden throng,
Softly, lovingly;
From each mossed and quaint tree-column,
Stretched toward the dimpling river,
How they quiver!
While in low, pathetic tone
Twilight's herald-breeze is blown
Down the sunset solemn!

Hear! hear!
Dropped from gray mists, circling high,
The sea-wending curlew's cry,
Strangely wild and drear;
Echoed by a voice that thrills us,
From the murmurous verge of ocean—
Voice that fills us
With a sense of mystery old,
And vague memories which enfold
Many a weird emotion.

Turn! turn!
From yon loftier cloud-land dun;
Mark what splendors of the sun
Westward throb and burn—
Burn as if some glorious angel
Blessed the air and land, and river
With his mute evangel:
All things own so rich a grace
That in Heaven's divine embrace
Earth seems clasped forever!

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LAMIA UNVEILED.

Her step is soft as a fay's footfall,
And her eyes are wonderful founts of blue;
But I've seen that small foot spurning hearts,
And the soul that burns so strangely through
Those orbs of blue,
O! is't a human soul at all?

I never have gazed on their cloudless light,
But there came a chill to my blood and brain,
And their ominous beauty hath struck me dumb
With a secret and nameless pain:
Ay, blood and brain
Grew cold as with spells of a witch's blight.

Is't true? Can it be that a mortal frame
Of the tenderest mould, of the fairest grace,
May hold but a serpent's soul in sooth?
That the white and red of the daintiest face
May mask the trace
Of subtle guile, that shall wake to flame

And smite with the sting of a poisoned jest,
Or the sudden flashing of deadly scorn,
If it be, I know that your Charmian there,
In her fragile grace, is a Lamia, born
To blight the morn
Of the passion that clings to her faithless breast!

Why, look! As we speak, she has turned her wiles
On the gilded wooer her eyes had sought,
While you were steeped in the roseate gulf
Of a sweet, voluptuous thought:
Some loves are bought,
And you'll yearn in vain for her 'wildering smiles.

From this night forth, until placid and meek,
(Oh! meek as a saint, as an angel bland!)
With a faint rose flushing her brow and cheek,
She whispers, “Adieu! I must give my hand,
At the heart's command.
Win a worthier love; you have only to seek!”

RACHEL.

INSCRIBED TO MRS. M. D., OF GEORGIA.

“A more desolate Rachel than she of old, because, although her children ‘are not,’ yet the fountain of her tears is sealed.”

The wan September moonbeams, struggling down
Through the gray clouds upon her desolate head,
The coldness of their muffled radiance shed
Faintly above her like a spectral crown:

So, glimmering ghostlike in the dreary light,
Recounting her strange sorrows o'er and o'er,
Her words rang hollow as far waves ashore
Rolled through the sombre void of windless night.

Nor in her mortal weakness could she win
Even brief redemption from the soul's eclipse.
She looked like suffering Patience, on whose lips
Cold fingers press to keep the wild grief in.

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Suddenly on the pathos and the woe
Of that sad vision broke the gleeful noise
From the near playground of blithe girls and boys,
Through shine and shadow hurrying to and fro.

A wearier shade the pallid face o'er-crossed;
She shivered, drooping; but through flowery bars
Of the rude trellis sought the distant stars,
Saying, low: “Where dwell in heaven my loved and lost?

Dear Christ, I thought, if soft and ruthful, thou
Still reign'st beyond us,—ah! assuage the pain
Of this worn soul, more laden than hers of Nain;
Ope thy deep heavens for one swift moment now;

And, while her very heart-throbs seem to cease
For rapture, let those hungering eyes behold
Her lost beloved transfigured in thy fold,
Crowned with the palm, walking the fields of peace!

THE SNOW-MESSENGERS.

Dedicated to John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with pen portraits of both.

The pine-trees lift their dark bewildered eyes—
Or so I deem—up to the clouded skies;
No breeze, no faintest breeze, is heard to blow:
In wizard silence falls the windless snow.

It falls in breezeless quiet, strangely still;
'Scapes the dulled pane, but loads the sheltering sill.
With curious hand the fleecy flakes I mould,
And draw them inward, rounded, from the cold.

The glittering ball that chills my fingertips
I hold a moment's space to loving lips;
For from the northward these pure snow-flakes came,
And to my touch their coldness thrills like flame.

Outbreathed from luminous memories nursed apart,
Deep in the veiled adytum of the heart,
The type of Norland dearth such snows may be:
They bring the soul of summer's warmth to me.

Beholding them, in magical light expands
The changeful charm that crowns the northern lands,
And a fair past I deemed a glory fled
Comes back, with happy sunshine round its head.

For Ariel fancy takes her airiest flights
To pass once more o'er Hampshire's mountain heights,
To view the flower-bright pastures bloom in grace
By many a lowering hill-side's swarthy base;

The fruitful farms, the enchanted vales, to view,
And the coy mountain lakes' transcendent blue,
Or flash of sea-waves up the thunderous dune,
With wan sails whitening in the midnight moon;

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The cataract front of storm, malignly rife
With deathless instincts of demoniac strife,
Or, in shy contrast, down a shaded dell,
The rivulet tinkling like an Alpine bell;

And many a cool, calm stretch of cultured lawn,
Touched by the freshness of the crystal dawn,
Sloped to the sea, whose laughing waters meet
About the unrobed virgin's rosy feet.

But, tireless fancy, stay the wing that roams,
And fold it last near northern hearts and homes.

These tropic veins still own their kindred heat,
And thoughts of thee, my cherished South, are sweet—
Mournfully sweet—and wed to memories vast,
High-hovering still o'er thy majestic past.

But a new epoch greets us; with it blends
The voice of ancient foes now changed to friends.
Ah! who would friendship's outstretched hand despise,
Or mock the kindling light in generous eyes?

So, 'neath the Quaker-poet's tranquil roof,
From all dull discords of the world aloof,
I sit once more, and measured converse hold
With him whose nobler thoughts are rhythmic gold;

See his deep brows half puckered in a knot
O'er some hard problem of our mortal lot,
Or a dream soft as May winds of the south
Waft a girl's sweetness round his firm-set mouth.

Or should he deem wrong threats the public weal,
Lo! the whole man seems girt with flashing steel;

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His glance a sword thrust, and his words of ire
Like thunder-tones from some old prophet's lyre.

Or by the hearth-stone when the day is done,
Mark, swiftly launched, a sudden shaft of fun;
The short quick laugh, the smartly smitten knees,
And all sure tokens of a mind at ease.

Discerning which, by some mysterious law,
Near to his seat two household favorites draw,
Till on her master's shoulders, sly and sleek,
Grimalkin, mounting, rubs his furrowed cheek;

While terrier Dick, denied all words to rail,
Snarls as he shakes a short protesting tail,
But with shrewd eyes says, plain as plain can be,
“Drop that sly cat. I'm worthier far than she.”

And he who loves all lowliest lives to please,
Conciliates soon his dumb Diogenes,
Who in return his garment nips with care,
And drags the poet out, to take the air.

God's innocent pensioners in the woodlands dim,
The fields and pastures, know and trust in him;
And in their love his lonely heart is blessed,
Our pure, hale-minded Cowper of the West!

[OMITTED]

The scene is changed; and now I stand again
By one, the cordial prince of kindly men,
Courtly yet natural, comrade meet for kings,
But fond of homeliest thoughts and homeliest things.

A poet too, in whose warm brain and breast
What birds of song have filled a golden nest,
Till in song's summer prime their wings unfurled,
Have made Arcadian half the listening world,

Around whose eve some radiant grace of morn
Smiles like the dew-light on a mountain thorn.
Blithely he bears Time's envious load today:
Ah! the green heart o'ertops the head of gray.

Alert as youth, with vivid, various talk
He wiles the way through grove and garden walk,
Fair flowers untrained, trees fraught with wedded doves,
Past the cool copse and willowy glade he loves.

Here gleams innocuous of a mirthful mood
Pulse like mild fire-flies down a dusky wood,
Or keener speech (his leonine head unbowed)
Speeds lightning-clear from thought's o'ershadowing cloud.

O deep blue eyes! O voice as woman's low!
O firm white hand, with kindliest warmth aglow!
O manly form, and frank, sweet, courteous mien,
Reflex of museful days and nights serene!

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Still are ye near me, vivid, actual still,
Here in my lonely fastness on the hill;
Nor can ye wane till cold my life-blood flows,
And fancy fades in feeling's last repose.

What! snowing yet? The landscape waxes pale;
Round the mute heaven there hangs a quivering veil,
Through whose frail woof like silent shuttles go
The glancing glamours of the glittering snow.

Yes, falling still, while fond remembrance stirs
In these wan-faced, unwonted messengers.
Dumb storm! outpour your arctic heart's desire!
Your flakes to me seem flushed with fairy fire!

TO ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.

Last of a stalwart time and race gone by,
That simple, stately, God-appointed band,
Who wrought alone to glorify their land,
With lives built high on truth's eternity,
While placemen plot, while flatterers fawn or lie,
And foul corruptions, wave on wave, expand,
I see thee rise, stainless of heart as hand,
O man of Roman thought and radiant eye!

Through thy frail form, there burn divinely strong
The antique virtues of a worthier day;
Thy soul is golden, if thy head be gray,
No years can work that lofty nature wrong;
They set to concords of ethereal song
A life grown holier on its heavenward way.

THE ENCHANTED MIRROR.

FROM THE PERSIAN.

What time o'er Persia ruled that upright Khan
Khosru the Good, in Shiraz lived a man,
A beggar-carle, to whose rough hands were given—
I know not how—a mirror clear as heaven
On beauteous, vernal mornings, and more bright
Than streamlets sparkling in midsummer's light;
And, strange to say, whoso should look therein,
Though uglier than a nightmare dream of sin,
Grew comely as the loveliest shapes we know;
The while—oh, wonder! a fair form and face
Caught straightway somewhat of celestial grace.

Where'er in twilight dusk, or noontide glow
With swift, firm pace or footstep sad and slow,
Where'er he walked through the broad land of palms,
Or yet his lips unclosed to plead for alms,
The beggar held his mystic treasure high
To glass the forms of those who passed him by;
And all who came within that marvel's range,
Paused spell-bound by the strangely-dazzling change;

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Lords, ladies, gazed! the prospect pleased them well;
“Ah, heavens!” they sighed, “how irresistible!”
E'en the coarse hag, foul, wrinkled, and unclean,
Beamed like a blushing virgin of sixteen.

Hearts are transformed with faces; outward beauty
Seems to make quick the inward sense of duty;
For none, of all the charmèd throng that pass
Revivified within the fairy glass,
But pours upon the beggar pence with praise,
Invoking on his head long, golden days,
And every joy that lights our mortal ways.

In vain!—the beggar sickened. While he lay
In death's cold shadow, prostrate and forlorn,
He bade his wife call to him, on a morn,
His only son: “Guard well when I am dead,”
Feebly, with fluttering breath, the old man said;
“This mystic glass, whereby great things are won—
Be shrewd, be watchful; do as I have done,
And thou shalt prosper likewise, O my son!”

He took the precious gift—that brainless wight—
But, scorning to employ its powers aright,
Returned all pale and penniless at night.

“Fool!” cried the angry father, “well I guess
Why thus thou seek'st me, pale and penniless:
O stupid dolt! vain peacock! arrant ass!
Thou hast watched all day thine own face in the glass;
Go to! this foolish fruit of idle pride
No human heart hath ever satisfied,
Far less an empty pocket lined with gold;
Thy coxcomb pate to base self-love is sold!
Yet hearken once again: he's only wise
Who dupes the world through flattery's mirrored lies;
But past all terms of scorn the insensate elf
Who holds its glass therein to view—himself!”

THE IMPRISONED SEA-WINDS.

Voices of strange sea breezes caught,
Half tangled in the pine-tree tall,
With ocean's tenderest music fraught,
Serenely rise, and sweetly fall.

They charm the lids of wearied eyes,
And all the dreamy senses bless
With breath of wave-born symphonies,
And balms of mild forgetfulness,

'Till o'er the fragrant calms of peace,
My soul, scarce moved, benignly glides,
Or in all sorrows' soft surcease,
Rocks trancèd on the phantom tides:

But still those faint sea voices speak,
Those prisoned sea winds rise and fall,
The ghost of sea foam sweeps my cheek,
And the sea's mystery sighs through all.

BLANCHE AND NELL.

A BALLAD.

Oh, Blanche is a city lady,
Bedecked in her silks and lace:
She walks with the mien of a stately queen,
And a queen's imperious grace.

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But Nell is a country maiden,
Her dress from the farmstead loom:
Her step is free as a breeze at sea,
And her face is a rose in bloom.

The house of Blanche is a marvel
Of marble from base to dome;
It hath all things fair, and costly and rare,
But alas! it is not—home!

Nell lives in a lonely cottage
On the shores of a wave-washed isle;
And the life she leads with its loving deeds
The angels behold and smile.

Blanche finds her palace a prison,
And oft, through the dreary years,
In her burdened breast there is sad unrest,
And her eyes are dimmed with tears.

But to Nell her toils are pastime,
(Though never till night they cease);
And her soul's afloat like a buoyant boat
On the crystal tides of peace.

Ah! Blanche hath many a lover,
But she broodeth o'er old regret;
The shy, sweet red from her cheek is fled
For the star of her heart has set.

Fair Nell! but a single lover
Hath she in the wide, wide world;
Yet warmly apart in her glowing heart
Love bides, with his pinions furled.

To Blanche all life seems shadowed,
And she but a ghost therein;
Thro' the misty gray of her autumn day
Steal voices of grief and sin.

To Nell all life is sunshine,
All earth like a fairy sod,
Where the roses grow, and the violets blow,
In the softest breath of God.

What meaneth this mighty contrast
Of lives that we meet and mark?
One bright as the flowers from May-tide showers,
One rayless, sombre, and dark?

O, folly of mortal wisdom,
That neither will break nor bow,
That riddle hath vexed the thought perplexed
Of millions of souls ere now!

O, folly of mortal wisdom!
From your guesses what good can come?
We can learn no more than the wise of yore;
'Tis better to trust, and—be dumb!

THE DARK.

A FANTASY.

The passionless twilight slowly fades
Beyond the gray, grim woodland glades,
Till now, with mournful eyes, I mark
The approaching dark:

A clouded spirit, borne from far,
Whose sombre front no delicate star
Brightens,—to tint with silvery light
Her realms of night:

An awful spirit! her pale lips
Low whispering down the drear eclipse,
Send thro' those rayless spaces chill
An ominous thrill:

Her tongue's strange language none may know;
We only feel it ebb and flow
In murmurs of half-muffled sighs,
And vague replies:

All hail! akin to me thou art,
Dim angel of the veilèd heart—
Ah! wrap me close, ah! fold me deep!
I fain would sleep!

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IN THE STUDIO.

You walk my studio's modest round,
With slowly supercilious air;
While in each lifted eyebrow lurks,
The keenness of an ambushed sneer.

You lift your glass, and scan the walls,
Between the pictures—with a glance
Which takes the curtained drapery in,
But views the art-work all askance:

A sigh! a shrug! and then you turn
Homeward—your judgment fixed as fate—
The labors of a life-time gauged,
Serenely in your shallow pate!

WASHINGTON!

Feb. 22, 1732.

Bright natal morn! what face appears
Beyond the rolling mist of years?—
A face whose loftiest traits combine
All virtues of a stainless line
Passed from leal sire to loyal son;
The face of him whose steadfast zeal
Drew harmonies of law and right
From chaos and anarchic night:
Who with a power serene as Fate's
Wrought from rude hordes of turbulent States
The grandeur of our commonweal:—
All hail! all hail! to Washington!

Freedom he wooed in such brave guise,
Men gazing in her luminous eyes
Beheld all heaven reflected shine
Far down those sapphire orbs divine:
And, worshipped her so chastely won;
If still she panted, fresh from strife,
And blood-stains flecked her garment's rim,
They could not make its whiteness dim;
For, shed by hearts sublimely true,
Such drops are changed to sacred dew.
The chrism of patriot light and life,—
Baptizing first our Washington.

For cloudless years, benignant still.
This Freedom worked her bounteous will;—
Mingling with homespun man and maid,
Her pale cheek caught a browner shade
In fields where harvest toils were done;
To theirs she tuned her rhythmic tongue
Veiling in part her goddess-mien:
The woman smiled above the queen;
While stationed always by her side,
Men saw—as bridegroom near his bride,
(O bride, forever fair and young!)—
Her chosen hero—Washington!

She wove for him a civic crown;
She made so pure his hale renown,
All glories of the antique days,
Waned in the clear, immaculate blaze
Poured from his nature's noontide sun;
No slave of folly's catchword school,
His instincts proud of blood and race
She tempered with sweet, human grace,
Till his broad being's rounded flow
Sea-like, embraced the high and low,
Swayed by the golden-sceptred rule,
The equal will of Washington.

His influence spread so wide and deep,
Earth's fettered millions stirred in sleep;
And murmurs born of wakening flame
On the wild winds of twilight came
From lands by despot-swarms o'errun;
They too would win the priceless boon
Of Freedom's dower;—they too would see,
And clasp the robes of Liberty;
But, throned within the virgin west,
She heard them not;—she loved to rest
In dew-lit dawn and tranquil noon,
Next the strong heart of Washington!

Through shower and sun the seasons rolled,
November's gray and April's gold;
They only raised (more calmly grand)
His genius of supreme command,

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Whose course, in blood and wrath begun,
Grew gentler, as the mellowing lights
Of peace made beauteous sky and sod;
His evening came;—he walked with God;
And down life's gradual sunset-slope,
He hearkened to a heavenly hope;—
“Look up! behold the fadeless heights
Which rise to greet thee,—Washington!”

He dies! the nations hold their breath!
He dies! but is he thrall to Death?—
Thousands who quaff earth's sunshine free,
Are less alive on earth than he;
Lacking that power which thrills through none
But God's elect, that wingèd spell
Which like miraculous lightning darts
Electric to all noble hearts;—
Flashed from his soul's sublimer sphere,
'Tis still a matchless influence here!
Majestic spirit! all is well,
Where'er thou rulest,—Washington!

IN AMBUSH.

The crescent moon, with pallid glow,
Swept backward like a bended bow:
Across, a shaft of phantom light
Thrilled, like an arrow winged for flight.

Just when that flickering shaft was aimed
Venus in mellow radiance flamed,
Unmindful of the treacherous dart
Which seemed upreared to pierce her heart;

For, fain to smite her through and through,
Dian lay ambushed in the blue:
Half veiled from sight, still, still below,
She aimed her shaft, she clasped her bow.

For ever thus, since time was born,
Cold virtue points her shaft of scorn
At passionate love, in whose warm beam
Her own but seems a crescent dream.

SOUTH CAROLINA TO THE STATES OF THE NORTH.

ESPECIALLY TO THOSE THAT FORMED A PART OF THE ORIGINAL THIRTEEN.

Dedicated to His Excellency, Wade Hampton.

I lift these hands with iron fetters banded:
Beneath the scornful sunlight and cold stars
I rear my once imperial forehead branded
By alien shame's immedicable scars;
Like some pale captive, shunned by all the nations,
I crouch unpitied, quivering and apart—
Laden with countless woes and desolations,
The life-blood freezing round a broken heart!

About my feet, splashed red with blood of slaughters,
My children gathering in wild, mournful throngs;
Despairing sons, frail infants, stricken daughters,
Rehearse the awful burden of their wrongs;
Vain is their cry, and worse than vain their pleading:

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I turn from stormy breasts, from yearning eyes,
To mark where Freedom's outraged form receding,
Wanes in chill shadow down the midnight skies!

I wooed her once in wild tempestuous places,
The purple vintage of my soul outpoured,
To win and keep her unrestrained embraces,
What time the olive-crown o'ertopped the sword;
O! northmen, with your gallant heroes blending,
Mine, in old years, for this sweet goddess died;
But now—ah! shame, all other shame transcending!
Your pitiless hands have torn her from my side.

What! 'tis a tyrant-party's treacherous action—
Your hand is clean, your conscience clear, ye sigh;
Ay! but ere now your sires had throttled faction,
Or, pealed o'er half the world their battle-cry;
Its voice outrung from solemn mountain-passes
Swept by wild storm-winds of the Atlantic strand,
To where the swart Sierras' sullen grasses,
Droop in low languors of the sunset-land!

Never, since earthly States began their story,
Hath any suffered, bided, borne like me:
At last, recalling all mine ancient glory,
I vowed my fettered commonwealth to free:
Even at the thought, beside the prostrate column
Of chartered rights, which blasted lay and dim—
Uprose my noblest son with purpose solemn,
While, host on host, his brethren followed him:

Wrong, grasped by truth, arraigned by law, (whose sober
Majestic mandates rule o'er change and time)—
Smit by the ballot, like some flushed October,
Reeled in the autumn rankness of his crime;
Struck, tortured, pierced—but not a blow returning.
The steadfast phalanx of my honored braves
Planted their bloodless flag where sunrise burning,
Flashed a new splendor o'er our martyrs' graves!

What then? O, sister States! what welcome omen
Of love and concord crossed our brightening blue,
The foes we vanquished, are they not your foemen,
Our laws upheld, your sacred safeguards, too?
Yet scarce had victory crowned our grand endeavor,
And peace crept out from shadowy glooms remote—
Than—as if bared to blast all hope forever,
Your tyrant's sword shone glittering at my throat!

Once more my bursting chains were reunited,
Once more barbarian plaudits wildly rung
O'er the last promise of deliverance blighted,

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The prostrate purpose, and the palsied tongue:
Ah! faithless sisters, 'neath my swift undoing,
Peers the black presage of your wrath to come;
Above your heads are signal clouds of ruin,
Whose lightnings flash, whose thunders are not dumb!

There towers a judgment-seat beyond our seeing;
There lives a Judge, whom none can bribe or blind;
Before whose dread decree, your spirit fleeing,
May reap the whirlwind, having sown the wind:
I, on that day of justice, fierce and torrid,
When blood—your blood—outpours like poisoned wine,
Pointing to these chained limbs, this blasted forehead,
May mock your ruin, as ye mocked at mine!

This Poem was composed at a period when it seemed as if all the horrors of misgovernment, so graphically depicted by Pike in his “Prostrate State,” would be perpetuated in South Carolina.

It was a significant and terrible epoch; a time American statesmen would do well to remember occasionally as a warning against patchwork political re-constructions.

THE STRICKEN SOUTH TO THE NORTH.

[Dedicated to Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

“We are thinking a great deal about the poor fever-stricken cities of the South, and all contributing according to our means for their relief. Every morning as the paper comes, the first question is ‘What is the last account from Memphis, Grenada, and New Orleans.’”

—Extract from a private letter of Dr. Holmes.

When ruthful time the South's memorial places—
Her heroes' graves—had wreathed in grass and flowers;
When Peace ethereal, crowned by all her graces,
Had turned to make more bright the summer hours;
When doubtful hearts revived, and hopes grew stronger;
When old sore-cankering wounds that pierced and stung,
Throbbed with their first, mad, feverous pain no longer,
While the fair future spake with flattering tongue;
When once, once more she felt her pulses beating
To rhythms of healthful joy and brave desire;
Lo! round her doomed horizon darkly meeting,
A pall of blood-red vapors veined with fire!

O! ghastly portent of fast-coming sorrows!
Of doom that blasts the blood and blights the breath,
Robs youth and manhood of all golden morrows—
And life's clear goblet brims with wine of death!—
O! swift fulfillment of this portent dreary!
O! nightmare rule of ruin, racked by fears,
Heartbroken wail, and solemn miserere,
Imperious anguish, and soul-melting tears!
O! faith, thrust downward from celestial splendors,
O! love grief-bound, with palely-murmurous mouth!
O! agonized by life's supreme surrenders—
Behold her now—the scourged and suffering South!

No balm in Gilead? nay, but while her forehead
Pallid and drooping, lies in foulest dust,
There steals across the desolate spaces torrid,
A voice of manful cheer and heavenly trust,
A hand redeeming breaks the frozen starkness
Of palsied nerve, and dull, despondent brain;

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Rolls back the curtain of malignant darkness,
And shows the eternal blue of heaven again—
Revealing there, o'er worlds convulsed and shaken,
That face whose mystic tenderness enticed
To hope new-born earth's lost bereaved, forsaken!
Ah! still beyond the tempest smiles the Christ!

Whose voice? Whose hand? Oh, thanks, divinest Master,
Thanks for those grand emotions which impart
Grace to the North to feel the South's disaster,
The South to bow with touched and cordial heart!
Now, now at last the links which war had broken
Are welded fast, at mercy's charmed commands;
Now, now at last the magic words are spoken
Which blend in one two long-divided lands!
O North! you came with warrior strife and clangor;
You left our South one gory burial ground;
But love, more potent than your haughtiest anger,
Subdues the souls which hate could only wound!

THE RETURN OF PEACE.

[_]

[Written by request of the committee of arrangements, for the opening ceremonies of the International Cotton Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia, Oct. 5, 1881.

I had a vision at that mystic hour,
When in the ebon garden of the Night,
Blooms the Cimmerian flower
Of doubt and darkness, cowering from the light.
I seemed to stand on a vast lonely height,
Above a city ravished and o'erthrown
The air about me one long lingering moan
Of lamentation like a dreary sea
Scourged by the storm to murmurous weariness;
Then, from dim levels of mist-folded ground
Borne upward suddenly.
Burst the deep-rolling stress
Of jubilant drums, blent with the silvery sound
Of long-drawn bugle notes—the clash of swords
(Outflashed by alien lords)—
And warrior-voices wild with victory.

They could not quell the grieved and shuddering air,
That breathed about me its forlorn despair:
It almost seemed as if stern Triumph sped
To one whose hopes were dead,
And flaunting there his fortune's ruddier grace,
Smote—with a taunt—wan Misery in the face!

Lo! far away,
(For now my dream grows clear as luminous day,)
The victor's camp-fires gird the city round;
But she, unrobed, discrowned—
A new Andromeda, beside the main
Of her own passionate pain;
Bowed, naked, shivering low—
Veils the soft gleam of melancholy eyes.
Yet lovelier in their woe,—
Alike from hopeless earth and hopeless skies.
No Perseus, for her sake, serenely fleet,
Shall cleave the heavens with winged and shining feet:—
Ah me! the maid is lost—
For sorrow, like keen frost

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Shall eat into her being's anguished core—
Atlanta (not Andromeda in this),
What outside helper can bring back her bliss?
Can re-illume, beyond its storm-built bar,
Her youth's auroral star,
Or wake the aspiring heart that sleeps forever more.

O! lying prophet of a sombre mood,
This city of our love
Is no poor, timorous dove,
To crouch and die unstruggling in the mire;
If, for a time, she yields to force and fire,
Blinded by battle-smoke, and drenched with blood,
Still must that dauntless hardihood
Drawn to her veins from out the iron hills,
(Nerving the brain that toils, the soul that wills,)
Shake off the lotus-languishment of grief!
I see her rise and clasp her old belief,
In God and goodness—with imperial glance,
Face the dark front of frowning Circumstance,—
While trusting only to her strong right arm
To wrench from deadly harm,
All civic blessings and fair fruits of peace!
High-souled to gain (despite her ravished years),
And dragon-forms of monstrous doubts and fears,
The matchless splendor of Toil's “golden fleece!”

I see her rise, and strive with strenuous hands firmly to lay
The fresh foundations of a nobler sway—
War-wasted lands
Laden with ashes, gray and desolate—
Touched by the charm of some regenerate fate—
Flush into golden harvests prodigal;
Set by the steam-god's fiery passion free,
I hear the rise and fall
Of ponderous iron-clamped machinery,
Shake, as with earthquake thrill, the factory halls;
While round the massive walls
Slow vapor, like a sinuous serpent steals—
Through which revolve in circles, great or small,
The deafening thunders of the tireless wheels!

Far down each busy mart
That throbs and heaves as with a human heart
Quick merchants pass, some debonair and gay,
With undimmed, youthful locks—
Some wrinkled, sombre, gray—
But all with one accord
Dreaming of him—their lord—
The mighty monarch of the realm of stocks!
And year by year her face more frankly bright,
Glows with the ardor of the bloodless fight
For bounteous empire o'er her cherished South.
More sweet the smile upon her maiden mouth,
Just rounding to rare curves of womanhood:
Because all unwithstood
The magic of her power and stately pride
Hath called from many a clime
Of tropic sunshine and of winter rime,
The world's skilled art and science to her side;
Hence from her transient tomb,
Three lustra since, a hideous spot to see—
Grows the majestic tree
Of heightened and green-leaved prosperity.

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Hence, her broad gardens bloom
With rose and lily, and all flowers of balm.
And hence above the lines
Of her vast railways, droop the laden vines—
A luscious largess thro' the summer calm!

Feeling her veins so full of lusty blood,
That pulsed within them like a rhythmic flood,
And eager for sweet sisterhood,—the bond
Blissful and fond,
That yet may hold all nations in its thrall,
Atlanta—from a night of splendid dreams,
Roused by soft kisses of the morning beams,
Decreed a glorious festival
Of art and commerce in her brave domain;
She sent her summons on the courier breeze;
Or thro' the lightning -wingèd wire
Flashed forth her soul's desire:—
Swiftly it passed,
O'er native hills and streams and prairies vast,—
And o'er waste barriers of dividing seas
'Till from all quarters, like quick tongues of flame,
That warm, but burn not,—cordial answers came,
And waftage of benignant messages.

Thus, thus it is a mighty concourse meets
O'erflowing squares and streets—
Borne at flood-tide toward the guarded ground,
Where treasures of two hemispheres are found,
To tax the inquiring mind, the curious eye!
Grain of the upland and damp river-bed,
In yellow stalks, or sifted meal for bread;
Unnumbered births of Ceres clustered nigh;
Beholding which—as touched by tropic heat,—
(The old-world picture never can grow old,
Nor the deep love that thrills it dumb and cold)—
Clear fancy looks on Boaz in the wheat,
And in her simple truth,
The tender eyes of Ruth
Holding the garnered fragments at his feet!

But piled o'er all, thro' many an unbound bale
Peering to show its snow-white softness pale,
—Snow-white, yet warm, and destined to be furled
In some auspicious day,
For which we yearn and pray,
Round half the naked misery of the world,
A fleece more rich than Jason's, glances down.
Ah! well we know no monarch's jewelled crown,
No marvellous koh-i-noor,
Won, first perchance, from gulfs of human gore,
Or life-toil of swart millions, gaunt and poor,
Hath e'er outshone its peerless sovereignty.
[OMITTED]
The wings of song unfold
Towards thy noontide-gold;
The eyes of song are clear,
(Turned on thy broadening sphere)
To mark, oh! city of the midland-weald,
And follow thy fair fortunes far afield—
The years unborn,
Doubtless must bring to thee
Trials to test thy spirit's constancy;
(While unthrift aliens wear the mask of scorn).

303

Financial shocks without thee and within;
Wrought by shrewd moneyed Shylocks hot to win
Their brazen game of monstrous usury;
Ravage of bandit “rings” whose boundless maw
Can swallow all things glibly, save—the law!
And many a subtler ill
Sudden and subtle as the ambush laid,
By black-browed “stranglers” 'mid an Orient glade;
But thou, with keenest will,
Shalt cut the bonds of stealthy fraud apart,
And if force fronts thee with a murderous blade,
Pierce the rash son of Anak to the heart!

Oh! queen! thy brilliant horoscope
Was cast by Helios in the halls of hope;
And hope becomes fulfillment, as thy tread—
Firm, placed between the living and the dead—
Wins the high grade which owns a heavenward slope;
For force and fraud undone,
And stormless summits won.
In thee I view heaven's purpose perfected:
Thou shalt be empress of all peaceful ties,
All potent industries,
All world-embracing magnanimities;
A warrior-queen no more, but mailed in love,
Thy spear a fulgent shaft of sun-steeped grain;
Thy shield a buckler, the field-fairies wove
Of strong green grasses, in the silvery noon
Of some full harvest-moon,
Thy stainless crown, red roses, blent with white!
Now, throned above the half-forgotten pain

304

Of dreadful war, and war's remorseless blight,
Thy heart-throbs glad and great,
Sending through all thy Titan-statured state,
Fresh life and gathering tides of grander power
From glorious hour to hour,
Thousands thy deeds shall bless
With strenuous pride, toned down to tenderness:
Shall bless thy deeds, exalt thy name;
Till every breeze that sweeps from hill to lea,
And every wind that furrows the deep sea,
Shall waft the fragrance of thy soul abroad
The sweetness and the splendor of thy fame:—
For thou, midmost a large and opulent store,
Of all things wrought to meet a nation's need,
Thou, nobly pure,
Of any darkening taint of selfish greed,—
Wert pre-ordained to be
Purveyor of divinest charity,—
The love-commissioned almoner of God.

YORKTOWN CENTENNIAL LYRIC.

[_]

[Written at the request of the Yorktown Centennial Commission, appointed by Congress, to conduct the celebration of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, to the combined forces of France and America, upon the 19th of Oct. 1781, at Yorktown, Va.]

Hark, hark! down the century's long reaching slope
To those transports of triumph, those raptures of hope,
The voices of main and of mountain combined
In glad resonance borne on the wings of the wind,
The bass of the drum and the trumpet that thrills
Through the multiplied echoes of jubilant hills.
And mark how the years melting upward like mist
Which the breath of some splendid enchantment has kissed,
Reveal on the ocean, reveal on the shore
The proud pageant of conquest that graced them of yore,
When blended forever in love as in fame
See, the standard which stole from the starlight its flame,
And type of all chivalry, glory, romance,
The lilies, the luminous lilies of France.

Oh, stubborn the strife ere the conflict was won!
And the wild whirling war wrack half stifled the sun.
The thunders of cannon that boomed on the lea,
But re-echoed far thunders pealed up from the sea,
Where guarding his sea lists, a knight on the waves,
Bold De Grasse kept at bay the bluff bull-dogs of Graves.
The day turned to darkness, the night changed to fire,
Still more fierce waxed the combat, more deadly the ire,
Undimmed by the gloom, in majestic advance,
Oh, behold where they ride o'er the red battle tide,
Those banners united in love as in fame,
The brave standard which drew from the star-beams their flame,
And type of all chivalry, glory, romance,
The lilies, the luminous lilies of France.

No respite, no pause; by the York's tortured flood,
The grim Lion of England is writhing in blood.

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Cornwallis may chafe and coarse Tarleton aver,
As he sharpens his broadsword and buckles his spur,
“This blade, which so oft has reaped rebels like grain,
Shall now harvest for death the rude yeomen again.”
Vain boast! for ere sunset he's flying in fear,
With the rebels he scouted close, close in his rear,
While the French on his flank hurl such volleys of shot
That e'en Gloucester's redoubt must be growing too hot.
Thus wedded in love as united in fame,
Lo! the standard which stole from the starlight its flame,
And type of all chivalry, glory, romance,
The lilies, the luminous lilies of France.

O morning superb! when the siege reached its close;
See! the sundawn outbloom, like the alchemist's rose!
The last wreaths of smoke from dim trenches upcurled,
Are transformed to a glory that smiles on the world.
Joy, joy! Save the wan, wasted front of the foe,
With his battle-flags furled and his arms trailing low;—
Respect for the brave! In stern silence they yield,
And in silence they pass with bowed heads from the field.
Then triumph transcendent! so Titan of tone
That some vowed it must startle King George on his throne.

When Peace to her own, timed the pulse of the land,
And the war weapon sank from the war-wearied hand,
Young Freedom upborne to the height of the goal
She had yearned for so long with deep travail of soul,
A song of her future raised, thrilling and clear,
Till the woods leaned to hearken, the hill slopes to hear:—
Yet fraught with all magical grandeurs that gleam
On the hero's high hope, or the patriot's dream,
What future, tho' bright, in cold shadow shall cast
The proud beauty that haloes the brow of the past.
Oh! wedded in love, as united in fame,
See the standard which stole from the starlight its flame,
And type of all chivalry, glory, romance,
The lilies, the luminous lilies of France.

ON THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS IN RUSSIA.

“Be advised! Do not trample upon my people. Nations and men that oppress us do not thrive.”

—From Charles Reade's “Never Too Late to Mend.”

What murmurs are these that so wofully rise
Into heart-storms of agony borne from afar?
A tempest of passion, a tumult of sighs?
There is dread on the earth, and stern grief in the skies,
While the nations, appalled, watch the realm of the Czar!

Can humanity's sun have gone down in an hour,
Or a fiend have struck mercy's soft key-note ajar,
That upwhirled on the fierce winds of madness and power,
This cloud—with its hail of harsh hatreds—should lower
O'er those who still call on their “father,” the Czar?

306

Can hell have burst upward, and spawned from its womb
The worst of all demons that menace and mar?
O God! see an empire reeking in gloom—
Hark! the death-shock, the shriek, the wild volleys of doom—
Ay! the riot of hell shakes the land of the Czar!

The fields are flame-girdled, the rivers roll red
Through the sulphurous fumes and swift ravage of war,
A war on the helpless, unhelmeted head,
Which tortures the living and spares not the dead;
Is he sleeping, or dumb, their “good father” the Czar?

Ah, no!—through the corridors stately and vast
Of his palace that gleams like a pale polar star,
On a gale from the south these black tidings have passed:
He hears! and the lightnings of justice at last
Quiver hissing and hot in the hand of the Czar!

The world holds its breathing to mark them in flame
On their limitless course that no bulwark can bar;
But instead, through his wily state parasite came
A rescript so false, its unspeakable shame
Should haunt to his death the dark dreams of the Czar!

No word for the victims, all butchered and bare,
By the hearth-stone defiled, and the blood-tainted lar;
For the poor ravished maid, whose sole shroud is her hair;
For the mother's lament, or the father's despair:
No pity for such thrills the thought of the Czar;

But his spirit leans, tender and yearning, above
The mad helots who riot, rage, murder afar;
To them he is soft as a nest-brooding dove;
But the murdered! alas! they are stinted of love,
Right, justice, or ruth, in the creed of the Czar!

Shall grim carnage goad onward, embruted and base,
The black coursers that strain at her iron-wrought car,
While those of high purpose and fetterless race
Idly gaze on the foul mediæval disgrace
Which poisons all earth from yon realm of the Czar?

Wake, England, your thunders! America, fling
To the wind the shrewd statecrafts that hamper, or mar!
Blend your voices of wrath! your deep warnings outring,
To smite the dulled ears, and blind soul of the king—
Who rules—Heaven help them! those realms of the Czar!

ASSASSINATION.

O blinded readers of the scroll of time,
Think ye that freedom yields her hand to crime?

Or the fair whiteness of her virginal bud
Of heavenly hope, would desecrate with blood?

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Her eyes are chastened lightnings, and the fire
Of her divinely purified desire

Burns not in ambush by assassins trod,
But on the holiest mountain heights of God!

So, ye that fain would meet her fond embrace,
Purge the base soul, unmask the treacherous face,

Drop bowl or dagger while ye bring her naught
But the grand worship of a selfless thought!

ENGLAND.

Land of my father's love, my father's race,
How long must I in weary exile sigh
To meet thee, O my empress, face to face,
And kiss thy radiant robes before I die?

O England! in my creed, the humblest dust
Beside thy haunted shores and shadowy streams,
Is touched by memories and by thoughts august,
By golden histories and majestic dreams.

O England! to my mood thy lowliest flower
Feeds on the smiles of some transcendent sky;
Thy frailest fern-leaf shrines a spell of power!
Ah! shall I walk thy woodland's ere I die?

Thy sacred places, where dead heroes rest
By temples set in ivy-twilight deep;
Thy fragrant fields topped by the skylark's crest;
Thy hidden waters breathing balms of sleep:

Thy castled homes, and granges veiled afar
In antique dells; thy ruins hoar and high;
Thy mountain tarns, each like a glittering star,
Shall I behold their marvels ere I die?

Thine opulent towns, throned o'er the subject-main,
Girt by brave fleets, their weary canvas furled,
Deep-laden argosies through storm and strain,
Borne from the utmost boundaries of the world

O'er all, thy London! every stone with breath
Indued to question, counsel, or reply;
City of mightiest life and mightiest death,
Shall I behold thy splendors ere I die?

But most I yearn, in body as heart, to bow
Before our England's poets, strong and wise,
Watch some grand thought uplift the laureate's brow,
And flash or fade in Swinburne's fiery eyes.

And other glorious minstrels would I greet
Bound to my life by many a rhythmic tie,
When shall I hear their welcomes frankly sweet,
And clasp those cordial hands, before I die?

308

Fair blow the breezes; high are sail and steam;
Soon must I mark brave England's brightening lea;
Fulfilled at length, the large and lustrous dream
Which lured me long across the summer sea!

Alas! a moment's triumph!—false as vain!
O'er dreary hills the gaunt pines moan and sigh;
Pale grows my dream, pierced through by bodeful pain;
England! I shall not see thee ere I die!

TO LONGFELLOW.

(ON HEARING HE WAS ILL.)

O thou, whose potent genius (like the sun
Tenderly mellowed by a rippling haze)
Hast gained thee all men's homage, love and praise,
Surely thy web of life is not outspun,
Thy glory rounded, thy last guerdon won!
Nay, poet, nay!—from thought's calm sunset ways
May new-born notes of undegenerate lays
Charm back the twilight gloom ere day be done!

But past the poet crowned I see the friend—
Frank, courteous, true—about whose locks of gray,
Like golden bees, some glints of summer stray;
Clear-eyed, with lips half poised 'twixt smile and sigh;
A brow in whose soul-mirroring manhood blend
Grace, sweetness, power and magnanimity!

“PHILIP MY KING.”

“Philip, my king,” ay, still thou art a king,
Though storms of sorrow on thy suffering head
Have flashed and thundered through the midnight's dread;
Ah, lofty soul! fraught with the sky-lark's wing
To capture heaven, the sky-lark's voice to sing
Such notes ethereal through veiled brightness shed
Their gracious power to liquid pathos wed,
Thrills like the soft rain-pulses of the spring:

Banned from earth's day—thine inward sight expands
Above the night-bound senses' birth or bars;
Lord of a larger realm, of subtler scope,
Where thou at last shalt press the lips of Hope,
And feel God's angel lift in radiant hands
Thy life from darkness to a place of stars!

Meanwhile, alas! despite these inward spells
Of voice and vision, and fond hope to be,
Perchance,—though vaguely shadowed forth to thee,—
Oft-times thy thought but echoes the deep knells
Of buried joy; oft-times thy spirit swells
With moaning memories, like a smitten sea,
When the worn tempest wandering up the lea,
Leaves a low wind to breathe its wild farewells.

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O brother!—pondering dreary and apart
O'er the dead blossoms of deciduous years:
O poet! fed too long on bitter tears!
I waft, o'er seas, a white-winged courier-dove,
Bearing to thee this balmy spray of love,
Warm from the nested fragrance of my heart.

“Philip my King,” Miss Mulock's exquisite song, all lovers of poetry must recall. The little hero of that lyric was Philip Marston, the author's god-son.

A PLEA FOR THE GRAY.

[_]

[A discussion has recently been inaugurated in the city of Mobile, Ala., among the military companies, as to the propriety of changing the Gray for the Blue or some other uniform.]

When the land' s martyr, mid her tears,
Outbreathed his latest breath,
The discord of long, festering years,
Lay also dumb in death:
Our souls a new-born friendship drew
With spells of kindliest sway;
At last, at last, the conquering Blue
Blent with the vanquished Gray!

Yet, who thro' this south-land of ours,
While faith and love are free,
But still must cast memorial flowers
Across the grave of Lee?
And oft their ancient grief renew
O'er “Stonewall's” cherished clay?
The heart that's pledged to guard the Blue
Must honor still the Gray!

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O veterans of Potomac's flood,
Or Vicksburg's lurid sky,
Old passions may be purged of blood,
Old memories cannot die!
They fill your eyes with fiery dew,
Revive your manhood's May,
And past the bright victorious Blue,
Bring back the stainless Gray!

O martyrs of the desperate fight,
All weak and broken now,
With shattered nerves, or blasted sight,
Frail arms and furrowed brow!
What think ye of the patriot view
Flashed on your minds to-day?
Too old to don the prosperous Blue,
Ye clasp your tattered Gray!

From many a worn and wasted mound,
And dust-encumbered clod,
The voices of dead heroes sound,
Rising from earth to God!
“Our doom was dark, our lives were true,
Ah! cast not quite away,
What time ye hail the favored Blue—
Old dreams that crowned the Gray!”

Can honor in his sacred grave
Less fair and glorious be?
Can faith on fortune's fickle wave,
Change with the changeful sea?
Beware lest what ye rashly do
Should end in shamed dismay,
And all pure champions of the Blue,
Scorn traitors to the Gray!

UNION OF BLUE AND GRAY.

[_]

[Suggested by the recent visit of Governor Bigelow and the Connecticut companies to Charleston, South Carolina.]

The Blue is marching south once more,
With serried steel and stately tread;
Their martial music pealed before,
Their flag of stars flashed overhead.
Ah! not through storm and stress they come,
The thunders of old hate are dumb,
And frank as clear October's ray
This meeting of the Blue and Gray.

A Phœnix from her outworn fires,
Her gory ashes, rising free,
Fair Charleston with her stainless spires
Gleams by the silver-stranded sea.
No hurtling hail nor hostile ball
Breaks through the treacherous battle-pall;
True voices speak from hearts as true,
For strife lies dead 'twixt Gray and Blue.

Grim Sumter, like a Titan maimed,
Still glooms beyond his shattered keep;
But where his bolts of lightning flamed
There broods a quiet, mild as sleep;
His granite base, long cleansed of blood,
Is circled by a golden flood.
Type of that peace whose sacred sway
Enfolds the Blue, exalts the Gray.

The sea-tides faintly rise afar,
And—wings of all the breezes furled,
Seem slowly borne o'er beach and bar,
Dream-murmurings from a spirit world,
Through throbbing drum and bugle-trill
The distant calm seems deeper still—
Deep as that faith whose cordial dew
Hath soothed the Gray and charmed the Blue.

O'er Ashley's breast the autumn smiles,
All mellowed in her hazy fold,
While the white arms of languid isles
Are girdled by ethereal gold.
All Nature whispers: war is o'er,
Fierce feuds have fled our sea and shore,
Old wrongs forget, old ties renew,
O heroes of the Gray and Blue!

The southern Palm and northern Pine
No longer clash through leaf and bough;
Tranquilities of depth benign
Have bound their blending foliage now,

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Or, tranced by cloudless star and moon,
Serene they shine in sun-lit noon.
Their equal shadows softly play
Above the Blue, across the Gray.

THE KING OF THE PLOW.

The sword is re-sheathed in its scabbard,
The rifle hangs safe on the wall;
No longer we quail at the hungry
Hot rush of the ravenous ball,
The war-cloud has hurled its last lightning,
Its last awful thunders are still,
While the demon of conflict in Hades
Lies fettered in force as in will:
Above the broad fields that he ravaged,
What monarch rules blissfully now?
Oh! crown him with bays that are bloodless,
The king, the brave king of the plow!

A king! ay! what ruler more potent
Has ever swayed earth by his nod?
A monarch! aye, more than a monarch,
A homely, but bountiful God!
He stands where in earth's sure protection
The seed-grains are scattered and sown,
To uprise in serene resurrection
When spring her soft trumpet hath blown!
A monarch! yea, more than a monarch,
Though toil-drops are thick on his brow;
O! crown him with corn-leaf and wheat-leaf,
The king, the strong king of the plow!

Through the shadow and shine of past ages,
(While tyrants were blinded with blood)
He reared the pure ensign of Ceres
By meadow, and mountain, and flood,
And the long, leafy gold of his harvests
The earth-sprites and air-sprites had spun,
Grew rhythmic when swept by the breezes,
Grew royal, when kissed by the sun;
Before the stern charm of his patience
What rock-rooted forces must bow!
Come! crown him with corn-leaf and wheat-leaf,
The king, the bold king of the plow!

Through valleys of balm-drooping myrtles,
By banks of Arcadian streams,
Where the wind-songs are set to the mystic
Mild murmur of passionless dreams;
On the storm-haunted uplands of Thule,
By ice-girdled fiords and floes,
Alike speeds the spell of his godhood,
The bloom of his heritage glows;
A monarch! yea, more than a monarch,
All climes to his prowess must bow;
Come crown him with bays that are stainless,
The king, the brave king of the plow.

Far, far in earth's uttermost future,
As boundless of splendor as scope,
I see the fair angel!—fruition,
Outspeed his high heralds of hope;
The roses of joy rain around him,
The lilies of sweetness and calm,
For the sword has been changed to the plowshare,
The lion lies down with the lamb!
O! angel-majestic! We know thee,
Though raised and transfigured art thou,
This lord of life's grand consummation
Was once the swart king of the plow!

312

IN MEMORIAM.

I.
LONGFELLOW DEAD.

Ay, it is well! Crush back your selfish tears;
For from the half-veiled face of earthly spring
Hath he not risen on heaven-aspiring wing
To reach the spring-tide of the eternal years?

With life full-orbed, he stands amid his peers,
The grand immortals! a fair, mild-eyed king,
Flushing to hear their potent welcomes ring
Round the far circle of those luminous spheres.

Mock not his heavenly cheer with mortal wail,
Unless some human-hearted nightingale,
Pierced by grief's thorn, shall give such music birth
That he, the new-winged soul, the crowned and shriven,
May lean beyond the effulgent verge of heaven,
To catch his own sweet requiem, borne from earth!

Such marvellous requiem were a pæan too—
(Woe touched and quivering with triumphant fire);
For him whose course flashed always high and higher,
Is lost beyond the strange, mysterious blue:
Ah! yet, we murmur, can this thing be true?
Forever silent here, that tender lyre,
Tuned to all gracious themes, all pure desire,
Whose notes dropped sweet as honey, soft as dew?
No tears! you say—since rounded, brave, complete,
The poet's work lies radiant at God's feet.
Nay! nay! our hearts with grief must hold their tryst:
How dim grows all about us and above!
Vainly we grope through death's bewildering mist,
To feel once more his clasp of human love!

II.
ON THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.

I see the Nation, as in antique ages,
Crouched with rent robes, and ashes on her head:
Her mournful eyes are deep with dark presages,
Her soul is haunted by a formless dread!

“O God!” she cries, “why hast Thou left me bleeding,
Wounded and quivering to the heart's hot core?
Can fervid faith, winged prayer, and anguished pleading
Win balm and pity from thy heavens no more?

“I knelt, I yearned, in agonizing passion,
Breathless to catch thy ‘still small voice’ from far;
Now thou hast answered, but in awful fashion,
And stripped our midnight of its last pale star.

“What tears are given me in o'ermastering measure,
From fathomless floods of Marah, darkly free,
While that pure life I held my noblest treasure
Is plunged forever in death's tideless sea!

313

“Hark to those hollow sounds of lamentation,
The muffled music, the funereal bell;
From far and wide on wings of desolation
Float wild and wailful voices of farewell.

“The North-land mourns her grief in full libation,
Outpoured for him who died at victory's goal;
And the great West, in solemn ministration,
May not recall her hero's shining soul.

“Yea, the North mourns; the West; a stricken mother,
Droops as in sackcloth with veiled brow and mouth;
And what old strifes, what waning hates, can smother
The generous heart-throbs of the pitying South?

“Did doubt remain?—She crushed its latest ember
At that stern moment when the victim's fall
Changed loveliest summer to a grim December,
Paled by the hiss of Guiteau's murderous ball.

“Thus by the spell of one vast grief united
(Where cypress boughs their death-cold shadows wave),
My sons, I trust, a holier faith have plighted,
And sealed the compact by his sacred grave.”

'Twas thus she spoke; but still in prostrate sorrow,
While lowlier earthward drooped her brow august.
To-day is dark; vague darkness clouds to-morrow.
Ah! in God's hand the nations are but—dust!

III.
DEAN STANLEY.

Dead! dead! in sooth his marbled brow is cold,
And prostrate lies that brave, majestic head;
True! his stilled features own death's arctic mould,
Yet, by Christ's blood, I know he is not dead!

Here fades the cast-off vestment that he wore,
The robe of flesh, whence his true self hath fled;
Whate'er be false, one faith holds fast and sure,
Great souls like his abide not with the dead:

Eyried with God, beyond all mortal pain,
Breathing the effluence of ethereal birth,
Through deeds divine, his spirit walks again,
On rhythmic feet the mournful paths of earth!

In heaven immortal, yet on earth supreme,
The glamour of his goodness still survives,
Not in vain glimpses of a flattering dream,
But flower and fruit of ransomed human lives.

His hopes were ocean-wide, and clasped mankind;
No Levite plea his mercy turned apart,
But wounded souls—to whom all else were blind—
He soothed with wine and balsam of the heart.

314

With stainless hands he reared his Master's cross;
His Master's watchword pealed o'er land and sea;
And still through days of gain, and days of loss,
Proclaimed the golden truce of charity.

All men were brethren to his larger creed,
But given the thought sincere—the earnest aim;
God's garden will not spurn the humblest weed
That yearns for purer air and loftier flame.

This sweet evangel of the unborn years,
Seer-like he spake, as one that viewed his goal,
While the world felt through darkness and through tears,
Mysterious music thrill its raptured soul.

Dead! nay, not dead! while eagle thoughts aspire,
Clothed in winged deeds across the empyreal height,
And all the expanding space is flushed with fire,
And deep on deep, heaven opens to our sight,—

He cannot die! yet o'er his dust we shed
Our rain of human sorrow; on his breast
Cross the pale palms; and pulseless heart and head
Leave to the quiet of his cloistered rest.

Sleep, knightly scholar! warrior-saint, repose!
Thy life-force folded like an unfurled sail!
Spent is time's rage—its foam of crested woes—
And thou hast found, at last, the Holy Grail!

IV.
HIRAM H. BENNER.

[Dedicated to the Wife of this Hero and Martyr.]

When the war-drums beat and the trumpets blare,
When banners flaunt in the stormy air,
When at thought of the deeds that must soon be done,
The hearts of a thousand leap up as one,
Who could not rush through the din and smoke,
The cannon's crash and the sabre stroke,
Scarce conscious of ebbing blood or breath,
With a laugh for wounds and a scoff at death?

But when on the sullen breeze there comes
No thrill of trumpets nor throb of drums,
But only the wail of the sick laid low
By the treacherous blight of a viewless foe—
Who, then, will upgird his loins for fight
With the loathsome pest in the poisoned night,
No martial music his pulse to start,
But the still, small voice of the ruthful heart?
Who then? Behold him, the calm, the brave,
On his billowy path to an alien grave!
Serene in the charm of his God-like will,
This soldier is armored to save, not kill.
Ah! swiftly he speeds on the mist-bound stream
This pilgrim wrapped in his tender dream,
His vision of help for the sick laid low
By the evil spell of an ambushed foe.

Ah! swiftly he speeds 'mid the hollow boom
Of bells that are tolling to death and doom,

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Till even the sounds of the bells grow still;
For the hands of their ringers are lax and chill.
And the hum of the mourners is heard no more
On the misty slope and the vacant shore,
And the few frail creatures that greet him seem
But the ghosts of men by a phantom stream.

Still the hero his own great soul enticed
To suffer and toil in the name of Christ,
He follows wherever his Lord had led,
To the famished hut or the dying bed.
He medicines softly the fevered pain;
To the starving he bringeth his golden grain;
And ever before him and ever above
Is the sheen of the unfurled wings of love.

Meanwhile, in his distant home are those
That his going has robbed of their sweet repose.
The days pass by them like leaden years;
The nights are bitter with tears and fears—
Till at last, by the lightning glamour sped,
Comes a name and date, with the one word, “Dead!”
And the arms of the smitten are lifted high,
And the heavens are rent by an anguished cry!

Dead! dead! Vain word for the wise to hear!
How false its echo on heart and ear!
To the earth and earth's he may close his eyes,
But who dares tell us a martyr dies?
And of him just gone it were best to say
That in some charmed hour of night or day—
Having given us all that his soul could give—
Brave Hiram Benner began to live.

V.
W. GILMORE SIMMS.

A POEM

[_]

Delivered on the night of the 13th of December, 1877 “at the Charlestown Academy of Music,” as prologue to the “Dramatic Entertainment” in aid of the “Simms Memorial fund.”

The swift mysterious seasons rise and set;
The omnipotent years pass o'er us, bright or dun;—
Dawns blush, and mid-days burn, 'till scarce aware
Of what deep meaning haunts our twilight air,
We pause bewildered, yearning for the sun;
Only to find in that strange evening-tide,
By the last sunset pathos sanctified,
Pale memory near us, and divine regret!

Then memory gently takes us by the hand;
And doubtful boundaries of a faded time,
Half veiled in mist and rime,
Emerge, grow bright, expand;
The past becomes the present to our eyes;
Poor slaves of dust and death,
(As if some trump of resurrection clear
Somewhere outpealed, our senses could not hear)
Rise, freed from churchyard taint and mortal stain;
Old friends! dear comrades! have we met again?
God! how these dismal years
Of anguished desolation, and veiled tears,
Of fettered feeling, and despondent sighs,
Wither and shrivel like a parchment scroll

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Seized by the fury of consuming fire,
Before the rapture of the illumined soul,
Lifted and lightened by our love's desire!

Old friends! dear comrades! have we met once more?
Come! let us fondly mark
In this weird truce, whose moments soon must flee,
'Twixt the charmed heart and dread reality,
Those well-belovéd features that ye wore
Once on this earthly shore,
Now rescued from the void and treacherous dark!
O! faces soft or strong,
Familiar faces! how ye press and throng
Closely about us, while the enchanted light
Changes to noonday our long spiritual night!
The faithful eyes that beamed in ours of yore,
Shine on us in their ancient guileless way,
Undimmed, unshorn of one beneficent ray,
And vital seeming as our own, to-day;
Lips smile, as once they smiled with innocent zest,
When round the social board
The impetuous flood-tide poured
Of curbless mirth, and keen sparkling jest
Vanished like wine-foam on its golden crest!
We feel the loyal grasp
Of many a warm hand, yielding clasp for clasp;
But may not stay, alas! we may not stay
To greet ye one by one,
Comrades! returned from realms beyond the sun;
For lo! in rightful precedence of power,
“A Saul amongst his brethren,” than the rest
Loftier, if ruder in his natural might,
The man who toiled through fortune's bitterest hour,
As calmly steadfast and supremely brave,
As if above a fair life's tranquil wave,
Brooded the halcyon with unruffled breast;
The man whose sturdy frame upheld aright,
We meet, (O friends), to consecrate to-night!

All pregnant powers that wait
On intellectual state,
Favored and loved him; earliest, dearest came
Imagination, robed in mystical flame;
Her clear eyes searching all created things
Heavenly and earthly; with vast breadth of wings
Engirdled by the magic of a spell ineffable;
And like the sportive nymph of woodland bowers,
Fancy stole on him coyly, pranked with flowers,
Whereof the fairest her white fingers shed,
To crown his bended head.
Bluff humor true, if broad,
Placed in his hand a mirth-evoking rod,
While satire, from the heights of reason proud,
Flashed a keen gleam, like lightning from a cloud
The levin-bolt so sheerly cuts in two,
The cloud disparts, to leave—a luminous blue!

All that he was, all that he owned, we know
Was lavished freely on one sacred shrine,
The shrine of home and country! from the first
Fresh blush of youth, when merged in sanguine glow,

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His life-path seemed a shadowless steep to shine,
Leading forever upward to the stars;
Through many a desperate and embittered strife
That raging, rose and burst
Above the storm-wracked waste of middle-life.
Down to the day, a few sad years ago,
When a grave veteran with his age's scars,
He moved among us, like a Titan maimed;
Only one glorious goal,
Through fate, grief, change, the pure allegiance claimed
Of his unconquered and majestic soul;
The goal of honor; not that he might rise
Alone and dominant; but that all men's eyes
Might view, perchance through much brave toil of his,
His country stripped of every filthy weed
Of crime imputed; in thought, word and deed,
A noble people, none would dare despise
In their unsullied Palingenesis,
(Which he with blissful awe,
And all a poet's prescient faith foresaw;)
A noble people, o'er their subject-lands
Ruling with constant hearts and stainless hands;
Their feet firm planted as McGregor's were,
Deep in the herbage of their native sod,
And every honest forehead free to rear
A front unquelled by fear,
Untouched by shame, unfurrowed by despair,—
High in man's sight, or bowed alone to God!

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So, let us rear the shaft, and poise the bust
Above the mouldering, but ah! priceless dust
Of vanished genius! Let our homage be
Large as that splendid prodigality
Of force and love, wherewith he stanchly wrought
Out from the quarries of his own deep thought,
Unnumbered shapes; whether of good or ill,
No puny puppets whose false action frets
On a false stage, like feeble Marionettes;
But life-like, human still;
Types of a by-gone age of crime and lust;
Or, grand historic forms, in whom we view
Re-vivified, and re-created stand,
The braves who strove through cloud-encompassed ways,
Infinite travail, and malign dispraise,
To guard, to save, to wrench from tyrant hordes,
By the pen's virtue, or the lordlier sword's
Unravished Liberty,
The virgin huntress on a virgin strand!

I, through whose song your hearts have spoken to-night,
Soul-present with you, yet am far away;
Outside my exile's home, I watch the sway
Of the bowed pine-tops in the gloaming gray,
Casting across the melancholy lea,
A tint of browner blight;
Outside my exile's home, borne to and fro,
I hear the inarticulate murmurs flow
Of the faint wind-tides breathing like a sea;
When, in clear vision, softly dawns on me,
(As if in contrast with yon slow decay),
The loveliest land that smiles beneath the sky,
The coast-land of our Western Italy;
I view the waters quivering; quaff the breeze,
Whose briny raciness keeps an under taste
Of flavorous tropic sweets (perchance swept home,
Across the flickering waste
Of summer waves, capped by the Ariel foam),
From Cuba's perfumed groves, and garden spiceries!

Along the horizon-line a vapor swims,
Pale rose and amethyst, melting into gold;
Up to our feet the fawning ripples rolled,
Glimmer an instant, tremble, lapse, and die;
The whole rare scene, its every element
Etherealized, transmuted subtly, blent
By viewless alchemy,
Into the glory of a golden mood,
Brings potent exaltations, while I walk,
(A joyful youth again),
The snow-white beaches by the Atlantic Main!
Ah! not alone! the carking curse of Time
Far from him yet; his bold hopes unsubdued
By the long anguish of the woes to be,
Midmost his years, in mellow-hearted prime,
Beside me stands our stalwart-statured Simms!

See! what a Viking's mien!
Half tawny locks in careless masses curled
Over his ample forehead's massive dome!
Eyes of bold outlook, that sometimes beneath
Their level-fronted brows, shine lambent, deep,
With inspirations scarce aroused from sleep;

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And sometimes rife with ire,
Sent forth as sword-blades from an unbared sheath,
Flashes of sudden fire!
His whole air breathes of combat, unserene
Profounds of feeling, by a scornful world
Too early stirred to impotent disdains;
Generous withal; bound by all liberal ties
Of lordly-natured magnanimities;
Whereof we mark the sign
In the curved fullness of a mobile mouth,
Almost voluptuous; hinting of the south,
Whose suns high summer shed through all his veins:
Blending the mildness of a cordial grace
With sterner traits of his Berserker face,
Firm-set as granite, haughty, leonine.

No prim Precisian he! his fluent talk
Roved thro' all topics, vivifying all;
Now deftly ranging level plains of thought,
To sink, anon in metaphysical deeps;
Whence, by caprice of strange transition brought
Outward and upward, the free current sought
Ideal summits, gathering in its course,
Splendid momentum and imperious force,
Till, down it rushed as mighty cataracts fall,
Hurled from gaunt mountain steeps!

Sportive he could be as a gamesome boy!
By heaven! as 'twere but yesterday, I see
His tall frame quake with throes of jollity;
Hear his rich voice that owned a jovial tone,
Jocund as Falstaff's own;
And catch moist glints of steel-blue eyes o'errun
Sideways, by tiny rivulets of fun!
Alas! this vivid vision slowly fades!
Its serious beauty, and its flush of joy
Pass into nothingness! ... Stern Death resumes
His sombre empire in the dusk of tombs;
And the deep umbrage of the cypress glades
Is wanly, coldly cast
In lengthening gloom o'er the reburied past!
What then? the spirit of him
We mourn and fain would honor, grows not dim;
On earth will live with consummated toil
Worthily wrought, despite the hot turmoil
Of open enmity, the secret guile,
That mole-like burrowed 'neath the fruitful soil
Of his broad mental acres, but to show
Marks of its crawling littleness between,
Each far-extended row
Of those hale harvests, glittering gold or green!

And somewhere, somewhere in the infinite space,
Like all true souls by our Soul-Father prized,
It dwells forever individualized;
No ghost bewildered 'midst a “No Man's Land;”
Outlawed and banned
Of fair identity's redeeming grace,
Shivering before its wretched phantom self,
Marred by Lethean moonshine—a pale elf,
A passionless shadow, but in mind and heart,
The mortal creature's marvellous counterpart;
Only exalted, nobler; down on us
Gazing thro' fathomless ethers luminous;
Watching the earth and earth-ways from afar,

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Perhaps with somewhat of a scornful smile;
Yet tempered by the tolerance which beseems
One long translated from our sphere of dreams,
Hollow illusions, vacant vanities,
To that vast actual, which beyond us lies,
Where who may guess? midst yonder opulent skies;
Clear “coigns of vantage,” in some deathless star!

VI.
DICKENS.

Methinks the air
Throbs with the tolling of harmonious bells,
Rung by the hands of spirits; everywhere
We feel the presence of a soft despair
And thrill to voices of divine farewells.

Sweet Fancy lost,
Wandering in darkness, now makes silvery moan;
While Pathos, pale, and shadowy, like a ghost,
Sobs upon Humor's breast, that mourns him most,
The wizard king who leaves them all—alone.

Wan genii throng,
From earth's four quarters hurrying, mount and mart,
Pure woodland peace, the city's din and wrong,
Each breathing low a fond funereal song,
Each sadly bowed o'er that grand, silent heart.

The children's tears
Mingle with manhood's woe, that falls like rain;
Low lieth one who towered above his peers,
And nevermore, through all the fruitful years,
Our eyes shall greet the master's like again.

Creations fine,
His prodigal offspring, crowd so thickly round
That Wit falls foul of Sorrow, Cupids twine
Warm arms with Avarice, and Love's strength divine
Hath vanquished Hate on Hate's own chosen ground.

Though gone, his art
Triumphant spans the threatening clouds of death;
Its rainbow hues forever pulse and start,
Steeped in the life-blood of the human heart,
And woven on heavens beyond Time's stormy breath.

VII.
TO BAYARD TAYLOR BEYOND US.

A VISION OF CHRISTMAS EVE, 1878.

As here within I watch the fervid coals,
While the chill heavens without shine wanly white,
I wonder, friend! in what rare realm of souls,
You hail the uprising Christmas-tide to-night!

I leave the fire-place, lift the curtain's fold,
And peering past these shadowy window-bars,
See through broad rifts of ghostly clouds unrolled,
The pulsing pallor of phantasmal stars.

Phantoms they seem, glimpsed through the clouded deep,
Till the winds cease, and cloudland's ghastly glow

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Gives place above to luminous calms of sleep,
Beneath, to glittering amplitudes of snow!

Some stars like steely bosks on blazoned shields,
Stud constellations measureless in might;
Some lily-pale, make fair the ethereal fields,
In which, O friend, art thou ensphered to-night?

Where'er mid yonder infinite worlds it be,
Its souls, I know, are clothed with wings of fire;
How wouldst thou scorn even Immortality,
In whose dull rest thou couldst not still aspire!

There, Homer raised where genius cannot nod,
Hears the orbed thunders of celestial seas;
And Shakespeare, lofty almost as a God,
Smiles his large smile at Aristophanes;

With earth's supremest souls, still grouped apart,
Great souls made perfect in the eternal noon,
There thy loved Goethe holds thee to his heart,
Re-born to youth and all life's chords in tune.

While in the liberal air of that wide heaven,
He whispers: “Come! we share the self-same height;
To me on earth thy noblest toils were given,
Brothers, henceforth, we walk these paths of light.”

Clear and more clear the radiant vision gleams!
More bright grand shapes and glorious faces grow;
While like deep fugues of victory, heard in dreams,
A thousand heavenly clarions seem to blow!

VIII.
BAYARD TAYLOR (UPON DEATH).

[_]

“More than once I have met death, but without fear! Nor do I fear now! Without being able to demonstrate it, I know that my soul cannot die ... Indeed, to me the infinite is more comprehensible than the finite!”

These words occur in a letter of Bayard Taylor's to me, written not many weeks before his death. They have suggested the following sonnet:—

“Oft have I fronted Death, nor feared his might!
To me immortal, this dim Finite seems
Like some waste low-land, crossed by wandering streams
Whose clouded waves scarce catch our yearning sight:
Clearer by far, the imperial Infinite!
Though its ethereal radiance only gleams
In exaltations of majestic dreams,
Such dreams portray God's heaven of heavens aright!”
Thou blissful Faith! that on death's imminent brink
Thus much of heaven's mysterious truth hast told!
Soul-life aspires, though all the stars should sink;
Not vain our loftiest instinct's upward stress,
Nor hath the immortal hope shone clear and bold,
To quench at death, his torch in nothingness!

IX.
RICHARD H. DANA, SEN.

O deep grave eyes! that long have seemed to gaze
On our low level from far loftier days,
O grand gray head! an aureole seemed to gird,
Drawn from the spirit's pure, immaculate rays!

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At length death's signal sounds! From weary eyes
Pass the pale phantoms of our earth and skies;
The gray head droops; the museful lips are closed
On life's vain questionings and more vain replies!

Like some gaunt oak wert thou, that lonely stands
'Mid fallen trunks in outworn desert lands;
Still sound at core, with rhythmic leaves that stir
To soft swift touches of aerial hands.

Ah! long we viewed thee thus, forlornly free,
In that dead grove the sole unravished tree;
Lo! the dark axe man smites! the oak lies low
That towered in lonely calm o'er land and sea!

X.
BRYANT DEAD!

Lo! there he lies, our Patriarch Poet, dead!
The solemn angel of eternal peace
Has waved a wand of mystery o'er his head,
Touched his strong heart, and bade his pulses cease.

Behold in marble quietude he lies!
Pallid and cold, divorced from earthly breath,
With tranquil brow, lax hands, and dreamless eyes,
Yet the closed lips would seem to smile at death.

Well may they smile; for death, to such as he,
Brings purer freedom, loftier thought and aim;
And, in grand truce with immortality,
Lifts to song's fadeless heaven his star-like fame!

XI.
THE POLE OF DEATH.

IN MEMORY OF SIDNEY LANIER.

How solemnly on mournful eyes
The mystic warning rose,
While o'er the Singer's forehead lies
A twilight of repose.

The twilight deepens into night,—
That night of frozen breath,
The rigor of whose Arctic blight,
We recognize as—death!

But since beyond the polar ice
May shine bright baths of balm;
Past its grim barriers' last device,
A crystal-hearted calm,—

Thus, ice-bound Death that guards so well
His far-off, secret goal,
May clasp a peace ineffable,
For some who reach his pole!

My poet—is it thus with thee,
Beyond this twilight gray,—
This frozen blight, this sombre sea,—
Ah! hast thou found the Day?

XII.
THE DEATH OF HOOD.

The maimed and broken warrior lay,
By his last foeman brought to bay.

No sounds of battlefield were there—
The drum's deep bass, the trumpet's blare.

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No lines of swart battalions broke
Infuriate, thro' the sulphurous smoke.

But silence held the tainted room
An ominous hush, an awful gloom,

Save when, with feverish moan, he stirred,
And dropped some faint, half-muttered word,

Or outlined in vague, shadowy phrase,
The changeful scenes of perished days!

What thoughts on his bewildered brain,
Must then have flashed their blinding pain!

The past and future, blent in one,—
Wild chaos round life's setting sun.

But most his spirit's yearning gaze
Was fain to pierce the future's haze,

And haply view what fate should find
The tender loves he left behind.

“O God! outworn, despondent, poor,
I tarry at death's opening door,

While subtlest ties of sacred birth
Still bind me to the lives of earth.

How can I in calm courage die,
Thrilled by the anguish of a cry

I know from orphaned lips shall start
Above a father's pulseless heart?”

His eyes, by lingering languors kissed,
Shone like sad stars thro' autumn mist;

And all his being felt the stress
Of helpless passion's bitterness.

When, from the fever-haunted room,
The prescient hush, the dreary gloom,

A blissful hope divinely stole
O'er the vexed waters of his soul,

That sank as sank that stormy sea,
Subdued by Christ in Galilee.

It whispered low, with smiling mouth,
“She is not dead,—thy queenly South.

And since for her each liberal vein
Lavished thy life, like vintage rain,

When round the bursting wine-press meet
The Ionian harvesters' crimsoned feet;

And since for her no galling curb
Could bind thy patriot will superb.

Yea! since for her thine all was spent,
Unmeasured, with a grand content,—

Soldier, thine orphaned ones shall rest,
Serene, on her imperial breast.

Her faithful arms shall be their fold,
In summer's heat, in winter's cold;

And her proud beauty melt above
Their weakness in majestic love!”

Ah! then the expiring hero's face,
Like Stephen's, glowed with rapturous grace.

Mad missiles of a morbid mood,
Hurled at his heart in solitude,

No longer wounding, round it fell;
Peace sweetened his supreme farewell!

For sure the harmonious hope was true,
O South! he leaned his faith on you!

And in clear vision, ere he died,
Saw its pure promise justified.

During the terrible yellow fever season of 1878, General Hood and his wife died at very nearly the same time. They left a large family of children unprovided for, under circumstances which aroused the sympathy of the public, north and south. At the South, a considerable fund was subsequently raised for their support; while northern philanthropists, we understand, adopted two of the children.

MEDITATIVE AND RELIGIOUS.

I.
CHRIST ON EARTH.

Had we but lived in those mysterious days,
When, a veiled God 'mid unregenerate men,
Christ calmly walked our devious mortal ways,

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Crowned with grief's bitter rue in place of bays,—
Ah! had we lived but then:

Lived to drink in with every wondering breath,
A consciousness beyond all human ken,
That clothed in flesh, as long conceived in faith,
We viewed the Lord of life and Lord of death,—
Ah! had we lived but then:

To mark all Nature quickening where He trod,
Whether thro' golden field, or shadowy glen,
While a strange sweetness breathed from leaf and clod,
As thro' man's image they divined their God;—
Ah! had we lived but then!

Wild birds above him passed on reverent wing,
And savage sovereigns of dark dune or den,
Out stole to greet Him with mild murmuring,
Soft as a nested dove's song in the spring—
Ah! had we lived but then!

At “peace: be still!” the storm-wind ceased to roar,
And the lulled waters seemed to sigh “amen!”
Fear—the soul's mightier tempest—surged no more,
But a strange stillness fell on sea and shore;—
Ah! had we lived but then!

With our own ears to hear the words He said,
(Their music pondering o'er and o'er again!)
The wine of wisdom quaff from wisdom's head,
View the lame leap, and watch the uprising dead:
Ah! had we lived but then!

The world grows old. Faith, once a mountain stream,
Now crawls polluted down a poisonous fen;
The Bethlehem star hath lost its morning beam;
Thy face, dear Christ, wanes like a wasted dream,—
How changed, how cold since then.

Ah! 'tis our sordid lives whose promise fails:
These languorous lives of low, lost, aimless men;
Thro' mockery's mist our Lord's pure aureole pales,
Yet tenderer than the Syrian nightingales,
His voice sounds now as then.

II.
HARVEST-HOME.

O'er all the fragrant land this harvest day,
What bounteous sheaves are garnered, ear and blade!
Whether the heavens be golden-glad, or gray,—
And the swart laborers toil in sun or shade:—

Like some fair mother in time's morning beams,
When mortal beauty lured immortal eyes,
Here, Earth lies smiling in ethereal dreams,
While her deep-bosomed breathings fall and rise!

Through half-closed lids she views o'er lawn and lea,
Rich-fruited trees, vast piles of glimmering grain,—

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And from the mountain boundaries to the sea,
Hears the low rumbling of the loaded wain.

A magical murmur born of ocean-deeps,
Blent with the pine-tree's lingering music thrills
Up the brown pastures to the trackless steeps,
And ancient caverns of the lonely hills.

Far-flashing insects flicker thro' the grass;
The humble-bee with burly bass drones by;
Afar the plover pipes; the curlews pass
In long lithe lines across the violet sky:

A mellowed radiance rings creation round;
Plenty and peace the auspicious season bless;
The full year pauses proudly, clothed and crowned
In consummation of high queenliness:

All nature seems to throb with rhythmic fires;
Dawns rise harmonious; splendid sunsets roll
Down to the chorus of invisible choirs—
Strange winds in tune with Earth's victorious soul!—

Thus, on the verge of winter's dreary rest,
Nature rejoices in rare pomps of power;
To breeze and sunbeam bares her prodigal breast,
And robes in purple her last shadowless hour.

Ah, when Life's autumn nears the eternal main,
May the heart's granary its rich depths unfold,—
Brimmed with immaculate sheaves of heavenly grain,
And flushed with fruitage of unfading gold!

III.
RECONCILIATION.

[From the South to the North. Written in view of the new year.]

Land of the North! I waft to thee
The South's warm benedicite!
Thou camest when all was grief and pain,
The feverish blood, the tortured brain,
When through hot veins delirium ran,
Thou cam'st, the true Samaritan!

The charm of ruthful grace divine,
The golden oil and perfumed wine,
Have soothed far deeper wounds than those
Which harmed the body's hale repose;
On anguished souls dropped purely calm,
And sweet as Mary's “spikenard” balm!

Lo! now o'er all the world are drawn
Clear splendors of the New-year's dawn!
O North! O South! let warfare cease!
Hark! to that prince whose name is peace!
And ere time's new-born child departs,
Be joined in hands and joined in hearts!

Once wedded thus, O North! O South!
Should discord ope her Marah mouth,
Smite the foul lips so basely fain
To outpour hate's salt tides again:
Long raged the storm, long lowered the night,—
O faction, fly our morning light!

IV.
A VERNAL HYMN.

The fresh spring burgeons into bloom—
And Earth with all her vernal charms
Lies like a queenly bride enclasped
Within her heavenly bridegroom's arms;

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The storms that raved have sunk to peace;
Freed rivulets weave a blithesome lay,
And blissful Nature softly sings
Preludings of her perfect day!

Meanwhile there's not a breeze that thrills
Leaf, bud, and flower with genial kiss,—
Which does not breathe thy mystic hope,
Oh, soul of Palingenesis:—

Glance where we may, the symbols rise
Of loftier loves and lives to be:—
This marvellous spring-time seems to grasp
The skirts of immortality!

V.
CHRISTIAN EXALTATION.

O Christian soldier! shouldst thou rue
Life and its toils, as others do—
Wear a sad frown from day to day,
And garb thy soul in hodden-gray?
O rather shouldst thou smile elate,
Unquelled by sin, unawed by hate,—
Thy lofty-statured spirit dress
In moods of royal stateliness;—
For say, what service so divine
As that, ah! warrior heart, of thine,
High pledged alike through gain or loss,
To thy brave banner of the cross?

Yea! what hast thou to do with gloom,
Whose footsteps spurn the conquered tomb?
Thou that through dreariest dark can see
A smiling immortality?

Leave to the mournful doubting slave,
Who deems the whole wan earth a grave,
Across whose dusky mounds forlorn
Can rise no resurrection morn,
The sombre mien, the funeral weed,
That darkly match so dark a creed;
But be thy brow turned bright on all,
Thy voice like some clear clarion call,
Pealing o'er life's tumultuous van
The keynote of the hopes of man,
While o'er thee flames through gain, through loss,—
That fadeless symbol of the cross.

VI.
SOLITUDE; IN YOUTH AND AGE.

In youth we shrink from solitude!
Its quiet ways we shun,
Because our hearts are fain to dance
With others' in the sun;—
Life's nectar bubbling brightly up,
O'erfloweth toward our brother's cup.

In age we shrink from solitude,
Because our God is there;
And something in his “still, small voice”
Doth bid our souls “beware!”
Who flies from God and conscience, can
But seek his fellow-sinner—man!

VII.
DENIAL.

We look with scorn on Peter's thrice-told lie;
Boldly we say, “Good brother! you nor I,
So near the sacred Lord, the Christ, indeed,
Had dared His name and marvellous grace deny.”

Oh, futile boast! Oh, haughty lips, be dumb!
Unheralded by boisterous trump or drum,
How oft 'mid silent eves and midnight chimes,
Vainly to us our pleading Lord hath come—

Knocked at our hearts, and striven to enter there;
But we poor slaves of mortal sin and care,
Sunk in deep sloth, or bound by spiritual sleep,
Heard not the voice divine, the tender prayer!

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Ah! well for us if some late spring-tide hour
Faith still may bring, with blended shine and shower;
If through warm tears a late remorse may shed,
Our wakened souls put forth one heavenly flower!

VIII.
LESSON OF SUBMISSION.

Ben Youssuf, bound to Mecca, day by day
Toiled bravely o'er the desert's fiery way,
Till its hot sands and flint-sown courses sore
Pressed on the broidered sandals which he wore,
Scorching and cutting! at the last they fell
Loosely abroad;—he seemed to fare through hell,
So blistering now, the flame-hued rocks and dust:—
“O mighty Allah!” cried he, “art thou just,
To let thy faithful pilgrim, serving thee,
Pass onward, thus, in nameless agony?”
With bitter thoughts and half-rebellious mind
He left, at length, the desert sands behind,
And still in that dark temper—far from grace—
Went where his brethren midst the holy place
Kneeled, by the Caäba's sanctity enthralled;—
Lo! there he marked a smitten wretch who crawled
Nearer the shrine, on bleeding hands and knees,
Yet his deep eyes were stars of prayer and peace;—
And ah, how Youssuf's heart remorseful beat,
To find he lacked not only shoes, but—feet!

IX.
THE SUPREME HOUR.

There comes an hour when all life's joys and pains
To our raised vision seem
But as the flickering phantom that remains
Of some dead midnight dream!

There comes an hour when earth recedes so far.
Its wasted wavering ray
Wanes to the ghostly pallor of a star
Merged in the milky way.

Set on the sharp, sheer summit that divides
Immortal truth from mortal fantasie;
We hear the moaning of time's muffled tides
In measureless distance die!

Past passions—loves, ambitions and despairs,
Across the expiring swell
Send thro' void space, like wafts of Lethean airs,
Vague voices of farewell.

Ah, then! from life's long-haunted dream we part,
Roused as a child new-born,
We feel the pulses of the eternal heart
Throb thro' the eternal morn.

X.
A CHRISTMAS LYRIC.

Tho' the Earth with age seems whitened,
And her tresses hoary and old
No longer are flushed and brightened
By glintings of brown or gold,
A voice from the Syrian highlands,
O'er waters that flash and stir,
By the belts of their tropic islands,
Still singeth of joy to her!

A song which the centuries hallow!
Though softer than April rain
That soweth on field and fallow,
A spell that shall rise in grain—

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Yet deep as the sea-strain chanted
On the fluctuant ocean-lyre,
By the magical west-wind haunted,
With the pulse of his soul on fire!

A promise to lift the lowly,—
To weed the soul of its tares,
And change into harmonies holy
The discord of fierce despairs:
A glory of high Evangels,
Of rhythmical storms and calms;
All hail to the voices of angels,
Heard over the starlit palms!

A hymn of hope to the ages,
The music of deathless trust,
No frenzy of mortal rages
Can darken with doubt or dust;
A rapture of high evangels,
But centred in sacred calms!
Ah! still the chorus of angels
Thrills over the Bethlehem palms!

Still heralds the day-spring tender,
That never can melt or close,
Till the noon of its deepening splendor
Out-blooms, like a mystic rose,
Whose petals are rays supernal
Of love that hath all sufficed,—
And whose heart is the grace eternal,
Of the fathomless peace of Christ!

XI.
THE PILGRIM.

Through deepening dust and dreary dearth
I walk the darkened wastes of earth,
A weary pilgrim sore beset,
By hopeless griefs and stern regret.

With broken staff and tattered shoon
I wander slow from dawn to noon—
From arid noon till dew-impearled,
Pale twilight steals across the world.

Yet sometimes through dim evening calms
I catch the gleam of distant palms;
And hear, far off, a mystic sea
Divine as waves on Galilee.

Perchance through paths unknown, forlorn,
I still may reach an orient morn;
To rest when Easter breezes stir,
Around the sacred sepulchre.

XII.
PENUEL.

Near Jabbok Ford, endued with sacred might,
The patriarch strove-with one that silent came,
Obscurely limned against the twilight flame—
Strove thro' slow watches of the marvellous night!

“Ungird thine arms, for lo! 'tis morning light,”
Spake the weird stranger!—“nay, but grant the claim,
Made good thro' strife divine, and bless my name,
'Ere yet thou goest from doubtful clasp and sight!”

Thus Jacob, in the slowly ebbing swell
Of power and passion,—yearning still to mark
That wrestler's face between the dawn and dark:

Again, “wilt thou not bless me?” ... yea! and yea!”
Dropped a still voice, what time the new-born day
Haloed an angel's head at Penuel!

XIII.
PATIENCE.

She hath no beauty in her face,
Unless the chastened sweetness there
And meek long-suffering yield a grace
To make her mournful features fair.

Shunned by the gay, the proud, the young,
She roams through dim unsheltered ways;

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Nor lover's vow, nor flatterer's tongue,
Brings music to her sober days.

At best, her skies are clouded o'er,
And oft she fronts the stinging sleet,
Or feels on some tempestuous shore
The storm-waves lash her naked feet!

Where'er she strays, or musing stands
By lonesome beach, by turbulent mart,—
We see her pale, half-tremulous hands
Crossed humbly o'er her aching heart.

Within, a secret pain she bears,
A pain too deep to feel the balm
An April spirit finds in tears,—
Alas! all cureless griefs are calm!

Yet in her passionless strength supreme,
Despair beyond her pathway flies,
Awed by the softly steadfast beam
Of sad, but heaven-enamored eyes!

Who pause to greet her, vaguely seem
Touched by fine wafts of holier air,
As those who in some mystic dream
Talk with the angels unaware!

XIV.
THE LATTER PEACE.

We have passed the noonday summit,
We have left the noonday heat,
And down the hillside slowly
Descend our weary feet.
Yet the evening airs are balmy,
And the evening shadows sweet.

Our summer's latest roses
Lay withered long ago;
And even the flowers of autumn
Scarce keep their mellowed glow.
Yet a peaceful season woos us
Ere the time of storms and snow.

Like the tender twilight weather
When the toil of day is done,
And we feel the bliss of quiet
Our constant hearts have won—
When the vesper planet blushes,
Kissed by the dying sun.

So falls that tranquil season,
Dew-like, on soul and sight,
Faith's silvery star rise blended
With memory's sunset light,
Wherein life pauses softly
Along the verge of night.

XV.
GAUTAMA.

Seven weary centuries ere our star-like Christ
Rose on the clouded heavens of mortal faith
Gautama came, the stern high priest of death,
Oblivion's sombre, dark evangelist.
Millions of souls hath this dread creed enticed
To wander lost through realms of baleful breath,
Ghoul-haunted, rife with shapes of sin and scath,
Monstrous, yet dim, as births of midnight mist:

All life, he taught, hath been, all life must be
Accursed! the gift of demons! All delight
Lies at the far-off goal of pulseless peace.

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“Pray,” sighed he, “that this breath of men shall cease;
Our hell is earth, our heaven eternal night;
Our only godhead vague Nonentity!”

Note.—We yield to none in our cordial admiration of Mr. Edwin Arnold's “Light of Asia;” but we regard that most eloquent, pathetic, and beautiful poem, chiefly as a poem—and by no means as an absolutely authoritative presentation of Gautama's creed, or its tendencies. It even seems to us that Mr. Arnold is himself somewhat in the dark as to these matters. The “prodigious controversy among the erudite in regard to Gautama's doctrines,” Mr. Arnold confronts chiefly by his own firm conviction that “a third of mankind would never have been brought to believe in blank abstractions, or in nothingness, as the crown of Being!” Au contraire, we cannot fairly ignore the opinion of those Orientalists who maintain, that “Nirvana” is essentially nothingness; and moreover, that the idea involved in it has a peculiar charm for the Hindoo mind.

XVI.
CHRIST.

The soul's physician thus the soul would kill,
The soul's high priest its heaven-bound pinions stay,
Bring from fresh beauty chaos, night from day,
Despair from trust, from all good promise ill;
The outworn heart and sickened senses still
Must shroud heaven's life in fogs of foul decay,
Veil the swift angel, love, and hide the ray
Born of God's smile with masks of morbid will:—

But Truth, and Truth's great Master cannot die;
While Love, the seraph, free of wings and eyes,
Upsweeps the realm of calm immensity.
A thousand times our buried Christ shall rise
In prayerful souls to hush their anguished sighs,
And dawn, not darkness, rule o'er earth and sky.

XVII.
A WINTER HYMN.

O Weary winds! O winds that wail!
O'er desert fields and ice-locked rills!
O heavens that brood so cold and pale
Above the frozen Norland hills!

Nature is like some sorrowing soul,
Robed in a garb of dreariest woe;—
She cannot see her vernal goal
Through ghostly veils of mist and snow:—

Her pulse beats low; through all her veins
Scarce can the sluggish life-blood start;
What feeble, faltering heat sustains
The half-numbed forces of her heart!

Above, despondent eyes she lifts,
To view the sun-ray's dubious birth;
Beneath she marks the storm-piled drifts
About a waste bewildering earth!

Ah, stricken Mother! hast thou lost
All memory of the germs that rest
Untouched by tempest, rain, or frost,
Shrined in thine own immortal breast?

Bend, bend thine ear; yea, bend and hear,—
Despite the winds' and woodlands' strife,—
Deep in Earth's bosom, faint and clear,
The far-off murmurous hints of life:—

The sound of waves in whispering flow;
Of seeds that stir in dreams of light,
Whose sweetness mocks the shrouded snow,
Whose radiance smiles at death and night;

So, Christian spirit! wrapt in grief,—
Beneath thy misery's frozen sod,
Love works, to burst in flower and leaf,
On some fair spring-dawn fresh from God!

XVIII.
THE THREE URNS.

List to an Arab parable, wherein
The beauty of the Orient fancy shrines
A star-like truth, the iconoclastic West
Is blind to see, its shrewd material vision
Bent over on the foulest soils of earth,
If only gold may gild them! Hear and—learn!

Nimroud, the king to whom his fourscore years
Had brought a wisdom pure as his white locks,

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(And spotless they as snow on Caucasus!)
One morn commanded his three sons to grace
His presence chamber; there in front of each
A mighty urn, sealed with a mystic seal,
Was duly set—the one of burnished gold,
Blazed like an August noon—of amber fair
The other—but the third (dull as a cloud
Seen 'gainst the bright flash of a distant wave.
Or 'twixt the glittering tree-tops), seemed, in form,
A rugged mould wrought from the common earth.

“Choose thou, my eldest,” said the king, deep-breathed,
“Choose thou amongst these urns, the urn which seems
To thee most precious,”—whereupon he chose
The Vase of Gold, which bore in jewelled flame,
Clear leaping, the word “Empire,”—opened it,
And found beneath a deadly, vaporous fume,
(Which on the instant sickened heart and sense),—
Nought but a bubbling tide of vital blood,
Hot, as appeared, that moment from the veins
Of murdered manhood. The fair amber vase,
With “Glory” written on it—“this for me!”
Exclaimed the second prince, with eager eyes,
And feverish hands clasping his treasure close,—
Too close, alas! for as he spake, the urn
Crashed on his breast, and bruised and tortured it,
And a rare dust, the ashes of great men,
Dead centuries since, rose from its shattered bulk
Pungent, and yet so light the feeblest puff
Of failing wind hath shorn and scattered them
Into vague air. One vase alone remained,
Which the third son unsealing, found therein,
Deep-graven, glittering like a planet keen,
Thro' gulfs of envious darkness the sole name
Of God,—“which name, O! princes,” said the king,
“Doth sanctify yon vase of common earth
Above all precious metals sought of men,
Since but one letter of that sacred three,
Outweighs all worlds, from the mild star of eve,
Shining on love, to those mysterious orbs,
Which gird the pathway of the Pleiades.”

XIX.
ON THE DECLINE OF FAITH.

As in some half-burned forest, one by one,
We catch far echoes on the doleful breeze,
Born of the downfall of its ruined trees;
While even thro' those which stand, slow shudderings run,
As if Fate's ruthless hand were laid thereon;
So, in a world sore-smitten by foul disease,
—That Pest, called Doubt—we mark by slow degrees.
The fall of many a faith that wooed the sun:
Some, with low sigh of parting bough, or leaf,

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Strain, quivering downward to the abhorrèd ground;
Some totter feebly, groaning toward their doom;
While some broad-centuried growths of old Belief,
Sapped as by fire, defeatured, charred, discrowned,
Fall with a loud crash, and long reverberant boom!

Thus, fated hour by hour, more gaunt and bare,
Gloom the wan spaces, whence, a power to bless,
Up burgeoned once, in grace or stateliness,
Some creed divine, offspring of light and air;
What then? and must we yield to blank despair,
Beholding God Himself wax less and less,
Paled in the skeptical storm-cloud's whirl and stress,
Till all is lost—love, reverence, hope, and prayer.
O man! when faith succumbs, and reason reels,
Before some impious, bold iconoclast,
Turn to thy heart that reasons not, but feels;
Creeds change! shrines perish! still (her instinct saith),
Still the soul lives, the soul must conquer Death.
Hold fast to God, and God will hold thee fast!

XX.
THE ULTIMATE TRUST.

Though in the wine-press of thy wrath divine,
My crushed hopes droop, like crude and worthless must,
That love and mercy, Father! still are thine,
With reverent soul, I trust!

Though all my life be shattered by thine ire,
The mystic whirlwind of thy will august,
Still, from the din, the darkness and the fire,
I lift my song of trust!

Tho' foes assail me! yea, within, without!
Harrow my heart, and hurl its joys in dust,
No forceful fear, nor fraud of treacherous doubt,
Disarms my bucklered trust!

Though my lost years be wrapped in Arctic cloud,
And Grief on me hath wreaked her ruthless lust,
Still, like an angel's face above a shroud
Smiles my celestial trust!

Tho', Lord! thou wear'st a mask of hate ('twould seem),
And for a time, I think—as mortals must—
That mask shall melt, as melts a nightmare dream,
Before my Orient trust!

Yea! tho' Thou slay me, and supine, I cower,
Heart-pierced and bleeding from the fiery thrust,—
I know there bides in heaven a glorious hour,
To crown my sacred trust!

XXI.
“A LITTLE WHILE I FAIN WOULD LINGER YET.”

A little while (my life is almost set!)
I fain would pause along the downward way,
Musing an hour in this sad sunset-ray,
While, Sweet! our eyes with tender tears are wet;
A little hour I fain would linger yet.

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A little while I fain would linger yet,
All for love's sake, for love that cannot tire;
Though fervid youth be dead, with youth's desire,
And hope has faded to a vague regret,
A little while I fain would linger yet.

A little while I fain would linger here:
Behold! who knows what strange, mysterious bars
'Twixt souls that love, may rise in other stars?
Nor can love deem the face of death is fair;
A little while I still would linger here.

A little while I yearn to hold thee fast,
Hand locked in hand, and loyal heart to heart;
(O pitying Christ! those woeful words, “We part!”)
So ere the darkness fall, the light be past,
A little while I fain would hold thee fast.

A little while, when night and twilight meet;
Behind, our broken years; before, the deep
Weird wonder of the last unfathomed sleep.
A little while I still would clasp thee, Sweet;
A little while, when night and twilight meet.

A little while I fain would linger here;
Behold! who knows what soul-dividing bars
Earth's faithful loves may part in other stars?
Nor can love deem the face of death is fair:
A little while I still would linger here.

XXII.
TWILIGHT MONOLOGUE.

Can it be that the glory of manhood has passed,
That its purpose, its passion, its might,
Have all paled with the fervor that fed them at last,
As the twilight comes down with the night?

Can it be I have lived, dreamed, and labored in vain—
That above me, unconquered and bright,
The proud goal I had aimed at is taunting my pain,
As the twilight comes down with the night?

Can it be that my hopes, which seemed noble and fair,
Were predestined to mildew and blight?
Ah! sad disenchantment! that bids me beware
Of a twilight which heralds the night!

The glad days, the brave years that were lusty and long—
How they fade on vague memory's sight!
And their joys are like echoes of jubilant song,
As the twilight comes down with the night!

All the past is o'ershadowed, the present is dim,
And could earth's fairest future requite
The worn spirit that swoons, the racked senses that swim,
In this dread of the twilight and night?

There is dew on my raiment; the sea winds wail low,
As lost birds, wafted wave-ward in flight,

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And all Nature grows cold, as my heart in its woe,
At the advent of twilight and night!

From the realm of dead sunset scarce darkened as yet—
Over hills mist-enshrouded and white,
A deep sigh of ineffable, mournful regret,
Seems exhaled 'twixt the twilight and night!

O! thou genius of art! I have worshipped and blessed;
O! thou soul of all beauty and light!
Lift me up in thine arms, give me warmth from thy breast,
Ere the twilight be merged in the night!

Let me draw from thy bosom miraculous breath,
And for once, on song's uppermost height,
I may chant to the nations such music in death
As shall mock at the twilight and night!

XXIII.
THE SHADOW OF DEATH.

I pray you, when the shadow of death draws nigh,
To bear me out beneath the unmeasured heaven;
I fain would hear the pine-trees' slumberous sigh,
And watch the cloud flotillas drifted high,
By slow, soft breezes driven
Due south, perchance toward realms of tropic balms,
And the warm fragrance of the Syrian palms.

I pray you, when the shadow of death comes down,
Oh! lay me close to nature's pulses deep,
Whether her breast with autumn tints be brown,
Or bright with summer, or hale winter's crown
Press on her brows in sleep;
So nigh the dawn of some new, mavellous birth,
I'd look to heaven, still clasped in arms of earth!

I pray you, when the shadow of death draws near,
Give, give me freedom for my last, faint breath;
Beneath God's liberal heaven I could not fear,
His merciful winds would dry my latest tear,
His sunshine soften death,
And some fair shreds of our dear earth's delight
Cling round the spirit in her upward flight.

XXIV.
FINIS.

A moment's gleam, a hint of sunnier weather,
Borne from the storm-clouds and the mists of fate;
Dawned, with a tender “Peradventure” hither,
A soft “Perchance it is not yet too late!”

And so a transient omen magnifying,
My soul would fain pass brightened, unto thine;
But to my half-formed thought comes truth replying:
“No life mounts backward from its wan decline.”

Would'st thou expect, drear winter, ashen, sober,
To burn with blushes of a spring-tide noon?
Would'st thou expect the hectic-cheeked October
To catch the virginal freshness of young June?

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All mortal lives like year's seasons ever
Pass from their May dawn and rare summer's bloom,
Down to the day when autumn winds dissever
Life's latest sheaves to strew them near a tomb.

And then death looms, that pitiless grim December.
Bringing cold tears, a winding sheet like snow,
Last, a carved stone, which bids the world remember
One of its countless myriads sleeps below.

XXV.
THE SHADOWS ON THE WALL.

What mournful influence chills my soul to-night?
I watch the expiring flames that fade and fall,
From which outleap vague shafts of arrowy light,
Pursued by spectral shadows on the wall.

My thoughts are wandering on the verge of dreams,
Mist-laden, gray, and sombre as a pall,
While lower, feebler, flit the fireside gleams,
And darker those quaint shadows on the wall.

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The old sad voice (fraught with the centuries' tears)
That seems through infinite space and time to call,
Faint with the doubts and grief of antique years,
Years that are dim as shadows on the wall;

The old sad voice is whispering to my heart:
Man's life, phantasmal, vain, illusive all,
Beholds too soon its cloud-foundations part,
Melting like midnight shadows on the wall.

Too soon the noblest passions, worn and old,
Die, or grow dulled and languid past recall;
Even love may wane in memory's twilight cold,
Sad, wavering, wan, as shadows on the wall.

And oft the loftiest nature's loftiest aim,
Heaven-soaring once, wide as this earthly ball,
Sinks, a tamed eagle o'er whose eyes of flame
The death-films steal like shadows on the wall.

A subtler voice whispers the conscious soul,
“What of high hopes which held thy youth in thrall?
Where flash thy chariot wheels, where shines thy goal?”
The mocking shadows answer from the wall.

With deepening dusk and faded flame they grow
Fantastic phantoms, hovering over all
The tremulous space, or flickering to and fro
In wild unearthly antics on the wall.

Till as the last slow ember drops in gloom,
Like vassals hurrying through some wizard's hall,
Whirling they pass, and darkness haunts the room,
No life, not even a shadow on the wall!

XXVI.
CONSUMMATUM EST.

I've done with all the world can give,
Whate'er its kind or measure.
(O Christ! what paltry lives we live
If toil be lord, or pleasure!).
Alas! I only yearn for sleep,
Calm rest for fevered riot—
The sacred sleep, the shadows deep,
Of death's majestic quiet.

I've done with all our earth-life lends—
False hopes and wild ambitions,
Brilliant beginnings, futile ends,
And long-postponed fruitions,
Those hollow shows dissembling truth,
Vain myths that mock the real,
The dreary wrecks of peace and youth
Above a crushed ideal.

I've done with heavenly dreams that wane
At touch of earth-born dawnings,
With fervid passion, useless pain,
Brave aims and dim forewarnings;
I've done with alien tears or smiles,
Past days and vague to-morrows;
I've done with earth's unhallowed wiles,
Brief joys and helpless sorrows.

I've done with compacts sealed in dust,
Dull cares that overweighed me,
With promise of the Judas-trust,
That, while it kissed, betrayed me;
With all save love, whose matchless face
Midmost a life's undoing
Smiles in its tender angel's grace
To sanctify the ruin.

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I've done with all beneath the stars,
O world! so wanly fleeting!
How long against time's ruthless bars
Have the soul's wings been beating,
Till even the soul but yearns for sleep,
Calm rest for fevered riot—
The sacred sleep, the shadows deep,
Of death's majestic quiet!

XXVII.
THE BROKEN CHORDS.

Like a worn wind-harp on a barren lea,
Unstirred by subtle breathings of the sea,
Though sweet south-breezes swell the floodtide's flow,
The lyric power in this worn heart of mine
Droops in the twilight of life's wan decline,
While the loosed chords of song grown lax and low,
Are dumb to all the heavenly airs that blow!

Only, sometimes along each shattered string
I hear the ghost of Memory murmuring
Old strains, as half in sadness half in scorn,
So faint, so far, they scarcely pass the bound
'Twixt sullen silence and ethereal sound,—
Mere wraiths of murmurous tone, that die forlorn
Ere yet we deem those faltering notes are born!

So, smitten chords, sink, wane, and pass away!
Yet have ye made soft music in your day
On many a sea-swept strand or breezy lawn.
Once more I hear that yearning music rise;
Once more I see deep tears in tender eyes;
And all my soul melts in me, fondly drawn
Back to youth's love and youth's Arcadian dawn!

XXVIII.
THE RIFT WITHIN THE LUTE.

A tiny rift within the lute
May sometimes make the music mute!
By slow degrees, the rift grows wide,
By slow degrees, the tender tide—
Harmonious once—of loving thought
Becomes with harsher measures fraught,
Until the heart's Arcadian breath
Lapses thro' discord into death!

XXIX.
IN HARBOR.

I think it is over, over,
I think it is over at last,
Voices of foeman and lover,
The sweet and the bitter have passed:—
Life, like a tempest of ocean
Hath outblown its ultimate blast:
There's but a faint sobbing sea-ward
While the calm of the tide deepens leeward,
And behold! like the welcoming quiver
Of heart-pulses throbbed thro' the river,
Those lights in the harbor at last,
The heavenly harbor at last!

I feel it is over! over!
For the winds and the waters surcease;
Ah!—few were the days of the rover
That smiled in the beauty of peace!
And distant and dim was the omen
That hinted redress or release:—
From the ravage of life, and its riot
What marvel I yearn for the quiet
Which bides in the harbor at last?
For the lights with their welcoming quiver
That through the sanctified river
Which girdles the harbor at last,
This heavenly harbor at last?

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I know it is over, over,
I know it is over at last!
Down sail! the sheathed anchor uncover,
For the stress of the voyage has passed:
Life, life a tempest of ocean
Hath outbreathed its ultimate blast:
There's but a faint sobbing sea-ward,
While the calm of the tide deepens leeward;
And behold! like the welcoming quiver
Of heart-pulses throbbed thro' the river,
Those lights in the harbor at last,
The heavenly harbor at last!

XXX.
FORECASTINGS.

When I am gone, what alien steps shall tread
This flowery garden-close?
What alien hands shall pluck the violets sweet,
Or gather the rich petals of the rose,
When I—drear thought!—am dead?

When I am gone, toward doubtful darkness led,
What voices, false or true,
Shall echo round these old, familiar haunts
My happiest days of tranquil manhood knew,
Ah me! when I am dead?

When I am gone, what museful eyes instead
Of these dimmed eyes of mine,
Beneath yon trellised porch shall mark thro' heaven,
On cloudless eves the summer sunsets shine,
When I, alas! am dead?

When I am gone, and all is done and said,
One life had wrought below—
'Mid these fair scenes what other souls shall thrill,
In turn, to love and anguish, joy and woe—
Dear Christ! when I am dead?

Though I be dead, perchance when Spring has shed
Her gentlest influence round—
Here, where love reigned, my ghostly feet may tread
The old accustomed paths without a sound,—
Perchance—when I am dead!

Though I be dead, earth's fragrant white and red
Here in spring roses met,
May to strange spiritual senses bring the balms
Of tender memory and divine regret,
Yea! even to me—though dead!

Though I be dead, with faded hands and head
Laid in unbreathing rest—
Dear cottage roof! thou still mayst lure me back,
Among the unconscious living a wan guest,
Veiled, as Fate veils the dead:

A guest of shadowy frame, ethereal tread,
Amongst them, yet apart—
A sombre mystery! in whose bosom throb
The faint, slow pulses of its phantom heart,
Ah, heaven! not wholly dead!

XXXI.
APPEAL TO NATURE OF THE SOLITARY HEART.

Dear mother, take me to thy breast!
I have no other place of rest
In all this weary world of men:
Ah! fold me in thy love again,
Sweet mother; clasp me to thy breast!

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From out thy womb, long since, I came,
A creature wrought of dust and flame;
I knew no mortal mother's grace,
But only viewed thy mystic face,
That softly went, and softly came!

I knew thee in the sunset grand,
The waveless calm, the silvery strand;
From out the shimmering twilight-bars
I saw thee smile between the stars,
Divinely sweet, or softly grand!

I heard, beneath the sylvan arch,
Thy battling winds, led on by March,
Sweep where the solemn pine-tops close
About its ravaged, dim repose—
Hushed, awed, beneath the woodland arch!

I heard thee, 'mid some tender hour,
In lisping leaf and rustling flower,
In low lute-breathings of the breeze,
And tidal sighs o'er moonless seas
Star-charmed in midnight's mournful hour!

I thrilled at each far-whispered tone
That touched me from thy vast unknown,
At every dew-bright hint that fell
From out thy soul unsearchable,
Yea, each strange hint and shadowy tone!

I felt, through dim, awe-laden space,
The coming of thy veilèd face;
And in the fragrant night's eclipse
The kisses of thy deathless lips,
Like strange star-pluses, throbbed through space!

Now mine own pulses, beating low,
Whisper the spent life: “Thou must go;
Even as a wasted rivulet, pass
Beyond the light, beneath the grass,
For strength grows faint, and hope is low!”

FOUR POEMS FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS.

I.
TO THE POET WHITTIER. ON HIS 70th BIRTHDAY.

From this far realm of pines I waft thee now
A brother's greeting, Poet, tried and true;
So thick the laurels on thy reverend brow,
We scarce can see the white locks glimmering through!

O pure of thought! Earnest in heart as pen,
The tests of time have left thee undefiled;
And o'er the snows of threescore years and ten
Shines the unsullied aureole of a child.

II.
TO O. W. HOLMES, ON HIS BIRTHDAY.

Dear Doctor, whose blandly invincible pen
Has honored so often your great fellowmen
With your genius and virtues, who doubts it is true
That the world owes in turn, a warm tribute to you?

Wheresoever rare merit has lifted its head
From the cool country calm or the city's hotbed—
You were always the first to applaud it by name,
And to smooth for its feet the harsh pathway to fame.

Wheresoever beneath the broad rule of the sun,
By some spirit elect, a grand deed has been done—

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Its electrical spell like the lightning's would dart,
Though the globe lay between, to thrill first in your heart!

Philanthropist! poet! romancer! combined—
Ay! shrewd scientist too—who shall fathom your mind,
Shall plumb that strange sea to the uttermost deep,
With its vast under-tides, and its rhythmical sweep?

You have toiled in life's noon, till the hot blasting light
Blinds the eyes that would gauge your soul stature aright;
But when eve comes at last, 't will be clear to mankind,
By the length of bright shadow your soul leaves behind!

III.
TO EMERSON.

ON HIS 77th BIRTHDAY.

“I do esteeme him a deepe sincere soule; one that seemeth ever to be travailing after the Infinite!”—

Sir Thomas Browne.

Ah! what to him our trivial praise or blame,
Who through long years hath raised half-mournful eyes
Yearning to mark some heaven-descended flame
Light his soul's altar rife with sacrifice?

The offering of far thoughts, profound as prayer,
And starry dreams, still rhythmical of youth,
With travail of brain that pants for loftier air,
To the veiled mystery of immaculate Truth:

No Orient seer—wild woodlands, 'round him furled,—
Building his shrine 'mid virginal vales apart,
E'er watched and waited in the antique world,
For fire divine, with more ethereal heart!

Can life's supreme oblations still remain
All undiscerned? or hath some marvellous levin
Hallowed his gift, and down his rifted pain
Flashed the white splendor of God's grace from heaven?

IV.
TO HON. R. G. H.

UPON HIS 78th BIRTHDAY.

Close to the verge of fourscore crowded years
Your heart is strong, your soul serene and bright;
As when confronting first life's hopes and fears—
The star of manhood crowned your brow with light.

Clear thoughts are spells to keep the lifeblood pure,
Brave aims are medicinal, rife with balm;
What wonder then, with thee life's joys endure,
And life's majestic sunset smiles in calm!

For thou art one whose brotherhood supreme
Hath touched all circles of benign desire;
Therefore, thy days like some unclouded dream,
Are slowly melting into heavenly fire.