MY PROLOGUE
I
If heat of youth, 'tis heat suppressed
That fills my breast:
The childhood of a voiceless lyre
Preserves my fire.
I chanted not while I was young;
But ere age chill, I liberate my tongue!
II
Apart from stormy ways of men,
Maine's loneliest glen
Held me as banished, and unheard
I saved my word:
I would not know the bitter taste
Of the crude fame which falls to them that haste.
III
On each impatient year I tossed
A holocaust
Of effort, ashes ere it burned,
And justly spurned.
If now I own maturer days.
I know not: dust to me is passing praise.
IV
But out of life arises song,
Clear, vital, strong—
The speech men pray for when they pine,
The speech divine
No other can interpret: grand
And permanent as time and race and land.
V
I dreamed I spake it: do I dream,
In pride supreme,
Or, like late lovers, found the bride
Their youth denied,
Is this my stinted passion's flow?
It well may be; and they that read will know.
1874.
