 | Calmstorm, the reformer |  |
5. PART V.
SCENE I.
—A street. Second and Third Citizens meeting.Sec. Cit.
Whither haste you with a foot so gloomy,
Swift and silent?
Third Cit.
There's but one place—the Square.
Sec. Cit.
But one. I too am thither bent. Know you
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Third Cit.
More than I would, and more than you would hear.
A man who dwells next-neighboring him, reports
That all last night, most at the dead of night,
And at the hour when slumber turns upon
The ridgy dark to catch a glimpse of day
As it comes on toward the dreaming lid,
One walked in Calmstorm's chamber up and down,
Who seemed—for so a rushing sound, and then
A silence, would make known—to struggle
With th' invisible air, and groanings from him came
That shook the house: 'Twas a dark, dreary night,
And the black Heavens (he said) pressed sullen and close,
Against his dwelling windows.
Sec. Cit.
The day,
I fear, will, brief or long, outlive the man:
I saw afar how this dark hand would at the end
Grasp up the heaven. 'Tis feared his mind is touched.
Third Cit.
Could pity now begin, and weep forever
From this hour till time is fallen to ashes
And a cinder's gloom, her tears would be
A second's dew to what this sadness asks,
Of fountains, rivers, seas, not all insensible.
Sec. Cit.
I dread to go.
Third Cit.
And I, yet more, to stay:
And yet the wheel must roll through all its round
Until the Great Disposer stop it. Let's hasten.
[Exeunt.
SCENE II.
—A Public Square. Calmstorm.Calmstorm.
O why are all the forces of the world in arms
Against a single heart? I hear them not, I see them not,
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The engines that the world has built to break its peace
And crush its blessers!—
Enter Umena, Dorcas.
Umena.
Bear up, dear Calmstorm, and remember
Deep-centered in the Universe's heart,
The Power that looks on these our trial-days,
And is at peace if we endure them well:
For Suffering is fellow with the mighty God,
And walked with him, and slept and rose with him
Through all his way in old Judea.
Calm.
I hear two Voices, one on either hand—
[Cheers and shouts
Listen again! The one resounds with rage,
Wilder than is the bison's angry mane,
And harsher than the crying jaguar's throat—
Ominous of shattered walls, fires in the air,
And tempests in the streets of cities.
It is the great Rabble's cry—Why, oh why
Will ye rend the fair breast of the realm,
And scatter on the ground the branches
Of its hope? Listen, again, Umena.
Not smoother is the down upon the dove,
More musical the pause of dying winds,
And orderly as is the white condor's flock
When down it flies from Alleghany
Unto the rivered vale. This is the People's:
Of this is born in calmness, strength and truth,
The popular edict, born in the Law,
And for the Law and through the Law, unquenchable
As are th' Eternal courses of the Sun!—
It happens, I know, at times, that this great voice
Is dumb. This latter, now that I hearken,
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And cheer me.
The Double Cry sweeps this way swiftly,
And is confounded, each with each;
Alas, my ear distinguishes them not—
A voiceless tumult and no more.
[Walks apart.
Dorcas.
O, be not thou downcast, Umena.
Umena.
I am sorrowful, Dorcas, that he is sad,
Doubting the hope and future of his race,
His brethren, and his kin of human kind—
Would that some angel, winged and blest of God,
And better-souled than they that stand aloof,
Might 'mid the waters of his grief descend,
And bring him healing!
Dorcas.
I have a fear as well as you—
There was a wren, a small, brown, quiet wren,
That came this morning, at the early light,
And on the threshold of his window sate—
Umena.
Spare him!—he must not go so soon from me!
Dear Heaven! swing all your crystal windows wide,
And pour down Truth! least Earth should yawn
Upon his wandering steps, and snatch him in the dark
From all he loves and all he loves to look on.
Spare me!—I cannot look on this and live.
[Exit Umena, followed by Dorcas.
Enter First Politician.
Calm.
You seek me, and would speak with me?
First Pol.
I am a suitor that you will sign a bond
In my behalf, as one who seeks to serve,
Humbly, in a small trust, the general weal.
[Presents a paper.
Calm.
You've fallen in your search on the worst day of days:
I have no power to serve the humblest man,
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Whatever, in faith and zeal, men do or may,
To lift the weight of penury or woe
From other men, is passed clean from my reach.—
You see that little cloud that dwindles in the east!—
Alas, 'tis gone before you lift your eyes—
That vapor vanishable and vanished now,
Has greater power to serve you and to harm you,
When after many days or many weeks
Or many months, slowly it reappears,
In a returning rain, or summer's gust,
Or in the silent dew of night, than I.
First Pol.
You're touched, I fear, with some old malady,
That wears upon you: the hollowness
Of your look, an hour gone by, has dug.
Calm.
You seem to be the spirit of my thought!—
Know you the inward and the backward
Of my days?
First Pol.
This much I know, too much, perhaps—
You've tried or try Fortune's each edge:
You have outlived the fierce and furious West—
The East—what think you of its silent way?
Calm.
I know them both.
First Pol.
The word or blow, the eye or hand, choose either,
And you get buffets that reach the heart of life.
Calm.
I am a man of glass, and all men spy
My swiftly-running sands.
[Aside.
First Pol.
Spirit or body, which be killed and who shall kill?—
Oh, sad and woful sons of men, that this must be!
Calm.
The Avenger crouching on the Earth behind,
And the Dark Angel beckoning me before!
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Believe me sir, and I well know what I would speak—
There is no hope of the world—
Where'er I go, I hear such dreadful tales
Of tumults and of wars, such faith-breach deep,
Such heart-burns, and such angers, and such frays
In the universal and the single world,
Such sad confounding of the high and low—
Calm.
Oh, catalogue it not in dark detail,
But let it be a blackness undefined!
First Pol.
Such jars and jealousies, groanings of the poor,
And pale lamentings of the rich,
The secret and the open hand of malice,
The bitterness of evil tongues—the nation strifes—
Calm.
You do—you do! I cannot doubt it.
Would they—oh! will they never so accord?
The Europe-born, he of the Far Isles,
Asian, and Afric black as night that moves
Slowly across her troubled face, with New America
Join hands about the earth, upholding it
Mother and fountain Spirit to them all!—
One as the globe itself, though mountain-varied,
Each cinctured with its own peculiar clime,
Together ne'er make up,
A round and perfect whole, without a flaw,
A clear and crystal orb of power and love!—
But whither do I stray? your voice recalls me.—
First Pol'n.
Murders as though each human arm were red,
And struck at the other in a general fray;
And baleful risings of the armed upon
The weaponless; bloody o'erwhelmings of the weak;
Whole tribes driven irresistibly off—
The harsh unprosperous plough pursuing
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Calm.
Your voice rolls on and might, till it become
One with the blasting of the general trump—
The same in fearfulness, the same in sound—
First Pol.
And so it might! For flash on flash, the tidings follow,
'Till the pale earth verberates!
Hear you that raging shout!
[A shout at a distance.
Allow me that I take your hand in mine
Before we part. 'Tis cold and damp.
[Aside.]
Th' avenging shaft has struck!—
[Exit First Pol.
Calmstorm.
What means he? He mocked me or he seemed to—
Great memory's globe moves round, and brings me light,
The mist clears off, and now it rushes back,
Not the meek suitor's with a low request,
But heading fierce th' unappeasable van;
That face I knew it, and must know it,—
A hundred angry faces all in one—
Through all the ages of illimitable life,
For he it was that knit my hideous bonds,
Beneath the eye of the enkindled West,
Cheer'd by her fiery throng, and cheering them;
He is the deadly double of my life,
For now he ties them with his subtle speech
Closer than hands; a knot unseverable.
If I spread out these arms I cannot meet
The foe: if I advance this foot I find him not,
Impalpable he comes upon me as the air
In his dread periods of plague and tempest.
They kill me with Opinion's hellish shot;
Opinion that, as the dead man's spirit walks,
A fatal exhalation, no body to be seen,
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'Tis not my life they strike at, but my name
They would shake down from its high-fixed
And towery station.
Pass on, thou dream that seemed the Time to come
In its sweet dawning; with thee bear along
The dreamer, on whose lids and in whose eyes
Thy cradle was for many years of joy!
There lingers in the limbs a sense of chains
After the chains are shattered; the thought
Of that sweet bondage binds me for a little yet,
Until believer and belief in the one
Same grave are laid.
Who, who this knot will disentangle
Of life, and weal and woe in life, for men
In the massed city, on the crowded way,
In links and ranks innumerable.
Who break this net of meshes numberless,
Where to be free is to be bound: where speech
That should give hope, enmeshes more the foot,
Than silence that consents to bondage!
Enter First Citizen, gazes at Calmstorm fixedly, for a while.
First Cit.
Umena's dead.
Calm.
[pausing.]
There was one spoke to me just now.
The voice came from a far land whose dialect
I should not know. Dead?
First Cit.
Heart-struck with grief
At the sad going-out of all your hopes:
Her tresses spread upon the silent ground,
Her face, winter and summer sweetly mixed,
Turned to the sky, a woman no longer,
But a painting wrought most cunningly
By passion's hand—the earth she beautifies.
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That heals and saves the world—Calmstorm, look up!
And then she passed away to Him she spake of.
[Gazes silently at Calmstorm, and then Exit.
Calmstorm.
Fairer!—oh, what in all the all-embracing air,
In thought or speech or look, fairer than thou!
The tears my spirit, too sadly, knows thy due
Cannot be stayed nor shed, but at their flood-tide pause
The next motion of the moon to see
What time brings on.
[Loud sounds without.
Hearken again!—The tumult deepens like a sea.
I have disturbed the general peace; and now
They rage and riot, objectless, against
The men of no offence! Once more, rouse up
Thou troubled heart, and seek to give the anger
Of the popular strength an aim of nobleness:
Once more, thou breaking spirit, be thyself,
And drive the shaggy uproar to his den!
[Exit Calmstorm.
SCENE III.
—A street. Slinely and Darkledge.Sline.
I've heard from him within the last half hour—
An ashy paleness in his features grows,
And his hands shake when he would lift them
To his brow.—Signs unquestionable these,
Of what draws near: The great blight has struck him;
His wife is dead.
Dark.
She might have lived, and yet the world gone
Fairly on. A sudden malady?
Sline.
No suddener than the overthrow that comes
On Calmstorm. It broke her woman's foolish heart,
To look on him and see the strong thought
Of his doom shake all his powers.
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She goes before him to account some hour
Or two. A pity—confess Slinely—
That he's o'ermastered by too fierce a zeal
To tamper with high station, and the ordered rule
Of the world.
[Enter a messenger, whispers Slinely, Exit.
Sline.
Calmstorm has come forth and walks in the Square,
A pace or two from this, an old-used haunt of his—
There is a friend's house hard by there, in which
A window I have borrowed.
[Another messenger as before.
The crowd swells swiftly through all this fervent
Neighborhood. The window looks upon
The very point where they must gather,
And thence, we may, unseen, gaze on the end.
[Another messenger, &c.
Hearken! Heard you not that, a wide, deep hiss,
As if all the wildernesses of the world
Had emptied into a street, near by,
Their serpents in a rage.—A moment more,
And you will hear a shout to rock you
From your feet. The Popular Tongue clamours,
[A shout.
As if it were the bell of doom. Again!
Again! The bravest shouters of the world!
The sea when mad, the sky most merciless
Has not a speech one half so deep or rough.
There is a silence, now—let's hasten on—
For in their faces, still with deepest scorn,
In fingers pointed at his treacherous heart,
We shall behold the power 'gainst which no man,
Of adamant or iron or the pure diamond built,
Can stand.
[Exeunt Darkledge, Slinely.
SCENE IV.
—A street. First Citizen, Second Citizen, &c.First Cit.
On the high open square,
Dripping a spray of blood from the red storm
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His sword piercing in silence the calm ground—
Cathedral-like he stands and looks to Heaven:
Nor words nor prayers would pierce his solitude.
Look therefore for the rending of the temple
That inwalls his mighty spirit: He can
But stand in silence endless, and so die.
Third Cit.
He weeps not, nor sobs?
First Cit.
Murmurs no more than ocean
Gone to rest for a whole summer's night.
Third Cit.
Alas! alas! a word were worth a world,
From that true spirit now! The city darkens on us,
As I think what sight the city witnesses
In this up-breaking heart.
First Cit.
Behold, this way the mournful pageant moves,
Calmstorm, unheralded and unpursued:
Alone, yet in his sad white features see
The ruins of a world more than in columns
Desert-struck, down-broken empire's ways,
And arches desolate. He yet will speak again.
Third Cit.
Be silent as the earth
The hour before 'twas walked by man!
Enter Calmstorm.
Calm.
I see it now, I see it now—the fatal force
That dwells in men like me; that summons,
By some sad potency, all devil-like
And hideous qualities—to rend the caller.
Could ye not stay your hands from me,—whose hand
And heart and spirit were yours to the last strain!
Was I the image where was gathered up
All that you hate, and hating, would destroy,
And not a worker with you to o'erthrow
Such idols!
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For all my past days are lighted up
To view by this late blaze!—
And now, as then in the ensanguined west,
The furnace-fiery throng pursue me from afar,
Their eager eyes outrun their steps, although their feet
Are winged,—their hands are swifter than their sight,
Their hate before them all!
An open field of large rough-bearded men,
Who've cast away each hook that holds them
To the world of house, of temple, and of judgment-seat,
They stand amassed, and I before them stand—
The guilty and the free—arraigner and arraigned;
And as the torches on their faces flash,
They lift me up on high—they look on me,
I look on them; the court's arrayed in full,—
There is a shuffle, and a quick-breathed talk,
As of a dark offence; when from the throng
A shout of “guilty” springs—a thousand arms
Flung in the air, as one and all at once,
Clash into a loud and long resounding,
Like the sea, and thousand-throated
As the bison bulls trampling the green immeasurable,
“Guilty” again strikes up against the unmoved heaven.
Juror, and judge, and criminal, they wrap me
In their hideous arms, and storm-like sweep away
Confusion in the earth, the heaven, the troubled air.
Blighted forever be that tree, accursed
The hand that set it!
First Cit.
Ah, woeful hour! the branches black, e'en now
Upon his countenance lie, and shakes he
Darkly, as they shook when swayed the chill wind
Their double life, amid the dreary wood.
[Aside.
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These limbs, these limbs that bear me now erect,
Knit by these hungry cords, and by that evil hand;
I smote him while these arms were free, that back
He reeled, indenting deep his followers—
A man whom I had keenly once rebuked,
For certain dark and most outrageous wrongs—
He put a spell in every knot, yet closer knit
By the fierce eyes of many lookers-on,
That, vulture-like, drank up each motion of his hand:
The unhoused wood, the lean untended wolf,
My neighbor only—the long, dull, changeless day,
And the dead night;
The heavens were shivered as a glass, in haste;
The earth reliable, crumbled away beneath
My feet, and fell like dust, or seemed to fall
Into the under void: the infinite of stars,
And the mooned whiteness of the rolling night,
Paled to an idle glimmer far away.
Alone remained
The mournful waving of the dark-leaved branch,
And the sad swaying of its painful trunk.
And this re-echoes that with blood and hate,
And overwhelming hopelessness.
I now should lean, an arm on each, upon
The pillars of the world. They've crumbled from me;
And I stand a naked man, too capable
Of decline for it to need me any more!
There was a time once, on the other side
Of this walled darkness, where felicity
And the young faith, sweet-throated omens, sung:
I had a hope, which at its glowing birth
Was full of joy.—It smiled and shook its locks,
And looked upon me tranquil, bright, and free—
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Of all best things.
It filled the earth with joy, it filled the heavens,
And in its golden light men walked or seemed
Angels, whose free, glad feet murmured
Along the earth, murmured at every fall;
The golden light has passed away,
Unto another planet, to another sphere.
Oh, dark and chill seems the sad earth,
And clanking chains I hear, and wailing tongues;
And far in the thick onward time,
Behold the sadness that enwraps the world
Unrent, forever and forever, still unrent—
Look on that fair young Hope, it pines and dies
An outcast on the threshold of the world.
Thou Land, Colossus-like, that spread'st thyself,
Until, a foot on either shore, thou may'st
Thy neck unconquerable stoop, and bathe
Thy sinewy arms wide as thou wilt and deep,
In the salt greenness of the two great seas,
And have no watcher of thy lonesome sport!
Ye masses of mankind, thou Populous Heart!
[Casting his sword on the ground.
Lie there, thou ancient champion,
Until another hand, and worthier
Of thy wielding, lift thee, or lie forever.
I will not mar thy serviceable blade
Longer with this vain breath, nor with the air,
A shieldless and invulnerable foe,
Bemock thee more!
[He falls.
First Cit.
Oh let him fall not on the earth unpropped!
Calm.
Kind friend, good friends, why take you thus
My hand, and look on me in this wild way?
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I would have been its friend, but am its beggar:
The counsel that I take with her, henceforth
Must be as secret as the eyeless worm.
What light is that that flashes yonder up?
What faces do I see? What voices hear
Innumerable? Reach me thine hand, dark spirit,
And help me over the perilous flood
Upon whose brink I stand—
First Cit.
See, how his hand
Wanders the air, as if it sought another,
Stretched to him from above!
Calm.
The heavens are bowed in blackness at my gaze,
And then, again, the tinkling of the pastoral bells
Comes up—
Good-bye, good-bye to all, and lay me
By the swift river's bank, where first I dreamed
This dream. And let the Hope sit by my grave.
Umena knows it,—alas!
[He dies.
[Slinely, Darkledge, Waning, Dorcas, &c., approaching and gazing on.
Third Cit.
Life's lightning
From his marble limbs is gone.
First Cit.
And the sphered thunder of his speech
Is now forever still!
[Curtain falls.
| Calmstorm, the reformer | |