University of Virginia Library

LIFE.

DEATH.

SPRING.

Late art thou, but to come thou couldst not fail,
Divinest minister of the divine.
Firstling of the great Sun, we hail
Thy bounteous plenitude of green,
Sprung from the deep mysterious mine
Of life, unfathomable and unseen.
Thou floodst our hearts with beauty from the bloom
Of thy young, happy face,
And from our thoughts their gloom
With virgin joyousness dost chase,
And tremulous glee of flowering trees,
With whose fresh beauties the caressing breeze
Dallies, showering sweet breath into the air,
And sunny kisses, with bold stealth
Seizing their vernal perfumes rare,
Enriching nature with her own new wealth.
This sudden sun-born burst
Of leafy life all round our earth,
Quick resurrection of hushed nature, hearsed
In winter's crypt, this bright rebirth,
This universal blossoming,
This certain strangling of cold death
By the warm Herculean breath
Of the reviving Spring
In her old earthen cradle,—this
Rhythmic renewal of deep nature's bliss,
Is token from th' all-loving and all-seeing
Of man's reblossom'd joy in a perennial being.

GARIBALDI.

Again is Italy summoned to mourn,
Yet with a thankful cheerfulness,
That her loved Hero is upborne
When the high work, 't was his to bless
His country with, is done.
Distracted Italy is one,
United, self-directing, free
Of foreign force, while he,—
One of her saviors, who
As child could bravely save an adult life,
And, foremost of a patriot crew,
Spent a stout manhood in ennobling strife,—
Ascended to his burnished seat
Blest by full hearts, which he had swelled
With freemen's blood and made to beat
With pulses that had quelled
Fierce tyrannies. The famous man
Passed calmly on, more reverenced, more dear,
To a new, thankful nation than
Any son living.
'Bove his bier
All the past greatness shone of Italy;
All souls that through the struggling ages
Had boldly fostered her high destiny,
The men who live in consecrated pages,
Whom we that breathe outside the warm confines
Of Alps and Apennines,
Study for high enlightenment
And stouter bracing of our souls,—
Pages whence the new hardiment
Of hero or of thinker rolls
Upon us waves of strength and thought:
These gloried ones shine there in circles wrought
Of superearthly splendor, quick to greet,
With heavenly salutation meet,
Their Garibaldi, him who, single-handed,
Had wrested from the tyrants 'gainst him banded
Populous Naples and broad Sicily,
And given them to triumphant Italy:
Cavour, Mazzini, who so well
In his large soul foredrew the nation's span,
Victor Emmanuel,
The patriot King, and man
So true, that he deserved to be
King of emancipated Italy;
Manin, and many others who
With heart-beat strong and true,
Had spent them for their country's good.
To him these were the nearest,
Yet hardly were they dearest,
So many had outpoured their blood
To enrich with freedom a lov'd land.
The aspiring Poets all were there.
Poets are patriots by command
Of love, warmed by the ideal glare
Which lights their being. Alfieri the proud,
Who sang of liberty, with a stern pen
Straight'ning the souls of crouching countrymen,
To lone, sublimest Dante, whom the shroud
Of exile could not deaden, but he soared
On flashing pinion from Hell's lowest story,
Through thickly peopled Purgatory,
High up to saintly Beatrice the adored.
All came who with the glow of beauty
Illuminate their land through Art,
Or clasp her in the motherly arms of duty.
Savonarola took close part
Beside Da Vinci, Angelo, Raphael;
Heaven-widening Galileo hand in hand
Hovered with Titian. The strong spell
Of the new glory swelled the crowded band
With great Antiquity, when Rome
Was Europe. Came from highest home
The Brutuses and Cicero,
Long clean of anger, pain, and woe,
True Scipios and Antonines,
All glittered round Caprera's sea-set lines.
With lightning looks of exultation,
Outshining earth-drawn ecstasy,—
Looks of emancipation,—
Amid seraphic melody,
Too piercing pure for mortal's ear,
With glow, as of rainbows intermingled,
Great Garibaldi tenderly outsingled,
Heavenward with jubilant joy they steer;
Him, now to immortal spirit-figure moulded,
They loving waft aloft in angel-arms enfolded.

ASPIRATION.

Th' innumerable Suns that star the vault
We wonder in, when our own Sun
Unrolls mysterious night, assault
The soul with such sublimities, they stun
Our earthly thinkings. When we strain
Feeling and thought to seize their meanings,
We vivify the brain
With quick creative gleamings,
And these, speaking with voice of solar light,
Unveil a supersolar Might.
Man's thought can never grasp,
But his high feeling can enclasp
This Might. With the spirit of the whole
Can swell and bound the soul,
For of infinitude we are,
And towards the farthest star
Can speed ourselves in happy awe,
Seize its eternal law,
And feed great yearnings. We
Are parcel of eternity,
A portion of all that we feel and see;
Not th' outward world alone, but Deity
Mirrors itself upon the procreant brain,
That glowing centre of circumferences
Unlimited, where endless is our gain.
Spirit is never subject unto fences,
But with devout elation
Moves through the brightening brightness of creation.
Man can reflect this brightness
Because of the inward rightness
Of his deep nature. He longs for the better;
His true nobility chafes at the fetter
Of bondman, aiming to be freer,
On ever higher, purer, to uprear
His being. And in his puissant self
Is the divinity that aye protests
'Gainst pressures that would lay him on the shelf
Of apathy, foiling his high behests.
He is a wingéd creature, his wings beating
Invisibly the air, to lift him
To higher ranges, thus defeating
The lower; he aye longs to sift him
Of gross carnalities, and mount
Towards spirit's primal fount,
Struggling to obey his soul's attraction
From mouldy sloth to polished action,
Inwardly mourning when dull vice
Embraces him in its constrictive ice.
At times, amid the passions devilish
Of a bad man, upshoots a holy wish,
Like infant's chirp within a robber's cave,
That circumfuses all
The father's heart, melting the pall
Of evil; or like a single star,—when rave
The tempest's demons,—that peeps through the storm's
Cold blackness, and the sailor's heart rewarms.
Life should be a curriculum of prizes:
Man is the more himself the more he rises:
'T is his angelic instinct to aspire:
Manhood must mount, from low to high, from high to higher.

TRUTH.

In the hale birth-throes of first being
Was born this God, this bold, all-seeing,
All-beautifying Truth,
This old, eternal Youth.
A universal presence,
He rides upon the Sun's fierce beams,
He floats among the Sea's calm dreams;
His birthful breath makes nature's crescence.
A thousand stars glow in his eye;
Quintessence of divinity,
God calls him when he doth create;
He in creation hath no mate.
Without him man were less than beast,
And life a tasteless, hopeless feast.
Loosen Truth's hold on human thought,
Shadow his splendor in the feeling,
And, like a painted savage caught
By cruel potions, man goes reeling.
In the broad brain Truth quires
As lightning in the air,
When, leaping from his cloudy lair,
Stagnation he with motion fires.
Man's quenchless guardian-light,
Truth pilots him through wreckful night,
And should he stumble into crime,
Uplifts him with a call sublime.
Truth is man's spiritual Sun,
Older, more luminous, than the one
We walk by in Time's small periphery,
Our beaming monitor through all Eternity.

IDEAL.

In what a nest of love and joy,
And holy mystery,
He lay, the baby boy!
Hope in her heavenliest glee
Hovering, and pouring from above
Sparkles into the eyes of joy and love.
A soul-bud, beautiful
As angel's smile on the dawn beaming,
Life, mighty life, astreaming
Through him in currents full
Of perfumed promise, his soft breathing
To firmer beauty roseate limbs awreathing;
For the great Sun looks on him lovingly,
Ripening the finer elements of air
To mould him to proportion's grace, while He
Who moulds the Sun, and hath creative care
Of universal being,
Freights his new breath with subtle filaments
That speed, like lightning to our seeing,
To the brain, building with fire its vast contents,
Sowing it with the seeds
Of crownéd thoughts and deeds,
Making it exquisitely rife
With all the fragrancies of life.
His daily living grows to be
One long unbroken blossoming,
And like some tropic tree,
Unstung by frost's cold sting,
In prodigal opulence
Outthrowing mingled sweet incense
Of flower and fruit from the same branch,
New, generous plans bloom near to staunch
Nutritious deeds. But he is still a child
Springing toward youth from station
To station, on the strong faith lifted
Of fearless expectation;
And ever undefiled,
For that young spirit is so gifted
With human upward swing
That in his brain is plied
Triumphantly Life's subtlest skill
In moulding individual will.
Pure as the thoughts of modest bride,
Or consciousness that good deeds bring,
Are his desires.
Like lofty spires
Upstreaming in the sky
From solid sure foundations,
They mount; not groveling in a sordid sty,
But in their swift mutations
Are so unselfed that angels hear them,
Taking delight to come down helpful near them.
The warm tempestuous straits
That palpitating youth sails through
He passed unscathed amid the baits
Of fragrant sensualities untrue,
Above his head unconsciously unfurled,—
Daunting th' hypocrisies of the world,—
The hallowed flag of innocence.
He entered manhood's strenuous path,
Invigorated by the intense
Clean strength of youth's elastic bath.
Fresh life he drew from a so fervent power,
It strengthened, sweetened, sanctified each hour.
Welcome as scented breeze
In spring, mysterious as the light
Of silent stars, resistless as decrees
Of Fate, and with the might
Of deepest heave of Ocean,
Cometh, flame-crested, the warm wave
Of love, flooding with rapturous emotion,
And with imaginings so bold and brave,
His being's core, that he feels recreated,
As with a larger soul dilated.
And now his life put on its earnestness.
The titles, husband, father, were a claim
His fellows had that he should bless
His household with th' ascending flame
Kindled by countrymen's and neighbor's prayer
For its victorious weal.
His manhood shone in thoughtful care
Of largest interests, such as deal
With the mind's loftiest life, and with
Sound enterprises, of such pith
They strengthen while they purge
The vital currents of communities.
His hopes, sprung from the purest deeps
Of intuition, bore him to the verge
Of present possibilities.
He stood upon the heights whence leaps
To loftier heights prophetic vision,
(The heights that gender popular derision.)
In these profoundest moods,
When on itself the mind creative broods,
He looked like Shelley, or still younger Keats,
When rapt, by inspiration inly stirred,
With head upturned, on magic seats
They hearken for the voice by genius heard;
For he, too, was a poet. Verse
He wrote not, but that rhythmic sweep of thought
He had which comes of feelings wrought
By noble sympathies, that nurse
The will to lofty deeds, and send
The wishes outward where they blend
With beauty's magic to create
On the broad solid ground
Of practice just, compelling very Fate
To second his aspiring bound.
So rich he was in human feeling,
And on his lustrous path he trod
With such religious sure reliance
Ever to largest principles appealing,
That like great Kepler in celestial science,
He, too, could think the thoughts of God.
Unto the beautiful,—wherein
Creative mind is most revealed,—
His soul was so akin,
That to him were unsealed
Secrets of the vast All.
Much of its mystery
Was opened to him in the fall
Of Niagaras, in the tideful sea,
In midnight orbs' wise twinkle,
In the calm throb of his own pulse,
In the auroral lights that sprinkle
The night-born dew with glory,
In the great thunders that convulse
The clouds, in all the heroic traits of Story.
Nay, in the common and the little
Flashes the beautiful,
In grass and grain, in every tittle
Of visible, audible nature, in the dull
As in the bright. Creative power
Is nowhere felt but there upflames the dower
Of beauty's life. The microscope
Reveals the beautiful in mud,
Flaring upon us an immense new hope,
For tiniest earthy particle is a bud
Of promise. What,—could its keen focus reach
Into the darkest heart,—what would it teach?
Men, living men, were his rich source
Of knowledge; for in them the fineness
Outshone, beside the force,
Of infinite divineness.
His daily comrades were the great
Of the big past, men of such weight
Their fiery thoughts and deeds
Become prolific seeds
Planted in the universal mind.
The mightiest of men, the Nazarene,
The topmost man of all his kind,
Whose life was in the clean
Inspiring deeps of sympathy,
Him he aye studied as an exemplar
Of the highest in humanity.
Thinking good thoughts, looking afar
Beyond the smaller self,
The worldly lusts of show and power and pelf,
His day lighted by loves, ne'er dimmed by fears,
He grew in wisdom with the years,
His life one limpid stream of joyous duty,
Which filled it full as June with beauty,
So full that time brought him no oldness.
Spirit ruled him as it ruled Socrates;
And so, when on his flesh at last crept coldness,
Shone bright before his spiritual eye the keys
Of th' Heav'n he had made about him on the earth;
And from his body's bier
He rose in th' ecstasy of a new birth,
His face aglow with beams thrown from th' angelic sphere.

REAL.

THE BEAUTIFUL.

I.

Throughout th' eternal sequences of time
Momently is shed by every fiery Sun
Of the hot hundred millions safely spun
Into immensity by the sublime
Almighty Will, the Beautiful, whose clime
Is the universal air, across which run
Ceaseless creative messages that stun
Our thought, straining after words to rhyme
With th' unimaginably great. In each
Creative thought glows, as its very soul,
The Beautiful, which is essence divinest,
That colors, shapes and perfumes the vast Whole
And every part, e'en to the simple finest,
Sparkling wherever thought and feeling reach.

THE BEAUTIFUL.

II.

Beauty's deep office holy is to teach,
Through the purification of delight
Kindling into clear vision the higher sight.
Within a cove, upon a sunny beach,
I have seen the mighty Ocean,—without breach
Of his high privileges, stormful might
Laying aside,—come calmly in, with bright
Dear children, round, ruddy, as ripened peach,
To toy, gently rolling low-crested billows
Into their fearless arms,—like monarch playing
On the floor with his gleeful boys, arraying
Himself in love instead of robe and crown,—
The waves wooing the little limbs like pillows:
A sight the eyes in lustral tears to drown.

ROSA.

FOUNDATIONS.

Like the two hands that knead our daily bread,
Nature and man should work with even will
And watchfulness, when innocent childhood lifts
Its helpless palms and prayerful eyes, and prays
For love and wisdom in the guardianship
Of its young years. Nature is ever wise,
Watchful and active as th' unhalting Sun,
That warms and keeps alive all earthly being.
On man Nature outpours her choicest wealth;
He is entrusted to her motherly love;
Part of herself, and yet, greater than she,
Reflectively creative, he doth rise
Out of great Nature, and above her soars;
For he hath wings of thought, precursive thought,
Wherewith, and manful will, he rules his own
And her resources vast.
Hale human babe
Is a potential deity on earth;
Lord of the outward world, if he do grow
To be lord of himself. Deep Nature calls
On deeper man to mould an infant's powers
And inborn potencies, within man's sphere,
His boundless sphere, almost omnipotent.
Love and high reason are his master-gifts,
Empowering him to be like to a God.
Teach the loved child to know and love all things,—
Earthworms, that so beneficently work
Beneath the surface of the teemful soil,
Insects that buzz joyously through the air,
The bird who pipes a jubilant holiday
To tune man's heart into blithe harmony
With this all-quickening multitudinous life,
The obedient horse and ox that multiply
His strength a hundred-fold. Show him the Sun
Setting dim dawn ablaze with full-orbed light,
Higher and higher in benignant power
Mounting to bounteous hot magnificence.
Teach him no fear; the rageful hurricane,
The thunderclap, let him not dread. Teach him
To shrink before rebuke,—even though it be
No louder than the faintest whisper's breath,—
That from his deepest sounds with sacred voice.
Within his inmost is a deathless spark,
Of fire to guide and rule. This is for him
The holy of holies. Here, in humble awe,
Let him oft hearken: thus hearkening, he
Is nearest to th' Almighty. When the stars
Look down on him, and he on them, is wrought
The chain that binds him to the supreme Mind:
These myriad eyes embrace him with their beams.
Like diamond, filling its quick heart with light
From the far sun, to glow with mingled fire,
Man's deep capacity for reverence
Swells to religious thought when midnight opes,
With shining stellar keys, Infinitude,
Deepening the moral beauty of his life.

POETRY.

It is not in the trees or in the ocean,
Nor in the air or earth or spacious skies,
Nor in the forms of nature, or the motion
Of stream or fawn, not even in the eyes
Of woman: in the soul of man it lies,
This peerless, heavenly gift, creative power
That lights and consecrates all these, and plies
For man's uplifting in bright happiest hour
This dearest privilege and his divinest dower.

CEASELESS CREATION.

SKETCHES.

NO END.

There is no end: Eternity
Seizes each atom, and to be
Involves unceasing growth.
Mind quickens all:
To die were rotting sloth,
Hateful impossible impotence.
Life tendeth upward, and to fall
Is but a seeming, whence
Uprise again all things:
Mind, their great mother, lendeth wings.
Heart-beats cease not within the tomb:
The “spiritual body” quits dissolving flesh,
And far above a fleshly doom
Carries the soul's unceasing throb to fresh
And higher planes of being.
Life, in its million shapes,
Is an incessant fleeing
From outworn moulds to new; escapes
From matter's bonds, ascending
Through infinite degrees,
Creating and effacing, rending
Material forms with th' ease
Of spirit-mastership,
Aye razing to rebuild,
Through instantaneous power to equip
With its deep inwardness all atoms, filled
Thereby with an instinctive need
Of nursing every seed
Planted by overruling Mind.
Mysterious Mind lends eyes
To all things, even to what seems blind,
To comets in the boundless skies,
Nor less to molecules that creep
Through th' universe, upbuilding it,
Mightiest of instruments, that heap
Life upon life, and fit
Parts to their place in grandest wholes,
Obedient to primordial Will.
Mind launches thus infinitude of souls,
The purposes of being to fulfill,
Mind's mighty power and splendor aye attended
By thoughts of perfectness, so interblended
With mind's own essence, that they glow
Twin sovereign lights,—perennial bow
Of promise, over all supreme.
Immeasurably bright and pure,
They waken in all creatures soaring dream,
And thereby all forever lure
Upward towards better, higher,
Inflaming all with quenchless, holy fire.

OMNIPRESENCE OF BEAUTY.

Beauty is so deep 'tis one with life,
And no imaginative knife
Can part their threads, close intertwined
By primal generative Mind.
Nay, Beauty might be called the life of being,
Primordial essence bright,
Aye, very soul of the all-decreeing,
Original, creative, holy Might.—
Sea-shells come up from the salt sea,
Sprinkling fresh beauty through their eyes,
Iridescent interfusedly;
With gleam of sea-dipped dyes,
And th' infinite grace of varying curves,
Refining, soothing tenderest nerves.
With what delight of recognition
We greet the peeping leaf-buds green,
Into life's first fruition
Bursting in multitudinous sheen,
With unslaked thirstiness
Drinking the sweetened air,
Reveling in the sun's warm caress,
Outgushed so numerous, broad, and fair,
They make the forest's grandeur vast.
And now they are past, fallen, gone to enrich the roots
That nourished them. But Beauty is not past.
Instead of leaves, from each tree shoots
Radiance, as though the sun
Had showered stars among the branches:
But for an hour; at noon are none,—
Melted by the same might that launches,
Even in winter, heated arrows. Lo!
In a night Beauty re-assumes
His sway, sheeting with snow
Each twig and limb: the forest looms,
In the calm morning light,
A wondrous maze of sparkling white.
Again the sap reflows, and floods
The earth with leafy green.
A twofold beauty is in the woods,
A vocal rivaling the seen!
Music of a transcendant quire,
Cadence unreached by instrument or words,
Sweet improvisation, straining higher,
In the melodious worshiping of birds
At dawn, spontaneous anthem, rich and pure,
Mounting to Heaven whence it came,
To man's devotion timely overture,
Waking religious joy without a name.
From rivulet to river,
From cataract to dew,
From lakelet's shore to ocean's,
Great Beauty is the giver
Of joyance ever new;
Through aspects and through motions,
In Nature's colors, forms
Of leopard and of fishes,
In sunny calms, in storms,
In human thoughts and wishes,
In lightning's lifeful flashes,
In children's silken hair,
In eyes and soft eyelashes,—
Beauty is everywhere.
And man, to be himself, must see it:
Chief child of Beauty, he should rise
To the height of his high birth: nay, he must be it
In feeling thought, if he would prize
The grandeur of his opportunities,
The splendor of his possibilities.
Beauty sparkles over surfaces because
It vivifies the core.
Inseparable from life, one are their laws:
Beauty is the gold in life's ore.
The highest we can know
Is human life; in man
Beauty's great lessons glow
Their deepest, in the van
Of all corporeal being.
His body, what a wonder!
Earth's supreme beauty, all o'erseeing,
Majestic more than any creature under
Heaven's cope; superlatively framed
For strength, and spring, and grace,
Alone erect, by heat or cold untamed,
In his compact, far-looking, listening face
Form and expressiveness unmatched.
Behind upreaching forehead bold,—
As Heaven's best will had been unlatched,
And let loose potencies untold,—
That mighty product lies, the human brain,
The miracle of miracles, the seat
Of Mind; Mind which, once growing, never wanes,
But action follows its eternal beat.
Mind! Through those sun-shaped orbs, the eyes,
Lightens this mightiness!
Behind in awful silence lies
The tool of puissance only less
Than high omnipotence,—
Puissance of such a might
That should it rend its ordained continents
Before its glare would pale all light
Of suns, and to a whisper sink
The tropic thunderburst.
But on this fearful brink
We stand safe and assured. We are not curst
By primal power: we are blest
By a divine beneficence,
Potent to subject all to law's behest,
Wielding 'gainst chaos absolute defense.
And this quick instrument of soul,
This master-mass of matter superfine,
This vivid brain, is only great as whole
Through self-subsistent parts that all combine
In rhythmical subordination,
Its maker, Mind, with the lower organs holding
The infinite details of creation,
With the highest in its grasp enfolding
The largest, deepest, thought and feeling,
The grandeur and the reach of Man,
His splendent possibilities revealing,
Therewith divinist beauty, purpose, plan.
The nearer we to spiritual sources,
The fuller, subtler, is the unfolding
Of Beauty's life. Man with his earthly forces
Gets only glimpses bright, beholding,
Through deep, inspiring sensibilities,
Resplendent tokens, signs,
Of what the supreme wisdom is
In its beneficent designs.
On earth man could easier the sun outstare
Than front, unblasted, Beauty's heavenliest glare.