Idyls and Songs :: :: University of Virginia Library

In happy days—long past, you recollect them,
We held discourse, dear Friend, on art and verse:
What style, what metre, fitting as a robe
The naked thought beneath, endraping it
In thousand-fold expression—adding grace
Where it received it—best might suit the modes
And giddy-paced invention of our age:
While talk of summer days, and Wales, and all
The flashing glories of her torrent-depths
Mingled its freshness.

And one while 'twas said,
That ‘deepest streams run clearest:’ and, again,
Both voting that deep matter and deep thought
Wedded in verse, for studious readers call'd,
And dutiful attention—'twas agreed
‘Transparent rills are shallow:’ till, between
These seeming discrepancies, Truth, who sits
'Twixt poles of endless severance, yet the same,
(You told us), found her station.

And we said,
‘Thoughts differ in degree, no less than kind.
There is no one Procrustean bed for all:
Things hang not in the heavy dock-yard scales,
But most hair-balanced: 'tis the difficult mean,
Their evanescent meeting-point, we aim at.
Some thoughts, like characters, themselves unfold,
Themselves their own interpreters: of such
The mass of verse is fashion'd.’

‘Some,’ you said.
(And push'd the smouldering brands that fronted us
Together to one cone of whiter heat,
Your meditative habit)—‘Some, as erst
That Eleusinian Temple, where within
The mysteries of earth were shadow'd forth,
With pictured porch and outwork was fenced round,—
For Prologue, by the reader's self set forth,
In studious preparation—or built up
By him that frames the story, call aloud:—
Then most, if e'er the records of past time
Are summon'd forth their essence to give up,
Rich concentration:—So the stream of thought
In deep and equable lucidity
Flows undisturb'd, in bright allurement strong
To tempt th' onlooker, who within its depths
Sees his own features glass'd, with headlong plunge
To entrust him to those waters, and so float
Bathed in the currents of the murmurous song’.
—And I—(for Art, that in the present fades,
Had once a splendour and an empery
To sway the hearts of men)—would here set forth
Her birth, and first derival; not from aught
That yet survives in sculptured majesty,
Or glows in picture,—from the principles
And canons of the beautiful, deduced;—
But from the course of her own lordly tale
And history develop'd: how by need
Of all-inventing man, and fond requirement,
She sprang to light—then faded: as the rose
On morning clouds, that first the sun calls forth,
And then effaces.

So I launch the song,
That asks forbearance, and the serious gaze
Of bending studiousness.

And if from thee,
O thee alone, such favour I should win,
I count my aim accomplish'd—the reward
That o'er-rewards the task—O, who would wish
Whate'er the toil, the purpose of the race,
More than th' award of justice, when her throne
Is shared with Love and Wisdom—co-assessors?

I

Not in thine infant season,
Fair lordly mother of mankind, great Earth;
Not in thy sober time of conscious reason,
Had thy too short-lived daughter, Art, her birth:—
But ere the splendours of thy youthful prime
Were yet unpurpled in the hue
That tracks the whitening hand of Time,
To her swift perfectness she grew.
For then Earth cast her glances round,
And saw the freshness of her youth
In fateful limits cabin'd, closed, and bound,
Her soaring pinions cut and chain'd:
Chain'd by stern and serious Truth,
So long desired, and now so deeply gain'd:
To stay the sense of that too-conscious pain,
Art gave her back her youth again.

II

Alas for that bright morning
When the sore labour of man's o'erstrain'd wit,
To heal the faith that reason blights with scorning,
To know his being and to fathom it,
Lay hidden from his joyous infant soul!
Flush'd with a brimming sense of life,
His eager eye inform'd the whole
With that which in himself was rife:
Deep soul—glad heart—the glance—the tone
And spirit that moved his pliant limbs.
Echo! thy voice—thine own—yet not thine own—
Down long Ionian vales rang out,
Resonant with festive hymns;

Th' adoring dance; the tuneful measured shout:—
Man woke the living rocks with votive lays:
The living rocks gave back their praise.

III

No sculptured grace was needed
To image the great Gods, clear seen around:
Not yet to upper air had Zeus receded:
Gods walk'd this earth—earth yet was hallow'd ground.
Was not great Pan abroad upon the hills?
And eager-eyed, while day declines,
To chase the Nymphs 'long vales and rills,
Lyaeus hid in leafy vines?
Deméter cheer'd the conscious Earth,
Smiling: with one who gather'd flowers,
Bright in the grace of a celestial birth,
Her yet untouch'd Persephoné:
Weave the dance, immortal Hours!
Trip thro' fair night and day with order'd glee:
Young Phoebus' step is in the noontide glen:
Manlike he mingles among men.

IV

But Time knows no delaying:
Earth's freshness pales: the glory fades and dies:
Unconscious soon, some inner law obeying,
Man takes the measure of the worlds and skies.
Argo! thine oars are out—thy sails unfurl'd,
Earth's limits fly before thy prow;
Man maps the spaces of the world,
Wild rocks and woods before him bow.
The God fades off from stream and hill,
From sun, from sky, from night, from day:
The stars whirl on around us, calm and still:—
All things are bound by Fate's decree,
Inborn laws all things obey,
And we are circled by necessity.
Gift piled on gift—prayer link'd to prayer, are vain;
Void utterance of unheard pain.

V

But for his consolation,
Man turns to busy life, and rests him there:
That half-unconscious sense of desolation
O'ermaster'd by the days' successive care.
Lo, fretted earth yields up her pleasant spoil;
Lo, thick the white-wall'd cities rise;
Proud roofs, the sheltering prize of toil,
Bar out his childhood's deities.
High-fated slave, tho' lord of earth,
Her elements admit his sway:
Yet life is but a gleam 'twixt death and birth—
A weary race—a pilgrimage
O'er a half forgotten way:—
Fain would he know his hidden heritage;
Fain would instinctive Faith, with clouded eyes,
Pierce the dim mist that veils her skies.

VI

Now, self-reveal'd in glory,
In eye-commanding grace, that wins and sways,
Enchantress Art display'd Man's earlier story,
Clad in the splendour of forgotten days.
The phantom Gods of his creative youth
Bow'd to the summons of her spell;
Came imaged forth, in sterner truth,
In visible shape henceforth to dwell.
In calm and voiceless majesty
Man framed the Gods of his own thought,
The self-made visions of an eager eye.
High o'er the azure-trembling brine,
Hundred-handed labour wrought
The many-column'd splendour of the shrine.
Hark! the long echoes of th' exulting strain,
The Gods inhabit earth again!

VII

The wanderers' feet delaying
In the green shady chasms of sun-proof glens,
Or by the run of babbling streamlets straying,
Or the dark root-fringed depth of mountain dens
Are fixt in adoration: glad they lend

The flexure of a willing knee,
While heart and limb, due homage, bend
To the white-sculptur'd majesty.
The many-colour'd lines on frieze
And vantage-coigne high deeds display
Of those who fought to gain Elysian ease,
The hero-links of earth and sky:—
Shout! brave hearts, for well ye may:
Art has charm'd back the Gods of infancy;
No more their forms lie veil'd from mortal ken:—
Art has restored the Gods to men.

VIII

But O! too-transient treasure—
Treasure once lost, and ne'er again returning:
Would thou wert yet with us in thy full measure!
Are we not for a hidden something yearning,
An inexpressive sense of lost delight?
Toil sinks 'neath his own fever'd weight:
A day-long care: a wakeful night:
Wealth leaves the soul insatiate:
Man cries for peace, and finds it not:
Sick with the mystery of the earth—
The Future felt—the Past not all forgot:—
Where is the power, whose spell of yore
Read the riddle of our birth?
Return—return—our vanish'd hopes restore;
Man craves thine aid, from Faith too long exiled,
And would again be as a Child.

EPILOGUE.

So take the song. And if a fond regret
For unreturning days of youth and freshness
And those instinctive motions of belief
That mark a nation's childhood, cast a tone
O'er words not idly chosen, blame not, Friend,
The conscious partial utterance.

All have known—
Save those, at either pole of truth congeal'd
In rigid lifelessness—self-charter'd slaves
To blind mechanical consistency—
The balanced pulses of the soul within:
Magnetic oscillations: thoughts that dip
To Past or Future:—most in those, perchance,
Who sum their strength up for the present day
In quiet hopefulness.

The master-souls—
He—and that other, who took up his robe,
And gave the annals of imperial Rome
A fame undying as the wars of Greece,
Athens, and Sparta—said ‘Man differs not
From man in essence: 'tis the lesson learnt
From History, best studied:’ and, again,
‘There is a circle in all things, and life
In seasonable order, with the year
Turns and returns.’—There is a chain in all
That links us to Futurity: the Past
Is born again among us.

And as those
Whose oft reverted gaze, while journeying on
Feeds on the thoughtful distance, till a hope
Springs unrepress'd, that in the goal they seek
Their starting-point is mirror'd: so unblamed
The wish may rise, that by no idle spells
Of servile imitation, life recall'd
Might reimbreathe the Past, and bring her down
With gifts to heal our failings, nor averse
From present aspirations, thence,—where now
Unmoved in graceful lifelessness, she sits,
Pedestal'd high in sculptured majesty.