The poetical works of Bayard Taylor :: :: University of Virginia Library

When bleak winds through the Northern pines were sweeping,
Some hero-skald, reclining on the sand,
Attuned it first, the chords harmonious keeping
With murmuring forest and with moaning strand:
And when, at night, the horns of mead foamed over,
And torches flared around the wassail board,
It breathed no song of maid, nor sigh of lover,
It rang aloud the triumphs of the sword!
It mocked the thunders of the ice-ribbed ocean,
With clenched hands beating back the dragon's prow;
It gave Berserker arms their battle motion,
And swelled the red veins on the Viking's brow!

II

No myrtle, plucked in dalliance, ever sheathed it,
To melt the savage ardor of its flow;
The only gauds wherewith its lord enwreathed it,
The lusty fir and Druid mistletoe.
Thus bound, it kept the old, accustomed cadence,
Whether it pealed through slumberous ilex bowers
In stormy wooing of Byzantine maidens,
Or shook Trinacria's languid lap of flowers;
Whether Genseric's conquering march it chanted,
Till cloudy Atlas rang with Gothic staves,
Or where gray Calpè's pillared feet are planted,
Died grandly out upon the unknown waves!

III

Not unto Scania's bards alone belonging,
The craft that loosed its tongues of changing sound,
For Ossian played, and ghosts of heroes, thronging,
Leaned on their spears above the misty mound.
The Cambrian eagle, round his eyrie winging,
Heard the wild chant through mountain-passes rolled,
When bearded throats chimed in with mighty singing,
And monarchs listened, in their torques of gold:
Its dreary wail, blent with the seamews' clangor,
Surged round the lonely keep of Penmaen-Mawr;
It pealed aloud, in battle's glorious anger,
Behind the banner of the Blazing Star!

IV

The strings are silent; who shall dare to wake them,
Though later deeds demand their living powers?
Silent in other lands, what hand shall make them
Leap as of old, to shape the songs of ours?

Here, while the sapless bulk of Europe moulders,
Springs the rich blood to hero-veins unsealed,—
Source of that Will, that on its fearless shoulders
Would bear the world's fate lightly as a shield:
Here moves a larger life, to grander measures
Beneath our sky and through our forests rung;
Why sleeps the harp, forgetful of its treasures,—
Buried in songs that never yet were sung?

V

Great, solemn songs, that with majestic sounding
Should swell the Nation's heart from sea to sea;
Informed with power, with earnest hope abounding
And prophecies of triumph yet to be!
Songs, by the wild wind for a thousand ages
Hummed o'er our central prairies, vast and lone;
Glassed by the Northern lakes in crystal pages,
And carved by hills on pinnacles of stone;
Songs chanted now, where undiscovered fountains
Make in the wilderness their babbling home,
And through the deep-hewn cañons of the mountains
Plunge the cold rivers in perpetual foam!

VI

Sung but by these: our forests have no voices;
Rapt with no loftier strain our rivers roll;
Far in the sky, no song-crowned peak rejoices
In words that give the silent air a soul.
Wake, mighty Harp! and thrill the shores that hearken
For the first peal of thine immortal rhyme:
Call from the shadows that begin to darken
The beaming forms of our heroic time:
Sing us of deeds, that on thy strings outsoaring
The ancient soul they glorified so long,
Shall win the world to hear thy grand restoring,
And own thy latest thy sublimest song!

1850.