University of Virginia Library

SONNETS.

TO E. P. C.

[I.
1. The Summer goes, with all its birds and flowers]

The Summer goes, with all its birds and flowers;
The Autumn passes with its solemn sky;
The Winter comes again—yet you and I
Know not the old companionship once ours.
The twilight mist between us hangs and lowers;
Your face I see not—voice I cannot hear.
No letter tells me you in thought are near.
The west-wind blows and sweeps away the showers,
But from the west no whisper comes of you.
Friends press around you in your distant home—
(Your distant home I never yet have seen,)
And old familiar greetings still renew;
While I with fancy's eyes alone can come
And peep unnoted there behind your screen.

[II.
2. Parted by time and space for many a year]

Parted by time and space for many a year,
Yet ever longing, hoping for a day
When, heart to heart, the happy weeks shall stay
Their flight for us, and all our sky be clear
As in our boyhood's spring—my brother dear,
You and I bide our time. The buds of May
Shall blossom yet for us. What though the gray
Of dusky Autumn eventide be near,
And silver locks and beards have changed us so
From what we were—you still to me are young,
And I to you. The fireside of our loves
Shall be our summer, bright as in the glow
Of youth, when we, two blithe Arcadians, sung
And fluted in those old Virginia groves.

[III.
3. Ah, happy time! when music bound in one]

Ah, happy time! when music bound in one
Two kindred souls that ne'er were out of tune:
When in the porch, beneath the summer moon,
Our supper o'er, our school-boy lessons done,
While other lads were at some boisterous fun,
We trilled our Tara's Hall or Bonnie Doon:
Or in some fire-lit wintry afternoon,
Our flutes, you first, I second, bravely won
Their winding path through many a tough duet;
Nor cared for plaudits louder than the praise
Mother or sisters, in those simple days,
Well pleased, bestowed: ah, sweeter than we met
In after-life, from critics pledged to raise
Art's standard high as dome or minaret.

[IV.
4. Friend, dear as Memory's joys! of life that's past]

Friend, dear as Memory's joys! of life that's past
A part, and part of better life to come,
If life to come there be, in some dear home
Beyond the rigid clouds that overcast
Our sundered lives—all that is mine thou hast;—
All thoughts, all sympathies;—though far I roam
From you—by mountains, streams, or ocean's foam
Divided long—yet ever, first and last,
Our love knows no division. In my soul
And yours, we twin-born spirits of one blood,
Still, as of old, are one. No sea can roll
Between its league-long melancholy flood,
No separate interests, loves, or pressing cares
Disturb the mutual trust our being shares.

[V.
5. All loves have frailer roots than loves that start]

All loves have frailer roots than loves that start
From one ancestral blood. The friends we find
In youth pass on before us, or behind
Are dropped, or on diverging paths depart,
While branches from one trunk still own one heart,
And bud and bear from one maternal mind.
Sister and brother need no vows to bind
Their pre-ordained alliance, nor the art
Of lovers plotting through a thousand fears
Lest love, of passion born, should fade or change;
Nor dread the undermining drip of years;
Nor stand on forms that other souls estrange.
Such love is ours, and theirs who bear our name,
Born in the honored home from which we came.

[VI.
6. Ah, many a time our memory slips aside]

Ah, many a time our memory slips aside
And leaves the round of present cares and joys,
To live again the time when we were boys;
To call our parents back with love and pride;
To see again the dear ones who have died;
To dream once more amid the household toys,
The sports, the jests, the masquerades, the noise,
The blaze and sparkle of the wood fireside;
The books, the drawings, and the merry press
Around the blithe tea-board; the evenings long;
Rattling backgammon and still, solemn chess;
And best of all when instrument and song
Bore us to visionary lands and streams,
And crowned our nights with coronals of dreams.

[VII.
7. Those times are gone, that circle thinned away]

Those times are gone, that circle thinned away,
And we who live, now scattered far and wide,
Each in our separate centres fixed abide,
Round which new interests now revolve and play
In separate loves and duties day by day.
Yet, by the records of old loves allied,
We clasp each other's hands beneath the tide
Of time, and cling together as we may.
Even so beneath the sea the throbbing wires
That bind the sundered continents in one,
In space-annihilating pulses thrill
With swift-winged words and purpose and desires.
Our earlier visions haunt our memories still,
And age grows young in friendship's quickening sun.

[VIII.
8. You were not born to hide such gifts as yours]

You were not born to hide such gifts as yours
'Neath dreary law-books, nor amid the dust
And dry routine of desks to sit and rust
Where clerks plod through their tasks on office-floors.
Let duller laborers drudge through daily chores,
And do what fate for them makes fit and just.
You bravely do your work because you must;
And when released, your genius sings and soars.
Such humor from your pen hath ever run
In pictures or in letters all unforced,
As Hogarth, Lamb, or Dickens might have done;
Finer than many a noted wit, who, horsed
Upon the people's favor, waves his blade
Like Harlequin, and makes his jests his trade.

[IX.
9. I needs must praise the natural gifts of one]

I needs must praise the natural gifts of one
Who praises not himself, nor seeks for praise;
Too unambitious for these emulous days,
When each small talent seeks the public sun,
And victors' wreaths are worn before they are won.
So true to conscience that he oft betrays
Himself, o'ervaluing standards others raise,
Or underrating what himself has done.
Who might have risen in letters or in art;
But faithful to the work he early chose,
To that he gave his time, if not his heart.
Whose genuine self begins when labors close—
When with his friends, or books, or pen, apart,
His cheerful sunset light far round him glows.

[X.
10. Forgive—that thus the trumpet I have blown]

Forgive—that thus the trumpet I have blown
You never sounded—never cared to hear.
The world, I know, can give no smile or tear
To those whose story it has never known.
But must the poet tune his lyre alone
To themes of passionate hope or love or fear,—
Or thoughts of loftier flight, yet shun the clear
Affection of two brothers' hearts at one?
If gallant sonneteers may sing the light
And radiant demoiselles of olden time—
If in their melodies they may not slight
The fleeting passion of their youthful prime,
The old true loves from boyhood ever bright
Are surely worth the tribute of a rhyme.

SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD.

XI.
THE PRINTING PRESS.

In boyhood's days we read with keen delight
How young Aladdin rubbed his lamp and raised
The towering Djin whose form his soul amazed,
Yet who was pledged to serve him day and night.
But Gutenberg evoked a giant sprite
Of vaster power, when Europe stood and gazed
To see him rub his types with ink. Then blazed
Across the lands a glorious shape of light,
Who stripped the cowl from priests, the crown from kings,
And hand in hand with Faith and Science wrought
To free the struggling spirit's limèd wings,
And guard the ancestral throne of sovereign Thought.
The world was dumb. Then first it found its tongue
And spake—and heaven and earth in answer rung.

XII.
THE OCEAN STEAMER.

With streaming pennons, scorning sail and oar,
With steady tramp and swift revolving wheel,
And even pulse from throbbing heart of steel,
She plies her arrowy course from shore to shore.
In vain the siren calms her steps allure;
In vain the billows thunder on her keel;
Her giant form may toss and rock and reel
And shiver in the wintry tempest's roar;
The calms and storms alike her pride can spurn.
True to the day she keeps her appointed time.
Long leagues of ocean vanish at her stern—
She drinks the air, and tastes another clime,
Where men their former wonder fast unlearn,
Which hailed her coming as a thing sublime.

XIII.
THE LOCOMOTIVE.

Whirling along its living freight, it came,
Hot, panting, fierce, yet docile to command—
The roaring monster, blazing through the land
Athwart the night, with crest of smoke and flame;
Like those weird bulls Medea learned to tame
By sorcery, yoked to plough the Colchian strand
In forced obedience under Jason's hand.
Yet modern skill outstripped this antique fame,
When o'er our plains and through the rocky bar
Of hills it pushed its ever-lengthening line
Of iron roads, with gain far more divine
Than when the daring Argonauts from far
Came for the golden fleece, which like a star
Hung clouded in the dragon-guarded shrine.

XIV.
THE TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE.

Fleeter than time, across the Continent,
Through unsunned ocean depths, from beach to beach,
Around the rolling globe Thought's couriers reach.
The new-tuned earth like some vast instrument
Tingles from zone to zone; for Art has lent
New nerves, new pulse, new motion—all to each,
And each to all, in swift electric speech
Bound by a force unwearied and unspent.
Now lone Katahdin talks with Caucasus;
The Arctic ice-fields with the sultry South,
The sun-bathed palm thrills to the pine-tree's call.
We for all realms were made, and they for us.
For all there is a soul, an ear, a mouth;
And Time and Space are naught. The mind is all.

XV.
THE PHOTOGRAPH.

Phœbus Apollo, from Olympus driven,
Lived with Admetus, tending herds and flocks:
And strolling o'er the pastures and the rocks
He found his life much duller than in Heaven.
For he had left his bow, his songs, his lyre,
His divinations and his healing skill,
And as a serf obeyed his master's will.
One day a new thought waked an old desire.
He took to painting, with his colors seven,
The sheep, the cows, the faces of the swains,
All shapes and hues in forests and on plains.
These old sun-pictures all are lost, or given
Away among the gods. Man owns but half
The Sun-god's secret—in the Photograph.

XVI.
THE SPECTROSCOPE.

All honor to that keen Promethean soul
Who caught the prismic hues of Jove and Mars,
And from the glances of the dædal stars,
And from the fiery sun, the secret stole
That all are parts of one primeval Whole,—
One substance beaming through Creation's bars
Consent and peace, amid the chemic wars
Of gases and of atoms. Yonder roll
The planets; yonder, baffling human thought,
Suns, systems, all whose burning hearts are wooed
To one confession—so hath Science caught
Those eye-beams frank, whose speech cannot delude,—
How of one stuff our mortal earth is wrought
With stars in their divine infinitude.

XVII.
THE MICROPHONE.

The small enlarged, the distant nearer brought
To sight, made marvels in a denser age.
But Science turns with every year a page
In the enchanted volume of her thought.
The wizard's wand no longer now is sought.
Yet with a cunning toy the Archimage
May hear from Rome Vesuvius' thunders rage,
And earthquake mutterings underground are caught,
Alike with trivial sounds. Would there might rise
Some spiritual seer, some prophet wise,
Whose tactile vision would avert the woes
Born of conflicting forces in the state;—
Some listener to the deep volcanic throes
Below the surface—ere we cry, “Too late!”

XVIII.
THE FIRESIDE.

With what a live intelligence the flame
Glows and leaps up in spires of flickering red,
And turns the coal just now so dull and dead
To a companion—not like those who came
To weary me with iteration tame
Of idle talk in shallow fancies bred.
From dreary moods the cheerful fire has led
My thoughts, which now their manlier strength reclaim.
And like some frozen thing that feels the sun
Through solitudes of winter penetrate,
The frolic currents through my senses run;
While fluttering whispers soft and intimate
Out of the ruddy firelight of the grate
Make talk, love, music, poetry in one.

XIX.
THE LADY'S SONNET. TWILIGHT.

I know not why I chose to seem so cold
At parting from you; for since you are gone
I see you still—I hear each word, each tone;
And what I hid from you I wish were told.
I, who was proud and shy, seem now too bold
To write these lines—and yet must write to own
I would unsay my words, now I'm alone.
From my dark window out upon the wold
I look. 'Twas through yon pathway to the west
I watched you going, while the sunset light
Went with you—and a shadow seemed to fall
Upon my heart. And now I cannot rest
Till I have written; for I said, “To-night
I'll send your answer.” Now I've told you all.

XX.
THE LOVER'S SONNET. MIDNIGHT.

I waited through the night, while summer blew
The breath of roses through my darkened room.
The whispering breeze just stirred the leafy gloom
Beyond the window. On the lawn the dew
Lay glistening in the starlight. No one knew
I did not sleep, but waited here my doom
Or victory. I saw the light-house loom
Across the bay. The silence grew and grew,
And hour by hour kept pace with my suspense.
Each rustling noise, each passing footstep seemed
The coming messenger I hoped yet feared.
At last a knock—a throb—a pause intense—
Your letter came. I read as if I dreamed.
Almost too great to bear my bliss appeared!

XXI.
THE PINES AND THE SEA.

Beyond the low marsh-meadows and the beach,
Seen through the hoary trunks of windy pines,
The long blue level of the ocean shines.
The distant surf, with hoarse, complaining speech,
Out from its sandy barrier seems to reach;
And while the sun behind the woods declines,
The moaning sea with sighing boughs combines,
And waves and pines make answer, each to each.
O melancholy soul, whom far and near,
In life, faith, hope, the same sad undertone
Pursues from thought to thought! thou needs must hear
An old refrain, too much, too long thine own:
'T is thy mortality infects thine ear;
The mournful strain was in thyself alone.

XXII.
PENNYROYAL.

Heavy with cares no winnowing hand could sift,
Wrapt in a sadness never to be told,
As o'er the fields and through the woods I strolled,
Following with restless footstep but the drift
Of the still August morn, so I might shift
The scenery of my thoughts, and gild their old
Monotonous fringes with a light less cold,
I found the aromatic herb, whose swift
And sweet associations bore me away
To boyhood, when beneath an oak like this
I culled the fragrant leaves. Crude childhood's bliss
Was in the scent; but brighter smiled the day
For memories no cold shade could overcast—
Safe 'mid the unblighted treasures of the past.

XXIII.
BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH SYMPHONY.

The mind's deep history here in tones is wrought,
The faith, the struggles of the aspiring soul,
The confidence of youth, the chill control
Of manhood's doubts by stern experience taught;
Alternate moods of bold and timorous thought,
Sunshine and shadow—cloud and aureole;
The failing foothold as the shining goal
Appears, and truth so long, so fondly sought
Is blurred and dimmed. Again and yet again
The exulting march resounds. We must win now!
Slowly the doubts dissolve in clearer air.
Bolder and grander the triumphal strain
Ascends. Heaven's light is glancing on the brow,
And turns to boundless hope the old despair.

XXIV. THE SECEDERS.
1.

Far from the pure Castalian fount our feet
Have strayed away where daily we unlearn
How Truth is one with Beauty. For we turn
No more to hear the strains we sprang to greet
When we were young, and love and life were sweet
Before the world had taught us how to earn
Its baser wealth, and from our doors to spurn
The Muse like some poor vagabond and cheat.
For we are young, and did not see the baits
That in the distance lured us down the roads
Where Toil and Care and Doubt, those lurking fates,
Subdued our pliant backs to alien loads;
Till long since deadened to the Poet's tones,
They fall on us as rain on logs and stones.

XXV. [THE SECEDERS.]
2.

Yet what were love, and what were toil and thought,
And what were life, bereft of Poesy?
Who lingers in a garden where the bee
By no rich beds of fragrant flowers is caught—
A homely vegetable patch where naught
Is prized but for some table-caterer's fee,
And Nature pledged to market-ministry?
To me another lore was early taught;
And rather would I lose the dear delights
Of eye and ear, than wilfully forego
The power that can transfigure sounds and sights,
Can steep the world in symbols, and bestow
The free admittance to all depths and heights,
And make dull earth a heaven of thought below.

XXVI. IN A LIBRARY.
1.

In my friend's library I sit alone,
Hemmed in by books. The dead and living there,
Shrined in a thousand volumes rich and rare,
Tower in long rows, with names to me unknown.
A dim half-curtained light o'er all is thrown.
A shadowed Dante looks with stony stare
Out from his dusky niche. The very air
Seems hushed before some intellectual throne.
What ranks of grand philosophers, what choice
And gay romancers, what historians sage,
What wits, what poets, on those crowded shelves!
All dumb forever, till the mind gives voice
To each dead letter of each senseless page,
And adds a soul they own not of themselves.

XXVII. [IN A LIBRARY.]
2.

A miracle—that man should learn to fill
These little vessels with his boundless soul;
Should through these arbitrary signs control
The world, and scatter broadcast at his will
His unseen thought, in endless transcript still
Fast multiplied o'er lands from pole to pole
By magic art; and, as the ages roll,
Still fresh as streamlets from the Muses' hill.
Yet in these alcoves tranced, the lords of thought
Stand bound as by enchantment—signs or words
Have none to break the silence. None but they
Their mute proud lips unlock, who here have brought
The key. Them as their masters they obey.
For them they talk and sing like uncaged birds.

XXVIII.
PAST SORROWS.

As tangled driftwood barring up a stream
Against our struggling oars when hope is high
To reach some fair green island we descry
Lying beyond us in the morning's gleam,
And shimmering like a landscape in a dream—
Yet waiting patiently the logs float by,
And all our course lies open to the eye—
So sorrows come and go. What though they seem
A blight whose touch might turn a young head gray,
Joy dawns again. Hope beckons us before.
The tide that pressed against us breaks our bars;
The visionary islands smile once more.
Life, with its rest by night, its work by day,
Forgets the old griefs, and heals their deepest scars.

XXIX. LIFE AND DEATH.
1.

O solemn portal, veiled in mist and cloud,
Where all who have lived throng in, an endless line,
Forbid to tell by backward look or sign
What destiny awaits the advancing crowd;
Bourne crossed but once with no return allowed;
Dumb, spectral gate, terrestrial yet divine,
Beyond whose arch all powers and fates combine,
Pledged to divulge no secrets of the shroud.
Close, close behind we step, and strive to catch
Some whisper in the dark, some glimmering light;
Through circling whirls of thought intent to snatch
A drifting hope—a faith that grows to sight;
And yet assured, whatever may befall,
That must be somehow best that comes to all.

XXX. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
2.

Or endless sleep 'twill be,—and that is rest,
Freedom forever from life's weary cares—
Or else a life beyond the climbing stairs
And dizzy pinnacles of thought expressed
In symbols such as in our mortal breast
Are framed by time and space;—life that upbears
The soul by a law untried amid these snares
Of sense that make it a too willing guest.
So sleep or waking were a boon divine.
Yet why this inextinguishable thirst,
This hope, this faith that to existence cling?
Nay e'en the poor dark chrysalis some fine
Ethereal creature prisons, till it burst
Into the unknown air on golden wing.

XXXI. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
3.

If death be final, what is life, with all
Its lavish promises, its thwarted aims,
Its lost ideals, its dishonored claims,
Its uncompleted growth? A prison wall,
Whose heartless stones but echo back our call;
An epitaph recording but our names;
A puppet-stage where joys and griefs and shames
Furnish a demon jester's carnival;
A plan without a purpose or a form;
A roofless temple; an unfinished tale.
And men like madrepores through calm and storm
Toil, die to build a branch of fossil frail,
And add from all their dreams, thoughts, acts, belief,
A few more inches to a coral-reef.

XXXII. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
4.

If at one door stands life to cheat our trust,
And at another, death, to mock because
We thought life's promise good; if all that was
And is and should be ends in fume and dust—
Then let us live for joy alone—the rust
Of ease encase our minds—the grander laws
Of souls be set aside. Let no man pause
To weigh between his virtue and his lust.
From first to last life baffles all our hopes
Of aught but present bliss. Death waits to mock
Our haste to indorse a visionary bond.
Let pleasure dance us down earth's sunny slopes,
And crown our heads with roses, ere the shock
Of thunder falls. There is no life beyond?

XXXIII. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
5.

Yet in all facts of sense life stands revealed;
And from a thousand symbols hope may take
Its charter to escape the Stygian lake,
And find existence in an ampler field.
The streams by winter's icy breath congealed
Flow when the voices of the spring awake.
The electric current lives when tempests break
The wires. The chemic energies unsealed
By sudden change, in other forms survive.
The senses cheat us where the mind corrects
Their partial verdict. More than all, the heart—
The heart cold science counts not, is alive—
Of the undivided soul that vital part
Her microscopic eye in vain dissects.

XXXIV. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
6.

So, heralded by Reason, Faith may tread
The darkened vale, the dolorous paths of night,
In the great thought secure that life and light
Flow from the Soul of all, who, with the dead
As with the living, is the fountain-head.
And though our loved and lost are snatched from sight,
Some unseen power will guide them in their flight,
And to some unknown home their steps are led.
Yet has no seer, by sacred visions fired,
Disclosed their state to those they leave behind;
No holy prophet, saint or sage inspired—
Save in the magic lantern of the mind—
Seen in ecstatic trance those realms desired:
And all the oracles are dumb and blind.

XXXV. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
7.

The wish behind the thought is the soul's star
Of faith, and out of earth we build our heaven.
Life to each unschooled child of time has given
A fairy wand with which he thinks to unbar
The dark gate to a region vast and far,
Where all is gained at length for which he has striven—
All loss requited—all offences shriven—
All toil o'erpassed—effaced each battle-scar.
But ah! what heaven of rest could countervail
The ever widening thought—the endless stress
Of action whereinto the heart is born?
What sphere so blessèd it could overbless
With sweets the soul, when all such gifts must fail,
If from its chosen work that soul were torn?

XXXVI. [LIFE AND DEATH.]
8.

Not for a rapture unalloyed I ask.
Not for a recompense for all I miss.
A banquet of the gods in heavenly bliss,
A realm in whose warm sunshine I may bask,
Life without discipline or earnest task
Could ill repay the unfinished work of this.
Nay—e'en to clasp some long-lost Beatrice
In bowers of paradise—the mortal mask
Dropped from her face now glorified and bright.
But I would fain take up what here I left
All crude and incomplete; would toil and strive
To regain the power of which I am bereft
By slow decay and death, with fuller light
To aid the larger life that may survive.

XXXVII. TO JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.

Unbidden to the feast where friends have brought,
To greet thy seventy years, their wreaths of rhyme,—
For that thy form erect such weight of time
Should bear, was never present to my thought,—
Whittier, I bring my offering, though unsought.
Thou, first of all our bards, hast rung the chime
Of souls, whose zeal denounced a nation's crime.
Thy fire, intense yet soft, from heaven was caught.
Thou too the dear neglected chords hast wooed
Of plain New England life, and earned a fame
From whose wide light thy modest nature shrinks.
Long shall the land revere and love thy name;
Long find among thy songs the golden links
That bind the world in peace and brotherhood.

XXXVIII. TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. ÆT. 70.

A fountain in our green New England hills
Sent forth a brook, whose music, as I stood
To listen, laughed and sang through field and wood
With mingled melodies of joyous rills.
Now, following where they led, a river fills
Its channel with a wide calm shining flood
Still murmuring on its banks with changeful mood.
So, Poet, sound thy “stops of various quills,”
Where waves of song, wit, wisdom charm our ears
As in thy youth, and thoughts and smiles by turns
Are ours, grave, gay, or tender. Time forgets
To freeze thy deepening stream. The stealthy years
But bribe the Muse to bring thee amulets
That guard the soul whose fire of youth still burns.

XXXIX.
BAYARD TAYLOR.

Can one so strong in hope, so rich in bloom
That promised fruit of nobler worth than all
He yet had given, drop thus with sudden fall?
The busy brain no more its work resume?
Can death for life so versatile find room?
Still must we fancy thou canst hear our call
Across the sea—with no dividing wall
More dense than space to interpose its doom.
Ah then—farewell, young-hearted genial friend!
Farewell, true poet, who didst grow and build
From thought to thought still upward and still new.
Farewell, unsullied toiler in a guild
Where some defile their hands, and where so few
With aims as pure strive faithful to the end.

XL.
JOHN WEISS.

The summer comes again, yet nothing brings
Of him but memories of that clear-lit eye,
That voice, that presence that can never die.
Fame o'er his dust no public trumpet rings.
No bard beside his grave his genius sings.
Yet he was one of that brave company,
The apostles of the race—the champion high
Of faith by reason guarded from the slings
Of dull sectarians and of atheist foes.
In him the scholar, teacher, prophet, wit
And genial friend were blended in one strain.
From his electric intellect arose
Auroral lights in which the past was lit,
And Æschylus and Shakspeare lived again.

XLI.
GEORGE RIPLEY.

Warm, generous and young in heart and brain,
A wise, ripe scholar of the antique mould,
Had he but chosen he might have enrolled
His name among philosophers who gain
Renown, and lead an academic train.
But unambitious in a humbler fold—
Humbler yet wider—he the current told
Of others' thoughts and works in graceful strain.
So from his watch-tower calm the public mind
He charmed and wisely led. Still young in age,
And still in fireside talk the cordial friend,
He read between the lines upon life's page
The deeper meaning those alone can find
Whose souls toward truth and not its semblance, tend.

XLII. TO G. W. C.

The day so long remembered comes again.
The years have vanished. On the vessel's deck
We stand and wave adieux, until a speck
Our bark appears to friends whose eyes would fain
Follow our voyage o'er the unknown main.
Shadows of sails and masts and rigging fleck
The sunlit ship. The captain's call and beck
Hurry the cheery sailors as they strain
The windy sheets; while we in careless mood
Gaze on the silver clouds and azure sea,
Filled with old ocean's novel solitude,
And dream of that new life of Italy,
The golden fleece for which we sailed away,
Whose splendor freshens this memorial day.

XLIII.
LONDON.

Black in the midnight lies the City vast.
Its dim horizon from my window high
I see shut in beneath a misty sky
Red with the light a million lamp-fires cast
Up from the humming streets. And now at last
With lessening roar the weary wheels go by.
At last in sleep all discords swoon and die.
Now wakes the solemn visionary Past,
Peopled with spirits of the mighty dead
Whose names are London's glory and her shame—
Seers, poets, heroes, martyrs—deathless lives
Long blazoned in the chronicles of fame.
The inglorious Present veils its dwarfish head.
England's ideal life alone survives!

XLIV.
VEILED MEMORIES.

Of love that was, of friendship in the days
Of youth long gone, yet oft remembered still,
And seen like distant landscapes from a hill,
Clothed in a garment of aërial haze,
What need to sing? Yet real is each phase
Of life; and Time, that brings all good and ill
Of this our mortal lot, can never spill
One drop of that full cup he fills and weighs.
Ah, faces veiled that start from out the past!
Ah, spectral images once swift and warm!
Ye are but hidden by perspectives vast.
To-day o'ermasters all. And yet each form
Of life and thought, forgotten or aloof,
Is woven through the soul's strange warp and woof.

XLV. TENNYSON.
1.

His brows were circled by a wreath of bays,
The symbol of the bard's well-earned renown—
Upon his head more regal than the crown
Of kings. For he by his immortal lays
Is King among the poets of these days.
And far and wide where'er our mother-tongue
Is known, his wingèd lines are read and sung
In crowded cities and in green by-ways.
What could his country give that he had not?
Fame, wealth, love's best companionship he had.
And, blown across the seas, no lonely spot
Of our far West but felt the effluence glad
Borne to our hearts as from ethereal fire
In the rich music of his English lyre.

XLVI. [TENNYSON.]
2.

How grand he would have stood, had he declined
The needless coronet he donned, as though
Its gilt could heighten his proud aureole's glow.
But downward he has stepped, a seat to find—
Not with the lords of that imperial kind
Whose simple manhood, fed by love and truth,
Found far from monarchs' courts perennial youth
In the ideal gardens of the mind;—
But in a throng of blank nobilities
In outward fellowship of lip and eye—
Of empty forms and hollow courtesies;
Thou art become as one of us—they cry.
Another shape than thine must now be worn.
Son of the morning—how thy beams are shorn!

XLVII. TO G. W. C.

Still shines our August day, as calm, as bright
As when, long years ago, we sailed away
Down the blue Narrows and the widening bay
Into the wrinkling ocean's flashing light;
And the whole universe of sound and sight
Repeats the radiance of that festal day.
But for the inward eye no power can stay
The fleeting splendor of our youth's delight.
Still shines our August day,—but not for me
The old enchantment,—when, by care and sorrow
Untried, the hopeful heart was ever free
To greet the morn as herald of like morrow.
Yet shine, fair day! And let my soul from thee
Hope, faith, and strength for life's dim future borrow.

XLVIII.
GLADSTONE.

For Peace, and all that follows in her path—
Nor slighting honor and his country's fame,
He stood unmoved, and dared to face the blame
Of party-spirit and its turbid wrath.
He saw in vision the dread aftermath,
Should war once kindle its world-circling flame
Through Asian tribes that bear the British name.
Time few such crises for a people hath,
And few such leaders. Calmly he pursued
A course at which the feebler spirits sneered,
The bolder fumed with clamor loud and rude.
And while the world still doubted, hoped, and feared,
This chief a bloodless victory hath won—
Britannia's wisest, best, and bravest son.

XLIX. J. R. L. (ON HIS HOMEWARD VOYAGE.)
1.

Back from old England, in whose courts he stood
Foremost to knit by act and word the band
Between the daughter and the mother-land
In all by either prized of truth and good,
We welcome to a fellowship renewed
His country's friend and ours. The master-hand
That held the pen and lyre could still command
Affairs of state, controlling league and feud.
So, helped, not hindered, may his later strains
Flow deeper, richer, though by sorrow toned;
And life by losses grow as once by gains;
And age hold fast the best that youth has owned.
But ah, hurt not with touch too heavy, Time,
The light-winged wisdom of his gayer rhyme.

L. [J. R. L. (ON HIS HOMEWARD VOYAGE.)]
2.

O ship that bears him to his native shore,
Beneath whose keel the seething ocean heaves,
Bring safe our poet with his garnered sheaves
Of Life's ripe autumn poesy and lore!
Though round the old homestead where we met of yore
In the unsaddened days the southwind grieves
Through his green elms, and all their summer leaves
Seem whispering of the scenes that come no more,
Yet may the years that brought him honors due
Where Europe's best and wisest learned his worth,
Yield hope and strength to reach horizons new
In the broad Western land that gave him birth;
Nor bar his vision to a sunlit view
Beyond the enshrouding mysteries of earth.

LI. THE HUMAN FLOWER.
1.

In the old void of unrecorded time,
In long, slow æons of the voiceless past,
A seed from out the weltering fire-mist cast
Took root—a struggling plant that from its prime
Through rudiments uncouth, through rock and slime,
Grew, changing form and issue—and clinging fast,
Stretched its aspiring tendrils—till at last
Shaped like a spirit it began to climb
Beyond its rugged stem with leaf and bud
Still burgeoning to greet the sunlit air
That clothed its regal top with love and power,
And compassed it as with a heavenly flood—
Until it burst in bloom beyond compare,
The world's consummate, peerless human flower.

LII. [THE HUMAN FLOWER.]
2.

Shall that bright flower the countless ages toiled
And travailed to bring forth—shall that rare rose,
Whose bloom and fragrance earth and heaven unclose
Their treasuries to enrich, by death be foiled?
Its matchless splendor trampled down and spoiled?
Shall that Celestial Love—who watched its throes
Through centuries of long struggles and of woes,
And freed it from the old Serpent round it coiled;
Who tended it, and reared its glorious head
Above the brambles and the poisonous marsh,
And shielded it when zones were cased in ice—
Leave it to perish when the summons harsh
Of death is rung,—or, ere its leaves are shed,
Transplant it to his realm of Paradise?

LIII.
AUGUST.

Far off among the fields and meadow rills
The August noon bends o'er a world of green.
In the blue sky the white clouds pause, and lean
To paint broad shadows on the wooded hills
And upland farms. A brooding silence fills
The languid hours. No living forms are seen
Save birds and insects. Here and there, between
The broad boughs and the grass, the locust trills
Unseen his long-drawn, slumberous monotone.
The sparrow and the lonely phœbe-bird,
Now near, now far, across the fields are heard;
And close beside me here that Spanish drone,
The dancing grasshopper, whom no trouble frets,
In the hot sunshine snaps his castanets.

LIV.
IDLE HOURS.

Ye idle hours of summer, not in vain,
To one by Nature's beauty fed, ye pass—
Though sending through the mental camera glass
No philosophic lesson to the brain,
But only pictures fair of shaded lane,
Of dappled cows knee-deep in meadow grass;
Bright hill-tops with their sloping forest mass,
Or barn-roofs glimmering gray across the plain.
Earth, air, and water, and the sacred skies
Have something still to tell, not less, I ween,
Than famous books the learned sages prize,
Weighted with thought abstract and logic keen,
Where Concord pores with metaphysic eyes
O'er vasty deeps of the unknown and unseen.

LV. MUSIC AND POETRY.
1.

Sing, poets, as ye list, of fields, of flowers,
Of changing seasons with their brilliant round
Of keen delights, or themes still more profound—
Where soul through sense transmutes this world of ours.
There is a life intense beyond your powers
Of utterance, which the ear alone has found
In the aerial fields of rhythmic sound—
The inviolate pathways and air-woven bowers
Built by entwining melodies and chords.
Ah, could I find some correspondent sign
Matching such wondrous art with fitting words!
But vain the task. Within his hallowed shrine
Apollo veils his face. No muse records
In human speech such mysteries divine.

LVI. [MUSIC AND POETRY.]
2.

Yet words though weak are all that poets own
Wherewith their muse translates that kindred muse
Of Harmony, whose subtle forms and hues
Float in the unlanguaged poesy of Tone.
And so no true-souled artist stands alone;
But all are brothers, though one hand may use
A magic wand the others must refuse,
And painters need no sculptor's Parian stone.
If Art is long, yet is her province wide.
While all for truth and beauty live and dare,
One sacred temple covers all her sons.
Music and Poesy stand side by side.
Through every member one blood-current runs:
One aim, one work, one destiny they share.

LVII.
TO SLEEP.

Come, Sleep—Oblivion's sire! Come, blessed Sleep!
Thy shadowy sheltering wings above me spread.
Fold to thy balmy breast my weary head.
Shut close behind the gates of sense, and steep
All sad remembrance in thy Lethe deep.
But come not as thou comest to the bed
Of the tired laborer sleeping like the dead
In dull and dreamless trance. But let me keep
The visionary paths of fantasy
Down through the mystic mazes of a land
Transfigured by thy wonder-working spell.
So lead me, gentle Sleep, with guiding hand,
That when I wake from dreams, I still may be
Wooed back to tread thy fields of asphodel.