University of Virginia Library

TO MY FRIEND,

ON HIS BIRTHDAY.

TO MY FRIEND,

ON HIS BIRTHDAY.

He who has walked among his fellow-men
This life's rough path for threescore years and ten,
Bearing for others, on the weary way,
The heat and burden of the toilsome day;
Sounding the silvery notes of faith and hope
Whene'er the weak or the despairing droop;
Speaking the words of sympathy and love,
Far the wild discords of the world above;
Raising the fallen, succoring the opprest—
The Holy Graal of unfound good his quest;
Holding aloft, a true and blameless Knight,
The stainless banner of the Just and Right:
He is the Christian hero of to-day,
And at his feet my tribute here I lay.

CHARITY.

O Thou who once on earth beneath the weight
Of our mortality didst live and move,
The incarnation of profoundest love;
Who on the Cross that love didst consummate,
Whose deep and ample fullness could embrace
The poorest, meanest of our fallen race:
How shall we e'er that boundless debt repay?
By long, loud prayers in gorgeous temples said?
By rich oblations on thine altars laid?
Ah, no! not thus Thou didst appoint the way:
When Thou wast bowed our human woe beneath,
Then as a legacy Thou didst bequeath
Earth's sorrowing children to our ministry,
Saying, As ye do to them ye do to me.

UNTIL DEATH.

AB ASTRIS.

ACCORDANCE.

He who with bold and skilful hand sweeps o'er
The organ-keys of some cathedral pile,
Flooding with music, vault, and nave, and aisle,
Though on his ear falls but a thunderous roar.
In the composer's lofty motive free,
Knows well that all that temple, vast and dim,
Thrills to its base with anthem, psalm, and hymn,
True to the changeless laws of harmony.
So he who on these clanging chords of life,
With firm, sweet touch plays the Great Master's score,
Of truth, and love, and duty, evermore,
Knows, too, that far beyond this roar and strife,
Though he may never hear, in the true time,
These notes must all accord in symphonies sublime.

A SUMMER IDYL.

The city is dreary and dusty and lone,
The Smiths and the Joneses and Jenkinses gone;
The doors are all barred, and the shutters all down,
And nobody left in this desolate town—
Save the sweeper who wearily loiters and lags,
The ashman, and he who cries “Bottles and rags!”
And a hurrying crowd one knows nothing about,
Though each one of them somebody cares for, no doubt;
The streets everywhere are plowed into a rut,
For putting down pipes that never stay put.
Gazing up from my window above may be scanned
A strip of the sky as wide as my hand;
And then, looking earthward, may dimly be seen
At least a square yard once of emerald green;
But now from the heat and sewer-gas, behold!
It has taken the favorite hue of old gold.
Then the odors,—not Milton's Sabean, I own,
Nor yet those that Coleridge found at Cologne,
But here to our trained, tried olfactories known,
As the Hunter's Point perfume—from boiling old bone.
You boast of your singing birds lodged in the trees,
Of the dash of the waves, the sigh of the breeze,
The lowing of herds, the hum of the bees—
Sweet voices of Nature,—but what are all these
To our lively mosquitos' appeal to the senses,
The wail of the cats as they stray o'er the fences;
Till a friend at my side, in a rage going on,
Makes use of “cuss words” and calls for his gun.
And here comes the organ that stops at our door,
To grind out its music that makes, with the roar
Of the wagons and carts as they rumble and jolt
O'er the roughly paved streets, a prolonged thunderbolt;
And every two minutes the up-in-air train
Goes whirring along like a demon insane;
Till all thought is dispersed, like a mist in the air,
And silence is golden, we meekly declare.
Then the heat that no thoughts of the blizzard assuage,
When Phœbus and Fahrenheit start a rampage;
And when “General Humidity” joins in the tilt,
Like plucked flowers of the field the poor mortal must wilt,
Till he cries, like the wit, in disconsolate tones,
To take off his flesh and sit in his bones.
But, however, to sum up and make myself clear,
For July and August I would not be here;
But give me New-York for nine months of the year,—
With all its shortcomings there 's no place so dear;
With its life and its rush, what it does and has done,
There is no city like it under the sun.

LARGESS.

INDIAN SUMMER

O sweet, sad autumn of the waning year,
Though in thy bowers the roses all lie dead,
And from thy woods the song of birds has fled,
And winter, stern and cold, is hovering near;
Yet from thy presence breathes a holy calm.
The fervid heats, the lightning storms, all past,
A tender light o'er earth and sky is cast,
And all thy solemn voices chant a psalm.
Oh, Indian Summer, autumn of the soul,
That no returning Spring shall visit more,
Though all thy rose-hued morning dreams are o'er,
And phantoms dread stand threat'ning at the goal,
Yet are these days dear as e'en Summer knew;
These Sibylline leaves of life, so precious, since so few.

TO THE UNKNOWN BUILDER OF THE CATHEDRAL OF COLOGNE

Unknown great Master! whose creative thought
Is here inscribed, though from Fame's shining scroll
Thy name is lost, this wondrous dome is fraught
With the expression of thy reverent soul.
Immortal, in each curve and line inwrought;
As in the vast, harmonious, perfect whole:
We see buttress, tower, and pinnacle that reach
In forests of great columns, towering high,
With deep grooved arches interlacing each,
Lift their bold outlines dark against the sky.
It rises like a vision in mid-air, indeed
A temple meet for a divine abode;
The embodied symbol of man's highest creed;
A symphony in stone; a thought of God.

TO CAPTAIN WEST, OF THE STEAMER ATLANTIC

LINES TO ---

I thank thee—not for that kind deed alone,
Though deep within my heart the record lies,
Engraved with those few pleasant memories,
That like stray sunbeams on my life have shone:
I thank thee most for this—that when belief
In human worth was darkening into doubt,—
As one by one, I marked with bitter grief
Those I had reverenced with a faith devout
Turn recreant back upon their heavenward way
And sink before me into common clay;
That thou dost come my faith to reassure,
My wavering trust in goodness to restore,
And bid my fainting hope take wing once more.

SPRINGTIME

TO GEORGE PEABODY

No Eastern tale, no annals of the past,
Of Greece or Rome, deeds such as thine relate,
Deeds kings and emperors might emulate,
That o'er thy native land new luster cast;
The land that opens all her wide domain
To the oppressed of every name and zone,
And with a spirit generous as thine own,
Pours forth the gifts her boundless stores contain;
The land that shall embalm thy memory
In love and honor, while long ages hence
The bounteous stream of thy beneficence,
Bearing along to millions yet to be
Tributes of light and love, its course shall run,
Still widening as it flows, like the broad Amazon!

TO LAMARTINE

TO FITZ-GREENE HALLECK

I see the sons of genius rise
The nobles of our land,
And foremost in the gathering ranks
I see the poet-band.
That priesthood of the Beautiful
To whom alone 't is given
To lift our spirits from the dust,
Back to their native heaven.
But there is one among the throng
Not passed his manhood's prime,
The laurel-wreath upon his brow
Has greener grown with time;
And in his eye yet glows the light
Of the celestial fire,
But cast beside him on the earth
Is his neglected lyre.
The lyre whose high heroic notes
A thousand hearts have stirred
Lies mute—the skilful hand no more
Awakes one slumbering chord.
O poet, rouse thee from thy dreams!
Wake from the voiceless slumbers,
And once again give to the breeze
The music of thy numbers.
Sing! for our country claims her bards,
She listens for thy strains;
Sing! for upon our jarring earth
Too much of discord reigns.

TO PETER COOPER

The Pyramids of Egypt, even to-day
The wonder of the world, stupendous stand
In their material greatness, and defy
Alike relentless Time and Libyan sand.
But what great thought through those grim structures smiles?
What Aspiration reared those wondrous piles?
None,—save that kings, forgotten long ago,
Might leave their worthless dust to waste below.
This Shrine thou 'st reared to Science and to Art
A nobler Thought than Egypt dreamed contains,
And every stone speaks of a regal heart
Benignant as the Nile to desert plains,
When all the arid waste it overflows,
And the parched shores grow green, and blossom as the rose.

TO CHARLES BUTLER

TO THE SAME

LIBERTY TO IRELAND

TO EMMA

I look within those deep, dark, lustrous eyes,
And there I read thy heart's sweet mysteries;
There, like those lakes that mirror earth and sky,
The lights and shadows of the future lie.
For thee ambition has no clarion call;
Thou 'lt seek no home in court, or princely hall,
Where folly reigns, and the world's votaries throng
To wile the hours with mirth, and dance, and song.
Nor wilt thou seek to blazon high thy name,
As woman may, upon the scroll of Fame.
But there 's an empire o'er which thou wouldst reign,
Yet should thy subjects wear no despot's chain.
It is the empire of the Heart. It shall be thine,
And o'er it thou shalt reign by “right divine.”

TO ANNA

For thee, the Sibyl in the future sees
A lovely cottage hidden by the trees;—
Round its white porch are trained the clustering vines;
Beneath its roof perpetual summer shines—
The heart's sweet summer that shall take its dyes
From the clear sunshine of thine azure eyes.
The nightingale shall sing thee to thy dreams;
The lark shall wake thee with morn's earliest beams;
The flocks and herds shall own thy gentle care;
All living things thy kind regard shall share.
And as thou wanderest midst the lovely scene,
The flowers shall claim thee for their fairy queen.
And here, where Nature wears her loveliest spell,
Shalt thou, her fairest work, serenely dwell;
Far from the world's “ignoble strife” and care,
With some loved spirit “for thy minister,”
Thy life like some fair stream shall glide away,
And thou shalt sleep, to wake in the Eternal Day.

TO NETTIE

ON RECEIVING A PICTURE OF AN ITALIAN COUNTESS

TO JULIETTE ON HER WEDDING-DAY

When our first parents were from Eden driven
To wander exiled in this world of care,
Hope changed to fear, and memory to despair;
But once, to their posterity 't is given
The vision of that blissful home to share:
Whene'er two wedded souls as one are bound,
Then the lost Paradise again is found;
But trifles light as air this dream dispel,
And drive the hapless mortals forth disowned,
In the cold air of common life to dwell.
To-day for thee, these dreamland gates are riven;
Enter, and in its charmèd precincts stay
Till thy sweet life at last shall pass away,
And thou shalt find it is not far to Heaven.

TO JULIETTE'S TWINS

TO MISS EDITH M. THOMAS

Your Pegasus, Edith, is hitched to a star,
While mine drags along a Sixth Avenue car;
Yours bears you away to the far empyrean,
Mine carries me down through the quarters plebeian.
Now, soaring aloft, you stop at Antares,
Call it home, that 's the place for Penates and Lares;
Or back to old Greece with her heroes and gods,
You get up a flirtation in sonnets and odes.
(Though they hailed from Olympus, that classical spot,
These “old parties,” confess, were a pretty bad lot.)
Then with dear Mother Nature you make very free
To fathom her secrets of bird, flower, and tree;
To live with her ever on intimate terms,
A freedom on your part, she always confirms,
Although so exclusive she is with the rest of us,
Never giving her password or key to the best of us.
But you have them both, and can seek at your pleasure
Her most secret haunts, her most precious treasure;
And she calls you in accents as winning and mild,
As some fond old grandmother calls a pet child.
The round of my Pegasus lies through the town;
He travels and travels, now up, and now down;
I pull on the strap, and he willingly stops,
And leaves me to visit the markets and shops.
(My car, you perceive, is the bobtail variety
So little admired by the press and society.)
But wherever we go he signally fails
To lift me above the street levels and rails.
So you see that our steeds are not matched for a race,
And with all best endeavors can never keep pace.

THE BRIDES OF INDRA

VIVA ITALIA!