Anyta and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Anyta and other poems

Calvert, George Henry (1803-1889)

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ANYTA.

I.

Thy happy tongue strings vocal pearls
From morn to eve through listening noon;
Thou shakest beauty from thy curls,
As on the longest day of June
The Sun pours splendor from his eyes,
Thou font of sinless ecstasies.

Thou indoor Sun, whose gendering ray
Is the glad look thy smile that crests,
Thy little self sheds light all day,

Kindling new love in thankful breasts,
And breeding such good thoughts in me
That I am inly warmed by thee.

And was I once as thou now art,
My days with rosy blossoms rife?
Therefore it is thy little heart
Singing so true fresh songs of life,
Tunes mine upon a wiser key,
And makes me find myself in thee.

1853.

II.

My feelings grow too large for speech,
If on the cliff in vivid hour
I stand, and with my mind would reach
About the sea and clasp its power.

When reverend Night, opening her eyes,
Bends all their pomp of look on me,
Dilated by the light, I rise
On thoughts of hushed solemnity.

Thy great new eyes light in me thought
Deeper than sea or night can draw,
To speechless love and wonder wrought,
Gazing in them with holy awe.

III.

The life that flashes in the cloud
Dies in its thunder-greeted birth:
The night it scatters from the earth
Reclasps it with an earthy shroud.

Quick kindled from a sphere still higher
Are lightnings mixt of finer light,
That die not, quenched in sudden night,
But live a steadfast sacred fire.

Like suns new-lit by th' Architect,
Who warms th' eternal domes above,
Fresh flashes issuing from his love
Warm thee, by his great hand bedeckt.

And thus in glistening unity
Thy beauties inly bud and flower:
Thou beam'st with daily brightened power,
Each day more full of Deity.

IV.

With thee 't is ever morning,
Thou playmate of the Hours;
Young Time keeps young, adorning
Thy life with dewy flowers.
Thy minutes all are blessings,
Rained from an inward Heaven;
We share them through caressings,
Regiving what thou 'st given.
Hope's fondling, pet of gladness,
Of prattling joy
The ready toy,
Thy coming gilds the clouds of sadness.

Is it a fiery breathing,
The pulsing of the brain,
In the rich turmoil seething
Of its initial gain?
Or does imagination,
Enfreed by thee and fed,
Exhale an emanation
To girt thy glittering head?
For lo! a golden glory
Circles thy brow:
It fronts me now,
Palpable as that of sacred story.

Fresh orb of holy fire,
That sun'st our earthy night,
Thy motion swings me higher,
Thou singing star of light!
The splendor in thy glances
Relumes my darkened youth;

Thou swell'st my tide of fancies
New satellite of truth.
Wise monitor of duty,
Mysterious child!
In thee uppiled
Are treasuries of love and beauty.

V.

The noonday heat hath hushed the air,
And leaflets drink with noiseless glee
Their fill of light, and everywhere
The hot earth pulses silently.

Adown through ash-leaved maple limbs,
That guard with green the open sash,
A thousand rays with voiceless hymns,
A golden throng, benignant flash.

The light and air serenely keep
A smiling watch about the bed,
Whereon divine resistless sleep
Hath chained those lips, that restless head.

The warm beams play at hide-and-seek
'Mong naked knees and arms and curls,
And smoothly glide from rounded cheek,
Like flying shadows chased from pearls.

And whosoever now draws nigh,
A loving listening silence keeps,
To catch that whisper from on high,
The breathing of a child that sleeps.

VI.

Life's tide in that sleep-circled breast
Heaves with a swell so much more worth
Than common cadences of earth,
It might be breathings of the blest.

The Builder builds a being rare,
Flushing it full with virgin power,
And in its rest, that holy hour,
Unresting works creative there.

And Beauty then—like flowers at night,
That nurse their sweetness in their sleep—
Crouches to spring with bolder leap,
And seize tranced eyes with gaudier light.

VII.

Of genius 't is the gorgeous gift
To read the cipher always gleaming
From Nature's face, and shrewdly sift
The subtleties of her wise seeming.

The Artist's large elected eye,
Tracking the Almighty's splendent duty,
Enraptured sees even gross things lie
Transfigured by the soul of beauty.

And things that are or great or good
Shine with a twofold lustre glowing,
Imburnished by his purple mood,
Like streams 'mid autumn foliage flowing.

These trembling moods, by plastic might
Transmuted are to firm creations,
So potent fair, they grow the light
And glory of the proudest nations.

And kings upraise themselves who raise
Art-palaces to ward these treasures,
That so the heart with joy amaze,
And feed such inward endless pleasures,

That thoughtful, thankful, Christian men,
To steep their eyes in these pure pages,
Bringing best will or practised ken,
Make to them votive pilgrimages.

And such a Palace broadly stands,
Its walls with hallowed handwork flashing,
Where Elbe is proudest of her lands,
Her waters stately Dresden dashing.

Here flame-eyed Rubens' titan brush
Hastens to fix the thronged emotions,
Lightening from his hot brain, that gush
In fulgent floods of grand proportions.

And here the wisest gaze with awe,
To see unfolded by a brother
Beauty transcending earthly law,—
The Saviour-Child and sainted Mother,

“Madonna di San Sisto” styled,
Whereinto holy Raphael melted
His boundless being undefiled:—
Those radiant heads, with grandeur belted.

Here too is great Correggio's “Night.”
The dawn, that through Heaven's portal prieth,
Has not yet scaled in his auburn flight
The lonely manger, wherein lieth

The sacred Child. Yet, lo! a sight!
Athwart the air so thick and sparkless
From th' Infant streams triumphant light,
Divinely vanquishing the darkness.—

Fresh to my heart dear memories bring
That pictured joy, thee now beholding,
As Cherubs 'bout thee sleeping sing,
Thy tender life in theirs enfolding;

While from thy brow divinely flows
Fresh conquering light, our souls illuming:
With love and hope it silent glows,
The earth's dank gloominess consuming.

VIII.

They hover near,—like sunlit airs
About the new-born lily's bloom,
To shield it from the wither'd doom
A stagnant darkness surely bears,—

They hover near, the ghostly powers,
They fan celestial light upon
The lid that veils its fiery sun:
Their vision guides the bandaged Hours,—

A vision that nor rests nor swerves,
That knows not darkness, knows not sleep,
That long hath quit the realms that keep
The spirit subject to the nerves.

How solemn is this living death!
The haughty self so lowly lain,
The muffling of the mighty brain,
And life but an unconscious breath.

IX.

As cloudlet silvered by the Sun,
Or air-supported gossamer,
Thou sleepest safe, without a stir,
Uplifted by His benison.

Great Sleep, thou liest on those lids
Like a warm calm upon the ocean,
When winds have folded up their motion,
And June to brooding stillness bids.

Lie gently, gracious Sleep, the while
Life's inmost channels brim with streams
To ripple soft through flowery dreams,
That dally with a waking smile.

X.

Lift at last those lids belashed:
From without and from within
Counter streams of light are flashed:
A new glory tints her skin.

Wide awake, she lieth still;
As she would her conscience steep
In the juices choice that fill
Life with savor after sleep.

Still she lieth, and her mouth
Joy exchangeth with her eyes:
As with breathings from the south
Flush her temples where she lies.

XI.

Lusty freedom's brave child,
Thy dear motions all swing
To a rhythm such as angel-ears quaff:
In the air what is wild,
On the earth what can sing
Set their chords to thy musical laugh.

From thy black impish eyes
Leap young goblins of fun,
Deftly mounted on beamlets of light:
With their gossamer ties,
Out of mischief quick spun,
They fast bind us with magical might.

And these bonds make us free,
With their magical might
Unloosing of years the rough hold:
We grow guiltless with thee,
While we move in the sight
Of thy joy and thy innocence bold.

XII.

Thou art a vision which the eyes
Cannot see with all their light:
Too far a mystery in thee lies
For the reason's measured sight.

Thou art a myth entrapped in flesh,
From its antique cloudy land,
Delighting in the sudden mesh
Spun by Beauty's lithesome hand:

A Poem bounding through the leaves,
Interlaced with sun and thee,
More true than ever Poet weaves
In his gladdest minstrelsy.

A beamlet art thou of the dawn,
Shot from Night's high-peopled blue,
To skim across a May-steeped lawn,
Scattering diamonds on the dew.

So full of Morning's healthy gush
Is thy motion's fluent spring,
Thou know'st nor noon nor evening's hush,
Nor for thee hath Time a wing.

Too nimble thou for sense to catch thee
In thy mystic joyous dance:
Imagination e'en can't match thee
With his fleet extravagance.

XIII.

Swift minutes run before thy feet;
But not the swiftest passeth by
Till he hath touched the springs that ply
Thy ruddy pulse's wishful beat.

Each comes from far to bring his gift,
He comes from God's eternity;
Mysterious gives his gift to thee,
Then silent onward passeth swift.

And lordly Day, when thou dost sleep,
His vassals' tribute counteth o'er,
And, miser with his more to more,
Rejoiceth in the growing heap.

XIV.

Like matin-note from bridal nest
Entangled in a blooming tree;
Or, rockt on ripple's trembling breast,
The moon's long path across the sea;

Or foremost sunbeams' ordered flight,
A gairish, gleesome, countless crew,
That scale the dungeon-walls of night
To kiss th' expectant eyes of dew,—

Like all that best, through eye and ear,
High thought doth launch upon the deeps
Where unseen hands our being steer
And life with sightless movement leaps,

Is thy free glance's mystery;
And in thy voice's maiden mood
Are cadences that fall on me,
Soft echoes from infinitude.

XV.

Transparent streamlets upward run
From roots that cull a dainty food,
And send it in an amber flood
To meet the embraces of the sun.

A miracle the summit shows:
The overrunnings of the rill
A broidered chalice scoop, and fill
With fragrant flakes, which are the rose.

But pale and cold and thin the vein
Of earthy blood that vivifies
The rose, to juices hot that rise
Ensanguined to thy crescent brain;

And there through torrid teemful spells,—
Which human senses dare not trace,
Nor less than holiest thought embrace,—
Perform their plastic miracles.

XVI.

For there such luminous fires are lit,
A blaze athwart the stars they fling,
And flashing broad, the riches bring
Of shapes, sounds, colors infinite.

And others kindle warmer yet,
And thought's smooth endless coils unwind,
That blandly thy new being bind
In law's unseen connubial net.

And others warmer, finer still,
Upon thy inward softly melt
The loves that purest hearts have felt,
And fuse thy bashful wants to will.

And this deep inward wealth o'erruns
In featured joyfulness, and dips
In beauty's foam curl, cheek, and lips,
And eyes that borrow of the suns.

XVII.

But deeper inward, still more rare,
Are essences that swiftly sweep,
And, glorified, as nimble leap
As lightnings in their boreal lair.

Than rubiest blood more potent they,
They mete its currents to the heart,
And rule its pulse with earthless art
In supersubtle ghostly play.

Earth cannot hear their working-hymn,
Nor see their billowy hues of flame,
To which Beethoven's chords were tame,
And splendors of the rainbow dim.

Streaming from life's great fountain-head,
They know nor death, decay, nor sleep,
Foredestined to upmount the steep
Of angel-summits, music-led.

Behind all thought and passion sit
The immortal, to the mortal bound,
And watch each motion, blow, or wound,
With looks informed from th' Infinite,—

With looks more grand than beamy bend
From old Olympian battlements,
When to great Agamemnon's tents
The Grecian gods a greeting send.

XVIII.

Like the violets veined thou cullest,—
Singing, as the laden bees,
Untaught airs wherewith thou lullest
Sweetest inner harmonies,—
Is the pensive opal blaze
Of thy face on summer days.

Like the restless leap of fountain,
Musical from morn to eve,
That from distant trackless mountain
Draws the thread its jet to weave,
From the Highest, dim away,
Comes thy tuneful bubbling day.

Like the changeful joy of skies,
Flooded so by western Sun
With sweet awe they brim our eyes,
And the heart to prayer is won,
Is the shifting earnest play
Of thy childhood's dimpled day.

XIX.

The Sun his children doth embrace,
In flame his arm they feel:
Through love it is he rolls through space
Each ordered orbit's wheel.

From several suns the fervor warms
Thy new corruscant path,
And burns with love the hydra-harms
That multiply with wrath.

But not a beam from us outstarts
To beck thee on thy way,
But it returns upon our hearts
To bless us with its day,—

A day elate with love's own light,
Illumination pure,—
A spark seraphic, kindled white
By inward sufflature.

XX.

As flusht Aurora, crowned with May,
Snatches from Night the dreamy flowers,
Earth's beauties waken to the day
Of thy new-risen spriteful powers.

And one by one life's wonders press
Their features on thy molten brain,
Where words that lift and thoughts that bless
In quivering piles are hourly lain.

Like pictured cherub-heads a-wing,
Soft glistening through fresh incense-fires,
Here little loves and longings cling,
And peeping buds of pure desires.

They nestle shy and close and warm,
An unfledged brood of meteless might,
That twitter, chirp and flit, and arm
Their pinions for a summer flight.

XXI.

But pinions puissant-plumed have I,—
Imagination's brood, by love
Requickened,—keen to soar and rove
Through the deep Future's swarming sky.

Ere yet thy paths grow steep and rough,
While still the day has all its bloom,
And night no care for one to whom
Each glossy hour is life enough,

I waft me to the rubied peaks,
First warmed by Fortune's gairish ray,
Where breezes fan the heats of day,
And latest linger golden streaks.

Here, with a thousand shadows chased,—
By foils and artful mouldings cast,—
A towered palace, light and vast,
With oriels, corbels, finials graced,

Looks from a hundred windows out,
Through vista'd park, on leafy forms,
Gigantic playmates of the storms,
Hoar oaks, that help the tempest shout.

Within, smooth luxury—refined
By manly need—enrobes the halls
And chambers, from whose storied walls
Gleams lifesome Art's transfusive mind.

The air is sweet with courtesy;
And martial wills and grandeurs proud
Are quelled by breeding in the crowd
That radiant waving circles thee,

Mistress and Matron young, whose jets
Of speech canorous fountains make,
And from whose breathing beauties break
As lightnings from thy carcanets.

XXII.

But wherefore leap the jocund years
To hang upon thy woman's state
The dole of gross ambition's weight,
That presses out the bitterest tears?

If Fancy, hopeful-hovering, will
Dare the dim Future's silent vast,
Shield her, the dear one, 'gainst the blast
Of joyments that the duties chill.

Let Fancy work it modestly
Each nimble gleaming spirit-vein,
Intreasured in a blossom-brain,
To glisten through eternity.

Audacious sacrilege it is,
To build for thee with wishful thought,
God's fresh-enkindled flame inwrought
With earthen—greedy fantasies.

XXIII.

And Fancy hath her craven moods;
Then, 'gainst my heart, she cowards me,
And through my pallor makes me see
Of crime and vice the raven broods

Screeching about thy shadowed head,—
Untimely tamed by net of gray;—
Then darkening still my cold dismay,
She conjures phantoms upas-fed,

Dim visible,—so murksome vague,—
Except on thy wan features, feared
To clammy paleness, as though bleared
By poison of an inward plague.

Then quickly shifts the torture's phase,
And, like a cave within a cave,
Sinks to a deeper night; and, slave
To terrors undivulged, I gaze,

Blinded at first by blackness. Then
By silent lightning swift is torn
The pitchy screen, and thou, forlorn,
Sittest within a muttering den.

Ere on this hell sweep other blast,
My harrowed soul the senses shakes
Loose from the spell, like one who wakes
With dreams unspeakable aghast.

XXIV.

Cold Fancy here 's no friend of mine,
But traitress, who doth dog my mood,
To tempt me with circean food,
Or drug me with a poisoned wine.

And false to me to thee she 's false;
And so I gird me 'gainst her bribes,
And hearken where the soul imbibes
Naught that or flatters or appalls,—

Where accents free are laden deep
With music tuned on heavenly bars;
Where pulses throbbing through the stars
Temper thy motion's joyful sweep.

Thy lightest plays are buds that hold
A rhythmic life within their flakes,
And through fresh orient glancing breaks
Thy noon in marvels manifold.

And marvels more than fancy feigns
Are smallest deeds, so dim their reach;
Nor can all thought such wisdom teach
As thy young loves and petty pains.

With these and these alone I'll build
A modest future for thy years:
I'll build it more of smiles than tears,
And pray that Heaven its sorrows gild.

1861.

OTHER POEMS.

A HARP OF MANY STRINGS.

Softly doth sleep at dawn unlock
The forted palace where she broods;
Then back to their chambers instant flock
The brain's unnumbered multitudes.

Through the quick-opened casement, where
An hour before was lonely night,
My fresh eyes meet the crowded glare,
And broad beatitudes of light.

The joyance of the star-cooled trees,
Earth's baptizement in dewy air,
Love-messages through whispering breeze,
The sky's gold crown of misty hair,

The winds that with grave shadows romp,
Splendors that through the glad leaves leap,
Young Morning's sunny pilèd pomp,—
All these are harvests I may reap.

Nor does the wonder steal away
If I step out into the blaze,—
The broad is changed for subtler day,
The grosser for minute amaze;

For leaf and blossom, blade and bush,
So vibrate each with separate law,
And beauty so doth all beflush,
That wonder deepens into awe.

From sleepless nature, myriad-faced,
Upglimmers such a sea of eyes,
My brain, with sibyl-lights belaced,
Illumined wills it will be wise.

And thought is chafed by orphic hints,
The common glistens weird and strange,
And melt the firmest forms and tints
In mystic sequences of change.

And all about are sights and sounds
That suckle rapture, since began
Creation's radiant rhythmic rounds
Through rose and beetle up to man.

No pulse of life that humblest beats,
On earth below, in air above,
But its unhindered motion heats
In healthy hearts the pulse of love.

Each dumbest creature music wakes
That through the deeper life-chord rings,
As love upon us quivering shakes
The warmth that lifts seraphic wings.

Across the isles of joy and woe
Æolian gales forever sweep;
Than hearts that faintly feel them blow
More blest are hearts they make to weep.

From wide still burning hearths the past
Bejems me with its whitest rays,
Whitened in the high holy blast
Of sage and poet's brain ablaze.

And in my jubilant thought so nurst,
Giant imaginations surge,
As they the bonds of clay would burst,
And daunt me on creation's verge.

In sleep's far travel what great hosts
Accost the soul, we cannot say;
But gifts are given, as angel-ghosts
Had dyed them in a higher day.

Great lights great joys forever ply
About my life: the breath that warms
The Sun blows on my cheek, and I
Seem dandled in almighty arms.

I am a harp of many strings,
And all the day, through night and noon,
Upon me God his music flings,
If I but keep the harp in tune.

PREVISIONS.

Yet shall be waked the slumbering years
By the quick tramp of guilty war,
And blameless eyes be scorched by tears
Wrung from new depths of old despair.

Hate shall yet brew his venom's blight
By heat that ne'er from vengeance warps,
Till sleepless, pale, unpitying night
Casts at day's door a mangled corpse.

Young truths shall still their counsel keep,
Silent 'mid clack of hoary lies,
That, servile bold, maskt manhood steep
In slime of stale hypocrisies.

As lightning's breath at tranquil noon
Upbuilds beneath the western vault
Its far-off cloud-based batteries, soon
To volley the dread thunderbolt,

In life's warm lulls shall still be nurst
Hot ires, that, foully fed, and pent
In Custom's coward cages, burst
On the rackt world with ghastly rent.

And still from age's sensual lip
Shall ooze the lees of rotted truth,
Dripping, a daily upas-drip
In the sweet blood of listening youth.

But truth, though tortured, is truth still,
The stanchest tool wherewith doth ply
In the world's sway his regnant will,
The God who can't create a lie.

Lies are all human, fibres true
Perversely twisted in the strain
Of sense, that lusts beyond its due,
Stifling high joy with pampered pain.

Nor in life's swarming womb, where sleep
Action's full germs, is there a seed
But from its vivid core might leap
The graces of a sinless deed.

On Time's green stem the clustered fruit
Eternity's replenishings
With such remedial sap recruit,
That age to age aye bettering brings.

Thus by the soul's aspiring toil
Her earthly garment shall be wove
With ever dwindling taint of soil,
Till human life be heavenly love.

1857.

LOVE.

I.

This sorrow-shadowed world would sparkle, bright
As painless Paradise to its new Eve,
If earth's love-woven threads were lines of light;
For not the basest bosom but 't will heave
At times love-laden, and the many grieve
Love-anguished daily, while to most is dear
Lone life through one or more to whom they cleave,
In thought tracking them hourly, far or near,
Sending Love warm o'er arctic trail or desert drear.

II.

And drearier than Sahara's starless waste,
When winds are playing billows with its sands,
Colder than frozen moonbeam, pallid traced
Through Greenland's slanting snows, the soul in bands
Of rigid self so fortressed it withstands
Hot summons of beleaguering troops of woe,
That myriad-tongued with thin briarian hands
Upwail and stretch from their dejection low,
And moan like tempests that through foundering cordage blow.

III.

If in such loveless cave could live a soul,
And not—in deep self-darkened dungeon pent,
Uncoupled from the sunn'd celestial whole—
Lose its immortal gait and hardiment,

And, forfeiting the limitless ascent
Of the undying, wane to earthy breath,
To vex the sea, with wintry blusterings blent,
Or creep plague-tainted lusty sheets beneath,
Or howl round hearths where love is weeping for a death.

IV.

Full blest is only he who warmly weeps;
And Love's most sacred fonts are brim with tears,
Through which grow visible his voiceless deeps,
As heaven's through night's blue gush of farthest spheres.
These drops are jewels stored in toilsome years,
Wherein Love glistens on his gala-days
Of sorrow, sad despair, and ardent fears,
That rouse great Love, who foremost pangs allays;
For his wide glow first fires then soothes them with his blaze,

V.

As the hot helpful Sun Spring's stormy rains,
Who with his tender bloom-enkindling heat
Strains them to joyous fruit and wipes their stains.
High partner of the sovereign Sun, Love's feet
Glide like Aurora's arrows that defeat
The flying darkness and uplight the dew:
Where'er he comes, life's beauties rise to greet
His flame: the faint expended old renew
Their juices, and the young pant for the good and true.

VI.

Love is the measure of the more or less
Of depth in deed, from the brave lonely fall
Of martyred saint to nursing lioness,
Who shields her cub with death. Upon the pall,
Folded in every heart, waiting the call

Of deathful selfishness, Love throws his spark,
And like benignant light that rends the wall
Of cloud to hang on high the exultant arc,
Love's ray cleaves the bleak tempest and the lurid dark.

VII.

The tender breath of timorous spring doth kiss
With Love's first joy the wishful earth, that drinks
The welcome warmth, and tokens of her bliss
Soon gives in blossomed lea, and on the brinks
Of quickened brooks, through hyacinths and pinks
And violets, in the new bridal coats
Of amorous flies, the clinking golden links
Of gleesome matin-minstrelsy, that floats
From groves thrilled by the quiring of love-swollen throats.

VIII.

Through the croaked plainings of this jangled life
No song doth sparkle but its melody

Is Love's, whose music sleeps in hottest strife,
And wakes to smooth destruction's deepening sea,
Wooes the palled ear of pining misery,
The sullen eye of outcast crime endears;
So strong, that, were Love banished, earth would be
One vast encampment of armed hates and fears,
A restless desolation, void of smiles and tears.

IX.

History's best beacons, her refulgent torches
By Love are lighted, whose empyrean fire
Makes Moses' sacred mountain smoke, and scorches
The bush, stifles the lower with a higher
Heroic heat in the doomed Brutus' sire,
Turns heavenward Dante's fruitful look that roams
Through Hell, deep tunes the wistful minstrel-choir,
And warmer glows than even in tenderest homes
In the dim vaulted sweep of great cathedral domes.

X.

The starry mazes peopling heaven are gifts
Of Love, and by their mystic light we read
The cipher of the eternal hand that lifts
The film of seeming chaos, plants the seed
That grows to suns, by whose great touch is freed
The joy of hopeful being, and momently
Are loosed souls multitudinous, of breed
So lordly they are born immortal, free,
Co-heirs from God of hope and faith and charity.

XI.

The soul's ascendant recompense 't is Love's
To heap, urging life's motion toward the heights
Where man puts on his majesty and moves
Erect, purged to unbarbèd free delights;
Where—feebler feebler grown the sordid fights
Of self—activities more calm and wide

And meedful by his breath are fed, and rights
To duties high deported so allied,
His pulses are with ceaseless benediction plied.

XII.

Tempered in us by Love is the great awe
That else would freeze the swelling thoughts that soar
To seek the all-holy source of life and law,
To which we then are nearest when we pour
Ourselves upon our fellows, and our core
Grows seedful ripe through self-forgetfulness,
And we, feeling Love's health through every pore,
Nearer and nearer to the godhead press,
And blessèd are in that we live to love and bless.

TO A ROSE.

Not the honeyed bee doth sip
All thy fragrance blossomed rife:
Sweetest juices from thy lip
Go to nourish higher life.

Human souls are fed by thee:
What thou draw'st from air and earth
Is compounded cunningly
In a gift of moral worth.

Wisest thinker of our kind
Comes not near thee in his walk,
But thou dost enrich his mind,
Pendant on a tiny stalk.

Nurseling of the tenderest air,
All the life thou hast to live,
Dearest child of culture's care,
Is, to give, and still to give.

ALONE.

The widowed mother, one by one
Hath seen her children drop away.
A boy was left: now he is gone,
She sits forlorn, that mother gray.

The captive weeps upon his stone,
Chained to the narrow wintry floor:
Nor voice nor eye to him is known,
Save when the jailer opes his door.

By wayward shipwreck singly thrown
Upon a distant speechless isle,
A sailor-boy so mute has grown
That he at last hath ceased to smile.

Think you that these are all alone,
Because bereft of human gaze?
Never was aught but on it shone
Incessant superhuman blaze.

The blindest worm, the proudest throne
Are ever blest with company:
Who were an instant left alone,
That instant would he cease to be.

And that first death would shake the stars,
With terror rack creation's face,
That sprung were life's eternal bars,
And God no more was in his place.

THE DEMON.

I.

Cradled in earth's diviner wealth,
The costly breath of infancy,—
That orbed the ruddy limbs to be
Like dimpled coral tinct with health,—
A new soul beamed its mortal joy
Through the fresh eyelids of a boy.

II.

He lay couched on the silent marge
Of boundless mights, that deeply swelled
In tune with mights that in him welled,—

A boy of look so lustrous large,
That where in inward light he lay
The happiest sunbeams came to play.

III.

And with them played a sunnier light,
Quelling with swollen tides of work
The jealous stains of busy murk,—
Beauty's illuminings, clean and bright
As Seraph's phantasies of power,
And to all being a sumless dower.

IV.

And still another braid of beams—
As her loost hair a maiden's feet—
Enwinds him in their hallowed heat:
With such electric current streams
Love on his head, an answering flood
Leaps through his eyes and rose cheek's blood;

V.

So that he lay a lump of joy,
A fount spouted through hundred jets
Of smiles. And Beauty, pausing, lets
Love have his will on the dear boy:
For Beauty can not do Love's duty,
Nor even Love do that of Beauty.—

VI.

Sunbeam by hasty blackness quenched,
Of light were not more swift deflowered
Than that blest boy. So low he cowered,
As being's pivot had been wrenched,
Or he had heard through his mother's kisses
Cold whisperings from a serpent's hisses.

VII.

Lower and lower quailed the boy.
Choked by gaunt Pallor's pulseless breath,—

Wan wafture from the wastes of death,—
He lay a new-launched wreck of joy,
Wrecked in broad day, and none could see
The sudden rock of his misery.

VIII.

Whence that despiteous covert thrill?
Are his young eyeballs glazed by glare
Of bristling monster clutched from air?
Or are his terrors ghostlier still?
Do subtler spectres inly creep
Through the dim chambers left by sleep?

IX.

Mightier than even the might of thought,—
That grasps in the gauge of its great seeing
The deep magnificence of being,—
Is love, here to its utmost wrought,
Swift filtered through earth's holiest part,
A trembling large maternal heart;

X.

Whence now in flood so warm it gushed,—
Like sane looks poured on madman's eyes,
Stilling their lunar ecstasies,—
The boy's cold terror melted: hushed,
His tears ceased falling on her breast,
And there he sobbed his moan to rest.

XI.

And angered Beauty,—quick returned
To where the love-rockt infant slept,—
With Love and Life such vigil kept,
That when he waked his rose cheek burned,
As o'er its joy had never passed
A viewless spectre's whitening blast.

XII.

And still as on the road he skipped
From childhood's smile to boyhood's laugh,

At times, when just about to quaff
The cup from gladness' river dipt,
Such shadow on him strange would fall
The draught grew thick in sudden gall.

XIII.

But on the panting hearts of boys
E'en weight of shadows cannot lie:
Betossed on fitful lights they die,
Scourged by the nimble whip of joys,—
Pet brood of omnipresent truth,
Th' invisible spirit-guard of youth.—

XIV.

The strenuous ploughman's obdurate tread
Less cold entombs the suppliant flowers—
All young and diadem'd with showers—
Than fresh-crowned manhood's vaulting head
Scorns the late urchin's puny joys,
Counting them but a witless noise.

XV.

The boy has thought himself to man,
And stoutly covets manly prizes.
As the first ray from sun that rises,
Striking a hill or barbacan,
Chafes the strong eye of plumèd troop,
Embattled for the lusted swoop,

XVI.

On him, elate and heated, blazed—
Like beckoning lights in happiest dreams—
A virgin drift of Hope's brisk beams,
As, proud and glad, he dauntless gazed
Where, glittering in the dewy sun,
Wide lay the victories to be won.

XVII.

How trustful broad doth prophesy
The heart, when new and strong and good!

And truly too; for in young blood,
As in first Adam's, folded lie
The potencies that are to be
The all of human destiny.

XVIII.

Yet not for seer fulfilment is.
Young hearts are but a magic glass,
Whereon just flash, then quickly pass
Life's gorgeous possibilities
Back to the future's calm abyss,
To sleep till light shall wake their bliss.

XIX.

Against his thought he soon was sad.
Besprent by ceaseless rain of sorrow,
He saw each day entoiled by its morrow,
Coy good constrained by brazen bad;
Ever beside warm quickening wombs
The frosty deeps of infant tombs.—

XX.

And now th' invisible rays of thought—
White-heated by beleaguering fires
In the quick furnace of desires—
Are to such plastic temper wrought,
They forge, of mingled ores compact,
The humming wheels of human act.

XXI.

But when, hot from the surgy brain,
The generous, guiltless, young ideal
First meets the old grim sordid real,
Like heated bar immersed, with pain
Winces the soul, and dark and cold
Inward recoils to griefs untold.

XXII.

But love will blench at no ordeal;
And who shall set on thought a cope?

So beauty, love, and happy hope,
Young mothers of the hale ideal,
Who in benignant longings bask,
Grow stronger, younger at their task;

XXIII.

Aye, ever stronger, younger, bolder,
Till from man's turbid sleep be past
The shadow by his day-dreams cast,
And wrong in its foul embers smoulder,
Fused by the crescent Sun of right,
Climbing mankind from height to height.

XXIV.

Like cheery breeze-blest galleon, warm
With flusht farewells and valiant hails,
That smooth from festive moorings sails
Into a noyous night of storm,
And, shrieking, straining, leaping, brave,
Breasts the close lightning, blast and wave,

XXV.

Was his quick launch into the world,
A true, bold, willing man, whose will,
Affronted, baffled, wounded, still
Waxed braver in the shock, and, whirled
On the rude vortex, drew strong breath
To gird its ribs 'gainst inward death.

XXVI.

Unlike the ship, no rest had he.
A stout man, with the will to steer,
Leaves never tempests in his rear:
They front him ever angrily.
Co-angered, he struck stronger through,
As wilder blacker storm-racks flew.

XXVII.

On life's mid-path he stood, unbent;
But sad his eye was, and his brow

In furrows knit, as if the now
Despised the past and challenge sent
To the future. Round his mouth were dates
Indented there by scorns and hates.

XXVIII.

Not one was he to flinch or falter:
Nor eye of man nor frown of hell
Could for a trice his courage quell.
And yet, as with himself he 'd palter,
Or that his ruddiest heart-drops paled,
At times the spirit in him quailed.

XXIX.

Across clear onward thoughts would fall,—
Like shower on festal cavalcade,
Or summons on a bridegroom laid,—
A rueful shadow's sudden pall,
That fixed his eye and blanched his lips,
And drenched him in malign eclipse.

XXX.

With weird alarms even sleep was shook.
Athwart the jointless dreams would crawl
A hideous hydra to appall
The bravest. Crouched, a dastard look
Glared from his wrinkled furtive eyes,
Greenish and circumfused with lies.

XXXI.

In a long, sinewy, jagged jaw
Revenge was toothed; cold avarice pined
Pale on his forehead, intertwined
With lurid hate; in a vast maw
Were crammed mixt crude things, of the best,
Which he could gulp, but not digest.

XXXII.

With such associate to dream on
Proved bravest nerve. But now 'gan loom

Blacker against the ashy gloom
Gigantesque the trembling Demon.
Then, weltered in cold sweat, he quaked,
And, shrieking, from his torture waked.—

XXXIII.

The moving shadow, worded night,
Unto the day that made her cleaves,
And lives by food her master leaves,
Gathering what droppeth in his flight,
Whereon, through the veiled hours, she broods,
For good or ill, as be her moods.

XXXIV.

Only that form was haggard night's;
Begotten on shy, helpless sleep
By wilful day, who bids her weep
Or laugh, according as he blights
Or blesses her lone hours. What stalks
In shade, first in the noontide walks.

XXXV.

The strong man's strength was mastering will,
Itself o'ermastered by the blood
Of lustful wants,—the feverish food
Of pampered life,—which when they fill
Th' imperial orbs of thought, usurp
A throne, and linkèd life discerp

XXXVI.

With bad contentions, endless, black,
Splintering the wholesome man in two,
The social both and single, who,
Self-tortured, gasps upon the rack
Of thwartings, doubtings, plots, and dreads,
Like one who in armed darkness treads.

XXXVII.

Who is unruled by lustless wants,
Knows not his rank, and basely creeps,—

Whate'er his front,—and craven peeps
For harbor 'mong the heart's low haunts.
A crownless King is he, his state
Sad as were Eve's without her mate,

XXXVIII.

Woful as sunless planet reeling
Through thickened chaos,—or an ocean
Heaved in perpetual shade, its motion
Untuned by light,—or the pale feeling
At frantic lion's torrid roar,
Heard on far Iceland's arctic shore.

XXXIX.

And thus for him was night in day:
The sunshine of the soul was quenched
By earth-clouds, and the reason wrenched
Its loyal path, the upward way.
The worst were not mute slumber's gleams,
But in loud noon the conscious dreams;

XL.

Day-dreams about the night they make
In the blank future's awe-hedged realm,—
Vague misshapes, horrible whims that whelm
The minds that breed them, which still take
Unholy joy in self-born fright,
Hugging with vague and stern delight

XLI.

Their terrible imaginations,
The froward offspring, coarse and grim,
Of sultry passions that bedim
Their life,—lusts and indignations,
Wherewith they God endow, blaspheming
With their loose, selfish, dark day-dreaming.

XLII.

Now sways the ghostly infinite law,
That the unseen rules the seen. Each hour

These phantasms truculent lap power
From life's selectest blood, and draw
Poison from healthy juice, to kill
All generous, loving, kindly will.

XLIII.

So was his higher being curst
By mandates from the lower nature
Of ires, anxieties, each feature
Dark with a darkness inly nurst,
That in his steadfast face you spell
Prints grooved by thoughts of death and hell.

XLIV.

Death is a dream of unripe man,
A carnal myth,—in being a schism
Impossible,—a cold egotism
Of crude self-busied brains, which plan,
That with the ceasing of a breath
Ceases God's law, which knows not death.—

XLV.

The murkiest midnight feels the Sun:
In total shade men could not breathe:
And when in ghastliest umbrage seethe
The passions,—like pale silver, spun
In the black earth, that unseen glows,—
Through dreariest bosom secret flows

XLVI.

A thread of lucent life, which chance
Or prosperous stroke of purpose bares;
Or, oftener still, spontaneous flares
An inward flame, that in the dance
Fresh leaps,—the grovelling dance of death,—
And the blind heart illumineth.

XLVII.

That is a resurrection-day,
When through the crusted sensual clods

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Breaks the self-loosened soul, and God's
Great smile—first greeted—shines away
The terrors, greeds, and spites that meet
Round the numb'd heart, its winding-sheet.

XLVIII.

O! the deep pious ecstasy,
When, from the smaller self upflown,
We firmly sail on currents blown
Love-lifted towards humanity.
The far Heavens quit their frosty skies,
And stooping to us warm our eyes;

XLIX.

And touch the brain with holy calm,
That all about we patent see
Divine impulsions working free
The prisoned world. With chastened palm
We handle commonest things, and bless
All ours with the new happiness.

101

L.

One he had been who sent abroad—
Horsed fleeter than the tempest's wind—
His myriad messengers of mind,
Sent far, even to the verge of fraud,
For homage, power, delight, and pelf,
To gild one petty home for self.

LI.

But now, as though fresh sap had shot
A subtler tide into the brain,
Making it sparkle in a train
Of glib imaginings, all hot
With great desires, the strong man grew
Transformed to something mildly new.

LII.

Another sun rose on his face;
And there—like unbowed prisoner, free

102

By stir of slow-paced liberty—
The soul came out, and through the haze
Of ebbing darkness glistened glorious
In its own light, jubilant, victorious.

LIII.

New thoughts gave action wiser bent;
New acts gave life so sweet a grace,
That men looked hopeful in his face,
And outcasts blest him as he went.
If higher joy can be, he proved,
Than loving, 't is to be beloved.

LIV.

For ripened use too late in him
These selfless pulses of the heart:
Spirit from flesh will quickly part:
The soul hies to a home less dim.
But not in anguish part the two.
Gentle regretful sighs came through,

103

LV.

That freer verge he had not here
To be his better self,—for earth
Rebuilding on a cleaner hearth
The life he had misbuilt,—and rear
A name that memory might hold,
And warmer grow in growing old.

LVI.

Soon melt even these unbodied sighs;
For on his willing conscience roll
Such pageants of the radiant Whole,
The bounded earth-life from him flies
A speck. He feels himself to be
Parcel of vast Infinity.

LVII.

A freer pulse new thought upbears,
More true than life, more wide than dreams;

104

What he had been locked childhood seems;
And earth, with its earthy wants and cares,
Lies suddenly remote, and cast
Behind him in the dusky past;

LVIII.

While he—like dawn seizing vast glooms
With surges of its easy might—
Rides forward on majestic light,
Mindless of flesh-imagined dooms;
His calm clear spirit-staring eyes
Ranged far beyond the visual skies.—

LIX.

Again the routed gang remuster,—
Minions of venomous desires,—
To sway him back to stealthy mires.
Only to singe their wings they cluster.
Himself his panoply, with arms
Of light he 's helmed 'gainst wily harms.

105

LX.

Still unabashed, by power unvouched,
Through laurelled hopes, through visions blest,
Vainly once more the old shades prest;
And at the last beside him crouched,
Like baffled buzzard on a bier,
Writhing, unmarkt, the Demon, Fear.

106

SONG OF BIRDS BEFORE DAWN IN SPRING.

Swinging upon the edge of light,
As violets on flushed April's edge,
They ply their tuneful privilege
Yet in the chambers of the night.

As planets speaking from the blue,
They sparkle in the silence deep,
And their unsullied voices steep
In moisture of the fragrant dew.

107

Leap, dreamer, from the dizzy pool,
Where wicked fancy drowns thy sense;
Leap to the call of innocence,
And bathe thy heated instincts cool.

Sad sleeper, shake thee loose from fears,—
Old wizard Dream's unfathomed cheat,—
And hearken how these notes repeat
The music of enravished spheres.

And thou, whose slumbered breathings move
Concordant with seraphic lyres,
Awake, to bless thy ear with choirs
Of warblers singing songs of love.

108

CHILDREN.

What distant fingers knead their clay,
What fervors slumber in their sleep,
Of all they be unweeting they,
They laugh and prattle, kiss and weep.

How strong, how great, these little things,
Who play among our busy feet;
They hold us with the gordian strings
Tied by the heart's enraptured beat.

109

They are the deep perpetual peace,
That underlies life's windy war,
The limpid unploughed layer where cease
The rages that the surface mar.

110

STRIKE NOT A CHILD.

Strike not a child: the Maker's breath
Is warmer in its heart
Than in or man or woman's. Death
To the holy spirit is in the smart
Of brutal blows. 'T is sacrilege
To wound a chirping child,—
In whom God just hath smiled,—
Free fluttering on life's dreadful edge.

111

He trembles! that great face, so fair
But now, is quenched; its flood
Of beauty ebbed inward to the lair
Where suckles Anger his mad brood.
Your blow has thrust him ere his time
Over the precipice,
To the black pit where hiss
The scalding lusts that chafe to crime.

112

POETS.

We haunt the early mountain heights,
Flusht by the dawns of truth;
Here rustle God's creative mights,
Here we can keep our youth:
Rather the morning's golden flight,
With never rested wings,
Than the unwholesome ignorant night
Which too much resting brings.

113

We crowd the glad auroral halls,
Where beautiful Ideals
Aye brace and tone themselves for calls
To earth's abrupt ordeals:
Better a day in Beauty's school,—
Beauty the bride of Truth,—
Than months of seedless, drowsy rule;
For thus we keep our youth.

114

A KING.

I.

Sovereign he is of throned domains, more wide
Than Rome's blanched eagles with their boldest wing
O'ershadowed; or than in her sea-nursed pride
England, whose ampler arms such realms enring,
That round the globe her morning gun
Reverberates, chasing the Sun.

II.

The Lydian King was not so rich as mine,—
Whom Solon's wisdom snatched from fiery death,—

115

Nor did luxurious, learned Lucullus dine
With guests so finely choice. Napoleon's breath,
When Monarchs trembled at its sound,
Was less imperially becrowned.

III.

Not wreckful spendthrift who,—like faithless cask,
Letting rare wine as plenteous water leak,—
Wastes handfuls daily, nor doth ever ask
Whether they be copper or gold, and eke
Would rather they were gold, for so
He furthers fate at every blow;

IV.

Nor he whose ointed palm, like the sky's sluices,
Opes only for a wise beneficence,
Of whose compassionings the flooded juices
To gush watch ever for a sweet pretence:—
These lavish two spend not so fast
As he whose horoscope I cast.

116

V.

Not scented darling of gem'd women's eyes,
With his happy teeth and smooth bemirror'd curls,
Who at the glass, his shrine, doth sacrifice
With incense that around himself aye purls,
More dainty tended is than he,
The pet of my poor minstrelsy.

VI.

Father, of long illustrious lines the last
But for one tremulous remnant twig,—round whom
Convolve the chaplet of a princely past,
And love, the warmer for the threatened tomb,—
She like a tarn, secluded, far,
That lonely clasps each stooping star:—

VII.

Rich lover, and more rich in love than gold,
In bounteousness still richer than in both,

117

Who with his bounteousness makes wealth unfold
The plaits of love and his intreasured troth,
Whose tributes so his mistress cover,
She dreams, a fairy is her lover:—

VIII.

Not these, nor any of the thousands living,
Gifted with spirit's or with body's goods,
And with the still more blessed gift of giving,
Can give like him, who gives as do the woods,
That give a world of leaves in spring
That oaks may grow and birds may sing.—

IX.

The subtlest visitors to the large brain
Who spirit-like from th' Infinite descend,
And ever travel with a glittering train
Of halos new, that with the old inblend
To wield the top of privilege,
Whetting of thought the restless edge;

118

X.

Of the great heart the dearest intimates,
Who come because 't is warm and warmer make it,
Showered with love that from creation dates,
The Word's winged soul and life of Him who spake it;—
These lordly vassals proudly bring
Of crowns the proudest to our King.

XI.

But King he is not yet, nor to his head
Will fit the crown, till 'tween those circled bands
A third, afire with gems, outvaults, to wed
The two, in glow as of celestial hands.
Like Morning's holy rim of light,
That welds forever day to night,

XII.

And thus sublimely wedged, moves on the earth
Creative, Beauty's visionary might

119

Enfrees, where'er it falls, imprisoned worth,—
The mind's best pioneer, with its lustral light
Giving to thought a fleckless eye
And chasteness unto sympathy.

XIII.

Who is encompassed by this tripled crown
Has solar warmth which he no more can keep
Within one bosom, than the Sun can frown
His summer beams to icicles, or sleep
While towards him in maternal May
Turns the young earth with prayer for day.

XIV.

Of the best gifts that knows immortal life
To yearning man he is the elected giver,
Gifts of warm truths, that feed the soul till, rife
For better mansions here, they make it shiver
Of strongest Kings the strongest will,
Obedient to a stronger still.

120

XV.

The primal hallowing power is his, to feel
Throb through his heart the pulse of all that throbs.
Dim planets that in space their splendors wheel,
Warriors triumphant, bondsmen through their sobs,
All trust, as all things do that stir,
In him, God's meet interpreter.

XVI.

He sits enthroned in Nature, whence to his brain
From life's perennial springs run rills of force,
Which, filtered there, flow limpid back again,
For centuries the fonts of new resource.
To one whom God with crown enrings
What are a thousand man-made Kings?

XVII.

His is the right divine, the puissant lord
Of men through all the births of history,

121

Puissant that with a breath he makes the chord
Vibrate that 's deepest, truest. Who is he?
The Poet-Thinker, he it is,—
King through his fiery sympathies.

XVIII.

Seek that exhaustless land, whose seedful dower
Of men the peopled silence of the past
Enfolds with stately joy; whose giant power,
Rewaked by Garibaldi's patriot blast,
Flushes the classic land with sheen
Bright as the grandeurs that have been.

XIX.

Adown five hundred years of wakeful time,
Bequeathed from million sires to million sons,
Undimmed, unsoiled by centuries of crime,
Like Heaven's unwasted fire, translucent runs,
Through tyranny's dull desert blight,
One quenchless shaft of thoughtful light.

122

XX.

Dead are her dastard Kings and putrid Popes,
Dead to men's love and wants and memory;
But in Ausonia's inmost thoughts and hopes,—
A strength and promise yet of victory,—
Live primal Dante's quivering words,
To patriots, inly-flaming swords.

XXI.

Hark to the organ-swell of thoughts that teach,
From Luther's home, men foremost in life's race.
What gave the pitch to that full concert's reach,
What still is strongest those vast chords to brace,
Binding a severed land in one,
Is the deep rhythm of Gœthe's tone.

XXII.

Wipe from proud England's scroll her highest name,
And the sweet manly tongue that clasps the earth

123

With freedom's clamorous voice, were not the same.
From him, the Seer, dates its fulgent worth:
'T is he swells England's brain so wide
With his great soul's creative tide.

XXIII.

And we, a mighty mother's soaring child,
Who on self-balanced centre stand apart,
Irreverent of her Kings, our sovereign mild
Thee we enthrone within our thankful heart,
Great Englishman, greatest, most dear,
Beloved, revered, becrowned Shakespeare.

1859.

124

THE MEETING.

They met again, and they were calm,
The calm of happy years;
The memories that startled both
Dissolved them not in tears.

The past lay still within its deep,
And came not to the face;
Each saw it,—she through his old strength,
And he through her old grace.

125

He led a daughter by the hand,
And she by hers a boy;
The children kissed each other cheeks
With ready childish joy.

Then in their eyes that swiftly met
Kindled a tender light,
Shot o'er the future from the past,
With nuptial blessing bright.

She took his girl upon her knee,
And he on his her boy;
And thus they freely looked and talked,
Brimmed with parental joy.

126

DOWNWARD.

Down from great Alps the Rivers leap,
Slaking the plain with flooded sweep:
Shoots, like an angel on the sight,
'Thwart the low gloom the Pharos' light:
Humbly the wise their wisdom speak:
Forgiveness stoops to souls that seek:
Love looks its strongest downward bent
From mother's lid on babe new-sent:
The highest joy the highest know,
Is to work downward to the low,
Melting with daily dawn of love
The frosts cold Misery's night hath wove:
Their sleepless vigil in the skies
The spirits keep with earthward eyes.

127

THE YOUNG MOTHER.

Earth has no look more deep
Than a young mother's, gazing
On her boy asleep;
Her eyes oft raising,
Then swift descending,
On him again their lustre bending;
As she on him from Him above
Would look a sacrament of love.

128

Not so attended is the mate
Of Monarch in her queenliest state:
Sovereign omnipotent she is,
Her subjects peerless fantasies,
That bend them to her farthest will,
As, rapt, in wakeful dream she stirs
Musings that all the mother thrill.
And what a dream is hers!
Poetic lovers never woo
Ideal words to paint their loves,
So warmly, or more lively sue
Delight for gifts, than she now moves
Imaginations that upspring
From her heart's nest, and round the dome
Of starriest heaven familiar sing
As finding there his fitter home.

Across the chasms of time she floats;
She tempts the future's giddiest brinks;

129

Of space she leaps the shadowy moats;
Only from Hope's fresh cup she drinks.
Thus from Fancy's free caressings
Gathering for him ripest blessings,
She careers where life most glistens,
Where to her own heart-wants she listens.

Her sleeping boy!—He stirs, he wakes.
Quick as a cloud the lightning's bar
From Fancy free her soul she shakes,
And swifter than a shooting star
To Earth from Dream's loved heights she springs,
A mother with an angel's wings;
And in her countenance a light
Struck from creative cores,—a glare
For aught save a young mother's face too bright,
And here on earth seen only there.

130

ODE.

EMOTION AND THOUGHT.

I.

The floods of vast Emotion heave;
Then towards the shore of sense outgushing,
Their trembling billows cleave,
With a moan-mingled glee,
To its firm bosom, rushing
Thereon, like to a crested sea
Clasping the brawny land,
And thence rebounding,

131

Its sunny kisses sounding
On the eternal sand.

II.

Not from a rash admiring
Stir in your amplest deeps,
But with a calm aspiring,
That ye may grandly wake
Your great twin-brother Thought, who sleeps
O'ercanopied by visions. Shake
The dew of common dreams
From his big eye, which gleams
Bold lightning, in the welcome heat
Surging from fonts that dart
Creative breath, as beat
The swollen pulses of your heart.—
Rouse ye, your strength with light enwreathing,
High sovereign Thought,
That blest Emotion's procreant breathing

132

Waste not its virtue, wrought
To perdurable forms by you,—
Forms beautiful as true.

III.

The measureless waters and the air
Keep themselves clean with motion,
Bathed ever in the ocean
Of universal light. More fair
Than speech can tell
Earth rises from her star-watched rest,
Resplendent 'neath the spell
Of powers within her quickened breast,—
Creation's voiceless powers, that leap
Forever in warm nature's womb,
And know nor check nor sleep,
Nor death's material doom;
Eternally alive and rife
With affluent life;

133

Their forging might revealed,
Daily on mortal vision wheeled,
In beauty's myriad thoughts and forms,
And the dark majesty of storms.

IV.

In tiniest things
Is instant revelation
Of this transcendent life, which sings
Interminable jubilation,
And flings
On shore and sea
Everlastingly,
Ethereal radiance, whose quick glow
There where its fires
Feed infinite desires,—
Within the bounteous heart of man,—
Is deeper now than aye,

134

Flashing new light on God's near way,
Inflaming us to feel and know
How much we are, how much we can.

V.

Upon our opened eyes
Rushes Infinity,
Poured in us from the skies:
Eternity
Broods ever on the inward senses:
The centres we
Of such circumferences!
Out of ourselves so far we stretch,
In holiest moments we can catch
Glimpses of th' unimaginable glare
Of higher homes, and list their jubilee,
Voiced like a million clarions' trophied blare
Heard faintly o'er a subject sea.

135

VI.

Unhatched abilities,
Beautiful possibilities,
Live in your soundless deeps,
Supreme illimitable twain!
Their latent life it is that keeps
You profluent towards a higher plane,
They who uplift and lave humanity,—
Which else in swinish trough had lain,
Unfeeling of Infinity,
Unthinking of Eternity,
Whose awful presences
Transfigure fleshly essences,
Swathing in a pellucid zone man's being,
Through which he feels the vision of the Allseeing.

136

VII.

Immeasurable Emotion,
Unconquerable Thought,
By whose inmarried motion
All best ascendancies are wrought;
Upmount ye, interfused
For mutual beneficence,
Your diverse strength conjointly used
Against the downward pull of sense;
Each lifting each,
So ye may reach
Into the empyrian day
Of supersensuous truth,
Whose indefatigable ray
Knows not the night of pause,
Regendering ceaselessly worn manhood's youth
With the ever freshened forces of anointed laws.

137

VIII.

What a glad awe
O'erfills the expectant soul,
When vaulting thought
Of being's courses grasps a new law
On the scaled ramparts of the Whole;
And thence supremely taught,
More festering rags
From the cold back of ignorance drags,
And grown humanely bold,
Casts on our nakedness
Another fold
Of warm truth's sacredness.

138

VEILS.

We move within a world of veils:
They are not cleft by thrust of will:
We know them not as such until
The higher thought o'er will prevails.

With each new throb of inward power
Another mesh is softly rent;
Then light to dark is quiet blent,
As rosier tint to ripening flower.

139

We dimly see till we create
The things that on our senses rise,
Enshrouded in a lone surmise;
For all upon the spirit wait.

The silent soul is ever sending
Creative messages to things:
On these a yearning ray she flings,
Their breath with her diviner blending.

Her life is one long slow prevailing
Against recruited sensuous odds,
Exalting man's desires, and God's
Great visage more and more unveiling.

140

WE.

We glimmer specks in shoreless space,
But motes the mountains are we see,
And digits to immensity
Whatever here the senses trace.

But this immensity is ours,
Partakers we in sacred rule,
If loyally we bide, and school
Our deep immeasurable powers.

141

From astral zones upon us shoot
Near eyes with calm parental glow,
In whose fine mystic light may grow
The sourest will to sweetened fruit.

On spirit spirit ever ray'th:
The free'd from their supernal day
Beckon to those still bound in clay,
In them to nurse upcleaving faith.

And through the folds of living dust
From higher life come shafts of love,
To link the soul to souls above,
And strengthen freedom's strength with trust.

But who to unbelief doth cling,
Revolves amid unbodied bands,
Twitted and tossed by viewless hands,
As children blinded in the ring.

142

FOREVER.

Their flight he watches with feathery joy,
As high over head is heard
The wild flock's cry,—then quick the boy
Wishes himself a bird.

The youthful man upon a peak,
Amid a mountain-throng,
Chafes at his limbs, so wingless weak,
While he riots the peaks among.

143

The father and grandfather hies,
In thought, affection, will,
To his scattered progeny; but lies
His crippled body still.

And what are these but dumb foresight
Of acts as yet unfreed,—
Shoots from a latent life, whose light
Foreshines the certain deed?

Shall the eye go where the man can not?
Shall thought or bolder dreams,
Whose range and reach are aye begot
By the soul that through them gleams?

Does man's deep inward him bemock
With sham presentiment,
His heart with moony longings rock,
And nothing more be meant?

144

Could malice strike from the great source
Of order, reason, love?
Does He give feeling, thought, and force,
To balk them from above?

Dim prescience these, sweet prophecy,
Mysterious far foretelling
Of life disbodied, life to be
With will, with love aye welling;—

Faint whisperings from the power that roofs
All being unfailingly,—
Soul-bidden promptings, hints, near proofs
Of immortality.

The present, past, and future clasp
Each other in a ring;
And if of one a link you grasp,
Through all a thrill you fling.

145

They end not here our appetites,
On earth they but begin;
For though our bodies rot, their rights
Survive as bliss or sin.

A marriage deep without divorce
Is that of spirit and flesh,
And from the cold, relapsing corpse
Springs life forever fresh.

The body's members are no toys
For the soul's sublunar play;
But counters, that in griefs or joys
Sum what the soul must pay.

How fruitful is the littleness
Wherewith our souls are vext,
When acorns of this world express
Oaks rooted in the next.

146

Aye, thus by thought and phrase we split
An intermelted whole;
But thought and phrase can sunder it
No more than speech the soul.

Our worlds are one, and one are we:
That still too close our glance
To mete this rounded unity,
Is the due of ignorance.

Could men foreknow that they will live,
And ever be themselves,
To the self a higher hold 't would give,
That sordidly now delves.

To thought what height 't would lend, to spy
Beyond earth's finite seeing,
Life's littleness o'erbalanced by
Its magnitude of being!

147

Our lusts and pampered tawdry needs
Pile dread upon the bier;
With them hard-hearted Christless creeds,
That brew the curse of fear.

The man he feels no blast of age,
Is by no sickness torn:
After a long earth-pilgrimage
The clay coat 't is that 's worn.

The spirit keeps its light, a flame
That aye illumineth
Earth-paths, as well as what we name
The shadowed vale of death.

148

A STAR.

The moon lies still beneath the trees,
And silver-spots the sleeping moss,
And touches with a ghostly gloss
The leaves unwakened by the breeze.

A silence as of myriad swoons
Drives in my feelings to their deeps,
Where still more awful silence sleeps,
Mid lights more ghostly than the moon's.

149

From th' eastward, through a leafy rent,
Flashes across the moony sleep
One star upon my inmost deep,
Voicing the silence therein pent.

With holy glances, diamond-hued,
About my flickering lights it winds,
And all my finite tossings binds
To fixtures of infinitude.

SONNETS.

157

TO KEATS.

Of the heart's reasons wherefore one would know
That the departed live, and smile or sigh
When we do, with a level sympathy,
There 's one I feel an impulse to let flow
In tuneful words: it is, that I might throw
Upon thy listening ear, if so may be,
My thankfulness for what I owe to thee,
Imperial genius, who, a boy, didst sow
Fresh seeds, of quickening power to men, great Keats;
So wisely great in thy unfurnished youth,
That, what had been thy broad Shakesperian feats
If ripened, swift imaginations gasp
To guess, sure only that sublimer truth
Had more enriched thy larger rhythmic grasp.

158

TO SHELLEY.

Upon thy subtile nature was a bloom,
Unearthly in its tender, gleamful glow,
As thou had'st strayed from some sane star where blow
But halcyon airs, and here, blinded by gloom,
Did'st stumble, for the lack of light and room,
And strike and wound with purposed good; and so,
Through Highest pity, thou had'st leave to go
Early to where for each earth-life its doom
Awaits it, as the fruit the seed, and where
Thy multitudinous imaginings,
So truthful pure, on Heaven's fulgent stair
Fit issue find, and mid the radiant rings
Of mounting Angels thy great spirit's glare
Adds to the brightness of the brightest things.

159

TO COLERIDGE.

Coleridge, for many a studious year I have been
Thy thankful mate; climbing the misty heights
Of speculation, or when—the delights
Of great imagination's realm serene
Blessing me through th' impassioned visions seen
By ravished genius—thou hast shown me sights,
Revealed to mighty Poets with the lights
Struck by creative frenzy; visions clean,
That mind in purgatorial surges dip,
And we come freshened forth, so purified,
That ever anew thy rich companionship
I court, to warm me at a holy fire,
And be with deep soul-logic stoutly plied,
Or trance-ensteeped by thy melodious lyre.

160

TO WORDSWORTH.

Among my unabating joys are these,
That under thy calm roof I pressed the hand
Whose life had been obedience to command
Of rarest genius; that beneath thy trees
I shared with thee thy cordial mountain-breeze,
Answered thy speech, and looked into the bland
Mysterious eyes that had beshone the land,—
Those inlets to deep beauty's boundless seas,—
And there, beside thy household lakes, did hear
Thee laugh, and feel thy smile, so kindly blent
With hospitalities, that since that year
Thy face hath been a loved accompaniment
To the grand music, mounting tier on tier,
That to my thought profounder rhythm hath lent.

161

TO GŒTHE.

Teutonic leader,—in the foremost file
Of that pickt corps, whose rapture 't is to feel
With subtler closer sense all woe and weal,
And forge the feeling into rhythmic pile
Of words, so tuned they sing the sigh and smile
Of all humanity,—meek did'st thou kneel
At Nature's pious altars, midst the peal
Of prophet-organs, thy great self the while
All ear and eye, thou greatest of the band,
Whose voices waked their brooding Luther-land,—
At last left lone in Weimar, famed through thee,
Wearing with stately grace thy triple crown
Of science, statesmanship, and poesy,
Enrobed in age and love and rare renown.

162

TO MILTON.

Burned into History's high beacon-page
By deed and thought and genius,—triple fire,
Seld-seen on earth,—thy wreathèd name flares higher
Than all men's else in the sublimest age
Of England, where against Time's billowy rage
None is more fenced than thou, without thy lyre,
Whose tones shall ring till pales the last dim pyre,
And crumbles earth's triumphant equipage,—
Stirring meanwhile, with deep sonorous peals,
All whom its softer notes have quick entranced,
Dulcet and manful,—first on even keels
Smooth wafting raptured souls, then in high storms
Of giant music purging them, advanced
To where the holier spheral influence warms.

163

TO SHAKESPEARE.

Coruscant Presence, who dost ceaseless shine
Unbodied benefaction on the blest,—
Thy lifted myriad-millions, aye possest
Of that wide speech, in whose unwearied mine
Thou art the richest vein,—phrases of thine,
The largest, most embossed, the fiery best,
He needs who, cheered by gratitude, would crest
His love and awe with epithets so fine
They shall exhale some flavor of thy worth,
A fraction speak of what men owe to thee,
Thou lonely one, at whose still modest birth
Were born new worlds of truth and ecstasy,
Thou great emblazoner of man and earth,
Thou secret-holder of humanity.

164

TO DANTE.

Monarch august, thy solitary throne
Didst thou with solitary wisdom earn,
Midst want and gloom and exile, stout and stern
To master thy great self, and all alone,—
Away from Tuscan hearth and children blown
By Guelfian tempests,—with strange power to turn
Thy soul's hot tumults into flames that burn
A world-effulgency, while for thy own
Dear land thy mighty rhyme hath been a breath
Breathing from Beatrice's heaven through thee,
A breath of holier life heaving beneath
The life of universal Italy,
Where, sung thy song, thou passedst lone through death,
Ended thy long sublime soliloquy.

165

TO HOMER.

In realms beyond young Story's dusky day,
Where but for thee were Chaos' lightless rule,
Thy fresh strong-souled impersonings so fool
The senses, that we yield us to their sway,
And clasp unto our hearts with earnest play
Thy Doric brood, in whose primeval school
Poet or sage is glad to fill a stool,
And grow beneath thy fruitful quenchless ray,
As on thy vast horizon Gods and men
Shame history with the grandeurs of their strife,
Inbreed delight, wrath, wonder, love, and ruth,
And deepen man's outworn fast fading ken
With teachings of the dear religious truth,
That Heaven and earth live intermingled life.

166

TO THE PRINCE OF WALES.

Not lonely did a mother's grateful gaze
Illume thy cradled brow; but from all climes
And continents of this round earth came chimes
Of love, that made a globe-enclasping blaze
Of hearty homage to thy tender days,—
A flame nor quenched nor dimmed by changeful time's
Assault; but still old loyalty sublimes
Thy manly person with its steadfast rays;
Wherewith has now been wreathed a novel fire,
Long burning in a kindred People's core,
And by thy presence kindled to desire
To burst in buoyant greeting and outpour
A great Republic's welcome from its breast
To England's future King, our honored guest.

October, 1860.

167

TO ENGLAND.

England, we are proud to be thy eldest child,
Thankful to God for the rich heritage
Which thou, ere we were born, from age to age
With thoughts and deeds of mightiest men up-piled,
Too great within thy bounds to be inisled,
And thence,—wide wafted on the undying page,
Feeding the soul of hero and of sage
In every Christian land,—on us have smiled,
Through privilege of tongue, a daily cheer,
So warmly kindred to our Saxon hearts,
That we, though sundered from thee, parent dear,
Have kept our love and reverence through all smarts,
And now stride with thee in one grand career,
Sowing the Earth with freedom and with arts.

October, 1860.

168

TO SCOTT.

Winfield, thy prophet-parents named thee, Scott;
And now at climax of delight they fold
Thee in celestial vision, and behold
Their warrior win his highest field; for not
Canadian laurels, 't was thy youthful lot
To reap victorious, nor thy wreaths of gold,
Inwove with Azteck palm, will e'er be rolled
With such sonorous hymn from trumpets hot
With fame's fresh breathing, as thy present deeds,
Baffling the blackest treason ever hatched
In the foul nests where brood the godless greeds,
Its crime foiled by a steadfast eye that watched
Thy perilled country, and in its dread needs
With duteous mastership from ruin snatched.

January 22d, 1861.

169

TO ANDERSON.

Glad lightning, on his myriad-footed steed,
Sped o'er the land, as happiest angels ride
On blissful errands; then through the flood tide
Of fiery syllables, thy sudden deed
Poured on the Nation's troubled heart such seed
Of power, the flagging pulse leapt in its side,
The eagle soared sunward, again strong-eyed,
Stout men looked each on each with freshened pride,
And stretched to the utmost admiration's creed
Towards mothers that could bear the like of thee,
Who mid mad shriek of treason's thwarted brag,
With soldier's grasp and true soul's loyalty,
Outflung with prayer on Sumpter's martial crag
Freedom's broad shield, terrible on land and sea,
The world's chief hope,—our war-won fulgent flag.

January 27th, 1861.

170

TO LUTHER.

Deep in the sanctuaries of the mind,
Where, mystically fed, are fiery wrought
The exulting miracles of freest thought,
Where boldened wills the subtleties unwind
That in conspirant coils resistless bind
Man to his broadest duties, where are caught
Fresh whispers from skyed voices, where are fought
Truth's foremost battles,—there art thou enshrined,
Forever incensed by new love and light
Born daily in the aspiring hearts where glows
The fire of freedom, kindled through thy might,
Thou Titan of the Conscience, whose vast blows
Clove Popedom to the core, and freed the right
From Thraldom's lurid spells and deathful throes.

March 8th, 1862.