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115

III. PART III
ORIGINAL POEMS-PERSONAL AND MISCELLANEOUS

117

TO JOSEPH BRENAN.

A REPLY.

Friend and brother, and yet more than brother,
Thou endowed with all of Shelley's soul!
Thou whose heart so burneth for thy mother,
That, like his, it may defy all other
Flames, while time shall roll!
Thou of language bland, and manner meekest,
Gentle bearing, yet unswerving will—
Gladly, gladly, list I when thou speakest,
Honoured highly is the man thou seekest
To redeem from ill!
Truly showest thou me the one thing needful!
Thou art not, nor is the world yet blind.
Truly have I been long years unheedful
Of the thorns and tares, that choked the weedful
Garden of my mind!
Thorns and tares, which rose in rank profusion
Round my scanty fruitage and my flowers,
Till I almost deemed it self-delusion,
Any attempt or glance at their extrusion
From their midnight bowers.
118

Dream and waking life have now been blended
Longtime in the caverns of my soul—
Oft in daylight have my steps descended
Down to that dusk realm where all is ended,
Save remeadless dole!
Oft, with tears, I have groaned to God for pity—
Oft gone wandering till my way grew dim—
Oft sung unto Him a prayerful ditty—
Oft, all lonely in this throngful city
Raised my soul to Him!
And from path to path His mercy tracked me—
From a many a peril snatched He me,
When false friends, pursued, betrayed, attacked me,
When gloom overdarked, and sickness racked me,
He was by to save and free!
Friend! thou warnest me in truly noble
Thoughts and phrases! I will heed thee well—
Well will I obey thy mystic double
Counsel, through all scenes of woe and trouble,
As a magic spell!
Yes! to live a bard, in thought and feeling!
Yes! to act my rhyme, by self-restraint,
This is truth's, is reason's deep revealing,
Unto me from thee, as God's to a kneeling
And entranced saint!
Fare thee well! we now know each the other,
Each has struck the other's inmost chords—
Fare thee well, my friend and more than brother,
And may scorn pursue me if I smother
In my soul thy words!
119

THE DYING ENTHUSIAST.

BALLAD.

Speak no more of life,
What can life bestow,
In this amphitheatre of strife,
All times dark with tragedy and woe?
Knowest thou not how care and pain
Build their lampless dwelling in the brain,
Ever, as the stern intrusion
Of our teachers, time and truth,
Turn to gloom the bright illusion,
Rainbowed on the soul of youth?
Could I live to find that this is so?
Oh! no! no!
As the stream of time
Sluggishly doth flow,
Look how all of beaming and sublime,
Sinks into the black abysm below.
Yea, the loftiest intellect,
Earliest on the strand of life is wrecked.
Nought of lovely, nothing glorious,
Lives to triumph o'er decay;
Desolation reigns victorious—
Mind is dungeon-walled by clay;
Could I bear to feel mine own laid low?
Oh! no! no!
Restless o'er the earth
Thronging millions go:
But behold how genius, love, and worth,
Move like lonely phantoms to and fro.
120

Suns are quenched, and kingdoms fall,
But the doom of these outdarkens all!
Die they then? Yes, love's devotion,
Stricken, withers in its bloom;
Fond affections, deep as ocean,
In their cradle find their tomb:
Shall I linger, then, to count each throe?
Oh! no! no!
Prison-bursting death!
Welcome be thy blow!
Thine is but the forfeit of my breath,
Not the spirit! nor the spirit's glow.
Spheres of beauty—hallowed spheres,
Undefaced by time, undimmed by tears,
Henceforth hail! oh, who would grovel,
In a world, impure as this?
Who would weep, in cell or hovel,
When a palace might be his?
Wouldst thou have me the bright lot forego?
Oh! no! no!

THE NAMELESS ONE.

BALLAD.

Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,
That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
God will inspire me while I deliver
My soul of thee!
Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
No eye beheld.
121

Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,
No star of all heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.
Roll on, my song, and to after ages
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
He would have taught men, from wisdom's pages,
The way to live.
And tell how trampled, derided, hated,
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
He fled for shelter to God, who mated
His soul with song—
With song which alway, sublime or vapid,
Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,
Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid—
A mountain stream.
Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.
Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove.
Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,
And some whose hands should have wrought for him
(If children live not for sires and mothers,)
His mind grew dim.
122

And he fell far through that pit abysmal
The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
And pawned his soul for the devil's dismal
Stock of returns.
But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,
And shapes and signs of the final wrath,
When death, in hideous and ghastly starkness,
Stood on his path.
And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,
And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the silent morrow,
That no ray lights.
And lives he still, then? Yes! Old and hoary
At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,
He lives enduring what future story
Will never know.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
Here and in hell.

THE ONE MYSTERY.

BALLAD.

'Tis idle! we exhaust and squander
The glittering mine of thought in vain;
All-baffled reason cannot wander
Beyond her chain.
123

The flood of life runs dark—dark clouds
Make lampless night around its shore:
The dead, where are they? In their shrouds—
Man knows no more.
Evoke the ancient and the past,
Will one illumining star arise?
Or must the film, from first to last,
O'erspread thine eyes?
When life, love, glory, beauty, wither,
Will wisdom's page, or science' chart,
Map out for thee the region whither
Their shades depart?
Supposest thou the wondrous powers,
To high imagination given,
Pale types of what shall yet be ours,
When earth is heaven?
When this decaying shell is cold,
Oh! sayest thou the soul shall climb
That magic mount she trod of old,
Ere childhood's time?
And shall the sacred pulse that thrilled,
Thrill once again to glory's name?
And shall the conquering love that filled
All earth with flame,
Reborn, revived, renewed, immortal,
Resume his reign in prouder might,
A sun beyond the ebon portal
Of death and night?
No more, no more—with aching brow
And restless heart, and burning brain,
We ask the When, the Where, the How,
And ask in vain.
124

And all philosophy, all faith,
All earthly—all celestial lore,
Have but one voice, which only saith—
Endure—adore!

A BROKEN-HEARTED LAY.

Weep for one blank, one desert epoch in
The history of the heart; it is the time
When all which dazzled us no more can win;
When all that beamed of starlike and sublime
Wanes, and we stand lone mourners o'er the burial
Of perished pleasure, and a pall funereal,
Stretching afar across the hueless heaven,
Curtains the kingly glory of the sun,
And robes the melancholy earth in one
Wide gloom: when friends for whom we could have striven
With pain, and peril, and the sword, and given
Myriads of lives, had such been merged in ours,
Requite us with falseheartedness and wrong;
When sorrows haunt our path like evil powers,
Sweeping and countless as the legion throng.
Then, when the upbroken dreams of boyhood's span,
And when the inanity of all things human,
And when the dark ingratitude of man,
And when the hollower perfidy of woman,
Come down like night upon the feelings, turning
This rich, bright world, so redolent of bloom,
Into a lazar-house of tears and mourning—
Into the semblance of a living tomb!
125

When, yielding to the might she cannot master,
The soul forsakes her palace halls of youth,
And (touched by the Ithuriel wand of truth,
Which oft in one brief hour works wonders vaster
Than those of Egypt's old magician host)
Sees at a single glance that all is lost!
And brooding in her cold and desolate lair
Over the phantom-wreck of things that were,
And asking destiny if nought remain?
Is answered—bitterness and life-long pain,
Remembrance, and reflection, and despair,
And torturing thoughts that will not be forbidden,
And agonies that cannot all be hidden!

THE GROANS OF DESPAIR.

Oh no, my friend! I abide unseen—
You paint your home as left forlorn?—
Yet ask not me to meet you more,
This heart of mine, once gay and green,
Far more than yours is now outworn,
And feels as 'twere one cancered sore;
I walk alone in trouble
Revolving thoughts of gloom,
Each passing day doth but redouble
The miseries of my doom!
In trouble? Oh, how weak a word!—
In woe, in horror, let me say—
In wretchedness without a name!
The wrath of God, the avenging sword
Of Heav'n burns in my breast alway,
126

With ever freshly torturing flame!
And desolateness and terror
Have made me their dark mate—
The ghastly brood of sin and error
Repented all—Too Late
I see black dragons mount the sky,
I see earth yawn beneath my feet—
I feel within the asp, the worm
That will not sleep and cannot die,
Fair though may show the winding sheet!
I hear all night, as through a storm,
Hoarse voices calling, calling
My name upon the wind—
All omens, monstrous and appalling,
Affright my guilty mind.
I exult alone in one wild hour,
That hour in which the red cup drowns
The memories it anon renews
In ghastlier guise, in fiercer power—
Then Fancy brings me golden crowns,
And visions of all brilliant hues
Lap my lost soul in gladness,
Until I awake again,
And the dark lava-fires of madness
Once more sweep through my brain!
You tell me truth may win me back—
Alas! your words but pierce like spears!
Alas! my hopes lie long inurned!
The gone is gone—man cannot track
Afresh his course of blasted years,
Or bid flowers bloom where fires have burned.
127

Such flowers bloomed once around me,
But those are dead!—all—all!
And now the fiends who've bound me
Hold me in hopeless thrall!
In those resplendent years of Youth
When virtue seems the true romance,
And naught else lures the generous mind,
I might, even had I strayed from Truth,
Have yet retrieved my road perchance,
And left mine errors far behind—
But return now?—oh, never,
Never, and never more!
Truth's holy fire is quenched for ever
Within my bosom's core!
Farewell! my friend. For you fair hope
Still smiles—though lone, you still are free.
But, for myself, I nightly die—
In dreams I see that black gate ope
That shows my future doom to me
In pictured forms that cannot lie!
Farewell! forget my story,
I live beneath a ban:
But to the all-wise God be glory,
Whate'er becomes of Man!

DISASTER.

I knew that Disaster
Would shadow thy morning, and must;
The fair alabaster
Is easily trampled to dust.
128

If the bright lake lay stilly
When whirlwinds rose to deform,
If the life of the lily
Were charmed against every storm,
Thou mightest, though human,
Have smiled through the saddest of years—
Thou mightest, though Woman,
Have lived unacquainted with tears.
Weep, hapless forsaken!
In my lyrical art I can find
No spell that may waken
The glow of young hope in thy mind.
Weep, fairest and frailest!
Since bitter, though fruitless, regret
For the loss thou bewailest
Hath power to win tears from thee yet;
Weep, while from their fountain
Those drops of affliction can roll—
The snows on the mountain
Will soon be less cold than thy soul.
Not always shall Sorrow
As a scimitar pierce to thy core;
There cometh a morrow
When its tyranny daunteth no more;
Chill Habitude, steeling
The breast, consecrates it to Pride,
And the current of Feeling
Is locked like a firm winter-tide,
And the stricken heart pillows
Itself in repose upon Pain,
And cares roll in billows
O'er the hull of the soul still in vain.
129

But the crumbling palace
Is lovely through ruin and ill,
And the wineless chalice
Sheds light on the banquet still;
And as odours of glory
Exhale from the patriot's shroud,
As the mountain, though hoary
And barren, still kisses the cloud,
So may thine affections
Live on, though their fervour be past,
And the heart's recollections
May hallow their shrine to the last!

POMPEII.

The heralds of thy ruin and despair
Thickened and quickened as thy time drew nigh.
What prodigies of sound convulsed the air!
How many a death-flag was unfurled on high!
The sullen sun went down—a globe of blood,
Rayless, and colouring every heart with gloom,
Till even the dullest felt and understood
The coming of an overwhelming doom—
The presage of a destiny and fall,
A shock, a thunder-shock, for thee, for them—for all.
The sullen sun went down—a globe of blood,
Rayless, and colouring every soul with gloom;
And men's imagination, prone to brood
Over the worst, and summon from the womb
Of unborn Time, the Evil and the Dark,
Launched forth in fear upon that shoreless ocean,
130

Whose whirlpool billows but engulf the bark—
Conjectured Dread, and each fresh-felt emotion,
Like spectral figures on a magic mirror,
Seemed wilder than the last, and stronglier strung with terror.
We shrink within ourselves when Night and Storm
Are darkly mustering; for, to every soul
Heaven here foreshadows character and form
Of Nature's death-hour. Doth the thunder roll,
The wild wave boil, the lightning stream or strike,
Flood, fire, and earthquake devastate, in vain?
Or is there not a voice which peals alike
To all from these, conjuring up that train
Of scenes and images that shall be born
In living, naked might upon the Judgment morn?
If thus we cower to tempest and to night,
How feltest thou when first the red bolt broke,
That seventeen suffocating centuries might
Enshroud thine ashes in Time's midnight cloak?
Where wert thou in that moment? Was thy power
All a funeral phantom? Thy renown
An echo? Thine the triumph of an hour?
Enough!—I rave—when empires, worlds, go down
Time's wave to dissolution—when they bow
To Fate, let none ask where, but simply—what wert thou?
The desolated cities which of yore
Perished by flooding fire and sulphury rain,
Where sleeps the Dead Sea's immemorial shore,
Lie, blasted wrecks, below that mortar plain.
131

They fell—thou fellest—but, renounced of Earth,
Blotted from being to eternal years,
Their image chills the life-blood—thine gives birth,
Even while we shudder, to some human tears.
Hadst thou less guilt? Who knows? The book of Time
Bears on each leaf alike the broad red stamp of crime.

TO LAURA.

“ADDIO LA VITA DELLA VITA!”

The life of life is gone and over;
I live, to feel I live in vain,
And worlds were worthless to recover
That dazzling dream of mine again.
The idol I adored is broken,
And I may weep its overthrow;
Thy lips at length my doom have spoken,
And all that now remains is woe.
And is it thus indeed we sever?
And hast thou then forgotten all?
And canst thou cast me off for ever,
To mourn my dark and hopeless thrall?
Oh, Perfidy! in friend or foe,
In stranger, lover, husband, wife,
Thou art the blackest drop of woe
That bubbles in the Cup of Life!
But most and worst in Woman's breast,
Triumphant in thy blasting power,
Thou reignest like a demon-guest
Enthroned in some celestial bower!
132

Oh! cold and cruel she who, while
She lavishes all wiles to win
Her lover o'er, can smile and smile,
Yet be all dark and false within!
Who, when his glances on another
Too idly and too long have dwelt,
Can sigh, as though she strove to smother
The grief her bosom never felt!
Who, versed in every witching art
That even the warmest love would dare,
First having gained her victim's heart,
Then turns him over to despair!
Alas! and can this treachery be?
The worm that winds in slime along
Is less contemptible than she
Who revels in such heartless wrong!
Go, thou, exulting in thy guilt,
And weave thy wanton web anew!
Go, false as fair, and, if thou wilt,
Again betray the Fond and True!
Yet learn that this, my last farewell,
Is less in anger than in sorrow;
Mine is the tale that myriads tell
Who loathe to-day, and dread to-morrow.
Me, Laura, me thou never knewest,
Nor sawest that if my speech was cold,
The love is deepest oft and truest
That burns within the breast untold.
My soul was formed for Love and Grief—
These both were blended at my birth,
But lifeless as a shrivelled leaf
Lie now my dearest hopes on earth.
133

I sigh—where none my sighs return,
I love, but am not loved again;
Till life be past this heart must burn,
With none to soothe or share its pain.
Adieu! In Pleasure's giddy whirl
Soon wilt thou have forgotten me,
But where, oh, too-dissembling girl,
Shall I from thy dear image flee?
Adieu! for thee the heavens are bright;
Bright flowers along thy pathway lie;
The bolts that strike, the winds that blight,
Will pass thy Bower of Beauty by;
But when shall rest be mine? Alas!
When first the winter winds shall wave
The pale wild-flowers and long dark grass
Above mine unremembered grave.

LINES ON THE DEATH OF A BELOVED FRIEND.

I stood aloof: I dared not to behold
Thy relics covered over with the mould;
I shed no tear—I uttered not a groan,
But oh! I felt heart-broken and alone!
How feel I now? The bitterness of grief
Has passed, for all that is intense is brief—
A softer sadness overshades my mind,
But there thine image ever lies enshrined.
134

And if I mourn—for this is human, too—
I mourn no longer that thy days were few,
Nor that thou hast escaped the tears and woe,
And deaths on deaths the Living undergo.
Thou fadedst in the Spring-time of thine years—
Life's juggling joys and spirit-wasting fears
Thou knewest but in romance—and to thine eyes
Man shone a god—the earth a Paradise!
Thou diedst ere the icy breath of Scorn
Froze the warm feelings of thy girlhood's morn—
Ere thou couldst learn that Man is but a slave,
And this blank world a prison and a grave.
Thy spirit is at peace—Peace! blessèd word!
Forgotten by the million—or unheard;
But mine still struggles down this Vale of Death,
And courts the favour of a little breath!
Through every stage of Life's consuming fever
The soul too often is her own deceiver,
And revels—even in a world like this—
In golden visions of unbounded bliss.
But he who, looking on the naked chart
Of Life, feels nature sinking at his heart,
He who is drugged with sorrows, he for whom
Affliction carves a pathway to the tomb,
He will unite with me to bless that Power
Who gathers and transplants the fragile flower
Ere yet the spirit of the whirlwind storm
Comes forth in wrath to prostrate and deform.
And if it be that God Himself removes
From peril and contagion those He loves,
Weep such no more—but strew with freshest roses
The hallowed mound where Innocence reposes.
135

So may bright lilies and each odorous flower
Grow o'er thy grave and form a beauteous bower,
Exhaust their sweetness on the gales around,
And drop, for grief, their honey on the ground!
The world is round me now, but sad and single
I stand amid the throng with whom I mingle;
Not one of all of whom can be to me
The bosom treasure I have lost in thee.

LIFE AND ITS ILLUSIONS.

“Lean not on Earth—'twill pierce thee to the heart—
A broken reed at best, but oft a spear,
On whose sharp point Peace bleeds, and Hope expires.”
—Young.

We are but shadows! None of all those things,
Formless and vague, that flit upon the wings
Of wild Imagination round thy couch,
When Slumber seals thine eyes, is clothed with such
An unreality as Human Life,
Cherished and clung to as it is; the fear,
The thrilling hope, the agonising strife
Are not more unavailing there than here.
To him who reads what Nature would portray,
What speaks the night? A comment on the day.
Day dies—Night lives—and, as in dumb derision,
Mocks the past phantom with her own vain vision!
Man shuts the Volume of the Past for aye—
A blind slave to the all-absorbing Present,
He courts debasement, and from day to day
His wheel of toil revolves, revolves incessant;
136

And well may earth-directed zeal be blighted!
And well may Time laugh selfish hopes to scorn!
He lives in vain whose reckless years have slighted
The humbling truth which Penitence and grey
Hairs teach the Wise, that such cold hopes are born
Only to dupe and to be thus requited!
How many such there be!—in whom the thorn
Which Disappointment plants festers in vain,
Save as the instrument of sleepless pain—
Who bear about with them the burning feeling
And fire of that intolerable word
Which, inly searching, pierceth, like a sword,
The breast whose wounds thenceforward know no healing!
Behold the overteeming globe! Its millions
Bear mournful witness. Cycles, centuries roll,
That Man may madly forfeit Heaven's pavilions,
To hug his darling trammels:—Yet the soul,
The startled soul, upbounding from the mire
Of earthliness, and all alive with fears,
Unsmothered by the lethargy of years
Whose dates are blanks, at moments will inquire,
“And whither tends this wasting struggle? Hath
The living universe no loftier path
Than that we toil on ever? Must the eye
Of Hope but light a desert? Shall the high
Spirit of Enterprise be chilled and bowed,
And grovel in darkness, reft of all its proud
Prerogatives? Alas! and must Man barter
The Eternal for the Perishing—but to be
The world's applauded and degraded martyr,
Unsouled, enthralled, and never to be free?”
Ancient of Days! First Cause! Adored! Unknown!
Who wert, and art, and art to come! The heart
Yearns, in its lucid moods, to Thee alone!
137

Thy name is Love; thy word is Truth; thou art
The Fount of Happiness—the source of Glory—
Eternity is in thy hands, and Power.
Oh, from that sphere unrecognised by our
Slow souls, look down upon a world which, hoary
In Evil and in Error though it be,
Retains even yet some trace of that primeval
Beauty that bloomed upon its brow ere Evil
And Error wiled it from Thy Love and Thee!
Look down, and if, while human brows are brightening
In godless triumph, angel eyes be weeping,
Publish Thy will in syllables of lightning
And sentences of thunder to the Sleeping!
Look down, and renovate the waning name
Of Goodness, and relume the waning light
Of Truth and Purity!—that all may aim
At one imperishable crown—the bright
Guerdon which they who by untired and holy
Exertion overcome the world, inherit—
The Self-denying, the Peaceable, the Lowly,
The truly Merciful, the Poor in spirit!
So shall the end of thine all-perfect plan
At length be realised in erring Man.

LIFE IS THE DESERT AND THE SOLITUDE.

It is the joyous time of June,
And fresh from Nature's liberal hand
Is richly lavished every boon
The laughing earth and skies demand;
138

How shines the variegated land—
How swell the many sparkling streams!
All is as gorgeous and as grand
As the creations wherewith teems
The poet's haunted brain amid his noonday dreams.
Falls now the golden veil of even;
The vault on high, the intense profound,
Breaks into all the hues of heaven;
I see far off the mountains crowned
With glory—I behold around
Enough of summer's power to mould
The breast not altogether bound
By grief to thoughts whose uncontrolled
Fervour leaves feeling dumb and human utterance cold.
Yet I am far—oh! far from feeling
The life, the thrilling glow, the power
Which have their dwelling in the healing
And holy influence of the hour.
Affliction is my doom and dower;
And cares, in many a darkening throng,
Like night-clouds round a ruin, lour
Over a soul which (never strong
To stem the tide of ill) will not resist them long.
And all that glances on my vision,
Inanimate or breathing, rife
With voiceless beauty, half Elysian,
Of youthful and exuberant life,
Serves but to nurse the sleepless strife
Within—arousing the keen thought,
Quick-born, which stabbeth like a knife,
And wakes anticipations fraught
With heaviest hues of gloom from memory's pictures wrought.
139

What slakeless strife is still consuming
This martyred heart from day to day?
Lies not the bower where love was blooming
Time-trampled into long decay?
Alas! when hope's illusive ray
Plays round our paths, the bright deceiver
Allures us only to betray,
Leaving us thenceforth wanderers ever,
Forlorn along the shores of life's all-troubled river.
Had I but dreamed in younger years
That time should paralyse and bow
Me thus—thus fill mine eyes with tears—
Thus chill my soul and cloud my brow!
No! I had not been breathing now—
This heart had long ago been broken;
I had not lived to witness how
Deeply and bitterly each token
Of bygone joy will yield what misery hath bespoken.
Alas! for those who stand alone—
The shrouded few who feel and know
What none beside have felt and known
To all of such a mould below
Is born an undeparting woe,
Beheld by none and shared with none—
A cankering worm whose work is slow,
But gnaws the heart-strings one by one,
And drains the bosom's blood till the last drop be gone.
140

ENTHUSIASM.

Not yet trodden under wholly,
Not yet darkened,
Oh, my spirit's flickering lamp, art thou!
Still, alas! thou wanest—though but slowly;
And I feel as though my heart had hearkened
To the whispers of despondence now.
Yet the world shall not enthral me—
Never! never!
On my briary pathway to the grave
Shapes of pain and peril may appal me,
Agony and ruin may befal me—
Darkness and dismay may lower ever,
But, cold world, I will not die thy slave!
Underneath my foot I trample
You, ye juggles—
Pleasure, passion, thirst of power and gold!
Shall I, dare I, shame the bright example,
Beaming, burning in the deeds and struggles
Of the consecrated few of old?
Sacred flame—which art eternal!
Oh! bright essence!
Thou, Enthusiasm! forsake me not!
Oh, though life be reft of all her vernal
Beauty, ever let thy magic presence
Shed its glory round my clouded lot.
141

TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.

O, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,
How it plashes on the window-sill!
Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,
Strass and Gass around are grown so still.
Here I sit, with coffee in my cup—
Ah! 'twas rarely I beheld it flow
In the taverns where I loved to sup
Twenty golden years ago!
Twenty years ago, alas!—but stay,
On my life, 'tis half-past twelve o'clock!
After all, the hours do slip away—
Come, here goes to burn another block!
For the night, or morn, is wet and cold,
And my fire is dwindling rather low:—
I had fire enough, when young and bold,
Twenty golden years ago!
Dear! I don't feel well at all, somehow:
Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;
Floods of tears grow common with me now,
High-Dutch floods, that Reason cannot dam.
Doctors think I'll neither live nor thrive
If I mope at home so—I don't know—
Am I living now? I was alive
Twenty golden years ago.
Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,
Not quite bookless, though, unless I chuse,
Left with nought to do, except to groan,
Not a soul to woo, except the Muse—
142

O! this, this is hard for me to bear,
Me, who whilome lived so much en haut,
Me, who broke all hearts like chinaware
Twenty golden years ago!
P'rhaps 'tis better:—Time's defacing waves
Long have quenched the radiance of my brow—
They who curse me nightly from their graves
Scarce could love me were they living now;
But my loneliness hath darker ills—
Such dun-duns as Conscience, Thought and Co.,
Awful Gorgons! worse than tailors' bills
Twenty golden years ago!
Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,
O, how plaintive you would ween I was!
But I won't, albeit I have a deal
More to wail about than Kerner has!
Kerner's tears are wept for withered flowers,
Mine for withered hopes; my Scroll of Woe
Dates, alas! from Youth's deserted bowers,
Twenty golden years ago!
Yet may Deutschland's bardlings flourish long!
Me, I tweak no beak among them;—hawks
Must not pounce on hawks; besides, in song
I could once beat all of them by chalks.
Though you find me, as I near my goal,
Sentimentalising like Rousseau,
O! I had a grand Byronian soul
Twenty golden years ago!
Tick-tick, tick-tick!—Not a sound save Time's,
And the windgust, as it drives the rain—
Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
Go to bed, and rest thine aching brain!
143

Sleep!—no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow—
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!

THE COMING EVENT.

Curtain the lamp, and bury the bowl—
The ban is on drinking!
Reason shall reign the queen of the soul
When the spirits are sinking.
Chained lies the demon that smote with blight
Men's morals and laurels;
So, hail to Health, and a long Good-night
To old wine and new quarrels!
Nights shall descend, and no taverns ring
To the roar of our revels;
Mornings shall dawn, but none of them bring
White lips and blue devils.
Riot and Frenzy sleep with Remorse
In the obsolete potion,
And Mind grows calm as a ship on her course
O'er the level of Ocean.
So should it be!—for Man's world of romance
Is fast disappearing,
And shadows of Changes are seen in advance,
Whose epochs are nearing;
And days are at hand when the Best will require
All means of salvation,
And the souls of men shall be tried in the fire
Of the Final Probation.
144

And the Witling no longer or sneers or smiles;
And the Worldling dissembles;
And the blank-minded Sceptic feels anxious at whiles,
And wonders and trembles;
And fear and defiance are blent in the jest
Of the blind Self-deceiver;
And infinite hope is born in the breast
Of the childlike Believer.
Darken the lamp, then, and bury the bowl,
Ye Faithfullest-hearted!
And, as your swift years hasten on to the goal
Whither worlds have departed,
Spend all, sinew, soul, in your zeal to atone
For the past and its errors;
So best shall ye bear to encounter alone
The Event and its terrors.

GASPARÓ BANDOLLO.

AN ANECDOTE OF THE SOUTH OF ITALY. (1820.)

I.

Once—twice—the stunning musquetry
Peals echoing down the dark ravine.
Sevrini's blood wells forth like wine.
Weak—footsore—faint as faint may be,
And powerless to resist or flee,
He drags him to a peasant's hovel.
“Ha! Giambattista!—thou, good boy?
145

One short hour's shelter! I can grovel
Unseen beneath yon scattered sheaves.
So!—there! Departing Daylight leaves
This nook dark; and, methinks, the spot
Is safe if thou betray me not.
Let me but baffle those base hounds!
If mine plead not, Italia's wounds
May—that Italia they destroy!”
—He speaks, and crouches down, and gathers
Around his limbs the light loose litter,
With one deep groan—O God, how bitter!—
Given to the lost land of his fathers.

II.

Hark! his pursuers follow after—
On by the bloody track they follow.
Rings their fierce yell of demon laughter
Upon the winds, adown the hollow.
Rings loud exulting yell on yell.
—“By Heaven!—See!—here the miscreant fell
And rose again!—and, if these black
Leaves mock us not, here fails the track!
Ha, so!—a hut! The hunted rebel
Hath earthed him here. Now, comrades, treble
Your care! A thousand gold zecchini
Are on the head, alive or dead,
Of the outlaw, Vascoló Sevrini!”

III.

Half loth alike to leave or linger,
In burst the slaves of Alien Law.—
O! ruefullest of sights to see!
Mute stands yon trembler, but his finger
Points to the blood-bedabbled straw,
That blushes for his perfidy.
Ill-starred Sevrini, woe for thee!
146

God be thy stay, thou Doomed One, thou!
Strong hands and many are on thee now;
Through the long gorge of that steep valley
They drag thee up Mount Bruno's brow,
And thy best bravery little skills!
O! stood'st thou on Calabria's hills,
With nought beside thine own good sword,
With nothing save the soul that slumbers
Within thee now, to quell this horde!—
But, bleeding—bound—o'erborne by numbers,
Thy day is by to strike and rally!
Thou fallest by the hands of cravens
Rock-hardened against all remorse;
And Morn's red rays shall see the ravens
Fleshing their foul beaks in thy corse!

IV.

But Heaven and Earth are hushed once more.
Young Giambattista's eyes are bent
In fearful glances on the floor.
But little weeneth he or weeteth
Of the deep cry his land repeateth
In million tones of one lament.
Nought pondereth he of wars of yore,
Of battling Ghibelline and Guelph,
And bootless fights and trampled lands,
And Gallic swords and Teuton chains,
His eye but marks yon dark-red stains.
Those red stains now burn on himself,
And in his heart, and on his hands!

V.

But sky and sea once more are still;
The duskier shades of Eventide
Are gathering round Mount Bruno's hill.
147

The boy starts up, as from a dream;
He hears a low, quick sound outside.
Was it the running valley-stream?
No! 'twas his father's foot that trod.
Alas, poor nerveless youth! denied
The kindling blood that fires thy race,
Dost thou not weep, and pray thy God
That Earth might ope its depths, and hide
Thee from that outraged father's face?

VI.

The eye is dark, the cheek is hollow,
To-night of Gasparó Bandollo,
And his high brow shows worn and pale.
Slight signs all of the inward strife—
Of the soul's lightning, swift to strike
And sure to slay, but flashing never!
For Man and Earth and Heaven alike
Seem for him voiceful of a tale
That robs him of all rest for ever,
And leaves his own right hand to sever
The last link binding him to Life!
Calm even to marble, stern and sad,
He eyes the spots of tell-tale hue,
Then, turning to the cowering lad,
With stirless lips but asks him, “Who?”

VII.

“Oh, father!” cried the boy—then, wild
With terror of some dreadful doom,
He gasped for breath.—“Speak, wretched child!
Who sought my asylum, and from whom?”
—“O God! Sevrini!”—“From—” “The Sbirri.”
“The fugitive was wounded, weary?”—
—“O, father! I—this dreary room—”
148

—“And thou betrayedst him?”—“O Heaven!”—
—“And thou betrayedst him?”—“I—only—”
—“And thou betrayedst him?” “O! hear me,
My father! I watch here so lonely
All day, and feel, oh! so bereaven,
With not a sight or sound to cheer me!
My mind—my—But, I only pointed—
I spake not!”—And, with such disjointed
And feeble phrases, the poor youth,
Powerless to gloss the ghastly truth,
Sank on his knees with shrieks and tears
Before the author of his years.
—And he? What throes his breast might stifle
Were hidden as beneath a pall.
He merely turned him to the wall,
And, with closed eyes, took down his rifle.

VIII.

“Go forth, boy!”—“Father! father!—spare”—
—“Go forth, boy! So! Now kneel in prayer!”
—“My God!—my father!”—“Ay, boy, right!
Hast now none other!”—There is light
Enough still for a deed of blood.
Stern man, whose sense of nationhood
So vanquishes thy love paternal,
And wilt thou, then, pollute this vernal
And virgin sod with gore even now,
And a son's gore? What answerest thou?
—“Kneel down!” Ay! he will kneel—and fall,
Will kneel, and fall to rise no more;
But not by thee shall thus be sped
The spirit of yon trembling thrall!
Didst thou dream nought of this before?
Fate slayeth him. Thy child is dead.
149

IX.

The child is dead of old Bandollo,
And he, the sire, hath scarce to follow
His offspring to the last dark barrow,
So much hath Grief's long-rankling arrow
Forestalled for him that doom of Death
Which takes from Suffering nought save breath—
A grief that speaks, albeit untold,
And lives, where all seems dead and cold,
And finds no refuge in the Past,
And sees the Future overcast
With broader gloom than even the Present.
Better that thou, unhappy peasant,
Hadst died in youth and made no sign,
Nor dreamt Life's Day must have an Even.
Better thy child's lot had been thine—
The best lot after all! for Heaven
Most careth for such weakling souls.—
Onwards in power the wide flood rolls
Whose thunder-waves wake evermore
The caverned soul of each far shore,
But when the midnight storm-wind sweeps
In wrath above its broken deeps,
What heart but ponders darkly over
The myriad wrecks those waters cover!
It is the lonely brook alone
That winds its way with Music's tone
By orange bower and lily-blossom,
And sinks into the Parent Wave,
Not as worn Age into its grave,
But as pure Childhood on God's bosom.
150

AN INVITATION.

Friends to Freedom! is't not time
That your course were shaped at length?
Wherefore stand ye loitering here?
Seek some healthier, holier clime,
Where your souls may grow in strength,
And whence Love hath exiled Fear!
Europe—Southern, Saxon, Celt—
Sits alone, in tattered robe,
In our days she burns with none
Of the lightning-life she felt,
When Rome shook the troubled globe,
Twenty centuries agone.
Deutschland sleeps: her star hath waned,
France, the Thundress whilome, now
Singeth small, with bated breath;
Spain is bleeding, Poland chained;
Italy can but groan and vow;
England lieth sick to death.
Cross with me the Atlantic's foam,
And your genuine goal is won.
Purely Freedom's breezes blow,
Merrily Freedom's children roam
By the dœdal Amazon,
And the glorious Ohio!
Thither take not gems and gold,
Nought from Europe's robber-hoards
Must profane the Western Zones.
151

Thither take ye spirits bold,
Thither take ye ploughs and swords,
And your father's buried bones!
Come!—if Liberty's true fires
Burn within your bosoms, come!
If ye would that in your graves
Your free sons would bless their sires
Make the Far Green West your home,
Cross with me the Atlantic's waves!

SIBERIA.

In Siberia's wastes
The Ice-wind's breath
Woundeth like the toothèd steel;
Lost Siberia doth reveal
Only blight and death.
Blight and death alone.
No Summer shines.
Night is interblent with Day.
In Siberia's wastes alway
The blood blackens, the heart pines.
In Siberia's wastes
No tears are shed,
For they freeze within the brain.
Nought is felt but dullest pain,
Pain acute, yet dead;
Pain as in a dream,
When years go by
Funeral-paced, yet fugitive,
When man lives, and doth not live,
Doth not live—nor die.
152

In Siberia's wastes
Are sands and rocks.
Nothing blooms of green or soft,
But the snow-peaks rise aloft
And the gaunt ice-blocks.
And the exile there
Is one with those;
They are part, and he is part,
For the sands are in his heart,
And the killing snows.
Therefore, in those wastes
None curse the Czar.
Each man's tongue is cloven by
The North Blast, that heweth nigh
With sharp scymitar.
And such doom each drees,
Till, hunger-gnawn,
And cold-slain, he at length sinks there,
Yet scarce more a corpse than ere
His last breath was drawn.

VERY INTERESTING SONNETS.

To Caroline.

I.

[Have I not called thee angel-like and fair?]

Have I not called thee angel-like and fair?
What wouldst thou more? 'Twere perilous to gaze
Long on those dark bright eyes whose flashing rays
Fill with a soft and fond, yet proud, despair
153

The bosoms of the shrouded few, who share
Their locked-up thoughts with none: thou hast their praise;
But beauty hears not their adoring lays,
Which tremble when but whispered in the air.
Yet, think not, although stamped as one of those,
Ah! think not thou this heart hath never burned
With passion deeply felt and ill returned.
If, ice-cold now, its pulse no longer glows,
The memory of unuttered love and woes
Lies there, alas! too faithfully inurned.

II.

[For once I dreamed that mutual love was more]

For once I dreamed that mutual love was more
Than a bright phantom thought; and when mankind
Mocked mine illusion, then did I deplore
Their ignorance, and deem them cold and blind.
And years rolled on, and still I did adore
The unreal image loftily enshrined
In the recesses of mine own sick mind.
Enough; the spell is broke—the dream is o'er,
The enchantment is dissolved—the world appears
The thing it is—a theatre—a mart.
Genius illumines, and the work of art
Renews the wonders of our childhood's years;
Power awes—wealth shines—wit sparkles—but the heart,
The heart is lost, for love no more endears.
154

COUNSEL TO THE WORLDLY-WISE.

Go A-Foot and go A-head!
That's the way to prosper;
Whoso must be carriage-led
Suffereth serious loss per
Day in health as well as wealth,
By that laziness with which
Walkers have from birth warred;
And ere long grim Death by stealth
Mounts the tilbury, and the rich
Loller tumbleth earthward!
Also keep your conscience pure—
Neither lie nor borrow;
He who starves to-day, be sure
Always carves to-morrow.
March in front; don't sulk behind;
Dare to live, though sneering groups
Dub you rara avis—
“Serve your country—love your kind,”
And whene'er your spirit droops,
Think of Thomas Davis!

COUNSEL OF A COSMOPOLITAN.

Give smiles and sighs alike to all,
Serve all, but love not any;
Love's dangerous and delicious thrall
Hath been the tomb of many.
155

The sweetest wine-thoughts of the heart
Are turned ere long to bitter;
Sad memories loom when joys depart,
And gloom comes after glitter.
Why pawn thy soul for one lone flower,
And slight the whole bright garland;
Clarissa's eyes, Lucinda's bower,
Will fail thee in a far land!
Love God and Virtue! Love the Sun,
The Stars, the Trees, the Mountains!
The only living streams that run
Flow from Eternal Fountains!

LINES WRITTEN IN A NUNNERY CHAPEL.

Me hither from noonlight
A voice ever calls
Where pale pillars cluster
And organ tones roll—
Nor sunlight nor moonlight
E'er silvers these walls—
Lives here other lustre—
The Light of the Soul.
Here budded and blossomed—
Here faded and died—
Like brief blooming roses
Earth's purest of pure!
Now ever embosomed
In bliss they abide—
Oh! may, when Life closes,
My meed be as sure!
156

THE NIGHT IS FALLING.

The night is falling in chill December,
The frost is mantling the silent stream,
Dark mists are shrouding the mountain's brow;
My soul is weary: I now
Remember
The days of roses but as a dream.
The icy hand of the old Benumber,
The hand of Winter is on my brain,
I try to smile, while I inly grieve:
I dare not hope or believe
That Summer
Will ever brighten the earth again.
So, gazing gravewards, albeit immortal,
Man cannot pierce through the girdling Night
That sunders Time from Eternity,
Nor feel this death-vale to be
The portal
To realms of glory and Living Light.

WISDOM AND FOLLY.

They who go forth, and finally win
Their way to the Temple of Truth by Error's multiplied stages,
They are the Sages!
They who stop short for life at some inn
On the side of the road—say Momus's, Mammon's, or Cupid's,
They are the Stupids!
157

REST ONLY IN THE GRAVE.

I rode till I reached the House of Wealth—
'Twas filled with Riot and blighted health.
I rode till I reached the House of Love—
'Twas vocal with sighs beneath and above!
I rode till I reached the House of Sin—
There were shrieks and curses without and within.
I rode till I reached the House of Toil—
Its inmates had nothing to bake or boil.
I rode in search of the House of Content
But never could reach it, far as I went!
The House of Quiet, for strong and weak
And Poor and rich, I have still to seek—
That House is narrow, and dark, and small—
But the only Peaceful House of all!

LIFE.

O human destiny! thou art a mystery
Which tasks the o'er-wearied intellect in vain;
A world thou art of cabalistic history
Whose lessons madden and destroy the brain,
O Life!—whose page, a necromantic scroll,
Is charactered with sentences of terror
Which, like the shapes on a magician's mirror,
At once bewilder and appal the soul—
We blindly roam thy labyrinth of error,
And clasp a phantom when we gain thy goal!
158

Yet roll, thou troubled flood of Time! Still bear
Thy base wrecks to the whirlgulfs of the past—
But Man and Heaven will bless thee if thou hast
Spared for their final sphere the Noble and the Fair.

LOVE.

Spirit of wordless love! that in the lone
Bowers of the poet's museful soul doth weave
Tissues of thought, hued like the skies of eve
Ere the last glories of the sun hath shone!
How soon, almost before our hearts have known
The change, above the ruins of thy throne
Whose trampled beauty we would fain retrieve
By all earth's thrones beside, we stand and grieve!
We weep not, for the world's chill breath hath bound
In triple ice the fountain of our tears,
And ever-mourning memory thenceforth rears
Her altars upon desecrated ground,
And always, with a low despairful sound,
Tolls the disastrous bell of all our years!

LAMENTATION OF JEREMIAS OVER JERUSALEM.

(A Paraphrase from Holy Scripture.)

“And it came to pass, after Israel was carried into captivity, and Jerusalem was desolate, that Jeremias the prophet sat weeping, and mourned with this lamentation over Jerusalem, and with a sorrowful mind, sighing and moaning, he said”:—

159

How doth she sit alone,
The city late so thronged; how doth she sit in woe,
Begirt with solitude and graves!
Oh! how is she that from her Temple-throne
Ruled o'er the Gentiles, now become
A widow in her dreary home!
How have her Princes fallen low,
And dwindled into slaves!
She weepeth all night long,
Forsaken and forgot: her face is dusk with tears;
Her heart is rent with many throes,
Not one of all the once-admiring throng
That sued and wooed her night and morn
But looketh down on her with scorn!
Her fondest friends of other years
Have now become her foes!
Her dwelling-place is dark:
Her palaces lie waste: she feareth even to pass
Their bass-courts desolate and bare.
She hath become a byword and a mark
Among the nations: lorn and lone,
She seeketh rest and findeth none.
Her persecuting foes, alas!
Have caught her in their snare!
Gloom shroudeth Sion's halls
And trodden in the dust lie silver lamp and bowl,
Her golden gates are turned to clay,
Her priests are now the godless Gentiles' thralls.
Her youths walk wan and sorrow-worn;
Her silent virgins droop and mourn.
In hopeless bitterness of soul
She sigheth all the day!
160

Behold the sad Bereaven!
Her enemies have grown to be her pitiless lords,
And mock her in her sore disgrace!
Her sins have risen in black array to Heaven;
Therefore the Lord Jehovah hath
Rained on her head His chastening wrath;
Therefore her sons go bound with cords
Before the oppressor's face!
How hath her glory fled!
The beauty is out-blotted as a fallen star
Of her that whilom looked so fair!
Her stricken Princes cower for shame and dread!
Like wandering sheep, that seek in vain
Their pasture ground o'er hill and plain,
They stray abroad, they flee afar,
Guideless, and in despair!
Oh! lost Jerusalem
Where now be her mad hours of wantonness and wine?
Her leprousness is on her hands,
So lately prankt with pearl and golden gem!
A captive Queen she sits, cast down
From Heaven to Earth, without her crown!
O Lord, my God, what grief is mine
To see her thus in bands!
She lieth overthrown,
Smitten of Thee, O Lord! and shrinking in her fear
Before the alien Gentile powers,
Since Thou hast cast away Thy Church, Thine own!
They violate her sanctuary,
Of whom command was given by Thee,
That they should ne'er adventure near
Her Temple and its towers!
161

Woe for the fallen Queen!
Her people groan and die, despairful of relief.
They famish and they cry for bread!
No more her nobles walk in silken sheen!
Their gauds and rings, their precious things
Are pawned for food! O God! it wrings
My soul to see it! Through my grief
I lie as one half dead!
Oh, ye who travel by!
All ye who pass this way, stop short a while, and see
If Earth have sorrow like to mine!
Judea's dark iniquities belie
The faith she vaunteth in her God;
And therefore are her people trod
In dust this day, and men tread me
As treaders tread the wine.
O, most mysterious Lord!
From Thine high place in Heaven Thou sendest fire and flame
Into my dry and withered bones!
Thou searchest me as with an angry sword!
Thou spreadest snares aneath my feet!
In vain I pray, in vain entreat,
Thou turnest me away with shame,
And heedest not my groans!
Thus waileth she aloud,
The God-forsaken one, in this her day of dole:—
“My spirit faileth me; mine eyes
Are filmèd o'er with mist; my neck is bowed
Beneath a yoke the livelong day,
And there doth lie a weight alway,
An iron hand, on my spent soul,
That will not let it rise!
162

“The Lord, the Lord is just!
His wrath is kindled fierce against me for my ways.
I have provoked the Lord, my God,
Therefore I make my darkling bed in dust.
Pity me, ye who see me, all!
Pity my sons, who pine in thrall!
Their spirit wastes, their strength decays,
Under the Gentile's rod.
“I sought my friends to tell
The story of my woes; alas! they would not hear!
Disease drank up my princes' blood,
For Famine's hand lay black on them as well.
My priests, too, fainted on their feet;
They feebly crawled from street to street,
Seeking all day, afar and near,
A morsel of coarse food!
“Behold, O Lord!—behold!
Behold my wretchedness! For I am overcome
By suffering—almost by despair!
My heart is torn with agonies untold!
The land expires beneath Thy frown;
Abroad the red sword striketh down
Its tens of thousands; and at home
Death reigneth everywhere!
“My groanings are not hid.
All they who hated me regard me with disdain!
They see the darkness of my face,
And mock it, for they know Thou hast forbid
My nearest friends to help me now.
But Thou wilt yet avenge me, Thou!
They shall lie low where I have lain
Who scoff at my disgrace!
163

“Then shall their evil fall
On their own heads—for still 'tis evil in Thy sight,
And they shall mourn as now I mourn;
And Thou, Lord, shalt make vintage of them all,
And tread them down even as they see
Thou, for my sins, hast trodden me,
They who to-day deride and slight
The afflictions I have borne!”

KHIDDER.

Thus said or sung
Khidder, the ever-young:—
Journeying, I passed an ancient town—
Of lindens green its battlements bore a crown,
And at its turreted gates, on either hand,
Did fountains stand,
In marble white of rarest chiselling,
The which on high did fling
Water, that then like rain went twinkling down,
With a rainbow glancing in the spray
As it wreathed in the sunny ray.
I marked where, 'neath the frown
Of the dark rampart, smiled a garden fair;
And an old man was there,
That gathered fruit. “Good father,” I began,
“Since when, I pray you, standeth here
This goodly city with its fountains clear?”
164

To which that agèd man
Made answer—“Ever stood
The city where it stands to-day,
And as it stands so shall it stand for aye,
Come evil days or good.”
Him gathering fruit I left, and journeyed on;
But when a thousand years were come and gone,
Again I passed that way, and lo!
There was no city, there were no
Fountains of chiselling rare,
No garden fair,
Only
A lonely
Shepherd was piping there,
Whose little flock seemed less
In that wide pasture of the wilderness.
“Good friend,” quoth I,
“How long hath the fair city passed away,
That stood with gates so high,
With fountains bright, and gardens gay,
Where now these sheep do stray?”
And he replied—“What withers makes but room
For what springs up in verdurous bloom—
Sheep have grazed ever here, and here will graze for aye.”
Him piping there I left, and journeyed on;
But when a thousand years were come and gone,
Again I passed
That way, and see! there was a lake
That darkened in the blast,
And waves that brake
With a melancholy roar
Along that lonely shore.
165

And on a shingly point that ran
Far out into the lake, a fisherman
Was hauling in his net. To him I said:
“Good friend,
I fain would know
Since when it is that here these waters flow?”
Whereat he shook his head,
—And answer made, “Heaven lend
Thee better wit, good brother! Ever here
These waters flowed, and so
Will ever flow:
And aye in this dark rolling wave
Men fished, and still fish,
And ever will fish,
Until fish
No more in waters swim.”
Him
Hauling his net I left, and journeyed on;
But when a thousand years were come and gone,
Again I passed that way, and lo! there stood,
Where waves had rolled, a green and flourishing wood—
Flourishing in youth it seemed, and yet was old—
And there it stood where deep blue waves had rolled.
A place of pleasant shade!
A wandering wind among the branches played,
And birds were now where fish had been;
And through the depth of green,
In many a gush the golden sunshine streamed;
And wild flowers gleamed
About the brown and mossy
Roots of the ancient trees,
And the cushioned sward so glossy
That compassed these.
166

Here, as I passed, there met
Me, on the border of that forest wide,
One with an axe, whom, when I spied,
Quoth I—“Good neighbour, let
Me ask, I pray you, how long hath this wood
Stood,
Spreading its covert, broad and green,
Here, where mine eyes have seen
A royal city stand, whose battlements
Were like the ancient rocks;
And then a place for shepherds' tents,
And pasturage of flocks;
And then,
Roughening beneath the blast,
A vast
Dark mere—a haunt of fishermen?”
There was a cold surprise
In the man's eyes
While thus I spoke, and, as I made an end,
This was his dry
Reply—
“Facetious friend,
This wood
Hath ever stood
Even where it stands to-day;
And as it stands, so shall it stand for aye.
And here men catch no fish—here tend
No sheep—to no town-markets wend;
But aye in these
Green shades men felled, and still fell,
And ever will fell
Trees.”
Him with his axe I left, and journeyed on;
But when a thousand years were come and gone,
167

Again I passed
That way; and lo! a town—
And spires, and domes, and towers looked proudly down
Upon a vast
And sounding tide of life,
That flowed through many a street, and surged
In many a market-place, and urged
Its way in many a wheeling current, hither
And thither.
How rose the strife
Of sounds! the ceaseless beat
Of feet!
The noise of carts, of whips—the roll
Of chariots, coaches, cabs, gigs—(all
Who keep the last-named vehicle we call
Respectable)—horse-tramplings, and the toll
Of bells; the whirl, the clash, the hubbub-mingling
Of voices, deep and shrill; the clattering, jingling,
The indescribable, indefinable roar;
The grating, creaking, booming, clanking, thumping,
And bumping,
And stumping
Of folks with wooden legs; the gabbling,
And babbling,
And many more
Quite nameless helpings
To the general effect; dog-yelpings,
Laughter, and shout, and cry; all sounds of gladness,
Of sadness,
And madness,—
For there were people marrying,
And others carrying
The dead they would have died for to the grave—
(Sadly the church bell tolled
168

When the young men were burying the old—
More sadly spake that bodeful tongue
When the old were burying the young)—
Thus did the tumult rave
Through that fair city—nor were wanting there
Of dancing dogs or bear,
Or needy knife-
Grinder, or man with dismal wife,
That sang deplorably of “purling groves
And verdant streams, all where young Damon roves
With tender Phillida, the nymph he loves,
And softly breathe
The balmy moonbeam's wreathe,
And amorous turtle-doves”—
Or other doleful men, that blew
The melancholiest tunes—the which they only knew—
On flutes and other instruments of wind;
Or small dark imps, with hurdy-
Gurdy,
And marmoset, that grinned
For nuts, and might have been his brother,
They were so like each other;
Or man
That danced like the god Pan,
Twitching
A spasmy face
From side to side with a grace
Bewitching,
The while he whistled
In sorted pipes, all at his chin that bristled;
Or fiddler, fiddling much
For little profit, and a many such
Street musics most forlorn
In that too pitiless rout quite overborne.
169

Now, when as I beheld
The crowd, and heard the din of life once more
Swell, as it swelled
In that same place four thousand years before,
I asked of them that passed me in the throng
How long
The city thereabouts had stood,
And what was gone with pasture, lake, and wood;
But at such question most men did but stare,
And so pass on; and some did laugh and shake
Their heads, me deeming mad; but none would spare
The time, or take
The pains to answer me, for there
All were in haste—all busy—bent to make
The most of every minute,
And do, an if they might, an hour's work in it.
Yet as I gave not o'er, but pertinaciously
Plied with my question every passer-by,
A dozen voices did at length reply
Ungraciously—
“What ravest thou
Of pasture, lake, and wood? As it is now
So was it always here, and so will be for aye.”
Them, hurrying there, I left, and journeyed on—
But when a thousand years are come and gone,
Again I'll pass that way.

BEAR UP.

Time rolleth on; and with our years
Our sorrows grow and multiply,
Our visions fade;
170

With late remorse and withering fears,
We look for light to days gone by;
But all is shade.
Our dear fond friends have long been gone,
No moon is up in Heaven above;
The chill winds blow.
The dolorous night of age comes on;
The current of our life and love
Moves low, moves slow.
Yet earth hath still a twofold dower;
On desert sands the palm trees rise
In greenest bloom;
The dawn breaks at the darkest hour;
Stars brightliest shine when midnight skies
Are palled in gloom;
The deep hath treasures unrevealed
Of gold and gems and argosies,
And gallant ships;
The sword strikes hurtless on the shield;
And from the once plague-laden breeze
Health greets thy lips!
Thou, therefore, man, shalt never droop,
Shalt never doubt, shalt always trust
The power of God;
Thou art not Heaven's or nature's dupe!
This fleshly hull shall rot in dust,
A trodden clod.
But wilt thou cower, tho' death draw nigh?
The mouldering frame, the eternal soul,
Which, say, is best;
Thou canst not live unless thou die,
Thou must march far to reach thy goal
Of endless rest.
171

Bear up! even tho' thou be, like me,
Stretched on a couch of torturing pain
This weary day;
Tho' heaven and earth seem dark to thee,
And thine eye glance around in vain
For one hope-ray!
Tho' overborne by wrong and ill,
Tho' thou hast drained, even to the lees,
Life's bitter cup.
Tho' death and hell be round thee still.
Place faith in God! He hears, He sees!
Bear up! Bear up!

SONNET.

[Bird that discoursest from yon poplar bough]

Bird that discoursest from yon poplar bough,
Outweeping night, and in thy eloquent tears
Holding sweet converse with the thousand spheres
That glow and glisten from Night's glorious brow—
Oh! may thy lot be mine! that, lonely now,
And doomed to mourn the remnant of my years,
My song may swell to more than mortal ears,
And sweet as is thy strain be poured my vow!
Bird of the poet's paradise! by thee
Taught where the tides of feeling deepest tremble,
Playful in gloom, like some sequestered sea,
I, too, amidst my anguish would dissemble,
And turn misfortune to such melody
That my despair thy transports would resemble!
172

GENIUS.

(WRITTEN AT THE AGE OF SIXTEEN.)

O Genius! Genius! all thou dost endure,
First from thyself, and finally from those
The earth-bound and the blind, who cannot feel
That there be souls with purposes as pure
And lofty as the mountain snows, and zeal
All quenchless as the spirit whence it flows.
In whom that fire, struck like the spark from steel,
In other bosoms ever lives and glows.
Of such, thrice blessed are they whom ere mature
Life generates woes which God alone can heal,
His mercy calls to loftier spheres than this—
For the mind's conflicts are the worst of woes;
And fathomless and fearful yawns the Abyss
Of Darkness thenceforth under all who inherit
The melancholy changeless hue of heart
Which flings its pale gloom o'er the years of youth,
Those most—or least—illumined by the spirit
Of the eternal archetype of Truth.
For such as these there is no peace within,
Either in action or in contemplation,
From first to last—but even as they begin,
They close the dim night of their tribulation;
Worn by the torture of the untiring breast,
Which, scorning all, and shunned of all, by turns,
Upheld in solitary strength begot
By its own unsharèd shroudedness of lot,
Through years and years of crushed hopes, throbs, and burns,
And burns, and throbs, and will not be at rest,
Searching a desolate Earth for that it findeth not.
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