Amenophis and Other Poems Sacred and Secular :: :: University of Virginia Library

Urania, voice of Heaven within the heart!
Urania fair, that art
Silent amid thy sisters, yet alone
To man then audible
When the sad ear rejects all earthly tone;—

When the last farewell sigh of wife or child
Leaves us unreconciled;
When the gray death-mists o'er our own weak eyes
Fold, and the Star of Faith
Burns o'er the gulph that sheer before us lies:—

O shrined by Hellas in her central shrine,
By Milton named divine,
By us, yet, meaner men, thy voice is heard
At times, as the faint cry
Dropp'd dewlike from the twilight-wheeling bird:—

Mid life's low dust and din we hear that cry,
And start to find thee nigh;
As in some rock-hewn den the sunlit blue
Through rifts peers in, and tells
Of higher worlds than this, and life more true.

—Sweet summer moon, that pours on this fair bay
A fairer light than day,
O'er yon still sea thy steady gleam in flakes
Of orange-silver laid
Down one long path just heaves, and heaving breaks,

And, broken, reunites itself:—and then
I hear again, again,
The great tenth wave with one long impulse smite
Whole miles of bay, and send
The voice of central ocean through the night.

Remote at once and near, the muffled roar
Intones around the shore:
Then the wing'd tribes that call the night their day
With elfin pipings pass;
And then again the billow smites the bay.

As when the seven bold chiefs Prydéri led,

In the old Welsh tale, the Mabinogi of Bronwen, the Birds of Rhiannon (perhaps a Lake-nymph, and mother to Pryderi), sang the dead to life and the living to sleep. Brân Fendigaid (the Blessed) plays a great and mysterious part in these early legends: he was son to Llyr Llediaith, King of Britain; and one tradition makes him bring Christianity into the island. Brân was slain in Ireland, and his sister Bronwen (white-bosomed), dying of grief, was buried by the Alaw in Anglesey: where, in accordance with the legend, her bones, placed in a foursquare stone grave, were found at a spot called Ynys Bronwen in 1813. Brân's head, carried to the White Mount (the Tower) of London, whilst undisturbed, guarded the Island from invasion. (Lady C. Guest, the Mabinogion, and Rhys, Arthurian Legend.) — Ardudwy ... One of the six ancient districts of Merioneth.

Bearing Brân's sacred head,
At Harlech in Ardudwy, music-bound,
Sat year on year, and heard
Rhiannon's feather'd quire: O'erseas the sound

Murmur'd, far-floating; yet in each man's ear
Rang sweet and close and clear;
And they forgot their slaughter'd comrades brave
On Erin's fatal field,
And the white-bosom'd Bronwen's long-hid grave,

Listening:—E'en so o'er us, in this fair bay,
Their spell the sea-sounds lay,
Recalling how the fresh Ionian breeze
To that great sightless seer

Homer: cf.

------μαλα πολλα μεταξυ,
ουρεα τε σκιοεντα θαλασσα τε ηχηεσσα.

—Iliad 1, 156-7.

Who sang the shadowy hills and sounding seas,

Bore the same voice, and spoke of other powers
And other worlds than ours;
As if some oracle in that rhythmic wave
Told how, through all the noise
Of those who cry, and boast, and laugh, and rave,

The Eternal Order makes His music clear
To hearts that choose to hear;
And though in His high pleasure He withdraw
Himself behind Himself,
Yet through all worlds is love, and life, and law.

—Eugenia! Singly dearest! Not as, while
In love's first hour, a smile
Of glory brighten'd earth, we see it now:
The dream is gone: and we
Calmly the bitter, better truth avow.

E'en yet, life's journey to the children dear
Looks summer-mid-day clear:
But taught by stumbling steps, we know the way
Has no more light at best
Than these low moonbeams on the billows gray,

The dusking hills, and skies that darker grow
As the stars keenlier glow:—
Only within the heart Urania's voice
Wakens a chord at times,
And thy hand meets in mine, and we rejoice

Sedately: and we know the faith we hold
Was, before Time, enroll'd
In God's own archives: and the dawn's soft breeze
Smites cool upon the brow,
And Heaven's first day-smile trembles o'er the seas.