University of Virginia Library

ENGLAND.

Arise up, England, from the smoky cloud
That covers thee; the din of whirling wheels:
Not the pale spinner, prematurely bowed
By his hot toil, alone the influence feels
Of all this deep necessity for gain:
Gain still; but deem not only by the strain
Of engines on the sea and on the shore,
Glory, that was thy birthright, to retain.
Oh thou that knewest not a conqueror,
Unchecked desires have multiplied in thee,
Till with their bat-wings they shut out the sun:
So in the dusk thou goest moodily,
With a bent head, as one who gropes for ore,
Heedless of living streams that round him run.

BERTRAND DE BORN.

Warrior, and poet, in this balanced day
'Twould puzzle thee, I doubt, Messire de Born,
To rouse up princes into chivalrous scorn
Of peace, with thy sirventes; and bid the array
Of battle gather proudly, with the lay
That stirred King Philip, like a stream i' the morn
Waking the sluggard; as thy speech outworn,
The moon of thy vocation fades away.
For 'tis a staid and reasonable time,
That debt would to morality endear;
Counting the clink of taxes, 'stead of rhyme:
But not the less doth passion's flame appear
Rending the earth, in many another clime,
From the old volcano, though it bursts not here.

THE STEAM-BOAT.

White wings, that o'er the hyacinthine sea
With joy or hope or sorrow long have sped;
Since first he voyaged whom the Colchian wed;
Bearing lone ships o'er many a salt degree:
A voice came thence where ye were wont to be;
A strange and serpent utterance; high o'er head,
Trailed its dark breath; and with Ixion's tread
A keel passed by, mocking the stormy lee.
Into the rack, far lessening, on it went,
As once that antique lover of the cloud:
While ye to veering winds were bowed and bent;
And Ocean roared with his great voice aloud;
Lashing his waves 'gainst isle and continent,
Vexed with the wake that wheel-borne ship had ploughed.

TO THE CHARTISTS.

With doubtful purpose, through the doubtful night,
Your spearheads glimmering in the misty moon,
Why gather ye; and with wild lyric tune
Call up the wondering cocks before the light?
Oh what conflicting sense of wrongs or right
Marshalled ye thus; and in the star-led noon
Of sleep bade forth? Hers is a better boon,
Dear countrymen, than that for which ye fight.
Think ye to utter, as the Sybil doth,
Rugged, and strange, but pèrdurable things;
The world's ordainèd counsel with mad mouth?
Now heavy-laden Time wild stories brings
Of Nostradamus; and the world is drowth,
Gaping for clouds—but Truth keeps the old springs.

CHAUCER.

When I remember, how, nor separate chance,
Nor restless traffic peopling many a shore,
Nor old tradition with innumerous lore,
But poets wrought our best inheritance;
Sweet words and noble; in their gai science
That England heard, and then for evermore
Loved as her own, and did with deeds adore;
I bless thee with a kindred heart, Provence:
For to thy tales, like waves that come and go,
Sat Chaucer listening with exulting ear;
And casting his own phrase in giant mould:
That still had charms for sorrow's gentlest tear,
Telling the story of Griselda's woe,
“Under the roots of Vesulus the cold.”

TO A FRIEND.

Dear------, from those far eastern climes,
Over whose border I was hovering,
Once, as an eagle, whose uncertain wing
Turns backward from the Danube, and sublimes
His flight into a vision, scenes and times
Of travel-quickened thought to ours you bring;
Leading us by the Terek's Lesghian spring;
I, nothing in return can give, but rhymes.
But yet in these, o'erpassing time and tide,
Your name to Casbeck's spirit I commend;
To write it as a stream on his gaunt side,
Whose joyous southern windings may descend
To Teflis, or that sea by which abide,
Rivalling his, the shades of Demavend.

THE CRUCIFIX.

O thou, of temper captious, and of soul
Too dull, save outward things to comprehend;
Whom that small wooden crucifix doth offend;
And water in its pine or beechen bowl;
By which, when bells for Ave Mary toll,
The peasant on these hills doth lowly bend;
Praying good angels will his house defend;
While o'er his sleeping head the planets roll.
Why railest at such ordinance? for thus
Did Augustine, and venerable Bede,
And saints whose names above doth Peter know.
Not as of binding force it comes to us;
But, when the emblem ye abjure, take heed,
Lest ye forget the inner meaning so.

UNSECTARIAN EDUCATION.

Ye who the plumes of wisdom would put on,
Why shun ye then with other daws to perch
Under the ancestral angles of the Church,
In the spring time? though in summer ye be gone,
And make your haunt by some earth-cumbered stone,
In the deep woods; which ye with curious search
Discover: even there, the oak, and birch,
Though different, keep assimilating tone.
And oh fair moon of youth, canst thou not make
Of hard disputed questions vague the lines?
As sea, and shore, beneath thy lustrous wake:
Wise men have loved wide limit, that assigns
A silent hallowed path, for faith to take,
Where things too great expression ill defines.

THE OAK.

Say not that always on immortal things
Did the old Greeks their lyric thoughts bestow;
Not always from his fountain's highest flow
Called they the steed with cloud-surpassing wings.
But the sweet voice of Heliconian springs
Came leaping to their hearts in plains below;
Under some oak: and they the Gods let go;
Hymning his shade to their memorial strings.
Few are they now on the impatient earth,
Those harborous giants, sons of many days;
For time bears hardly on heroic birth;
Bringing vile use to eke his cold decays:
Or hurls them down for winter's boisterous mirth;
But birds and poets still find some to praise.

BACCHANTE DOLOROSA.

Under a poplar, in that mournful clime
Whose shadows change not ever, but the stars
Shine out, the cold and melancholy Lars
Of the abode of Gods of the elder time,
Pale sat Agave; weeping for the crime
That stained with her own blood the Bromian cars:
A sistrum at her feet, whose golden bars
Bore long unreckoned tears, like frosty rime.
E'en as some moonlit marble, seemed she there;
That Phidias might have wrought, on the same day
When his unresting thought with Jove's could share:
Still was the place, save when, as in the spray
Of the Pine forest moves the fitful air,
Stole up a low sad voice and sighed away.

ART.

As o'er the sea's deep world-sustaining breast,
Climbing the steep horizon, onward bear
The thought-wing'd ships; and each his track more fair
Believes, for 'tis his own, than all the rest;
Which not the less doth fade as 'tis imprest;
And the great waters, and cloud-traversed air,
With their enduring might, are only there;
And space of days unmeasured, East, and West:
Dread realms of Art, illimitable as ocean,
So fares man's spirit o'er your region waves;
Proudly, and lonely, with a choral motion;
Sunshine he courts, but tempests too he braves;
Seeking the port, where, for their heart's devotion,
Fame lights her star over such seamen's graves.

THE BALLOT.

Lest in each vein thenceforth a poison flow,
Making thee one pale mass of quickening ill,
Rife with new monsters 'neath the Moon, until
In some prodigious night a Cæsar grow;
England, abjure the voice, that loud, or low,
With subtle change as if 'twere natural, still
Urges “The Ballot” on thy feverish will;
Thy rights of old were never conquered so:
But men in whom Plantagenet's red blood
Ran bright, or Tudor's, on their cousin kings
Looked sternly, and for popular rights upstood.
Time changes all—if it hath changed these things,
Oh see not yet, within a box of wood,
A place for Peace to fold her famous wings.

THOUGHTS UNDER A WALNUT-TREE.

Bright walnut, as along this Rhenish road
Spring greets us both, the hills of Armenie
Rise on my thought; deep forests, where the bee
Rears in your hollow arms her populous brood,
Seeking (like poets) in the solitude
Of consular cities, for sweet store.—Oh tree!
Honey thy kind hives there; but here, for me,
Far-ranging thoughts, of fancy long pursued.
Yet not on o'ergrown cornices of the dead
Lies the great wreath of noble quest, nor 'mid
Vain relics of the satrapies of Rome.
He who would win it for his living head,
Must conquer to himself the power that's hid,
Like lightning in the region, o'er his home.

ON A MONUMENT WITH THE FIGURES OF HOPE AND CONTEMPLATION.

Yes, it is fit Carrara's regal stone
With imaged thought should rise above the dead;
Or softly bow with pale ideal head,
Like cherished sorrow into beauty grown:
These are the forms that joy can look upon,
And then beyond them, like an angel sped;
Lovest thou rather the material bed
Of earthy death—or else—oblivion?
There was no death for that rejoicing spirit,
There should be no oblivion, gaze, so may
Noble and pure perchance thine own become:
Of one in heaven, who on the earth was near it,
The record this; but nothing doth it say;
For Hope and Contemplation both are dumb.

EFFECT OF THE SUPPRESSION OF CHANTRIES IN ENGLAND.

Amid this multiplicity of creeds,
This liberty of all that into one
Should knit men's hearts, and of Religion
Thence hath the name, how strong thy tide proceeds,
Deep Rome; as the sea-wave o'er the rocks and weeds
Lifting its utterance, thou dost hold thine own;
Making thy sins, with that harmonic tone,
Seem but as tales that the wild ocean breeds.
Wiser than she, who the apostolic name
Claims emulously, and for her patron Paul;
Self-stripped, denuded of all spiritual awe,
Save from one source; so cold we grow and tame,
Since the sweet voice hath vanished from the wall
Wearily echoing to the parson's saw.

POETRY BY THE WAY-SIDE.

Wandering along the vision-haunted way,
One did I meet, whom straight my heart did know;
But in strange seeming he was pleased to go,
And quaint, as by the forest-brook the jay;
The leaf-hid brook, with one particular ray
That the sun gilds, and of his orbèd glow
Gives thence suggestion to the sense; e'en so
On mine the quick poetic spirit did play,
From a feather in the head of one who followed
A trade associate with the tortoise-shell,
Client of Mercury, through the towns and shires,
A rude Autolycus with hat rain-hollowed;
And still, as droopt fantastically it fell,
The shows of things conformed to his desires.

FAME.

Dante, how many, long ere half their age,
Have thought them in a gloomy wood, like thee,
Astray from the true path; that others see,
And follow, therefore, in the golden page
Of Hope inscribed. But some their battle wage
Then haughtier 'gainst oblivion, and shall be
As thou by Virgil onward led, or he
That over Lethe bore the Sibyl's gage:
One waits their coming; not with tongues and eyes,
As the vain-glorious dream, and her vague throne
Would fill, though 'twere the winds and stars of heaven;
But oft she foils, still points to high emprise,
And they shall know not, till their wrestling's done,
It is an angel, with whom they have striven.

ON A PEBBLE USED IN MAKING GLASS.

White pebble, that man's subtle art ere long
Shall change to crystal, which the bubbling wine
Lights up with gladness, or the eyes divine
Of beauty see within the impalpable wrong,
Their own reflection—now the forest song
Murmurs around thee, a glad rest were thine,
Here on the rock, did always summer shine
These grave columnar woods, and hills among;
But winter comes, like a cold angry cloud
Up-streaming from a glacier, and his shield
Fills all the hollow sky, and shuts the sun;
Then with new fire may'st thou have been annealed,
And I, amid some fair reflected crowd
In thy deep mirror, follow only one.