Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

My old Companion! we have been apart
And have lost count of one another's heart.
A various Past, an unknown region lies
Between the sweet tract of our memories
And the too-stirring Present. I have been
A wanderer now through many a foreign scene,
Not without inward change; and I have dwelt
Much in my lonely spirit, till I felt

366

I was a person to myself unknown;
And this hath been one fruit of being alone.
And I have changed each image of my life;
And all the objects of my mortal strife
I have arrayed in other shapes and places,
Encompassing myself with different faces,
To see in what relationship I stood
To the new world around me: both my good
And ill have been most intricately shifted,
And my whole life insensibly uplifted
Unto a different end: my fear and hope
Have other holdfasts and another scope:
And love is unto me a different birth
From what it was in our old boyish mirth,
And hath a deeper root in this kind earth.
I have a more abounding joy, a will
Less mutable, and faculties more still.
There were green withs about my spirit bound,
But they are lying faded on the ground.
Now I can walk abroad in the sweet calm
Of resignation, breathing holy balm
Like evening air around me: I am haunted
By a new boldness, solemn and undaunted,
The very treasure I have always wanted;
And, with whatever friends or strangers thrown,
The secret of that boldness is my own,
An underground delight, a murmuring
Among dry leaves and grass, as from a spring.
The thing for which I pined, the early lost,
The vainly sought on boyhood's sunny coast,
The thing that left me, like an uncaged dove,
I have laid hands on: and it is not love.

I mourn not, as thou mournest, o'er the fate
Of our own summer year of Thirty Eight.

367

It came and went within us, like a breeze,
Chiming among our thoughts as in the trees.
It stirred us, as a breeze may stir the lake,
And thou art gazing yet on its bright wake.
A glory is no glory, if it last;
Thou art entranced, young dreamer! in the past.
None dream so wildly or so much, as those
Whose early manhood rank or duty throws
Into the fret of action, action spoken,
Where energy is prematurely broken
Into such fragments and small sums of power
As may be drawn for by the present hour.
These are the dreamers, whom the little things
Of this life deafen with their murmurings,
Who are constrained to let the Present cast
A shadow o'er the Future and the Past,
Or let the Present's feverish pressure dry
Those two great fountains of nobility.

There is a time in life when it is well
That our true selves should be invisible,
When we should stand in patient calm apart,
And action should lie still within our heart,
Like unripe ore, collecting every hour
From self-restraint new increments of power.
There is a time in life when we should shroud
Our inner selves with somewhat of a cloud,
When to bystanders we should strive to seem
Less than we are, and to appear to dream
When we are toiling earnestly and much:
For so may we ward off all outward touch
And meddling hindrance, which might mar and spoil
The growing fabric of our hidden toil.
And therefore am I anchored in blue lakes,
And screened, like some shy bird, by copsewood brakes,

368

Lest things drift uppermost and be revealed,
Which I would have in my dim self concealed.

For I have had, like many another man,
A life with two beginnings; and I ran
Unto an end in my first forward youth,
Which had the vesture and the face of truth;
But it was not the measure of my being,
And therefore am I with wise caution fleeing
To lurk awhile and tarry for more age
In an obscure and quiet anchorage.

In that old rambling year of Thirty Eight
Thou knewest me encircled with a state
And retinue of vision, feeling, thought,
Joy, fear, and hot conception, all inwrought.
That pageant is worn out: from that old ring
I have stepped forth, and am encompassing
Myself afresh, and with long-pondered moves
Am bringing up new joys, new fears, new loves.
Thou askest how and whence hath come the change?
In what new fields my thought and fancy range?
I can but tell thee of some outward shapes;
Thou canst but hear the murmur which escapes
Amid the silence: it will show where lies
The growing quarrel in our sympathies.

Ah for the faded year of Thirty Eight!
How little recked I then of this strange fate
Which lay in ambush at the very door
Of headlong youth, the spoiler of its store,
Like a new wisdom in a heart grown old,
A mountain stone amid the shy flock rolled.—
Enough; and dost thou ask where now I range,
Through what transfiguring of inward change?

To thee that Thirty Eight still sparkles near,
While to thy friend it is a faded year—

369

Faded in all save truest love for thee,
And that high-souled young priest beyond the sea,
And that dear bard, whose life is like a river,
Singing and sighing on its road for ever.
Time was when from within myself I drew
My powers and thoughts and instincts: all I knew
Was but the self-sprung harvest of my heart,
And the whole outward world was cast apart.
I was a worldless man, a thing detached,
A wandering cloud, a being all unmatched
With outward destiny; but now my power
Is from the world imported every hour.
The pains I suffer, and the tears I see,
Men's passions chance-encountered, children's glee,
And moral contradictions, and green leaves,
And skies, and streams,—from these my spirit weaves
Her web, and every day that passes by
Doth add some little to the tapestry:
For moral wisdom is a growing thing,
Whene'er it rises from an outward spring.

Time was when with a young man's pride I dreamed
Quaintness was power; and when to differ seemed
Greater than to agree, and I esteemed
All individual marks, which stand apart,
Above the beatings of my common heart,
The heart I share with others: now I cherish
All commonplace designs as things which nourish
A fellow-feeling with my kindred; now
To rise and sink, to range from high to low,
To think as all men think in woe or mirth,
Seems unto me the greatest gift on earth.

370

Thus self hath daily less significance;
And, like one waking from a pleasant trance,
I love the pensive glow of earth far more
Than the bright lights upon that dream-land shore.
Our boyhood was a noble savage state,
Whence we were not reclaimed in Thirty Eight.
But now the heart's meek household growths are ours,
And we must shade ourselves in their green bowers,
With holiest care the shoots to prune or train,
With smiles for sunshine, blameless tears for rain.

I am not idle, though at anchor staying
To learn self-mastery, a wise delaying.
Had it been good, or had a heart of truth,
I would sue back to me my banished youth.
In calmly bending waters now I ride
With manhood flowing round me like a tide:
And, whether winds be foul or fair skies blue,
I shall heave anchor when the ship is due,
And come within thy sight to seek a part
In the world's fretful glory, where thou art—
A man in place with boyhood at thy heart.
To thee, still in the lap of our old dream,
This uncouth teaching for a while must seem
A cold philosophy, a barren song;
But it will not seem so unto thee long.
Thou too wilt one day learn—it is not cold
To speak of boyhood as a thing grown old.