Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And the light of the heaven she's gone to THE PIONEER. WHAT man would live coffined with brick and stone, Imprisoned from the influences of air, And cramped with selfish land-marks everywhere, When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own? What man would read and read the selfsame faces, And, like the marbles which the windmill grinds, Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds, This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces, When there are woods and un-man-stifled places? What man o'er one old thought would pore and pore, Shut like a book between its covers thin For every fool to leave his dog's-ears in, What man would watch life's oozy element What man with men would push and altercate, Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends, When he can have the skies and woods for friends, Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate, And in himself be ruler, church, and state? Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest, To change and change is life, to move and never rest;- The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind; Each man is some man's servant; every soul Is by some other's presence quite discrowned; Each owes the next through all the imperfect round, Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal, And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll. Here, life the undiminished man demands; New faculties stretch out to meet new wants; Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and hands, Come out, then, from the old thoughts and old ways, Before you harden to a crystal cold Which the new life can shatter, but not mould; Freedom for you still waits, still, looking backward, stays, But widens still the irretrievable space. LONGING. Of all the myriad moods of mind The thing we long for, that we are Still, through our paltry stir and strife, Longing is God's fresh heavenward will But, would we learn that heart's full scope Our lives must climb from hope to hope Ah! let us hope that to our praise The moments when we tread his ways, That some slight good is also wrought When we are simply good in thought, ODE TO FRANCE. FEBRUARY, 1848. I. As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches Build up their imminent crags of noiseless snow, Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launches And the blind havoc leaps unwarned below, So grew and gathered through the silent years. The madness of a People, wrong by wrong. There seemed no strength in the dumb toiler's tears, No strength in suffering;- but the Past was strong: The brute despair of trampled centuries Leaped up with one hoarse yell and snapped its bands, Groped for its right with horny, callous hands, And stared around for God with bloodshot eyes. What wonder if those palms were all too hard For nice distinctions, if that mænad throngThey whose thick atmosphere no bard Had shivered with the lightning of his song, Brutes with the memories and desires of men, Whose chronicles were writ with iron pen, In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low Set wrong to balance wrong, And physicked woe with woe ? II. They did as they were taught; not theirs the blame, III. What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know; These have found piteous voice in song and prose; But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe, Their grinding centuries, what Muse had those? Though hall and palace had nor eyes nor ears, Hardening a people's heart to senseless stone, Thou knowest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! They noted down their fetters, link by link; Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink; Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men, Notched with a headman's axe upon a block: What marvel if, when came the avenging shock, "T was Ate, not Urania, held the pen? IV. With eye averted and an anguished frown, Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife, Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down, Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife; Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, Not first on palace and cathedral spire While these stand black against her morning skies, Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man. V. O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit? Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed! And thou become a fugitive and scoff: Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold, And weakest of all fences one of steel;· Go and keep school again like him of old, The Syracusan tyrant; - thou mayst feel Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal! VI. Not long can he be ruler who allows His time to run before him; thou wast naught Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows Was no more emblem of the People's thought: Vain were thy bayonets against the foe Thou hadst to cope with; thou didst wage War not with Frenchmen merely; - no, Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age, The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine Scattered thy frail endeavor, And, like poor last year's leaves, whirled thee and thine Into the Dark forever! |