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THE misspelt scrawl, upon the wall
By some Pompeian idler traced,
In ashes packed (ironie fact !)
Lies eighteen centuries uneffaced,
While many a page of bard and sage,
Deemed once mankind's immortal gain,
Lost from Time's ark, leaves no more mark
Than a keel's furrow through the main.

O Chance and Change! our buzz's range
Is scarcely wider than a fly's;
Then let us play at fame to-day,
To-morrow be unknown and wise;
And while the fair beg locks of hair,
And autographs, and Lord knows what,
Quick! let' us scratch our

match,

moment's

Make our brief blaze, and be forgot!

Too pressed to wait, upon her slate
Fame writes a name or two in doubt;
Scarce written, these no longer please,
And her own finger rubs them out:
It may ensue, fair girl, that you
Years hence this yellowing leaf may see,
And put to task, your memory ask
In vain, "This Lowell, who was he?"

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That floats for an instant 'twixt goblet and brain;

A breath-born perfection, half something, half naught,

And breaks if it strike the hard edge of a thought.

Do you ask me to make such? Ah no, not so simple;

Ask Apelles to paint you the ravishing dimple

Whose shifting enchantment lights Venus's cheek,

And the artist will tell you his skill is to seek;

Once fix it, 't is naught, for the charm of it rises

From the sudden bopeeps of its smiling surprises.

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To Ticknor's and Longfellow's classical gown,

And profess four strange languages, which, luckless elf,

I speak like a native (of Cambridge) myself,

Let me beg, Mr. President, leave to propose A sentiment treading on nobody's toes, And give, in such ale as with pump-handles we brew,

Their memory who saved us from all talking Hebrew,

A toast that to deluge with water is good, For in Scripture they come in just after the flood:

I give you the men but for whom, as I guess, sir,

Modern languages ne'er could have had a professor,

The builders of Babel, to whose zeal the

lungs

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HOW I CONSULTED THE ORACLE OF THE GOLDFISHES

WHAT know we of the world immense
Beyond the narrow ring of sense?
What should we know, who lounge about
The house we dwell in, nor find out,
Masked by a wall, the secret cell
Where the soul's priests in hiding dwell?
The winding stair that steals aloof
To chapel-mysteries 'neath the roof?

It lies about us, yet as far
From sense sequestered as a star
New launched its wake of fire to trace
In secrecies of unprobed space,
Whose beacon's lightning-pinioned spears
Might earthward haste a thousand years
Nor reach it. So remote seems this
World undiscovered, yet it is

A neighbor near and dumb as death,
So near, we seem to feel the breath

he might have wished to preserve. Three of them were published before his death. Of the rest, two appear here for the first time. C. E. N."

Of its hushed habitants as they
Pass us unchallenged, night and day.

Never could mortal ear nor eye
By sound or sign suspect them nigh,
Yet why may not some subtler sense
Than those poor two give evidence?
Transfuse the ferment of their being
Into our own, past hearing, seeing,
As men, if once attempered so,
Far off each other's thought can know ?
As horses with an instant thrill
Measure their rider's strength of will?
Comes not to all some glimpse that brings
Strange sense of sense-escaping things?
Wraiths some transfigured nerve divines ?
Approaches, premonitions, signs,
Voices of Ariel that die out

In the dim No Man's Land of Doubt ?

Are these Night's dusky birds? Are these Phantasmas of the silences

Outer or inner? — rude heirlooms
From grovellers in the cavern-glooms,
Who in unhuman Nature saw
Misshapen foes with tusk and claw,
And with those night-fears brute and blind
Peopled the chaos of their mind,
Which, in ungovernable hours,

Still make their bestial lair in ours?

Were they, or

no;

With fruitage new, none else shall share:
Sated with wavering in the Void,
It backward climbs, so best employed,
And, where no proof is nor can be,
Seeks refuge with Analogy;

Truth's soft half-sister, she may tell
Where lurks, seld-sought, the other's well
With metaphysic midges sore,

My Thought seeks comfort at her door,

were they not? Yes; And, at her feet a suppliant cast,

Uncalled they come, unbid they go,

And leave us fumbling in a doubt
Whether within us or without
The spell of this illusion be
That witches us to hear and see
As in a twi-life what it will,

And hath such wonder-working skill
That what we deemed most solid-wrought
Turns a mere figment of our thought,
Which when we grasp at in despair
Our fingers find vain semblance there,
For Psyche seeks a corner-stone
Firmer than aught to matter known.

Is it illusion? Dream-stuff? Show
Made of the wish to have it so?

'T were something, even though this were all:

So the poor prisoner, on his wall
Long gazing, from the chance designs
Of crack, mould, weather-stain, refines
New and new pictures without cease,
Landscape, or saint, or altar-piece:
But these are Fancy's common brood
Hatched in the nest of solitude;
This is Dame Wish's hourly trade,
By our rude sires a goddess made.
Could longing, though its heart broke, give
Trances in which we chiefly live?
Moments that darken all beside,
Tearfully radiant as a bride ?
Beckonings of bright escape, of wings
Purchased with loss of baser things?
Blithe truancies from all control
Of Hyle, outings of the soul?

The worm, by trustful instinct led,
Draws from its womb a slender thread,
And drops, confiding that the breeze
Will waft it to unpastured trees:
So the brain spins itself, and so
Swings boldly off in hope to blow
Across some tree of knowledge, fair

Evokes a spectre of the past.

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Not such as shook the knees of Saul,
But winsome, golden-gay withal, -
Two fishes in a globe of glass,
That pass, and waver, and re-pass,
And lighten that way, and then this,
Silent as meditation is.
With a half-humorous smile I see
In this their aimless industry,
These errands nowhere and returns
Grave as a pair of funeral urns,
This ever-seek and never-find,
A mocking image of my mind.
But not for this I bade you climb
Up from the darkening deeps of time:
Help me to tame these wild day-mares
That sudden on me unawares.
Fish, do your duty, as did they
Of the Black Island far away
In life's safe places, far as you
From all that now I see or do.
You come, embodied flames, as when
I knew you first, nor yet knew men;
Your gold renews my golden days,
Your splendor all my loss repays.

"T is more than sixty years ago
Since first I watched your to-and-fro;
Two generations come and gone
From silence to oblivion,

With all their noisy strife and stress
Lulled in the grave's forgivingness,
While you unquenchably survive
Immortal, almost more alive.

I watched you then a curious boy,
Who in your beauty found fuli joy,
And, by no problem-debts distrest,
Sate at life's board a welcome guest.
You were my sister's pets, not mine;
But Property's dividing line
No hint of dispossession drew
On any map my simplesse knew;
O golden age, not yet dethroned!
What made me happy, that I owned;

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