And fairer stars, with whose calm height | my soul Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond. O God! this world, so crammed with eager life, That comes and goes and wanders back to silence Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails Of highest endeavor, - this mad, unthrift world, Which, every hour, throws life enough Our great thoughts, white and godlike, to shine down The future, Life, the irredeemable block, Which one o'er-hasty chisel-dint oft mars, Scanting our room to cut the features out Of our full hope, so forcing us to crown With a mean head the perfect limbs, or leave The god's face glowing o'er a satyr's trunk, Failure's brief epitaph. Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need, Losing God's sacred use, to be a bond 'Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowl ingly O'er his own selfish hoard at bay; no state, Holds up a shape of large Humanity Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird, Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me Which makes the wise heart certain of its Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends. Here am I; for what end God knows, not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul: Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea, The beating heart of this great enterprise, Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death; This have I mused on, since mine eye could first Among the stars distinguish and with joy As would a foundling to the talisman whose; A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside, ends; Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again, Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying moon. While other youths perplexed their mandolins, Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine In the loose glories of her lover's hair, I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoön, moon Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls. O days whose memory tames to fawning down The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck! I know not when this hope enthralled me first, But from my boyhood up I loved to hear The tall pine-forests of the Apennine Murmur their hoary legends of the sea, Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld The sudden dark of tropic night shut down O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes, The while a pair of herons trailingly Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels. And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds To my world-seeking heart paid fealty, Then did I entertain the poet's song, I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore: The trial still is the strength's complement, Of the world's scorn, are the right mother milk THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies, Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art, They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart. Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak, Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone, Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone. It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines. Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light; And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells. |