Where ye

sell your

Some weak phantom, which your doubt
Shapes upon the dark without
From the dark within, a guess
At the spirit's deathlessness,
Which ye entertain with fear
In your self-built dungeon bere,

God-given lives
Just for gold to buy you gyves,
Ye without a shudder meet
In the city's noonday street,
Spirits sadder and more dread
Than from out the clay have fled,
Buried, beyond hope of light,
In the body's haunted night!
See ye not that woman pale ?
There are bloodhounds on her trail !
Bloodhounds two, all gaunt and lean,
(For the soul their scent is keen,)
Want and Sin, and Sin is last,
They have followed far and fast;
Want gave tongue, and, at her howl,
Sin awakened with a growl.
Ah, poor girl ! she had a right
To a blessing from the light;
Title-deeds to sky and earth
God gave to her at her birth;
But, before they were enjoyed,
Poverty had made them void,
And had drunk the sunshine up
From all nature's ample cup,
Leaving her a first-born's share
In the dregs of darkness there.
Often, on the sidewalk bleak,
Hungry, all alone, and weak,
She has seen, in night and storm,
Rooms o'erflow with firelight warm,
Which, outside the window-glass,
Doubled all the cold, alas !
Till each ray that on her fell
Stabbed her like an icicle,
And she almost loved the wail
Of the bloodhounds on her trail.
Till the floor becomes her bier,
She shall feel their pantings near,
Close upon her very heels,
Spite of all the din of wheels;
Shivering on her pallet poor,
She shall hear them at the door
Whine and scratch to be let in,
Sister bloodhounds, Want and Sin !

'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin
Wove the weary broidery in,
Bending backward from her toil,
Lest ber tears the silk might soil,
And, in midnights chill and murk,
Stitched her life into the work,
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart's and forget-me-not,
Satirizing her despair
With the emblems woven there.
Little doth the wearer heed
Of the heart-break in the brede;
A hyena by her side
Skulks, down-looking, - it is Pride.
He digs for her in the earth,
Where lie all her claims of birth,
With his foul paws rooting o'er
Some long-buried ancestor,
Who perhaps a statue won
By the ill deeds he had done,
By the innocent blood he shed,
By the desolation spread
Over happy villages,
Blotting out the smile of

peace.
There walks Judas, he who sold
Yesterday his Lord for gold,
Sold God's presence in his heart
For a proud step in the mart;
He hath dealt in flesh and blood;
At the bank his name is good;
At the bank, and only there,
'T is a marketable ware.
In his eyes that stealthy gleam
Was not learned of sky or stream,
But it has the cold, hard glint
Of new dollars from the mint.
Open now your spirit's eyes,
Look through that poor clay disguise
Which has thickened, day by day,
Till it keeps all light at bay,
And his soul in pitchy gloom
Gropes about its narrow tomb,
From whose dank and slimy walls
Drop by drop the horror falls.
Look! a serpent lank and cold
Hugs his spirit fold on fold;
From his heart, all day and night,
It doth suck God's blessed light.
Drink it will, and drink it must,
Till the cup holds naught but dust;
All day long he hears it hiss,
Writhing in its fiendish bliss;
All night long he sees its eyes
Flicker with foul ecstasies,
As the spirit ebbs away

Hark! that rustle of a dress,
Stiff with lavish costliness !
Here comes one whose cheek would flush
But to have her garment brush

Never can these hills of bliss
Be o'erclimbed by feet like his !

But enough! Oh, do not dare
From the next the veil to tear,
Woven of station, trade, or dress,
More obscene than nakedness,
Wherewith plausible culture drapes
Fallen Nature's myriad shapes !
Let us rather love to mark
How the unextinguished spark
Still gleams through the thin disguise
Of our customs, pomps, and lies,
And, not seldom blown to flame,
Vindicates its ancient claim.

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STUDIES FOR TWO HEADS

Into the absorbing clay. Who is he that skulks, afraid Of the trust he has betrayed, Shuddering if perchance a gleam Of old nobleness should stream Through the pent, unwholesome room, Where his shrunk soul cowers in gloom, Spirit sad beyond the rest By more instinct for the best? 'T is a poet who was sent For a bad world's punishment, By compelling it to see Golden glimpses of To Be, By compelling it to hear Songs that prove the angels near; Who was sent to be the tongue Of the weak and spirit-wrung, Whence the fiery-winged Despair In men's shrinking eyes might flare. 'T is our hope doth fashion us To base use or glorious: He who might have been a lark Of Truth's morning, from the dark Raining down melodious hope Of a freer, broader scope, Aspirations, prophecies, Of the spirit's full sunrise, Chose to be a bird of night, That, with eyes refusing light, Hooted from some hollow tree Of the world's idolatry. ”T is his punishment to hear Sweep of eager pinions near, And his own vain wings to feel Drooping downward to his heel, All their grace and import lost, Burdening his weary ghost: Ever walking by his side He must see his angel guide, Who at intervals doth turn Looks on him so sadly stern, With such ever-new surprise Of hushed anguish in her eyes, That it seems the light of day From around him shrinks away, Or drops blunted from the wall Built around him by his fall. Then the mountains, whose white peaks Catch the morning's earliest streaks, He must see, where prophets sit, Turning east their faces lit, Whence, with footsteps beautiful, To the earth, yet dim and dull, They the gladsome tidings bring Of the sunlight's hastening:

The second of these studies was from A. Bronson Alcott. See Letters II. 349, where Lowell has something to say of the ease with which he wrote at the time of this poem, i. e. before 1850. He was under an engagement at this time to write constantly for the AntiSlavery Standard, and he threw off many poems as part of the fulfilment of his engagement. The spur to activity came when his own mind was fertile, and some of his best known and most spontaneous work appeared at this time.

Her eye;

SOME sort of heart I know is hers, –

I chanced to feel her pulse one night; A brain she has that never errs,

And yet is never nobly right;
It does not leap to great results,

But, in some corner out of sight,
Suspects a spot of latent blight,

And, o'er the impatient infinite,
She bargains, haggles, and consults.

it seems a chemic test And drops upon you like an acid; It bites you with unconscious zest,

So clear and bright, so coldly placid; It holds you quietly aloof,

It holds, and yet it does not win you; It merely puts you to the proof

And sorts what qualities are in you; It smiles, but never brings you nearer,

It lights, her nature draws not nigh; 'T is but that yours is growing clearer

To her assays; — yes, try and try,
You 'll get no deeper than her eye.

There, you are classified: she's gone

Far, far away into herself;
Each with its Latin label on,
Your poor components, one by one,

Are laid upon their proper shelf
In her compact and ordered mind,
And what of you is left behind
Is no more to her than the wind;
In that clear brain, which, day and night,

No movement of the heart e'er jostles, Her friends are ranged on left and right, Here, silex, hornblende, sionite;

There, animal remains and fossils.

And yet, O subtile analyst,

That canst each property detect
Of mood or grain, that canst untwist

Each tangled skein of intellect,
And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare
Each mental nerve more fine than air,-

O brain exact, that in thy scales Canst weigh the sun and never err,

For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art;Thou never canst compute for her The distance and diameter

Of any simple human heart.

The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans

The gulf wherein so many fall,

'Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,
Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth with all its spots.
Himself unshaken as the sky,
His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high

Systems and creeds pellmell together; 'T is strange as to a deaf man's eye, While trees uprooted splinter by,

The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;

Less of iconoclast than shaper, His spirit, safe behind the reach Of the tornado of his speech,

Burns calmly as glowworm's taper. So great in speech, but, ah ! in act

So overrun with vermin troubles, The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact

Of life collapses all his bubbles: Had he but lived in Plato's day,

He might, unless my fancy errs, Have shared that golden voice's sway

O'er barefooted philosophers. Our nipping climate hardly suits The ripening of ideal fruits: His theories vanquish us all summer, But winter makes him dumb and dumber; To see him mid life's needful things

Is something painfully bewildering;
He seems an angel with clipt wings

Tied to a mortal wife and children,
And by a brother seraph taken
In the act of eating eggs and bacon.
Like a clear fountain, his desire

Exults and leaps toward the light,
In every drop it says “ Aspire !"

Striving for more ideal height; And as the fountain, falling thence, Crawls baffled through the common gut

ter, So, from his speech's eminence, He shrinks into the present tense,

Unkinged by foolish bread and butter. Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds

Not all of life that's brave and wise is; He strews an ampler future's seeds,

'T is your fault if no harvest rises; Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught

That all he is and has is Beauty's ?

II

Hear him but speak, and you will feel

The shadows of the Portico Over your tranquil spirit steal,

To modulate all joy and woe To one subdued, subduing glow; Above our squabbling business-hours, Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers, His nature satirizes ours;

A form and front of Attic grace,

He shames the higgling market-place, And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.

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What throbbing verse can fitly render That face so pure, so trembling-tender ?

Sensation glimmers through its rest,
It speaks unmanacled by words,

As full of motion as a nest
That palpitates with unfledged birds;

'T is likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,

White with the angel's coming gleam, And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans, And larger destinies seem man's ; You conjure from his glowing face