con see But to benigner regions beckons us, How changed, dear friend, are thy part and To destinies of more rewarded toil. thy child's! In the hushed chamber, sitting by the dead, He bends above thy cradle now, or holds It grates on us to hear the flood of life His warning finger out to be thy guide; Whirl rustling onward, senseless of our Thou art the nursling now; he watches loss. thee The bee hums on; around the blossomed Slow learning, one by one, the secret things vine Which are to him used sights of every day; Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket He smiles to see thy wondering glances chirps; The locust's shrill alarum stings the ear; The grass and pebbles of the spirit-world, Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from To thee miraculous; and he will teach farm to farm, Thy knees their due observances of prayer. His cheery brothers, telling of the sun, Children are God's apostles, day by day Answer, till far away the joyance dies: Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and We never knew before how God had filled peace; The summer air with happy living sounds; Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone. All round us seems an overplus of life, To me, at least, his going hence hath given And yet the one dear heart lies cold and Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies, still. And opened a new fountain in my heart It is most strange, when the great miracle For thee, my friend, and all: and oh, if Hath for our sakes been done, when we Death have had More near approaches meditates, and clasps Our inwardest experience of God, Even now some dearer, more reluctant When with his presence still the room ex hand, pands, God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may And is awed after him, that naught is changed, That 't is thine angel, who, with loving That Nature's face looks unacknowledging, haste, And the mad world still dances heedless on Unto the service of the inner shrine, After its butterflies, and gives no sign. Doth waken thy belovëd with a kiss. 'T is hard at first to see it all aright: In vain Faith blows her trump to summon back EURYDICE Her scattered troop: yet, through the clouded glass HEAVEN'S сир held down to me I drain, Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Undazzled on the kindness of God's face; Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines I suck the last drop of the sky; through. With each hot sense I draw to the lees The quickening out-door influences, Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice Though for its press each grape-bunch had Are sent into the world, - no little thing, The white feet of an Oread. When this unbounded possibility Into the outer silence is withdrawn. Through our coarse art gleam, now and Ah, in this world, where every guiding then, thread The features of angelic men: Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, 'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint death, Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint; The visionary hand of Might-have-been The dauber's botch no more obscures Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim! The mighty master's portraitures. a At that elm-vista's end I trace we turn life's diary o'er To find but one word, - Nevermore. a And who can say what luckier beam For us, a Prayer breathed in vain ! no wish's sway branched, An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of I only know she came and went. And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went. some green inlet THE CHANGELING I HAD a little daughter, And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature, Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine. THE PIONEER I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair; For it was as wavy and golden, And as many changes took, On the yellow bed of a brook. Upon me, her kneeling lover, How it leaped from her lips to her eye lids, And dimpled her wholly over, Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her veins to me! What man would live coffined with brick and stone, Imprisoned from the healing touch of air, And cramped with selfish landmarks everywhere, When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own ? What man would read and read the self same faces, And, like the marbles which the wind mill 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-penfolded spaces ? She had been with us scarce a twelve month, And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari But loosed the hampering strings, My little bird used her wings. A little angel child, And smiles as she never smiled: Where she always used to lie, And I feel as weak as a violet Alone 'neath the awful sky. 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, When solitude is his, and God forevermore, Just for the opening of a paltry door ? As weak, yet as trustful also; For the whole year long I see All the wonders of faithful Nature Still worked for the love of me; Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, Rain falls, suns rise and set, Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet. What man would watch life's cozy element Creep Letheward forever, when he might Down some great river drift beyond men's sight, To where the undethronëd forest's royal tent Broods with its hush o'er half a conti nent ? This child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast: Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair. What man with men would push and al tercate, Piecing out crooked means to 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 Which one was e'er so dear, so kind, nest, So beautiful as Longing ? The wingëd brood, flown thence, new The thing we long for, that we are dwellings plan; For one transcendent moment, The serf of his own Past is not a man; Before the Present poor and bare To change and change is life, to move and Can make its sneering comment. never rest; Not what we are, but what we hope, is Still, through our paltry stir and strife, best. Glows down the wished Ideal, And Longing moulds in clay what Life The wild, free woods make no man halt Carves in the marble Real; or blind; To let the new life in, we know, Cities rob men of eyes and hands and Desire must ope the portal; feet, Perhaps the longing to be so Patching one whole of many incom- Helps make the soul immortal. plete; The general preys upon the individual Longing is God's fresh heavenward will mind, With our poor earthward striving; And each alone is helpless as the wind. We quench it that we may be still Content with merely living; Each man is some man's servant; every But, would we learn that heart's full scope soul Which we are hourly wronging, Is by some other's presence quite dis- Our lives must climb from hope to hope crowned; And realize our longing. Each owes the next through all the imperfect round, Ah ! let us hope that to our praise Yet not with mutual help; each man is his Good God not only reckons own goal, The moments when we tread his ways, And the whole earth must stop to pay But when the spirit beckons, him toll. That some slight good is also wrought Beyond self-satisfaction, Here, life the undiminished man de- When we are simply good in thought, mands; Howe'er we fail in action. New faculties stretch out to meet new wants; What Nature asks, that Nature also ODE TO FRANCE grants; Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and FEBRUARY, 1848 feet and hands, And to his life is knit with hourly bands. As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches Build up their imminent crags of noiseCome out, then, from the old thoughts Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin Before you barden to a crystal cold launches Which the new life can shatter, but In unwarned havoc on the roofs below, not mould; So grew and gathered through the silent Freedom for you still waits, still, looking years backward, stays, The madness of a People, wrong by But widens still the irretrievable space. wrong There seemed no strength in the dumb LONGING toiler's tears, No strength in suffering; but the Past Of all the myriad moods of mind was strong: That through the soul come thronging, The brute despair of trampled centuries less snow, and old ways, IV II Leaped up with one hoarse yell and Hardening a people's heart to senseless snapped its bands, stone, Groped for its right with horny, callous Thou knewest them, O Earth, that drank bands, their tears, And stared around for God with bloodshot O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate eyes. moan ! What wonder if those palms were all too | They noted down their fetters, link by hard link; For nice distinctions, - if that mænad Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and throng red the ink; They whose thick atmosphere no bard Rude was their score, as suits unlettered Had shivered with the lightning of his men, song, Notched with a headsman's axe upon a Brutes with the memories and desires of block: men, What marvel if, when came the avenging Whose chronicles were writ with iron shock, pen, ’T was Atë, not Urania, held the pen ? In the crooked shoulder and the fore head low, Set wrong to balance wrong, With eye averted, and an anguished frown, And physicked woe with woe? Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife, Where, like the heart of Vengeance up They did as they were taught; not theirs and down, the blame, Throbs in its framework the bloodIf men who scattered firebrands reaped the muffled knife; flame: Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet They trampled Peace beneath their sav- Turn never backward: hers no bloody glare ; And by her golden tresses drew Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, Mercy along the pavement of the street. And where it enters there is no despair: O Freedom ! Freedom ! is thy morning- Not first on palace and cathedral spire dew Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire; So gory red ? Alas, thy light had While these stand black against her ne'er morning skies, Shone in upon the chaos of their lair ! The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak They reared to thee such symbol as they Along his bills; the craftsman's burning knew, eyes And worshipped it with flame and Own with cool tears its influence motherblood, meek; A Vengeance, axe in hand, that stood It lights the poet's heart up like a star; Holding a tyrant's head up by the clotted Ah ! while the tyrant deemed it still hair. afar, And twined with golden threads his futile snare, What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these That swift, convicting glow all round we know; These have found piteous voice in song | ’T was close beside him there, Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man. But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe, Their grinding centuries, - what Muse O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit ? had those ? A dynasty plucked out as 't were a weed Though ball and palace had nor eyes nor Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no ears, seed ! age feet, III him ran; and prose; V |
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