'COME forth!' my catbird calls to me, 'And hear me sing a cavatina

1 I have not felt in the mood to do much during my imprisonment. One little poem I have written, The Nightingale in the Study.' 'Tis a dialogue between my catbird and me-he calling me out of doors, I giving my better reasons for staying within. Of course my nightingale is Calderon. (LOWELL, in a letter to Professor C. E. Norton, July 8, 1867. Lowell's Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. i, p. 390.)

On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking. "Come out!" with me the oriole cries, Escape the demon that pursues you! And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise, Still hiding farther onward, wooes you.'

Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,
Hast poured from that syringa thicket 30
The quaintly discontinuous lays

To which I hold a season-ticket,
'A season-ticket cheaply bought
With a dessert of pilfered berries,
And who so oft my soul hast caught
With morn and evening voluntaries,

'Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
With fancy-led, half-conscious finger. 40

'A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

'I ask no ampler skies than those

His magic music rears above me,

Sometimes a breath floats by me,

An odor from Dreamland sent, That makes the ghost seem nigh me Of a splendor that came and went, Of a life lived somewhere, I know not In what diviner sphere, Of memories that stay not and go not, Like music heard once by an ear

That cannot forget or reclaim it, A something so shy, it would shame it To make it a show,

A something too vague, could I name it, For others to know,

As if I had lived it or dreamed it,

As if I had acted or schemed it,
Long ago!

And yet, could I live it over,

This life that stirs in my brain, Could I be both maiden and lover, Moon and tide, bee and clover,

As I seem to have been, once again, Could I but speak it and show it,

40

50

Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.

'Lo, time and space enough,' we cry,
To write an epic!' so we try
Our nibs upon the edge, and die.

Muse not which way the pen to hold,
Luck hates the slow and loves the bold,
Soon come the darkness and the cold.

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

THE electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill

Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes,

1 See Lowell's letters to Professor Charles Eliot Norton, February 2, and February 26, 1874, especially the second letter. Lowell was in Florence when Agassiz died. His death,' he says, 'came home to me in a singular way, growing into my consciousness from day to day as if it were a graft new-set, that by degrees became part of my own wood and drew a greater share of my sap than belonged to it, as grafts sometimes will.' (Lowell's Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. ii, pp. 115116.) See also the references in note on p. 211.