A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown.
Thrice-venerable spot!
River more fateful than the Rubicon !
O'er those red planks, to snatch her diadem, Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them, And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.
Think you these felt no charms
In their gray homesteads and embowered farms? In household faces waiting at the door
Their evening step should lighten up no more? In fields their boyish steps had known?
In trees their fathers' hands had set
And which with them had grown
Widening each year their leafy coronet?
Felt they no pang of passionate regret
For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?
These things are dear to every man that lives,
And life prized more for what it lends than gives; Yea, many a tie, by iteration sweet,
Strove to detain their fatal feet:
And yet the enduring half they chose,
Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,—
The invisible things of God before the seen and known :
Therefore their memory inspiration blows
With echoes gathering on from zone to zone, For manhood is the one immortal thing Beneath Time's changeful sky,
And, where it lightened once, from age to age Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, That length of days is knowing when to die.
What marvellous change of things and men! She, a world-wandering orphan then, So mighty now! Those are her streams That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels Of all that does and all that dreams, Of all that thinks and all that feels Through spaces stretched from sea to sea : By idle tongues and busy brains,
By who doth right and who refrains, Hers are our losses and our gains, Our maker and our victim she.
Maiden half mortal, half divine,
We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks
Our hearts were filled with pride's tumultuous wine; Better to-day who rather feels than thinks: Yet will some graver thoughts intrude
And cares of nobler mood:
They won thee who shall keep thee? From the deeps Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood,
And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps, I hear the voice as of a mighty wind
From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined,- "I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide With men whom dust of faction cannot blind To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind; With men, by culture trained and fortified, Who bitter duty to sweet lusts prefer, Fearless to counsel and obey:
Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword, Not to be drawn in passion or in play, But terrible to punish and deter,
Implacable as God's word,
Like it a shepherd's crook to them that blindly err, Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints, Shoots of that only race whose patient sense Hath known to mingle flux with permanence, Rated my chaste denials and restraints Above the moment's dear-paid paradise: Beware lest, shifting with Time's gradual creep, The light that guided shine into your eyes: The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep; Be therefore timely wise,
Nor laugh when this one steals and that one lies, As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies, Till the deaf fury come your house to sweep!" I hear the voice and unaffrighted bow:
Ye shall not be prophetic now,
Heralds of ill, that darkening fly
Between my vision and the rainbowed sky, Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak
From many a blasted bough
On Igdrasil's storm-sinewed oak,
That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou.
Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast,
For thee I love as those who pardon most.
Away, ungrateful doubt, away! At least she is our own to-day; Break into rapture, my song, Verses, leap forth in the sun, Bearing the joyance along
Like a train of fire as ye run! Pause not for choosing of words, Let them but blossom and sing Blithe as the orchards and birds With the new coming of spring! Dance in your jollity, bells, Shout, cannon, cease not, ye drums, Answer, ye hill-sides and dells, Bow, all ye people, she comes, Radiant, calm-fronted as when She hallowed that April day : Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay, Softener and strengthener of men, Freedom, not won by the vain, Not to be courted in play, Not to be kept without pain! Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay, Handmaid and mistress of all, Kindler of deed and of thought, Thou, that to hut and to hall Equal deliverance brought ! Souls of her martyrs, draw near, Touch our dull lips with your fire, That we may praise without fear Her, our delight, our desire, Our faith's inextinguishable star, Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, Our present, our past, our to be,
Who will mingle her life with our dust And make us deserve to be free!
WHILE the slow clock, as they were miser's gold, Counts and recounts the mornward steps of Time, The darkness thrills with conscience of each crime By Death committed, daily grown more cold; Once more the list of all my wrongs is told, And ghostly hands stretch to me from my prime, Helpless farewells, as from an alien clime; For each new loss redoubles all the old. This morn 'twas May; the blossoms were astir With southern wind; but now the boughs are bent With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze : How much of all my past is dumb with her, And of my future, too, for with her went Half of that world I ever cared to please! May 13th, 1877.
As sinks the sun behind yon alien hills, Whose heather-purpled slopes, in glory round Flush all my thoughts with momentary gold What pang of vain regret my fancy thrills! Here 'tis enchanted ground the peasant tills, Where the shy ballad dared its blooms unfold, And memory's glamour makes new sights seem old, As when our life some vanished dream fulfils; Yet not to thee belong these painless tears, Land loved, ere seen; before my darkened eyes, From far beyond the waters and the years,
Horizons mute that wait their poet rise; The stream before me faints and disappears, And in the shades the western splendour dies.
ON BEING ASKED FOR AN AUTOGRAPH IN VENICE.
Amid these fragments of heroic days,
When thought met deed with mutual passions' leap, There sits a Fame whose silent trump makes cheap What short-lived rumour of ourselves we raise ; They had far other estimate of praise Who stamped the signet of their soul so deep In art and action, and whose memories keep Their height like stars above our misty ways; In this grave presence to record my name, Something within me hangs the head and shrinks; Dull were the soul without some joy in Fame : Yet here to claim remembrance were, methinks, Like him who in the desert's awful frame, Notches his cockney initials on the sphinx.
THE DANCING BEAR.
FAR Over Elf-land poets sketch their sway, And win their dearest crowns beyond the goal Of their own conscious purpose; they control With gossamer threads wide-flown our fancy's play, And so our action. On my walk to-day A wallowing bear begged clumsily his toll, When straight a vision rose of Atta Troll,
And scenes ideal witched mine eyes away.
'Merci, Mossiew!" the astonished bear-ward cried, Grateful for thrice his hope to me, the slave
Of partial memory, seeing at his side
A bear immortal; the glad dole I gave Was none of mine; poor Heine o'er the wide Atlantic water reached it from his grave.
UNCONSCIOUS as the sunshine, simply sweet, And generous as that, thou dost not close Thyself in art, as life were but a rose To rumple bee-like with luxurious feet; Thy higher mind therein finds sure retreat,
But not from care of common hopes and woes :
Thee the dark chamber, thee the unfriended knows, Although no gaping crowds thy praise repeat; Consummate artist, who life's landscape bleak Hast brimmed with sun, to many a clouded eye, Touched to a brighter hue the beggar's cheek, Hung over orphan lives a gracious sky,
And traced for eyes, that else would vainly seek, Fair pictures of an angel drawing nigh. FLORENCE, ITALY, January 1874.
WRITTEN IN A CHILD'S ALBUM.
'TWAS sung of old in hut and hall, How once a king in evil hour Hung musing o'er his castle wall, And, lost in idle dreams, let fall' Into the sea his ring of power.
Then, let him sorrow as he might, And pledge his daughter and his throne To who restored the jewel bright, The broken spell would ne'er unite; The grim old ocean held his own.
Those awful powers on man that wait, On man, the beggar or the king, To hovel bare or hall of state,
A magic ring that masters fate
On each succeeding birthday bring.
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