Something there was that chilled me in her voice; I felt Youth's hand grow slack and cold in mine, As if to be withdrawn, and I replied: "O, leave the hot wild heart within my breast! Duty comes soon enough, too soon comes Death; This slippery globe of life whirls of itself, Hasting our youth away into the dark; These senses, quivering with electric heats, Too soon will show, like nests on wintry boughs Obtrusive emptiness, too palpable wreck, Which whistling north-winds line with downy snow Sometimes, or fringe with foliaged rime, Thither the singing birds no more rein vain, turn.' Where Hunger reaped the unattainable grain, Where Idleness enforced saw idle lands, Leagues of unpeopled soil, the common earth, Walled round with paper against God and Man. "I cannot look," I groaned, "at only these ; The heart grows hardened with perpetual wont, And palters with a feigned necessity, The Form replied: 'Men follow Duty, never overtake; Duty nor lifts her veil nor looks behind." But, as she spake, a loosened lock of hair Slipped from beneath her hood, and I, who looked To see it gray and thin, saw amplest gold; Not that dull metal dug from sordid earth, But such as the retiring sunset flood Leaves heaped on bays and capes of island cloud. "O Guide divine," I prayed, "although not yet I may repair the virtue which I feel Gone out at touch of untuned things and foul With draughts of Beauty, yet declare how soon!" "Faithless and faint of heart," the voice returned, "Thou see'st no beauty save thou make it first; Man, Woman, Nature, each is but a glass Where the soul sees the image of herself, Visible echoes, offsprings of herself. But, since thou need'st assurance of how | Since last, dear friend, I clasped your hand, And stood upon the impoverished land, The old worn world of hurry and heat, The young, fresh world of thought and scope, While you, where beckoning billows fleet Climb far sky-beaches still and sweet, You sought the new world in the old, He needs no ship to cross the tide, Whatever moulds of various brain Come back our ancient walks to tread, Dear haunts of lost or scattered friends, Old Harvard's scholar-factories red, Where song and smoke and laughter sped The nights to proctor-haunted ends. Constant are all our former loves, Unchanged the icehouse-girdled pond, Its hemlock glooms, its shadowy coves, Where floats the coot and never moves, Its slopes of long-tamed green beyond. Our old familiars are not laid, Though snapt our wands and sunk our books; They beckon, not to be gainsaid, Where, round broad meads that mowers wade, The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks. Curl slow, and plunge forever in. Where, as the cloudbergs eastward blow, | Against the beach's yellow zone, There have we watched the West unfurl And vapory surfs that crowd and curl Doubtful at first and far away, Up a ridged beach of cloudy gray, Then suddenly, in lurid mood, And, as we watch those canvas towers hours Convoy you from this land of ours, For years thrice three, wise Horace said, Come back! Not ours the Old World's The Old World's ill, thank God, not The days enforce our native mood, That first my tottering footsteps trod; Thence climbs an influence more benign Sacred to me those fibres fine That first clasped earth. O, ne'er be mine The alien sun and alien rain! These nourish not like homelier glows The moon looms large o'er town and In pastures dear to childhood's eyes, And scorned to have her sweet caprices Strait-waistcoated in you or me. I, who take root and firmly eling, Thought fixedness the only thing; Why Nature made the butterflies, (Those dreams of wings that float and hover At noon the slumberous poppies over,) Was something hidden from mine eyes, Till once, upon a rock's brown bosom, Then first of both I felt the beauty; Clearer it grew than winter sky Scythians, with Nature not at strife, An hour they pitch their shifting tents In thoughts, in feelings, and events; Beneath the palm-trees, on the grass, They sing, they dance, make love, and chatter, Vex the grim temples with their clatter, And make Truth's fount their lookingglass. A picnic life; from love to love, No lens to see them through like her. So witchingly her finger-tips row A perfectness found nowhere else. | The beach-bird on its pearly verge Thy virtue makes not vice of mine, SELF-STUDY. A PRESENCE both by night and day, And yet I felt it everywhere; How sweet it was! A buttercup Who was the nymph? Nay, I will see, And spells as numberless as sand, I turned to clasp her, but "Farewell," poor. "Since you have found me out, I go; |