Part 2

Now forth into the darkness all are gone, But memory, still unsated, follows on, Retracing step by step our homeward walk, With many a laugh among our serious talk, Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide, The long red streamers from the windows glide, Or the dim western moon Rocks her skiff’s image on the broad lagoon, And Boston shows a soft Venetian side In that Arcadian light when roof and tree, Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy; Or haply in the sky’s cold chambers wide Shivered the winter stars, while all below, As if an end were come of human ill, The world was wrapt in innocence of snow And the cast-iron bay was blind and still; These were our poetry; in him perhaps Science had barred the gate that lets in dream, And he would rather count the perch and bream Than with the current’s idle fancy lapse; And yet he had the poet’s open eye That takes a frank delight in all it sees, Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky, To him the life-long friend of fields and trees: Then came the prose of the suburban street, Its silence deepened by our echoing feet, And converse such as rambling hazard finds; Then he who many cities knew and many minds, And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian forms Of misty memory, bade them live anew As when they shared earth’s manifold delight, In shape, in gait, in voice, in gesture true, And, with an accent heightening as he warms, Would stop forgetful of the shortening night, Drop my confining arm, and pour profuse Much worldly wisdom kept for others' use, Not for his own, for he was rash and free, His purse or knowledge all men’s, like the sea. Still can I hear his voice’s shrilling might (With pauses broken, while the fitful spark He blew more hotly rounded on the dark To hint his features with a Rembrandt light) Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck, Or Cuvier’s taller shade, and many more Whom he had seen, or knew from others' sight, And make them men to me as ne’er before: Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea, German or French thrust by the lagging word, For a good leash of mother-tongues had he. At last, arrived at where our paths divide, “Good night!” and, ere the distance grew too wide, “Good night!” again; and now with cheated ear I half hear his who mine shall never hear.

2.

Sometimes it seemed as if New England air For his large lungs too parsimonious were, As if those empty rooms of dogma drear Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere Counting the horns o’er of the Beast, Still scaring those whose faith in it is least, As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere That sharpen all the needles of the East, Had been to him like death, Accustomed to draw Europe’s freer breath In a more stable element; Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose, Our practical horizon grimly pent, Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze, Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close, Our social monotone of level days, Might make our best seem banishment; But it was nothing so; Haply his instinct might divine, Beneath our drift of puritanic snow, The marvel sensitive and fine Of sanguinaria over-rash to blow And trust its shyness to an air malign; Well might he prize truth’s warranty and pledge In the grim outcrop of our granite edge, Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need In the gaunt sons of Calvin’s iron breed, As prompt to give as skilled to win and keep; But, though such intuitions might not cheer, Yet life was good to him, and, there or here, With that sufficing joy, the day was never cheap; Thereto his mind was its own ample sphere, And, like those buildings great that through the year Carry one temperature, his nature large Made its own climate, nor could any marge Traced by convention stay him from his bent: He had a habitude of mountain air; He brought wide outlook where he went, And could on sunny uplands dwell Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair High-hung of viny Neufchâtel; Nor, surely, did he miss Some pale, imaginary bliss Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss.

V. 1.

I cannot think he wished so soon to die With all his senses full of eager heat, And rosy years that stood expectant by To buckle the winged sandals on their feet, He that was friends with earth, and all her sweet Took with both hands unsparingly: Truly this life is precious to the root, And good the feel of grass beneath the foot; To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom, Tenants in common with the bees, And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees, Is better than long waiting in the tomb; Only once more to feel the coming spring As the birds feel it when it bids them sing, Only once more to see the moon Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms Curve her mild sickle in the West Sweet with the breath of hay-cocks, were a boon Worth any promise of soothsayer realms Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest; To take December by the beard And crush the creaking snow with springy foot, While overhead the North’s dumb streamers shoot, Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared, Then the long evening-ends Lingered by cosy chimney-nooks, With high companionship of books Or slippered talk of friends And sweet habitual looks, Is better than to stop the ears with dust: Too soon the spectre comes to say, “Thou must!”

2.

When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast, They comfort us with sense of rest; They must be glad to lie forever still; Their work is ended with their day; Another fills their room; ’tis the World’s ancient way, Whether for good or ill; But the deft spinners of the brain, Who love each added day and find it gain, Them overtakes the doom To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom (Trophy that was to be of life-long pain), The thread no other skill can ever knit again. ’Twas so with him, for he was glad to live, ’Twas doubly so, for he left work begun; Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive Till all the allotted flax were spun? It matters not; for, go at night or noon, A friend, whene’er he dies, has died too soon, And, once we hear the hopeless _He is dead_, So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

VI. 1.

I seem to see the black procession go: That crawling prose of death too well I know, The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe; I see it wind through that unsightly grove, Once beautiful, but long defaced With granite permanence of cockney taste And all those grim disfigurements we love: There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste Nature rebels at: and it is not true Of those most precious parts of him we knew: Could we be conscious but as dreamers be, ’Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity; Nay, to be mingled with the elements, The fellow-servant of creative powers, Partaker in the solemn year’s events, To share the work of busy-fingered hours, To be night’s silent almoner of dew, To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, To stream as tides the ocean caverns through, Or with the rapture of great winds to blow About earth’s shaken coignes, were not a fate To leave us all-disconsolate; Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod Of charitable earth That takes out all our mortal stains, And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod, Methinks were better worth Than the poor fruit of most men’s wakeful pains, The heart’s insatiable ache: But such was not his faith, Nor mine: it may be he had trod Outside the plain old path of _God thus spake_, But God to him was very God, And not a visionary wraith Skulking in murky corners of the mind, And he was sure to be Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, Not with His essence mystically combined, As some high spirits long, but whole and free, A perfected and conscious Agassiz. And such I figure him: the wise of old Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold, Not truly with the guild enrolled Of him who seeking inward guessed Diviner riddles than the rest, And groping in the darks of thought Touched the Great Hand and knew it not; Rather he shares the daily light, From reason’s charier fountains won, Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite, And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

2.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled The winning tongue; the forehead’s high-piled heap, A cairn which every science helped to build, Unvalued will its golden secrets keep: He knows at last if Life or Death be best: Wherever he be flown, whatever vest The being hath put on which lately here So many-friended was, so full of cheer To make men feel the Seeker’s noble zest, We have not lost him all; he is not gone To the dumb herd of them that wholly die; The beauty of his better self lives on In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye He trained to Truth’s exact severity; He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him Whose living word still stimulates the air? In endless file shall loving scholars come The glow of his transmitted touch to share, And trace his features with an eye less dim Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb.

FLORENCE, ITALY, _February, 1874_.

TO HOLMES

ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY.

Dear Wendell, why need count the years Since first your genius made me thrill, If what moved then to smiles or tears, Or both contending, move me still?

What has the Calendar to do With poets? What Time’s fruitless tooth With gay immortals such as you Whose years but emphasize your youth?

One air gave both their lease of breath; The same paths lured our boyish feet; One earth will hold us safe in death, With dust of saints and scholars sweet.

Our legends from one source were drawn, I scarce distinguish yours from mine, And _don’t_ we make the Gentiles yawn With “You remembers?” o’er our wine!

If I, with too senescent air, Invade your elder memory’s pale, You snub me with a pitying “Where Were you in the September Gale?”

Both stared entranced at Lafayette, Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet As scarcely worth one’s while to see.

Ten years my senior, when my name In Harvard’s entrance-book was writ, Her halls still echoed with the fame Of you, her poet and her wit.

’Tis fifty years from then to now: But your Last Leaf renews its green, Though, for the laurels on your brow (So thick they crowd), ’tis hardly seen.

The oriole’s fledglings fifty times Have flown from our familiar elms; As many poets with their rhymes Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms.

The birds are hushed, the poets gone Where no harsh critic’s lash can reach, And still your wingëd brood sing on To all who love our English speech.

Nay, let the foolish records be That make believe you’re seventy-five: You’re the old Wendell still to me,-- And that’s the youngest man alive.

The gray-blue eyes, I see them still, The gallant front with brown o’erhung, The shape alert, the wit at will, The phrase that stuck, but never stung.

You keep your youth as yon Scotch firs, Whose gaunt line my horizon hems, Though twilight all the lowland blurs, Hold sunset in their ruddy stems.

_You_ with the elders? Yes, ’tis true, But in no sadly literal sense, With elders and coevals too, Whose verb admits no preterite tense.

Master alike in speech and song Of fame’s great antiseptic--Style, You with the classic few belong Who tempered wisdom with a smile.

Outlive us all! Who else like you Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff, And make us with the pen we knew Deathless at least in epitaph?

WOLLASTON, _August 29, 1884_.

IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue, When Contemplation tells her pensive beads Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new. Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!

The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel, Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl, Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON’S “OLD WORLD IDYLLS.”

I.

At length arrived, your book I take To read in for the author’s sake; Too gray for new sensations grown, Can charm to Art or Nature known This torpor from my senses shake?

Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake? Is a thrush gurgling from the brake? Has Spring, on all the breezes blown, At length arrived?

Long may you live such songs to make, And I to listen while you wake, With skill of late disused, each tone Of the _Lesboum barbiton_, At mastery, through long finger-ache, At length arrived.

II.

As I read on, what changes steal O’er me and through, from head to heel? A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside, My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,-- Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele!

Down vistas long of clipt _charmille_ Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel; Tabor and pipe the dancers guide As I read on.

While in and out the verses wheel The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal, Lithe ankles that to music glide, But chastely and by chance descried; Art? Nature? Which do I most feel As I read on?

TO C. F. BRADFORD

ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE.

The pipe came safe, and welcome too, As anything must be from you; A meerschaum pure, ’twould float as light As she the girls call Amphitrite. Mixture divine of foam and clay, From both it stole the best away: Its foam is such as crowns the glow Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot; Its clay is but congested lymph Jove chose to make some choicer nymph; And here combined,--why, this must be The birth of some enchanted sea, Shaped to immortal form, the type And very Venus of a pipe.

When high I heap it with the weed From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore And cast upon Virginia’s shore, I’ll think,--So fill the fairer bowl And wise alembic of thy soul, With herbs far-sought that shall distil, Not fumes to slacken thought and will, But bracing essences that nerve To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve.

When curls the smoke in eddies soft, And hangs a shifting dream aloft, That gives and takes, though chance-designed, The impress of the dreamer’s mind, I’ll think,--So let the vapors bred By Passion, in the heart or head, Pass off and upward into space, Waving farewells of tenderest grace, Remembered in some happier time, To blend their beauty with my rhyme.

While slowly o’er its candid bowl The color deepens (as the soul That burns in mortals leaves its trace Of bale or beauty on the face), I’ll think,--So let the essence rare Of years consuming make me fair; So, ’gainst the ills of life profuse, Steep me in some narcotic juice; And if my soul must part with all That whiteness which we greenness call, Smooth back, O Fortune, half thy frown, And make me beautifully brown!

Dream-forger, I refill thy cup With reverie’s wasteful pittance up, And while the fire burns slow away, Hiding itself in ashes gray, I’ll think,--As inward Youth retreats, Compelled to spare his wasting heats, When Life’s Ash-Wednesday comes about, And my head’s gray with fires burnt out, While stays one spark to light the eye, With the last flash of memory, ’Twill leap to welcome C. F. B., Who sent my favorite pipe to me.

BANKSIDE.

(HOME OF EDMUND QUINCY.)

DEDHAM, MAY 21, 1877.

I.

I christened you in happier days, before These gray forebodings on my brow were seen; You are still lovely in your new-leaved green; The brimming river soothes his grassy shore; The bridge is there; the rock with lichens hoar; And the same shadows on the water lean, Outlasting us. How many graves between That day and this! How many shadows more Darken my heart, their substance from these eyes Hidden forever! So our world is made Of life and death commingled; and the sighs Outweigh the smiles, in equal balance laid: What compensation? None, save that the All-wise So schools us to love things that cannot fade.

II.

Thank God, he saw you last in pomp of May, Ere any leaf had felt the year’s regret; Your latest image in his memory set Was fair as when your landscape’s peaceful sway Charmed dearer eyes with his to make delay On Hope’s long prospect,--as if They forget The happy, They, the unspeakable Three, whose debt, Like the hawk’s shadow, blots our brightest day: Better it is that ye should look so fair, Slopes that he loved, and ever-murmuring pines That make a music out of silent air, And bloom-heaped orchard-trees in prosperous lines; In you the heart some sweeter hints divines, And wiser, than in winter’s dull despair.

III.

Old Friend, farewell! Your kindly door again I enter, but the master’s hand in mine No more clasps welcome, and the temperate wine, That cheered our long nights, other lips must stain: All is unchanged, but I expect in vain The face alert, the manners free and fine, The seventy years borne lightly as the pine Wears its first down of snow in green disdain: Much did he, and much well; yet most of all I prized his skill in leisure and the ease Of a life flowing full without a plan; For most are idly busy; him I call Thrice fortunate who knew himself to please, Learned in those arts that make a gentleman.

IV.

Nor deem he lived unto himself alone; His was the public spirit of his sire, And in those eyes, soft with domestic fire, A quenchless light of fiercer temper shone What time about the world our shame was blown On every wind; his soul would not conspire With selfish men to soothe the mob’s desire, Veiling with garlands Moloch’s bloody stone; The high-bred instincts of a better day Ruled in his blood, when to be citizen Rang Roman yet, and a Free People’s sway Was not the exchequer of impoverished men, Nor statesmanship with loaded votes to play, Nor public office a tramps' boosing-ken.

JOSEPH WINLOCK.

DIED JUNE 11, 1875.

Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient will Through years one hair’s-breadth on our Dark to gain, Who, from the stars he studied not in vain, Had learned their secret to be strong and still, Careless of fames that earth’s tin trumpets fill; Born under Leo, broad of build and brain, While others slept, he watched in that hushed fane Of Science, only witness of his skill: Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell, But inextinguishable his luminous trace In mind and heart of all that knew him well. Happy man’s doom! To him the Fates were known Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of space, Unprescient, through God’s mercy, of his own!

SONNET.

TO FANNY ALEXANDER.

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 babbling 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 orphaned lives a gracious sky, And traced for eyes, that else would vainly seek, Fair pictures of an angel drawing nigh!

FLORENCE, 1873.

JEFFRIES WYMAN.

DIED SEPTEMBER 4, 1874.

The wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many, honored by the Few; To count as naught in World, or Church, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great; To feel mysterious Nature ever new; To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clew, And learn by each discovery how to wait. He widened knowledge and escaped the praise; He wisely taught, because more wise to learn; He toiled for Science, not to draw men’s gaze, But for her lore of self-denial stern. That such a man could spring from our decays Fans the soul’s nobler faith until it burn.

TO A FRIEND

WHO GAVE ME A GROUP OF WEEDS AND GRASSES, AFTER A DRAWING OF DÜRER.

True as the sun’s own work, but more refined, It tells of love behind the artist’s eye, Of sweet companionships with earth and sky, And summers stored, the sunshine of the mind. What peace! Sure, ere you breathe, the fickle wind Will break its truce and bend that grass-plume high, Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly That flits a more luxurious perch to find. Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall, A serene moment, deftly caught and kept To make immortal summer on my wall. Had he who drew such gladness ever wept? Ask rather could he else have seen at all, Or grown in Nature’s mysteries an adept?

WITH AN ARMCHAIR.

About the oak that framed this chair, of old The seasons danced their round; delighted wings Brought music to its boughs; shy woodland things Shared its broad roof, ’neath whose green glooms grown bold, Lovers, more shy than they, their secret told; The resurrection of a thousand springs Swelled in its veins, and dim imaginings Teased them, perchance, of life more manifold. Such shall it know when its proud arms enclose My Lady Goshawk, musing here at rest, Careless of him who into exile goes, Yet, while his gift by those fair limbs is prest, Through some fine sympathy of nature knows That, seas between us, she is still his guest.

E. G. DE R.

Why should I seek her spell to decompose Or to its source each rill of influence trace That feeds the brimming river of her grace? The petals numbered but degrade to prose Summer’s triumphant poem of the rose: Enough for me to watch the wavering chase, Like wind o’er grass, of moods across her face, Fairest in motion, fairer in repose. Steeped in her sunshine, let me, while I may, Partake the bounty: I content should be That her mirth cheats my temples of their gray, Her charm makes years long spent seem yet to be. Wit, goodness, grace, swift flash from grave to gay,-- All these are good, but better far is she.

BON VOYAGE!

Ship, blest to bear such freight across the blue, May stormless stars control thy horoscope; In keel and hull, in every spar and rope, Be night and day to thy dear office true! Ocean, men’s path and their divider too, No fairer shrine of memory and hope To the underworld adown thy westering slope E’er vanished, or whom such regrets pursue: Smooth all thy surges as when Jove to Crete Swam with less costly burthen, and prepare A pathway meet for her home-coming soon With golden undulations such as greet The printless summer-sandals of the moon And tempt the Nautilus his cruise to dare!

TO WHITTIER

ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY.

New England’s poet, rich in love as years, Her hills and valleys praise thee, her swift brooks Dance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooks Thy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hears As maids their lovers', and no treason fears; Through thee her Merrimacs and Agiochooks And many a name uncouth win gracious looks, Sweetly familiar to both Englands' ears: Peaceful by birthright as a virgin lake, The lily’s anchorage, which no eyes behold Save those of stars, yet for thy brother’s sake That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as bold As that wherewith the heart of Roland brake, Far heard across the New World and the Old.

ON AN AUTUMN SKETCH OF H. G. WILD.