Chapter 3
Sweet-fern and moss in many a glade are here. Where, strewn in flocks, what cheek-flushed myriads lie Dimpling in dream—unconscious slumberers mere, While billows endless round the beaches die.
PEBBLES
I
Though the Clerk of the Weather insist, And lay down the weather-law, Pintado and gannet they wist That the winds blow whither they list In tempest or flaw.
II
Old are the creeds, but stale the schools, Revamped as the mode may veer, But Orm from the schools to the beaches strays And, finding a Conch hoar with time, he delays And reverent lifts it to ear. That Voice, pitched in far monotone, Shall it swerve? shall it deviate ever? The Seas have inspired it, and Truth— Truth, varying from sameness never.
III
In hollows of the liquid hills Where the long Blue Ridges run, The flattery of no echo thrills, For echo the seas have none; Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain— The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain.
IV
On ocean where the embattled fleets repair, Man, suffering inflictor, sails on sufferance there.
V
Implacable I, the old Implacable Sea: Implacable most when most I smile serene— Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.
VI
Curled in the comb of yon billow Andean, Is it the Dragon’s heaven-challenging crest? Elemental mad ramping of ravening waters— Yet Christ on the Mount, and the dove in her nest!
VII
Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea— Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene; For healed I am ever by their pitiless breath Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine.
POEMS FROM TIMOLEON
LINES TRACED UNDER AN IMAGE OF AMOR THREATENING
Fear me, virgin whosoever Taking pride from love exempt, Fear me, slighted. Never, never Brave me, nor my fury tempt: Downy wings, but wroth they beat Tempest even in reason’s seat.
THE NIGHT MARCH
With banners furled and clarions mute, An army passes in the night; And beaming spears and helms salute The dark with bright.
In silence deep the legions stream, With open ranks, in order true; Over boundless plains they stream and gleam— No chief in view!
Afar, in twinkling distance lost, (So legends tell) he lonely wends And back through all that shining host His mandate sends.
THE RAVAGED VILLA
In shards the sylvan vases lie, Their links of dance undone, And brambles wither by thy brim, Choked fountain of the sun! The spider in the laurel spins, The weed exiles the flower: And, flung to kiln, Apollo’s bust Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.
THE NEW ZEALOT TO THE SUN
Persian, you rise Aflame from climes of sacrifice Where adulators sue, And prostrate man, with brow abased, Adheres to rites whose tenor traced All worship hitherto.
Arch type of sway, Meetly your over-ruling ray You fling from Asia’s plain, Whence flashed the javelins abroad Of many a wild incursive horde Led by some shepherd Cain.
Mid terrors dinned Gods too came conquerors from your Ind, The book of Brahma throve; They came like to the scythed car, Westward they rolled their empire far, Of night their purple wove.
Chemist, you breed In orient climes each sorcerous weed That energizes dream— Transmitted, spread in myths and creeds, Houris and hells, delirious screeds And Calvin’s last extreme.
What though your light In time’s first dawn compelled the flight Of Chaos’ startled clan, Shall never all your darted spears Disperse worse Anarchs, frauds and fears, Sprung from these weeds to man?
But Science yet An effluence ampler shall beget, And power beyond your play— Shall quell the shades you fail to rout, Yea, searching every secret out Elucidate your ray.
MONODY
To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal— Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees’ crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape.
LONE FOUNTS
Though fast youth’s glorious fable flies, View not the world with worldling’s eyes; Nor turn with weather of the time. Foreclose the coming of surprise: Stand where Posterity shall stand; Stand where the Ancients stood before, And, dipping in lone founts thy hand, Drink of the never-varying lore: Wise once, and wise thence evermore.
THE BENCH OF BOORS
In bed I muse on Tenier’s boors, Embrowned and beery losels all; A wakeful brain Elaborates pain: Within low doors the slugs of boors Laze and yawn and doze again.
In dreams they doze, the drowsy boors, Their hazy hovel warm and small: Thought’s ampler bound But chill is found: Within low doors the basking boors Snugly hug the ember-mound.
Sleepless, I see the slumberous boors Their blurred eyes blink, their eyelids fall: Thought’s eager sight Aches—overbright! Within low doors the boozy boors Cat-naps take in pipe-bowl light.
ART
In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt—a wind to freeze; Sad patience—joyous energies; Humility—yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel—Art.
THE ENTHUSIAST
_“Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him.”_
Shall hearts that beat no base retreat In youth’s magnanimous years— Ignoble hold it, if discreet When interest tames to fears; Shall spirits that worship light Perfidious deem its sacred glow, Recant, and trudge where worldlings go, Conform and own them right?
Shall Time with creeping influence cold Unnerve and cow? the heart Pine for the heartless ones enrolled With palterers of the mart? Shall faith abjure her skies, Or pale probation blench her down To shrink from Truth so still, so lone Mid loud gregarious lies?
Each burning boat in Caesar’s rear, Flames—No return through me! So put the torch to ties though dear, If ties but tempters be. Nor cringe if come the night: Walk through the cloud to meet the pall, Though light forsake thee, never fall From fealty to light.
SHELLEY’S VISION
Wandering late by morning seas When my heart with pain was low— Hate the censor pelted me— Deject I saw my shadow go.
In elf-caprice of bitter tone I too would pelt the pelted one: At my shadow I cast a stone.
When lo, upon that sun-lit ground I saw the quivering phantom take The likeness of St. Stephen crowned: Then did self-reverence awake.
THE MARCHIONESS OF BRINVILLIERS
He toned the sprightly beam of morning With twilight meek of tender eve, Brightness interfused with softness, Light and shade did weave: And gave to candor equal place With mystery starred in open skies; And, floating all in sweetness, made Her fathomless mild eyes.
THE AGE OF THE ANTONINES
While faith forecasts millennial years Spite Europe’s embattled lines, Back to the Past one glance be cast— The Age of the Antonines! O summit of fate, O zenith of time When a pagan gentleman reigned, And the olive was nailed to the inn of the world Nor the peace of the just was feigned. A halcyon Age, afar it shines, Solstice of Man and the Antonines.
Hymns to the nations’ friendly gods Went up from the fellowly shrines, No demagogue beat the pulpit-drum In the Age of the Antonines! The sting was not dreamed to be taken from death, No Paradise pledged or sought, But they reasoned of fate at the flowing feast, Nor stifled the fluent thought, We sham, we shuffle while faith declines— They were frank in the Age of the Antonines.
Orders and ranks they kept degree, Few felt how the parvenu pines, No law-maker took the lawless one’s fee In the Age of the Antonines! Under law made will the world reposed And the ruler’s right confessed, For the heavens elected the Emperor then, The foremost of men the best. Ah, might we read in America’s signs The Age restored of the Antonines.
HERBA SANTA
I
After long wars when comes release Not olive wands proclaiming peace Can import dearer share Than stems of Herba Santa hazed In autumn’s Indian air. Of moods they breathe that care disarm, They pledge us lenitive and calm.
II
Shall code or creed a lure afford To win all selves to Love’s accord? When Love ordained a supper divine For the wide world of man, What bickerings o’er his gracious wine! Then strange new feuds began.
Effectual more in lowlier way, Pacific Herb, thy sensuous plea The bristling clans of Adam sway At least to fellowship in thee! Before thine altar tribal flags are furled, Fain wouldst thou make one hearthstone of the world.
III
To scythe, to sceptre, pen and hod— Yea, sodden laborers dumb; To brains overplied, to feet that plod, In solace of the _Truce of God_ The Calumet has come!
IV
Ah for the world ere Raleigh’s find Never that knew this suasive balm That helps when Gilead’s fails to heal, Helps by an interserted charm.
Insinuous thou that through the nerve Windest the soul, and so canst win Some from repinings, some from sin, The Church’s aim thou dost subserve.
The ruffled fag fordone with care And brooding, God would ease this pain: Him soothest thou and smoothest down Till some content return again.
Even ruffians feel thy influence breed Saint Martin’s summer in the mind, They feel this last evangel plead, As did the first, apart from creed, Be peaceful, man—be kind!
V
Rejected once on higher plain, O Love supreme, to come again Can this be thine? Again to come, and win us too In likeness of a weed That as a god didst vainly woo, As man more vainly bleed?
VI
Forbear, my soul! and in thine Eastern chamber Rehearse the dream that brings the long release: Through jasmine sweet and talismanic amber Inhaling Herba Santa in the passive Pipe of Peace.
OFF CAPE COLONNA
Aloof they crown the foreland lone, From aloft they loftier rise— Fair columns, in the aureole rolled From sunned Greek seas and skies. They wax, sublimed to fancy’s view, A god-like group against the blue.
Over much like gods! Serene they saw The wolf-waves board the deck, And headlong hull of Falconer, And many a deadlier wreck.
THE APPARITION
_The Parthenon uplifted on its rock first challenging the view on the approach to Athens._
Abrupt the supernatural Cross, Vivid in startled air, Smote the Emperor Constantine And turned his soul’s allegiance there.
With other power appealing down, Trophy of Adam’s best! If cynic minds you scarce convert, You try them, shake them, or molest.
Diogenes, that honest heart, Lived ere your date began; Thee had he seen, he might have swerved In mood nor barked so much at Man.
L’ENVOI
_The Return of the Sire de Nesle._ A.D. 16
My towers at last! These rovings end, Their thirst is slaked in larger dearth: The yearning infinite recoils, For terrible is earth.
Kaf thrusts his snouted crags through fog: Araxes swells beyond his span, And knowledge poured by pilgrimage Overflows the banks of man.
But thou, my stay, thy lasting love One lonely good, let this but be! Weary to view the wide world’s swarm, But blest to fold but thee.
SUPPLEMENT
Were I fastidiously anxious for the symmetry of this book, it would close with the notes. But the times are such that patriotism—not free from solicitude—urges a claim overriding all literary scruples.
It is more than a year since the memorable surrender, but events have not yet rounded themselves into completion. Not justly can we complain of this. There has been an upheaval affecting the basis of things; to altered circumstances complicated adaptations are to be made; there are difficulties great and novel. But is Reason still waiting for Passion to spend itself? We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians?
In view of the infinite desirableness of Re-establishment, and considering that, so far as feeling is concerned, it depends not mainly on the temper in which the South regards the North, but rather conversely; one who never was a blind adherent feels constrained to submit some thoughts, counting on the indulgence of his countrymen.
And, first, it may be said that, if among the feelings and opinions growing immediately out of a great civil convulsion, there are any which time shall modify or do away, they are presumably those of a less temperate and charitable cast.
There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan. Yet the work of Reconstruction, if admitted to be feasible at all, demands little but common sense and Christian charity. Little but these? These are much.
Some of us are concerned because as yet the South shows no penitence. But what exactly do we mean by this? Since down to the close of the war she never confessed any for braving it, the only penitence now left her is that which springs solely from the sense of discomfiture; and since this evidently would be a contrition hypocritical, it would be unworthy in us to demand it. Certain it is that penitence, in the sense of voluntary humiliation, will never be displayed. Nor does this afford just ground for unreserved condemnation. It is enough, for all practical purposes, if the South have been taught by the terrors of civil war to feel that Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny; that both now lie buried in one grave; that her fate is linked with ours; and that together we comprise the Nation.
The clouds of heroes who battled for the Union it is needless to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people. It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.
Spite this clinging reproach, however, signal military virtues and achievements have conferred upon the Confederate arms historic fame, and upon certain of the commanders a renown extending beyond the sea—a renown which we of the North could not suppress, even if we would. In personal character, also, not a few of the military leaders of the South enforce forbearance; the memory of others the North refrains from disparaging; and some, with more or less of reluctance, she can respect. Posterity, sympathizing with our convictions, but removed from our passions, may perhaps go farther here. If George IV could, out of the graceful instinct of a gentleman, raise an honorable monument in the great fane of Christendom over the remains of the enemy of his dynasty, Charles Edward, the invader of England and victor in the rout of Preston Pans—upon whose head the king’s ancestor but one reign removed had set a price—is it probable that the granchildren of General Grant will pursue with rancor, or slur by sour neglect, the memory of Stonewall Jackson?
But the South herself is not wanting in recent histories and biographies which record the deeds of her chieftains—writings freely published at the North by loyal houses, widely read here, and with a deep though saddened interest. By students of the war such works are hailed as welcome accessories, and tending to the completeness of the record.
Supposing a happy issue out of present perplexities, then, in the generation next to come, Southerners there will be yielding allegiance to the Union, feeling all their interests bound up in it, and yet cherishing unrebuked that kind of feeling for the memory of the soldiers of the fallen Confederacy that Burns, Scott, and the Ettrick Shepherd felt for the memory of the gallant clansmen ruined through their fidelity to the Stuarts—a feeling whose passion was tempered by the poetry imbuing it, and which in no wise affected their loyalty to the Georges, and which, it may be added, indirectly contributed excellent things to literature. But, setting this view aside, dishonorable would it be in the South were she willing to abandon to shame the memory of brave men who with signal personal disinterestedness warred in her behalf, though from motives, as we believe, so deplorably astray.
Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity. The mourners who this summer bear flowers to the mounds of the Virginian and Georgian dead are, in their domestic bereavement and proud affection, as sacred in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs. And yet, in one aspect, how needless to point the contrast.
Cherishing such sentiments, it will hardly occasion surprise that, in looking over the battle-pieces in the foregoing collection, I have been tempted to withdraw or modify some of them, fearful lest in presenting, though but dramatically and by way of poetic record, the passions and epithets of civil war, I might be contributing to a bitterness which every sensible American must wish at an end. So, too, with the emotion of victory as reproduced on some pages, and particularly toward the close. It should not be construed into an exultation misapplied—an exultation as ungenerous as unwise, and made to minister, however indirectly, to that kind of censoriousness too apt to be produced in certain natures by success after trying reverses. Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
There are excesses which marked the conflict, most of which are perhaps inseparable from a civil strife so intense and prolonged, and involving warfare in some border countries new and imperfectly civilized. Barbarities also there were, for which the Southern people collectively can hardly be held responsible, though perpetrated by ruffians in their name. But surely other qualities—exalted ones—courage and fortitude matchless, were likewise displayed, and largely; and justly may these be held the characteristic traits, and not the former.
In this view, what Northern writer, however patriotic, but must revolt from acting on paper a part any way akin to that of the live dog to the dead lion; and yet it is right to rejoice for our triumphs, so far as it may justly imply an advance for our whole country and for humanity.
Let it be held no reproach to any one that he pleads for reasonable consideration for our late enemies, now stricken down and unavoidably debarred, for the time, from speaking through authorized agencies for themselves. Nothing has been urged here in the foolish hope of conciliating those men—few in number, we trust—who have resolved never to be reconciled to the Union. On such hearts everything is thrown away except it be religious commiseration, and the sincerest. Yet let them call to mind that unhappy Secessionist, not a military man, who with impious alacrity fired the first shot of the Civil War at Sumter, and a little more than four years afterward fired the last one into his heart at Richmond.
Noble was the gesture into which patriotic passion surprised the people in a utilitarian time and country; yet the glory of the war falls short of its pathos—a pathos which now at last ought to disarm all animosity.
How many and earnest thoughts still rise, and how hard to repress them. We feel what past years have been, and years, unretarded years, shall come. May we all have moderation; may we all show candor. Though, perhaps, nothing could ultimately have averted the strife, and though to treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes, nevertheless, let us not cover up or try to extenuate what, humanly speaking, is the truth—namely, that those unfraternal denunciations, continued through years, and which at last inflamed to deeds that ended in bloodshed, were reciprocal; and that, had the preponderating strength and the prospect of its unlimited increase lain on the other side, on ours might have lain those actions which now in our late opponents we stigmatize under the name of Rebellion. As frankly let us own—what it would be unbecoming to parade were foreigners concerned— that our triumph was won not more by skill and bravery than by superior resources and crushing numbers; that it was a triumph, too, over a people for years politically misled by designing men, and also by some honestly-erring men, who from their position could not have been otherwise than broadly influential; a people who, though, indeed, they sought to perpetuate the curse of slavery, and even extend it, were not the authors of it, but (less fortunate, not less righteous than we), were the fated inheritors; a people who, having a like origin with ourselves, share essentially in whatever worthy qualities we may possess. No one can add to the lasting reproach which hopeless defeat has now cast upon Secession by withholding the recognition of these verities.
Surely we ought to take it to heart that that kind of pacification, based upon principles operating equally all over the land, which lovers of their country yearn for, and which our arms, though signally triumphant, did not bring about, and which lawmaking, however anxious, or energetic, or repressive, never by itself can achieve, may yet be largely aided by generosity of sentiment public and private. Some revisionary legislation and adaptive is indispensable; but with this should harmoniously work another kind of prudence, not unallied with entire magnanimity. Benevolence and policy—Christianity and Machiavelli—dissuade from penal severities toward the subdued. Abstinence here is as obligatory as considerate care for our unfortunate fellowmen late in bonds, and, if observed, would equally prove to be wise forecast. The great qualities of the South, those attested in the War, we can perilously alienate, or we may make them nationally available at need.