ACT II.
_Evening._ _The Summit of Etna._
EMPEDOCLES.
Alone! On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste, Crowned by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth, Round which the sullen vapor rolls,--alone! Pausanias is far hence, and that is well, For I must henceforth speak no more with man. He has his lesson too, and that debt’s paid; And the good, learned, friendly, quiet man, May bravelier front his life, and in himself Find henceforth energy and heart. But I,-- The weary man, the banished citizen, Whose banishment is not his greatest ill, Whose weariness no energy can reach, And for whose hurt courage is not the cure,-- What should I do with life and living more?
No, thou art come too late, Empedocles! And the world hath the day, and must break thee, Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live: Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine. And being lonely thou art miserable; For something has impaired thy spirit’s strength, And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy. Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself, O sage! O sage! Take, then, the one way left; And turn thee to the elements, thy friends, Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers, And say: Ye servants, hear Empedocles, Who asks this final service at your hands! Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid The last spark of man’s consciousness with words; Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world, Be disarrayed of their divinity; Before the soul lose all her solemn joys, And awe be dead, and hope impossible, And the soul’s deep eternal night come on,-- Receive me, hide me, quench me, take me home!
_He advances to the edge of the crater. Smoke and fire break forth with a loud noise, and CALLICLES is heard below singing_:--
The lyre’s voice is lovely everywhere; In the court of gods, in the city of men, And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain-glen, In the still mountain air.
Only to Typho it sounds hatefully,-- To Typho only, the rebel o’erthrown, Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone, To embed them in the sea. Wherefore dost thou groan so loud? Wherefore do thy nostrils flash, Through the dark night, suddenly, Typho, such red jets of flame? Is thy tortured heart still proud? Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash? Still alert thy stone-crushed frame? Doth thy fierce soul still deplore Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills, And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore? Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep The fight which crowned thine ills, Thy last mischance on this Sicilian deep? Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair, Where erst the strong sea-currents sucked thee down, Never to cease to writhe, and try to rest, Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair? That thy groans, like thunder prest, Begin to roll, and almost drown The sweet notes whose lulling spell Gods and the race of mortals love so well, When through thy caves thou hearest music swell?
But an awful pleasure bland Spreading o’er the Thunderer’s face, When the sound climbs near his seat, The Olympian council sees; As he lets his lax right hand, Which the lightnings doth embrace, Sink upon his mighty knees. And the eagle, at the beck Of the appeasing, gracious harmony, Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck, Nestling nearer to Jove’s feet; While o’er his sovran eye The curtains of the blue films slowly meet. And the white Olympus-peaks Rosily brighten, and the soothed gods smile At one another from their golden chairs, And no one round the charmed circle speaks. Only the loved Hebe bears The cup about, whose draughts beguile Pain and care, with a dark store Of fresh-pulled violets wreathed and nodding o’er; And her flushed feet glow on the marble floor.
EMPEDOCLES.
He fables, yet speaks truth! The brave impetuous heart yields everywhere To the subtle, contriving head; Great qualities are trodden down, And littleness united Is become invincible.
These rumblings are not Typho’s groans, I know! These angry smoke-bursts Are not the passionate breath Of the mountain-crushed, tortured, intractable Titan king; But over all the world What suffering is there not seen Of plainness oppressed by cunning, As the well-counselled Zeus oppressed That self-helping son of earth! What anguish of greatness, Railed and hunted from the world, Because its simplicity rebukes This envious, miserable age!
I am weary of it. --Lie there, ye ensigns Of my unloved pre-eminence In an age like this! Among a people of children, Who thronged me in their cities, Who worshipped me in their houses, And asked, not wisdom, But drugs to charm with, But spells to mutter All the fool’s-armory of magic! Lie there, My golden circlet, My purple robe!
CALLICLES (_from below_).
As the sky-brightening south-wind clears the day, And makes the massed clouds roll, The music of the lyre blows away The clouds which wrap the soul.
Oh that fate had let me see That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre, That famous, final victory When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire!
When, from far Parnassus’ side, Young Apollo, all the pride Of the Phrygian flutes to tame, To the Phrygian highlands came; Where the long green reed-beds sway In the rippled waters gray Of that solitary lake Where Mæander’s springs are born; Where the ridged pine-wooded roots Of Messogis westward break, Mounting westward, high and higher. There was held the famous strife; There the Phrygian brought his flutes, And Apollo brought his lyre; And, when now the westering sun Touched the hills, the strife was done, And the attentive muses said,-- “Marsyas, thou art vanquishèd!” Then Apollo’s minister Hanged upon a branching fir Marsyas, that unhappy Faun, And began to whet his knife. But the Mænads, who were there, Left their friend, and with robes flowing In the wind, and loose dark hair O’er their polished bosoms blowing, Each her ribboned tambourine Flinging on the mountain-sod, With a lovely frightened mien Came about the youthful god. But he turned his beauteous face Haughtily another way, From the grassy sun-warmed place Where in proud repose he lay, With one arm over his head, Watching how the whetting sped.
But aloof, on the lake-strand, Did the young Olympus stand, Weeping at his master’s end; For the Faun had been his friend. For he taught him how to sing, And he taught him flute-playing. Many a morning had they gone To the glimmering mountain lakes, And had torn up by the roots The tall crested water-reeds With long plumes and soft brown seeds, And had carved them into flutes, Sitting on a tabled stone Where the shoreward ripple breaks. And he taught him how to please The red-snooded Phrygian girls, Whom the summer evening sees Flashing in the dance’s whirls Underneath the starlit trees In the mountain villages. Therefore now Olympus stands, At his master’s piteous cries Pressing fast with both his hands His white garment to his eyes, Not to see Apollo’s scorn.-- Ah, poor Faun, poor Faun! ah, poor Faun!
EMPEDOCLES.
And lie thou there, My laurel bough! Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there! Though thou hast been my shade in the world’s heat, Though I have loved thee, lived in honoring thee, Yet lie thou there, My laurel bough!
I am weary of thee. I am weary of the solitude Where he who bears thee must abide,-- Of the rocks of Parnassus, Of the gorge of Delphi, Of the moonlight peaks, and the caves. Thou guardest them, Apollo! Over the grave of the slain Pytho, Though young, intolerably severe! Thou keepest aloof the profane, But the solitude oppresses thy votary. The jars of men reach him not in thy valley, But can life reach him? Thou fencest him from the multitude: Who will fence him from himself? He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents, And the beating of his own heart; The air is thin, the veins swell, The temples tighten and throb there-- Air! air!
Take thy bough, set me free from my solitude; I have been enough alone!
Where shall thy votary fly, then? back to men? But they will gladly welcome him once more, And help him to unbend his too tense thought, And rid him of the presence of himself, And keep their friendly chatter at his ear, And haunt him, till the absence from himself, That other torment, grow unbearable; And he will fly to solitude again, And he will find its air too keen for him, And so change back; and many thousand times Be miserably bandied to and fro Like a sea-wave, betwixt the world and thee, Thou young, implacable god! and only death Shall cut his oscillations short, and so Bring him to poise. There is no other way.
And yet what days were those, Parmenides! When we were young, when we could number friends In all the Italian cities like ourselves; When with elated hearts we joined your train, Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth.[16] Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were closed and dead to us; But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy; And if the sacred load oppressed our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eased, The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again, In the delightful commerce of the world. We had not lost our balance then, nor grown Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy. The smallest thing could give us pleasure then,-- The sports of the country-people, A flute-note from the woods, Sunset over the sea; Seed-time and harvest, The reapers in the corn, The vinedresser in his vineyard, The village-girl at her wheel.
Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye Are for the happy, for the souls at ease, Who dwell on a firm basis of content! But he who has outlived his prosperous days; But he whose youth fell on a different world From that on which his exiled age is thrown,-- Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained By other rules than are in vogue to-day; Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change, But, in a world he loves not, must subsist In ceaseless opposition, be the guard Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards, That the world win no mastery over him; Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one; Who has no minute’s breathing-space allowed To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy,-- Joy and the outward world must die to him, As they are dead to me.
_A long pause, during which EMPEDOCLES remains motionless, plunged in thought. The night deepens. He moves forward, and gazes around him, and proceeds_:--
And yon, ye stars, Who slowly begin to marshal, As of old, in the fields of heaven, Your distant, melancholy lines! Have you, too, survived yourselves? Are you, too, what I fear to become? You too once lived; You too moved joyfully, Among august companions, In an older world, peopled by gods, In a mightier order, The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven. But now ye kindle Your lonely, cold-shining lights, Unwilling lingerers In the heavenly wilderness, For a younger, ignoble world; And renew, by necessity, Night after night your courses, In echoing, unneared silence, Above a race you know not, Uncaring and undelighted, Without friend and without home; Weary like us, though not Weary with our weariness.
No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you, No languor, no decay! languor and death, They are with me, not you! ye are alive,-- Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world, That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand,-- Thou, too, brimmest with life! the sea of cloud, That heaves its white and billowy vapors up To moat this isle of ashes from the world, Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down, O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads To Etna’s Lipareän sister-fires And the long dusky line of Italy,-- That mild and luminous floor of waters lives, With held-in joy swelling its heart: I only, Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has failed, I, who have not, like these, in solitude Maintained courage and force, and in myself Nursed an immortal vigor,--I alone Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read In all things my own deadness.
_A long silence. He continues_:--
Oh that I could glow like this mountain! Oh that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea! Oh that my soul were full of light as the stars! Oh that it brooded over the world like the air!
But no, this heart will glow no more; thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,-- But a naked, eternally restless mind!
_After a pause_:--
To the elements it came from, Every thing will return,-- Our bodies to earth, Our blood to water, Heat to fire, Breath to air: They were well born, they will be well entombed. But mind?...
And we might gladly share the fruitful stir Down in our mother earth’s miraculous womb; Well would it be With what rolled of us in the stormy main; We might have joy, blent with the all-bathing air, Or with the nimble, radiant life of fire.
But mind, but thought, If these have been the master part of us,-- Where will _they_ find their parent element? What will receive _them_, who will call _them_ home? But we shall still be in them, and they in us; And we shall be the strangers of the world; And they will be our lords, as they are now, And keep us prisoners of our consciousness, And never let us clasp and feel the All But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils. And we shall be unsatisfied as now; And we shall feel the agony of thirst, The ineffable longing for the life of life Baffled forever; and still thought and mind Will hurry us with them on their homeless march Over the unallied unopening earth, Over the unrecognizing sea; while air Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth, And fire repel us from its living waves. And then we shall unwillingly return Back to this meadow of calamity, This uncongenial place, this human life: And in our individual human state Go through the sad probation all again, To see if we will poise our life at last, To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which, we are one with the whole world; Or whether we will once more fall away Into the bondage of the flesh or mind, Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power. And each succeeding age in which we are born Will have more peril for us than the last; Will goad our senses with a sharper spur, Will fret our minds to an intenser play, Will make ourselves harder to be discerned. And we shall struggle a while, gasp and rebel; And we shall fly for refuge to past times, Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness; And the reality will pluck us back, Knead us in its hot hand, and change our nature. And we shall feel our powers of effort flag, And rally them for one last fight--and fail; And we shall sink in the impossible strife, And be astray forever. Slave of sense I have in no wise been; but slave of thought? And who can say: I have been always free, Lived ever in the light of my own soul? I cannot; I have lived in wrath and gloom, Fierce, disputatious, ever at war with man, Far from my own soul, far from warmth and light; But I have not grown easy in these bonds, But I have not denied what bonds these were. Yea, I take myself to witness, That I have loved no darkness, Sophisticated no truth, Nursed no dlusion, Allowed no fear!
And therefore, O ye elements! I know know-- Ye know it too--it hath been granted me Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved. I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.
Is it but for a moment? --Ah, boil up, ye vapors! Leap and roar, thou sea of fire! My soul glows to meet you. Ere it flag, ere the mists Of despondency and gloom Rush over it again, Receive me, save me!
[_He plunges into the crater._
CALLICLES (_from below_).
Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, Thick breaks the red flame; All Etna heaves fiercely Her forest-clothed frame.
Not here, O Apollo! Are haunts meet for thee; But where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea,--
Where the moon-silvered inlets Send far their light voice Up the still vale of Thisbe,-- Oh, speed, and rejoice!
On the sward at the cliff-top Lie strewn the white flocks: On the cliff-side the pigeons Roost deep in the rocks.
In the moonlight the shepherds, Soft lulled by the rills, Lie wrapped in their blankets Asleep on the hills.
--What forms are these coming So white through the gloom? What garments out-glistening The gold-flowered broom?
What sweet-breathing presence Out-perfumes the thyme? What voices enrapture The night’s balmy prime?
’Tis Apollo comes leading His choir, the Nine. The leader is fairest, But all are divine.
They are lost in the hollows! They stream up again! What seeks on this mountain The glorified train?
They bathe on this mountain, In the spring by their road; Then on to Olympus, Their endless abode.
--Whose praise do they mention? Of what is it told? What will be forever, What was from of old.
First hymn they the Father Of all things; and then, The rest of immortals, The action of men.
The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.
_BACCHANALIA; OR, THE NEW AGE._
I.
The evening comes, the fields are still. The tinkle of the thirsty rill, Unheard all day, ascends again; Deserted is the half-mown plain, Silent the swaths; the ringing wain, The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms, All housed within the sleeping farms. The business of the day is done, The last-left haymaker is gone. And from the thyme upon the height, And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows The perfume which the day foregoes. And on the pure horizon far, See, pulsing with the first-born star, The liquid sky above the hill! The evening comes, the fields are still.
Loitering and leaping, With saunter, with bounds, Flickering and circling In files and in rounds, Gayly their pine-staff green Tossing in air, Loose o’er their shoulders white Showering their hair, See! the wild Mænads Break from the wood, Youth and Iacchus Maddening their blood. See! through the quiet land Rioting they pass, Fling the fresh heaps about, Trample the grass, Tear from the rifled hedge Garlands, their prize; Fill with their sports the field, Fill with their cries.
Shepherd, what ails thee, then? Shepherd, why mute? Forth with thy joyous song! Forth with thy flute! Tempts not the revel blithe? Lure not their cries? Glow not their shoulders smooth? Melt not their eyes? Is not, on cheeks like those, Lovely the flush? --_Ah! so the quiet was! So was the hush!_
II.
The epoch ends, the world is still. The age has talked and worked its fill. The famous orators have shone, The famous poets sung and gone, The famous men of war have fought, The famous speculators thought, The famous players, sculptors, wrought, The famous painters filled their wall, The famous critics judged it all. The combatants are parted now; Uphung the spear, unbent the bow, The puissant crowned, the weak laid low. And in the after-silence sweet, Now strifes are hushed, our ears doth meet, Ascending pure, the bell-like fame Of this or that down-trodden name, Delicate spirits, pushed away In the hot press of the noonday. And o’er the plain, where the dead age Did its now-silent warfare wage,-- O’er that wide plain, now wrapped in gloom, Where many a splendor finds its tomb, Many spent fames and fallen nights nights-- The one or two immortal lights Rise slowly up into the sky, To shine there everlastingly, Like stars over the bounding hill. The epoch ends, the world is still.
Thundering and bursting In torrents, in waves, Carolling and shouting Over tombs, amid graves, See! on the cumbered plain Clearing a stage, Scattering the past about, Comes the new age. Bards make new poems, Thinkers new schools, Statesmen new systems, Critics new rules. All things begin again; Life is their prize; Earth with their deeds they fill, Fill with their cries.
Poet, what ails thee, then? Say, why so mute? Forth with thy praising voice! Forth with thy flute! Loiterer! why sittest thou Sunk in thy dream? Tempts not the bright new age? Shines not its stream? Look, ah! what genius, Art, science, wit! Soldiers like Cæsar, Statesmen like Pitt! Sculptors like Phidias, Raphaels in shoals, Poets like Shakspeare,-- Beautiful souls! See, on their glowing cheeks Heavenly the flush! --_Ah! so the silence was! So was the hush!_
The world but feels the present’s spell: The poet feels the past as well; Whatever men have done, might do, Whatever thought, might think it too.
_EPILOGUE TO LESSING’S LAOCOÖN._
One morn as through Hyde Park we walked, My friend and I, by chance we talked Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön; And after we a while had gone In Lessing’s track, and tried to see What painting is, what poetry,-- Diverging to another thought, “Ah!” cries my friend, “but who hath taught Why music and the other arts Oftener perform aright their parts Than poetry? why she, than they, Fewer fine successes can display?
“For ’tis so, surely! Even in Greece, Where best the poet framed his piece, Even in that Phœbus-guarded ground Pausanias on his travels found Good poems, if he looked, more rare (Though many) than good statues were-- For these, in truth, were everywhere. Of bards full many a stroke divine In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line, The land of Ariosto showed; And yet, e’en there, the canvas glowed With triumphs, a yet ampler brood, Of Raphael and his brotherhood. And nobly perfect, in our day Of haste, half-work, and disarray, Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, Hath risen Goethe’s, Wordsworth’s song; Yet even I (and none will bow Deeper to these) must needs allow, They yield us not, to soothe our pains, Such multitude of heavenly strains As from the kings of sound are blown,-- Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.”
While thus my friend discoursed, we pass Out of the path, and take the grass. The grass had still the green of May, And still the unblackened elms were gay; The kine were resting in the shade, The flies a summer murmur made. Bright was the morn, and south the air; The soft-couched cattle were as fair As those which pastured by the sea, That old-world morn, in Sicily, When on the beach the Cyclops lay, And Galatea from the bay Mocked her poor lovelorn giant’s lay. “Behold,” I said, “the painter’s sphere! The limits of his art appear. The passing group, the summer morn, The grass, the elms, that blossomed thorn,-- Those cattle couched, or, as they rise, Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes,-- These, or much greater things, but caught Like these, and in one aspect brought! In outward semblance he must give A moment’s life of things that live; Then let him choose his moment well, With power divine its story tell.”
Still we walked on, in thoughtful mood, And now upon the bridge we stood. Full of sweet breathings was the air, Of sudden stirs and pauses fair. Down o’er the stately bridge the breeze Came rustling from the garden-trees, And on the sparkling waters played; Light-plashing waves an answer made, And mimic boats their haven neared. Beyond, the abbey-towers appeared, By mist and chimneys unconfined, Free to the sweep of light and wind; While through their earth-moored nave below, Another breath of wind doth blow, Sound as of wandering breeze--but sound In laws by human artists bound. “The world of music!” I exclaimed,-- “This breeze that rustles by, that famed Abbey, recall it! what a sphere, Large and profound, hath genius here! The inspired musician, what a range, What power of passion, wealth of change! Some source of feeling he must choose, And its locked fount of beauty use, And through the stream of music tell Its else unutterable spell; To choose it rightly is his part, And press into its inmost heart.
“_Miserere, Domine!_ The words are uttered, and they flee. Deep is their penitential moan, Mighty their pathos, but ’tis gone. They have declared the spirit’s sore, Sore load, and words can do no more. Beethoven takes them then,--those two Poor, bounded words,--and makes them new; Infinite makes them, makes them young; Transplants them to another tongue, Where they can now, without constraint, Pour all the soul of their complaint, And roll adown a channel large The wealth divine they have in charge. Page after page of music turn, And still they live, and still they burn, Eternal, passion-fraught, and free,-- _Miserere, Domine!_”
Onward we moved, and reached the ride Where gayly flows the human tide. Afar, in rest the cattle lay; We heard, afar, faint music play; But agitated, brisk, and near, Men, with their stream of life, were here. Some hang upon the rails, and some On foot behind them go and come. This through the ride upon his steed Goes slowly by, and this at speed. The young, the happy, and the fair, The old, the sad, the worn, were there; Some vacant and some musing went, And some in talk and merriment. Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells! And now and then, perhaps, there swells A sigh, a tear--but in the throng All changes fast, and hies along. Hies, ah! from whence, what native ground? And to what goal, what ending, bound? “Behold at last the poet’s sphere! But who,” I said, “suffices here?
“For, ah! so much he has to do,-- Be painter and musician too! The aspect of the moment show, The feeling of the moment know! The aspect not, I grant, express Clear as the painter’s art can dress; The feeling not, I grant, explore So deep as the musician’s lore: But clear as words can make revealing, And deep as words can follow feeling. But, ah! then comes his sorest spell Of toil,--he must life’s _movement_ tell! The thread which binds it all in one, And not its separate parts alone. The _movement_ he must tell of life, Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife; His eye must travel down, at full, The long, unpausing spectacle; With faithful, unrelaxing force Attend it from its primal source, From change to change and year to year Attend it of its mid-career, Attend it to the last repose And solemn silence of its close.
“The cattle rising from the grass, His thought must follow where they pass; The penitent with anguish bowed, His thought must follow through the crowd. Yes! all this eddying, motley throng That sparkles in the sun along,-- Girl, statesman, merchant, soldier bold, Master and servant, young and old, Grave, gay, child, parent, husband, wife,-- He follows home, and lives their life.
“And many, many are the souls Life’s movement fascinates, controls. It draws them on, they cannot save Their feet from its alluring wave; They cannot leave it, they must go With its unconquerable flow. But ah! how few, of all that try This mighty march, do aught but die! For ill-endowed for such a way, Ill-stored in strength, in wits, are they. They faint, they stagger to and fro, And wandering from the stream they go; In pain, in terror, in distress, They see, all round, a wilderness. Sometimes a momentary gleam They catch of the mysterious stream; Sometimes, a second’s space, their ear The murmur of its waves doth hear; That transient glimpse in song they say, But not as painter can portray; That transient sound in song they tell, But not as the musician well. And when at last their snatches cease, And they are silent and at peace, The stream of life’s majestic whole Hath ne’er been mirrored on their soul.
“Only a few the life-stream’s shore With safe unwandering feet explore; Untired its movement bright attend, Follow its windings to the end. Then from its brimming waves their eye Drinks up delighted ecstasy, And its deep-toned, melodious voice Forever makes their ear rejoice. They speak! the happiness divine They feel runs o’er in every line; Its spell is round them like a shower; It gives them pathos, gives them power. No painter yet hath such a way, Nor no musician made, as they, And gathered on immortal knolls Such lovely flowers for cheering souls. Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach The charm which Homer, Shakspeare, teach. To these, to these, their thankful race Gives, then, the first, the fairest place; And brightest is their glory’s sheen, For greatest hath their labor been.”
_PERSISTENCY OF POETRY._
Though the Muse be gone away, Though she move not earth to-day, Souls, erewhile who caught her word, Ah! still harp on what they heard.
_A CAUTION TO POETS._
What poets feel not, when they make, A pleasure in creating, The world, in _its_ turn, will not take Pleasure in contemplating.
_THE YOUTH OF NATURE._
Raised are the dripping oars, Silent the boat! The lake, Lovely and soft as a dream, Swims in the sheen of the moon. The mountains stand at its head Clear in the pure June-night, But the valleys are flooded with haze. Rydal and Fairfield are there; In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead. So it is, so it will be for aye. Nature is fresh as of old, Is lovely; a mortal is dead.
The spots which recall him survive, For he lent a new life to these hills. The Pillar still broods o’er the fields Which border Ennerdale Lake, And Egremont sleeps by the sea. The gleam of The Evening Star Twinkles on Grasmere no more, But ruined and solemn and gray The sheepfold of Michael survives; And far to the south, the heath Still blows in the Quantock coombs, By the favorite waters of Ruth. These survive! Yet not without pain, Pain and dejection to-night, Can I feel that their poet is gone.
He grew old in an age he condemned. He looked on the rushing decay Of the times which had sheltered his youth; Felt the dissolving throes Of a social order he loved; Outlived his brethren, his peers; And, like the Theban seer, Died in his enemies’ day.
Cold bubbled the spring of Tilphusa, Copais lay bright in the moon, Helicon glassed in the lake Its firs, and afar rose the peaks Of Parnassus, snowily clear; Thebes was behind him in flames, And the clang of arms in his ear, When his awe-struck captors led The Theban seer to the spring. Tiresias drank and died. Nor did reviving Thebes See such a prophet again.
Well may we mourn, when the head Of a sacred poet lies low In an age which can rear them no more! The complaining millions of men Darken in labor and pain; But he was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes, and were glad. He is dead, and the fruit-bearing day Of his race is past on the earth; And darkness returns to our eyes.
For, oh! is it you, is it you, Moonlight, and shadow, and lake, And mountains, that fill us with joy, Or the poet who sings you so well? Is it you, O beauty, O grace, O charm, O romance, that we feel, Or the voice which reveals what you are? Are ye, like daylight and sun, Shared and rejoiced in by all? Or are ye immersed in the mass Of matter, and hard to extract, Or sunk at the core of the world Too deep for the most to discern? Like stars in the deep of the sky, Which arise on the glass of the sage, But are lost when their watcher is gone.
“They are here,”--I heard, as men heard In Mysian Ida the voice Of the mighty Mother, or Crete, The murmur of Nature, reply,-- “Loveliness, magic, grace, They are here! they are set in the world, They abide; and the finest of souls Hath not been thrilled by them all, Nor the dullest been dead to them quite. The poet who sings them may die, But they are immortal and live, For they are the life of the world. Will ye not learn it, and know, When ye mourn that a poet is dead, That the singer was less than his themes, Life, and emotion, and I?
“More than the singer are these. Weak is the tremor of pain That thrills in his mournfullest chord To that which once ran through his soul. Cold the elation of joy In his gladdest, airiest song, To that which of old in his youth Filled him and made him divine. Hardly his voice at its best Gives us a sense of the awe, The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom, Of the unlit gulf of himself.
“Ye know not yourselves; and your bards-- The clearest, the best, who have read Most in themselves--have beheld Less than they left unrevealed. Ye express not yourselves: can ye make With marble, with color, with word, What charmed you in others re-live? Can thy pencil, O artist! restore The figure, the bloom of thy love, As she was in her morning of spring? Canst thou paint the ineffable smile Of her eyes as they rested on thine? Can the image of life have the glow, The motion of life itself?
“Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me, The mateless, the one, will ye know? Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast, My longing, my sadness, my joy? Will ye claim for your great ones the gift To have rendered the gleam of my skies, To have echoed the moan of my seas, Uttered the voice of my hills? When your great ones depart, will ye say,-- _All things have suffered a loss,_ _Nature is hid in their grave_?
“Race after race, man after man, Have thought that my secret was theirs, Have dreamed that I lived but for them, That they were my glory and joy. --They are dust, they are changed, they are gone! I remain.”
_THE YOUTH OF MAN._
We, O Nature, depart: Thou survivest us! This, This, I know, is the law. Yes! but, more than this, Thou who seest us die Seest us change while we live; Seest our dreams, one by one, Seest our errors depart; Watchest us, Nature! throughout Mild and inscrutably calm.
Well for us that we change! Well for us that the power Which in our morning prime Saw the mistakes of our youth, Sweet, and forgiving, and good, Sees the contrition of age!
Behold, O Nature, this pair! See them to-night where they stand, Not with the halo of youth Crowning their brows with its light, Not with the sunshine of hope, Not with the rapture of spring, Which they had of old, when they stood Years ago at my side In this self-same garden, and said,-- “We are young, and the world is ours; Man, man is king of the world! Fools that these mystics are Who prate of Nature! but she Hath neither beauty, nor warmth, Nor life, nor emotion, nor power. But man has a thousand gifts, And the generous dreamer invests The senseless world with them all. Nature is nothing; her charm Lives in our eyes which can paint, Lives in our hearts which can feel.”
Thou, O Nature, wast mute, Mute as of old! Days flew, Days and years; and Time With the ceaseless stroke of his wings Brushed off the bloom from their soul. Clouded and dim grew their eye, Languid their heart--for youth Quickened its pulses no more. Slowly, within the walls Of an ever-narrowing world, They drooped, they grew blind, they grew old. Thee, and their youth in thee, Nature! they saw no more.
Murmur of living, Stir of existence, Soul of the world! Make, oh, make yourselves felt To the dying spirit of youth! Come, like the breath of the spring! Leave not a human soul To grow old in darkness and pain! Only the living can feel you, But leave us not while we live!
Here they stand to-night,-- Here, where this gray balustrade Crowns the still valley; behind In the castled house with its woods Which sheltered their childhood; the sun On its ivied windows; a scent From the gray-walled gardens, a breath Of the fragrant stock and the pink, Perfumes the evening air. Their children play on the lawns. They stand and listen; they hear The children’s shouts, and at times, Faintly, the bark of a dog From a distant farm in the hills. Nothing besides! in front The wide, wide valley outspreads To the dim horizon, reposed In the twilight, and bathed in dew, Cornfield and hamlet and copse Darkening fast; but a light, Far off, a glory of day, Still plays on the city-spires; And there in the dusk by the walls, With the gray mist marking its course Through the silent, flowery land, On, to the plains, to the sea, Floats the imperial stream.
Well I know what they feel! They gaze, and the evening wind Plays on their faces; they gaze,-- Airs from the Eden of youth Awake and stir in their soul; The past returns: they feel What they are, alas! what they were. They, not Nature, are changed. Well I know what they feel!
Hush, for tears Begin to steal to their eyes! Hush, for fruit Grows from such sorrow as theirs!
And they remember, With piercing, untold anguish, The proud boasting of their youth. And they feel how Nature was fair. And the mists of delusion, And the scales of habit, Fall away from their eyes; And they see, for a moment, Stretching out like the desert In its weary, unprofitable length, Their faded, ignoble lives.
While the locks are yet brown on thy head, While the soul still looks through thine eyes, While the heart still pours The mantling blood to thy cheek, Sink, O youth, in thy soul! Yearn to the greatness of Nature; Rally the good in the depths of thyself!
_PALLADIUM._
Set where the upper streams of Simois flow, Was the Palladium, high ’mid rock and wood; And Hector was in Ilium, far below, And fought, and saw it not; but there it stood!
It stood, and sun and moonshine rained their light On the pure columns of its glen-built hall. Backward and forward rolled the waves of fight Round Troy; but while this stood, Troy could not fall.
So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul. Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air; Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll: We visit it by moments, ah, too rare!
Men will renew the battle in the plain To-morrow: red with blood will Xanthus be; Hector and Ajax will be there again, Helen will come upon the wall to see.
Then we shall rust in shade, or shine in strife, And fluctuate ’twixt blind hopes and blind despairs, And fancy that we put forth all our life, And never know how with the soul it fares.
Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send; And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; And, while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.
_PROGRESS._
The Master stood upon the mount, and taught. He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes; “The old law,” they said, “is wholly come to naught: Behold the new world rise!”
“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw The old law observed by scribes and Pharisees? I say unto you, see ye keep that law More faithfully than these!
“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas! Think not that I to annul the law have willed: No jot, no tittle, from the law shall pass Till all have been fulfilled.”
So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago. And what, then, shall be said to those to-day, Who cry aloud to lay the old world low To clear the new world’s way?
“Religious fervors! ardor misapplied! Hence, hence!” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind! But keep him self-immersed, pre-occupied, And lame the active mind.”
Ah! from the old world let some one answer give: “Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares? I say unto you, see that _your_ souls live A deeper life than theirs!
“Say ye, ‘The spirit of man has found new roads, And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein’? Leave, then, the cross as ye have left carved gods, But guard the fire within!
“Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll, And no man may the other’s hurt behold; Yet each will have one anguish,--his own soul Which perishes of cold.”
Here let that voice make end; then let a strain From a far lonelier distance, like the wind Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again These men’s profoundest mind:--
“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath looked on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.
“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can? Which has not fallen on the dry heart like rain? Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man,-- _Thou must be born again!_
“Children of men! not that your age excel In pride of life the ages of your sires, But that _ye_ think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well, The Friend of man desires.”
_REVOLUTIONS._
Before man parted for this earthly strand, While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood, God put a heap of letters in his hand, And bade him make with them what word he could.
And man has turned them many times; made Greece, Rome, England, France; yes, nor in vain essayed Way after way, changes that never cease! The letters have combined, something was made.
But ah! an inextinguishable sense Haunts him that he has not made what he should; That he has still, though old, to recommence, Since he has not yet found the word God would.
And empire after empire, at their height Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on; Have felt their huge frames not constructed right, And drooped, and slowly died upon their throne.
One day, thou say’st, there will at last appear The word, the order, which God meant should be. --Ah! we shall know _that_ well when it comes near; The band will quit man’s heart, he will breathe free.
_SELF-DEPENDENCE._
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.
And a look of passionate desire O’er the sea and to the stars I send: “Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me, Calm me, ah, compose me to the end!
Ah, once more,” I cried, “ye stars, ye waters, On my heart your mighty charm renew; Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, Feel my soul becoming vast like you!”
From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven, Over the lit sea’s unquiet way, In the rustling night-air came the answer,-- “Wouldst thou _be_ as these are? _Live_ as they.
“Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
“And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul.
“Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state God’s other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see.”
O air-born voice! long since, severely clear, A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear,-- “Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself loses his misery!”
_MORALITY._
We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish ’twere done. Not till the hours of light return, All we have built do we discern.
Then, when the clouds are off the soul, When thou dost bask in Nature’s eye, Ask how _she_ viewed thy self-control, Thy struggling, tasked morality,-- Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air, Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.
And she, whose censure thou dost dread, Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek, See, on her face a glow is spread, A strong emotion on her cheek! “Ah, child!” she cries, “that strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not mine?
“There is no effort on _my_ brow; I do not strive, I do not weep: I rush with the swift spheres, and glow In joy, and when I will, I sleep. Yet that severe, that earnest air, I saw, I felt it once--but where?
“I knew not yet the gauge of time, Nor wore the manacles of space; I felt it in some other clime, I saw it in some other place. ’Twas when the heavenly house I trod, And lay upon the breast of God.”
_A SUMMER NIGHT._
In the deserted, moon-blanched street, How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Those windows, which I gaze at, frown, Silent and white, unopening down, Repellent as the world; but see, A break between the housetops shows The moon! and lost behind her, fading dim Into the dewy dark obscurity Down at the far horizon’s rim, Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!
And to my mind the thought Is on a sudden brought Of a past night, and a far different scene. Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep As clearly as at noon; The spring-tide’s brimming flow Heaved dazzlingly between; Houses, with long white sweep, Girdled the glistening bay; Behind, through the soft air, The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away. That night was far more fair-- But the same restless pacings to and fro, And the same vainly throbbing heart was there, And the same bright, calm moon.
And the calm moonlight seems to say,-- _Hast thou, then, still the old unquiet breast,_ _Which neither deadens into rest,_ _Nor ever feels the fiery glow_ _That whirls the spirit from itself away,_ _But fluctuates to and fro,_ _Never by passion quite possessed,_ _And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway?_ And I, I know not if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield, and be Like all the other men I see.
For most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun’s hot eye, With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give, Dreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall. And as, year after year, Fresh products of their barren labor fall From their tired hands, and rest Never yet comes more near, Gloom settles slowly down over their breast. And while they try to stem The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest, Death in their prison reaches them, Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.
And the rest, a few, Escape their prison, and depart On the wide ocean of life anew. There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart Listeth, will sail; Nor doth he know how there prevail, Despotic on that sea, Trade-winds which cross it from eternity. Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred By thwarting signs, and braves The freshening wind and blackening waves. And then the tempest strikes him; and between The lightning-bursts is seen Only a driving wreck, And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck With anguished face and flying hair, Grasping the rudder hard, Still bent to make some port, he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore. And sterner comes the roar Of sea and wind; and through the deepening gloom Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom, And he too disappears, and comes no more.
Is there no life, but these alone? Madman or slave, must man be one?
Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain! Clearness divine! Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign Of languor, though so calm, and though so great Are yet untroubled and unpassionate; Who, though so noble, share in the world’s toil, And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil! I will not say that your mild deeps retain A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain; But I will rather say that you remain A world above man’s head, to let him see How boundless might his soul’s horizons be, How vast, yet of what clear transparency! How it were good to live there, and breathe free; How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still!
_THE BURIED LIFE._
Light flows our war of mocking words; and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll. Yes, yes, we know that we can jest, We know, we know that we can smile! But there’s a something in this breast, To which thy light words bring no rest, And thy gay smiles no anodyne; Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men concealed Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Tricked in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet The same heart beats in every human breast!
But we, my love! doth a like spell benumb Our hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?
Ah! well for us, if even we, Even for a moment, can get free Our heart, and have our lips unchained; For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!
Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be,-- By what distractions he would be possessed, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity,-- That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being’s law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us,--to know Whence our lives come, and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves,-- Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on forever unexpressed. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well--but ’tis not true! And then we will no more be racked With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah, yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day.
Only--but this is rare-- When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear, When our world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed,-- A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow, And hears its winding murmur, and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth forever chase The flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast; And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.
_LINES WRITTEN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS._
In this lone, open glade I lie, Screened by deep boughs on either hand; And at its end, to stay the eye, Those black-crowned, red-boled pine-trees stand.
Birds here make song, each bird has his, Across the girdling city’s hum. How green under the boughs it is! How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!
Sometimes a child will cross the glade To take his nurse his broken toy; Sometimes a thrush flit overhead Deep in her unknown day’s employ.
Here at my feet what wonders pass! What endless, active life is here! What blowing daisies, fragrant grass! An air-stirred forest, fresh and clear.
Scarce fresher is the mountain sod Where the tired angler lies, stretched out, And, eased of basket and of rod, Counts his day’s spoil, the spotted trout.
In the huge world which roars hard by, Be others happy if they can! But in my helpless cradle I Was breathed on by the rural Pan.
I, on men’s impious uproar hurled, Think often, as I hear them rave, That peace has left the upper world, And now keeps only in the grave.
Yet here is peace forever new! When I who watch them am away, Still all things in this glade go through The changes of their quiet day.
Then to their happy rest they pass; The flowers upclose, the birds are fed, The night comes down upon the grass, The child sleeps warmly in his bed.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar.
The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others, give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
_A WISH._
I ask not that my bed of death From bands of greedy heirs be free; For these besiege the latest breath Of fortune’s favored sons, not me.
I ask not each kind soul to keep Tearless, when of my death he hears. Let those who will, if any, weep! There are worse plagues on earth than tears.
I ask but that my death may find The freedom to my life denied; Ask but the folly of mankind Then, then at last, to quit my side.
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, The friends who come, and gape, and go; The ceremonious air of gloom,-- All which makes death a hideous show!
Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.
Nor fetch, to take the accustomed toll Of the poor sinner bound for death, His brother-doctor of the soul, To canvass with official breath The future and its viewless things,-- That undiscovered mystery Which one who feels death’s winnowing wings Must needs read clearer, sure, than he!
Bring none of these; but let me be, While all around in silence lies, Moved to the window near, and see Once more, before my dying eyes,--
Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aërial landscape spread,-- The world which was ere I was born, The world which lasts when I am dead;
Which never was the friend of _one_, Nor promised love it could not give, But lit for all its generous sun, And lived itself, and made us live.
There let me gaze, till I become In soul, with what I gaze on, wed! To feel the universe my home; To have before my mind--instead
Of the sick-room, the mortal strife, The turmoil for a little breath-- The pure eternal course of life, Not human combatings with death!
Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow Composed, refreshed, ennobled, clear; Then willing let my spirit go To work or wait elsewhere or here!
THE FUTURE.
A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time; Brimming with wonder and joy, He spreads out his arms to the light, Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.
As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes Where the snowy mountainous pass, Echoing the screams of the eagles, Hems in its gorges the bed Of the new-born, clear-flowing stream; Whether he first sees light Where the river in gleaming rings Sluggishly winds through the plain; Whether in sound of the swallowing sea,-- As is the world on the banks, So is the mind of the man.
Vainly does each, as he glides, Fable and dream Of the lands which the river of Time Had left ere he woke on its breast, Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed. Only the tract where he sails He wots of; only the thoughts, Raised by the objects he passes, are his.
Who can see the green earth any more As she was by the sources of Time? Who imagines her fields as they lay In the sunshine, unworn by the plough? Who thinks as they thought, The tribes who then roamed on her breast, Her vigorous, primitive sons?
What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
What bard, At the height of his vision, can deem Of God, of the world, of the soul, With a plainness as near, As flashing, as Moses felt, When he lay in the night by his flock On the starlit Arabian waste? Can rise and obey The beck of the Spirit like him?
This tract which the river of Time Now flows through with us, is the plain. Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. Bordered by cities, and hoarse With a thousand cries is its stream. And we on its breast, our minds Are confused as the cries which we hear, Changing and short as the sights which we see.
And we say that repose has fled Forever the course of the river of Time. That cities will crowd to its edge In a blacker, incessanter line; That the din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream, Flatter the plain where it flows, Fiercer the sun overhead; That never will those on its breast See an ennobling sight, Drink of the feeling of quiet again.
But what was before us we know not, And we know not what shall succeed.
Haply, the river of Time-- As it grows, as the towns on its marge Fling their wavering lights On a wider, statelier stream-- May acquire, if not the calm Of its early mountainous shore, Yet a solemn peace of its own.
And the width of the waters, the hush Of the gray expanse where he floats, Freshening its current, and spotted with foam As it draws to the ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast,-- As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night-wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.
ELEGIAC POEMS.
_THE SCHOLAR-GYPSY._[17]
Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes! No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropped grasses shoot another head; But when the fields are still, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green, Come, shepherd, and again renew the quest!
Here, where the reaper was at work of late,-- In this high field’s dark corner, where he leaves His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse, And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves, Then here at noon comes back his stores to use,-- Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the corn,-- All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
Screened is this nook o’er the high, half-reaped field, And here till sundown, shepherd! will I be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep; And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid, And bower me from the August-sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers.
And near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book. Come, let me read the oft-read tale again! The story of that Oxford scholar poor, Of shining parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore, And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deemed, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
But once, years after, in the country-lanes, Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew, Met him, and of his way of life inquired; Whereat he answered, that the gypsy-crew, His mates, had arts to rule as they desired The workings of men’s brains, And they can bind them to what thoughts they will. “And I,” he said, “the secret of their art, When fully learned, will to the world impart; But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill.”
This said, he left them, and returned no more. But rumors hung about the country-side, That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray, Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied, In hat of antique shape, and cloak of gray, The same the gypsies wore. Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring; At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors, On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors Had found him seated at their entering;
But, ’mid their drink and clatter, he would fly. And I myself seem half to know thy looks, And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace; And boys who in lone wheat-fields scare the rooks I ask if thou hast passed their quiet place; Or in my boat I lie Moored to the cool bank in the summer-heats, Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills, And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt’st their shy retreats.
For most, I know, thou lov’st retired ground! Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt’s rope chops round; And leaning backward in a pensive dream, And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers Plucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.
And then they land, and thou art seen no more! Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come To dance around the Fyfield elm in May, Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam, Or cross a stile into the public way; Oft thou hast given them store Of flowers,--the frail-leafed, white anemone, Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves, And purple orchises with spotted leaves,-- But none hath words she can report of thee!
And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time’s here In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames, Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass, Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames, To bathe in the abandoned lasher pass, Have often passed thee near Sitting upon the river-bank o’ergrown; Marked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare, Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air: But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!
At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills, Where at her open door the housewife darns, Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate To watch the threshers in the mossy barns. Children, who early range these slopes and late For cresses from the rills, Have known thee eying, all an April-day, The springing pastures and the feeding kine; And marked thee, when the stars come out and shine, Through the long dewy grass move slow away.
In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,-- Where most the gypsies by the turf-edged way Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see With scarlet patches tagged and shreds of gray, Above the forest ground called Thessaly,-- The blackbird picking food Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all; So often has he known thee past him stray, Rapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
And once, in winter, on the causeway chill Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go, Have I not passed thee on the wooden bridge Wrapped in thy cloak and battling with the snow, Thy face toward Hinksey and its wintry ridge? And thou hast climbed the hill, And gained the white brow of the Cumner range; Turned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall, The line of festal light in Christ-church hall: Then sought thy straw in some sequestered grange.
But what--I dream! Two hundred years are flown Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls, And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe That thou wert wandered from the studious walls To learn strange arts, and join a gypsy-tribe. And thou from earth art gone Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid,-- Some country-nook, where o’er thy unknown grave Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave, Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.
--No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men? ’Tis that from change to change their being rolls; ’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls, And numb the elastic powers, Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen, And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit, To the just-pausing Genius we remit Our well-worn life, and are--what we have been.
Thou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so? Thou hadst _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire; Else wert thou long since numbered with thedead! Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire! The generations of thy peers are fled, And we ourselves shall go; But thou possessest an immortal lot, And we imagine thee exempt from age, And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page, Because thou hadst--what we, alas! have not.
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope, Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives, And each half lives a hundred different lives; Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day-- Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Yes, we await it! but it still delays, And then we suffer! and amongst us one, Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne; And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days; Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs, And how the dying spark of hope was fed, And how the breast was soothed, and how the head, And all his hourly varied anodynes.
This for our wisest! and we others pine, And wish the long unhappy dream would end, And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear; With close-lipped patience for our only friend,-- Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair,-- But none has hope like thine! Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray, Roaming the country-side, a truant boy, Nursing thy project in unclouded joy, And every doubt long blown by time away.
Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gayly as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife,-- Fly hence, our contact fear! Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood! Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn, Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!
Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silvered branches of the glade,-- Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue, On some mild pastoral slope Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales Freshen thy flowers as in former years With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, From the dark dingles, to the nightingales!
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life, Like us distracted, and like us unblest. Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles! --As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Ægean isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine, And knew the intruders on his ancient home,--
The young light-hearted masters of the waves,-- And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail, And day and night held on indignantly O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits, and unbent sails There where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; And on the beach undid his corded bales.
_THYRSIS._[18]
_A MONODY, to commemorate the author’s friend, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, who died at Florence, 1861._
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills! In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same; The village street its haunted mansion lacks, And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name, And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks.-- Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days,-- Thyrsis and I: we still had Thyrsis then.
Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm, Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames? The single-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs, The Vale, the three lone wears, the youthful Thames? This winter-eve is warm; Humid the air; leafless, yet soft as spring, The tender purple spray on copse and briers; And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!-- Only, methinks, some loss of habit’s power Befalls me wandering through this upland dim. Once passed I blindfold here, at any hour; Now seldom come I, since I came with him. That single elm-tree bright Against the west--I miss it! is it gone? We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said, Our friend the Gypsy-Scholar was not dead; While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on.
Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here, But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick; And with the country-folk acquaintance made By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick. Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assayed. Ah me! this many a year My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s-holiday! Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart Into the world and wave of men depart, But Thyrsis of his own will went away.
It irked him to be here, he could not rest. He loved each simple joy the country yields, He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, For that a shadow lowered on the fields, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep. Some life of men unblest He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing; he is dead.
So, some tempestuous morn in early June, When the year’s primal burst of bloom is o’er, Before the roses and the longest day,-- When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor, With blossoms red and white of fallen May, And chestnut-flowers, are strewn,-- So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry, From the wet field, through the vexed garden-trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: _The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I_!
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell, And stocks in fragrant blow; Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the full moon, and the white evening-star.
He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown! What matters it? next year he will return, And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days, With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern, And bluebells trembling by the forest-ways, And scent of hay new-mown. But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see,-- See him come back, and cut a smoother reed, And blow a strain the world at last shall heed; For Time, not Corydon, hath conquered thee!
Alack, for Corydon no rival now!-- But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate, Some good survivor with his flute would go, Piping a ditty sad for Bion’s fate; And cross the unpermitted ferry’s flow, And relax Pluto’s brow, And make leap up with joy the beauteous head Of Proserpine, among whose crownèd hair Are flowers first opened on Sicilian air, And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead.
Oh, easy access to the hearer’s grace When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, She knew the Dorian water’s gush divine, She knew each lily white which Enna yields, Each rose with blushing face; She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain. But ah! of our poor Thames she never heard; Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred; And we should tease her with our plaint in vain.
Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be; Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour In the old haunt, and find our tree-topped hill! Who, if not I, for questing here hath power? I know the wood which hides the daffodil; I know the Fyfield tree; I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river-fields, Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields; And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries;
I know these slopes: who knows them if not I? But many a dingle on the loved hillside, With thorns once studded, old white-blossomed trees, Where thick the cowslips grew, and far descried High towered the spikes of purple orchises, Hath since our day put by The coronals of that forgotten time; Down each green bank hath gone the ploughboy’s team, And only in the hidden brookside gleam Primroses, orphans of the flowery prime.
Where is the girl who by the boatman’s door, Above the locks, above the boating throng, Unmoored our skiff when through the Wytham flats, Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among, And darting swallows and light water-gnats, We tracked the shy Thames shore? Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell Of our boat passing heaved the river-grass, Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?-- They all are gone, and thou art gone as well!
Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade. I see her veil draw soft across the day, I feel her slowly chilling breath invade The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with gray; I feel her finger light Laid pausefully upon life’s headlong train,-- The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, The heart less bounding at emotion new, And hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.
And long the way appears, which seemed so short To the less-practised eye of sanguine youth; And high the mountain tops, in cloudy air,-- The mountain tops where is the throne of Truth, Tops in life’s morning-sun so bright and bare! Unbreachable the fort Of the long-battered world uplifts its wall; And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows, And near and real the charm of thy repose, And night as welcome as a friend would fall.
But hush! the upland hath a sudden loss Of quiet! Look, adown the dusk hillside, A troop of Oxford hunters going home, As in old days, jovial and talking, ride! From hunting with the Berkshire hounds they come. Quick! let me fly, and cross Into yon farther field! ’Tis done; and see, Backed by the sunset, which doth glorify The orange and pale violet evening-sky, Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree! the Tree!
I take the omen! Eve lets down her veil, The white fog creeps from bush to bush about, The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright, And in the scattered farms the lights come out. I cannot reach the signal-tree to-night, Yet, happy omen, hail! Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale (For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep The morningless and unawakening sleep Under the flowery oleanders pale);
Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!-- Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim, These brambles pale with mist engarlanded, That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him: To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air, Wandering with the great Mother’s train divine (And purer or more subtile soul than thee, I trow the mighty Mother doth not see) Within a folding of the Apennine,--
Thou hearest the immortal chants of old! Putting his sickle to the perilous grain In the hot cornfield of the Phrygian king, For thee the Lityerses-song again Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing;[19] Sings his Sicilian fold, His sheep, his hapless love, his blinded eyes; And how a call celestial round him rang, And heavenward from the fountain-brink he sprang, And all the marvel of the golden skies.
There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair. Despair I will not, while I yet descry ’Neath the soft canopy of English air That lonely tree against the western sky. Still, still these slopes, ’tis clear, Our Gypsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee! Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay, Woods with anemones in flower till May, Know him a wanderer still; then why not me?
A fugitive and gracious light he seeks, Shy to illumine; and I seek it too. This does not come with houses or with gold, With place, with honor, and a flattering crew; ’Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold; But the smooth-slipping weeks Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired; Out of the heed of mortals he is gone, He wends unfollowed, he must house alone; Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.
Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wast bound! Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour. Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest, If men esteemed thee feeble, gave thee power, If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest. And this rude Cumner ground, Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields, Here cam’st thou in thy jocund youthful time, Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime! And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields.
What though the music of thy rustic flute Kept not for long its happy, country tone; Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note Of men contention-tost, of men who groan, Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat-- It failed, and thou wast mute! Yet hadst thou alway visions of our light, And long with men of care thou couldst not stay, And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way, Left human haunt, and on alone till night.
Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! ’Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore, Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home. --Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar, Let in thy voice a whisper often come, To chase fatigue and fear: _Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died._ _Roam on! The light we sought is shining still._ _Dost thou ask proof! Our tree yet crowns the hill,_ _Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside_.
_MEMORIAL VERSES._
APRIL, 1850.
Goethe in Weimar sleeps; and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease. But one such death remained to come: The last poetic voice is dumb,-- We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.
When Byron’s eyes were shut in death, We bowed our head, and held our breath. He taught us little, but our soul Had _felt_ him like the thunder’s roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law; And yet with reverential awe We watched the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife.
When Goethe’s death was told, we said,-- Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head. Physician of the iron age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said, _Thou ailest here, and here_! He looked on Europe’s dying hour Of fitful dream and feverish power; His eye plunged down the weltering strife, The turmoil of expiring life: He said, _The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there_! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness.
And Wordsworth! Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice! For never has such soothing voice Been to your shadowy world conveyed, Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade Heard the clear song of Orpheus come Through Hades and the mournful gloom. Wordsworth has gone from us; and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen,--on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth: Smiles broke from us, and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o’er the sunlit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth returned; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furled, The freshness of the early world.
Ah! since dark days still bring to light Man’s prudence and man’s fiery might, Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force; But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power? Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel: Others will strengthen us to bear-- But who, ah! who will make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly; But who, like him, will put it by? Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, O Rotha, with thy living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hear thy voice right, now he is gone.
_STANZAS._
IN MEMORY OF EDWARD QUILLINAN.
I saw him sensitive in frame, I knew his spirits low; And wished him health, success, and fame-- I do not wish it now.
For these are all their own reward, And leave no good behind; They try us, oftenest make us hard, Less modest, pure, and kind.
Alas! yet to the suffering man, In this his mortal state, Friends could not give what fortune can,-- Health, ease, a heart elate.
But he is now by fortune foiled No more; and we retain The memory of a man unspoiled, Sweet, generous, and humane;
With all the fortunate have not, With gentle voice and brow. --Alive, we would have changed his lot: We would not change it now.
_STANZAS FROM CARNAC._
Far on its rocky knoll descried, Saint Michael’s chapel cuts the sky. I climbed; beneath me, bright and wide, Lay the lone coast of Brittany.
Bright in the sunset, weird and still, It lay beside the Atlantic wave, As though the wizard Merlin’s will Yet charmed it from his forest-grave.
Behind me on their grassy sweep, Bearded with lichen, scrawled and gray, The giant stones of Carnac sleep, In the mild evening of the May.
No priestly stern procession now Streams through their rows of pillars old; No victims bleed, no Druids bow: Sheep make the daisied aisles their fold.
From bush to bush the cuckoo flies, The orchis red gleams everywhere; Gold furze with broom in blossom vies, The bluebells perfume all the air.
And o’er the glistening, lonely land, Rise up, all round, the Christian spires; The church of Carnac, by the strand, Catches the westering sun’s last fires.
And there, across the watery way, See, low above the tide at flood, The sickle-sweep of Quiberon Bay, Whose beach once ran with loyal blood!
And beyond that, the Atlantic wide!-- All round, no soul, no boat, no hail; But, on the horizon’s verge descried, Hangs, touched with light, one snowy sail.
Ah! where is he who should have come[20] Where that far sail is passing now, Past the Loire’s mouth, and by the foam Of Finistère’s unquiet brow,--
Home, round into the English wave?-- He tarries where the Rock of Spain Mediterranean waters lave; He enters not the Atlantic main.
Oh, could he once have reached this air Freshened by plunging tides, by showers! Have felt this breath he loved, of fair Cool Northern fields, and grass, and flowers!
He longed for it--pressed on. In vain! At the Straits failed that spirit brave. The South was parent of his pain, The South is mistress of his grave.
_A SOUTHERN NIGHT._
The sandy spits, the shore-locked lakes, Melt into open, moonlit sea; The soft Mediterranean breaks At my feet, free.
Dotting the fields of corn and vine, Like ghosts, the huge gnarled olives stand; Behind, that lovely mountain line! While, by the strand,--
Cette, with its glistening houses white, Curves with the curving beach away To where the light-house beacons bright Far in the bay.
Ah! such a night, so soft, so lone, So moonlit, saw me once of yore[21] Wander unquiet, and my own Vexed heart deplore.
But now that trouble is forgot: Thy memory, thy pain, to-night, My brother! and thine early lot,[22] Possess me quite.
The murmur of this Midland deep Is heard to-night around thy grave, There, where Gibraltar’s cannoned steep O’erfrowns the wave.
For there, with bodily anguish keen, With Indian heats at last foredone, With public toil and private teen,-- Thou sank’st alone.
Slow to a stop, at morning gray, I see the smoke-crowned vessel come; Slow round her paddles dies away The seething foam.
A boat is lowered from her side; Ah, gently place him on the bench! That spirit--if all have not yet died-- A breath might quench.
Is this the eye, the footstep fast, The mien of youth, we used to see? Poor, gallant boy! for such thou wast, Still art, to me.
The limbs their wonted tasks refuse; The eyes are glazed, thou canst not speak; And whiter than thy white burnous That wasted cheek!
Enough! The boat, with quiet shock, Unto its haven coming nigh, Touches, and on Gibraltar’s rock Lands thee, to die.
Ah me! Gibraltar’s strand is far; But farther yet across the brine Thy dear wife’s ashes buried are, Remote from thine.
For there, where morning’s sacred fount Its golden rain on earth confers, The snowy Himalayan Mount O’ershadows hers.
Strange irony of fate, alas! Which, for two jaded English, saves, When from their dusty life they pass, Such peaceful graves!
In cities should we English lie, Where cries are rising ever new, And men’s incessant stream goes by,-- We who pursue
Our business with unslackening stride, Traverse in troops, with care-filled breast, The soft Mediterranean side, The Nile, the East,--
And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and bustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
Not by those hoary Indian hills, Not by this gracious Midland sea Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills, Should our graves be.
Some sage, to whom the world was dead, And men were specks, and life a play; Who made the roots of trees his bed, And once a day
With staff and gourd his way did bend To villages and homes of man, For food to keep him till he end His mortal span,--
And the pure goal of being reach; Gray-headed, wrinkled, clad in white; Without companion, without speech, By day and night
Pondering God’s mysteries untold, And tranquil as the glacier-snows,-- He by those Indian mountains old Might well repose.
Some gray crusading knight austere, Who bore Saint Louis company, And came home hurt to death, and here Landed to die;
Some youthful troubadour, whose tongue Filled Europe once with his love-pain, Who here outworn had sunk, and sung His dying strain;
Some girl, who here from castle-bower, With furtive step and cheek of flame, ’Twixt myrtle-hedges all in flower By moonlight came To meet her pirate-lover’s ship, And from the wave-kissed marble stair Beckoned him on with quivering lip And floating hair,
And lived some moons in happy trance, Then learnt his death, and pined away,-- Such by these waters of romance ’Twas meet to lay.
But you--a grave for knight or sage, Romantic, solitary, still, O spent ones of a work-day age! Befits you ill.
So sang I; but the midnight breeze, Down to the brimmed, moon-charmèd main, Comes softly through the olive-trees, And checks my strain.
I think of her whose gentle tongue All plaint in her own cause controlled; Of thee I think, my brother! young In heart, high-souled;
That comely face, that clustered brow, That cordial hand, that bearing free,-- I see them still, I see them now, Shall always see!
And what but gentleness untired, And what but noble feeling warm, Wherever shown, howe’er inspired, Is grace, is charm?
What else is all these waters are, What else is steeped in lucid sheen, What else is bright, what else is fair, What else serene?
Mild o’er her grave, ye mountains, shine! Gently by his, ye waters, glide! To that in you which is divine They were allied.
_HAWORTH CHURCHYARD._
APRIL, 1855.
Where, under Loughrigg, the stream Of Rotha sparkles through fields Vested forever with green, Four years since, in the house Of a gentle spirit now dead, Wordsworth’s son-in-law, friend,-- I saw the meeting of two Gifted women.[23] The one, Brilliant with recent renown, Young, unpractised, had told With a master’s accent her feigned Story of passionate life; The other, maturer in fame, Earning, she too, her praise First in fiction, had since Widened her sweep, and surveyed History, politics, mind.
The two held converse; they wrote In a book which of world-famous souls Kept the memorial: bard, Warrior, statesman, had signed Their names: chief glory of all, Scott had bestowed there his last Breathings of song, with a pen Tottering, a death-stricken hand.
Hope at that meeting smiled fair. Years in number, it seemed, Lay before both, and a fame Heightened, and multiplied power.-- Behold! The elder, to-day, Lies expecting from death, In mortal weakness, a last Summons! the younger is dead!
First to the living we pay Mournful homage: the Muse Gains not an earth-deafened ear.
Hail to the steadfast soul, Which, unflinching and keen, Wrought to erase from its depth Mist and illusion and fear! Hail to the spirit which dared Trust its own thoughts, before yet Echoed her back by the crowd! Hail to the courage which gave Voice to its creed, ere the creed Won consecration from time!
Turn we next to the dead.-- How shall we honor the young, The ardent, the gifted? how mourn? Console we cannot, her ear Is deaf. Far northward from here, In a churchyard high ’mid the moors Of Yorkshire, a little earth Stops it forever to praise.
Where behind Keighley the road Up to the heart of the moors Between heath-clad showery hills Runs, and colliers’ carts Poach the deep ways coming down, And a rough, grimed race have their homes,-- There on its slope is built The moorland town. But the church Stands on the crest of the hill, Lonely and bleak; at its side The parsonage-house and the graves.
Strew with laurel the grave Of the early-dying! Alas! Early she goes on the path To the silent country, and leaves Half her laurels unwon, Dying too soon; yet green Laurels she had, and a course Short, but redoubled by fame.
And not friendless, and not Only with strangers to meet, Faces ungreeting and cold, Thou, O mourned one, to-day Enterest the house of the grave! Those of thy blood, whom thou lovedst, Have preceded thee,--young, Loving, a sisterly band; Some in art, some in gift Inferior--all in fame. They, like friends, shall receive This comer, greet her with joy; Welcome the sister, the friend; Hear with delight of thy fame!
Round thee they lie; the grass Blows from their graves to thy own! She whose genius, though not Puissant like thine, was yet Sweet and graceful; and she (How shall I sing her?) whose soul Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died,-- The world-famed son of fire,--she who sank Baffled, unknown, self-consumed; Whose too bold dying song[24] Shook, like a clarion-blast, my soul.
Of one, too, I have heard, A brother: sleeps he here? Of all that gifted race Not the least gifted; young, Unhappy, eloquent; the child Of many hopes, of many tears. O boy, if here thou sleep’st, sleep well! On thee too did the Muse Bright in thy cradle smile; But some dark shadow came (I know not what) and interposed.
Sleep, O cluster of friends, Sleep! or only when May, Brought by the west-wind, returns Back to your native heaths, And the plover is heard on the moors, Yearly awake to behold The opening summer, the sky, The shining moorland; to hear The drowsy bee, as of old, Hum o’er the thyme, the grouse Call from the heather in bloom! Sleep, or only for this Break your united repose!
_EPILOGUE._
So I sang; but the Muse, Shaking her head, took the harp-- Stern interrupted my strain, Angrily smote on the chords.
April showers Rush o’er the Yorkshire moors. Stormy, through driving mist, Loom the blurred hills; the rain Lashes the newly-made grave.
Unquiet souls! --In the dark fermentation of earth, In the never-idle workshop of nature, In the eternal movement, Ye shall find yourselves again!
_RUGBY CHAPEL._
NOVEMBER, 1857.
Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of withered leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play! The lights come out in the street, In the schoolroom windows; but cold, Solemn, unlighted, austere, Through the gathering darkness, arise The chapel-walls, in whose bound Thou, my father! art laid.
There thou dost lie, in the gloom Of the autumn evening. But ah! That word _gloom_ to my mind Brings thee back in the light Of thy radiant vigor again. In the gloom of November we passed Days not dark at thy side; Seasons impaired not the ray Of thy buoyant cheerfulness clear. Such thou wast! and I stand In the autumn evening, and think Of bygone autumns with thee.
Fifteen years have gone round Since thou arosest to tread, In the summer-morning, the road Of death, at a call unforeseen, Sudden. For fifteen years, We who till then in thy shade Rested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak, have endured Sunshine and rain as we might, Bare, unshaded, alone, Lacking the shelter of thee.
O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! Somewhere, surely, afar, In the sounding labor-house vast Of being, is practised that strength, Zealous, beneficent, firm!
Yes, in some far-shining sphere, Conscious or not of the past, Still thou performest the word Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live, Prompt, unwearied, as here. Still thou upraisest with zeal The humble good from the ground, Sternly repressest the bad; Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse Those who with half-open eyes Tread the border-land dim ’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st, Succorest. This was thy work, This was thy life upon earth.
What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth? Most men eddy about Here and there, eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurled in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die,-- Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves, In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost ocean, have swelled, Foamed for a moment, and gone.
And there are some whom a thirst Ardent, unquenchable, fires, Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain. Ah yes! some of us strive Not without action to die Fruitless, but something to snatch From dull oblivion, nor all Glut the devouring grave. We, we have chosen our path,-- Path to a clear-purposed goal, Path of advance; but it leads A long, steep journey, through sunk Gorges, o’er mountains in snow. Cheerful, with friends, we set forth: Then, on the height, comes the storm. Thunder crashes from rock To rock; the cataracts reply; Lightnings dazzle our eyes; Roaring torrents have breached The track; the stream-bed descends In the place where the wayfarer once Planted his footstep; the spray Boils o’er its borders; aloft, The unseen snow-beds dislodge Their hanging ruin. Alas! Havoc is made in our train! Friends who set forth at our side Falter, are lost in the storm.
We, we only are left! With frowning foreheads, with lips Sternly compressed, we strain on, On; and at nightfall at last Come to the end of our way, To the lonely inn ’mid the rocks; Where the gaunt and taciturn host Stands on the threshold, the wind Shaking his thin white hairs, Holds his lantern to scan Our storm-beat figures, and asks,-- Whom in our party we bring? Whom we have left in the snow?
Sadly we answer, We bring Only ourselves! we lost Sight of the rest in the storm. Hardly ourselves we fought through, Stripped, without friends, as we are. Friends, companions, and train, The avalanche swept from our side.
But thou wouldst not _alone_ Be saved, my father! _alone_ Conquer and come to thy goal, Leaving the rest in the wild. We were weary, and we Fearful, and we in our march Fain to drop down and to die. Still thou turnedst, and still Beckonedst the trembler, and still Gavest the weary thy hand. If, in the paths of the world, Stones might have wounded thy feet, Toil or dejection have tried Thy spirit, of that we saw Nothing: to us thou wast still Cheerful, and helpful, and firm! Therefore to thee it was given Many to save with thyself; And, at the end of thy day, O faithful shepherd! to come, Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.
And through thee I believe In the noble and great who are gone; Pure souls honored and blest By former ages, who else else-- Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see-- Seemed but a dream of the heart, Seemed but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous and arid and vile; But souls tempered with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and friends of mankind.
Servants of God!--or sons Shall I not call you? because Not as servants ye knew Your Father’s innermost mind, His who unwillingly sees One of his little ones lost,-- Yours is the praise, if mankind Hath not as yet in its march Fainted and fallen and died.
See! In the rocks of the world Marches the host of mankind, A feeble, wavering line. Where are they tending? A God Marshalled them, gave them their goal. Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild: Sore thirst plagues them; the rocks, Rising all round, overawe; Factions divide them; their host Threatens to break, to dissolve. Ah! keep, keep them combined! Else, of the myriads who fill That army, not one shall arrive; Sole they shall stray; on the rocks Batter forever in vain, Die one by one in the waste.
Then, in such hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Ye like angels appear, Radiant with ardor divine. Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, re-inspire the brave. Order, courage, return; Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as ye go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God.
_HEINE’S GRAVE._
“_Henri Heine_”--’tis here! The black tombstone, the name Carved there--no more; and the smooth, Swarded alleys, the limes Touched with yellow by hot Summer, but under them still, In September’s bright afternoon, Shadow, and verdure, and cool. Trim Montmartre! the faint Murmur of Paris outside; Crisp everlasting-flowers, Yellow and black, on the graves.
Half blind, palsied, in pain, Hither to come, from the streets’ Uproar, surely not loath Wast thou, Heine! to lie Quiet, to ask for closed Shutters, and darkened room, And cool drinks, and an eased Posture, and opium, no more; Hither to come, and to sleep Under the wings of Renown.
Ah! not little, when pain Is most quelling, and man Easily quelled, and the fine Temper of genius so soon Thrills at each smart, is the praise, Not to have yielded to pain! No small boast, for a weak Son of mankind, to the earth Pinned by the thunder, to rear His bolt-scathed front to the stars; And, undaunted, retort ’Gainst thick-crashing, insane, Tyrannous tempests of bale, Arrowy lightnings of soul.
Hark! through the alley resounds Mocking laughter! A film Creeps o’er the sunshine; a breeze Ruffles the warm afternoon, Saddens my soul with its chill. Gibing of spirits in scorn Shakes every leaf of the grove, Mars the benignant repose Of this amiable home of the dead.
Bitter spirits, ye claim Heine? Alas, he is yours! Only a moment I longed Here in the quiet to snatch From such mates the outworn Poet, and steep him in calm. Only a moment! I knew Whose he was who is here Buried: I knew he was yours! Ah! I knew that I saw Here no sepulchre built In the laurelled rock, o’er the blue Naples bay, for a sweet Tender Virgil; no tomb On Ravenna sands, in the shade Of Ravenna pines, for a high Austere Dante; no grave By the Avon side, in the bright Stratford meadows, for thee, Shakspeare, loveliest of souls, Peerless in radiance, in joy!
What, then, so harsh and malign, Heine! distils from thy life? Poisons the peace of thy grave?
I chide with thee not, that thy sharp Upbraidings often assailed England, my country; for we, Heavy and sad, for her sons, Long since, deep in our hearts, Echo the blame of her foes. We too sigh that she flags; We too say that she now-- Scarce comprehending the voice Of her greatest, golden-mouthed sons Of a former age any more-- Stupidly travels her round Of mechanic business, and lets Slow die out of her life Glory, and genius, and joy.
So thou arraign’st her, her foe; So we arraign her, her sons. Yes, we arraign her! but she, The weary Titan, with deaf Ears, and labor-dimmed eyes, Regarding neither to right Nor left, goes passively by, Staggering on to her goal; Bearing on shoulders immense, Atlanteän, the load, Well-nigh not to be borne, Of the too vast orb of her fate.
But was it thou--I think Surely it was!--that bard Unnamed, who, Goethe said, _Had every other gift, but wanted love_-- Love, without which the tongue Even of angels sounds amiss?
Charm is the glory which makes Song of the poet divine. Love is the fountain of charm. How without charm wilt thou draw, Poet! the world to thy way? Not by the lightnings of wit, Not by the thunder of scorn. These to the world too are given; Wit it possesses, and scorn: Charm is the poet’s alone. _Hollow and dull are the great,_ _And artists envious, and the mob profane._ We know all this, we know! Cam’st thou from heaven, O child Of light! but this to declare? Alas! to help us forget Such barren knowledge a while, God gave the poet his song.
Therefore a secret unrest Tortured thee, brilliant and bold; Therefore triumph itself Tasted amiss to thy soul. Therefore, with blood of thy foes, Trickled in silence thine own. Therefore the victor’s heart Broke on the field of his fame.
Ah! as of old, from the pomp Of Italian Milan, the fair Flower of marble of white Southern palaces,--steps Bordered by statues, and walks Terraced, and orange bowers Heavy with fragrance,--the blond German Kaiser full oft Longed himself back to the fields, Rivers, and high-roofed towns Of his native Germany; so, So, how often! from hot Paris drawing-rooms, and lamps Blazing, and brilliant crowds, Starred and jewelled, of men Famous, of women the queens Of dazzling converse; from fumes Of praise, hot, heady fumes, to the poor brain That mount, that madden,--how oft Heine’s spirit outworn Longed itself out of the din, Back to the tranquil, the cool Far German home of his youth!
See! in the May afternoon, O’er the fresh short turf of the Hartz, A youth, with the foot of youth, Heine! thou climbest again: Up through the tall dark firs Warming their heads in the sun, Checkering the grass with their shade; Up by the stream, with its huge Moss-hung bowlders, and thin Musical water half-hid; Up o’er the rock-strewn slope, With the sinking sun, and the air Chill, and the shadows now Long on the gray hillside,-- To the stone-roofed hut at the top!
Or, yet later, in watch On the roof of the Brocken-tower Thou standest, gazing!--to see The broad red sun over field, Forest, and city, and spire, And mist-tracked steam of the wide, Wide German land, going down In a bank of vapors,--again Standest, at nightfall, alone!
Or, next morning, with limbs Rested by slumber, and heart Freshened and light with the May, O’er the gracious spurs coming down Of the Lower Hartz, among oaks And beechen coverts, and copse Of hazels green, in whose depth Ilse, the fairy transformed, In a thousand water-breaks light Pours her petulant youth; Climbing the rock which juts O’er the valley,--the dizzily perched Rock,--to its iron cross Once more thou cling’st; to the cross Clingest! with smiles, with a sigh!
Goethe too had been there.[25] In the long-past winter he came To the frozen Hartz, with his soul Passionate, eager; his youth All in ferment. But he, Destined to work and to live, Left it, and thou, alas! Only to laugh and to die.
But something prompts me: Not thus Take leave of Heine! not thus Speak the last word at his grave! Not in pity, and not With half censure: with awe Hail, as it passes from earth Scattering lightnings, that soul!
The Spirit of the world, Beholding the absurdity of men,-- Their vaunts, their feats,--let a sardonic smile, For one short moment, wander o’er his lips. _That smile was Heine!_ For its earthly hour The strange guest sparkled; now ’tis passed away.
That was Heine! and we, Myriads who live, who have lived, What are we all, but a mood, A single mood, of the life Of the Spirit in whom we exist, Who alone is all things in one?
Spirit, who fillest us all! Spirit, who utterest in each New-coming son of mankind Such of thy thoughts as thou wilt! O thou, one of whose moods, Bitter and strange, was the life Of Heine,--his strange, alas! His bitter life,--may a life Other and milder be mine! May’st thou a mood more serene, Happier, have uttered in mine! May’st thou the rapture of peace Deep have imbreathed at its core; Made it a ray of thy thought, Made it a beat of thy joy!
_STANZAS FROM THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE._
Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused With rain, where thick the crocus blows, Past the dark forges long disused, The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes. The bridge is crossed, and slow we ride, Through forest, up the mountain side.
The autumnal evening darkens round, The wind is up, and drives the rain; While, hark! far down, with strangled sound Doth the Dead Guier’s stream complain, Where that wet smoke, among the woods, Over his boiling caldron broods.
Swift rush the spectral vapors white Past limestone scars with ragged pines, Showing--then blotting from our sight!-- Halt--through the cloud-drift something shines! High in the valley, wet and drear, The huts of Courrerie appear.
_Strike leftward!_ cries our guide; and higher Mounts up the stony forest-way. At last the encircling trees retire; Look! through the showery twilight gray, What pointed roofs are these advance? A palace of the kings of France?
Approach, for what we seek is here! Alight, and sparely sup, and wait For rest in this outbuilding near; Then cross the sward, and reach that gate; Knock; pass the wicket. Thou art come To the Carthusians’ world-famed home.
The silent courts, where night and day Into their stone-carved basins cold The splashing icy fountains play, The humid corridors behold, Where, ghost-like in the deepening night, Cowled forms brush by in gleaming white!
The chapel, where no organ’s peal Invests the stern and naked prayer! With penitential cries they kneel And wrestle; rising then, with bare And white uplifted faces stand, Passing the Host from hand to hand; Each takes, and then his visage wan Is buried in his cowl once more. The cells!--the suffering Son of man Upon the wall; the knee-worn floor; And where they sleep, that wooden bed, Which shall their coffin be when dead!
The library, where tract and tome Not to feed priestly pride are there, To hymn the conquering march of Rome, Nor yet to amuse, as ours are: They paint of souls the inner strife, Their drops of blood, their death in life.
The garden, overgrown--yet mild, See, fragrant herbs are flowering there: Strong children of the Alpine wild Whose culture is the brethren’s care; Of human tasks their only one, And cheerful works beneath the sun.
Those halls, too, destined to contain Each its own pilgrim-host of old, From England, Germany, or Spain,-- All are before me! I behold The house, the brotherhood austere. And what am I, that I am here?
For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, Showed me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: _What dost thou in this living tomb?_
Forgive me, masters of the mind! At whose behest I long ago So much unlearned, so much resigned: I come not here to be your foe! I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, To curse and to deny your truth;
Not as their friend, or child, I speak! But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone; For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride: I come to shed them at their side.
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control!
For the world cries, your faith is now But a dead time’s exploded dream; My melancholy, sciolists say, Is a passed mode, an outworn theme.-- As if the world had ever had A faith, or sciolists been sad!
Ah! if it _be_ passed, take away, At least, the restlessness, the pain! Be man henceforth no more a prey To these out-dated stings again! The nobleness of grief is gone: Ah, leave us not the fret alone!
But,--if you cannot give us ease,-- Last of the race of them who grieve, Here leave us to die out with these Last of the people who believe! Silent, while years engrave the brow; Silent--the best are silent now.
Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb; Silent they are, though not content, And wait to see the future come. They have the grief men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more.
Our fathers watered with their tears This sea of time whereon we sail; Their voices were in all men’s ears Who passed within their puissant hail. Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute, and watch the waves.
For what availed it, all the noise And outcry of the former men? Say, have their sons achieved more joys? Say, is life lighter now than then? The sufferers died, they left their pain; The pangs which tortured them remain.
What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mocked the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own? What boots it, Shelley! that the breeze Carried thy lovely wail away, Musical through Italian trees Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay? Inheritors of thy distress, Have restless hearts one throb the less?
Or are we easier, to have read, O Obermann! the sad, stern page, Which tells us how thou hidd’st thy head From the fierce tempest of thine age In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau, Or chalets near the Alpine snow?
Ye slumber in your silent grave!-- The world, which for an idle day Grace to your mood of sadness gave, Long since hath flung her weeds away. The eternal trifler breaks your spell; But we--we learnt your lore too well!
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity. Sons of the world, oh! speed those years; But, while we wait, allow our tears!
Allow them! We admire with awe The exulting thunder of your race; You give the universe your law, You triumph over time and space: Your pride of life, your tireless powers, We praise them, but they are not ours.
We are like children reared in shade Beneath some old-world abbey wall, Forgotten in a forest-glade, And secret from the eyes of all. Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves, Their abbey, and its close of graves!
But, where the road runs near the stream, Oft through the trees they catch a glance Of passing troops in the sun’s beam,-- Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance; Forth to the world those soldiers fare, To life, to cities, and to war.
And through the woods, another way, Faint bugle-notes from far are borne, Where hunters gather, staghounds bay, Round some old forest-lodge at morn. Gay dames are there, in sylvan green; Laughter and cries--those notes between!
The banners flashing through the trees Make their blood dance, and chain their eyes; That bugle-music on the breeze Arrests them with a charmed surprise. Banner by turns and bugle woo: _Ye shy recluses, follow too!_
O children, what do ye reply? “Action and pleasure, will ye roam Through these secluded dells to cry And call us? but too late ye come! Too late for us your call ye blow, Whose bent was taken long ago.
“Long since we pace this shadowed nave; We watch those yellow tapers shine, Emblems of hope over the grave, In the high altar’s depth divine. The organ carries to our ear Its accents of another sphere.
“Fenced early in this cloistral round Of revery, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air? --Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease; And leave our desert to its peace!”
_STANZAS_
IN MEMORY OF THE AUTHOR OF OBERMANN.[26]
NOVEMBER, 1849.
In front the awful Alpine track Crawls up its rocky stair; The autumn storm-winds drive the rack, Close o’er it, in the air.
Behind are the abandoned baths[27] Mute in their meadows lone; The leaves are on the valley-paths, The mists are on the Rhone,--
The white mists rolling like a sea; I hear the torrents roar. --Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee; I feel thee near once more.
I turn thy leaves; I feel their breath Once more upon me roll; That air of languor, cold, and death, Which brooded o’er thy soul.
Fly hence, poor wretch, whoe’er thou art, Condemned to cast about, All shipwreck in thy own weak heart, For comfort from without!
A fever in these pages burns Beneath the calm they feign; A wounded human spirit turns, Here, on its bed of pain.
Yes, though the virgin mountain air Fresh through these pages blows; Though to these leaves the glaciers spare The soul of their mute snows;
Though here a mountain murmur swells Of many a dark-boughed pine; Though, as you read, you hear the bells Of the high-pasturing kine,--
Yet through the hum of torrent lone, And brooding mountain bee, There sobs I know not what ground-tone Of human agony.
Is it for this, because the sound Is fraught too deep with pain, That, Obermann! the world around So little loves thy strain?
Some secrets may the poet tell, For the world loves new ways: To tell too deep ones is not well,-- It knows not what he says.
Yet, of the spirits who have reigned In this our troubled day, I know but two who have attained, Save thee, to see their way.
By England’s lakes, in gray old age, His quiet home one keeps; And one, the strong much-toiling sage, In German Weimar sleeps.
But Wordsworth’s eyes avert their ken From half of human fate; And Goethe’s course few sons of men May think to emulate.
For he pursued a lonely road, His eyes on Nature’s plan; Neither made man too much a god, Nor God too much a man.
Strong was he, with a spirit free From mists, and sane and clear; Clearer, how much! than ours--yet we Have a worse course to steer.
For, though his manhood bore the blast Of a tremendous time, Yet in a tranquil world was passed His tenderer youthful prime.
But we, brought forth and reared in hours Of change, alarm, surprise,-- What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?
Like children bathing on the shore, Buried a wave beneath, The second wave succeeds before We have had time to breathe.
Too fast we live, too much are tried, Too harassed, to attain Wordsworth’s sweet calm, or Goethe’s wide And luminous view to gain.
And then we turn, thou sadder sage, To thee! we feel thy spell! --The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou too hast scanned it well.
Immovable thou sittest, still As death, composed to bear; Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill, And icy thy despair.
Yes, as the son of Thetis said, I hear thee saying now: _Greater by far than thou are dead;_ _Strive not! die also thou!_
Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
_The glow_, he cries, _the thrill of life,_ _Where, where do these abound?_ Not in the world, not in the strife Of men, shall they be found.
He who hath watched, not shared, the strife, Knows how the day hath gone: He only lives with the world’s life, Who hath renounced his own.
To thee we come, then! Clouds are rolled Where thou, O seer! art set; Thy realm of thought is drear and cold-- The world is colder yet.
And thou hast pleasures, too, to share With those who come to thee,-- Balms floating on thy mountain air, And healing sights to see.
How often, where the slopes are green On Jaman, hast thou sate By some high chalet-door, and seen The summer day grow late;
And darkness steal o’er the wet grass With the pale crocus starred, And reach that glimmering sheet of glass Beneath the piny sward,--
Lake Leman’s waters, far below; And watched the rosy light Fade from the distant peaks of snow; And on the air of night
Heard accents of the eternal tongue Through the pine branches play,-- Listened, and felt thyself grow young! Listened, and wept-- Away!
Away the dreams that but deceive! And thou, sad guide, adieu! I go, fate drives me; but I leave Half of my life with you.
We, in some unknown Power’s employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign.
I in the world must live; but thou, Thou melancholy shade! Wilt not, if thou canst see me now, Condemn me, nor upbraid.
For thou art gone away from earth, And place with those dost claim, The children of the second birth, Whom the world could not tame;
And with that small transfigured band, Whom many a different way Conducted to their common land, Thou learn’st to think as they
Christian and Pagan, king and slave, Soldier and anchorite, Distinctions we esteem so grave, Are nothing in their sight.
They do not ask, who pined unseen, Who was on action hurled, Whose one bond is, that all have been Unspotted by the world.
There without anger thou wilt see Him who obeys thy spell No more, so he but rest, like thee, Unsoiled; and so, farewell!
Farewell! Whether thou now liest near That much-loved inland sea, The ripples of whose blue waves cheer Vevey and Meillerie;
And in that gracious region bland, Where with clear-rustling wave The scented pines of Switzerland Stand dark round thy green grave,--
Between the dusty vineyard-walls Issuing on that green place, The early peasant still recalls The pensive stranger’s face,--
And stoops to clear thy moss-grown date Ere he plods on again; Or whether, by maligner fate, Among the swarms of men,--
Where between granite terraces The blue Seine rolls her wave, The Capital of Pleasure sees Thy hardly-heard-of grave,--
Farewell! Under the sky we part, In this stern Alpine dell. O unstrung will! O broken heart! A last, a last farewell!
_OBERMANN ONCE MORE._
(COMPOSED MANY YEARS AFTER THE PRECEDING.)
_Savez-vous quelque bien qui console du regret d’un monde?_ OBERMANN.
Glion? Ah! twenty years, it cuts[28] All meaning from a name! White houses prank where once were huts; Glion, but not the same!
And yet I know not! All unchanged The turf, the pines, the sky! The hills in their old order ranged; The lake, with Chillon by;
And ’neath those chestnut-trees, where stiff And stony mounts the way, The crackling husk-heaps burn, as if I left them yesterday.
Across the valley, on that slope, The huts of Avant shine; Its pines, under their branches, ope Ways for the pasturing kine.
Full-foaming milk-pails, Alpine fare, Sweet heaps of fresh-cut grass, Invite to rest the traveller there Before he climb the pass,--
The gentian-flowered pass, its crown[29] With yellow spires aflame; Whence drops the path to Allière down, And walls where Byron came;[30]
By their green river, who doth change His birth-name just below, Orchard and croft and full-stored grange Nursed by his pastoral flow.
But stop! to fetch back thoughts that stray Beyond this gracious bound, The cone of Jaman, pale and gray, See, in the blue profound!
Ah, Jaman! delicately tall Above his sun-warmed firs,-- What thoughts to me his rocks recall, What memories he stirs!
And who but thou must be, in truth, Obermann! with me here? Thou master of my wandering youth, But left this many a year!
Yes, I forget the world’s work wrought, Its warfare waged with pain: An eremite with thee, in thought Once more I slip my chain,--
And to thy mountain chalet come, And lie beside its door, And hear the wild bee’s Alpine hum, And thy sad, tranquil lore.
Again I feel the words inspire Their mournful calm; serene, Yet tinged with infinite desire For all that _might_ have been,--
The harmony from which man swerved Made his life’s rule once more; The universal order served, Earth happier than before.
--While thus I mused, night gently ran Down over hill and wood. Then, still and sudden, Obermann On the grass near me stood.
Those pensive features well I knew,-- On my mind, years before, Imaged so oft, imaged so true! --A shepherd’s garb he wore;
A mountain flower was in his hand, A book was in his breast. Bent on my face, with gaze which scanned My soul, his eyes did rest.
“And is it thou,” he cried, “so long Held by the world which we Loved not, who turnest from the throng Back to thy youth and me?
“And from thy world, with heart opprest, Choosest thou _now_ to turn? Ah me! we anchorites read things best, Clearest their course discern!
“Thou fled’st me when the ungenial earth, Man’s work-place, lay in gloom: Return’st thou in her hour of birth, Of hopes and hearts in bloom?
“Perceiv’st thou not the change of day? Ah! Carry back thy ken, What, some two thousand years! Survey The world as it was then.
“Like ours it looked in outward air. Its head was clear and true, Sumptuous its clothing, rich its fare, No pause its action knew;
“Stout was its arm, each thew and bone Seemed puissant and alive: But, ah! its heart, its heart was stone, And so it could not thrive!
“On that hard Pagan world, disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell.
“In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, The Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the Appian Way.
“He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers; No easier nor no quicker passed The impracticable hours.
“The brooding East with awe beheld Her impious younger world. The Roman tempest swelled and swelled, And on her head was hurled.
“The East bowed low before the blast In patient, deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again.
“So well she mused, a morning broke Across her spirit gray; A conquering, new-born joy awoke, And filled her life with day.
“‘Poor world!’ she cried, ‘so deep accurst, That runn’st from pole to pole To seek a draught to slake thy thirst.-- Go, seek it in thy soul!’
“She heard it, the victorious West, In crown and sword arrayed; She felt the void which mined her breast, She shivered and obeyed.
“She vailed her eagles, snapped her sword, And laid her sceptre down; Her stately purple she abhorred, And her imperial crown.
“She broke her flutes, she stopped her sports, Her artists could not please. She tore her books, she shut her courts, She fled her palaces.
“Lust of the eye, and pride of life, She left it all behind, And hurried, torn with inward strife, The wilderness to find.
“Tears washed the trouble from her face; She changed into a child; ’Mid weeds and wrecks she stood,--a place Of ruin,--but she smiled!
“Oh, had I lived in that great day, How had its glory new Filled earth and heaven, and caught away My ravished spirit too!
“No thoughts that to the world belong Had stood against the wave Of love which set so deep and strong From Christ’s then open grave.
“No cloister-floor of humid stone Had been too cold for me; For me no Eastern desert lone Had been too far to flee.
“No lonely life had passed too slow, When I could hourly scan Upon his cross, with head sunk low, That nailed, thorn-crownèd Man; “Could see the Mother with the Child Whose tender winning arts Have to his little arms beguiled So many wounded hearts!
“And centuries came, and ran their course; And, unspent all that time, Still, still went forth that Child’s dear force, And still was at its prime.
“Ay, ages long endured his span Of life,--’tis true received,-- That gracious Child, that thorn-crowned Man! --He lived while we believed.
“While we believed, on earth he went, And open stood his grave; Men called from chamber, church, and tent, And Christ was by to save.
“Now he is dead! Far hence he lies In the lorn Syrian town; And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.
“In vain men still, with hoping new, Regard his death-place dumb, And say the stone is not yet to, And wait for words to come.
“Ah! from that silent sacred land Of sun, and arid stone, And crumbling wall, and sultry sand, Comes now one word alone!
“From David’s lips that word did roll; ’Tis true and living yet,-- _No man can save his brother’s soul,_ _Nor pay his brother’s debt._
“Alone, self-poised, henceforward man Must labor; must resign His all too human creeds, and scan Simply the way divine;
“But slow that tide of common thought, Which bathed our life, retired; Slow, slow the old world wore to naught, And pulse by pulse expired.
“Its frame yet stood without a breach, When blood and warmth were fled; And still it spake its wonted speech, But every word was dead.
“And oh! we cried, that on this corse Might fall a freshening storm! Rive its dry bones, and with new force A new-sprung world inform!
“--Down came the storm! O’er France it passed In sheets of scathing fire. All Europe felt that fiery blast, And shook as it rushed by her.
“Down came the storm! In ruins fell The worn-out world we knew. It passed, that elemental swell: Again appeared the blue;
“The sun shone in the new-washed sky. --And what from heaven saw he? Blocks of the past, like icebergs high, Float on a rolling sea!
“Upon them plies the race of man All it before endeavored: ‘Ye live,’ I cried, ‘ye work and plan, And know not ye are severed!
“‘Poor fragments of a broken world, Whereon men pitch their tent! Why were ye too to death not hurled When your world’s day was spent?
“‘That glow of central fire is done Which with its fusing flame Knit all your parts, and kept you one; But ye, ye are the same!
“‘The past, its mask of union on, Had ceased to live and thrive: The past, its mask of union gone, Say, is it more alive?
“‘Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, Your social order too. Where tarries he, the Power who said,-- _See, I make all things new?_
“‘The millions suffer still, and grieve. And what can helpers heal With old-world cures men half believe For woes they wholly feel?
“‘And yet men have such need of joy! But joy whose grounds are true, And joy that should all hearts employ As when the past was new.
“‘Ah! not the emotion of that past, Its common hope, were vain! Some new such hope must dawn at last, Or man must toss in pain.
“‘But now the old is out of date, The new is not yet born. And who can be _alone_ elate, While the world lies forlorn?’
“Then to the wilderness I fled. There among Alpine snows And pastoral huts I hid my head, And sought and found repose.
“It was not yet the appointed hour. Sad, patient, and resigned, I watched the crocus fade and flower, I felt the sun and wind.
“The day I lived in was not mine: Man gets no second day. In dreams I saw the future shine, But ah! I could not stay!
“Action I had not, followers, fame. I passed obscure, alone. The after-world forgets my name, Nor do I wish it known.
“Composed to bear, I lived and died, And knew my life was vain. With fate I murmur not, nor chide. At Sèvres by the Seine
“(If Paris that brief flight allow) My humble tomb explore! It bears: _Eternity, be thou My refuge!_ and no more.
“But thou, whom fellowship of mood Did make from haunts of strife Come to my mountain solitude, And learn my frustrate life;
“O thou, who, ere thy flying span Was past of cheerful youth, Didst find the solitary man, And love his cheerless truth,--
“Despair not thou as I despaired, Nor be cold gloom thy prison! Forward the gracious hours have fared, And see! the sun is risen!
“He breaks the winter of the past; A green, new earth appears. Millions, whose life in ice lay fast, Have thoughts and smiles and tears.
“What though there still need effort, strife? Though much be still unwon? Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life; Death’s frozen hour is done.
“The world’s great order dawns in sheen After long darkness rude, Divinelier imaged, clearer seen, With happier zeal pursued.
“With hope extinct, and brow composed, I marked the present die; Its term of life was nearly closed, Yet it had more than I.
“But thou, though to the world’s new hour Thou come with aspect marred, Shorn of the joy, the bloom, the power, Which best befits its bard;
“Though more than half thy years be past, And spent thy youthful prime; Though, round thy firmer manhood cast, Hang weeds of our sad time
“Whereof thy youth felt all the spell, And traversed all the shade,-- Though late, though dimmed, though weak, yet tell Hope to a world new-made!
“Help it to fill that deep desire, The want which crazed our brain, Consumed our soul with thirst like fire, Immedicable pain;
“Which to the wilderness drove out Our life, to Alpine snow, And palsied all our word with doubt, And all our work with woe.
“What still of strength is left, employ, This end to help attain: _One common wave of thought and joy_ _Lifting mankind again!_”
--The vision ended. I awoke As out of sleep, and no Voice moved: only the torrent broke The silence, far below.
Soft darkness on the turf did lie; Solemn, o’er hut and wood, In the yet star-sown nightly sky, The peak of Jaman stood.
Still in my soul the voice I heard Of Obermann! Away I turned; by some vague impulse stirred, Along the rocks of Naye,--
Past Sonchaud’s piny flanks I gaze, And the blanched summit bare Of Malatrait, to where in haze The Valais opens fair,
And the domed Velan, with his snows, Behind the upcrowding hills, Doth all the heavenly opening close Which the Rhone’s murmur fills;
And glorious there, without a sound, Across the glimmering lake, High in the Valais-depth profound, I saw the morning break.
NOTES.
NOTE [1], PAGE 2.
_Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen._
The name Europe (Εὐρώπη, _the wide prospect_) probably describes the appearance of the European coast to the Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor opposite. The name Asia, again, comes, it has been thought, from the muddy fens of the rivers of Asia Minor, such as the Cayster or Mæander, which struck the imagination of the Greeks living near them.
NOTE [2], PAGE 8.
_Mycerinus._
“After Chephren, Mycerinus, son of Cheops, reigned over Egypt. He abhorred his father’s courses, and judged his subjects more justly than any of their kings had done. To him there came an oracle from the city of Buto, to the effect that he was to live but six years longer, and to die in the seventh year from that time.”--HERODOTUS.
NOTE [3], PAGE 37.
_Stagirius._
Stagirius was a young monk to whom St. Chrysostom addressed three books, and of whom those books give an account. They will be found in the first volume of the Benedictine edition of St. Chrysostom’s works.
NOTE [4], PAGE 51.
_That wayside inn we left to-day._
Those who have been long familiar with the English Lake Country will find no difficulty in recalling, from the description in the text, the roadside inn at Wythburn, on the descent from Dunmail Raise towards Keswick; its sedentary landlord of thirty years ago; and the passage over the Wythburn Fells to Watendlath.
NOTE [5], PAGE 59.
_Sohrab and Rustum._
The story of Sohrab and Rustum is told in Sir John Malcolm’s “History of Persia,” as follows:--
“The young Sohrab was the fruit of one of Rustum’s early amours. He had left his mother, and sought fame under the banners of Afrasiab, whose armies he commanded; and soon obtained a renown beyond that of all contemporary heroes but his father. He had carried death and dismay into the ranks of the Persians, and had terrified the boldest warriors of that country, before Rustum encountered him, which at last that hero resolved to do under a feigned name. They met three times. The first time, they parted by mutual consent, though Sohrab had the advantage; the second, the youth obtained a victory, but granted life to his unknown father; the third was fatal to Sohrab, who, when writhing in the pangs of death, warned his conqueror to shun the vengeance that is inspired by parental woes, and bade him dread the rage of the mighty Rustum, who must soon learn that he had slain his son Sohrab. These words, we are told, were as death to the aged hero; and when he recovered from a trance, he called in despair for proofs of what Sohrab had said. The afflicted and dying youth tore open his mail, and showed his father a seal which his mother had placed on his arm when she discovered to him the secret of his birth, and bade him seek his father. The sight of his own signet rendered Rustum quite frantic: he cursed himself, attempting to put an end to his existence, and was only prevented by the efforts of his expiring son. After Sohrab’s death, he burned his tents and all his goods, and carried the corpse to Seistan, where it was interred; the army of Turan was, agreeably to the last request of Sohrab, permitted to cross the Oxus unmolested. To reconcile us to the improbability of this tale, we are informed that Rustum could have no idea his son was in existence. The mother of Sohrab had written to him her child was a daughter, fearing to lose her darling infant if she revealed the truth; and Rustum, as before stated, fought under a feigned name, an usage not uncommon in the chivalrous combats of those days.”
NOTE [6], PAGE 94.
_Balder Dead._
“Balder the Good having been tormented with terrible dreams, indicating that his life was in great peril, communicated them to the assembled Æsir, who resolved to conjure all things to avert from him the threatened danger. Then Frigga exacted an oath from fire and water, from iron and all other metals, as well as from stones, earths, diseases, beasts, birds, poisons, and creeping things, that none of them would do any harm to Balder. When this was done, it became a favorite pastime of the Æsir, at their meetings, to get Balder to stand up and serve them as a mark, some hurling darts at him, some stones, while others hewed at him with their swords and battle-axes; for, do they what they would, none of them could harm him, and this was regarded by all as a great honor shown to Balder. But when Loki beheld the scene, he was sorely vexed that Balder was not hurt. Assuming, therefore, the shape of a woman, he went to Fensalir, the mansion of Frigga. That goddess, when she saw the pretended woman, inquired of her if she knew what the Æsir were doing at their meetings. She replied, that they were throwing darts and stones at Balder without being able to hurt him.
“‘Ay,’ said Frigga, ’neither metal nor wood can hurt Balder, for I have exacted an oath from all of them.’
“‘What!’ exclaimed the woman, ‘have all things sworn to spare Balder?’
“‘All things,’ replied Frigga, ‘except one little shrub that grows on the eastern side of Valhalla, and is called Mistletoe, and which I thought too young and feeble to crave an oath from.’
“As soon as Loki heard this, he went away, and, resuming his natural shape, cut off the mistletoe, and repaired to the place where the gods were assembled. There he found Hödur standing apart, without partaking of the sports, on account of his blindness; and going up to him said, ‘Why dost thou not also throw something at Balder?’ “‘Because I am blind,’ answered Hödur, ‘and see not where Balder is, and have, moreover, nothing to throw with.’
“‘Come, then,’ said Loki, ‘do like the rest, and show honor to Balder by throwing this twig at him, and I will direct thy arm toward the place where he stands.’
“Hödur then took the mistletoe, and, under the guidance of Loki, darted it at Balder, who, pierced through and through, fell down lifeless.”--_Edda._
NOTE [7], PAGE 131.
_Tristram and Iseult._
“In the court of his uncle King Marc, the king of Cornwall, who at this time resided at the castle of Tyntagel, Tristram became expert in all knightly exercises. The king of Ireland, at Tristram’s solicitations, promised to bestow his daughter Iseult in marriage on King Marc. The mother of Iseult gave to her daughter’s confidante a philtre, or love-potion, to be administered on the night of her nuptials. Of this beverage Tristram and Iseult, on their voyage to Cornwall, unfortunately partook. Its influence, during the remainder of their lives, regulated the affections and destiny of the lovers.
“After the arrival of Tristram and Iseult in Cornwall, and the nuptials of the latter with King Marc, a great part of the romance is occupied with their contrivances to procure secret interviews.--Tristram, being forced to leave Cornwall on account of the displeasure of his uncle, repaired to Brittany, where lived Iseult with the White Hands. He married her, more out of gratitude than love. Afterwards he proceeded to the dominions of Arthur, which became the theatre of unnumbered exploits.
“Tristram, subsequent to these events, returned to Brittany, and to his long-neglected wife. There, being wounded and sick, he was soon reduced to the lowest ebb. In this situation, he dispatched a confidant to the queen of Cornwall, to try if he could induce her to accompany him to Brittany,” etc.--DUNLOP’S _History of Fiction_.
NOTE [8], PAGE 167.
_That son of Italy who tried to blow._
Giacopone di Todi.
NOTE [9], PAGE 172.
_Recalls the obscure opposer he outweighed._
Gilbert de la Porrée, at the Council of Rheims in 1148.
NOTE [10], PAGE 173.
_Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried._
The Montanists.
NOTE [11], PAGE 174.
_Monica._
See St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” book ix. chapter 11.
NOTE [12], PAGE 175.
_My Marguerite smiles upon the strand._
See, among “Early Poems,” the poem called “A Memory-Picture,” p. 23.
NOTE [13], PAGE 199.
_The Hunter of the Tanagræan Field._
Orion, the Wild Huntsman of Greek legend, and in this capacity appearing in both earth and sky.
NOTE [14], PAGE 200.
_O’er the sun-reddened western straits._
Erytheia, the legendary region around the Pillars of Hercules, probably took its name from the redness of the west under which the Greeks saw it.
NOTE [15], PAGE 222.
_Of the sun-loving gentian, in the heat._
The _gentiana lutea_.
NOTE [16], PAGE 246.
_Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth._
See the Fragments of Parmenides:--
......κοῦραι δʹ ὁδὀν ἡγεμόνευον, ἡλἱαδες κοῦραι, προλιποῦσαι δὠματα νυκτός, εἰς ϕάος............
NOTE [17], PAGE 291.
_The Scholar-Gypsy._
“There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others; that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned.”--GLANVIL’S _Vanity of Dogmatizing_, 1661.
NOTE [18], PAGE 299.
_Thyrsis._
Throughout this poem there is reference to the preceding piece, “The Scholar-Gypsy.”
NOTE [19], PAGE 305.
_Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing._
Daphnis, the ideal Sicilian shepherd of Greek pastoral poetry, was said to have followed into Phrygia his mistress Piplea, who had been carried off by robbers, and to have found her in the power of the king of Phrygia, Lityerses. Lityerses used to make strangers try a contest with him in reaping corn, and to put them to death if he overcame them. Hercules arrived in time to save Daphnis, took upon himself the reaping-contest with Lityerses, overcame him, and slew him. The Lityerses-song connected with this tradition was, like the Linus-song, one of the early plaintive strains of Greek popular poetry, and used to be sung by corn-reapers. Other traditions represented Daphnis as beloved by a nymph who exacted from him an oath to love no one else. He fell in love with a princess, and was struck blind by the jealous nymph. Mercury, who was his father, raised him to heaven, and made a fountain spring up in the place from which he ascended. At this fountain the Sicilians offered yearly sacrifices. See SERVIUS, _Comment. in Virgil. Bucol._, v. 20 and viii. 68.
NOTE [20], PAGE 312.
_Ah! where is he, who should have come._
The author’s brother, William Delafield Arnold, Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab, and author of “Oakfield, or Fellowship in the East,” died at Gibraltar, on his way home from India, April the 9th, 1859.
NOTE [21], PAGE 313.
_So moonlit, saw me once of yore._
See the poem, “A Summer Night,” p. 278.
NOTE [22], PAGE 313.
_My brother! and thine early lot._
See Note 20.
NOTE [23], PAGE 317.
_I saw the meeting of two Gifted women._
Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Martineau.
NOTE [24], PAGE 320.
_Whose too bold dying song._
See the last lines written by Emily Brontë, in “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.”
NOTE [25], PAGE 334.
_Goethe too had been there._
See _Harzreise im Winter_, in Goethe’s _Gedichte_.
NOTE [26], PAGE 342.
The author of _Obermann_, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, has little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France he is almost unknown. But the profound inwardness, the austere sincerity, of his principal work, _Obermann_, the delicate feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many passages of it, have attracted and charmed some of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain number of spirits whom they touch and interest.
Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the Seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: _Éternité, deviens mon asile!_
The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,--Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël,--are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though _Obermann_, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers, he is the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinizing. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces by which modern life is and has been impelled lives in the letters of _Obermann_; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now fully bringing to light,--all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.
Besides _Obermann_, there is one other of Senancour’s works which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting: its title is _Libres Méditations d’un Solitaire Inconnu_.
NOTE [27], PAGE 342.
_Behind are the abandoned baths._
The Baths of Leuk. This poem was conceived, and partly composed, in the valley going down from the foot of the Gemmi Pass towards the Rhone.
NOTE [28], PAGE 348.
_Glion? Ah! twenty years, it cuts._
Probably all who know the Vevey end of the Lake of Geneva will recollect Glion, the mountain village above the Castle of Chillon. Glion now has hotels, _pensions_, and villas; but twenty years ago it was hardly more than the huts of Avant opposite to it,--huts through which goes that beautiful path over the Col de Jaman, followed by so many foot-travellers on their way from Vevey to the Simmenthal and Thun.
NOTE [29], PAGE 349.
_The gentian-flowered pass, its crown._
See Note 15.
NOTE [30], PAGE 349.
_And walls where Byron came._
Montbovon. See Byron’s Journal, in his “Works,” vol. iii. p. 258. The river Saane becomes the Sarine below Montbovon.
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BY JACOB ABBOTT,
“_The Prince of Writers for the Young._”
“Jacob Abbott’s books contain so much practical wisdom concerning the every-day life of children, and so many lessons in honor, truthfulness, and courtesy, that they should not be left out of the libraries of boys and girls.”--_From “Books for the Young,” compiled by C. M. Hewins, Librarian of the Hartford Library Association._
=ABBOTT’S AMERICAN HISTORIES FOR YOUTH.= 8 vols. Illustrated by Darley, Herrick, Chapin, and others. 12mo $10.00
I. Aboriginal America. II. Discovery of America. III. The Southern Colonies. IV. The Northern Colonies. V. Wars of the Colonies. VI. The Revolt of the Colonies. VII. The War of the Revolution. VIII. George Washington.
=THE ROLLO BOOKS.= 14 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 14.00
Rollo Learning to Talk. Rollo Learning to Read. Rollo at Work. Rollo at Play. Rollo at School. Rollo’s Vacation. Rollo’s Experiments. Rollo’s Museum. Rollo’s Travels. Rollo’s Correspondence. Rollo’s Philosophy--Water. Rollo’s Philosophy--Air. Rollo’s Philosophy--Fire. Rollo’s Philosophy--Sky.
=THE JONAS BOOKS.= 6 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 6.00
Jonas a Judge. Caleb in Town. Caleb in the Country. Jonas’s Stories. Jonas on a Farm in Summer. Jonas on a Farm in Winter.
=THE LUCY BOOKS.= 6 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 6.00
Lucy Among the Mountains. Lucy’s Conversations. Lucy on the Sea Shore. Lucy at Study. Lucy at Play. Stories Told to Cousin Lucy.
=AUGUST STORIES.= 4 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 5.00
August and Elvie. Hunter and Tom. Schooner Mary Ann. Granville Valley.
=JUNO STORIES.= 4 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 5.00
Hubert. Juno and Georgie. Juno on a Journey. Mary Osborne.
=Tennyson’s Complete Poems.= Illustrated Edition, with Portrait and 24 Full Page Illustrations by celebrated Artists. Engraved by Geo. T. Andrew. Uniform in size and style with Cambridge Book of Poetry. Royal 8vo.
Cloth, gilt $5.00 Morocco, gilt $10.00 Tree calf $12.00
=The Cambridge Book of Poetry and Song.= Selected from English and American Authors, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES. Illustrated by the best artists. Containing many selections found in no other compilation. Carefully indexed and a most attractive and valuable book of reference. Royal 8vo.
Cloth, gilt $5.00 Half morocco 7.50 Full morocco $10.00 Tree calf 12.00
=Initials and Pseudonyms. A Dictionary of Literary Disguises.= Edited by WILLIAM CUSHING. 8vo.
Cloth $5.00 Half morocco $7.50
=A Dictionary of Poetical Quotations.= Based upon that of Henry G. Bohn. _Revised_, _Corrected_, and _Enlarged_ by the addition of over 1200 Quotations. By ANNA L. WARD. Crown 8vo.
Bevelled boards $2.50 Interleaved edition $3.50
=Her Majesty’s Tower.= By W. HEPWORTH DIXON. A History of the Tower of London. 2 vols. 12mo. 47 Illustrations $4.00
=Foster’s Cyclopædias of Illustrations.= Containing over 16,000 Quotations from Prose and Poetic Literature, on all subjects which come within the range of Christian Teaching. Prose Illustrations, Vols. I. and II.; Poetical Illustrations, Vols. I. and II. Price in cloth, $5.00; in sheep, $6.00 per volume.
=Conybeare & Howson’s Life of St. Paul.= 12mo.
Illustrated edition $1.50 Popular edition $1.00
=Red Letter Poems.= By English men and women. Illustrated edition. 24 Full Page Illustrations. 8vo.
Cloth, gilt $3.50 Morocco, or tree calf 7.50
=George Eliot’s Poems.= 8vo. Illustrated edition.
Cloth, gilt 4.50 Morocco, or tree calf 9.00
=George Eliot’s Works.= 8 vols. 12mo. Cloth 10.00
=Hawthorne’s Complete Works.= 6 vols. 16mo. Cloth 10.00
=Lytton’s (Bulwer) Works.= 13 vols. 12mo 16.25
=Walton’s Complete Angler.= With 86 Illustrations. From Major’s 4th edition 2.00
=Charles Lamb’s Works.= 3 vols. 12mo 3.75
=Disraeli’s Works.= 6 vols. 12mo 7.50
=Milman’s Works.= 8 vols. 12mo 12.00
=Dickens’ Works.= 15 vols. 12mo 18.75
=Thackeray’s Works.= 11 vols. 12mo 13.75
=Waverley Novels.= 12 vols. 12mo 15.00
=Princes, Authors and Statesmen of our Time.= By JAMES T. FIELDS, E. P. WHIPPLE, CANON FARRAR, LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON and others, with 50 Illustrations. 8vo 2.75
=The Poor Boy and the Merchant Prince=; OR, THE LIFE OF AMOS LAWRENCE. 16mo. By WILLIAM M. THAYER 1.00
=The Good Girl and the True Woman=; OR, THE LIFE OF MARY LYON. 16mo. By WILLIAM M. THAYER 1.00
=Nelson=; OR, HOW A COUNTRY BOY MADE HIS WAY IN THE CITY. Being Incidents in the Life of a Successful Merchant of Boston. 16mo. By WILLIAM M. THAYER 1.25
=Poor Boys who Became Famous.= By SARAH K. BOLTON. Short biographical sketches of George Peabody, Horace Greeley, Bayard Taylor, Michael Faraday, and other Noted People, with numerous portraits. 12mo 1.50
=General Gordon, The Christian Hero.= A careful and well-written life of this Knightly Soldier, especially adapted to young people. 12mo 1.25
=Little Arthur’s England.= By Lady CALCOTT. With 36 Illustrations. Elegantly printed and bound in red cloth, giving in concise and easy language all the essential facts of English History for young People. 12mo. Cloth 1.25
=Little Arthur’s France.= On the plan of Little Arthur’s England, and bound in uniform style. 12mo 1.25
“Exceptionally fitted to interest and instruct young people.”--_Boston Advertiser._
=Off to the Wilds.= By GEO. MANVILLE FENN. A Story of Hunting Adventures in South Africa. A favorite book with the boys. Sq. 8vo. Fully Illustrated 1.75
=The Mutiny on Board the Leander.= By BERNARD HELDMANN. A Story of Strange Adventures in the Southern Pacific. Sq. 8vo. 24 Illustrations 1.75
=Martin the Skipper.= By JAMES F. COBB, author of “The Watchers on the Longships,” etc. A Tale for Boys and Seafaring Folk. 12mo 1.50
=The Watchers on the Longships.= By JAMES F. COBB. A Story of Thrilling Interest, founded on fact, illustrating Moral Heroism and Faithfulness to Duty. 12mo 1.50
=A Home in the Holy Land.= By MRS. FINN. An excellent and faithful Description of Home Life in the Holy Land at the Present Day. 12mo 1.50
=The Farmer Boy=; OR, HOW HE BECAME COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. The Life of George Washington. By Uncle Juvenal. 16mo 1.00
=A Year at Poplar Row.= By MARCH ELLINWOOD. A noble ideal of Christian Girlhood and Young Womanhood. 12mo 1.25
=Hints to Our Boys.= By A. J. SYMINGTON, with an Introduction by LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. Square 16mo .75
=Abbott’s American Histories for Youth.= 8 vols. Illustrated. 12mo, $10.00. 4 vols 6.00
=August Stories.= 4 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 4.50
=Juno Stories.= 4 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 4.50
=The Jonas Books.= 6 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 5.00
=The Lucy Books.= 6 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 5.00
=The Rollo Books.= 14 vols. Illustrated. 16mo 12.00
_Millions_ of copies of Jacob Abbott’s books have been sold, and they have become classics among the Literature for children.