The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell

Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,

'T were sweet to leave this shifting life
of tents

Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;
Nay, to be mingled with the elements,
The fellow-servant of creative powers,
Partaker in the solemn year's events,
To share the work of busy-fingered
hours,

To be night's silent almoner of dew,
To rise again in plants and breathe

and grow,

To stream as tides the ocean caverns

through,

About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate

To leave us all-disconsolate; Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod

Of charitable earth

That takes out all our mortal stains, And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod,

Methinks were better worth
Than the poor fruit of most men's wake-
ful pains,

The heart's insatiable ache:
But such was not his faith,
Nor mine: it may be he had trod
Outside the plain old path of God thus
spake,

But God to him was very God,
And not a visionary wraith
Skulking in murky corners of the
mind,

And he was sure to be
Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as
He,

Not with His essence mystically com-
bined,

As some high spirits long, but whole and free,

A perfected and conscious Agassiz.
And such I figure him: the wise of old
Welcome and own him of their peaceful
fold,

Not truly with the guild enrolled
Of him who seeking inward guessed
Diviner riddles than the rest,

And groping in the darks of thought
Touched the Great Hand and knew it
not;

Rather he shares the daily light,

From reason's charier fountains won, Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite,

And Cuvier clasps once more his long

lost son.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled The winning tongue; the forehead's highpiled heap,

A cairn which every science helped to
build,

Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:
He knows at last if Life or Death be
best:

Wherever he be flown, whatever vest
Or with the rapture of great winds to The being hath put on which lately

blow

here

The moral? Where Doubt's eddies toss and twirl

Faith's slender shallop till her footing reel,

Plunge if you find not peace beneath the whirl,

Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON'S "OLD WORLD IDYLLS."

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

Hush! my parched ears what runnels

slake?

Is a thrush gurgling from the brake? Has Spring, on all the breezes blown, At length arrived?

Long may you live such songs to make,
And I to listen while you wake,
With skill of late disused, each tone
Of the Lesboum barbiton,

At mastery, through long finger-ache, At length arrived.

II.

As I read on, what changes steal
O'er me and through, from head to
heel ?

A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside,
My rough Tweeds bloom to silken
pride,
Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick
Steele !

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

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

TO C. F. BRADFORD

ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE.
THE pipe came safe, and welcome too,
As anything must be from you;
A meerschaum pure, 't would float as
light

As she the girls call Amphitrite.
Mixture divine of foam and clay,
From both it stole the best away:
Its foam is such as crowns the glow
Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot;
Its clay is but congested lymph

Jove chose to make some choicer nymph; And here combined, —why, this must be

The birth of some enchanted sea,
Shaped to immortal form, the type
And very Venus of a pipe.

When high I heap it with the weed
From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed
Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore
And cast upon Virginia's shore,
I'll think, So fill the fairer bowl
And wise alembic of thy soul,

With herbs far-sought that shall distil,
Not fumes to slacken thought and will,
But bracing essences that nerve
To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve.

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448

JOSEPH WINLOCK.

SONNET.

JEFFRIES WYMAN.

To him the Fates

The seventy years borne lightly as the | Happy man's doom! pine were known Wears its first down of snow in green Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of

disdain:

Much did he, and much well; yet most

space,

Unprescient, through God's mercy, of his

THE wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many, honored by the Few;

To count as naught in World, or Church, or State,

But inwardly in secret to be great;
To feel mysterious Nature ever new;
To touch, if not to grasp, her endless
clue,

And learn by each discovery how to wait. He widened knowledge and escaped the praise;

He wisely taught, because more wise to learn;

He toiled for Science, not to draw men's gaze,

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