Have you not made us lead of gold? To feed your crucible, not sold
Our temple's sacred chalices?"
Then o'er my senses came a change; My book seemed all traditions, Old legends of profoundest range, Diablery, and stories strange
Of goblins, elves, magicians.
Old gods in modern saints I found,
Old creeds in strange disguises; I thought them safely underground, And here they were, all safe and sound, Without a sign of phthisis.
Truth was, my outward eyes were closed, Although I did not know it; Deep into dream-land I had dozed, And so was happily transposed From proser into poet.
So what I read took flesh and blood, And turned to living creatures : The words were but the dingy bud That bloomed, like Adam, from the mud, To human forms and features.
I saw how Zeus was lodged once more By Baucis and Philemon ; The text said, "Not alone of yore, But every day, at every door, Knocks still the masking Demon."
DAIMON 't was printed in the book And, as I read it slowly,
The letters stirred and changed, and took
Jove's stature, the Olympian look Of painless melancholy.
He paused upon the threshold worn: "With coin I cannot pay you; Yet would I fain make some return; The gift for cheapness do not spurn. Accept this hen, I pray you.
"Plain feathers wears my Hemera, And has from ages olden;
She makes her nest in common hay, And yet, of all the birds that lay, Her eggs alone are golden."
As when from far-off cloud-bergs springs A crag, and, hurtling under, From cliff to cliff the rumor flings,
He turned, and could no more be seen; So she from flight-foreboding wings
Old Baucis stared a moment,
Shook out a murmurous thunder.
She gripped the poet to her breast,
And ever, upward soaring, Earth seemed a new moon in the west, And then one light among the rest
Where squadrons lie at mooring. How tell to what heaven-hallowed seat The eagle bent his courses? The waves that on its bases beat, The gales that round it weave and fleet, Are life's creative forces.
Here was the bird's primeval nest,
High on a promontory Star-pharosed, where she takes her rest To brood new æons 'neath her breast, The future's unfledged glory.
I know not how, but I was there All feeling, hearing, seeing;
It was not wind that stirred my hair But living breath, the essence rare Of unembodied being.
And in the nest an egg of gold
Lay soft in self-made lustre,
Gazing whereon, what depths untold Within, what marvels manifold, Seemed silently to muster!
Daily such splendors to confront Is still to me and you sent?
It glowed as when Saint Peter's front, Illumed, forgets its stony wont,
And seems to throb translucent.
One saw therein the life of man, (Or so the poet found it,) The yolk and white, conceive who can, Were the glad earth, that, floating, span In the glad heaven around it.
I knew this as one knows in dream, Where no effects to causes
Are chained as in our work-day scheme, And then was wakened by a scream
That seemed to come from Baucis.
"Bless Zeus!" she cried, "I'm safe below!"
First pale, then red as coral; And I, still drowsy, pondered slow, And seemed to find, but hardly know, Something like this for moral.
Fach day the world is born anew For him who takes it rightly;
Not fresher that which Adam knew, Not sweeter that whose moonlit dew Entranced Arcadia nightly.
Rightly? That 's simply: 't is to see
Some substance casts these shadows Which we call Life and History, That aimless seem to chase and flee
Like wind-gleams over meadows.
Simply? That's nobly: 't is to know That God may still be met with, Nor groweth old, nor doth bestow These senses fine, this brain aglow, To grovel and forget with.
Beauty, Herr Doctor, trust in me, No chemistry will win you; Charis still rises from the sea : If you can't find her, might it be Because you seek within you?
A FAMILIAR EPISTLE TO A FRIEND.
ALIKE I hate to be your debtor, Or write a mere perfunctory letter; For letters, so it seems to me, Our careless quintessence should be, Our real nature's truant play
When Consciousness looks t' other way; Not drop by drop, with watchful skill, Gathered in Art's deliberate still, But life's insensible completeness Got as the ripe grape gets its sweetness, As if it had a way to fuse The golden sunlight into juice. The boxes hiss, the tube is dry; Hopeless my mental pump I try; As those petroleum wells that spout Awhile like M. C.'s, then give out, My spring, once full as Arethusa, Is a mere bore as dry 's Creusa; And yet you ask me why I'm glum, And why my graver Muse is dumb. Ah me! I've reasons manifold Condensed in one, I'm getting old!
When life, once past its fortieth year, Wheels up its evening hemisphere, The mind's own shadow, which the boy Saw onward point to hope and joy, Shifts round, irrevocably set Tow'rd morning's loss and vain regret, And, argue with it as we will, The clock is unconverted still.
"But count the gains," I hear you say, "Which far the seeming loss outweigh; Friendships built firm 'gainst flood and wind
On rock-foundations of the mind; Knowledge instead of scheming hope; For wild adventure, settled scope; Talents, from surface-ore profuse, Tempered and edged to tools for use; Judgment, for passion's headlong whirls; Old sorrows crystalled into pearls; Losses by patience turned to gains, Possessions now, that once were pains; Joy's blossom gone, as go it must, To ripen seeds of faith and trust; Why heed a snow-flake on the roof If fire within keep Age aloof Though blundering north-winds push
With palms benumbed against the pane?"
My dear old Friend, you 're very wise; We always are with others' eyes, And see so clear! (our neighbor's deck on)
What reef the idiot 's sure to wreck on; Folks when they learn how life has quizzed 'em
Are fain to make a shift with Wisdom, And, finding she nor breaks nor bends, Give her a letter to their friends. Draw passion's torrent whoso will Through sluices smooth to turn a mill, And, taking solid toll of grist, Forget the rainbow in the mist, The exulting leap, the aimless haste Scattered in iridescent waste; Prefer who likes the sure esteem To cheated youth's midsummer dream, When every friend was more than Damon,
Each quicksand safe to build a fame on; Believe that prudence snug excels Youth's gross of verdant spectacles, Through which earth's withered stubble
Charm that turns Doll to Cleopatra ; Bacchus (that now is scarce induced To give Eld's lagging blood a boost), With cymbals' clang and pards to draw him,
Divine as Ariadne saw him, Storms through Youth's pulse with all his train
And wins new Indies in his brain; Apollo (with the old a trope, A sort of finer Mister Pope), Apollo but the Muse forbids; At his approach cast down thy lids, And think it joy enough to hear Far off his arrows singing clear; He knows enough who silent knows The quiver chiming as he goes; He tells too much who e'er betrays The shining Archer's secret ways.
Dear Friend, you 're right and I am
My quibbles are not worth a song, And I sophistically tease
My fancy sad to tricks like these. I could not cheat you if I would; You know me and my jesting mood, Mere surface-foam, for pride concealing The purpose of my deeper feeling.
I have not spit one drop of joy Poured in the senses of the boy, Nor Nature fails my walks to bless With all her golden inwardness; And as blind nestlings, unafraid, Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade By which their downy dream is stirred, Taking it for the mother-bird,
So, when God's shadow, which is light, Unheralded, by day or night, My wakening instincts falls across, Silent as sunbeams over moss, In my heart's nest half-conscious things Stir with a helpless sense of wings, Lift themselves up, and tremble long With premonitions sweet of song.
But let me end with a comparison Never yet hit upon by e'er a son Of our American Apollo,
(And there's where I shall beat them hollow,
If he indeed 's no courtly St. John, But, as West said, a Mohawk Injun.) A poem 's like a cruise for whales : Through untried seas the hunter sails, His prow dividing waters known To the blue iceberg's hulk alone; At last, on farthest edge of day, He marks the smoky puff of spray; Then with bent oars the shallop flies To where the basking quarry lies; Then the excitement of the strife, The crimsoned waves, - ah, this is life!
But, the dead plunder once secured And safe beside the vessel moored, All that had stirred the blood before Is so much blubber, nothing more, (I mean no pun, nor image so Mere sentimental verse, you know,) And all is tedium, smoke, and soil, In trying out the noisome oil.
Yes, this is life! And so the bard Through briny deserts, never scarred Since Noah's keel, a subject seeks, And lies upon the watch for weeks; That once harpooned and helpless lying, What follows is but weary trying.
Now I've a notion, if a poet Beat up for themes, his verse will show it;
I wait for subjects that hunt me, By day or night won't let me be, And hang about me like a curse, Till they have made me into verse, From line to line my fingers tease Beyond my knowledge, as the bees Build no new cell till those before With limpid summer-sweet run o'er; Then, if I neither sing nor shine, Is it the subject's fault, or mine?
How strange are the freaks of memory! The lessons of life we forget, While a trifle, a trick of color, In the wonderful web is set, -
Set by some mordant of fancy, And, spite of the wear and tear Of time or distance or trouble,
Insists on its right to be there.
A chance had brought us together; Our talk was of matters-of-course; We were nothing, one to the other,
But a short half-hour's resource.
We spoke of French acting and actors, And their easy, natural way: Of the weather, for it was raining As we drove home from the play. We debated the social nothings
We bore ourselves so to discuss; The thunderous rumors of battle Were silent the while for us.
Arrived at her door, we left her With a drippingly hurried adieu, And our wheels went crunching the gravel
Of the oak-darkened avenue.
As we drove away through the shadow, The candle she held in the door
From rain-varnished tree-trunk to tree- | A sweeter secret hides behind his fame, And Love steals shyly through the loud acclaim
fainter, and flashed more;
Flashed fainter, then wholly faded Before we had passed the wood; But the light of the face behind it Went with me and stayed for good.
The vision of scarce a moment,
And hardly marked at the time, It comes unbidden to haunt me, Like a scrap of ballad-rhyme.
Some suck up poison from a sorrow's core,
As naught but nightshade grew upon earth's ground; Love turned all his to heart's-ease, and the more
Fate tried his bastions, she but forced a door
Leading to sweeter manhood and more sound.
Even as a wind-waved fountain's swaying shade
Seems of mixed race, a gray wraith shot with sun,
So through his trial faith translucent rayed
Till darkness, half disnatured so, betrayed
A heart of sunshine that would fain o'errun.
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