Poetical Works

What's Knowledge, with her stocks and lands,

To gay Conjecture's yellow strands? What 's watching her slow flocks in

crease

To ventures for the golden fleece?
What her deep ships, safe under lee,
To youth's light craft, that drinks the

sea,

For Flying Islands making sail,
And failing where 't is gain to fail?
Ah me! Expereince (so we 're told),
Time's crucible, turns lead to gold;
Yet what's experience won but dross,
Cloud-gold transmuted to our loss?
What but base coin the best event
To the untried experiment?

'T was an old couple, says the poet, That lodged the gods and did not know

it; Youth sees and knows them as they

were

Before Olympus' top was bare;
From Swampscot's flats his eye divine
Sees Venus rocking on the brine,
With lucent limbs, that somehow scat-
ter a

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 wrong;

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 spilt 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.

Be patient, and perhaps (who knows?) These may be winged one day like those ;

If thrushes, close-embowered to sing, Pierced through with June's delicious sting;

If swallows, their half-hour to run
Star-breasted in the setting sun.
At first they're but the unfledged proem,
Or songless schedule of a poem ;
When from the shell they're hardly dry
If some folks thrust them forth, must I?

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?

AN EMBER PICTURE.

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.

Had she beauty? Well, not what they call so ;

You may find a thousand as fair; And yet there's her face in my memory With no special claim to be there.

As I sit sometimes in the twilight,

And call back to life in the coals
Old faces and hopes and fancies
Long buried, (good rest to their
souls!)

Her face shines out in the embers;
I see her holding the light,
And hear the crunch of the gravel

And the sweep of the rain that night.

"T is a face that can never grow older,
That never can part with its gleam,
"T is a gracious possession forever,
For is it not all a dream?

316

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY.-IN THE TWILIGHT.

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY.

"COME forth!" my catbird calls to me,
"And hear me sing a cavatina
That, in this old familiar tree,

Shall hang a garden of Alcina.

"These buttercups shall brim with wine Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic; May not New England be divine ? My ode to ripening summer classic? "Or, if to me you will not hark,

By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing Till all the alder-coverts dark

Seem sunshine-dappled with his sing.
ing.

"Come out beneath the unmastered sky,
With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,

Without premeditated graces.

"What boot your many-volumed gains, Those withered leaves forever turning, To win, at best, for all your pains,

A nature mummy-wrapt in learning? "The leaves wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

""Come out!' with me the oriole cries, Escape the demon that pursues you! And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,

Still hiding farther onward, wooes you."

"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days, Has poured from that syringa thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays

To which I hold a season-ticket,

"A season-ticket cheaply bought

With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul hast caught With morn and evening voluntaries,

"Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

"A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

"I ask no ampler skies than those His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,

And does not Doña Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars, A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing, Then silence deep with breathless stars, And overhead a white hand flashing.

"O music of all moods and climes, Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes,

The moorish cymbal tinkles faintly! "O life borne lightly in the hand, For friend or foe with grace Castilian! O valley safe in Fancy's land,

Not tramped to mud yet by the million!

"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale To his, my singer of all weathers, My Calderon, my nightingale,

My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

"Ah, friend, these singers dead so long,
And still, God knows, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to all song,
To Nature's self her better glory."

IN THE TWILIGHT.

MEN say the sullen instrument,
That, from the Master's bow,
With pangs of joy or woe,
Feels music's soul through every fibre
sent,

Whispers the ravished strings
More than he knew or meant;

Old summers in its memory glow;
The secrets of the wind it sings;
It hears the April-loosened springs;
And mixes with its mood
All it dreamed when it stood
In the murmurous pine-wood
Long ago!

The magical moonlight then

Steeped every bough and cone; The roar of the brook in the glen

Came dim from the distance blown;
The wind through its glooms sang low,
And it swayed to and fro
With delight as it stood,
In the wonderful wood,
Long ago!

O my life, have we not had seasons
That only said, Live and rejoice?
That asked not for causes and reasons,
But made us all feeling and voice?
When we went with the winds in their
blowing,

When Nature and we were peers,
And we seemed to share in the flowing
Of the inexhaustible years?

Have we not from the earth drawn

juices

Too fine for earth's sordid uses?
Have I heard, have I seen

All I feel, all I know?
Doth my heart overween?
Or could it have been
Long ago?

Sometimes a breath floats by me, An odor from Dreamland sent,