A Christmas Letter
When the moon is broken on the waters,
Rippling, rolling, and flashing into splendor,
How the shadows limned upon her silver
Dance and quiver into forms fantastic!
How the reaper dear to merry childhood
Merges, loses all his olden features,
Other semblance taking every moment!
Often thus, in gazing on the river
Of the nation's thought that hurries seaward,
Fanned by zephyrs stirred by angry breezes,
Star-bespangled, gloomed by passing cloudlets,
Have I viewed the clear, white disk of Boston
Brightening all the current into glory.
While within the fancy-charming circle
Forms unseen, yet loved for noble doing,
Shifted, changing, like dissolving figures
Cast in darkness on a snowy background.
You have here the first start that was made by my brain,
In a more or less decasyllabical train,
As I waited by Charles for the summons to go —
Let me finish it here by the Delaware's flow.
But I give up the metre; I'm bad at a jig;
And I can't dance off-hand in Catullian rig.
Already I've written some rickety lines,
Like a broken-back pitchfork with spider-leg tines,
Or the cabala-marks that my pencil is making,
'Twixt rumbling and tumbling, and shaking and quaking.
Perhaps here and there you can guess what I mean;
If you can't, never mind; it will blossom unseen.
You caught me at echoing once, and forgot;
Now, see, I am echoing whether or not.
Not echoing , no; for the mountain-side sends
The very same message it gains from its friends;
Tone, syllable, emphasis, accent are there;
The soul of the sender returns through the air.
Alas! but one singer can render again
The choir of the dawning, the song-sparrow's strain.
Blithe, cheery, delightful, how welcome to all,
The fine thrill of music that runs through his call!
Mark the turn of his head; note his quivering wings;
We hear but his voice, but the whole of him sings.
Tone, finger, and eye, how they pointed the verse!
How they sped like a dart, every epithet terse!
How he captured the seer with a turn of his ee!
How he brought down the bard with his Quakerish " thee " !
How light was his sweep o'er the hallowed sod
Of " the velvety verse that Evangeline trod " !
As I never before, shall I ever again
See grouped at one board that great quartette of men!
For time will not halt for the pleader that clings,
And the thrush and the sparrow have vanishing wings.
Enough; to the present the present is given:
We may meet in Valhalla, or Hades, or Heaven.
And now from the Chester this tribute I send
To the man but once seen, whom I may not call friend,
A gift not unmeet for the season of mirth, —
'Tis the sunshine of Maryland drawn from her earth.
You will find in its fragrance the breath of the South,
And the thanks and the praise of her eloquent mouth.
By the Puritan punch-bowl a crystal may stand,
And the North and the South clasp a brotherly hand.
Perhaps, when the festival time has gone by,
With its stirring appeals to the ear or the eye,
By that " oriel " sitting, its subtle perfume
May fill with fresh fancies the gathering gloom.
You may see the wide orchard, a forest made tame,
With its coralline aisles ere they burst into flame;
How graceful the network of delicate sprigs,
With the fine blush of nature on branches and twigs!
Fair virginal nature, who waits for the day
When the young year shall robe her in bridal array.
It has come! it has come! and we lose the rare glow
In hillock on hillock of roseate snow.
The blush is still there, but the bridal-veil spreads
Its thick folds of beauty o'er myriad heads,
As the fleeces of sunset embosom the ray
Last shot from the shaft of the lord of the day.
For each tree is a cloud where the sun and the mist
Have mingled their graces in beautiful tryst,
And far to the westward the eye ranges o'er
A vast sea of love with an emerald shore,
Where the billows melt down to a rose-tinted plain,
And the long wall of woodland puts bounds to the main.
There the silvery lines of the saplings are seen,
And the first tender leafing of delicate green;
The pine with its deepening mellow of gold;
The cedars bronze clumping, outbellying bold.
And deep in their heart, I remember right well,
The warm mossy bowl of a shadowy dell,
Where we found fairy wine-cups and feathery fern,
And round winter-berries that ruby-like burn,
With one who has passed to the isles of the blest,
And the great flush of glory that lulls them to rest.
But I wander. Yet later the midsummer hours
Hang globes of ripe beauty on verdurous bowers;
Through the leaves, like Hesperides' apples, they peep,
Or the face of an angel just flashing from sleep:
Rich masses of shimmering, varying glow,
All ruddy above and all sunny below,
And the gay, kindly juices that revel within
Will burst at a touch through the delicate skin.
The still — must one drop to the earth from the sky?
Well, the death is a good one for peaches to die.
Right ruinous now (and our Hawthorne has said
That ruins are needed where poetry's bred),
Where fire and the streamlet the miracle wrought
That turned to crude sweetness that beauty unbought.
The sycamore, giant-like, towers above;
The birds in the bushes make musical love;
The rill on the pebbles keeps mystical rhyme;
The village-bell answers with far-stealing chime
(The one only sound that the world sends us here,
Lest nature than man should to man be more dear);
The greenbrier wattles its guardian wall;
The grape-vines have covered the wreck with their pall;
Nought now may appeal to the ear or the eye,
Save the beauty of earth and the blue of the sky.
What more? Like a poem, the soul of the peach
Needs time more than toil its perfection to reach;
One may strain at a task, but the after-touch shows
That only is worthy which ripens and grows.
It has waited and ripened in walls where the rime
Has fallen, like snow-flakes, from magical time,
Where Pope, Swift, and Johnson hold rule on the shelves,
And colony beauties make eyes at themselves
In mirrors, quaint gilt when the silver was new.
All life's changeless round has been passed in their view:
Birth, marriage, love, hatred, death, marriage, and birth, —
The self-same old story of dear mother earth.
Perhaps the Blue Lady has taken a sip, —
The tutelar spectre of Gumbo and Jip,
Who rules in the garret rooms, long given o'er
To spoils of the centuries vanished before;
In the gleam of the moon by the harpsichord sits,
And frightens the chambermaid out of her wits.
Her fingers dance lightly, — no music will follow,
And her eyes, when she turns them, are soulless and hollow.
It has felt the strong breezes of noble Queen Anne,
Where " Claiborne the traitor " stood firmly for man,
Faced stern and unflinching both Calvert and king,
And taught at the last that the vanquished can sting.
And later, when rang o'er the Chesapeake sand
The summons to arms of a newly-born land,
Here leaped the battalion that rushed on the steel,
And forced at red Brooklyn the Britons to reel,
Hand to hand, breast to breast. Though they sank on the sod,
They had saved the Right Wing — and they left it to God.
Yet again, when the sword from its sheath flashing flew,
The men of Queen Anne faced the soldiers in blue;
A quarrel ill-starred between brother and friend;
But they fought by their light and they fought to the end.
Through the wrath of the storm wrought the will of the sky.
The palm lies in splinters, the pine towers high.
Alas! the broad frondage is blackened and dead,
The far-scattered fragments are dripping with red.
Right or wrong, wise or foolish, so far as we ken,
The soil of Queen Anne has been fruitful of men.
May it tell of the pictures your pencil should limn, —
The long prairie reaches, the forest aisles dim;
The branches that brawl in the gash-like ravine,
Where the delicate crocus blooms open unseen;
The whispering reedlands that wake in full cry
With the chorus of frogs when the evening is nigh;
The swan-whitened shallows like quivering snow;
The far-sailing osprey that gazes below;
The bittern that flaps down the stream of the dead
Where the network of waters is gleaming like lead;
The sentinel vultures that quarter the sky, —
Not a feather is stirred, not a motion nor cry;
Round and round, without effort, they sail as they will,
Their mission is sombre, to watch and be still.
Rippling, rolling, and flashing into splendor,
How the shadows limned upon her silver
Dance and quiver into forms fantastic!
How the reaper dear to merry childhood
Merges, loses all his olden features,
Other semblance taking every moment!
Often thus, in gazing on the river
Of the nation's thought that hurries seaward,
Fanned by zephyrs stirred by angry breezes,
Star-bespangled, gloomed by passing cloudlets,
Have I viewed the clear, white disk of Boston
Brightening all the current into glory.
While within the fancy-charming circle
Forms unseen, yet loved for noble doing,
Shifted, changing, like dissolving figures
Cast in darkness on a snowy background.
You have here the first start that was made by my brain,
In a more or less decasyllabical train,
As I waited by Charles for the summons to go —
Let me finish it here by the Delaware's flow.
But I give up the metre; I'm bad at a jig;
And I can't dance off-hand in Catullian rig.
Already I've written some rickety lines,
Like a broken-back pitchfork with spider-leg tines,
Or the cabala-marks that my pencil is making,
'Twixt rumbling and tumbling, and shaking and quaking.
Perhaps here and there you can guess what I mean;
If you can't, never mind; it will blossom unseen.
You caught me at echoing once, and forgot;
Now, see, I am echoing whether or not.
Not echoing , no; for the mountain-side sends
The very same message it gains from its friends;
Tone, syllable, emphasis, accent are there;
The soul of the sender returns through the air.
Alas! but one singer can render again
The choir of the dawning, the song-sparrow's strain.
Blithe, cheery, delightful, how welcome to all,
The fine thrill of music that runs through his call!
Mark the turn of his head; note his quivering wings;
We hear but his voice, but the whole of him sings.
Tone, finger, and eye, how they pointed the verse!
How they sped like a dart, every epithet terse!
How he captured the seer with a turn of his ee!
How he brought down the bard with his Quakerish " thee " !
How light was his sweep o'er the hallowed sod
Of " the velvety verse that Evangeline trod " !
As I never before, shall I ever again
See grouped at one board that great quartette of men!
For time will not halt for the pleader that clings,
And the thrush and the sparrow have vanishing wings.
Enough; to the present the present is given:
We may meet in Valhalla, or Hades, or Heaven.
And now from the Chester this tribute I send
To the man but once seen, whom I may not call friend,
A gift not unmeet for the season of mirth, —
'Tis the sunshine of Maryland drawn from her earth.
You will find in its fragrance the breath of the South,
And the thanks and the praise of her eloquent mouth.
By the Puritan punch-bowl a crystal may stand,
And the North and the South clasp a brotherly hand.
Perhaps, when the festival time has gone by,
With its stirring appeals to the ear or the eye,
By that " oriel " sitting, its subtle perfume
May fill with fresh fancies the gathering gloom.
You may see the wide orchard, a forest made tame,
With its coralline aisles ere they burst into flame;
How graceful the network of delicate sprigs,
With the fine blush of nature on branches and twigs!
Fair virginal nature, who waits for the day
When the young year shall robe her in bridal array.
It has come! it has come! and we lose the rare glow
In hillock on hillock of roseate snow.
The blush is still there, but the bridal-veil spreads
Its thick folds of beauty o'er myriad heads,
As the fleeces of sunset embosom the ray
Last shot from the shaft of the lord of the day.
For each tree is a cloud where the sun and the mist
Have mingled their graces in beautiful tryst,
And far to the westward the eye ranges o'er
A vast sea of love with an emerald shore,
Where the billows melt down to a rose-tinted plain,
And the long wall of woodland puts bounds to the main.
There the silvery lines of the saplings are seen,
And the first tender leafing of delicate green;
The pine with its deepening mellow of gold;
The cedars bronze clumping, outbellying bold.
And deep in their heart, I remember right well,
The warm mossy bowl of a shadowy dell,
Where we found fairy wine-cups and feathery fern,
And round winter-berries that ruby-like burn,
With one who has passed to the isles of the blest,
And the great flush of glory that lulls them to rest.
But I wander. Yet later the midsummer hours
Hang globes of ripe beauty on verdurous bowers;
Through the leaves, like Hesperides' apples, they peep,
Or the face of an angel just flashing from sleep:
Rich masses of shimmering, varying glow,
All ruddy above and all sunny below,
And the gay, kindly juices that revel within
Will burst at a touch through the delicate skin.
The still — must one drop to the earth from the sky?
Well, the death is a good one for peaches to die.
Right ruinous now (and our Hawthorne has said
That ruins are needed where poetry's bred),
Where fire and the streamlet the miracle wrought
That turned to crude sweetness that beauty unbought.
The sycamore, giant-like, towers above;
The birds in the bushes make musical love;
The rill on the pebbles keeps mystical rhyme;
The village-bell answers with far-stealing chime
(The one only sound that the world sends us here,
Lest nature than man should to man be more dear);
The greenbrier wattles its guardian wall;
The grape-vines have covered the wreck with their pall;
Nought now may appeal to the ear or the eye,
Save the beauty of earth and the blue of the sky.
What more? Like a poem, the soul of the peach
Needs time more than toil its perfection to reach;
One may strain at a task, but the after-touch shows
That only is worthy which ripens and grows.
It has waited and ripened in walls where the rime
Has fallen, like snow-flakes, from magical time,
Where Pope, Swift, and Johnson hold rule on the shelves,
And colony beauties make eyes at themselves
In mirrors, quaint gilt when the silver was new.
All life's changeless round has been passed in their view:
Birth, marriage, love, hatred, death, marriage, and birth, —
The self-same old story of dear mother earth.
Perhaps the Blue Lady has taken a sip, —
The tutelar spectre of Gumbo and Jip,
Who rules in the garret rooms, long given o'er
To spoils of the centuries vanished before;
In the gleam of the moon by the harpsichord sits,
And frightens the chambermaid out of her wits.
Her fingers dance lightly, — no music will follow,
And her eyes, when she turns them, are soulless and hollow.
It has felt the strong breezes of noble Queen Anne,
Where " Claiborne the traitor " stood firmly for man,
Faced stern and unflinching both Calvert and king,
And taught at the last that the vanquished can sting.
And later, when rang o'er the Chesapeake sand
The summons to arms of a newly-born land,
Here leaped the battalion that rushed on the steel,
And forced at red Brooklyn the Britons to reel,
Hand to hand, breast to breast. Though they sank on the sod,
They had saved the Right Wing — and they left it to God.
Yet again, when the sword from its sheath flashing flew,
The men of Queen Anne faced the soldiers in blue;
A quarrel ill-starred between brother and friend;
But they fought by their light and they fought to the end.
Through the wrath of the storm wrought the will of the sky.
The palm lies in splinters, the pine towers high.
Alas! the broad frondage is blackened and dead,
The far-scattered fragments are dripping with red.
Right or wrong, wise or foolish, so far as we ken,
The soil of Queen Anne has been fruitful of men.
May it tell of the pictures your pencil should limn, —
The long prairie reaches, the forest aisles dim;
The branches that brawl in the gash-like ravine,
Where the delicate crocus blooms open unseen;
The whispering reedlands that wake in full cry
With the chorus of frogs when the evening is nigh;
The swan-whitened shallows like quivering snow;
The far-sailing osprey that gazes below;
The bittern that flaps down the stream of the dead
Where the network of waters is gleaming like lead;
The sentinel vultures that quarter the sky, —
Not a feather is stirred, not a motion nor cry;
Round and round, without effort, they sail as they will,
Their mission is sombre, to watch and be still.
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