Classic Poem

CXXI
Oh Love! no habitant of earth thou art--
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquenched soul--parched--wearied--wrung--and riven.
CXXII

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation:--where,
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?--
In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreached Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?
CXXIII

Who loves, raves--'tis youth's frenzy; but the cure
Is bitterer still; as charm by unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,
Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize,--wealthiest when most undone.
CXXIV

We wither from our youth, we gasp away--
Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first--
But all too late,--so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same,
Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst--
For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
CXXV

Few--none--find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies--but to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns Hope to dust,--the dust we all have trod.
CXXVI

Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew--
Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see--
And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.
CXXXVII

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly which they deem not of,
Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.
CXXXVIII

The seal is set.--Now welcome, thou dread power!
Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here
Walkest in the shadow of the midnight hour
With a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear;
Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear
Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene
Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear
That we become a part of what has been,
And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen.
CLXIII

And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven
The fire which we endure, it was repaid
By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath arrayed
With an eternal glory--which, if made
By human hands, is not of human thought;
And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid
One ringlet in the dust--nor hath it caught
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.
CLXIV

But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song,
The being who upheld it through the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more--these breathings are his last;
His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing:--if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could be classed
With forms which live and suffer--let that pass--
His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass,
CLXXVII

Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements!--in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted--Can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.
CLXXVIII

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love no Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal.
CLXXIX

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin--his control
Stops with the shore;--upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
CLXXX

His steps are not upon thy paths,--thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,--thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And sendest him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:--there let him lay.
CLXXXI

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,--
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
Less palpably before me--and the glow
Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.
CLXXXVI

Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been--
A sound which makes us linger;--yet--farewell!
Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his, if on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain
He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell;
Farewell! with him alone may rest the pain,
If such there were--with you, the moral of his strain!