Classic Poem

Eve coming slowly down, at peace we marked
From higher places the low sun decline
Across the bay, pouring o'er Monimet
A flood of ruddy light that made more rich,
Her decorous robe of crimson, — autumn's robe
Of berry-bearing plants and changing trees,
Responsive to that glory. Thence I gazed
With a more fond emotion; for the hills
Contained, or rather might conceal, that house, —
Mansion I fitlier call it. Gothic hall,
With colonnade like Reinsberg's own, contract
To a more private scale; and slated roofs
So purely French, pierced with such frames, that one
Not comely in herself, thence looking, gained
A face. Below were sheltering lattices,
With ample steps beat from the granite ledge,
That borders the fleet brook, most merrily
And in all seasons running down the lawn, —
Stream like Voltaire's, heard in the cheerful rooms.
Far and in lavish taste were ranged around
The labyrinthine walks, their ample shades
Contrived from growths of cultured affluence.
The medlar here pursued his quaint decay,
Near by the chalky hazel's stunted limb,
Or loaded figs sweet as e'er Smyrna grew;
Bohemian olive, orange-scented joy,
And sunny laburnum. Here shrubs divine,
Noble wigelia, roseate-blushed and white,
A summer wreath of glory, clothed the copse;
Or rich forsythia glittering like the fall,
And delicate as lace the pure white fringe, —
Each in its season on the enamoured air,
Breathed its soft beauty. And such flowers unveiled
As might adorn the Psyche in her bower, —
Gay-leaved geraniums, with rich fuchsias lake,
Pendant as graceful drop in loveliest ears;
And Scottish daisies like the peasant's song,
That taught its tender fame, Eolian Burns,
A flower to shine beneath the Scottish birch, —
Tree Wordsworth calls, " the lady of the wood. "
The gardens delicate with quality
Of luscious spoil, from Eastern realms conveyed, —
From Japan's fields her lilies' golden gleam,
Or whate'er Fortune in his pleasant trips
O'er China, thought an English charm; all lands,
And farthest skies raining their splendors down.
On the two sides touching the garden, fields
Social in grain, or lapped in orchard-wealth,
The succulent pear, braced apples, or blue plum,
Nor less there bloom, dusk clusters of ripe grapes
Rounding the vines, and walnuts stately gold,
As tallest column of Sierra's stone,
On mellow autumn's hillside.
So within
Genially spread presides refining taste.
The buoyant day, forth wheeling in his car,
Revealed in Guido's dream, here lights the wall
Upon soft Phosphor's blush; and near, the gaze
Instinct with manly genius and young strength,
Of Raphael; his hand so sensitive,
Ne'er touched the pencil but to lift the art
Above the saint he drew, — St. Barbara,
Or holy Catherine bending on the tomb.
And copies of the famous or the fine,
From graver ages ferried to compel
Our admiration, — Dante's shrunken form
Thinking immensely, aquiline and spare;
And polished Milton, creature of the court,
Munificent in diction; and the one
Whose face, traditionally drawn, reveals
To thirsty hearts Judea's loveliest soul.
While from the humble shelves mild rural books,
As liquid Maro dulcet on his flute,
And timorous Cowper with his three pet hares,
Regale the evening circle in their verse;
Unless the sweet piano fill the ear
Blithe in its strings, or with some soft-toned voice;
The courtly grandam, nodding o'er her glass,
And famished girlhood studying out her eyes.
On the same spot, led down the sallow years
From the first impress of the Pilgrim's foot,
Mark this home, succeeding generations;
Cordial descent, more with each added stock
Perfecting the true kind; more mellow fruit,
More culture of the mind, by skilful grafts.
Thus even in the comforts of the house,
The early architecture swept remote,
A costly and convenient mansion stands.
And as in England, skilful heralds rate
The arms and quarterings of good families,
So here the annals of the line descend,
By ladies treasured up, who knit composed
In quiet corners; or by robust sons,
Walking behind their ploughshares; and wise clerks,
Who trace the lineage from town histories.
So that the workmen on such peasant farms,
If never king with garter violet,
And sword of diamond hilt, impressed the blood
With knightly crest, yet by well-ordered work,
Or what the patient mind contrives to raise,
Keep memory and pride about the place:
In these plebeian homesteads is the stamp
Of true nobility. A lettered boy,
Drilled in collegiate walls, perchance, ascends
The pulpit's height, or thunders at the bar;
Another to new shores ordains his wit,
Viewing Calcutta's halls, — a traveller;
The gentler fabric softly weaving in
With other households similar in gift;
Till from the fragile and short-lived estate,
As thought in foreign lands where entail holds,
Rises the solid profit of the farm.
And time above the dear familiar place
Depends in venerable elms;
Like citron bright their lichen-painted trunks,
Fruit of parmelia's skill; meantime the house,
Pride of aspiring builders, slowly brings
The right results. For in our tragic clime
The keen north-west drives through the gaping boards;
Nor less the east, rich with the sea it loves,
Undoes the shingle, and abstracts the nail;
Slates bloom instead, and rocks of trust,
Replace the wood-foundation; blithe the flowers
Drawn on the wainscots, and the Indian vase
Floating from Canton's river tints the porch.
When evening calls the family within,
Social and warm the ruddy curtains fall
Around the dreamy casements, till the war
Of the continuous surf upon the ledge,
That shores the ocean's ingress, whispering, lulls,
And fancy brings the forms of other days.

O loved and gone, the darling of our hearts!
With thy soft winning ways, caressing smiles,
And step more light than tracks the forest fawn;
Who taught the old how kind the young might be;
How often thy soft figure, wandering o'er
The breezy lawn, or couched within the shade,
Made sweeter music than all sounds beside!
Gone, oh, forever gone! alone she sleeps
Upon the hillside looking o'er the sea;
Alone? when every heart, full of thy worth,
Enchanting Julia, sends its love to thee.

Safe is this peaceful haunt, far from the town,
With all its noise forgot, and steeped in silence.
No shrieking train let forth pants rumbling by;
No factory-bell, the presage of man's toil,
Infects the ear. Soft in its sovereign groves
The dwelling stands of one I knew of yore, —
He truly for seclusion framed, yet graced
With kindly instincts and delightful tastes,
I ever valued, as a hope for them,
Who love the simple scenes of rural bliss.
In cities' throngs might he have haply moved,
And held conspicuous reins in civil crowds,
Had not the charitable God supreme,
With lovelier council given him space to be,
The happiest man of all this earthly state, —
A valued scholar, and, addition blest!
Who made his hillside lovely to his friends,
And, loving, was beloved.

There, in soft dreams
Of hope, I half forgot the old complaint
Against the ambitious crowd who throng the mart,
Supreme each in his own conceit, or first
Might prove, if but allowed due scope, and ripe
For quick promotion. So the centuries flit;
And yet the god admires to people cities,
Arch over arch rebuilds their gates, and fills
The gaps cut by besiegers with their guns,
When the hot fight, on Prague or Warsaw fell,
Or Wolfe outdid Montcalm, and sealed his days.
How fulgent speed the suburbs, once the torch
Of Hecate to the walls applied! Sudden
In empty air the granaries fly aloft,
The year's tanned labor wasted on a spark,
Leaving the land disconsolate, where peace
Just softly cradled raised her Saviour's head.
Not from poor hamlet's sheds go forth the ranks,
But Potsdam rich in palaces, or Ghent
And Paris, camp supreme since Julian's days,
Where yet his thermae fast by Cluny's halls
Attest the spot, where the vague soldiery
Of latter Rome, swore fealty to their lord. —
Clustered together much like bees in cells,
Close, if unmingled, the associates dwell,
Where meagre penury hitches the skirt
Of silken grandeur, and hungry beggars
Swarm, gathering up cast-out bones, envious
Of the dogs well-fed. Just God! my heart
Bleeds to its depth to feel the children's woe,
Nurtured in rags, uncombed, unwashed, and starved,
Squalid by brutal license, reared in pain,
Old ere their youth has come, to steal and beg
Their joyous privilege. Who grateful sees
The scarlet carriole and the pampered steeds,
With a bedizened load of sickly dames? —
A tatter from their lace enough support
For poor folks half the month, good Christians too;
Fatal such contrast, accident at best.
No farthing wasted on the shivering child;
Then to the prison haled, the wretched thief
Plaything of grizzly sinners, learns his task,
Bible of righteousness, preached in those schools,
And graduates soon fine scholar.
One I knew,
A thinking man, his days in mercy spent,
Who sought to mitigate these carrion forms,
And raise some fresh emotion in the heart,
For them, cast out to ignorance and vice.
But then the o'ercrowded city crowding grows,
And breeds the plague that riots in its squares;
Builds up foul court-yards and unholy lanes,
The fountains of pollution; and endows
The university of thirst and lust
Patron of wickedness, — the lodger's crib; swiftly
The prison's cell receiving its refuse.
What are the costly prints that hide the walls
Where swelling Angelo his prophet seats,
And sibyls, big in muscle; what the stone
Smooth in Canova's taste, or gaslit throng
Clapping the tiresome Hamlet?
Can we sink
The dark and dangerous classes in the mire,
Safely obliterate? and at our ease
Napping behind the curtains, and delight
With spendthrift opulence of ill-got wealth,
And sideboard blazed with plate, omit the claim
Of human misery, fainting at the door?
Or shall we haunt the porches, taste the cool
And philosophic shade where wisdom sits
Upon its nodding throne, and heaps the page
With fruit luxuriant from the spells of Greece,
What Gorgias taught? There, in those seas of froth,
On which the unballast mind pursues
Its vagrant theories, with helm suppressed,
Heaping its dust in weary sophistries
To pamper future pedants; — there forget
In our release, the sufferings of the wretch
In tattered garb, his letters never learned,
Who rakes the city gutter for his meal?

Mother of arts and arms the City stands,
Bred by long centuries to lead the race,
And resting on her hero's head the crown,
Who makes the great occasion civil named,
Term by the learned, fashioned; civil,
Almost polite. Old temples line her streets,
Palace and arch, and Trajan's theatre
Where the Christian fed the starved lioness,
Caught in Numidia, with his lean flesh,
That thus Rome's emperors, applaud by sweaty palms,
Might drink a bloodier triumph. Now, it serves
The pardoning popes. Simply, if handed down,
Race worships most, the custom of the race,
Preserving man, and for long ages pets
The dead prerogative as if man's doom;
In Copan or Palenque, from strange shrines
Plump out new gods; or giant from its mud
Cardiff displays, there near the shallow stream,
Mutely forlorn, half asking to be spared,
Appropriate transcript of the natural man,
Hero of the old days! There he dreams,
The antique figure, carted from his bed,
Dreams of the time he shot the hippogriff
Trooping about his plains heavy with nightshade;
Or in his torrid swamps bestrode that beast,
The ichthyosaur, and listens to the yells
Of sharp hyena with the savans' talk,
As they debate his bones, and draw the plan
On which young nature laid his wide expanse.
Now drifted to the cities, he may hear
The swarm of pygmies buzzing at the door,
And, for the peal of ages on his case,
Remark the civic clock, politely tuned,
Shoot forth meridian time; the frantic crowd
That worry by his weight breathless to add
A blossom to their days, while his fell off,
Or ever Adam gave the palm to Eve.
Fearing the myth, they ridicule his age;
Less credible, they deem a hero dead
Than insects scarce conceived.

Far eras gone,
Magnificoes like this, old earth put forth,
That pave the brooks in Cardiff to this hour.
Races cropped out, and steady came the dream, —
The giant; the Goliaths fought and fell;
Vain was the search, while every shape of beast
Reckoned incredible the soil produced.
The civil congregation fed and died
In war and peace conceiving; but no work
Of sculpture ere the flood, or man of mould
Twice in his stature topping o'er the kind,
Till that good farmer of the Cardiff vale
Flat in the boggy drain barely concealed,
The fossil creature found. Model the form;
Brow of Caucasian eminence and depth;
His figure average in Camper's scale;
And neck and skull right as a theory.

Behold the entrance of a form in light,
From nations gone ere China or Japan
Baked clay pagodas, and, delightful gleam,
Bushels of Indian hatchets sank to please
Detective Lyell in the Amiens sand,
Or Switzer lake enjoyed the pile-built town.
Form water-worn; the mouth half eaten out,
And half the arm; the soles all honey-combed;
The stone of easy grain, and wrought with art.
More as some serious Roman looks it there
Than the brief creatures flitting on the streets
Bandaged in narrow garments fit to hide
Their scanty moulding. For that native drape
(Such as it is) outdoes the Roman baldness
Ere wig or peruke troubled the occiput.
And never in the brilliant forms of stone
That crowd the Vatican more royal shape
Of young Augustus, or Vespasian stern,
Or Sophocles, — the tall, commanding Greek.

Go search the page lucid with polished fiction,
Note the dim fable darkly lengthening down
From Tyre's first castle to the hour that cuts
Our dusty sunshine, — history bereft
Of combination. Selfish crowds still fret
The frosty streets, humanity obscured;
The grating wheel creaks in the iron rut;
Never will man his individual brass
Melt in a common pot, nor stretch the roof
For a whole people. Oft the married twain,
Engaged in private broil, deplore the scratch.
Thou crazy Frenchman with a ciphering pen,
Fourier! so scantly fed, yet firmly bent,
Attraction-mad, on sea of lemonade
To float the ripe community, where, knit
In genial temper, the attractive band
Of cohort butterflies, sunning their wings
Along the phalanx walls, and self forgot,
Thus must collapse labor competitive.
Alas! the butterflies loved colored gauze, —
This purple and that brown, for which they struck;
And cider-lemonade became small beer.
This legion envied that; the pivot stood
Slow rooted in the wheel, — a general sleep,
Attractive industry, thy tribes possessed.

Much men enjoy the anxious strife and jar,
And scheme demonstrative for pelf and power:
The toughest rules the trade. In its stone bank
On yonder corner, the Napoleon brain
Controls the dancing stocks, and in a twist
Of its persuasive lid depletes the bond,
And undermines its rate. Such heaven is this, —
The sharp and pungent sniff 'twixt man and man;
The neighbor's hand pressing the neighbor's throat,
Then fathoming his purse. The bright-rouged clerk
His equipage complete, flown on blood-coursers,
Forges his master's check to sate his duns;
The decimated globule teased to fame,
And grown profuse on the self-seeking puff,
Carries a simile to beauty's lip.
Books pass by binding; the tame laurelled bard
Wire-drawing out the pretty, shallow line,
Nurses at Spenser's fount his conscious babe.

Angel of Liberty in simple robe,
The dame, now past her youth, discourses much
Of rights and equities, and asks the urn.
Haste! let her trail those ribbons in the crush
Of unbribed patriots blushing from the bar,
And drop her vote. Freedom for all decrees
Laws unrestricted; end this imprisoning sex.
As grand Theresa, Austria's fondest boast,
To whose young babe the nation made the vow,
" Yes! for our king as one man shall we die; "
Her woman's breast, too sensitively proud,
And crossed by shadows from an aching nerve,
Drowned in a sea of blood the Austrian land,
Then for peace kneeled; and Cleopatra's heart,
And Helen's, Homer's flame, the woman's right
Held in the throbbing pulse, of blood so frail!
One fruit of civic finesse there emerged,
Conceived in fearful phrase, the pompous laws,
Tradition of the Romans, when there sprang
Diana's temple new from St. Paul's yard;
Narrow old precedents a Caesar's craft
Bred in his thought to mask his scheming hand,
And into codes fused by Justinian,
Then hurried o'er the Atlantic, by our saints,
The righteous Puritans, their heads as dry
As the remainder biscuit; laws and states
What ages more, riveted to the crowd!
Such bred the deeds of witchcraft, that his muse,
Our gentle-hearted Hawthorne's, touched so well,
Drawing a beauty out of all their cant,
And the self-lauding sect, moral in sin.
Headlong fall arch and fane, Silenus musing
Happy o'er his tun, and gay Bacchus tipped
In Ariadne's garlands; down with heaven,
And blue Olympus and its flashing court
Coming to wine in fashionable vests;
And Persian splendor at Persepolis,
Raised in its burning sunshine on the steps
With bands of dancing girls and horsemen fierce
Darting the jerrid; them we dream no more.

Surest of all the facts of mortal life
Men symbolize the meaning of the thoughts;
The Indian on his skin painting his bears,
And strange Peruvian on his quipo knots
Writing his stanza, down to Europe's pride,
Even to demonic Goethe, feats in words;
Great that Sanscrit's worth, who made the grammar,
Leaving the rest to follow as it might,
And Fin, with sixteen cases to one noun.
And Chinese calm, who wants no alphabet.
Where roams the tribe that never found its tongue?
While the poor beast, squeezed in one fettered strain,
Squeals inaccessible. Oh! should we not
As Indians with each spring consume the town,
Seeking new hunting-grounds and larger game?

Homeless and hopeless in those cruel walls,
Sybilla went, her heart long since bereaved.
She heard the footfalls sear the crowded streets,
Her fatal birthright, where no human pulse
To hers was beating. There she shunned the day!
Tall churches and rich houses draped in flowers,
And lovely maids tricked out with pearls and gold,
Barbaric pomp, and crafty usurers bent, —
All passed her by, the terror in her heart.
So sped she on the train, — a reindeer-course, —
Day's dying light painting the quiet fields,
The pale green sky reflected in the pools.
Oh! why was earth so fair? was love so fond
Ever consumed within the ring of fire?
That soft clear light that marks that heaven afar,
The emerald waters, and the evening star.

No more the tales that once the race of bards
Inspired, — of heaven's high court, or hell,
Of gods or god, Venus, and Mars; no more
The solitude of the high mountain's shrine;
Faded to night, irrevocably passed,
Where they may never be unloosed again:
A simpler and a sweeter lay demands
A new-born age, faintly demanding verse,
(For verse too high, or modulated prose),
The scholar's song, whom thought has made its own.
New times demand new powers; new powers, new men;
The old seems but a pale hypocrisy,
That myth of Serapis or Jupiter,
Vain word for us, and Brahma's holy grass,
Or Om (forbidden word), and Odin's skull
Rich with Valhalla's, and metheglin's fume.
But we might launch our gods, as they sang theirs,
Even as our clime and seasons native spring,
So now from us upsprings the myth to-day,
Or shall ere morning gild yon russet field?
Each holds his office, each his native skill,
By self in one part poised, by fate as much:
The rose can never bloom the lily's white,
Nor a still day usurp the whirlwind's roar.
Thus man is but a tool, that yet can draw
His one design on a wide-waving sea;
And though he sails on various voyages,
In different ships, and to as many ports,
The same sagacity, firm will, and faith,
Or luckless chance, yet guides his vessel on.

The glittering bait of power obstructs the mass, —
Mass we may frequent think, so few they stand,
Who, bent on higher ventures, tread Time's shore.
Around us weaves a thought we dimly feel,
As faint some moonlit shadow, flitting fast,
When the mild planet pearls our watery clouds,
And scarce reveals the light herself has made.
A thought is in the trees and seas and skies;
Lurks on the river's breast, or skims the grove;
Glitters at twilight off the folding clouds;
Speaks from young eyes, and throbs within the heart,
Nameless, unfathomed, dark, yet loving light.
This life the scholar loves, this life he breathes;
Without this life he could not tread the path
Of the low-falling world, to heaven the heir.
Who, then, might fitly chant of him whose eye
Is set so firmly in its parent cause? —
Not one of these plain fields and modest lot
The child, but some resplendent bard, whose verse,
Lit with celestial radiance, flashed the skies,
As sunset in her purples bathes the east
With a fore-painted morning.

From the grave he leads
Old glories to new life. His memory throws
Its still soft light across a heavenly path.
With saints, with priests, the wise, the great, he holds
A dread communion, and his thought embalms
Like amber, sweetness of all times. His hope
Hangs in the future; and his aim so high,
That yet through infinite ages vast
He still beholds a stream, where man shall sweep
To excel the glory of his present reign,
And thrones and empires stand where'er a man
Plants his firm tread on the subjected globe.
Make, then, his function saint-like and superb!
Be his the good to teach more than the old,
Revolving new society, new laws,
As in her frolic, nature upward soars
Through bush and glen and cedar-copses dark,
Where the blue berries show like ocean's bloom,
And o'er the chestnut hills whose gray rocks peep,
And far below, beyond, the sandy lake
Bears her retreating skies, and clouds the earth:
Where'er the face of things smiles or grows sad,
The scholar gleans, his faithful eye profound
To read the secret in each thing he sees, —
To love, if not to know.

His soul outbursts
The feebly measured current of his fate.
He rises like the sun in roseate pomp;
Like him, he sinks in splendor down 'mid stars;
As subjects to his throne, the learned haste, —
Focus for all their rays. For him the seas
They furrow with the sparkling keel of ships,
For him they iron o'er the land with flame,
And glass in lightning his projectile thought.
Nor less the star him pleasures in her speech,
Whether in volcan fierce she lifts the heavens,
Or casts in golden sand the river's chain.
His logic suits to each the prize he draws,
In great or less proportions. Let him rise
So long as the race rises, and in him
Its wise perfecting skilled creation claim!