The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 83

Virginia gave us this imperial man Cast in the ma.s.sive mould Of those high-statured ages old Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran; She gave us this unblemished gentleman: What shall we give her back but love and praise As in the dear old unestranged days 370 Before the inevitable wrong began?

Mother of States and undiminished men, Thou gavest us a country, giving him, And we owe alway what we owed thee then: The boon thou wouldst have s.n.a.t.c.hed from us agen s.h.i.+nes as before with no abatement dim, A great man's memory is the only thing With influence to outlast the present whim And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.

All of him that was subject to the hours 380 Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours: Across more recent graves, Where unresentful Nature waves Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod, Proclaiming the sweet Truce of G.o.d, We from this consecrated plain stretch out Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt As here the united North Poured her embrowned manhood forth In welcome of our savior and thy son. 390 Through battle we have better learned thy worth, The long-breathed valor and undaunted will, Which, like his own, the day's disaster done, Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.

Both thine and ours the victory hardly won; If ever with distempered voice or pen We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back, And for the dead of both don common black.

Be to us evermore as thou wast then, As we forget thou hast not always been, 400 Mother of States and unpolluted men, Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!

AN ODE

FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1876

I

1.

Entranced I saw a vision in the cloud That loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky, Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the eye, Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasy In golden mist, an ever-s.h.i.+fting crowd: There, 'mid unreal forms that came and went In air-spun robes, of evanescent dye, A woman's semblance shone preeminent; Not armed like Pallas, not like Hera proud, But, as on household diligence intent, 10 Beside her visionary wheel she bent Like Arete or Bertha, nor than they Less queenly in her port; about her knee Glad children cl.u.s.tered confident in play: Placid her pose, the calm of energy; And over her broad brow in many a round (That loosened would have gilt her garment's hem), Succinct, as toil prescribes, the hair was wound In l.u.s.trous coils, a natural diadem.

The cloud changed shape, obsequious to the whim 20 Of some trans.m.u.ting influence felt in me, And, looking now, a wolf I seemed to see Limned in that vapor, gaunt and hunger-bold, Threatening her charge; resolve in every limb, Erect she flamed in mail of sun-wove gold, Penthesilea's self for battle dight; One arm uplifted braced a flickering spear, And one her adamantine s.h.i.+eld made light; Her face, helm-shadowed, grew a thing to fear, And her fierce eyes, by danger challenged, took 30 Her trident-sceptred mother's dauntless look.

'I know thee now, O G.o.ddess-born!' I cried, And turned with loftier brow and firmer stride; For in that spectral cloud-work I had seen Her image, bodied forth by love and pride, The fearless, the benign, the mother-eyed, The fairer world's toil-consecrated queen.

2.

What shape by exile dreamed elates the mind Like hers whose hand, a fortress of the poor, No blood in vengeance spilt, though lawful, stains? 40 Who never turned a suppliant from her door?

Whose conquests are the gains of all mankind?

To-day her thanks shall fly on every wind, Unstinted, unrebuked, from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, One love, one hope, and not a doubt behind!

Cannon to cannon shall repeat her praise, Banner to banner flap it forth in flame; Her children shall rise up to bless her name, And wish her harmless length of days, The mighty mother of a mighty brood, 50 Blessed in all tongues and dear to every blood, The beautiful, the strong, and, best of all, the good.

3.

Seven years long was the bow Of battle bent, and the heightening Storm-heaps convulsed with the throe Of their uncontainable lightning; Seven years long heard the sea Crash of navies and wave-borne thunder; Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee, And new stars were seen, a world's wonder; 60 Each by her sisters made bright, All binding all to their stations, Cl.u.s.ter of manifold light Startling the old constellations: Men looked up and grew pale: Was it a comet or star, Omen of blessing or bale.

Hung o'er the ocean afar?

4.

Stormy the day of her birth: 69 Was she not born of the strong.

She, the last ripeness of earth, Beautiful, prophesied long?

Stormy the days of her prime: Hers are the pulses that beat Higher for perils sublime, Making them fawn at her feet.

Was she not born of the strong?

Was she not born of the wise?

Daring and counsel belong Of right to her confident eyes: Human and motherly they, 81 Careless of station or race: Hearken! her children to-day Shout for the joy of her face.

II

1.

No praises of the past are hers, No fanes by hallowing time caressed, No broken arch that ministers To Time's sad instinct in the breast; She has not gathered from the years Grandeur of tragedies and tears, 90 Nor from long leisure the unrest That finds repose in forms of cla.s.sic grace: These may delight the coming race Who haply shall not count it to our crime That we who fain would sing are here before our time.

She also hath her monuments; Not such as stand decrepitly resigned To ruin-mark the path of dead events That left no seed of better days behind, The tourist's pensioners that show their scars 100 And maunder of forgotten wars; She builds not on the ground, but in the mind, Her open-hearted palaces For larger-thonghted men with heaven and earth at ease: Her march the plump mow marks, the sleepless wheel, The golden sheaf, the self-swayed commonweal; The happy homesteads hid in orchard trees Whose sacrificial smokes through peaceful air Rise lost in heaven, the household's silent prayer; What architect hath bettered these? 110 With softened eye the westward traveller sees A thousand miles of neighbors side by side, Holding by toil-won t.i.tles fresh from G.o.d The lands no serf or seigneur ever trod, With manhood latent in the very sod, Where the long billow of the wheatfield's tide Flows to the sky across the prairie wide, A sweeter vision than the castled Rhine, Kindly with thoughts of Ruth and Bible-days benign.

2.

O ancient commonwealths, that we revere 120 Haply because we could not know you near, Your deeds like statues down the aisles of Time s.h.i.+ne peerless in memorial calm sublime, And Athens is a trumpet still, and Rome; Yet which of your achievements is not foam Weighed with this one of hers (below you far In fame, and born beneath a milder star), That to Earth's orphans, far as curves the dome Of death-deaf sky, the bounteous West means home, With dear precedency of natural ties 130 That stretch from roof to roof and make men gently wise?

And if the n.o.bler pa.s.sions wane, Distorted to base use, if the near goal Of insubstantial gain Tempt from the proper race-course of the soul That crowns their patient breath Whose feet, song-sandalled, are too fleet for Death, Yet may she claim one privilege urbane And haply first upon the civic roll, That none can breathe her air nor grow humane. 140

3.

Oh, better far the briefest hour Of Athens self-consumed, whose plastic power Hid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone; Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles crowd Whose fulgurous vans about the world had blown Triumphant storm and seeds of polity; Of Venice, fading o'er her s.h.i.+pless sea, Last iridescence of a sunset cloud; Than this inert prosperity, This bovine comfort in the sense alone! 150 Yet art came slowly even to such as those.

Whom no past genius cheated of their own With prudence of o'ermastering precedent; Petal by petal spreads the perfect rose, Secure of the divine event; And only children rend the bud half-blown To forestall Nature in her calm intent: Time hath a quiver full of purposes Which miss not of their aim, to us unknown, And brings about the impossible with ease: 160 Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break From where in legend-tinted line The peaks of h.e.l.las drink the morning's wine, To tremble on our lids with mystic sign Till the drowsed ichor in our veins awake And set our pulse in time with moods divine: Long the day lingered in its sea-fringed nest, Then touched the Tuscan hills with golden lance And paused; then on to Spain and France The splendor flew, and Albion's misty crest: 170 Shall Ocean bar him from his destined West?

Or are we, then, arrived too late, Doomed with the rest to grope disconsolate, Foreclosed of Beauty by our modern date?

III

1.

Poets, as their heads grow gray, Look from too far behind the eyes, Too long-experienced to be wise In guileless youth's diviner way; Life sings not now, but prophesies; Time's shadows they no more behold, 180 But, under them, the riddle old That mocks, bewilders, and defies: In childhood's face the seed of shame, In the green tree an ambushed flame, In Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night, They, though against their will, divine, And dread the care-dispelling wine Stored from the Muse's mintage bright, By age imbued with second-sight.

From Faith's own eyelids there peeps out, 190 Even as they look, the leer of doubt; The festal wreath their fancy loads With care that whispers and forebodes: Nor this our triumph-day can blunt Megaera's goads.

2.

Murmur of many voices in the air Denounces us degenerate, Unfaithful guardians of a n.o.ble fate, And prompts indifference or despair: Is this the country that we dreamed in youth, Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight, 200 Seed-field of simpler manners, braver truth, Where shams should cease to dominate In household, church, and state?

Is this Atlantis? This the unpoisoned soil, Sea-whelmed for ages and recovered late, Where parasitic greed no more should coil Bound Freedom's stem to bend awry and blight What grew so fair, sole plant of love and light?

Who sit where once in crowned seclusion sate The long-proved athletes of debate 210 Trained from their youth, as none thinks needful now?

Is this debating club where boys dispute, And wrangle o'er their stolen fruit, The Senate, erewhile cloister of the few, Where Clay once flashed and Webster's cloudy brow Brooded those bolts of thought that all the horizon knew?

3.

Oh, as this pensive moonlight blurs my pines, Here while I sit and meditate these lines, To gray-green dreams of what they are by day, So would some light, not reason's sharp-edged ray, 220 Trance me in moons.h.i.+ne as before the flight Of years had won me this unwelcome right To see things as they are, or shall he soon, In the frank prose of undissembling noon!

4.

Back to my breast, ungrateful sigh!

Whoever fails, whoever errs, The penalty be ours, not hers!

The present still seems vulgar, seen too nigh; The golden age is still the age that's past: I ask no drowsy opiate 230 To dull my vision of that only state Founded on faith in man, and therefore sure to last.

For, O my country, touched by thee, The gray hairs gather back their gold; Thy thought sets all my pulses free; The heart refuses to be old; The love is all that I can see.

Not to thy natal-day belong Time's prudent doubt or age's wrong, But gifts of grat.i.tude and song: Unsummoned crowd the thankful words, 241 As sap in spring-time floods the tree.

Foreboding the return of birds, For all that thou hast been to me!

IV

1.

Flawless his heart and tempered to the core Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave, First left behind him the firm-footed sh.o.r.e, And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar, Steered for the Unknown which G.o.ds to mortals gave.

Of thought and action the mysterious door, 250 Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave: Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun, And strange stars from beneath the horizon won, And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave: High-hearted surely he; But bolder they who first off-cast Their moorings from the habitable Past And ventured chartless on the sea Of storm-engendering Liberty: For all earth's width of waters is a span, 260 And their convulsed existence mere repose, Matched with the unstable heart of man, Sh.o.r.eless in wants, mist-girt in all it knows, Open to every wind of sect or clan, And sudden-pa.s.sionate in ebbs and flows.

2.