Poems of James Russell Lowell Part 32

t.i.tanic shapes with faces blank and dun, Of their old G.o.dhead lorn, Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun, Which they misdeem for morn; And yet the eternal sorrow In their unmonarched eyes says day is done Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, The shapes that haunt thy gloom Make signs to us and move their withered lips Across the gulf of doom; Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of s.h.i.+ps On the mirage's ocean.

And if sometimes a moaning wandereth From out thy desolate halls, If some grim shadow of thy living death Across our suns.h.i.+ne falls And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds Are silent now in dust, Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds Beneath some sudden gust; Thy forms and creeds have vanished, Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds From the world's garden banished.

Whatever of true life there was in thee Leaps in our age's veins; Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery, And shake thine idle chains;-- To thee thy dross is clinging, For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, Thy poets still are singing.

Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, Float the green Fortunate Isles, Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share Our martyrdoms and toils; The present moves attended With all of brave and excellent and fair That made the old time splendid.

TO THE FUTURE.

O Land of Promise! from what Pisgah's height Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers, Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight, Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers?

Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold, Its crags of opal and of chrysolite, Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold Still brightening abysses, And blazing precipices, Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven, Sometimes a glimpse is given Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.

O Land of Quiet! to thy sh.o.r.e the surf Of the perturbed Present rolls and sleeps; Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps, As to a mother's, the o'erwearied heart, Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart, The hurrying feet, the curses without number, And, circled with the glow Elysian, Of thine exulting vision, Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber.

To thee the Earth lifts up her fettered hands And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands, And her old woe-worn face a little while Grows young and n.o.ble; unto thee the Oppressor Looks, and is dumb with awe; The eternal law, Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser, Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding, And he can see the grim-eyed Doom From out the trembling gloom Its silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading.

What promises hast thou for Poets' eyes, Aweary of the turmoil and the wrong!

To all their hopes what overjoyed replies!

What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song!

Thy happy plains no war-trump's brawling clangor Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor; The humble glares not on the high with anger; Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more; In vain strives Self the G.o.d-like sense to smother; From the soul's deeps It throbs and leaps; The n.o.ble 'neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.

To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free; To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires, And grief and hunger climb about his knee, Welcome as children; thou upholdest The lone Inventor by his demon haunted; The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest, And, gazing o'er the midnight's bleak abyss, Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss, And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.

Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly The guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee, Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly Their own souls they were scarring; conquerors see With horror in their hands the accursed spear That tore the meek One's side on Calvary, And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear; Thou, too, art the Forgiver, The beauty of man's soul to man revealing; The arrows from thy quiver Pierce Error's guilty heart, but only pierce for healing.

O, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams, From out Life's sweat and turmoil would ye bear me?

Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,-- This agony of hopeless contrast spare me!

Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night!

He is a coward, who would borrow A charm against the present sorrow From the vague Future's promise of delight: As life's alarums nearer roll, The ancestral buckler calls, Self-clanging from the walls In the high temple of the soul; Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is, To feed the soul with patience, To heal its desolations With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies.

HEBE.

I saw the twinkle of white feet, I saw the flash of robes descending; Before her ran an influence fleet, That bowed my heart like barley bending.

As, in bare fields, the searching bees Pilot to blooms beyond our finding, It led me on, by sweet degrees, Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding.

Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me; The long-sought Secret's golden gates On musical hinges swung before me.

I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp Thrilling with G.o.dhood; like a lover I sprang the proffered life to clasp;-- The beaker fell; the luck was over.

The Earth has drunk the vintage up; What boots it patch the goblet's splinters?

Can Summer fill the icy cup, Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's?

O spendthrift, haste! await the G.o.ds; Their nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods The immortal gift in vain libations.

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hands would seize upon her, Follow thy life, and she will sue To pour for thee the cup of honor.

THE SEARCH.

I went to seek for Christ, And Nature seemed so fair That first the woods and fields my youth enticed, And I was sure to find him there: The temple I forsook, And to the solitude Allegiance paid; but winter came and shook The crown and purple from my wood; His snows, like desert sands, with scornful drift, Besieged the columned aisle and palace-gate; My Thebes, cut deep with many a solemn rift, But epitaphed her own sepulchred state: Then I remembered whom I went to seek, And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak.

Back to the world I turned, For Christ, I said, is king; So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, As far beneath his sojourning: Mid power and wealth I sought, But found no trace of him, And all the costly offerings I had brought With sudden rust and mould grew dim: I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, All must on stated days themselves imprison, Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws, Witless how long the life had thence arisen; Due sacrifice to this they set apart, Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart.

So from my feet the dust Of the proud World I shook; Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust, And half my sorrow's burden took.

After the World's soft bed, Its rich and dainty fare, Like down seemed Love's coa.r.s.e pillow to my head, His cheap food seemed as manna rare; Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet, Turned to the heedless city whence I came, Hard by I saw, and springs of wors.h.i.+p sweet Gushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same; Love looked me in the face and spake no words, But straight I knew those foot-prints were the Lord's.

I followed where they led And in a hovel rude, With naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for meekly stood A naked, hungry child Clung round his gracious knee, And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled To bless the smile that set him free; New miracles I saw his presence do,-- No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, The gathered chips into a woodpile grew, The broken morsel swelled to goodly store; I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak.

THE PRESENT CRISIS.

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the th.o.r.n.y stem of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro; At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with G.o.d In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod, Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the n.o.bler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flush of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;-- In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, G.o.d's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?

Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to ens.h.i.+eld her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, G.o.d's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath pa.s.sed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-- Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth G.o.d within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,-- "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."