No matter! no matter! in truth, said he :
But the streak, that fades and fades as we part,
Is a broken voice and a breaking heart :
No more to me.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.
What was he doing, the great God Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great God Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river :
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great God Pan,
While turbidly flow'd the river;
And hack'd and hew'd, as a great God can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great God Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notch'd the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
"This is the way," laugh'd the great God Pan, Laugh'd while he sat by the river,—
"The only way, since Gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed." Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power, by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great God Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great God Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man!
The true Gods sigh for the cost and pain,—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
Sweet! thou hast trod on a heart :
Pass! there's a world full of men ;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
Thou only hast stepp'd unaware,
(Malice not one can impute);
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud under-lip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet, peradventure, one day
Thou sitting alone at the glass, Remarking the bloom gone away, Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain,
From hundreds who flatter'd before, Such a word as " O, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, but more:
Thou wilt sigh, very like, on thy part-
"Of all I have known or can know
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon ages ago!"
How joyously the young Sea-Mew
Lay dreaming on the waters blue,
Whereon our little bark had thrown
A forward shade, the only one :
But shadows aye will man pursue.
Familiar with the waves, and free
As if their own white foam were he,
His heart upon the heart of ocean
Lay, learning all its mystic motion
And throbbing to the throbbing sea.
And such a brightness in his eye,
As if the ocean and the sky
Within him had lit up and nursed
A soul God gave him not at first,
To comprehend their majesty.
We were not cruel, yet did sunder
His white wing from the blue waves under,
And bound it,-while his fearless eyes
Shone up to ours in calm surprise,
As deeming us some ocean wonder.
We bore our ocean bird unto
A grassy place where he might view
The flowers that curtsey to the bees,
The waving of the tall green trees,
The falling of the silver dew.
But flowers of earth were pale to him
Who had seen the rainbow fishes swim;
And when earth's dew around him lay
He thought of ocean's winged spray :
And his eye waxed sad and dim.
The green trees round him only made
A prison with their darksome shade ;
And droop'd his wing, and mourned he
For his own boundless glittering sea,—
Albeit he knew not they could fade.
Then One her gladsome face did bring,
Her gentle voice's murmuring,
In ocean's stead his heart to move
And teach him what was human love:
He thought it a strange mournful thing.
He lay down in his grief to die
(First looking to the sea-like sky
That hath no waves): because, alas!
Our human touch did on him pass,
And with our touch our agony.
Unlike are we, unlike, O Princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou (bethink thee !) art A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages, from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to ply thy part
Of chief musician. What hast Thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor tired wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head, on mine the dew:
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Go from me! Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore,
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forebore-
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include Thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, he hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me! Though the word repeated
Should seem 66 a cuckoo song," as thou dost treat it,
Remember never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed!
Beloved! I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit's voice, in that doubt's pain
Cry-Speak once more, thou lovèst! Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll;
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
|