Your souls partake its influence, not in vain Looking within myself, I note how thin Where ye grope darkly,-ye who never knew Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled. Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue! One band ye cannot break,—the force that clips Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night; The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes; Yet they who watch your god-compelled return Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods. TO THE PAST. WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls, There all is hushed and breathless, There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands, Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands That once lit all the East; A dotard bleared and hoary, There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands Of Asia's long-quenched glory. Still as a city buried 'neath the sea, Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun, Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun, And yet the eternal sorrow In their unmonarched eyes says day is done O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, Make signs to us and move their withered lips Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships On the mirage's ocean. And if sometimes a moaning wandereth If some grim shadow of thy living death And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds. 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 Whatever of true life there was in thee For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, The present moves attended With all of brave and excellent and fair TO THE FUTURE. O LAND of Promise! from what Pisgah's height Its crags of opal and of chrysolite, Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold 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 shore the surf Of the perturbèd 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 The eternal law, Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser, Its silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading. What promises hast thou for Poets' eyes, It throbs and leaps; The noble '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, Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly 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; The beauty of man's soul to man revealing; 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, In the high temple of the soul; Where are most sorrows, there the poet's sphere is, To heal its desolations With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies. HEBE. I SAW the twinkle of white feet, As, in bare fields, the searching bees Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates; On musical hinges swung before me. |