L'ENVOI. TO THE MUSE. WHITHER? Albeit I follow fast, Not where thou art, but where thou wast, Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind! I haunt the pine-dark solitudes, With soft brown silence carpeted, And plot to snare thee in the woods: Peace I o'ertake, but thou art fled ! I find the rock where thou didst rest, The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; All Nature with thy parting thrills, Like branches after birds new-flown; Thy passage hill and hollow fills With hints of virtue not their own; In dimples still the water slips Where thou hast dipt thy finger-tips; Just, just beyond, forever burn Gleams of a grace without return; Upon thy shade I plant my foot, And through my frame strange raptures shoot; All of thee but thyself I grasp; I seem to fold thy luring shape, One mask and then another drops, Sometimes with flooded ear I list, From Maine to utmost Oregon; For thou hast slipt from it and me Not weary yet, I still must seek, Their cramped ideal soaring free; 'T was thou didst bear the fire about, That, like the springing of a mine Sent up to heaven the street-long shout; Full well I know that thou wast here, It was thy breath that brushed my ear; But vainly in the stress and whirl I dive for thee, the moment's pearl. Through every shape thou well canst run, Proteus, 'twixt rise and set of sun, Well pleased with logger-camps in Maine As where Milan's pale Duomo lies A stranded glacier on the plain, Its peaks and pinnacles of ice Melted in many a quaint device, And sees, above the city's din, Afar its silent Alpine kin: I track thee over carpets deep Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; I follow allwhere for thy sake. Find where, scarce yet unmoving, lies, Warm from thy limbs, thy last disguise; But thou another shape hast donned, And lurest still just, just beyond! But here a voice, I know not whence, Thrills clearly through my inward sense, Saying: "See where she sits at home While thou in search of her dost roam ! All summer long her ancient wheel Whirls humming by the open door, Or, when the hickory's social zeal Sets the wide chimney in a roar, Close-nestled by the tinkling hearth, It modulates the household mirth With that sweet serious undertone Of duty, music all her own; Still as of old she sits and spins Our hopes, our sorrows, and our sins; With equal care she twines the fates Of cottages and mighty states; She spins the earth, the air, the sea, The maiden's unschooled fancy free, The boy's first love, the man's first grief, The budding and the fall o' the leaf; The piping west-wind's snowy care The stamp and warrant of her art; "Harass her not: thy heat and stir Be something better than thy verse; And find the Listener's science still Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!" THE CATHEDRAL. These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn, Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thought Can overtake the rapture of the sense, To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl. Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, And that first passion beggars all behind, Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. Who, seeing once, has truly seen again The gray vague of unsympathizing sea That dragged his Fancy from her moorings back To shores inhospitable of eldest time, Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered 442 So Memory cheats us, glimpsing half- | While I grew pensive with the pensive revealed. Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous redbreast boding The bird I hear sings not from yonder But the flown ecstasy my childhood Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves be tween. I know not how it is with other men, For me, once felt is so felt nevermore. west Boomed intermittent through the shuddering elms, And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick Startled with crocuses the sullen turf song: One summer hour abides, what time I perched, Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, Denouncing me an alien and a thief: One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest, When in the lane I watched the ashleaves fall, Balancing softly earthward without Or twirling with directer impulse down with frost, year: And once I learned how marvellous winter was, When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, I creaked adventurous o'er the span gled crust That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten end- In ghastly solitude about the pole, sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me gate; And paradise was paradise the more, What we call Nature, all outside our- Is but our own conceit of what we see, Feeling with us, or making due pre tence; And therefore we the more persuade To make all things our thought's con- Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. She loves to cheat herself with feigned I find my own complexion everywhere: |