WHITHER? Albeit I follow fast,
In all life's circuit I but find,

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,
And vague air to my bosom clasp,
Thou lithe, perpetual Escape!

One mask and then another drops,
And thou art secret as before:

Sometimes with flooded ear I list,
And hear thee, wondrous organist,
From mighty continental stops
A thunder of new music pour;
Through pipes of earth and air and

From Maine to utmost Oregon;
The factory-wheels in cadence hum,
From brawling parties concords come;
All this I hear, or seem to hear,
But when, enchanted, I draw near
To mate with words the various theme,
Life seems a whiff of kitchen steam,
History an organ-grinder's thrum,

For thou hast slipt from it and me
And all thine organ-pipes left dumb,
Most mutable Perversity!

Not weary yet, I still must seek,
And hope for luck next day, next week;
I go to see the great man ride,
Shiplike, the swelling human tide
That floods to bear him into port,
Trophied from Senate-hall and Court;
Thy magnetism, I feel it there,
Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare,
Making the Mob a moment fine
With glimpses of their own Divine,
As in their demigod they see

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
To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep;
Across the sand of bar-room floors
'Mid the stale reek of boosing boors;
Where drowse the hay-field's fragrant
heats,

Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats;
I dog thee through the market's throngs
To where the sea with myriad tongues
Laps the green edges of the pier,
And the tall ships that eastward steer,
Curtsey their farewells to the town,
O'er the curved distance lessening
down;

I follow allwhere for thy sake.
Touch thy robe's hem, but ne'er o'er-
take,

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
For her their cloudy fleeces spare,
Or from the thorns of evil times
She can glean wool to twist her rhymes;
Morning and noon and eve supply
To her their fairest tints for dye,
But ever through her twirling thread
There spires one line of warmest red,
Tinged from the homestead's genial
heart,

The stamp and warrant of her art;
With this Time's sickle she outwears,
And blunts the Sisters' baffled shears.

"Harass her not: thy heat and stir
But greater coyness breed in her;
Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost,
Thy long apprenticeship not lost,
Learning at last that Stygian Fate
Unbends to him that knows to wait.
The Muse is womanish, nor deigns
Her love to him that pules and plains;
With proud, averted face she stands
To him that wooes with empty hands.
Make thyself free of Manhood's guild;
Pull down thy barns and greater build;
The wood, the mountain, and the plain
Wave breast-deep with the poet's grain;
Pluck thou the sunset's fruit of gold,
Glean from the heavens and ocean old;
From fireside lone and trampling street
Let thy life garner daily wheat;
The epic of a man rehearse,

Be something better than thy verse;
Make thyself rich, and then the Muse
Shall court thy precious interviews,
Shall take thy head upon her knee,
And such enchantment lilt to thee,
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow
From farthest stars to grass-blades
low,

And find the Listener's science still Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!"

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