If ye hear, without a blush, Is true Freedom but to break They are slaves who fear to speak COLUMBUS. THE Cordage creeks and rattles in the wind, With freaks of sudden hush; the reeling sea Now thumps like solid rock beneath the stern, Now leaps with clumsy wrath, strikes short, and, falling Crumbled to whispery foam, slips rustling down The broad backs of the waves, which jostle and crowd To ning themselves upon that unknown shore, Their used familiar since the dawn of time, Whither this foredoomed life is guided on To sway on triumph's hushed, aspiring poise One glittering moment, then to break fulfilled. How lonely is the sea's perpetual swing, The melancholy wash of endless waves, The sigh of some grim monster undescried, Fear-painted on the canvas of the dark, Shifting on his uneasy pillow of brine! Yet night brings more companions than the day To this drear waste; new constellations burn, And fairer stars, with whose calm height my soul Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond. O God! this world, so crammed with eager life, That comes and goes and wanders back to silence Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails Of highest endeavor, thrift world, this mad, un Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need, Losing God's sacred use, to be a bond "Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowlingly O'er his own selfish hoard at bay; no state, Knit strongly with eternal fibres up Holds up a shape of large Humanity With the red, fiery blood of the general life, Making them mighty in peace, as now in war They are, even in the flush of victory, weak, Conquering that manhood which should them subdue. And what gift bring I to this untried world? Shall the same tragedy be played anew, And the same lurid curtain drop at last On one dread desolation, one fierce crash Of that recoil which on its makers God Lets Ignorance and Sin and Hunger make, Early or late? Or shall that commonwealth Whose potent unity and concentric force Can draw these scattered joints and parts of men Into a whole ideal man once more, Which sucks not from its limbs the life umph gleams, O'er the blank ocean beckoning, and all night My heart flies on before me as I sail; Far on I see my lifelong enterprise, Which rose like Ganges 'mid the freezing snows Of a world's sordidness, sweep broadening down, And, gathering to itself a thousand streams, Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea; I see the ungated wall of chaos old, With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid night, Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist Before the irreversible feet of light ;And lo, with what clear omen in the east On day's gray threshold stands the eager dawn, Like young Leander rosy from the sea Glowing at Hero's lattice! One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me : God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded; Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off His cheek-swollen mates, and from the leaning mast Fortune's full sail strains forward! One poor day! — Remember whose and not how short it is ! It is God's day, it is Columbus's. A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, Is more than time enough to find a world. 1844. AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG. THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies, Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art, They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart. Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak, Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke ; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone, Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone. It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines. Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right |