In God's still memory folded Keeping cadence to my praising 10 deep; The bravely dumb that did their deed, And scorned to blot it with a name, Men of the plain heroic breed, That loved Heaven's silence more than fame. Such lived not in the past alone, But thread to-day the unheeding street, And, when he had tampered with thee, And stairs to Sin and Famine (Too confiding little maid!) known In a reed's precarious hollow Sing with the welcome of their To our frozen earth conveyed: feet: The den they enter grows a shrine, The grimy sash an oriel burns, Their cup of water warms like wine, Their speech is filled from heavenly urns. About their brows to me appears An aureole traced in tenderest light, For he swore I know not what; 20 Then, perfidious! having got The rainbow- gleam of smiles Sold thee into endless slavery, And gloriously dost vindicate Now in the ample chimney-place, Thy shining father's sacred wood, Which, guessing thy ancestral right, Sparkles and snaps its dumb delight, 80 And, at thy touch, poor outcast one, Feels through its gladdened fibres go The tingle and thrill and vassal glow Of instincts loyal to the sun. Once more a Princess lithe and Gropes for the latch-string in the Thou dancest with a whispering The love that wanders not beyond His earliest nest, but sits and tread, Therefore with thee I love to read Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs Or poises on its tremulous stalk Life in the withered words! how The current of unguided talk, swift recede Time's shadows! and how glows again Through its dead mass the incandescent verse, As when upon the anvils of the brain It glittering lay, wrought caught In smooth, dark pools of deeper thought. Meanwhile thou mellowest every word, A sweetly unobtrusive third; cyclopically For thou hast magic beyond wine, unlock natures each to each; By the fast-throbbing hammers of the poet's thought! Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred, The aspirations unattained, IIO The rhythms so rathe and delicate, To 140 The unspoken thought thou canst divine; Thou fill'st the pauses of the speech With whispers that to dream-land reach And broke, beneath the sombre And frozen fancy-springs unchain weight Of any airiest mortal word. VII In Arctic outskirts of the brain: What warm protection dost thou That close against rude day's ofbend fences, Round curtained talk of friend And open its shy midnight rose! 150 Now the kind nymph to Bacchus And, with a far-heard ring, And, as her incense floats and To humbler chambers of the self How struggles with the tempest's In vain for me their trumpets swells That warning of tumultuous bells! The fire is loose! and frantic knells Throb fast and faster, As tower to tower confusedly tells News of disaster. blow As unto him that lieth low In death's dark arches, And through the sod hears throbbing slow The muffled marches. |