SCIENCE AND POETRY

HE who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire

Over the land and through the sea-depths still,

Thought only of the flame-winged messenger

As a dull drudge that should encircle earth
With sordid messages of Trade, and tame
Blithe Ariel to a bagman. But the Muse
Not long will be defrauded. From her foe
Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch,
The Age of Wonder is renewed again,
And to our disenchanted day restores
The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to
Thought,

The Cloak that makes invisible; and with these

I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore, Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay.

A NEW YEAR'S GREETING THE century numbers fourscore years; You, fortressed in your teens, To Time's alarums close your ears, And, while he devastates your peers, Conceive not what he means.

If e'er life's winter fleck with snow

Your hair's deep shadowed bowers, That winsome head an art would know To make it charm, and wear it so As 't were a wreath of flowers.

If to such fairies years must come,
May yours fall soft and slow

As, shaken by a bee's low hum,
The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb,
Down to their mates below!

THE DISCOVERY

I WATCHED a moorland torrent run Down through the rift itself had made, Golden as honey in the sun,

Of darkest amber in the shade.

In this wild glen at last, methought,
The magic's secret I surprise;
Here Celia's guardian fairy caught
The changeful splendors of her eyes.

All else grows tame, the sky's one blue,
The one long languish of the rose,
But these, beyond prevision new,
Shall charm and startle to the close.

WITH A SEASHELL

SHELL, whose lips, than mine more cold,
Might with Dian's ear make bold,
Seek my Lady's; if thou win
To that portal, shut from sin,
Where commissioned angels' swords
Startle back unholy words,
Thou a miracle shalt see
Wrought by it and wrought in thee;
Thou, the dumb one, shalt recover
Speech of poet, speech of lover.
If she deign to lift you there,
Murmur what I may not dare;
In that archway, pearly-pink
As the Dawn's untrodden brink,
Murmur, "Excellent and good,
Beauty's best in every mood,
Never common, never tame,
Changeful fair as windwaved flame
Nay, I maunder; this she hears
Every day with mocking ears,
With a brow not sudden-stained
With the flush of bliss restrained,
With no tremor of the pulse
More than feels the dreaming dulse
In the midmost ocean's caves,
When a tempest heaps the waves.
Thou must woo her in a phrase
Mystic as the opal's blaze,
Which pure maids alone can see
When their lovers constant be.
I with thee a secret share,
Half a hope, and half a prayer,
Though no reach of mortal skill
Ever told it all, or will;

Say, "He bids me-nothing more
Tell you what you guessed before!

THE SECRET

I HAVE a fancy: how shall I bring it
Home to all mortals wherever they be?
Say it or sing it? Shoe it or wing it,
So it may outrun or outfly ME,
Merest cocoon-web whence it broke free?

Only one secret can save from disaster, Only one magic is that of the Master:

[The greater part of this poem was written many years ago as part of a larger one, to be called The Nooning, made up of tales in verse, some of them grave, some comic. It gives me a sad pleasure to remember that I was encouraged in this project by my friend the late Arthur Hugh Clough.]

Thus Lowell in the note which he prefixed to this poem when printing it in Heartsease and Rue. In his Letters are some more detailed references to the design of The Nooning. As far back as 1849, when issuing a new edition of his Poems, he wrote to Mr. Briggs: "My next volume, I think, will show an advance. It is to be called The Nooning. Now guess what it will be. The name suggests pleasant thoughts, does it not? But I shall not tell you anything about it yet, and you must not mention it." A little later he wrote to the same correspondent: "Maria invented the title for me, and is it not a pleasant one? My plan is this. I am going to bring together a party of half a dozen old friends at Elmwood. They go down to the river and bathe, and then one proposes that they shall go up into a great willow-tree (which stands at the end of the causey near our house, and has seats in it) to take their nooning. There they agree that each shall tell a story or recite a poem of some sort. In the tree they find a countryman already resting himself, who enters into the plan and tells a humorous tale, with touches of Yankee character and habits in it. I am to read my poem of the Voyage of Leif to Vinland, in which I mean to bring my hero straight into Boston Bay, as befits a Bay-state poet. Two of my poems are already written

one The Fountain of Youth (no connection with any other firm), and the other an Address to the Muse, by the Transcendentalist of the party. In The Nooning I shall have not

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even a glance towards Reform." Apparently Lowell regarded the book as imminent, but the death of his daughter Rose early in 1850 and the subsequent journey to Europe seem to have deferred the execution of his plans, and the book, as we know, never had a whole, though there were several fragments of it published. He held tenaciously, however, to his plan. In June, 1853, he wrote again to Mr. Briggs: "I have The Nooning to finish - - which shall turn out well;" and thirteen years later he wrote to Mr. Norton: "I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on what, do you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of The Nooning, and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! [plainly this poem of Fitz Adam's Story]. It is mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his 'prelude,' then his tale.' I describe an old inn and its landlord, bar-room, etc. It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and hope he will like it, for if he does n't I shall feel discouraged. It was very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind, and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday."

A scheme so long persisted in and returned to so often could scarcely be wholly unknown, and in a letter to Professor James B. Thayer written in December, 1868, we find Lowell answering a query he had put: "And The Nooning. Sure enough, where is it? The June Idyl [renamed Under the Willows] (written in '51 or '52) is a part of what I had written as the induction to it. The description of spring in one of the Biglow Papers is another fragment of the same, tagged with rhyme for the nonce. So is a passage in Mason and Slidell beginning

'Oh, strange new world.'

The Voyage to Vinland, the Pictures from Appledore, and Fitz Adam's Story were written for The Nooning, as originally planned. So, you see, I had made some progress. Perhaps it will come by and by not in the shape I meant at first, for something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. Besides, the Muse asks all of a man, and for many years I have been unable to give myself up as I would." Fragments of an Unfinished Poem, p. 158, is another bit of flotsam from The Nooning. THE next whose fortune 't was a tale to tell

Was one whom men, before they thought, loved well,

And after thinking wondered why they did, For half he seemed to let them, half forbid,

And wrapped him so in humors, sheath on sheath,

'T was hard to guess the mellow soul beneath;

But, once divined, you took him to your heart,

While he appeared to bear with you as part

Of life's impertinence, and once a year Betrayed his true self by a smile or tear, Or rather something sweetly-shy and loath, Withdrawn ere fully shown, and mixed of both.

A cynic? Not precisely: one who thrust Against a heart too prone to love and trust, Who so despised false sentiment he knew Scarce in himself to part the false and

true,

And strove to hide, by roughening-o'er the skin,

Those cobweb nerves he could not dull within.

Gentle by birth, but of a stem decayed,
He shunned life's rivalries and hated trade;
On a small patrimony and larger pride,
He lived uneaseful on the Other Side
(So he called Europe), only coming West
To give his Old-World appetite new zest;
Yet still the New World spooked it in his
veins,

A ghost he could not lay with all his pains;
For never Pilgrims' offshoot scapes control
Of those old instincts that have shaped his
soul.

A radical in thought, he puffed away
With shrewd contempt the dust of usage