Freed from wrath's pale eclipse, The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, What were our lives without thee? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee, Among the Nations bright beyond com- But ask whatever else, and we will pare? dare! L'ENVOI. TO THE MUSE. WHITHER? Albeit I follow fast, 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 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, Thy gathering fugue goes rolling on For thou hast slipt from it and me Not weary yet, I still must seek, Their cramped ideal soaring free; 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 As where Milan's pale Duomo lies I track thee over carpets deep Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; 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 stamp and warrant of her art; "Harass her not thy heat and stir Unbends to him that knows to wait. Be something better than thy verse; THE CATHEDRAL. FAR through the memory shines a happy | Can overtake the rapture of the sense, day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every 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 What we call Nature, all outside our- Is but our own conceit of what we see, Feeling with us, or making due pretence; To make all things our thought's confederates, One summer hour abides, what time I And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while 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 wind, Or twirling with directer impulse down On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost, While I grew pensive with the pensive year: And once I learned how marvellous Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. when our Fancy seeks analogies, Though she have hidden what she after finds, She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise. I find my own complexion everywhere: A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, No falcon ever felt delight of wings To swim on sunshine, masterless as And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could transmute her darkness into | Music where none is, and a keener pang Of exquisite surmise outleaping thought, pearl ; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush? What the full summer to that wonder new? But, if in nothing else, in us there is Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre. I blame not in the soul this daintiness, A dish warmed-over at the feast of life, Her will I pamper in her luxury: No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choice Shall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams, Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall be The invitiate firstlings of experience, Vibrations felt but once and felt lifelong: O, more than half-way turn that Grecian front Upon me, while with self-rebuke I spell, On the plain fillet that confines thy hair In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, The Naught in overplus, thy race's badge! One feast for her I secretly designed The flies and I its only customers, Who made me feel, in their engaging way, I was a poacher on their self-preserve, Intent constructively on lese-anglicism. To them (in those old razor-ridden days) My beard translated me to hostile French; So they, desiring guidance in the town, Half condescended to my baser sphere, And, clubbing in one mess their lack of phrase, Set their best man to grapple with the Gaul. "Esker vous ate a nabitang?" he asked; "I never ate one; are they good?" asked I; Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends, The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed, Abolished in the truce of common speech And mutual comfort of the mothertongue. |