Afar its silent Alpine kin: I track thee over carpets deep Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; I follow allwhere for thy sake. 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 The stamp and warrant of her art; "Harass her not: thy heat and stir Be something better than thy verse; low, And find the Listener's science still Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!" Το MR. JAMES T. FIELDS. MY DEAR FIELDS: Dr. Johnson's sturdy self-respect led him to invent the Bookseller as a substitute for the Patron. My relations with you have enabled me to discover how pleasantly the Friend may replace the Bookseller. Let me record my sense of many thoughtful services by associating your name with a poem which owes its appearance in this form to your partiality. Cordially yours, CAMBRIDGE, November 29, 1869. J. R. LOWELL. 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 powers, Pitiless seignories in the elements, Omnipotences blind that darkling smite, Misgave him, and repaganized the world? Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, Perplex the eye with pictures from within. This hath made poets dream of lives foregone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours. While I grew pensive with the pensive year: And once I learned how marvellous winter was, When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, I creaked adventurous o'er the spangled crust That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly In ghastly solitude about the pole, sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain Were painted with these sovran images; And later visions seem but copies pale From those unfading frescos of the past, Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me Parted from Nature by the joy in her That doubtfully revealed me to myself Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate; And paradise was paradise the more, Known once and barred against satiety. What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see, Our own reaction upon what we feel: The world's a woman to our shifting mood, Feeling with us, or making due pre tence; And therefore we the more persuade ourselves To make all things our thought's confederates, Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. So 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: No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, The rapture of its life made visible, The mystery of its yearning realized, As the first babe to the first woman born; Nausikaa might have stooped o'er, while, between, Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, send Her only image on through deepening deeps With endless repercussion of delight, Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul, That sometimes almost gives me to believe I might have been a poet, gives at least choice |