sun,

And strange stars from beneath the horizon won,

And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave:
High-hearted surely he;

But bolder they who first off-cast
Their moorings from the habitable Past
And ventured chartless on the sea
Of storm-engendering Liberty:

For all earth's width of waters is a span,
And their convulsed existence mere repose,
Matched with the unstable heart of man,
Shoreless in wants, mist - girt in all it
knows,

Open to every wind of sect or clan,
And sudden-passionate in ebbs and flows.

2.

Of ancient wisdom channelled deep in law, The undaunted few

Who changed the Old World for the New, And more devoutly prized

Than all perfection theorized

The more imperfect that had roots and grew.

They founded deep and well,

Those danger-chosen chiefs of men
Who still believed in Heaven and Hell,
Nor hoped to find a spell,

In some fine flourish of a pen,

To make a better man

Than long-considering Nature will or can,
Secure against his own mistakes,
Content with what life gives or takes,

And acting still on some fore-ordered plan,
A cog of iron in an iron wheel,

Too nicely poised to think or feel,
Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal.
They wasted not their brain in schemes
Of what man might be in some bubble-
sphere,

As if he must be other than he seems Because he was not what he should be here,

Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams:

Yet herein they were great

Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore, And wiser than the wisdom of the shelf, That they conceived a deeper-rooted state, Of hardier growth, alive from rind to core, By making man sole sponsor of himself.

3.

God of our fathers, Thou who wast, Art, and shalt be when those eye-wise who flout

Thy secret presence shall be lost

In the great light that dazzles them to doubt,

We, sprung from loins of stalwart men
Whose strength was in their trust

That Thou wouldst make thy dwelling in their dust

And walk with those a fellow-citizen
Who build a city of the just,

We, who believe Life's bases rest
Beyond the probe of chemic test,
Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near,

knew,

And laid their courses where the currents

draw

cree,

The land to Human Nature dear

Shall not be unbeloved of Thee.

THIS title was given to the volume of poems collected and published in 1888 after Lowell's return to private life. He took occasion to

I. FRIENDSHIP

AGASSIZ

Come

Dicesti egli ebbe non viv' egli ancora? Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome?

66

came

Lowell was in Florence when Agassiz died, and sent this poem home to Mr. Norton for publication. "His death," he says, home to me in a singular way, growing into my consciousness from day to day as if it were a graft new-set, that by degrees became part of my own wood and drew a greater share of my sap than belonged to it, as grafts sometimes will. I suppose that, unconsciously to myself, a great part of the ferment it produced in me was owing to the deaths of my sister Anna [Mrs. Charles R. Lowell], of Mrs.

whom I knew as a child in my early manhood, and of my cousin Amory, who was inextricably bound up with the primal associations of my life, associations which always have a singular sweetness for me. A very deep chord had been touched also at Florence by the sight of our old lodgings in the Casa Guidi, of the balcony Mabel used to run on, and the windows we used to look out at so long ago. I got sometimes into the mood I used to be in when I was always repeating to myself,

'King Pandion he is dead;

All thy friends are lapt in lead,' —

verses which seem to me desolately pathetic. At last I began to hum over bits of my poem in my head till it took complete possession of me and worked me up to a delicious state of excitement, all the more delicious as my brain (or at any rate the musical part of it) had been lying dormant so long. My old trick of seeing things with my eyes shut after I had gone to bed (I mean whimsical things utterly alien to the train of my thoughts- for example, a hospital ward with a long row of white, untenanted beds, and on the farthest a pile of those little wooden dolls with redpainted slippers) revived in full force. Nervons, horribly nervous, but happy for the first time (I mean consciously happy) since I

glean after his earlier harvest and preserved in it several poems written before the publication of Under the Willows.

came over here. And so by degrees my poem worked itself out. The parts came to me as I came awake, and I wrote them down in the morning. I had all my bricks - but the mortar would n't set, as the masons say. However, I got it into order at last. You will see there is a logical sequence if you look sharp. It was curious to me after it was done to see how fleshly it was. This impression of Agassiz had wormed itself into my consciousness, and without my knowing it had colored my whole poem. I could not help feeling how, if I had been writing of Emerson, for example, I should have been quite otherwise ideal. But there it is, and you can judge for yourself. I think there is some go in it somehow, but it is too near me yet to be judged fairly by me. old-fashioned, you see, but none the worse for that." The poem was dated February, 1874.

I

I.

It is

THE electric nerve, whose instantaneons thrill

Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes, Confutes poor Hope's last fallacy of ease,The distance that divided her from ill: Earth sentient seems again as when of old The horny foot of Pan

Stamped, and the conscious horror ran Beneath men's feet through all her fibres cold:

Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throe

From underground of our night-mantled foe:

The flame-winged feet

Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run Through briny abysses dreamless of the

To senses finer than the eyes, Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;

They wind a sorrow round with circum

stance

To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance

The inexorable face:

But now Fate stuns as with a mace; The savage of the skies, that men have caught

And some scant use of language taught,

Tells only what he must,

The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.

2.

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic

eyes,

I scanned the festering news we half despise

Yet scramble for no less, And read of public scandal, private fraud, Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,

Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,

And all the unwholesome mess

The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late

To teach the Old World how to wait,
When suddenly,

As happens if the brain, from overweight
Of blood, infect the eye,
Three tiny words grew lurid as I read,
And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead.
As when, beneath the street's familiar jar,
An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far,
Men listen and forebode, I hung my head,
And strove the present to recall,

As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall.

3.

Uprooted is our mountain oak, That promised long security of shade And brooding-place for many a winged thought;

Not by Time's softly-cadenced stroke With pauses of relenting pity stayed, But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed,

From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught

And in his broad maturity betrayed!

4.

Well might I, as of old, appeal to you,
O mountains woods and streams,

To help us mourn him, for ye loved him too;

But simpler moods befit our modern themes,

And no less perfect birth of nature can, Though they yearn tow'rd him, sympathize with man,

Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall;

Answer ye rather to my call, Strong poets of a more unconscious day, When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why,

Too much for softer arts forgotten since That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince,

And drown in music the heart's bitter cry! Lead me some steps in your directer way, Teach me those words that strike a solid root

Within the ears of men;

Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel, Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben,

For he was masculine from head to heel.
Nay, let himself stand undiminished by
With those clear parts of him that will not
die.

Himself from out the recent dark I claim
To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame;
To show himself, as still I seem to see,
A mortal, built upon the antique plan,
Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran,
And taking life as simply as a tree!
To claim my foiled good-by let him ap-
pear,

Large-limbed and human as I saw him

And would but memorize the shining half Of his large nature that was turned to me: Fain had I joined with those that honored

him

With eyes that darkened because his were dim,

And now been silent: but it might not be.

II

I.

In some the genius is a thing apart, A pillared hermit of the brain, Hoarding with incommunicable art

Its intellectual gain;

Man's web of circumstance and fate They from their perch of self observe, Indifferent as the figures on a slate

Are to the planet's sun-swung curve Whose bright returns they calculate; Their nice adjustment, part to part, Were shaken from its serviceable mood By unpremeditated stirs of heart

Or jar of human neighborhood: Some find their natural selves, and only then,

In furloughs of divine escape from men, And when, by that brief ecstasy left bare, Driven by some instinct of desire, They wander world ward, 't is to blink and stare,

Like wild things of the wood about a fire, Dazed by the social glow they cannot share;

His nature brooked no lonely lair, But basked and bourgeoned in copartnery, Companionship, and open-windowed glee: He knew, for he had tried, Those speculative heights that lure The unpractised foot, impatient of a guide, Tow'rd ether too attenuately pure For sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride,

But better loved the foothold sure Of paths that wind by old abodes of men Who hope at last the churchyard's peace

secure,

And follow time-worn rules, that them suffice,

Learned from their sires, traditionally wise, Careful of honest custom's how and when; His mind, too brave to look on Truth askance,

No more those habitudes of faith could share,

Virtues and faults it to one metal wrought, Fined all his blood to thought, And ran the molten man in all he said or did.

All Tully's rules and all Quintilian's too He by the light of listening faces knew, And his rapt audience all unconscious lent Their own roused force to make him eloquent;

Persuasion fondled in his look and tone; Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bring

To find new charm in accents not her own;
Her coy constraints and icy hindrances
Melted upon his lips to natural ease,
As a brook's fetters swell the dance of
spring.

Nor yet all sweetness: not in vain he wore,
Nor in the sheath of ceremony, controlled
By velvet courtesy or caution cold,
That sword of honest anger prized of old,
But, with two-handed wrath,
If baseness or pretension crossed his path,
Struck once nor needed to strike more.

"T is I that seem the dead: they all remain Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain: Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most, Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane;

In this abstraction it were light to deem Myself the figment of some stronger dream;

They are the real things, and I the ghost That glide unhindered through the solid door,

Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,

And strive to speak and am but futile air, As truly most of us are little more.

3.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,
The latest parted thence,

His features poised in genial armistice
And armed neutrality of self-defence
Beneath the forehead's walled preeminence,
While Tyro, plucking facts with careless
reach,

Settles off-hand our human how and whence; The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears

The infallible strategy of volunteers Making through Nature's walls its easy breach,

And seems to learn where he alone could teach.

Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fills As he our fireside were, our light and heat, Centre where minds diverse and various

In Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope,

Content with our New World and timely bold

To challenge the o'ermastery of the Old; Listening with eyes averse I see him sit Pricked with the cider of the Judge's wit (Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again),

While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline
Curves sharper to restrain
The merriment whose most unruly moods