Then groaned the other, with a choking | Now thumps like solid rock beneath the "T is shrunk and parched within me even now!" And, looking upward fearfully, he saw Only a wolf that shrank away and ran, stern, Now leaps with clumsy wrath, strikes short, and, falling Crumbled to whispery foam, slips rustling down The broad backs of the waves, which jostle and crowd Ugly and fierce, to hide among the To fling themselves upon that unknown woods. STANZAS ON FREEDOM. MEN! whose boast it is that ye Women! who shall one day bear Deeds to make the roused blood rush Is true Freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And, with leathern hearts, forget That we owe mankind a debt? No! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free! They are slaves who fear to speak COLUMBUS. THE Cordage creaks and rattles in the wind, With whims of sudden hush; the reeling sea shore, Fear-painted on the canvas of the dark, Shifting on his uneasy pillow of brine! Yet night brings more companions than the day To this drear waste; new constellations burn, And fairer stars, with whose calm height my soul Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond. O God! this world, so crammed with eager life, That comes and goes and wanders back to silence Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails Of highest endeavor, thrift world, this mad, un Which, every hour, throws life enough Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need, Losing God's sacred use, to be a bond 'Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowlingly O'er his own selfish hoard at bay; no state, Knit strongly with eternal fibres up Holds up a shape of large Humanity man Pays loyalty exulting, by which all Mould their own lives, and feel their pulses filled With the red, fiery blood of the general life, Making them mighty in peace, as now in war They are, even in the flush of victory, weak, Conquering that manhood which should them subdue. And what gift bring I to this untried world? Shall the same tragedy be played anew, And the same lurid curtain drop at last On one dread desolation, one fierce crash Of that recoil which on its makers God Lets Ignorance and Sin and Hunger make, Early or late? Or shall that commonwealth Whose potent unity and concentric force Can draw these scattered joints and parts of men Into a whole ideal man once more, Which sucks not from its limbs the life away, But sends its flood-tide and creates itself Over again in every citizen, Be there built up? For me, I have no choice; I might turn back to other destinies, For one sincere key opes all Fortune's doors; But whoso answers not God's earliest call Forfeits or dulls that faculty supreme His life's low valleys overbrow earth's clouds, And that Olympian spectre of the past Looms towering up in sovereign memory, Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of doom. Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird, Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede, Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends; Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again, Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying moon. While other youths perplexed their mandolins, Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine In the loose glories of her lover's hair, And wile another kiss to keep back day, I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoon, Did of my hope a dryad mistress make, Whom I would woo to meet me privily, Or underneath the stars, or when the moon Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls. O days whose memory tames to fawning down The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck! I know not when this hope enthralled me first, But from my boyhood up I loved to hear The tall pine-forests of the Apennine Murmur their hoary legends of the sea, Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld The sudden dark of tropic night shut down O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes, The while a pair of herons trailingly The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels. And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds To my world-seeking heart paid fealty, Then did I entertain the poet's song, I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore: For I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity. Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude Of living thing that comforted the year; Matched with the isolation drear and deep Of him who pines among the swarm of men, At once a new thought's king and pris oner, Feeling the truer life within his life, The fountain of his spirit's prophecy, Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop, In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears. He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell Widens beyond the circles of the stars, And all the sceptred spirits of the past Come thronging in to greet him as their peer; But in the market-place's glare and throng He sits apart, an exile, and his brow Aches with the mocking memory of its crown. But to the spirit select there is no choice; He cannot say, This will I do, or that, For the cheap means putting Heaven's ends in pawn, And bartering his bleak rocks, the freehold stern Of destiny's first-born, for smoother fields That yield no crop of self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's comple ment, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter Thus ever seems it when my soul can hear | You could not deem its crowding spires The voice that errs not; then my tri Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea; I see the ungated wall of chaos old, With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid night, Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist And lo, with what clear omen in the east One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me : God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded; Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off His cheek-swollen pack, and from the leaning mast Fortune's full sail strains forward! a work of human art, They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart. Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak, Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone, Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone. It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines. Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light; And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells. Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared onward red as blood, Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beFor miles away the fiery spray poured neath the eddying flood; And back and forth the billows sucked, down its deadly rain, and paused, and burst again. One poor day! From square to square with tiger leaps Remember whose and not how short it is! It is God's day, it is Columbus's. A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, Is more than time enough to find a world. 1844. AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG. THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies, Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; panted the lustful fire, The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire; And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea. Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look; His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook ; He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfold Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old. |