The Poetical Works of James Russel Lowell

Hark! that rustle of a dress, Stiff with lavish costliness!

Writhing in its fiendish bliss; All night long he sees its eyes

Here comes one whose cheek would Flicker with foul ecstasies,

flush

But to have her garment brush
'Gainst the girl whose fingers thin
Wove the weary broidery in,
Bending backward from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil,
And, in midnights chill and murk,
Stitched her life into the work,
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart's-ease and forget-me-not,
Satirizing her despair

- it is Pride.

With the emblems woven there.
Little doth the wearer heed
Of the heart-break in the brede;
A hyena by her side
Skulks, down-looking,
He digs for her in the earth,
Where lie all her claims of birth,
With his foul paws rooting o'er
Some long-buried ancestor,
Who, perhaps, a statue won
By the ill deeds he had done,
By the innocent blood he shed,
By the desolation spread
Over happy villages,
Blotting out the smile of peace.

There walks Judas, he who sold
Yesterday his Lord for gold,
Sold God's presence in his heart
For a proud step in the mart;
He hath dealt in flesh and blood;
At the bank his name is good;
At the bank, and only there,
'T is a marketable ware.
In his eyes that stealthy gleam
Was not learned of sky or stream,
But it has the cold, hard glint
Of new dollars from the mint.
Open now your spirit's eyes,
Look through that poor clay disguise
Which has thickened, day by day,
Till it keeps all light at bay,
And his soul in pitchy gloom
Gropes about its narrow tomb,
From whose dank and slimy walls
Drop by drop the horror falls.
Look! a serpent lank and cold
Hugs his spirit fold on fold;
From his heart, all day and night,
It doth suck God's blessed light.
Drink it will, and drink it must,
Till the cup holds naught but dust;
All day long he hears it hiss,

As the spirit ebbs away Into the absorbing clay.

Who is he that skulks, afraid
Of the trust he has betrayed,
Shuddering if perchance a gleam
Of old nobleness should stream
Through the pent, unwholesome room,
Where his shrunk soul cowers in
gloom,

Spirit sad beyond the rest

By more instinct for the best?
'T is a poet who was sent

For a bad world's punishment,
By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear
Songs that prove the angels near;
Who was sent to be the tongue
Of the weak and spirit-wrung,
Whence the fiery-winged Despair
In men's shrinking eyes might flare.
'T is our hope doth fashion us
To base use or glorious:

He who might have been a lark
Of Truth's morning, from the dark
Raining down melodious hope
Of a freer, broader scope,
Aspirations, prophecies,
Of the spirit's full sunrise,
Chose to be a bird of night,
That, with eyes refusing light,
Hooted from some hollow tree
Of the world's idolatry.
'Tis his punishment to hear
Flutterings of pinions near,
And his own vain wings to feel
Drooping downward to his heel,
All their grace and import lost,
Burdening his weary ghost:
Ever walking by his side
He must see his angel guide,
Who at intervals doth turn
Looks on him so sadly stern,
With such ever-new surprise
Of hushed anguish in her eyes,
That it seems the light of day
From around him shrinks away,
Or drops blunted from the wall
Built around him by his fall.
Then the mountains, whose white peaks
Catch the morning's earliest streaks,
He must see, where prophets sit,
Turning east their faces lit,

Whence, with footsteps beautiful,
To the earth, yet dim and dull,
They the gladsome tidings bring
Of the sunlight's hastening:
Never can these hills of bliss
Be o'erclimbed by feet like his !

But enough! O, do not dare
From the next the veil to tear,
Woven of station, trade, or dress,
More obscene than nakedness,
Wherewith plausible culture drapes
Fallen Nature's myriad shapes!
Let us rather love to mark
How the unextinguished spark
Will shine through the thin disguise
Of our customs, pomps, and lies,
And, not seldom blown to flame,
Vindicate its ancient claim.

In that clear brain, which, day and night,

No movement of the heart e'er jostles, Her friends are ranged on left and right,

Here, silex, hornblende, sienite ;

There, animal remains and fossils.
And yet, O subtile analyst,

That canst each property detect
Of mood or grain, that canst untwist
Each tangled skein of intellect,
And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare
Each mental nerve more fine than air,
O brain exact, that in thy scales
Canst weigh the sun and never err,

For once thy patient science fails,
One problem still defies thy art;
Thou never canst compute for her
The distance and diameter

Of any simple human heart.

Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words,

As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds ; "T is likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,

White with the angel's coming gleam, And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans,
And larger destinies seem man's;
You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans
The gulf wherein so many fall,
Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE.

Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth with all its spots.

Himself unshaken as the sky,

His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high

Systems and creeds pellmell together;

"T is strange as to a deaf man's eye, While trees uprooted splinter by,

The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;

Less of iconoclast than shaper,

His spirit, safe behind the reach

Of the tornado of his speech,

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO.

CAN this be thou who, lean and pale,
With such immitigable eye
Didst look upon those writhing souls in
bale,

And note each vengeance, and pass by
Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance
Cast backward one forbidden glance,

And saw Francesca, with child's glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee And with proud hands control its fiery prance?

Burns calmly as a glowworm's ta- With half-drooped lids, and smooth,

per.

So great in speech, but, ah! in act
So overrun with vermin troubles,
The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact
Of life collapses all his bubbles:
Had he but lived in Plato's day,

He might, unless my fancy errs,
Have shared that golden voice's sway
O'er barefooted philosophers.
Our nipping climate hardly suits
The ripening of ideal fruits :

His theories vanquish us all summer,
But winter makes him dumb and
dumber;

To see him mid life's needful things

Is something painfully bewildering;
He seems an angel with clipt wings
Tied to a mortal wife and children,
And by a brother seraph taken
In the act of eating eggs and bacon.
Like a clear fountain, his desire

Exults and leaps toward the light,
In every drop it says "Aspire!'

Striving for more ideal height;
And as the fountain, falling thence,
Crawls baffled through the common
gutter,

So, from his speech's eminence,
He shrinks into the present tense,
Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.

Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds Not all of life that 's brave and wise is;

He strews an ampler future's seeds,

"T is your fault if no harvest rises;
Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught
That all he is and has is Beauty's?
By soul the soul's gains must be wrought,
The Actual claims our coarser thought,
The Ideal hath its higher duties.

round brow,

And eye remote, that inly sees
Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now
In some sea-lulled Hesperides,
Thou movest through the jarring street,
Secluded from the noise of feet

By her gift-blossom in thy hand,
Thy branch of palm from Holy
Land;-

No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.

Yet there is something round thy lips
That prophesies the coming doom,
The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the
eclipse

Notches the perfect disk with gloom;
A something that would banish thee,
And thine untamed pursuer be,

From men and their unworthy fates,
Though Florence had not shut her

After its butterflies, and gives no sign.
T is hard at first to see it all aright:
In vain Faith blows her trump to sum-
mon back

Her scattered troop: yet, through the clouded glass

Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look Undazzled on the kindness of God's face;

Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through.

It is no little thing, when a fresh soul And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scope

For good, not gravitating earthward yet, But circling in diviner periods,

Are sent into the world, no little

The visionary hand of Might-have-been Though for its press each grape-bunch had Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim! The white feet of an Oread.

How changed, dear friend, are thy part

and thy child's!

He bends above thy cradle now, or holds
His warning finger out to be thy guide;
Thou art the nursling now; he watches
thee

Slow learning, one by one, the secret
things

Which are to him used sights of every day;

He smiles to see thy wondering glances

con

The grass and pebbles of the spirit-
world,

To thee miraculous; and he will teach
Thy knees their due observances of

prayer.

Children are God's apostles, day by day Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace;

Nor hath thy babe his mission left un

done.

To me, at least, his going hence hath
given

Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies,
And opened a new fountain in my heart
For thee, my friend, and all: and O, if
Death

More near approaches meditates, and
clasps

Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand,

God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see

That 't is thine angel, who, with loving
haste,

Unto the service of the inner shrine,
Doth waken thy beloved with a kiss.

EURYDICE.

Through our coarse art gleam, now and
then,

The features of angelic men :
'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint
Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint;
The dauber's botch no more obscures
The mighty master's portraitures.
And who can say what luckier beam
The hidden glory shall redeem,
For what chance clod the soul may wait
To stumble on its nobler fate,
Or why, to his unwarned abode,
Still by surprises comes the God?
Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross,
May meditate a whole youth's loss,
Some windfall joy, we know not whence,
Redeem a lifetime's rash expense,
And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark,
Stripped of their simulated dark,
Mountains of gold that pierce the sky,
Girdling its valleyed poverty.

I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return,
With olden heats my pulses burn,
Mine be the self-forgetting sweep,
The torrent impulse swift and wild,
Wherewith Taghkanic's rock born child
Dares gloriously the dangerous leap,
And, in his sky-descended mood,
Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood,
By touch of bravery's simple wand,
To amethyst and diamond,
Proving himself no bastard slip,
But the true granite-cradled one,
Nursed with the rock's primeval drip,
The cloud-embracing mountain's son !

Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's sway
Rebuilds the vanished yesterday;
For plated wares of Sheffield stamp
We gave the old Aladdin's lamp;
'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went

HEAVEN'S cup held down to me I That undesigned abandonment,

drain,

That wise, unquestioning content,

The sunshine mounts and spurs my Which could erect its microcosm

brain;

Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye

I suck the last drop of the sky ;
With each hot sense I draw to the lees
The quickening out-door influences,
And empty to each radiant comer
A supernaculum of summer:
Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice
Could bring enchantment so profuse,

Out of a weed's neglected blossom,
Could call up Arthur and his peers
By a low moss's clump of spears,
Or, in its shingle trireme launched,
Where Charles in some green inlet
branched,

Could venture for the golden fleece
And dragon-watched Hesperides,
Or, from its ripple-shattered fate,

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