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 dare! pare? 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 a 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, towns, 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 run, Proteus, 'twixt rise and set of sun, As where Milan's pale Duomo lies Its peaks and pinnacles of ice 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; MY DEAR FIELDS: Το MR. JAMES T. 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. THE CATHEDRAL. FAR through the memory shines a happy | 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 with in. This hath made poets dream of lives fore gone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing halfrevealed. Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous red breast boding rain : The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm ; But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves be tween. I know not how it is with other men, Whom I but guess, deciphering myself; For me, once felt is so felt nevermore. The fleeting relish at sensation's brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine. One spring I knew as never any since: All night the surges of the warm south west Boomed intermittent through the wallowing elms, And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song: One summer hour abides, what time I perched, Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof 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 |