The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell

Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran;

She gave us this unblemished gentle

man:

What shall we give her back but love and praise

As in the dear old unestranged days Before the inevitable wrong began? Mother of States and undiminished men, Thou gavest us a country, giving him, And we owe alway what we owed thee then :

The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us agen

Shines as before with no abatement dim. A great man's memory is the only thing

With influence to outlast the present whim

And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.

All of him that was subject to the hours

Lies in thy soil and makes it part of

ours:

Across more recent graves,
Where unresentful Nature waves
Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod,
Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God,
We from this consecrated plain stretch

out

Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt

As here the united North
Poured her embrowned manhood forth
In welcome of our savior and thy son.
Through battle we have better learned
thy worth,

The long-breathed valor and undaunted will,

Which, like his own, the day's disaster done,

Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.

Both thine and ours the victory hardly

won;

If ever with distempered voice or pen We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back,

And for the dead of both don common black.

Be to us evermore as thou wast then, As we forget thou hast not always been,

Mother of States and unpolluted men, Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen!

AN ODE

FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1876.

I. 1.

ENTRANCED I saw a vision in the cloud That loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky, Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the

eye,

Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasy In golden mist, an ever-shifting crowd: There, mid unreal forms that came and went

In robes air-spun, of evanescent dye, A woman's semblance shone pre-emineut;

Not armed like Pallas, not like Hera proud,

But, as on household diligence intent,
Beside her visionary wheel she bent
Like Aretë or Bertha, nor than they
Less queenly in her port: about her
knee

Glad children clustered confident in play :
Placid her pose, the calm of energy;
And over her broad brow in many a
round

(That loosened would have gilt her garment's hem),

Succinct, as toil prescribes, the hair was wound

In lustrous coils, a natural diadem. The cloud changed shape, obsequious to the whim

Of some transmuting influence felt in

Seven years long was the bow
Of battle bent, and the heightening
Storm-heaps convulsed with the throe
Of their uncontainable lightening ;
Seven years long heard the sea
Crash of navies and wave-borne thunder;
Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee,
And new stars were seen, a world's
wonder;

Each by her sisters made bright,
All binding all to their stations,
Cluster of manifold light
Startling the old constellations :
Men looked up and grew pale:
Was it a comet or star,
Omen of blessing or bale,
Hung o'er the ocean afar?

Stormy the day of her birth :
Was she not born of the strong,
She, the last ripeness of earth,
Beautiful, prophesied long?
Stormy the days of her prime:
Hers are the pulses that beat
Higher for perils sublime,
Making them fawn at her feet.
Was she not born of the strong?
Was she not born of the wise?
Daring and counsel belong
Of right to her confident eyes:
Human and motherly they,
Careless of station or race:
Hearken! her children to-day
Shout for the joy of her face.

Rise lost in heaven, the household's Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles

In fame, and born beneath a milder star), That to Earth's orphans, far as curves the dome,

Of death-deaf sky, the bounteous West
means home,

With dear precedency of natural ties
That stretch from roof to roof and make

men gently wise?

And if the nobler passions wane,
Distorted to base use, if the near goal
Of insubstantial gain

Tempt from the proper race-course of
the soul

That crowns their patient breath

And set our pulse in tune with moods divine :

Long the day lingered in its sea-fringed nest,

Then touched the Tuscan hills with
golden lance

And paused; then on to Spain and
France

The splendor flew, and Albion's misty
crest:

Shall Ocean bar him from his destined
West ?

Whose feet, song-pinioned, are too fleet Or are we, then, arrived too late,

for Death,

Yet may she claim one privilege urbane
And haply first upon the civic roll,
That none can breathe her air nor grow
humane.

O, better far the briefest hour

Of Athens self-consumed, whose plastic power

Hid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone;

Doomed with the rest to grope disconsolate,

Foreclosed of Beauty by our modern date?

III.
1.

POETS, as their heads grow gray,
Look from too far behind the eyes,
Too long-experienced to be wise

In guileless youth's diviner way;
Life sings not now, but prophesies;
Time's shadows they no more behold,
But, under them, the riddle old
Taat mocks, bewilders, and defies:
In childhood's face the seed of shame,
In the green tree an ambushed flame,
In Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night,
They, though against their will, di-
vine,

And dread the care-dispelling wine
Stored from the Muse's vintage bright,
By age imbued with second-sight.
From Faith's own eyelids there peeps
out,

Even as they look, the leer of doubt;
The festal wreath their fancy loads
With care that whispers and forebodes :
Nor this our triumph-day can blunt
Megara's goads.

Murmur of many voices in the air
Denounces us degenerate,
Unfaithful guardians of a noble fate,
And prompts indifference or despair:
Is this the country that we dreamed in
youth,

Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight,

O, as this pensive moonlight blurs my pines,

Here as I sit and meditate these lines, To gray-green dreams of what they are by day,

So would some light, not reason's sharpedged ray,

Trance me in moonshine as before the` flight

Of years had won me this unwelcome right

To see things as they are, or shall be

soon,

In the frank prose of undissembling

noon!

Back to my breast, ungrateful sigh!
Whoever fails, whoever errs,
The penalty be ours, not hers!
The present still seems vulgar, seen too
nigh;

The golden age is still the age that's past:

I ask no drowsy opiate

To dull my vision of that only state Founded on faith in man, and therefore sure to last.

For, O, my country, touched by thee,

Seed-field of simpler manners, braver The gray hairs gather back their gold;

truth,

Thy thought sets all my pulses free;
The heart refuses to be old;
The love is all that I can see.

Not to thy natal-day belong
Time's prudent doubt or age's wrong,
But gifts of gratitude and song:
Unsummoned crowd the thankful words,
As sap in spring-time floods the tree,
For all that thou hast been to me!
Foreboding the return of birds,

Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave :

Strength found he in the unsympathizing 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.

They steered by stars the elder shipmen knew,

And laid their courses where the currents draw

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

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 petu-
lant 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.

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 them 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,
Sure that, while lasts the immutable
decree,

Than long-considering Nature will or The land to Human Nature dear

can,

Shall not be unbeloved of Thee.

« Zurück Weiter »

Books