James Russell Lowell

“ Though Nature’s firm decree
The narrowing soul with narrowing dungeon bind,
Yet was his free of motion as the wind,
And held both worlds, of spirit and sense, in fee.
In charmed communion with his dual mind
He wandered Spain, himself both knight and hind,
Redressing wrongs he knew must ever be.
His humor wise could see life’s long deceit,
Man’s baffled aims, nor therefore both despise;
His knightly nature could ill fortune greet
Like an old friend. Whose ever such kind eyes
That pierced so deep, such scope, save his whose feet
By Avon ceased ’neath the same April’s skies? ”

“ Was it mine eyes' imposture I have seen
Flit with the moonbeams on from shade to sheen
Through the wood-openings? Nay, I see her now
Out of her heaven new-lighted, from her brow
The hair breeze-scattered, like loose mists that blow
Across her crescent, goldening as they go
High-kirtled for the chase, and what was shown,
Of maiden rondure, like the rose half-blown.
If dream, turn real! If a vision, stay! ”

“ Can, then, my twofold nature find content
In vain conceits of airy blandishment?
Ask I no more? Since yesterday I task
My storm-strewn thoughts to tell me what I ask:
Faint premonitions of mutation strange
Steal o’er my perfect orb, and, with the change,
Myself am changed; the shadow of my earth
Darkens the disc of that celestial worth
Which only yesterday could still suffice
Upwards to waft my thoughts in sacrifice;{63}
My heightened fancy with its touches warm
Moulds to a woman’s that ideal form;
Nor yet a woman’s wholly, but divine
With awe her purer essence bred in mine. ”

“ Smooth words that leave unflushed the brow and cheek?
To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseen
In private box, spectator of the scene
Where men the comedy of life rehearse,
Idly to judge which better and which worse
Each hireling actor spoiled his worthless part?
Were it not sweeter with a careless heart,
In happy commune with the untainted brooks,
To dream all day, or, walled with silent books,
To hear nor heed the World’s unmeaning noise,
Safe in my fortress stored with lifelong joys? ”

“ Herself against her other self conspires,
Takes woman’s nature, walks in mortal ways,
And finds in my remorse her beauty’s praise?
Yet all would I renounce to dream again
The dream in dreams fulfilled that made my pain,
My noble pain that heightened all my years
With crowns to win and prowess-breeding tears;
Nay, would that dream renounce once more to see
Her from her sky there looking down at me!
VII.
Goddess, reclimb thy heaven, and be once more
An inaccessible splendor to adore,
A faith, a hope of such transcendent worth{69}
As bred ennobling discontent with earth ”

“ Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere
Counting the horns o’er of the Beast,
Still scaring those whose faith in it is least,
As if those snaps o' th' moral atmosphere
That sharpen all the needles of the East,
Had been to him like death,{16}
Accustomed to draw Europe’s freer breath
In a more stable element;
Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose,
Our practical horizon grimly pent,
Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze,
Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close,
Our social monotone of level days,
Might make our best seem banishment ”

“ Knowing, what all experience serves to show,
No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.
You have heard harsher voices and more loud,
As all must, not sworn liegemen of the crowd,
And far aloof your silent mind could keep
As when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep,
The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can know
What hounds her lucent calm drives mad below.{52}
But to my business, while you rub your eyes
And wonder how you ever thought me wise.
Dear friend and old, they say you shake your head
And wish some bitter words of mine unsaid:
I wish they might be,—there we are agreed ”

“ Into the peerless Shape mine eyes hold fast.
This, too, at first I worshipt: soon, like wine,
Her eyes, in mine poured, frenzy-philtred mine;
Passion put Worship’s priestly raiment on
And to the woman knelt, the Goddess gone.
Was I, then, more than mortal made? or she
Less than divine that she might mate with me?
If mortal merely, could my nature cope
With such o’ermastery of maddening hope?
If Goddess, could she feel the blissful woe
That women in their self-surrender know? ”

“ As down to mine she deigns her longed-for lips;
And as her neck my happy arms enfold,
Flooded and lustred with her loosened gold,
She whispers words each sweeter than a kiss:
Then, wakened with the shock of sudden bliss,
My arms are empty, my awakener fled,
And, silent in the silent sky o’erhead,
But coldly as on ice-plated snow, she gleams,
Herself the mother and the child of dreams. ”

“ And but my chair is empty; ’mid them all
’Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain
Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain:
Well nigh I doubt which world is real most,
Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane;
In this abstraction it were light to deem{9}
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. ”

“ Feel masculine virtue flooding every limb,
And life, like Spring returning, brings the key
That sets my senses from their winter free,
Dancing like naked fauns too glad for shame.
Her passion, purified to palest flame,
Can it thus kindle? Is her purpose this?
I will not argue, lest I lose a bliss
That makes me dream Tithonus' fortune mine,
(Or what of it was palpably divine
Ere came the fruitlessly immortal gift;) {65}
I cannot curb my hope’s imperious drift
That wings with fire my dull mortality;
Though fancy-forged, ’tis all I feel or see.
IV.
My Goddess sinks ”

“ With silence-sandalled Sleep she comes to me,
(But softer-footed, sweeter-browed, than she,)
In motion gracious as a seagull’s wing,
And all her bright limbs, moving, seem to sing.
If life’s most solid things illusion seem,
Why should not substance wear the mask of dream? ”

“ The Truce of God is here; the breeze
Sighs as men sigh relieved from care,
Or tilts as lightly in the trees
As might a robin: all is ease,
With pledge of ampler ease to spare.
Repose fills all the generous space
Of undulant plain; the rook and crow
Hush; ’tis as if a silent grace,
By Nature murmured, calmed the face
Of Heaven above and Earth below. ”

“ Here lips their roses keep and locks their gold;
Here Love in pristine innocency bold
Speaks what our grosser conscience makes a crime.
Because it tells the dream that all have known
Once in their lives, and to life’s end the few ”

“ And that unwakened winter nears,
’Tis the void chair our surest guest receives,{13}
’Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,
’Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;
We count our rosary by the beads we miss:
To me, at least, it seemeth so,
An exile in the land once found divine,
While my starved fire burns low,
And homeless winds at the loose casement whine
Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine. ”

“ Her halls still echoed with the fame
Of you, her poet and her wit.
’Tis fifty years from then to now:
But your Last Leaf renews its green,
Though, for the laurels on your brow
(So thick they crowd) , ’tis hardly seen.
The oriole’s fledglings fifty times
Have flown from our familiar elms;
As many poets with their rhymes
Oblivion’s darkling dust o’erwhelms. ”

“ So linger, as from me earth’s light withdraws,
Dear touch of Nature, tremulously bright!
{119} PESSIMOPTIMISM.
Ye little think what toil it was to build
A world of men imperfect even as this,
Where we conceive of Good by what we miss,
Of Ill by that wherewith best days are filled;
A world whose every atom is self-willed,
Whose corner-stone is propt on artifice,
Whose joy is shorter-lived than woman’s kiss,
Whose wisdom hoarded is but to be spilled. ”

“ That swells fame living, chokes it after death,
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.
{5} II. 1.
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 ”

“ Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,
The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,
The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips
While Holmes’s rockets curve their long ellipse,
And burst in seeds of fire that burst again
To drop in scintillating rain.
{10} 4.
There too the face half-rustic, half-divine,
Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,
Of him who taught us not to mow and mope
About our fancied selves, but seek our scope
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 ”

“ Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing
That Something Else set all agoing?
Farther and farther back we push
From Moses and his burning bush;
Cry, “Art Thou there?” Above, below,
All nature mutters yes and no!
’Tis the old answer: we’re agreed
Being from Being must proceed,
Life be Life’s source. I might as well
Obey the meeting-house’s bell,
And listen while Old Hundred pours
Forth through the summer-opened doors,
From old and young. I hear it yet,
Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,{187}
While the gray minister, with face
Radiant, let loose his noble bass. ”

“ If men were knaves, why, people called them so,
And crime could see the prison-portal bend
Its brow severe at no long vista’s end.
In those days for plain things plain words would serve;
Men had not learned, to admire the graceful swerve
Wherewith the Æsthetic Nature’s genial mood
Makes public duty slope to private good ”

“ They say it is wholesome to rise with the sun,
And I dare say it may be if not overdone;
(I think it was Thomson who made the remark
’Twas an excellent thing in its way—for a lark;)
But to rise after dinner and look down the meeting
On a distant (as Gray calls it) prospect of Eating,
With a stomach half full and a cerebrum hollow
As the tortoise-shell ere it was strung for Apollo,
Under contract to raise anerithmon gelasma
With rhymes so hard hunted they gasp with the asthma,
And jokes not much younger than Jethro’s phylacteries,
Is something I leave you yourselves to characterize. ”

“ Mine eyes have feigned of late her rapture near,
Moulded of mind-mist that broad day dispels,
Here in these shadowy woods and brook-lulled dells.
Have no heaven-habitants e’er felt a void
In hearts sublimed with ichor unalloyed?
E’er longed to mingle with a mortal fate
Intense with pathos of its briefer date?
Could she partake, and live, our human stains? ”

“ Mine be the love that in itself can find
Seed of white thoughts, the lilies of the mind,
Seed of that glad surrender of the will
That finds in service self’s true purpose still;
Love that in outward fairness sees the tent
Pitched for an inmate far more excellent ”

“ We sailed for the moon, but, in sad disillusion,
Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast,
And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion
’Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past.
Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals,
He’s a genius or fool whom ye cheat at two-score,
And the man whose boy-promise was likened to Pascal’s
Is thankful at forty they don’t call him bore!
VI.
With what fumes of fame was each confident pate full! ”

“ He might have been a poet—many worse—
But that he had, or feigned, contempt of verse;
Called it tattooing language, and held rhymes
The young world’s lullaby of ruder times.
Bitter in words, too indolent for gall,
He satirized himself the first of all,
In men and their affairs could find no law,
And was the ill logic that he thought he saw. ”

“ Whose crannies are searched by the nightshade’s root,
Nor sound of service is ever heard,
Except from throat of the unclean bird,
Hooting to unassoiled shapes as they pass
In midnights unholy his witches' mass,
Or shouting “Ho! ho!” ”

“ And Ovid, could he but have heard,
Had hung a legendary pain
About the memory of the bird;{87}
A pain articulate so long
In penance of some mouldered crime
Whose ghost still flies the Furies' thong
Down the waste solitudes of time.
Waif of the young World’s wonder-hour,
When gods found mortal maidens fair,
And will malign was joined with power
Love’s kindly laws to overbear,
Like Progne, did it feel the stress
And coil of the prevailing words
Close round its being, and compress
Man’s ampler nature to a bird’s? ”

“ What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts or fears,
When, the day’s swan, she swam along the cheers
Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago?
The guns were shouting Io Hymen then
That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom;
The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men
To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb.
Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it blind,
Knowing what life is, what our humankind?
{116} PRISON OF CERVANTES.
Seat of all woes! ”