James Russell Lowell

“ Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed in martyr-fires,
Can they, so consecrate and so inspired,
By repetition wane to vexing wind?
Alas! we cannot draw habitual breath
In the thin air of life’s supremer heights,
We cannot make each meal a sacrament,
Nor with our tailors be disbodied souls,—
We men, too conscious of earth’s comedy,
Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate,
And only for great stakes can be sublime! ”

“ Where suns and systems inconspicuous float
As the poor blood-disks in our mortal veins.
Each age must worship its own thought of God,
More or less earthy, clarifying still{32}
With subsidence continuous of the dregs;
Nor saint nor sage could fix immutably
The fluent image of the unstable Best,
Still changing in their very hands that wrought:
To-day’s eternal truth To-morrow proved
Frail as frost-landscapes on a window-pane. ”

“ Change is the mask that all Continuance wears{38}
To keep us youngsters harmlessly amused;
Meanwhile some ailing or more watchful child,
Sitting apart, sees the old eyes gleam out,
Stern, and yet soft with humorous pity too.
Whilere, men burnt men for a doubtful point,
As if the mind were quenchable with fire,
And Faith danced round them with her war-paint on,
Devoutly savage as an Iroquois ”

“ I pause, transfigured by some stripe of bloom,
And my mind throngs with shining auguries,
Circle on circle, bright as seraphim,
With golden trumpets silent, that await
The signal to blow news of good to men. ”

“ Something more friendly with their ruder skies:
The gray spire, molten now in driving mist,
Now lulled with the incommunicable blue;{25}
The carvings touched to meanings new with snow,
Or commented with fleeting grace of shade;
The statues, motley as man’s memory,
Partial as that, so mixed of true and false,
History and legend meeting with a kiss
Across this bound-mark where their realms confine;
The painted windows, frecking gloom with glow,
Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer,
Meet symbol of the senses and the soul ”

“ Is old Religion but a spectre now,
Haunting the solitude of darkened minds,
Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day?
Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt,
Since Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite
And stretched electric threads from mind to mind?
Nay, did Faith build this wonder? or did Fear,
That makes a fetish and misnames it God{28}
(Blockish or metaphysic, matters not) ,
Contrive this coop to shut its tyrant in,
Appeased with playthings, that he might not harm? ”

“ By the New World’s new fiend, Publicity,
Whose testing thumb leaves everywhere its smutch,
Not one day feel within himself the need
Of loyalty to better than himself,
That shall ennoble him with the upward look? ”

“ That hears afar the breeze-borne rote, and longs,
Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell,
Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,
It rose before me, patiently remote
From the great tides of life it breasted once,
Hearing the noise of men as in a dream. ”

“ Child of an age that lectures, not creates,
Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past,
And twittering round the work of larger men,
As we had builded what we but deface.{26}
Far up the great bells wallowed in delight,
Tossing their clangors o’er the heedless town,
To call the worshippers who never came,
Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes. ”