Page images
PDF
EPUB

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

227

And knew, by a sure and inward sign, | Six vases of crystal then he took, That the work of his fingers was divine. And set them along the edge of the brook.

Then Ambrose said, "All those shall die The eternal death who believe not as I"; And some were boiled, some burned in fire, Some sawn in twain, that his heart's desire,

For the good of men's souls, might be satisfied,

By the drawing of all to the righteous side.

One day, as Ambrose was seeking the truth
In his lonely walk, he saw a youth
Resting himself in the shade of a tree;
It had never been given him to see
So shining a face, and the good man
thought

'T were pity he should not believe as he ought.

So he set himself by the young man's side, And the state of his soul with questions tried;

But the heart of the stranger was hardened indeed,

Nor received the stamp of the one true creed,

And the spirit of Ambrose waxed sore to find

Such face the porch of so narrow a mind.

"As each beholds in cloud and fire The shape that answers his own desire, So each," said the youth, "in the Law shall find

The figure and features of his mind; And to each in his mercy hath God allowed

His several pillar of fire and cloud."

The soul of Ambrose burned with zeal And holy wrath for the young man's weal: "Believest thou then, most wretched youth,'

Cried he, "a dividual essence in Truth? I fear me thy heart is too cramped with sin

To take the Lord in his glory in."

Now there bubbled beside them where they stood

A fountain of waters sweet and good; The youth to the streamlet's brink drew

near

Saying, "Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here!"

"As into these vessels the water I pour, There shall one hold less, another more, And the water unchanged, in every case, Shall put on the figure of the vase; 0 thou, who wouldst unity make through strife,

Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life?"

When Ambrose looked up, he stood alone, The youth and the stream and the vases were gone;

But he knew, by a sense of humbled grace,
He had talked with an angel face to face,
And felt his heart change inwardly,
As he fell on his knees beneath the tree.

AFTER THE BURIAL.

YES, faith is a goodly anchor; When skies are sweet as a psalm, At the bows it lolls so stalwart, In bluff, broad-shouldered calm.

And when over breakers to leeward
The tattered surges are hurled,
It may keep our head to the tempest,
With its grip on the base of the world.

But, after the shipwreck, tell me
What help in its iron thews,
Still true to the broken hawser,
Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?

In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,
When the helpless feet stretch out
And find in the deeps of darkness
No footing so solid as doubt,

Then better one spar of Memory,
One broken plank of the Past,
That our human heart may cling to,
Though hopeless of shore at last!

To the spirit its splendid conjectures,
To the flesh its sweet despair,
Its tears o'er the thin-worn locket.
With its anguish of deathless hair!

[blocks in formation]

turn

There's a narrow ridge in the graveyard | Forgive me, if from present things I
Would scarce stay a child in his race,
But to me and my thought it is wider
Than the star-sown vague of Space.

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
Your morals most drearily true;

But, since the earth clashed on her coffin,
I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;
'T is a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.

It is
pagan; but wait till you feel it,
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock.

Communion in spirit! Forgive me,
But I, who am earthy and weak,
Would give all my incomes from dream-
land

For a touch of her hand on my cheek.

That little shoe in the corner,
So worn and wrinkled and brown,
With its emptiness confutes you,
And argues your wisdom down.

COMMEMORATION ODE HARVARD UNIVERSITY, JULY 21, 1865.

LIFE may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So generous is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms, and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God's plan
And measure of a stalwart man,
Limbed like the old heroic breeds,
Who stand self-poised on manhood's
solid earth,

Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,

Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led, With ashes on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief:

To speak what in my heart will beat and

burn,

And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.

Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.

How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;

One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,

Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth,

And brave old wisdom of sincerity! They knew that outward grace is

dust;

They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,

And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.

His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,

Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy

bars,

A seamark now, now lost in vapors blind;

Broad prairie rather, genial, level.

lined,

Fruitful and friendly for all human

kind,

Yet also nigh to Heaven and loved of loftiest stars.

Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,

Ere any names of Serf and Peer
Could Nature's equal scheme deface;
Here was a type of the true elder

race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

MARIA WHITE LOWELL.

I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must

be

In him who condescends to victory
Such as the Present gives, and cannot
wait,

Safe in himself as in a fate.
So always firmly he:

He knew to bide his time,
And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.
Great captains, with their guns and
drums,

Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes:

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,

Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing

man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,

New birth of our new soil, the first American.

We sit here in the Promised Land That flows with Freedom's honey and milk:

But 't was they won it, sword in hand, Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk.

We welcome back our bravest and our

best;

Ah, me! not all! some come not with the rest, Who went forth brave and bright as any here!

I strive to mix some gladness with my strain,

But the sad strings complain,
And will not please the ear;

I sweep them for a pæan, but they wane
Again and yet again

Into a dirge, and die away in pain.
In these brave ranks I only see the gaps,
Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb

turf wraps, Dark to the triumph which they died to gain:

Fitlier may others greet the living,
For me the past is unforgiving;
I with uncovered head
Salute the sacred dead,

Who went, and who return not.
Say not so!

229

"T is not the grapes of Canaan that repay, But the high faith that failed not by the

way;

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave;

No bar of endless night exiles the brave; And to the saner mind

We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.

Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow! For never shall their aureoled presence lack:

I see them muster in a gleaming row, With ever-youthful brows that nobler show;

We find in our dull road their shining track;

In every nobler mood We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life's unalterable good, Of all our saintlier aspiration;

They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted

[blocks in formation]

They, in the valley's sheltering care, Soon crop the meadow's tender prime, And when the sod grows brown and bare, The shepherd strives to make them climb

To airy shelves of pasture green,

That hang along the mountain's side, Where grass and flowers together lean, And down through mist the sunbeams slide.

But naught can tempt the timid things The steep and rugged paths to try, Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings,

And seared below the pastures lie,

Till in his arms their lambs he takes,
Along the dizzy verge to go;
Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,
They follow on, o'er rock and snow.

And in those pastures, lifted fair,

More dewy-soft than lowland mead, The shepherd drops his tender care, And sheep and lambs together feed.

This parable, by Nature breathed,

Blew on me as the south-wind free O'er frozen brooks, that flow unsheathed From icy thraldom to the sea.

A blissful vision, through the night, Would all my happy senses sway, Of the good Shepherd on the height, Or climbing up the starry way,

Holding our little lamb asleep,

While, like the murmur of the sea, Sounded that voice along the deep, Saying, "Arise and follow me!"

THOMAS W. PARSONS.
[U. s. A.]

CAMPANILE DE PISA.

SNOW was glistening on the mountains, but the air was that of June, Leaves were falling, but the runnels playing still their summer tune,

And the dial's lazy shadow hovered nigh the brink of noon.

On the benches in the market, rows of languid idlers lay,

When to Pisa's nodding belfry, with a friend, I took my way.

From the top we looked around us, and as far as eye might strain, Saw no sign of life or motion in the town, or on the plain,

Hardly seemed the river moving, through the willows to the main; Nor was any noise disturbing Pisa from her drowsy hour,

Save the doves that fluttered 'neath us, in and out and round the tower.

Not a shout from gladsome children, or the clatter of a wheel,

Nor the spinner of the suburb, winding his discordant reel, Nor the stroke upon the pavement of a hoof or of a heel.

Even the slumberers, in the churchyard of the Campo Santo seemed Scarce more quiet than the living world that underneath us dreamed.

Dozing at the city's portal, heedless guard the sentry kept,

More than oriental dulness o'er the sunny farms had crept,

Near the walls the ducal herdsman by the dusty roadside slept; While his camels, resting round him, half alarmed the sullen ox, Seeing those Arabian monsters pastering with Etruria's flocks.

Then it was, like one who wandered, lately, singing by the Rhine, Strains perchance to maiden's hearing sweeter than this verse of mine, That we bade Imagination lift us on her wing divine.

And the days of Pisa's greatness rose from the sepulchral past,

When a thousand conquering galleys bore her standard at the mast.

Memory for a moment crowned her sovereign mistress of the seas, When she braved, upon the billows, Venice and the Genoese, Daring to deride the Pontiff, though he shook his angry keys.

THOMAS W. PARSONS.

231

When her admirals triumphant, riding | Pisa's patron saint hath hallowed to himo'er the Soldan's waves, self the joyful day,

Brought from Calvary's holy mountain | Never on the thronged Rialto showed the fitting soil for knightly graves.

[blocks in formation]

Carnival more gay.

[blocks in formation]

The lips, as Cumæ's cavern close,

The cheeks, with fast and sorrow thin, The rigid front, almost morose,

But for the patient hope within, Declare a life whose course hath been Unsullied still, though still severe, Which, through the wavering days of sin, Keep itself icy-chaste and clear. Not wholly such his haggard look

When wandering once, forlorn he strayed,

With no companion save his book,

To Corvo's hushed monastic shade: Where, as the Benedictine laid

His palm upon the pilgrim-guest, The single boon for which he prayed The convent's charity was rest.

« PreviousContinue »