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Title: Elfin land: and other poems
Author: Ball, Benjamin West
Language: English
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POEMS ***
POEMS.
ELFIN LAND:
AND
OTHER POEMS.
BY
BENJAMIN WEST BALL.
BOSTON AND CAMBRIDGE:
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY.
MDCCCLI.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by
JAMES MUNROE & COMPANY,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
THURSTON, TORRY & EMERSON, PRINTERS.
TO
D. S. H.,
THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED,
AS A TESTIMONIAL
OF AFFECTIONATE REGARD.
TO D. S. H.
I.
Ere thou wert seen, and ere I knew
Such loveliness on earth unfolded,
A morning dream revealed to view
That shape in perfect beauty moulded;
Around thy graceful waist, methought,
The fabled Zone of Love was glowing,
The cestus with enchantment fraught,
A charm, that vanquished all, bestowing—
The phantom fled, but evermore
Until thyself I might discover,
Its memory in my heart I bore,
Of shade impalpable the lover.
II.
When Eastward thou wert long sojourning,
From me divided and afar,
Though sunset in the West was burning,
I turned where shone my being’s star;
Beyond the woods, the village spires,
Adown the broadly flowing river
My glances winged by wild desires
To pierce the distance, would endeavor;
Each bickering train which eastward rolled,
Each trailing cloud that thither flew,
As long as eyesight could behold,
I followed, musing still of you;—
III.
Of you, the magnet of my heart,
The vision of my nightly slumber,
Of all my thoughts the central part,
And source of fancies without number.
The stars are not more dear to Night,
To scented winds the bursting blossom,
To Day its floods of golden light,
Than thou art, gentlest, to my bosom.
The beauty of the North is thine,
Its auburn tress, its eye of azure,
Its rose-hued cheek, whose freshness Time
Leaves blooming long without erasure.
IV.
Incarnate in thy graceful form,
I see that sweet Göthéan vision,
That dream of beauty soft and warm,
Which folded Faust in joy elysian.
Though clouds disturb the blue serene,
And storm and darkness round me lower,
Thy presence is a sunny gleam,
A bow of promise ’mid the shower;
Though from me fortune fall away,
By Hope itself disowned, forsaken,
Whilst thou art spared by pale decay,
I rest in peace, secure, unshaken.
CONTENTS.
PROEM 9
DISENCHANTMENT 12
ELFIN LAND. Part I. 17
Part II. 28
INSCRIPTION 37
THE TEUTONIC MINSTREL’S TOMB 38
INVOCATION 40
IONIA 41
THRENODY 46
CONCETTO 49
THE LAY OF THE CONDEMNED SPIRIT IN DANTE 50
LOVE’S LABOR LOST 51
THE PLAGUE IN SUMMER 55
EUTHANASIA 57
THE FORGOTTEN 58
TO W. P. R. 60
THE SONG OF ENEAS’ MEN 62
THE AUTHORESS OF THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO 64
MONODY OF THE COUNTESS OF NETTLESTEDE 65
CLOSE, CLOSE BY AIDENN 69
PAN AND LAÏS 71
ATHENS 76
ACHILLES’ SONG 77
ANASTASIUS 78
CYMINDIS 82
THE CEMETERY IN SUMMER 85
ALL HAIL, MY GENTLE, ETC. 88
THE SINGING MASONS AT CROCUSBURG 90
AGIMUR FATIS 92
A HERMITAGE 94
I SAW A SNAKE-GIRT, ETC. 95
LUCIFER REDUX 97
ANSALDO’S GARDEN 100
THE DYING MOSLEM 102
MDCCCXLVIII-IX 104
THE AUTUMNAL RIDE 110
TO —— 113
SUGGESTED BY A HEAD OF ACHILLES, IN SIR WM. GELL’S POMPEII 115
PSYCHE 117
THE SERAPH’S HOLIDAY 118
MORNING 121
AUTUMN 123
O POWER OF MUSIC 125
DREAMS 127
THE PENITENT 129
OCEAN, THOU ART DISENCHANTED 131
TWILIGHT IN EGYPT 133
ARIEL’S SONG 135
WHERE ABID’ST THOU, PROPHET MIGHTY 137
ON HER MONUMENTAL SCROLL 139
THE INDIAN SUMMER 141
HYMN TO PHOSPHOR 143
TO THE CRICKET 145
BOOTH’S RICHARD 147
L’ENVOI 149
POEMS.
PROËM.
A gleaner in the fields of song,
I follow where the great have gone,
The wise, the beautiful, the strong,
An humble garland weaving.
Their harmonies enchant mine ears,
Unseal the fontal depths of tears,
And lift my spirit to the spheres,
Each sense of pain bereaving.
Muse of the West! upon thy shrine
I lay this votive wreath of mine,
Though many an offering there may shine,
With brighter blossoms gleaming.
For, even now, though wild and young,
By cunning hands thy harp is strung,
And lips, with bees in clusters hung,
Thy fame are fast redeeming.
But late thy heart was pierced with pain,
Still o’er thee flows of raven grain
A vestment dun; thine eyelids rain
Their tears o’er one departed.
The harp of Israfel no more
Is heard below—some brighter shore
Receives him, and his lost Lenore
He clasps, the fiery hearted.
His were the wingéd words, that bear
Imaginations rich and rare,
As pinions’ seeds through all the air,
And sow them in each bosom.
Thoughts’ shadows lowered about his eye;
His forehead was a temple high,
Fit haunt for Dædal Poesy;
For flowers divine to blossom.
His spirit stalked in joyless gloom
Through autumn wolds, where never bloom
Was seen. Above, a sullen moon
Through flying rack was beaming;
The sighing winds their dirges blew,
The withered leaves in eddies flew,
Upon his brow the nightshade’s dew
In venomed drops was gleaming.
Sad heart, thy fiery throbs are o’er!
Thy soul has gained the eternal shore!
There mayst thou find the loved of yore,
Who went before thee thither!
Reknit to them by cords, which ne’er
The Parcæ dark again can shear,
Mayst thou enjoy ambrosial cheer
In regions of unclouded weather!
DISENCHANTMENT.
I.
Glides the shadow round the dial,
Youth and Hope have almost flown,
Vainly fade my days like water,
On the sandy desert thrown.
On the Tree of Life the verdure,
Leaf by leaf decaying, dies;
And a low prophetic murmur
In its waving branches sighs.
At its roots the Nornas sitting,
Chant, by turns, their solemn hymn;
In its shadow dreams are brooding,
As at old Dodona dim.
II.
Once like trodden vintage foaming,
Through my veins the life-blood rolled,
Fiery visions flashed around me,
Such as blinded prophets old.
Cold and dark the golden mountains,
Which of yore environed me;
From the star its sheen has faded,
From the blossom and the tree.
Gazing westward in the sunset,
I no longer can descry
Tents of Paladins, in clusters,
Pitched against the darkening sky.
III.
They have furled their gorgeous banners,
And their oriflammes uprolled,
They have struck their far pavilions,
Rich with purple and with gold.
In the galley of Ulysses
I no more at random sail,
On each tenth returning sunrise
Sure some stranger port to hail.
Now the regions of the Lotos
O’er the waters disappear;
Now the meadows of the Sirens
Starred with blossoms glitter near;
IV.
Now the golden ether leaving,
We to lampless glooms descend,
Where the Shadows of the Weary
Through the umbered spaces wend.
With “the blind old man” I wandered
On the soft Ionian shore,
Danced at harvest feasts in autumn,
While the oak tree arched me o’er;
Through the streets of Asian cities,
Lit with nuptial tapers trod,
Where in star-light flamed the altars
Of the yellow-buskined god.
V.
All the dark-eyed tribes of Hellas
I could visit, one by one,
In their _agorai_ I gossipped
With the idlers in the sun;
At the school of old Crotona
Heard the Samian recite,
How the eternal Monad flowers
Into blossoms infinite;
How from shape to shape forever
Silent, serpent-like it glides,
On a starred, unresting circle,
In its pilgrimages rides.
VI.
At the city of Glaucopis,
’Neath the olive trees I lay,
While the bird of Itys warbled
Through the livelong summer day,
And at moon-rise, decked with garlands,
Lay reclined in that alcove,
Where harangued the Man-Silenus
On the genesis of Love.
Fast the wine and wit were flowing,
Mid the banquet’s joyous din;
At the door, the son of Clinias,
Crowned and drunken, gazing in.
VII.
Or at morning, in some _stoa_,
Heard the Sage, as in his toils
He immeshed the wordy sophists
Come to dazzle from the Isles.
In the house of Thespis sitting,
On upæthric seats of stone,
Saw the tribes of birds collected
In a kingdom of their own;
In a quaint ethereal city,
Full of many-tinted plumes,
Which in mid-air intercepted
Jove’s refection, altar-fumes.
VIII.
But the portals of Athenæ
I no longer wander through,
To her Owl and to her _Bema_
I have bid a long adieu.
Cities thronged with breathing beings—
Not the pavements of the dead—
For the future I must frequent,
For the future I must tread.
Though their streets have not the glory,
Which the towns of Hellas wore,
In them I must toil and battle,
Till the fret and din are o’er.
IX.
Till the clamor of the Present
In the eternal silence dies,
And my frame, but dust and ruin,
In its final chamber lies,
With the vanished and forgotten,
With the lovely and the brave,
Who have sunken through the Ages,
To the quiet of the grave.
There the eye of love shall vainly
Through the red earth seek to pry,
There the grass and night winds only
True to sorrow ever sigh.
Elfin Land
PART I.
_Into the fabled Fairy land_
_My portals open wide,_
_Where life is all a holiday_
_From morn till eventide._
A soft and dreamy atmosphere
Above its plains is hung,
A summer noon and twilight fused
And mingled into one.
From all its bounds the turbaned cock
Is banished far away,
As erst he was from Sybaris,
Where drowsy people lay,
Indulging drowsy phantasies,
Long after break of day.
The cricket’s wiry song by night,
By day the humblebee’s,
The loudest noises are, that float
Upon the Elfin breeze.
The Welsh king, Arthur, and his court
Have dwelt long ages here—
Sir Launcelot still whispers sly
To faithless Guenevere.
Here Jacques and his gay compeers
In forests still carouse,
Pavilioned by a network green
Of melancholy boughs.
Removed beyond the Sabbath chime,
Far in the shady wold,
Unvexed by care they fleet the time,
As in the Age of Gold.
Still in the limpid runnels’ waves,
Which round their lodges wind,
And in the stones and in the trees,
Monitions deep they find.
That merry knot is also here
Of fabling Florentines,
Who revelled while the Avenger hung
O’er Arno and its vines.
The love of story, dance, and song,
They had in Tuscan land,
Still warms their breasts, though ferried o’er
Unto the Fairy strand.
Here too La Mancha’s cavalier
Reposes ’neath his bays,
Who roamed the wilds of tawny Spain
In quest of knightly praise.
O’er river, vale, and mountain lone,
He ne’er shall wander more,—
His steed is in the self-same stall
With Roland’s Brigliadore.
Stretched on the banks of Elfin streams,
With antique knights he lies,
And talks through all the livelong day,
Of many an old emprize.
Here sages dwell, whose names adorn
The mediæval time,
In lonely turrets, whence at night
Their ruddy tapers shine.
Aquinas, dialectic sage,
Endowed with subtlest wits—
Beneath a cobweb canopy
The saintly sophist sits.
And he, who in his wizard glass
To Surry’s eye displayed
His gentle lady o’er the sea,
With lilied pallor spread.
Brave Surry, knightly bard, who cull’d,
Where Tuscan summers shine,
Ambrosial flowers of heavenly song
To deck a colder clime.
Those cloistral lovers far renowned,
The sage and nun, are here,
Whose quenchless passion yielded not
To penances austere.
In vain the serge, the flinty bed,
The eremital glooms—
The boy-god flashed his fire-tipt reed
Athwart the censer’s fumes.
Ficino, mighty Platonist,
Hath here his dwelling-place;
No sphingal countenance more calm
Than his majestic face.
Among the starry flock was he,
Whose holy toils unsealed
The fountains of Hellenic lore,
And all their wealth revealed.
From Plato’s thoughts their Attic dress,
To charm an era rude,
He tore away, and in its stead
A meaner garb indued.
But unto eyes, o’er which no film
By ignorance is thrown,
His dreams those garments only grace
In which at birth they shone.
Of bright Cadmean rune he wove
A rich asbestic web;
Sometimes its woof like sunset glows,
Of gold and purple thread;
Sometimes with rosy spring it vies—
Then flowers inwoven shine;
Sometimes diaphonous as oil;
Than Coan gauze more fine.
And thus each imaged thought, that sprung
From his sciential brain,
A fluent drapery received,
To make its beauty plain.
Here pilgrims dwell, strange sights that saw
On many a foreign strand—
He born beneath the Doge’s rule,
Beloved of Kubla Khan,
And Mandeville, who journeyed far
Against the Eastern wind,
The sacred Capital to see,
And miracles of Ind.
None ever wore the sandal shoon
More marvellous than he;
For then the world had far away
Its realms of mystery.
The giant Roc then winnowed swift
The morning-cradled breeze,
And happy islands glittered o’er
The Occidental seas.
Upon Saint Michael’s happy morn
How throbbed his glowing brow,
When towards the ancient Orient
His galley turned her prow!
Already in the wind he smells
Hyblæan odors blown
From isles invisible, afar
Amid the Indian foam.
The turbaned millions, dusky, wild,
Already meet his eyes—
The domes of Islam crescent-crowned
In long perspective rise,
Mid waving palms, o’er level sands,
With skyey verges low,
Where from his eastern tent, the Sun
Spreads wide a saffron glow.
The golden thrones of Asian kings,
Their empery supreme,
Their capitals Titanic, laved
By many a famous stream;
The cities, desolate and lone,
Where desert monsters prowl,
Where spiders film the royal throne,
And shrieks the nightly owl;
Enormous Caf, the mountain wall
Of ancient Colchian land—
Where dragon-drawn Medea gave
The Argonaut her hand;
Nysæan Meros, mid whose rifts
The viny God was born,—
The empyreal sky its summit cleaves,
In shape a golden horn;
And o’er its top reclining swim
In zones of windless air
The slumbrous deities of Ind,
Removed from earthly care;
The Ammonian phalanx round its base
In festal garments ranged,
Their brows with ivied chaplets bound,
Their swords to _thyrsi_ changed;
The ravenous gryphons, brooding o’er
The desert’s gleaming gold,
The auroral Chersonese, that shines
With treasures manifold;
The groves of odorous scent, that line
The green Sabæan shore,
Whence wrapped in cerements dipt in balm,
His sire the Phœnix bore;
The Persian valley famed in song,
Where gentle Hafiz strayed;
The Indian Hollow far beyond,
By mountains tall embayed;
Whose virgins boast a richer bloom
Than peaches of Cabool,
And nymph-like fall their marble urns
With fountain-waters cool;
Whose looms produce a gorgeous web,
That with the rainbow vies,
So delicate its downy woof,
So deep its royal dyes.
The motionless Yogee, who stands
In wildernesses lone,
His sleepless eye forever fixed
On Brahma’s airy throne,
In blue infinity to melt
His troubled soul away,
And of the sunny Monad form
A portion and a ray.
The tales, Milesian-like, that charm
The vacant ear at eve,
Wherein the Orient fabulists
Their marvels interweave;
Of wondrous realms beyond the reach
Of mortal footstep far,
Whose maidens, winged with pinions light,
Outstrip the falling star;
Whose forests bear a vocal fruit,
With human tongues endowed,
That mid the autumn-laden boughs
Are querulous and loud;
Of sparry caves in musky hills,
Which sevenfold seas surround,
Where ancient kings enchanted lie,
In dreamless slumber bound;
Of potent gems, whose hidden might
Can thwart malignant star;
Of Eblis’ pavement saffron-strewn
’Neath fallen Istakhar;
All these in long succession rose,
Illumed by fancy’s ray,
As swiftly towards the Morning lands
His galley ploughed her way.
Elfin Land.
PART II.
But far the greatest miracle
Which Elfin land can show,
A hostel is, like that which stood
In Eastcheap long ago.
Before the entrance, in the blast
There swings a tusky sign;
And when at night the Elfin moon
And constellations shine,
A ruddy glow illumes the panes,
And looking through you see,
With merry faces seated round,
A famous company.
Prince Hal the royal wassailer,
And that great fount of fun,
Diana’s portly forester,
The merry knight Sir John,
With all their losel servitors,
Mirth-shaken cheek by cheek;
Cambysean Pistol, Peto, Poins,
And Bardolph’s fiery beak.
A grove there is in Elfin land,
Where closely intertwine
The Grecian myrtle’s branches light
With Gothic oak sublime.
Beneath its canopy of shade,
Their temples bound with bays,
Are grouped the minstrels, that adorn
The mediæval days.
The laurelled Ghibelline, who saw
The Stygian abyss,
The fiery mosques and walls, that gird
The capital of Dis;
The realms of penance, and the rings
Of constellated light,
Whose luminous pavilions hold
The righteous robed in white;
Uranian groves and spheral vales,
Saturnian academes,
Where sainted theologues abide,
Discoursing mystic themes;
The Paradisal stream, that winds
Through Heaven’s unfading bowers,
And on its banks the beauteous maid,
Who culled celestial flowers.
Him next the sweet Vauclusian swan,
Love’s Laureate, appears,
Who bathed his mistress’ widowed urn
With Heliconian tears;
Certaldo’s storied sage,—a bard,
Though round his genius rare
The golden manacles of verse
He did not choose to wear.
Those rosy morns, that usher in
Each festal-gladdened day,
His prose depicts in hues as bright
As could the poet’s lay.
His ultramontane brother, born
In Albion’s shady isle;
Dan Chaucer, of his tameless race
Apollo’s eldest child;
The Medecean banqueter,
Whose Fescennines unfold
The deeds of heathen Anakim
Restored to Peter’s fold;
Ferrara’s Melesigenes,
Who o’er a wide domain
Of haunted forests, mounts, and seas,
Exerts his magic reign;
A glowing Mœnad, with her locks
Dishevelled in the wind,
His fancy wantons far and near,
From Thule unto Ind;
Now from her griffin steed alights
Alcina’s palace near,
Now in the Patmian prophet’s car
Ascends the lunar sphere;
Or with Rinaldo wanders through
The Caledonian wood,
Amid whose shades and coverts green
Heroic trophies glowed;
Or paints the mighty Paladin
Transformed to monster gross,
Whose mistress drank in Ardennes lone
The lymph of Anterōs.
Next hapless Tasso, pale and wan,
Released from dungeon grates;
The sacred legions of the cross
His genius celebrates;
Armida’s mountain paradise
Amid the western seas;
Her dragon-yoke, whose nimble hooves
Could run upon the breeze.
The sombre forest, where encamped
Dark Eblis’ minions lay,
With shapes evoked from Orcus’ gloom
To fright his foes away.
Lo, marble pontifices spring,
To arch illusive streams,
And swans and nightingales rehearse
Their moist melodious threnes!
The centuried trees are cloven wide,
And forth from every plant
A maiden steps, whose tears might melt
A heart of adamant.
A sudden darkness veils the sky,
And fortresses of fire,
With ruddy towers of pillared flame,
Above the woods aspire.
Transfigured in the morning beam.
On Zion’s holy height
Rinaldo puts the dusky swarms
Of Erebus to flight.
Nor absent from the shining throng
That dainty bard, I ween,
Who hung the maiden empress throne
With garlands ever green.
The Elfin Court’s Demodocus,
His lay he carols light,
His fancy’s unexhausted urns
Still brimmed with waters bright.
Far distant from the minstrel’s bower,
Another group is seen,
Who ruled of yore a sylvan race
In western forests green.
Manhattan’s sleepy potentates—
Of ox-like girth are they;
In ages gone the Hudson rolled
Beneath their gentle sway.
A hazy _nimbus_ sleeps about
Their smooth unwrinkled brows;
Like ripened melon through its folds
Each mottled visage glows.
The ponderous Twiller dozes still,
Benignant, voiceless, deep;
His council-board, rotund and grave,
Unbroken silence keep.
And still Van Winkle snores and dreams
Upon the mountain side,
Unwakened by the ebbless flow
Of time’s unwearied tide.
And Sleepy Hollow’s pedagogue,
In smoky autumn air,
Lies musing of his faithless love,
His Katarina fair.
Those knights are here who wandered through
The forests of the south,
And vast savannas green and lone,
To find the fount of youth.
The towers and fanes they likewise sought
Of Eldorado bright;
Amid magnolian woods and palms
Uprose its turrets light.
Glittered its roofs with golden tiles—
All things of gold were wrought;
Its burghers wore a jaundiced hue
From yellow pavements caught.
But who shall number all that haunt
King Oberon’s domains?
His lieges are the airy shapes
Conceived in poet’s brains.
Their limbs are cast in fairer mould
Than those of common earth;
Their ladies are more beautiful
Than dames of mortal birth.
This work-day world perchance will show,
In epochs yet to be,
As goodly men and lovely maids
As those in Faërie.
INSCRIPTION.
Lithe ivy, let thy gliding foliage shade
This urn, where Shelley’s sacred dust is laid,
Whose fire was quenched beneath the angry sea,
That laves the sunny shores of Italy!
The Elements did moan around his bier.
In him they lost their best interpreter—
For his most subtile, sympathizing frame
Was as a sweet melodious instrument,
Through all whose pores and million channels went
The Universe into his heart and brain
In musical influxes, that ebbed amain
From out his lips, in verse of power to tame
A tiger’s heart, or suage an angel’s pain.
Through his well-jointed reeds the circling gyres
Of planets poured in song their soft desires,
And glad ovations, while their vernal dreams
The leaves did whisper, and the clouds and streams
And winds their fluent exultations pour,
With sky-pavilioned ocean’s organ-roar.
THE TEUTONIC MINSTREL’S TOMB.
Far north they say there lies a wizard land,
Which has above it all the changeless year,
A silver-shining, milk-warm atmosphere,
Amid whose windless calm the forests stand
As still as clustered obelisks. A bland
Delight is shed o’er all who enter here;
And by a lonely path their way they steer
Through dreamy hollows, under forests grand
Of larch and fir, round many a placid mere,
O’er silver streams and level barrens drear.
At length they come unto a mossy gate,
And find within a city desolate;
Its streets knee-deep with yellow leaves are strown,
And stiller than the Ephesian Sleeper’s cave.
The watchman’s horn at midnight lies unblown,—
The ivy-muffled bells hang dumb, and save
The noise of summer flies, sound there is none.
Wide open stands the Kaiser’s palace door,
And here and there, upon the dusty floor,
Swords, helms, and spears, and empty wine-cups lie
Between whose golden lips black spiders ply
Their filmy looms in bright security.
Within this city, reared by Elfin hands,
A huge and mouldering mausoleum stands.
These words are graved upon its portals gray,—
_The Singer of the Nibelungen Lay_.
INVOCATION.
O, placid Death! O, lotos-circled king!
Parent of rest and endless slumbering!
With downy-sandalled pace approach me now,
And bathe my lips and palpitating brow
From flagons full of cool Lethean spray,
For I am weary of the light of day.
Or call to Sleep, thy mild dejected twin,
And when the rosy-fingered Morn shall rise,
Will ye aloft upon the healthy wind,
That blows from out her dewy balconies,
Waft me to those calm isles, whose tribes obey
Sky-fallen Saturn’s ever peaceful sway?
IONIA.
Ye lands and immemorial isles, that bear
The name of Ion, who with besom made
Of laurel-boughs the Sun-god’s temple swept—
Ye golden climes, to poesy and love
Most dear, oases mid the wastes of Eld,
Where, in her lonely retrospective flight,
Bright-haired Mnemosyne delights to pause,
By matchless shapes of loveliness beguiled!
Within your bounds the plastic hand of art
First made the mountain’s marble entrails teem
With images of beauty, lining all
Your sea-washed strand with fair columnar cities,
Built high of glossiest sun-enamelled stone.
Forever o’er your myrtle-shaded vales,
Reclined on summer clouds, did Aphrodite
And golden Eros lean, kindling the air
With passion’s rosy glow. In all the earth
Beside, did visible nature never wear
Robes so resplendent. Through the luminous folds
Of your transparent atmosphere appeared
Unequalled prospects to enchant the eye;
Marmorean cities rising o’er the verge
Of halcyon seas, and promontories crowned
With tombs heroical, or glistening shrines;
And breezy mountains swathed with silver clouds,
The watchtowers blue of broad-eyed Jove; whence he
The limitless low-lying earth surveyed,
The towns of mortal men, their fights and toils.
Oft from your shore the fisherman descried
The smoke of conflagration climbing slow,
In graceful spires, far up the summer air,
From some beleaguered city of the isles;
And white-robed argosies from wealthy Tyre,
Rising and falling on the sparkling waves,
Voyaging with orient merchandise to towns,
Whose turrets glittered in the western beam.
Within your cities, villages, and fields,
Abode a graceful populace, with rites
And manners beautiful as e’er adorned
The imagined landscape of a poet’s dream;
The captive maid, descending with her urn
To shady spring, or cistern scooped from stone,
And flowing with cool water to the brim;
The royal virgin, seated far within
Some gorgeous recess of the kingly dome,
Plying with busy hand her dædal loom;
The wandering minstrel, slumbering fast at noon
By fountain-side or stream, or harping loud
In palace hall, and crowded market-place;
The frequent song of Hymen, saffron-robed,
Resounding through the torchlit street, what time
The star of love, thrice welcome Hesper, rose
Above some immemorial mountain’s brow;
The youthful vintagers, by moonlight pale
Bearing the grapes in osier talarisks,
While on his lute some beardless minstrel played
The Lay of Linus, regal boy, of all
The sons of men most musical, whose bloom
Was scorched and withered by the solar beam;
The rustic temple, hidden deep in groves
And pleasant solitudes, beneath whose dome
The village youth their glowing pæans sang;
And over all the dark blue heavens sublime,
Where from their sky-pavilions brightest shone
The ancient stars and constellations, hymned
By eldest bards—the sworded Titan named
Orion, with the starry sisterhoods,
Hyads and Pleïades in clusters bright.
Cradled amid your kindly influences,
The soft Ionian fancy wantoned wild
In warm voluptuous dreams of loveliness,
Pouring its inspirations in a tongue
Inimitable—a honeyed dialect—
Protean, flexible, all various,
Whose vowelled cadences could flow as smooth
As amber streams, or raise and modulate
Their intonations to the ocean’s deep
Sonorous surges chafing with the strand.
Indelible and burning Rune, its words
Upon the scroll of blind Meonides
Survive, and with their fluent numbers shame
The harsher languages of later days.
Nor in the Carian’s golden chronicle,
Though not arranged in metrical array,
Sound they less sweet. Alas! the glorious tribes,
Over whose chiselled lips they wont to roll
In honeyed song and fiery eloquence,
Have vanished. Hushed the lyres of Ibycus,
Bacchylides, and Sappho[1] starry-eyed,
And that delicious lute the Teian played
Within the halls of King Polycrates,
While round him, bound with leafed and roseal wreaths,
Mid fountain spray and snowy columns, danced
Ionia’s raven-tressed voluptuous girls.
Minstrel of beauty, love, and vinous joy,
Thy festal spirit yet survives on earth,
Clad in a garment of enduring verse,
The asbestine robe of all-immortal song!
[1] Sappho was an Æolian, but she is commonly included in this cluster
of poets.
THRENODY.
Though my boyhood scarce is over,
Yet the dark Plutonian tide
Many a friend and loyal lover
From my bosom doth divide.
In the cypress-shaded valleys
Of the solemn nether realm,
They in draughts from Lethe’s chalice,
Every mortal memory whelm.
While above, the pensive willow
Droops forever o’er their urns,
And around their earthy pillow
Glide the many-footed worms.
In the race with me they started
From the East with visions gay,
Vehement and hero-hearted,
Fearless of the coming fray.
Brightly flowed their golden tresses
In the soft auroral wind,
And, like falcons from their jesses,
Upward bore they unconfined.
Bathed their spirits in the splendor
Of the Scian bard sublime,
And of Maro’s lay more tender
Heard the symphony divine.
Felt their hearts with love unbounded
For their country running o’er,
While they read the words that sounded
In the Attic Pnyx of yore.
But the frosts of death descended,
Ere was gone the morning’s dew,
And their joyful being ended,
While the world was fresh and new.
Though the rose and lily wither
On their garden beds awhile,
Soon the gentle vernal weather
Shall restore their former smile.
But for man august and splendid,
Than the angels little lower,
When his dreamlike life is ended,
Blooms his withered frame no more.
Shades of friendship, gliding slowly
On Cocytus’ farther brink,
In this cup of nectar holy
Once again to you I drink.
Ye have crossed the languid river,
Ye have paid the last obole;
Day for you has set forever,
Ye have won the mystic goal!
CONCETTO.
Ammon’s solar fount congeals
In the heat and glare of noon;
But its waters it unseals
’Neath the kisses of the moon.
So the heart is often found
In the smiles of fortune cold;
But afflictions lowering round,
All its charities unfold.
THE LAY OF THE CONDEMNED SPIRIT IN DANTE.
—— nel dolce mondo.—_Inferno._
When o’er the threshold of the drear abyss,
Whose portals stern shall never ope for me,
Thy feet regain that upper world of bliss,
These shadowy orbs may never hope to see;
Wilt thou to kindred hearts, that linger yet
By Arno’s stream, my hapless name recall?
For mortals soon the dearest face forget,
When blanched by death it lies beneath the pall.
An exile in the realms of endless pain,
In dreams I see my pleasant earthly home;
Oh, bid them there resyllable my name,
Forgetful of the sins that make me moan!
Sweet world of bliss, forever lost to me,
For your blue heavens and pleasant sun I pine!
For grass, and flower, and stream, and rustling tree,
I mourn forever in the nether clime!
LOVE’S LABOR LOST.
I.
This royal gate, thou quivered sprite,
Shall ope to thee no more!
Mere Hymen’s torch is quenched and cold,
His burning lay is o’er.
The potentate, whose sceptre bright
This goodly realm obeys,
An anchoret in scholar’s weeds
Has vowed to pass his days.
II.
His palace is an academe,
As hushed as summer noon;
No festal sound is heard therein,
Beneath the sun or moon.
The palace-yard with rankest weeds
Is thickly overgrown,
And moss begins to carpet o’er
Each long untrodden stone.
III.
Bees swarm within the rifted walls,
And store their golden dew;
The livelong day with drowsy hum
They cleave the ether blue.
The yellow beams of summer sleep
In silence on the floors;
A muffled tread is sometimes heard
Along the corridors.
IV.
Within a vast and shady room,
With antique volumes piled,
In studious mood the monarch sits,
From passion’s lures exiled.
A skylight in the roof is made,
Through which at night are seen
The ancient stars in clusters bright,
Amid the blue serene.
V.
Around the king three famous lords,
Bound by the self-same vow,
In silence sit, and o’er the scrolls
Of starry Plato bow.
Above them gaze from lofty stands
The high-browed kings of thought,
Their furrowed lineaments divine
In placid marble wrought.
VI.
Beyond the blazoned window lies
A far-stretched prospect grand;
Lakes, emerald lawns, and rustling woods
O’erlooking all the land.
There in the sunshine, to and fro
Slow stalks a solemn wight,
Attended by a tiny page,
A pert and saucy sprite.
VII.
A blue pavilion farther on
Is pitched beneath the trees;
Begirt by tents, whose pennons float
And dally with the breeze.
A bevy fair of dark-eyed girls
Beneath their folds abide;
Unto the vows of yonder lords
What fortune will betide!
VIII.
Sometimes they scour the flowery meads,
On nimble palfreys white;
Sometimes they dance beneath the shade
Through all the balmy night.
Their merry songs, their jocund notes,
Are borne from grove to grove;
Fill up your ears with molten wax,
Ye enemies of love!
IX.
Short was the siege those damsels laid—
The king has gone away,
In lonely woods his lady’s wrath
By penance to allay.
The famous lords, who round him sat,
Each, at his maid’s command,
Attend a year the couch of death,
Ere he can win her hand.
THE PLAGUE IN SUMMER.
Oh golden hours! Elysian day,
Adorned with all things bright and gay;
Green boughs, and winds, and summer beams,
Lovely as Eden’s transient gleams!
But ah! the glorious robes ye wear
Deride the depths of man’s despair,
Since, lurking mid your gladsome rays,
The Plague of Ganges stalks and slays.
For he from Indian vales has come,
Following the circle of the sun;
Through Balk, and over Oxus’ stream,
Gliding as soundless as a dream,
Into the cities of the West,
That quail before the giant pest.
The stir of life in silence dies,
Where’er the mighty vampyre flies;
The voice of mirth is hushed and mute;
The viol shrill, the festal lute;
Alike o’er towns and hamlets brood
Silence, and Death, and Solitude;
While in the shadow of the pall
The busy worms hold carnival!
EUTHANASIA.
In the dawn of her life and the bloom of her spring,
Dark Asrael fanned her to sleep with his wing;
And her form, when the spirit had flown from its shrine,
Lay like marble, that’s moulded by chisel divine.
Oh, why was she garnered in life’s early bloom
To grace with her beauty the clods of the tomb?
There were victims for death, who were weary and old,
And who longed for the slumber unbroken and cold.
But her loveliness lives, for escaped from its urn,
In blossoms and odors her dust shall return—
And the Hesper-like glory, that shone in her eye,
To-night will be beaming a star in the sky.
THE FORGOTTEN.
Many a sword hath nobly wrought,
Many a warrior bravely fought,
Whose name the lyre hath never taught
To swell his nation’s minstrelsy.
In lonely woods their ashes sleep,
Whose dewy leaves above them weep,
And wild birds chant their dirges sweet—
But none e’er list their melody.
Oh, when we pledge our father’s fame,
One flowing goblet let us drain
To those, the long forgotten slain
Whose relics moulder silently;
And o’er their foes, the warriors red,
Who for their fenceless acres bled,
Let none a tear refuse to shed—
’Tis due to Nature’s chivalry.
What more becomes a noble foe,
Than o’er the brave, his sword laid low,
To let the tears of sorrow flow?
They glorify his victory.
No deathless bard their valor blest,
Or Paugus, Ajax of the West,
And Philip had not sunk to rest,
Enfolded in obscurity.
TO W. P. R.
The links of amity that bind
Our souls together evermore,
Are forged as strong as those that joined
The brave and beautiful of yore.
Though many a valley-darkening hill
And ocean billow may divide,
My heart retains thine image still,
Through every change of time and tide.
Though lapsing years are friendship’s bane,
And absence brings forgetfulness,
Yet these exert their might in vain,
They cannot make our love the less.
Across the billows of the sea,
Where rolls the legend-haunted river,
My dreaming spirit flies to thee,
Like arrow drawn from Phœbus’ quiver.
About thy hearth-stone, dim and cold,
Forsaken Lares droop and moan;
They miss the faces, that of old
Within their joyous precincts shone.
Full soon the halls of Dis shall hide
Both thee and me and all we love,
For, bubbles on a rushing tide,
Our evanescent beings move.
While yet the stars above us shine,
And youth and hope and love remain,
O, pilgrim seek thy natal clime,
And glad my heart and eyes again!
THE SONG OF ENEAS’ MEN.
Joy to us, for yonder river
Opens up a pathway calm
To the green and silent inland,
Under forests dropping balm.
Wandering Lares, ye shall nestle
In the hearth-light once again—
Ye shall drift no more at random,
Sport of tempest and of rain.
Though the gentle household voices,
Wont of old your ears to thrill,
By the banks of far Scamander
Are forever hushed and still;
Kindred hands shall heap your altars,
Kindred knees before you bow,
In the country of the stranger,
Into which we enter now.
Woodland carols bid us welcome
From the Siroc and the foam;
Safe escaped from moaning surges
We at length have found a home.
Shepherds’ fires on mountain headlands,
We shall watch your gleams no more,
Gazing wildly from the billows,
To the wished-for, tranquil shore.
Twins of Leda, on our quarters
Ye shall never flame again;
We shall bow to rustic altars,
Not the trident of the main.
Softly rolls the yellow river
Eddying to the briny sea,
Soon upon his waves to carry
Battle-ship and argosy;
Soon to change his rippling murmur
Into ocean’s clangor wild,
And be mingled with the waters
In which nations are inisled.
Joy to us, his gentle current
Opens up a pathway calm
To the green and silent inland,
Under forests dropping balm.
THE AUTHORESS OF THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO.
Her genius had its dwelling in the light
Of setting suns, and the deserted halls
Of ivy-clad chateaux, where, undisturbed,
Arachne plies her gossamer loom, filming
The sumptuous tapestries, embroidered o’er
With flowers and gay Ovidian phantasies,
And the refulgent mirrors, long ago
Wafted in argosies from the lagunes
Of wealthy Venice. Through the silent night,
The rippling shadows of the ancient trees
Dapple the floors, and ’neath the fireless hearths,
The crickets chirrup shrill—while from the walls
The painted semblance of some Lady Blanche,
Or rose-lipped Maude, or Eleanore looks down,
Long since enveloped in the robes of death.
In summer, when the luscious peach is ripe,
Through the great windows opening westward lie
Delicious prospects; lawns and wooded slopes,
Orchards of grapes—and o’er the tree-tops high
The glittering ocean backed by sunset skies,
With gold and amethystine vapors hung.
MONODY OF THE COUNTESS OF NETTLESTEDE.
Oh vernal sun, how cold thy beams to me!
Since they can never more illume
His face, my heart’s idolatry,
That now, alas! immersed in urnal gloom,
Far, far below thy golden glances lies,
Wrapt from these yearning arms and weeping eyes!
In vain for me, sweet flowers, ye reassume
Your vestments rare of oriental dyes;
Your subtle fragrance and your glorious bloom
But call to mind a sweeter far than you—
My Prince and Lord, my Beautiful and True,
Whose cheek was burnished with as bright a hue
As decks your leaves, whose eyes were wont to shine
Upon my glowing face like stars benign.
Again I hear the South wind’s murmurs low
Making the earth with life and beauty glow,
But now more icy than the Sarsar’s breath,
In deserts old the minister of death,
Around my worn and wasted frame it sighs,
Recalling soft Elysian memories.
How oft engraven in the oaken rind,
My hapless name with his I see entwined.
Dear hand, that carved these love knots, ’neath the mould
Thou now alas! art shrunken, pulseless, cold!
And has he left the world forevermore,
That still contains his ill-starred paramour?
Oh, woe is me! Oh sickening, keen distress!
Oh solemn, strange, and mighty loneliness!
That makes to issue from my riven breast
Sob after sob of anguish unrepressed
And irrepressible, till, nerveless down
My cold limbs sink upon the sun-warm ground.—
Thence up aloft I gaze with yearning eyes
Into the vast and azure-flowing skies,
Far, far beyond whose airy curtains stand
The many mansions of the angel land.
There, girt with seraphs sits the mother mild,
And there in glory reigns her sinless child.
Oh, Holy One! Thy countenance benign
Unto thy weary worshipper incline!
My lonely spirit quickly call away
From earth, and its pale tenement of clay!
The sunlit hills, woods, vales, and waters clear,
And home and household faces once so dear—
All these fair sights since his departure seem
Mournful and strange,—a vision and a dream.
Oh, Saviour merciful! whate’er his fate
Beyond the grave, let me participate.
If garmented in light, he walks serene
By thy still waters, through thy pastures green,
My soul make pure so long by sin defiled,
And, raised to heaven, acknowledge me thy child!
But if, Erinnys-like, the bloody Doom,
That here on earth pursued him to the tomb,
Lured by his sins relentless pass beyond,
And hunt him to the gulfs of woe profound,
Together let our erring sprites be hurled
Afar into some sad autumnal world—
Some land of withered leaves and sighing winds,
Where twined in one we may bewail our sins!
Father in Heaven, forgive this impious prayer!
Thou know’st it rises from my deep despair,
Be merciful unto my wretched state—
Indeed, indeed, I am unfortunate!
Far, far from me the loved one buried lies—
His sepulchre unknown to these dim eyes—
In that sad chapel, whose dark aisles contain
Full many a haughty heart and guilty brain,
Beauty and strength resolved to dust again.
There languish now henceforth in dull decay
Those eyes, that glistened with a star-like ray.
From his blanched lip and cheek forevermore
Fades the fresh rose which blossomed there before.
Gory and dank, bereft of all their grace
His tresses hang about his marble face—
Not as of old, when flowing unconfined,
Their odors wooed the amorous summer wind.
Livid and blue those beauteous lips, whose kiss,
The seal of love, imparted perfect bliss.
The rosy twilights and the moons of May,
Beneath whose beams we loved the hours away,
Are gone—and gone the ruddy ember-gloom,
That filled with lurid light our silent room,
When o’er our hall the wintry tempest flew,
And love our yearning hearts together drew.
My stay, my life, my hope, my star is gone—
And I am left in sorrow and alone;
The oak is stricken from the vine’s embrace,
And on the earth its tendrils run to waste!
Close, close by Aidenn’s happy portals
My tent is pitched forevermore,[2]
Through which to join the bright immortals,
My loved and lost have gone before.
In noontide trance and starry dream
Their forms transfigured oft I see;
Though Death’s cold river flows between,
Their gentle whispers come to me.
And Aidenn’s walls I see in dreams,
Its shining turrets golden-tiled;
But swiftly fade their lovely gleams,
And leave behind a longing wild.
There cleansed and pure from earthly stain,
Full many a martyred spirit dwells,
Through fire and wrong that did attain
Those far celestial citadels.
Ye white-robed warders, strong and bright,
That on those shining summits stand,
Entreat for me the Prince of Light,
That I may reach his happy land.
[2] The idea in the first four lines of this piece was borrowed from
a beautiful passage occurring in a biographical sketch of a late
distinguished poet.
PAN AND LAÏS.
I.
Once on a time, grown tired of shepherd’s fare,
From hilly Arcady with swift descent,
Rough Pan in tunic wove of subtile air,
Invisible to sacred Corinth went;
Through his aerial vesture vision-proof,
No mortal eye could see or horn or hoof.
II.
With soundless tread he passed from street to street,
Through which as arteries the sea-winds blew;
And gorgeous shows the mighty rustic greet,
Where’er from right to left his glance he threw;
Poor seem his pastoral hills and forests all,
Matched with the Isthmus’ peerless capital.
III.
For now its rampires, palaces, and shrines,
Lit up by morning’s golden glances stood;
A pillared labyrinth, through which there winds
With ceaseless flow a various multitude.
Nobles and merchants swiftly roll along,
On radiant cars by Thracian coursers drawn.
IV.
And hoary priests, in robes of purest white,
Lead slowly up the pomp of sacrifice
To stately fanes, where wreaths of incense light
From fuming altars climb the purple skies;
While slender pipes by youthful minions blown,
With softest melodies the rites make known.
V.
From foam-born Aphrodite’s voluptuous seat
On Acrocorinth’s lofty summit pour,
Their raven tresses dropping unguents sweet,
Her thousand handmaids to the busy shore,
Where they entangle in their wanton wiles
The voyagers come from continents and isles.
VI.
As on he passed, the Arcadian god admires,
Between tall sculptured piles that line the way,
Cool lymph in crystal jets, and sheaf-like spires,
From marble gorges spouted ceaselessly;
Whose myriad drops with charmed eyes he sees,
Bestrode by interwoven Irides.
VII.
Weary at length of wandering here and there,
His eyes sore dazzled by the eternal gleam
Of sun-kissed marbles, on a shady stair,
Near which uprose a fountain’s liquid sheen,
Pan sought repose, and heard a minstrel tell
In plastic verse of Here’s potent spell;
VIII.
Which, on a mountain-couch of vernal flowers,
Lulled by its might the Thunderer to sleep,
Who lay, regardless of the ebbing powers
Of Ilion’s champion, locked in swoonings deep.
Here, while he sat, a sudden silence fell
On all the street, that, quiet as the cell
IX.
Of Indian saint by Ganges’ marge afar,
Within a moment’s interval became;
For on a rose-ensanguined ivory car,
Of swanlike shape, and lovelier than the wain
Of Dawn, came Laïs, Eros’ idol fair,
Delicious, soft, and warm as vernal air.
X.
A golden tiar begirt her forehead white,
Which flashed with many an orient amethyst,
With jacinth, pearl, and opal’s fire-red light;
Each gem the guerdon of a burning kiss
On Asian lords bestowed, who wore the crowns
Of those voluptuous Ionian towns—
XI.
Miletus, Smyrna, and the rest, that line
The eastern margin of the central sea;
Whence many a burnished galley o’er the brine
To Corinth crosses, drawn by witchery
Of laughter-swimming eyes and rosy lips,
Wherein she doth all other towns eclipse.
XII.
Slow rolled proud Laïs’ wheels—while here and there,
On warrior, bard, and sage, who spell-bound stood,
She showered familiar smiles, that flushed the air,
And thrilled each heart in all the multitude;
Her partial glances raised a prouder glow
Than all the wreaths that glory could bestow.
XIII.
Pan, at her presence, felt his cloud-robe turn
Fire-red, like vapors round the sinking sun;
Not thus for dreamy Dian did he burn;
And how a kiss might from her lips be won,
He of his horn-clad brain assistance sought,
Which, full of schemes, struck out a subtle thought.
XIV.
For swift as light, from some far river’s meads,
A hornet flying drove his venomed sting
Into the foreheads of her glossy steeds;
They, bolting upward, made a sudden spring,
That snapped, like gossamer threads, each leathern trace,
And dashed the chariot on a statue’s base.
XV.
By arms invisible the falling dame
Was held unwounded in the yielding air;
And on her brow there fell a fiery rain
Of kisses, caught from lips in ambush there;
Then gently to the earth her form declined,
While rose a reed-like murmur on the wind.
ATHENS.
She sits in glory on her eyrie high,
Far seen, the Pharos of antiquity;
And, through the dusky-woven veil of time,
She vents her sun-bright shafts, that pierce and shine
Like lightning, from the golden quivers drawn
Of high philosophy and Sophoclean song.
Around her feet in lucid currents wind
Two streams, through marble-paven channels, lined
By temples pillar-propt, whose snowy sheen
Glistens like silver through the olive’s green.
ACHILLES’ SONG.
I.
Glory is in the balance laid,
An early doom and endless praise;
’Gainst these in adverse scale are weighed
The joys of peace and length of days.
Give me the grave—the glory give,
The field of honor, and the tomb!
What boots it like a hind to live,
And sink at last in lampless gloom?
II.
The soft embrace of love I yield,
The pleasures of the Sybarite;
And, rushing to the gory field,
With battle’s carnage feast my sight.
Though meteor-like my course may be,
Through blood and slaughter quickly run;
A growing fame remains to me,
While rivers flow, and shines the sun.
ANASTASIUS.
Lands of the burning East, adieu!
I bid your Sun farewell!
To colder climates, strange and new,
My bark the winds impel.
From olives of the Grecian vale
To northern firs I go;
To darkness, snow, and rain, and hail,
From skies that ever glow.
There memories gloomy as the clime,
Like vulture-beaks will gnaw;
The ruined maid, the plundered shrine,
The violated law—
The life-blood, which my gory hand
From friendship’s bosom drew—
These drive me from my native land,
To regions cold and new.
Isle of my birth, I never more
Will seek thee o’er the wave;
For fast beside thy lovely shore
Is Helen’s early grave.
The billows of the ocean roll,
And murmur softly there;
To Mary Mother for her soul
Is uttered many a prayer.
Old Stamboul’s halls I ne’er again
In pleasure’s train shall tread,
Nor sauntering view, with slackened rein,
Her City of the dead;
Nor o’er the yellow desert far
The dome of Ali spy,
Which in the distance, like a star,
Salutes the pilgrim’s eye.
Sole solace of my dark career,
A lovely boy is left;
My ruthless lust his mother dear
Of home and joy bereft.
Her phantom hovers ever nigh,
In sunshine and in shade,
Forevermore her gentle sigh
My bosom doth upbraid.
She loved me long, she loved me true,
I trampled on her heart,
My cold neglect the sweet one slew,
Like Asrael’s venomed dart.
Ah! white-robed saint, bend down on me
Thy features sad and mild;
My life a flowerless desert see,
All save thy gentle child.
The haughty Scian’s heart is riven,
His buoyant spirits flown;
For him there is no hope in heaven,
Below, no rest nor home.
Forgive me, O my slighted love!
Wert thou on earth again,
Believe me, thou shouldst not reprove—
My heart would own thy reign.
Already in my breast I feel
The immedicable ill,
The fell disease no art can heal,
Beyond the leech’s skill.
Sapped by its power my frame shall lie,
Mixed with its parent mould;
Once with those statues it could vie,
Which Hellas loved of old.
Its day of splendor and of power
Even in my youth is past;
Its Phidian symmetry no more
Shall beauty’s promise blast.
Apostate to my father’s creed,
I from their heaven am banned;
How o’er Jehennan shall I speed,
By light Al Serat spanned?
The infernal surge, which moans below
Its gossamer arches frail,
Me, plunging to the gulfs of woe,
Will whelm in endless bale.
Would that my soul might share a part
Of perfect bliss with thee!
O, dark-eyed Smyrniote of my heart,
My wronged Euphrosynè!
CYMINDIS.
Ορνιθι λιγυρη εναλιγκιος, ην τ’ εν ορεσσι
Χαλκιδα κικλησκουσι Θεοι, ανδρες δε Κυμινδιν.—_Homer._
Beside my lattice cool at dead of night,
As I sat musing on unnumbered things,
With startled glance I saw a figure bright,
No larger than a star, on luminous wings
Borne towards me with a swift continuous flight,
From some green island in the Occident.
At first, methought that Hesper from his throne
Upon the forehead of the firmament
Had parted, and was gliding o’er the foam
Of ocean towards me; but my error soon
Became apparent—for a gorgeous bird,
Apparelled in full many a splendid plume
Of green, and gold, and purple, came and stirred
An olive’s foliage with its flutterings;
Where, perching on a slender flexile bough,
It stayed its flight and furled its weary wings.
Voiceless awhile, against a dark green spray
It leaned its breast; then making prelude low,
From its dim throat poured out a lengthened flow
Of moist Memnonian melody—a lay
More soft and sweet than ancient Pan could play
Through all the wild Circean realm of sound,
Did range this feathered minstrel’s dulcet tongue;
So that no note, or high or low is found,
That by its tuneful throat was left unsung.
Sometimes I heard a flute’s low silvery plaining,
And then anon a shepherd’s reed was blown;
And then a far-off clarion’s exclaiming
Aroused my spirit with its martial tone;
Which died ere long into a tender moan—
The wail of Indian lover, languishing
Beneath a guarded princess’ lattice high.
This ceased; and next a music rivalling
The spheral chime that fills the starry sky,
An intervolved Æolian harmony,
Stole through the porch of sound into the hall
Where my delighted spirit sat enthroned,
And from their cells the loftiest thoughts, that woned
Therein, rapt into ecstasy, did call—
A sudden shriek of keenest anguish broke
My breathless rapture, and the silver chain
Of that wild song, alas! Cymindis’ note
(Such was that Iris-feathered warbler’s name)
Was stilled forever. Him within the beak
Of a relentless vulture dead I saw,
That, swooping from the clouds, his descant sweet
Had hushed to silence, to appease the maw
Of famine in his eyrie on the steep.
THE CEMETERY IN SUMMER.
The west wind in the piny bough
A low eternal threne
Weaves o’er the dead that sleep below
The sleep without a dream.
The night-leaved cypress’ shadow glooms,
The flexile willow sighs,
While gorgeous summer glows and blooms
In florid earth and skies.
On marble shaft and urnal stone
Glimmers the sunny beam,
And squirrels chirp and wild bees drone
About the alleys green.
Through leafy vistas, long and dim,
Where slanting sunlights fall,
I see a troop of spectres thin,
In cerement, shroud, and pall.
Shades insubstantial gliding slow,
The harvest of the years,
Above whose narrow dwellings flow
Bereaved affection’s tears.
The din of life from yonder towers
Is but a murmur here;
A bee-like hum amid the flowers,
It falls upon mine ear.
Ye tranquil sleepers, stretched below,
How pleasant is your rest!
Your pulseless hearts no longer know
The cares which life infest.
The silent Hours no longer bring
Or good or ill to you;
And slander’s shaft no more can sting
The slumberer ’neath the yew.
In cool seclusion dark and deep,
Beneath the teeming mould,
Ye reck not of the summer’s heat,
The sleety winter’s cold.
The constellated stars at night
Through waving branches gleam,
And Titan’s arrows, swift and bright,
Across your couches stream.
Sepulchral Eros, mourning here
Forgetful of thy bow,
With torch reversed and falling tear,
And pinion-shaded brow!
The eyes are dim beneath your tread,
That sunned you with their light;
The lips, where you on kisses fed,
Are cold and lily-white.
All hail, my gentle household Lar!
My silent mansion ’mid the trees!
My devious steps have wandered far,
O’er lands of Eld beyond the seas.
Amid thine autumn fields I hear,
Prophet of rain, the whistling quail;
While from its sheaf the wheaten ear
Is beaten by the sounding flail.
In other climes this quiet home
Has risen star-like to my view,
When tired, dejected, and alone,
No friendly heart my sorrows knew.
’Twas years ago the passion came,
A vague desire, a longing wild
To visit lands, whose wondrous fame
Had charmed my fancy when a child.
When dreamy south winds softly blew
In spring time o’er the misty glebe,
And birds of passage wedge-like flew
To distant lake and arctic mead,
I felt the longing uncontrolled,
The yearning wish to be away,
Where splendid cities rich and old
In happier climates glittering lay.
Their towers have filled my sated eyes,
Their sins and follies all are known,
With quickened step the pilgrim hies
To greet once more his long-left home.
O silent house! O breezy shade!
Haven of rest and refuge sweet!
The great world’s din can ne’er invade
Thy lonely courts, my green retreat!
Like Sirmio’s minstrel travel-worn,
My own soft couch at length I press,
And thinking o’er the toils I’ve borne,
Forget in sleep my weariness.
The singing masons
Building roofs of gold.—SHAKESPEARE.
Pilgrim! within the hollow of this oak
Once hummed and toiled a commonwealth of bees.
And in all honeydom there were no folk,
Of swifter wing or sharper sting than these.
The waxen fragments, round the fountain strown,
With more than dædal artifice ywrought,
Once formed the structures of their fragrant town,
Which hung embosomed in this oaken grot.
Its name was Crocusburg. ’Twas built, they say,
By queen Iophile, whose early home
Was in a mountain cleft of Attica.
She with her bees was often wont to roam
The Ægean isles, in quest of flowery prey;
And so it fell one summer afternoon,
As she led thence her train, each wing and thigh
Clogged with the sweets of many an island-bloom,
Just off Mount Sunium’s marble forehead high,
A sudden rain-gust blew them all awry
A thousand leagues into the western sky.
Beneath their flight, a waste of surges wild,
Shoreless and gray the vast Atlantic rolled;
And o’er its waves no Tyrian galley toiled,
Whereon they might their gauzy pinions fold.
But they escaped, a saffron-scented wind,
Which blew from meads below the horizon’s rim,
Into this blossom-tessellated vale
They swiftly traced, a thin aerial clue
By their keen muzzles in the trackless blue
Of heaven detected, and they builded here
A honey mart, that grew without a peer.
Its cells and waxen magazines ran o’er
With brimful floods of lucent yellow dew,
The choicest sweets of every gold-eyed flower,
That on the earth’s green bosom ever grew.
Whether its leaves and scented buds expand,
At morn and eve by spicy breezes fanned,
Above the tropics’ hot volcanic mould,
O’er sunless magazines of gems and gold;
Or nature weaves it with less gaudy dyes,
In moister looms, upon a colder shore—
Each flower-clad vale beneath the purple skies
Its tribute yielded to their fragrant store.
AGIMUR FATIS.
We are as wrecks upon a stormy sea,
The winds and currents bear us where they will;
Or dry leaves, that before the tempest flee,
Borne on to good or unevaded ill.
Ere weeping through the gates of life we came,
Our lots were fixed, each act and thought decreed:
In vain we strive—we stem the tide in vain;—
Alike the idiot’s brain, the sage’s rede.
Powerless before the unimpassioned Doom
The form of beauty and the lofty mind;
The shuttle speeds athwart the fatal loom—
Our lots are woven as the threads unwind.
Sorrow and gladness intertwined are ours,
Or woe unmixed, or pleasure undefiled;
Exult not, though thy path be strewn with flowers,
Oft mid their bloom the venomed asp lies coiled.
On the dark billows of the sea of fate
Full many a glorious shape floats wrecked and pale;
While meaner beings, haughty and elate,
A festal throng before the zephyrs sail.
And star-like eyes and lovely cheeks are dewed
With ceaseless tears, an unextinguished rain;
And youth and strength, and kingly fortitude
With dotard weakness struggle oft in vain.
A HERMITAGE.
A Saxon eremite of old did rear
My mossy walls beneath this pine-clad slope;
From learned Iona, armed with clerkly lere,
He went in youth, and dealt a deadly stroke
Through all the lonely Arctic Cyclades
On Pagan creeds; and o’er the misty seas
In Suevia with Odin’s might did cope,
The chief of blue Valhalla’s deities;
Nor ceased, till from his forest temple dark
Had fled each white-stoled oaken hierarch.
His mission done, beneath my lowly roof
His days he passed, from all the world aloof.
I saw a snake-girt embryon, crowned and dumb,
Its rigid finger, pointed towards the sky;
From whence the fiery breath of life must come,
That kindles unborn lip and rayless eye.
I saw a demon beagle dark as night,
A shadowy maiden, hounding through the air;
And as she fled she shrieked with wild affright,
And, Mœnad-like, behind her streamed her hair.
The bridal couch of sad Proserpina
In grim Hephæstus’ realm mine eyes beheld;
The ravished bride bewailed her home afar—
Her temples bound with Stygian asphodel.
I saw the vast Plutonian gardens, where
That cursed pomegranate shed its deadly bloom,
Whose fatal fruitage, banned from upper air
Sad Ceres’ daughter till the seventh moon.
I saw the Pleiads, in their skyey tent,
Bemoan their starry sister, dead and cold;
His bow against her fierce Orion bent—
Orion zoned with belt of fretted gold.
I saw the Avengers with viperean hair
Above the palace roofs at Argos fly;
The matricide Orestes shuddered there,
Obscene with matted locks and haggard eye.
I saw the loaded tables of the Sun,
By ancient Nilus’ orbëd fountains spread;
Where wont of old the happy gods to come,
Twelve days by long-lived Ethiops richly fed.
Phantoms of air exhaled by dark madjoon,
And visionary fabrics dim and vast;
Like vapors gliding o’er the autumnal moon,
Before imagination’s eye they passed.
LUCIFER REDUX.
Prince of the fallen stars,
Thy front shall lose its scars!
The fires shall cease to burn,
Thy legions shall return!
A ray shall pierce the gloom,
A voice dissolve the doom;
The victor shall relent,
The brazen chains be rent!
The demon’s crown of woe
No more shall gird thy brow;
The fires shall cease to burn.
Thy legions shall return.
The dark pavilions spread
Within thy kingdom dread;
The palaces of pain,
Like dreams, shall melt and wane.
And Eden’s flag unrolled,
Again thy helm enfold;
The fires shall cease to burn,
Thy legions shall return!
The mystic feud shall end,
Thy willing knees shall bend;
Once more the central throne
Thy homage bright shall own.
In heaven thy starred domain
Shall greet its chief again;
The fires shall cease to burn,
Thy legions shall return!
Thine ancient halls of state,
So long left desolate,
Shall ring with joy once more,
Shall bloom with wreath and flower.
The constellations bright,
The torches of the night,
Around thy steps shall chant
A pæan jubilant.
The wheels that o’er thee drove,
The sword thy mail that clove,
Shall lead thy glad return,
Before thy march shall burn!
ANSALDO’S GARDEN.
Beautiful the hearts that keep
’Neath the frosts of age
Something of their youthful heat,
Tempered in its rage.
Teian-like, they laugh and sing,
Though the shadows gather;
For they feel the warmth of spring
In the wintry weather.
Minstrels ’neath the snows of time
Feel their bosoms glowing,
With a fervor as sublime
As when flowers were blowing.
Like to tomb-lamps’ beams, that spread
Lustre round decay,
To the last their hearts will shed
Sunlike haloes, fancies gay.
Thus Ansaldo’s garden bloomed,
June in January set,
While the frosty stars illumed
Orange leaf and mignonette.
THE DYING MOSLEM.
Jannat al Aden’s towers I see,
I know my fate is nigh—
The Hûr al Oyun beckon me,
Their waving arms I spy.
Sweet maids of Heaven, I come, I come!
Mine eyes in darkness swim—
The chills of death my heart benumb,
And creep through every limb.
My trophies see around me piled—
The unbeliever’s blood
My dripping garments has defiled,
Has slaked my falchion good.
More soft to me than beds of flowers
The gory battle plain;
For thence I mount to Eden’s bowers,
And joys immortal gain.
The Houri’s kiss is sweeter far
Than whispers of the South;
Her eyes are like the evening star,
Her lot eternal youth!
MDCCCXLVIII-IX.
O torrid August—sun-emblazoned asp!
Reluctantly thy days, like coils, unclasp
And leave the worn and heat-enfeebled frame
Its wonted strength in cooler hours to gain.
O months with ruin fraught! O years of fate!
What stars malign o’er you predominate!
The seals of death are broke—the wide earth moans,
A lazar-house of pain through all her zones.
The seeds of swift decay broadcast impregn
The wave, the air, the land, the summer beam;
Is there no Tuscan garden as of old,
Where, to beguile the heart, sweet tales are told?
Where youth and beauty, weaving fables gay,
With dance and music keep the cares at bay?
No pangless isolation, green and fair,
Above whose fields are charms of taintless air?
O, vaunted Epoch! that look’st back with scorn
Upon thy brother ages elder-born—
That mak’st the lightning’s withering glance thy scribe,
And on the hissing cauldron’s breath dost ride—
With all thy boasted sciences, must thou
Before the sworded angel veil thy brow?
Art _thou_, too, vulnerable with all thine arts?
Hast _thou_ no shield to ward the lethal darts?
No potent balm, whose virtues can expel
The lurking venom from its citadel?
Must _thou_, too, pray for some Araunah’s floor,
Whereon the wasting vengeance may give o’er?
Cease, then, to vaunt—for know that ages gone
Have had a wisdom mightier than your own.
The globe, a ruined palace, still will be
To Death, Disease, and War, a mansion free,—
A mighty park, wherein, Orion-like,
The ghastly hunters unevaded strike;
Their hounds, the passions, which no arts can tame—
The ruthless beagles still pursue their game.
No sop, that puny science can devise,
Will hush their yells, or drowse their dragon eyes;
The melancholy Asia mourns afar,
Drooping in sorrow ’neath the Plague’s red star.
Beneath her palms the giant mother see,
Her turret-girded brow upon her knee!
The elephantine tusk, that stays her hand,
Lies unregarded in the yellow sand.
Not thus she mourned, when Iran’s king forlorn
Fled pale and vanquished towards the realms of morn.
The mystic Brahmin, roofed by groves sublime,
Lies grovelling before his pagod shrine;
In vain adores the monstrous shapes, that fill
The peaks of Meru’s golden-hornëd hill;
Poisoned with death the stream of Indus flows,
The baleful air a lurid furnace glows.
The spotted pard in sultry jungle cowers,
His nerves unstrung and withered all his powers;
The glistering scales, which clothe the serpent, wane,
Their splendors darkened by the touch of pain;
Flickers no more his tongue like cloven flame;
His crushing coils and horrent length unrolled,
Cumber the heated dust relaxed and cold.
On Himmalaya’s topmost summit lone
The Plague’s Red Fiend ascends his mountain throne,—
In shape an Afrite, or a gloomy Djinn,
Where, underneath the brows of Heaven, begin
The Ganges’ waters, that devolving pour
Through gates of ice and starlit arches hoar.
His bow is bent—the viewless arrows fall
On desert, ocean, vale, and capital;
The lonely ship, that ploughs the barren sea,
Is filled with shapes of writhing agony.
The desert trains of turbaned merchants wail
From rear to van, with anguish smitten pale;
Cabool and eldest Balk are resonant
With shriek, and dolorous sigh, and Koran chant;
And Persia’s rosy vales are thickly strewn
With lethal shafts that blight her spicy bloom,
And, through the palace of the Caliphate,
At blazing noontide speeds the wingëd fate;
And over all the fields of ancient Roum
Settles a cloud of pestilential gloom;
The keen shafts leave the shrouded East behind,
Thridding like light the mazes of the wind.
Onward their course they hold, nor once relent
Until they reach the shrill-tongued Occident.
The crash and roar of crowded cities cease,
And o’er their bulwark broods the desert’s peace.
The clanging enginery forgets to move,
Where luxury’s gauds by jaded hands are wove;
The wail, the dirge, the unextinguished moan,
In streets, in fields, in ships are heard alone.
Unknelled, unshrived, in yawning trenches deep,
The bursting corses fall a livid heap;
Death, at the growing carnage, laughs elate,
While round his throne Sesostres shrouded wait.
Athwart Atlantic’s troubled waters fly
The arrowy fates, and fill the western sky;
Fair Erie’s queen is stricken with distress—
Named for the herd that graze the wilderness.
And all the nascent states and cities young,
By forest, lake, and stream, with grief are wrung;
Till spent at length, beneath the sinking day
The red shafts quench their rage, and cease to slay.
THE AUTUMNAL RIDE.
October glittered brazen-hued
Beneath the keen autumnal sun;
Their leaves the ash and maple strewed
Like fiery coals of martyrdom.
The mountains reared their granite cones
Through veils of ether opaline;
Their bases cinctured round with zones
Of giant beech and Delphic pine.
We sucked the air with Ariel’s greed,
And chest and nostril ampler grew;
Mile after mile rushed by with speed—
We felt the freshness of the dew;
While dimpled laughter soon began
To loosen up the heart and brain;
The blood inebriated ran,
Quicksilver-like, through every vein.
We saw Monadnoc cleave the sky,
The eagle’s perch a peak sublime;
Aerial pasturages high,
Where grazed and lowed the mountain kine.
Majestic hill, thy might is sung
In strains that with thy cliffs shall last!
As long as Night her mantle dun,
And Day his beams shall o’er thee cast.
In radiant verse thy summit shines
Henceforth to all men evermore;
The lulling murmur of thy pines
Is audible on every shore.
From morn till noontide on we rode—
The day grew summery awhile;
The mountain vapors throbbed and glowed,
But soon they wore a pensive smile.
The sky, a magazine of hues,
Its amethystine glories rained;
That richer colors still diffuse,
The more the dying sunbeam waned.
O, day forever marked with white,
With Eva passed among the hills!
A year has flown—its keen delight
In memory yet my bosom thrills.
TO ——.
I.
Thou mortal Belial! thee I name
The mightiest sophist known to fame.
In the old Hellenic isles,
Rich in rhetoric’s winning wiles,
’Mongst their most persuasive dead,
None like thee was ever bred;
E’en the Ithacensian’s lips
Thou couldst cast into eclipse;
Nor serpent’s eye, nor siren’s lute,
Nor Coptic Lotos’ magic fruit,
Could bewilder and entrance,
Like thy honied utterance.
II.
Shadowed thick with jetty hair,
Flowing like acanthus fair
Over pillared capital,
Towers aloft thy kingly brow;
While from sunken eyes below
Gleams a fiery southern glance,
Keener far than keenest lance.
III.
These, with that Ionic form,
And Asiatic fancy warm,
Assembled and conjoined in one,
Make the Forum’s paragon!
SUGGESTED BY A HEAD OF ACHILLES IN SIR WILLIAM GELL’S POMPEII.
The swift Pelides from a Goddess’ loins,
Like lightning from a summer cloud was born;
Ambrosial youth incarnadined his limbs
With roseal lustre and Hebean bloom;
Yet in their marble smoothness lay enshrined
A Titan’s energy—and his large eyes,
That dreamed and languished like Endymion’s,
When, vine-like, round his neck the lucent arms
Of Lycomedes’ daughter were entwined,
Glowed like a pard’s in fight. A glossy wealth
Of sunny Apollonian tresses loosely rolled
Adown his ivory shoulders. In his breast
A fiery-blooded heart throbbed fiercely—now
In sorrow unappeased venting itself
Above his fallen friend; and now in ire
Unquenchable, that withered all his foes,
When vengeance called him to the ensanguined field.
The hero’s sword not only he could wield;
The heroic lyre he also strung, and oft
At eve, in his pavilion by the sea,
His melancholy spirit soothed with song.
PSYCHE.
In vigils lone she hears the chimes
Of voices from diviner climes,
And sees entranced the statures grand,
That throng her lofty fatherland.
Unwonted odors, strange and rare,
Float round her on the midnight air,
From gardens where her youth was spent,
Beyond the dark blue firmament.
The fleshly walls are white and thin,
Which close her yearning spirit in—
Celestial footfalls she can hear,
Inaudible to grosser ear.
She mourns her lot like one exiled,
Her songs are filled with longings wild
For home, and that serener day
Which lights the angels far away.
THE SERAPHS’ HOLIDAY.
There is a year when all the stars, which throng
The blue abysses of eternity,
Back to the stations, whence their march began,
Have rolled. The wondrous season passes not
In Heaven uncelebrated; but with pomp,
And dance, and song, and gorgeous festivals,
The happy people mark its slow return.
Then all the mighty Seraphim, who rule
By Allah’s will the starry satrapies
Of the Universe, with joyful hearts receive
Permission to revisit once again
The golden streets of Paradise, the groves,
And fields, and streams, and shady palaces
Of their nativity. Upon the morn
Of their return, soon as the eastern wind
Begins to fan the innumerable palms,
Amid whose waving branches glittering stand
The beatific mansions, straight the walls,
Smaragdine domes and minarets, which grace
Or fortify the blest metropolis,
Are thickly lined with eager faces, set
With dark angelic eyes, whose glances pierce
Interminably far the rosy veils
Of pure celestial air, wherein no mote
Or vapor floats to intercept the view.
Ere long, above the horizon’s verge appears
The expected pomp. East, West, and North and South,
Along the ancient thoroughfares, which lead
From Paradise through spaces infinite,
Besprinkled o’er with starry Cyclades,
Down to the fiery palaces, wherein
The solar Seraphs hold their sway, it comes—
A long array of chariots superb,
Harnessed to sun-engendered steeds, whose veins
Are filled with fluid fire, the succulence
Of the Heliacal pastures where they graze.
Proudly the planetary Sultans rein
Their haughty yokes, which underneath the shade
Of solar gonfalons advance, their feet
Unto the sound of lordly harmonies
Uplifting. Within the eternal gates,
Through wingëd throngs, o’er star-paved streets they ride,
And by the Stream of Life, shadowed with palms,
Unyoke their steeds, fettered with links of gold
Infrangible and bright, to graze the banks;
Then laving in the flood their giant limbs,
They haste unto the glad festivities.
MORNING.
All hail, thou blessed light of morn!
At length I feel thy cheering ray—
Through all the darksome night forlorn,
Yearning for thee I sleepless lay.
The Roman in his palace porch,
On the Parthenopean isle,
To dim his red nocturnal torch,
Ne’er prayed more fervently thy smile.
The dripping trees in verdure drest,
The rosy light, and eastern wind,
Dispel the larvæ, which infest
The slumbers of the troubled mind.
O Power divine! my spirit keep
From deeds of darkness ever clear,
Lest unto me the realms of Sleep
Should be beset with phantoms drear;
For Conscience to the wicked is
A demon-evocator pale,
And summons from the soul’s abyss
Forms, which must make the stoutest quail.
Bear witness, purple Eremite,
Who reared amid translucent seas
A gorgeous palace of delight,
A refuge from the Eumenides;
Colossal spectres nightly strode
Through portal, corridor and hall,
The Sea impersonated stood,
His dreaming spirit to appal.
Fronting the portals of the Sun,
His lurid torches burning low,
How oft amid the shadows dun
He waited for the morning’s glow.
Bringer of pleasant thoughts, all hail!
Thy touch dissolves the guilty dream.
And Orcus’ shapeless legions quail,
Flying before thy rosy beam.
AUTUMN.
When yellowing woods let fall their sapless leaves,
And, breathing softly from the mild South-west,
The Indian Summer mitigates the air,
Me it delights, leaving the towers of men,
With devious feet, and void of fixed intent,
To wander far into the country still;
My path, some grassy road untrodden lone,
Which leads the steps through woods of dwarfish pines,
Where dwells unscared the solitary jay,
And sings the cricket, sole inhabitants.
In these sweet solitudes the soul becomes
Tranquil as seas mid happy isles embayed;
Here weary hearts a balsam for their woes,
In whispering boughs and silent skies can find.
And here, amid the calm and liberal air,
The heated brain grows cool from contact free;
How sweet to live a sylvan eremite,
By some sequestered lake in forests hid,
Or pebble-paven urn, the cradle cool
Of tiny brook, or gently lapsing stream.
Legends there are of fallen kings, who held
Their exiled courts beneath the forest boughs;
Better their faded state in such pure haunts,
Than when it shone in haughty palaces!
O power of Music! whence thy spell
On man and brute, on soul and heart?
What spirit haunts the chorded shell,
Whose murmurs every passion start?
The silent tenants of the sea,
The brinded pard and serpent, own
Thy sway—their fierceness tamed by thee,
They cower and writhe about thy throne.
Thy lordly breath to war can yield
A glory wild, a nameless charm;
The sworded ranks, the embattled field
Thou fill’st with bosoms high and warm;
The gorgeous palaces of old
Thy magic numbers cause to rise,
And faces, which the valley’s mould
Has hidden long from weeping eyes.
The depths of love, its wild despair,
By thee are told, are breathed by thee,
And while thy whispers fill the air,
A better world we seem to see;
Some happier region undefiled,
Where youth and beauty aye abide—
Where sin the spirit ne’er beguiled,
And joy fills up the circuit wide.
DREAMS.
The magic of a dream how great!
To us it gives a might divine,
Whereby our souls annihilate
The power of death, and space, and time.
The forms which lie recumbent, cold,
In tombs and charnel-houses lone,
In dreams our eyes again behold,
As they in life were loved and known.
We enter through the gates of sleep,
Into a neutral interspace,
Most pleasant to the eyes that weep,
For Life and Death can there embrace.
There absence ceases to divide;
Though seas and mountains intervene,
Friend unto friend can swiftly glide,
And reck not of the space between.
There I last night thy form beheld,
My ancient comrade, tried and true!
Tears from my eyes profusely welled,
And tears as freely fell from you!
THE PENITENT.
Sorrowful, weak, dejected, and in fear,
Most Merciful, I fall before thy throne!
The world through wickedness is dark and drear,
Peace and content are found in Heaven alone.
A retrospect of sin behind me lies,
A peccant youth all spent at Belial’s shrine!
The meek Judæan beckoned from the skies;
I heeded not, seduced by powers malign.
The scales are fallen from my darkened sight,
A potent euphrasy is poured therein;
I look around with terror and affright,
Behold the world is vanity and sin!
With labor infinite, the race of men
Their ruined mansion struggle to restore;
By their own might they think to make again
The Earth a happy Eden as of yore.
This task no mortal skill can execute,
All Archimedean subtleties are vain;
Invention, sciences, and minds astute,
Are baulked, like those of old on Shinar’s plain.
Though unto us the elements become
Obsequious helots to our wills subdued;
Though, Ariel-like, the glittering lightning run,
To do our errands over land and flood;
All is in vain—a doom—a deadly blight
Is on us, and our space-embosomed home;
Our fallen natures can be made upright
By meek contrition and by faith alone.
Ocean, thou art disenchanted!
And the mariner no more
Anchors under islands haunted,
Off a silver-sanded shore;
Where he sees some Fairy’s palace
Glitter through the boscage green;
Hears the glancing of her shuttle,
And the wizard chant between.
Once the galley steering westward,
Toward the throne of Saturn sailed,
Toward the Islands of the Happy,
Where the summer never failed;
Where along the beach elysian,
Heroes born in better days
Wandered, fanned by winds eternal,
Blowing inland from the bays.
Ocean, thou art disenchanted!
And the mariner no more
Sees the sunken city glimmer,
Leagues away from any shore.
Where are Helice and Buris?
Leaning o’er the galley’s side,
Once the voyager saw them waver
With the motions of the tide.
Argosies condemned to wander
Havenless from clime to clime,
With ensanguined ingots laden,—
All have faded from the brine!
And the Triton’s shell no longer
Over yesty waves is blown;
And Poseidon’s burnished axle
Drifts a wreck upon the foam.
These are gone—but still thy surges
Kiss and girdle isles of balm,
Clasping beaches beryl-paven,
Latitudes of endless calm!
TWILIGHT IN EGYPT.
Round the City of the Sun,
And Mokattan mountains dun,
Fast the woof of Night is spun,
Planets through it gleaming;
Vista’d columns stretch in rows,
On whose tops with massive brows,
Sphinxes lion-limbed repose,
In the twilight dreaming.
Shines Canopus high and calm
Over sand and waving palm,
While the sea-winds, strewing balm,
Make the Lotos quiver;
Limned upon the rising Moon,
Sculptured demons frown and gloom,
Pedestalled amid the spume
Of the Coptic river.
Valè to the dying day
Memnon’s lips of marble say,
Darkling mid the shadows gray,
Which around it gather;
Girdled by the swelling stream,
Island-like the cities gleam,
O’er their imaged temples lean
In the blue that waver.
Gilded by the lunar disc,
Pyramid and obelisk
Towering stand, their bases kissed
By the gulfing water;
Lakelike spreads the fertile tide,
Veiling all the valley wide—
To and fro the shallops glide,
Filled with mirth and laughter.
ARIEL’S SONG.
I’ll quarry the sapphire sunset
For blocks of purple air,
And over the floor of ocean
I’ll build me a palace rare;
The South wind through its chambers
By day and night shall blow,
Fanning my brow with odors,
With lovesick whispers low.
Eolian lutes shall murmur
Their breezy notes to me,
And amber-tressed merwomen
My servitors shall be;
By showery sunbeams paven
With tessellated light,
My ivory floors shall glitter
A marvel to the sight.
And when my lids are heavy,
With slumber’s dews oppressed,
A pale-lipped shell shall circle
My limbs reclined in rest;
The pillars of my mansion
Full proudly shall aspire,
Their corbels wrought and woven
Of opalescent fire.
My torches shall be kindled
At wells of Naptha fine,
And myrrhine urns shall bubble
With draughts of Elfin wine;
Those gardens, which the daughters
Of Hesper sow and till,
With golden-rinded melons
My fragrant board shall fill.
The vaunted barge of Cydnus
My shallop shall outvie,
With silken cables furnished,
With sails of purple dye;
Its deck in halcyon weather
Shall bear me o’er the main—
Its argent beak shall follow
Apollo’s sinking wain.
Where abid’st thou, prophet mighty?
Whom the fiery horses drew
Skyward from the Jordan’s rivage,
Till they faded from the view,—
Past the sceptre of Uriel,
Regent of the solar fire,
Past the starry Lion couchant,
And the planet-chorded Lyre;
Till the citadels of Heaven
O’er the Sea of Jasper flamed,
And thy wingëd yoke in triumph
At its golden gates was reined;
Thou hast clomb the grades of splendor,
As the ages rolled away,
Till at length cherubic legions
Thee as hierarch obey.
But thy fatherland has fallen
From the might of other days;
The anathemas of Ebal
Blight and wither all its race.
Gone the ivory house of pleasure,
Where the Syrian cedars grew,
Where the minions of Astarte
Could a monarch’s heart subdue;
Gone the carven lion-warders
From that monarch’s jewelled throne—
But the genii malignant
Still his mighty signet own;
Still his song instinct with passion,
Like a string of rubies glows;
Than the vaunted lays of Teïos
With a sweeter cadence flows.
On her monumental scroll
Let these syllables be seen;
Meek Griselda was no dream,
No ideal of the soul.
Softly slumbers one below,
Who an equal worth could claim
With that visionary dame,
Drawn by poet long ago.
Face more beautiful and mild
Than the buried maiden bore,
Never blessed the earth before,
Never sorrow’s sigh beguiled.
Through her lineaments of white
Blushed the morning’s healthy hue,
And her eye of tender blue
Was with softest lustre bright.
Like the Mother sad and fair,
The Madonna in the skies,
She was patient, sinless, wise,
And of gentleness most rare.
In the mansion where she died,
All is silent, drear and lone;
In the yard the lindens moan—
Through the chambers shadows glide.
THE INDIAN SUMMER.
Now the sweet autumnal Summer which the Indian loved so well,
Over mountain, plain, and hollow sheds the glory of its spell.
Softer breathe the gentle zephyrs, and like visitants they seem
From a latitude benigner, from a climate more serene.
Dream the heavens warm and glowing, shining veils of tepid haze,
Nimbus-like investing nature, through the long celestial days.
Cities, hamlets, russet woodlands, saintly halos seem to wear,
All transfigured in the splendor of the mild October air.
Such perchance the lenient ether, such as these the tranquil skies,
Spread above the fields of heaven, arching over Paradise.
Brief their beauty, transient, fleeting—soon the north wind’s trump
is blown,
Whirl the leaves in gusty eddies, and the rainy tempests moan.
HYMN TO PHOSPHOR.
Radiant Phosphor! thou art fashioned
Like some beardless minion young,
And before the giant Mithra
Do thy wingëd sandals run.
Morning’s herald, urn of splendor!
From thy stellar fountains flow
Purer lustres, fires intenser
Than thy brother stars can show.
When their beams begin to darken
And the bird Alectryon sings,
Still thy torch’s tresses sparkle,
Still thine orb its radiance flings.
Once the Dawn adored thy beauty;
Thee her acolyte she made,
Waiting in her saffron porches,
While the world was wrapt in shade.
Kissed she oft thy beamy temples,
And from anemonies fair
Shook the dew-drops to besprinkle
Thy redundant yellow hair.
With her arms about thee folded,
Oft thy fragrant mouth she prest,
That exhaled a sweeter odor
Than the cassia-scented West.
Hail, thou silver-shielded planet,
Whom undying beams adorn!
Hail, thou firmamental leader!
Dewy sentinel of morn!
TO THE CRICKET.
Flourishes in song immortal
The Cicada famed of old;
On the brows of Attic women
Was its likeness worn in gold.
But my Cricket! none have praised thee,
Insect full of dulcet mirth!
Singing in the August moonlight,
Minstrel of the country hearth!
Sharded rhapsodist of Autumn,
When the year begins to wane,
In the grass and in the hedges
Trillest thou thy wiry strain.
Harp with clasps of ivory strengthened,
Unto thee does not belong;
Thine own body is a cithern,
Its pulsations make thy song.
In the midnight weird and holy,
When the moon is in eclipse,
Feedest thou on leaves of moly—
Honeydew-drops steep thy lips.
BOOTH’S RICHARD.
The sceptred Gorgon of the Isles,
The fiercest of the kingly brood,
Weaves o’er again his deadly wiles,
Again appears with flesh indued.
Promethean will uncrushed and calm,
His blighted sinews nerved and strung,
All foes he met without alarm—
At fiend or god his gauntlet flung.
His spirit was a dark abyss,
Its surface glassed with summer smiled;
But deep below the dragon hissed,
And thoughts like hydras lurked and coiled.
The bright-haired shadows drenched in blood,
The stifled Princes sweet and pale,
Athwart his dim pavilion strode—
His heart of iron did not quail.
Though from beneath Gehenna stirred,
And sent its legions to the fray,
The war-cry from his lips was heard,
Like blast of bugle far away.
Girt lion-like with countless foes—
On earth, in heaven, without a friend—
With clenching teeth and gathered brows
He battled bravely to the end.
L’ENVOI.
’Neath the rainy Equinox,
Flooding her dishevelled locks,
Lies the Summer dead and cold,
With her shroud about her rolled,
Like the drowned Ophelia fair,
Dripping from the oozy mere;
O’er her bleaching corse complain
Sighing winds and chilling rain.
Withered fillets, garlands sere,
Bind her brow and deck her bier—
Urnlike lilies, violets frail,
Faded blossoms of the vale,
Thickly strew her loosened hair.
Sorrowing o’er his daughter fair,
Sadly bends the stricken Year,
To her lips applies his ear;
For the voice which long ago
Cheered him with its music low,
Hearkens he, and for the smile
Wont his dotage to beguile,
Lifts her drooping lids in vain,—
She will never smile again.
Ravished from their mistress pale,
Fly her tresses on the gale;
Driving North winds pipe and rave
Threnodies about her grave.
Bird and leaf forsake the tree—
Sinks to rest the yellow bee;
All his labors in the sun,
All his airy voyages done;
While the squirrel gathers fast
Largess of the bough and blast.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Elfin land: and other poems" ***
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