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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of "The Poems of Sidney Lanier"**
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+Poems of Sidney Lanier.
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+July, 1996  [Etext #579]
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+
+Poems of Sidney Lanier.
+
+[Sidney Lanier; (Amer.) Georgian poet and scholar.  1842-1881.]
+
+Etext by A. Light, alight@mercury.interpath.net
+
+Special thanks to Oliver Darmstaedter, Wiebke Schuck, and Thomas Schaich
+for their help deciphering the old German font used for the poem (in German),
+`An Frau Nannette Falk-Auerbach'.
+
+Special thanks also to Sibyl Tyson, at The Springs Inn in Ponce de Leon, Fla.,
+for assistance in making this etext possible.
+
+
+
+[Note on text:  Italicized words or phrases are capitalized,
+if the italics were used for emphasis, or put in quotation marks,
+if the italics indicated a quotation.  In one case,
+an italicized and indented paragraph has been indented 10 spaces
+to set it apart.  Lines longer than 78 characters are broken,
+and the continuation is indented two spaces.]
+
+
+
+
+
+Poems of Sidney Lanier.
+
+Edited by his wife (Mary D. Lanier)
+
+With a Memorial by William Hayes Ward.
+
+
+
+            ---- "Go, trembling song,
+    And stay not long; oh stay not long;
+    Thou'rt only a gray and sober dove,
+    But thine eye is faith and thy wing is love."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+Memorial.
+
+
+Hymns of the Marshes.
+
+    I.  Sunrise.
+          (published December, 1882.)
+   II.  Individuality.
+          (published January, 1882.)
+  III.  Marsh Song -- At Sunset.
+          (published February, 1882.)
+   IV.  The Marshes of Glynn.
+          (published 1879.)
+
+Clover.
+  (published 1876.)
+
+The Waving of the Corn.
+  (1877.)
+
+The Song of the Chattahoochee.
+  (1877.)
+
+From the Flats.
+  (1877.)
+
+The Mocking-Bird.
+  (August, 1877.)
+
+Tampa Robins.
+  (1877.)
+
+The Crystal.
+  (1880.)
+
+The Revenge of Hamish.
+  (1878.)
+
+To Bayard Taylor.
+  (March, 1879.)
+
+A Dedication.  To Charlotte Cushman.
+  (`Earliest Collected Poems', 1876.)
+
+To Charlotte Cushman.
+  (March, 1876.)
+
+The Stirrup-Cup.
+  (1877.)
+
+A Song of Eternity in Time.
+  (1880.)
+
+Owl against Robin.
+  (August, 1880.)
+
+A Song of the Future.
+  (1877-78.)
+
+Opposition.
+  (1879-80.)
+
+Rose-Morals.
+  (May, 1876.)
+
+Corn.
+  (February, 1875.)
+
+The Symphony.
+  (June, 1875.)
+
+My Springs.
+  (October, 1882.)
+
+In Absence.
+  (September, 1875.)
+
+Acknowledgment.
+  (November, 1876.)
+
+Laus Mariae.
+  (1876.)
+
+Special Pleading.
+  (January, 1876.)
+
+The Bee.
+  (October, 1877.)
+
+The Harlequin of Dreams.
+  (April, 1878.)
+
+Street Cries.
+
+    I.  Remonstrance.
+          (April, 1883.)
+   II.  The Ship of Earth.
+  III.  How Love Looked for Hell.
+          (March, 1884.)
+   IV.  Tyranny.
+          (February, 1868.)
+    V.  Life and Song.
+          (September, 1868.)
+   VI.  To Richard Wagner.
+          (November, 1877.)
+  VII.  A Song of Love.
+          (January, 1884.)
+
+To Beethoven.
+  (March, 1877.)
+
+An Frau Nannette Falk-Auerbach.
+  (1878.)
+
+To Nannette Falk-Auerbach.
+  (1878.)
+
+To Our Mocking-Bird.
+  (1878.)
+
+The Dove.
+  (May, 1878.)
+
+To ----, with a Rose.
+  (December, 1876.)
+
+On Huntingdon's "Miranda".
+  (1874.)
+
+Ode to the Johns Hopkins University.
+  (1880.)
+
+To Dr. Thomas Shearer.
+
+Martha Washington.
+  (1876.)
+
+Psalm of the West.
+  (June, 1876.)
+
+At First.  To Charlotte Cushman.
+  (1883.)
+
+A Ballad of Trees and the Master.
+  (1880-81.)
+
+A Florida Sunday.
+  (1877.)
+
+To My Class:  On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness.
+  (October, 1884.)
+
+On Violet's Wafers, Sent Me When I Was Ill.
+  (October, 1884.)
+
+Ireland.
+  (1880.)
+
+Under the Cedarcroft Chestnut.
+  (1877-78.)
+
+An Evening Song.
+  (January, 1877.)
+
+A Sunrise Song.
+
+On a Palmetto.
+
+Struggle.
+
+Control.
+
+To J. D. H.
+
+Marsh Hymns.
+
+Thou and I.
+
+The Hard Times in Elfland.
+  (Baltimore, 1877.)
+
+
+  Dialect Poems.
+
+
+A Florida Ghost.
+  (1877-78.)
+
+Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn.
+  (Sidney and Clifford Lanier).  (1876.)
+
+"Nine from Eight".
+  (March, 1884.)
+
+"Thar's more in the Man than thar is in the Land".
+  (1869.)
+
+Jones's Private Argyment.
+
+The Power of Prayer; or, The First Steamboat up the Alabama.
+  (Sidney and Clifford Lanier).  (1875-76.)
+
+
+  Unrevised Early Poems.
+
+
+The Jacquerie.  A Fragment.
+
+The Golden Wedding of Sterling and Sarah Lanier, September 27, 1868.
+
+Strange Jokes.
+  (1883.)
+
+Nirvana.
+  (1871.)
+
+The Raven Days.
+
+Our Hills.
+
+Laughter in the Senate.
+
+Baby Charley.
+  (January, 1883.)
+
+A Sea-Shore Grave.  To M. J. L.
+  (Sidney and Clifford Lanier).  (July, 1871.)
+
+Souls and Rain-Drops.
+  (1883.)
+
+Nilsson.
+  (April, 1883.)
+
+Night and Day.
+  (July, 1884.)
+
+A Birthday Song.  To S. G.
+  (1867.)
+
+Resurrection.
+  (October, 1868.)
+
+To ----.
+
+The Wedding.
+  (August, 1884.)
+
+The Palm and the Pine.
+
+Spring Greeting.
+
+The Tournament.
+  (1867.)
+
+The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson.
+
+To Wilhelmina.
+  (September, 1884.)
+
+Wedding-Hymn.
+  (August, 1884.)
+
+In the Foam.
+  (1867.)
+
+Barnacles.
+  (1867.)
+
+Night.
+  (May, 1884.)
+
+June Dreams, in January.
+  (September, 1884.)
+
+
+Notes to Poems.
+
+
+The Centennial Meditation of Columbia.  1776-1876.  A Cantata.
+
+Note to the Cantata.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Memorial.
+
+
+
+Because I believe that Sidney Lanier was much more than a clever artisan
+in rhyme and metre; because he will, I think, take his final rank
+with the first princes of American song, I am glad to provide
+this slight memorial.  There is sufficient material in his letters
+for an extremely interesting biography, which could be properly prepared
+only by his wife.  These pages can give but a sketch of his life and work.
+
+Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Ga., on the third of February, 1842.
+His earliest known ancestor of the name was Jerome Lanier,
+a Huguenot refugee, who was attached to the court of Queen Elizabeth,
+very likely as a musical composer; and whose son, Nicholas,
+was in high favor with James I. and Charles I., as director of music,
+painter, and political envoy; and whose grandson, Nicholas,
+held a similar position in the court of Charles II.  A portrait
+of the elder Nicholas Lanier, by his friend Van Dyck, was sold,
+with other pictures belonging to Charles I., after his execution.
+The younger Nicholas was the first Marshal, or presiding officer,
+of the Society of Musicians, incorporated at the Restoration,
+"for the improvement of the science and the interest of its professors;"
+and it is remarkable that four others of the name of Lanier
+were among the few incorporators, one of them, John Lanier,
+very likely father of the Sir John Lanier who fought as Major-General
+at the Battle of the Boyne, and fell gloriously at Steinkirk
+along with the brave Douglas.
+
+The American branch of the family originated as early as 1716
+with the immigration of Thomas Lanier, who settled with other colonists
+on a grant of land ten miles square, which includes the present city
+of Richmond, Va.  One of the family, a Thomas Lanier, married an aunt
+of George Washington.  The family is somewhat widely scattered,
+chiefly in the Southern States.
+
+The father of our poet was Robert S. Lanier, a lawyer still living
+in Macon, Ga.  His mother was Mary Anderson, a Virginian of Scotch descent,
+from a family that supplied members of the House of Burgesses of Virginia
+for many years and in more than one generation, and was gifted in poetry,
+music, and oratory.
+
+His earliest passion was for music.  As a child he learned to play,
+almost without instruction, on every kind of instrument he could find;
+and while yet a boy he played the flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar,
+and banjo, especially devoting himself to the flute in deference to
+his father, who feared for him the powerful fascination of the violin.
+For it was the violin-voice that, above all others, commanded his soul.
+He has related that during his college days it would sometimes so exalt him
+in rapture, that presently he would sink from his solitary music-worship
+into a deep trance, thence to awake, alone, on the floor of his room,
+sorely shaken in nerve.
+
+In after years more than one listener remarked the strange violin effects
+which he conquered from the flute.  His devotion to music
+rather alarmed than pleased his friends, and while it was here
+that he first discovered that he possessed decided genius,
+he for some time shared the early notion of his parents,
+that it was an unworthy pursuit, and he rather repressed his taste.
+He did not then know by what inheritance it had come to him,
+nor how worthy is the art.
+
+At the age of fourteen he entered the sophomore class of Oglethorpe College,
+an institution under Presbyterian control near Midway, Ga.,
+which had not vitality enough to survive the war.  He graduated in 1860,
+at the age of eighteen, with the first honors of his class,
+having lost a year during which he took a clerkship in the Macon post-office.
+At least one genuine impulse was received in this college life,
+and that proceeded from Professor James Woodrow, who was then
+one of Sidney's teachers, and who has since been connected with
+the University and Theological Seminary in Columbia, S. C.
+During the last weeks of his life Mr. Lanier stated
+that he owed to Professor Woodrow the strongest and most valuable stimulus
+of his youth.  Immediately on his graduation he was called to a tutorship
+in the college, which position he held until the outbreak of the war.
+
+And here, with some hesitation, I record, as a true biography requires,
+the development of his consciousness of possessing real genius.
+One with this gift has a right to know it, just as others know if they possess
+talent or shiftiness of resource.  While we do not talk so much of genius now
+as we did a generation ago, we can yet recognize the difference between
+the fervor of that divine birth and the cantering of the livery Pegasus
+forth and back, along the vulgar boulevards over which facile talent
+rides his daily hack.  Only once or twice, in his own private note-book,
+or in a letter to his wife when it was needful, in sickness and loneliness,
+to strengthen her will and his by testifying his own deepest consciousness
+of power, did he whisper the assurance of his strength.
+But he knew it, and she knew it, and it gave his will a peace in toil,
+a sun-lit peace, notwithstanding sickness, or want, or misapprehension,
+calm above the zone of clouds.
+
+As I have said, his genius he first fully discovered in music.
+I copy from his pencilled college note-book what cannot have been written
+after he was eighteen years old.  The boy had been discussing
+the question with himself how far his inclinations were to be regarded
+as indicating his best capacities and his duties.  He says:
+
+==
+"The point which I wish to settle is merely, by what method shall I ascertain
+what I am fit for, as preliminary to ascertaining God's will
+with reference to me; or what my inclinations are, as preliminary
+to ascertaining what my capacities are, that is, what I am fit for.
+I am more than all perplexed by this fact, that the prime inclination,
+that is, natural bent (which I have checked, though) of my nature is to music;
+and for that I have the greatest talent; indeed, not boasting,
+for God gave it me, I have an extraordinary musical talent,
+and feel it within me plainly that I could rise as high as any composer.
+But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician,
+because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which,
+it seems to me, I might do.  Question here, What is the province of music
+in the economy of the world?"
+==
+
+Similar aspirations he felt at this early age, probably eighteen,
+for grand literary labor, as the same note-book would bear witness.
+We see here the boy talking to himself, a boy who had found in himself
+a standard above anything in his fellows.
+
+The breaking out of the war summoned Sidney Lanier from books to arms.
+In April, 1861, he enlisted in the Confederate Army,
+with the Macon Volunteers of the Second Georgia Battalion,
+the first military organization which left Georgia for Virginia.
+From his childhood he had had a military taste.  Even as a small boy
+he had raised a company of boys armed with bows and arrows,
+and so well did he drill them that an honored place was granted them
+in the military parades of their elders.  Having volunteered as a private
+at the age of nineteen, he remained a private till the last year of the war.
+Three times he was offered promotion and refused it because
+it would separate him from his younger brother, who was his companion in arms,
+as their singularly tender devotion would not allow them to be parted.
+The first year of service in Virginia was easy and pleasant,
+and he spent his abundant leisure in music and the study of German,
+French, and Spanish.  He was in the battles of Seven Pines,
+Drewry's Bluffs, and the seven days' fighting about Richmond,
+culminating in the terrible struggle of Malvern Hill.  After this campaign
+he was transferred, with his brother, to the signal service,
+the joke among his less fortunate companions being that he was selected
+because he could play the flute.  His headquarters were now
+for a short period at Petersburg, where he had the advantage
+of a small local library, but where he began to feel the premonitions
+of that fatal disease, consumption, against which he battled
+for fifteen years.  The regular full inspirations required by the flute
+probably prolonged his life.  In 1863 his detachment was mounted
+and did service in Virginia and North Carolina.  At last the two brothers
+were separated, it coming in the duty of each to take charge of a vessel
+which was to run the blockade.  Sidney's vessel was captured,
+and he was for five months in Point Lookout prison, until he was exchanged
+(with his flute, for he never lost it), near the close of the war.
+Those were very hard days for him, and a picture of them is given
+in his "Tiger Lilies", the novel which he wrote two years afterward.
+It is a luxuriant, unpruned work, written in haste for the press
+within the space of three weeks, but one which gave rich promise of the poet.
+A chapter in the middle of the book, introducing the scenes
+of those four years of struggle, is wholly devoted to a remarkable metaphor,
+which becomes an allegory and a sermon, in which war is pictured
+as "a strange, enormous, terrible flower," which "the early spring of 1861
+brought to bloom besides innumerable violets and jessamines."
+He tells how the plant is grown; what arguments the horticulturists give
+for cultivating it; how Christ inveighed against it,
+and how its shades are damp and its odors unhealthy;
+and what a fine specimen was grown the other day in North America
+by "two wealthy landed proprietors, who combined all their resources
+of money, of blood, of bones, of tears, of sulphur, and what not,
+to make this the grandest specimen of modern horticulture."
+"It is supposed by some," says he, "that seed of this American specimen
+(now dead) yet remains in the land; but as for this author
+(who, with many friends, suffered from the unhealthy odors of the plant),
+he could find it in his heart to wish fervently that this seed,
+if there be verily any, might perish in the germ, utterly out of sight
+and life and memory, and out of the remote hope of resurrection,
+forever and ever, no matter in whose granary they are cherished!"
+Through those four years, though earnestly devoted to the cause,
+and fulfilling his duties with zeal, his horror of war grew to the end.
+He had entered it in a "crack" regiment, with a dandy uniform,
+and was first encamped near Norfolk, where the gardens,
+with the Northern market hopelessly cut off, were given freely
+to the soldiers, who lived in every luxury; and every man had his sweetheart
+in Norfolk.  But the tyranny and Christlessness of war oppressed him,
+though he loved the free life in the saddle and under the stars.
+
+In February, 1865, he was released from Point Lookout
+and undertook the weary return on foot to his home in Georgia,
+with the twenty-dollar gold piece which he had in his pocket when captured,
+and which was returned to him, with his other little effects, when he
+was released.  Of course he had the flute, which he had hidden in his sleeve
+when he entered the prison, and which had earned him some comforts.
+He reached home March 15th, with his strength utterly exhausted.
+There followed six weeks of desperate illness, and just as he began
+to recover from it his beloved mother died of consumption.
+He himself arose from his sick-bed with pronounced congestion of one lung,
+but found relief in two months of out-of-door life with an uncle
+at Point Clear, Mobile Bay.  From December, 1865, to April, 1867,
+he filled a clerkship in Montgomery, Ala., and in the next month
+made his first visit to New York on the business of publishing
+his "Tiger Lilies", written in April.  In September, 1867, he took charge
+of a country academy of nearly a hundred pupils in Prattville, Ala.,
+and was married in December of the same year to Miss Mary Day,
+daughter of Charles Day, of Macon.
+
+To the years before Mr. Lanier's marriage belong a dozen poems
+included in this volume.  Two of them are translations from the German
+made during the war; the others are songs and miscellaneous poems,
+full of flush and force, but not yet moulded by those laws of art
+of whose authority he had hardly become conscious.  His access to books
+was limited, and he expressed himself more with music than with literature,
+taking down the notes of birds, and writing music to his own songs
+or those of Tennyson.
+
+In January, 1868, the next month after his marriage,
+he suffered his first hemorrhage from the lungs, and returned in May to Macon,
+in very low health.  Here he remained, studying and afterward practising law
+with his father, until December, 1872.  During this period there came,
+in the spring and summer of 1870, a more alarming decline with settled cough.
+He went for treatment to New York, where he remained two months,
+returning in October greatly improved and strong in hope;
+but again at home he lost ground steadily.  He was now fairly engaged
+in the brave struggle against consumption, which could have but one end.
+So precarious already was his health that a change of residence
+was determined on, and in December, 1872, he went to San Antonio, Texas,
+in search of a permanent home there, leaving his wife and children meanwhile
+at Macon.  But the climate did not prove favorable and he returned
+in April, 1873.
+
+During these five years a sense of holy obligation, based on the conviction
+that special talents had been given him, and that the time might be short,
+rested upon Lanier, until it was impossible to resist it longer.
+He felt himself called to something other than a country attorney's practice.
+It was the compulsion of waiting utterance, not yet enfranchised.
+From Texas he wrote to his wife:
+
+==
+"Were it not for some circumstances which make such a proposition
+seem absurd in the highest degree, I would think that I am shortly to die,
+and that my spirit hath been singing its swan-song before dissolution.
+All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle,
+unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody.
+The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs,
+passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs and body-songs
+hath blown upon me in quick gusts like the breath of passion,
+and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams, whereof each wave is at once
+a vision and a melody."
+==
+
+Now fully determined to give himself to music and literature so long
+as he could keep death at bay, he sought a land of books.  Taking his flute
+and his pen for sword and staff, he turned his face northward.
+After visiting New York he made his home in Baltimore, December, 1873,
+under engagement as first flute for the Peabody Symphony Concerts.
+
+With his settlement in Baltimore begins a story of as brave and sad a struggle
+as the history of genius records.  On the one hand was the opportunity
+for study, and the full consciousness of power, and a will never subdued;
+and on the other a body wasting with consumption, that must be forced
+to task beyond its strength not merely to express the thoughts of beauty
+which strove for utterance, but from the necessity of providing bread
+for his babes.  His father would have had him return to Macon,
+and settle down with him in business and share his income,
+but that would have been the suicide of every duty and ambition.
+So he wrote from Baltimore to his father, November 29, 1873:
+
+==
+"I have given your last letter the fullest and most careful consideration.
+After doing so I feel sure that Macon is not the place for me.
+If you could taste the delicious crystalline air, and the champagne breeze
+that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure
+that in point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life
+is ten times as great here as in Macon.  Then, as to business, why should I,
+nay, how CAN I, settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer
+for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty
+almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better?
+Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal,
+have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player in the world;
+and several others, of equally authoritative judgment,
+have given me an almost equal encouragement to work with my pen.
+(Of course I protest against the necessity which makes me write
+such things about myself.  I only do so because I so appreciate
+the love and tenderness which prompt you to desire me with you
+that I will make the fullest explanation possible of my course,
+out of reciprocal honor and respect for the motives which lead you
+to think differently from me.)  My dear father, think how, for twenty years,
+through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness,
+through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army
+and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement
+of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways --
+I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances,
+and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures
+of music and of poetry have steadily kept in my heart
+so that I could not banish them.  Does it not seem to you as to me,
+that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the devotees
+of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly,
+and through so much bitterness?"
+==
+
+What could his father do but yield?  And what could he do
+during the following years of his son's fight for standing-room on the planet
+but help?  But for that help, generously given by his father and brother,
+as their ability allowed, at the critical times of utter prostration,
+the end would not have been long delayed.  For the little
+that was necessary to give his household a humble support
+it was not easy for the most strenuous young author to win by his pen
+in the intervals between his hemorrhages.  He asked for very little,
+only the supply of absolute necessities, what it would be easy
+for a well man to earn, but what it was very hard for a man to earn
+scarce able to leave his bed, dependent on the chance income had
+from poems and articles in magazines that would take them, or from courses
+of lectures in schools.  Often for months together he could do no work.
+He was driven to Texas, to Florida, to Pennsylvania, to North Carolina,
+to try to recover health from pine breaths and clover blossoms.
+Supported by the implicit faith of one heart, which fully believed
+in his genius, and was willing to wait if he could only find his opportunity,
+his courage never failed.  He still kept before himself first his ideal
+and his mission, and he longed to live that he might accomplish them.
+It must have been in such a mood that, soon after coming to Baltimore,
+he wrote to his wife, who was detained in the South:
+
+==
+"So many great ideas for Art are born to me each day, I am swept away
+into the land of All-Delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind;
+and I find within myself such entire, yet humble, confidence
+of possessing every single element of power to carry them all out,
+save the little paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us
+clothed and fed in the meantime.
+
+"I do not understand this."
+==
+
+Lanier's was an unknown name, and he would write only in obedience
+to his own sense of art, and he did not fit his wares
+to the taste of those who buy verse.  It was to comfort his wife,
+in this period of greatest uncertainty whether he had not erred
+in launching in the sea of literature, that he wrote again
+a letter of frankest confession:
+
+==
+"I will make to thee a little confession of faith, telling thee,
+my dearer self, in words, what I do not say to my not-so-dear-self
+except in more modest feeling.
+
+"Know, then, that disappointments were inevitable, and will still come
+until I have fought the battle which every great artist has had to fight
+since time began.  This -- dimly felt while I was doubtful
+of my own vocation and powers -- is clear as the sun to me now that I KNOW,
+through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be
+in life and utterance, a great poet.
+
+"The philosophy of my disappointments is, that there is so much CLEVERNESS
+standing betwixt me and the public . . .  Richard Wagner is
+sixty years old and over, and one-half of the most cultivated artists
+of the most cultivated art-land, quoad music, still think him an absurdity.
+Says Schumann in one of his letters:  `The publishers will not listen to me
+for a moment'; and dost thou not remember Schubert, and Richter,
+and John Keats, and a sweet host more?
+
+"Now this is written because I sit here in my room daily,
+and picture THEE picturing ME worn, and troubled, or disheartened;
+and because I do not wish thee to think up any groundless sorrow in thy soul.
+Of course I have my keen sorrows, momentarily more keen than I would like
+any one to know; but I thank God that in a knowledge of Him and of myself
+which cometh to me daily in fresh revelations, I have a steadfast
+firmament of blue, in which all clouds soon dissolve.
+I have wanted to say this several times of late, but it is not easy
+to bring one's self to talk so of one's self, even to one's dearer self.
+
+"Have then . . . no fears nor anxieties in my behalf;
+look upon all my disappointments as mere witnesses that art has no enemy
+so unrelenting as cleverness, and as rough weather that seasons timber.
+It is of little consequence whether *I* fail; the *I* in the matter
+is a small business:  `Que mon nom soit fle/tri, que la France soit libre!'
+quoth Danton; which is to say, interpreted by my environment:
+Let my name perish -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
+and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it."
+==
+
+Having now given sacredly to art what vital forces his will could command,
+he devoted himself, with an intense energy, to the study
+of English literature, making himself a master of Anglo-Saxon
+and early English texts, and pursuing the study down to our own times.
+He read freely, also, and with a scholar's nice eagerness,
+in further fields of study, but all with a view to gathering the stores
+which a full man might draw from in the practice of poetic art;
+for he had that large compass which sees and seeks truths
+in various excursions, and no field of history, or philology, or philosophy,
+or science found him unsympathetic.  The opportunity for these studies
+opened a new era in his development, while we begin to find
+a crystallization of that theory of formal verse which he adopted,
+and a growing power to master it.  To this artistic side of poetry he gave,
+from this time, very special study, until he had formulated it
+in his lectures in the Johns Hopkins University, and in his volume
+"The Science of English Verse".
+
+But from this time the struggle against his fatal disease
+was conscious and constant.  In May, 1874, he visited Florida
+under an engagement to write a book for distribution by a railroad company.
+Two months of the summer were spent with his family at Sunnyside, Ga.,
+where "Corn" was written.  This poem, published in `Lippincott's Magazine',
+was much copied, and made him known to many admirers.
+No one of these was of so much value to him as Bayard Taylor,
+at whose suggestion he was chosen to write the cantata
+for the opening of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia,
+and with whom he carried on a correspondence so long as Mr. Taylor lived.
+To Mr. Taylor he owed introductions of value to other writers,
+and for his sympathy and aid his letters prove that he felt very grateful.
+In his first letter to Mr. Taylor, written August 7, 1875, he says:
+
+==
+"I could never describe to you what a mere drought and famine
+my life has been, as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy
+one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one
+is in conversational relation with men of letters, with travellers,
+with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things.
+Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation in the South
+since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying."
+==
+
+The selection of Mr. Lanier to write the Centennial Cantata
+first brought his name into general notice; but its publication,
+in advance of the music by Dudley Buck, was the occasion
+of an immense amount of ridicule, more or less good-humored.  It was written
+by a musician to go with music under the new relations of poetry to music
+brought about by the great modern development of the orchestra,
+and was not to be judged without its orchestral accompaniment.
+The criticism it received pained our poet, but did not at all affect his faith
+in his theories of art.  To his father he wrote from New York, May 8, 1876:
+
+==
+"My experience in the varying judgments given about poetry . . .
+has all converged upon one solitary principle, and the experience
+of the artist in all ages is reported by history to be of precisely
+the same direction.  That principle is, that the artist shall put forth,
+humbly and lovingly, and without bitterness against opposition,
+the very best and highest that is within him, utterly regardless
+of contemporary criticism.  What possible claim can contemporary criticism
+set up to respect -- that criticism which crucified Jesus Christ,
+stoned Stephen, hooted Paul for a madman, tried Luther for a criminal,
+tortured Galileo, bound Columbus in chains, drove Dante into a hell of exile,
+made Shakespeare write the sonnet, `When in disgrace with fortune
+and men's eyes', gave Milton five pounds for `Paradise Lost',
+kept Samuel Johnson cooling his heels on Lord Chesterfield's doorstep,
+reviled Shelley as an unclean dog, killed Keats, cracked jokes on Glueck,
+Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner, and committed so many other
+impious follies and stupidities that a thousand letters like this
+could not suffice even to catalogue them?"
+==
+
+Since first coming to the North in September, 1873,
+Mr. Lanier had been separated from his family.  The two happy months with them
+after his visit to Florida was followed by several other briefer visits.
+The winters of 1874-75 and 1875-76 found him still in Baltimore,
+playing at the Peabody, pursuing his studies and writing the "Symphony",
+the "Psalm of the West", the "Cantata", and some shorter poems,
+with a series of prose descriptive articles for `Lippincott's Magazine'.
+In the summer of 1876 he called his family to join him at West Chester, Pa.
+This was authorized by an engagement to write the Life of Charlotte Cushman.
+The work was begun, but the engagement was broken two months later,
+owing to the illness of the friend of the family who was to provide
+the material from the mass of private correspondence.
+
+Following this disappointment a new cold was incurred,
+and his health became so much impaired that in November
+the physicians told him he could not expect to live longer than May,
+unless he sought a warmer climate.  About the middle of December
+he started with his wife for the Gulf coast, and visited Tampa, Fla.,
+gaining considerable benefit from the mild climate.  In April he ventured
+North again, tarrying through the spring with his friends in Georgia;
+and, after a summer with his own family in Chadd's Ford, Pa.,
+a final move was ventured in October to Baltimore as home.
+Here he resumed his old place in the Peabody orchestra,
+and continued to play there for three winters.
+
+The Old English studies which he had pursued with such deep delight,
+he now put to use in a course of lectures on Elizabethan Verse,
+given in a private parlor to a class of thirty ladies.
+This was followed by a more ambitious "Shakespeare Course" of lectures
+in the smaller hall of the Peabody Institute.  The undertaking
+was immensely cheered on and greatly praised, but was a financial failure.
+It opened the way, however, to one of the chiefest delights of his life,
+his appointment as lecturer on English literature for the ensuing year
+at the Johns Hopkins University.  After some correspondence on the subject
+with President Gilman, he received notice on his birthday, 1879,
+of his appointment, with a salary attached (it may be mentioned),
+which gave him the first income assured in any year since his marriage.
+This stimulated him to new life, for he was now barely able to walk
+after a severe illness and renewed hemorrhage.
+
+The last two years had been more fruitful in verse than any
+that had gone before, as he had now acquired confidence in his view
+of the principles of art.  In 1875 he had written:
+
+==
+"In this little song [`Special Pleading'] I have begun to dare
+to give myself some freedom in my own peculiar style, and have allowed myself
+to treat words, similes, and metres with such freedom as I desired.
+The result convinces me that I can do so now safely."
+==
+
+Among his poems of this period may be mentioned "A Song of the Future",
+"The Revenge of Hamish", and -- what are excellent examples of the kind of art
+of which he had now gained command -- "The Song of the Chattahoochee",
+and "A Song of Love".  It was at this time that he wrote
+"The Marshes of Glynn", his most ambitious poem thus far,
+and one which he intended to follow with a series of "Hymns of the Marshes",
+which he left incomplete.
+
+The summer of 1879 was spent at Rockingham Springs, Va.,
+and here, in six weeks, was begun and finished his volume,
+"Science of English Verse".  Another severe illness prostrated him
+in September, but the necessity of work allowed no time for such distractions.
+In October he opened three lecture courses in young ladies' schools;
+and through the winter, notwithstanding a most menacing illness
+about January 1st, he was in continuous rehearsals and concerts
+at the Peabody, and besides miscellaneous writings and studies,
+gave weekly ten lectures upon English literature, two of them public
+at the University, two to University classes, and the remaining six
+at private schools.  The University public lectures upon English Verse,
+more especially Shakespeare's, in part contained, and in part
+were introductory to, "The Science of English Verse".
+
+The final consuming fever opened in May, 1880.  In July he went
+with Mrs. Lanier and her father to West Chester, Pa.,
+where a fourth son was born in August.  Unable to bear the fall climate,
+he returned, alone, early in September to his Baltimore home.
+
+This winter brought a hand-to-hand battle for life.  In December he came
+to the very door of death.  Before February he had essayed the open air
+to test himself for his second University lecture course.
+His improvement ceased on that first day of exposure.
+Nevertheless, by April he had gone through the twelve lectures
+(there were to have been twenty), which were later published
+under the title "The English Novel".  A few of the earlier lectures
+he penned himself; the rest he was obliged to dictate to his wife.
+With the utmost care of himself, going in a closed carriage
+and sitting during his lecture, his strength was so exhausted
+that the struggle for breath in the carriage on his return
+seemed each time to threaten the end.  Those who heard him
+listened with a sort of fascinated terror, as in doubt
+whether the hoarded breath would suffice to the end of the hour.
+
+It was in December of this winter, when too feeble to raise his food
+to his mouth, with a fever temperature of 104 degrees,
+that he pencilled his last and greatest poem, "Sunrise",
+one of his projected series of the "Hymns of the Marshes".
+It seemed as if he were in fear that he would die with it unuttered.
+
+At the end of April, 1881, he made his last visit to New York,
+to complete arrangements with Charles Scribner's Sons
+for the publication of other books of the King Arthur series.
+But in a day or two aggravated illness compelled his wife to join him,
+and his medical adviser pronounced tent-life in a pure, high climate
+to be the last hope.  His brother Clifford was summoned from Alabama
+to assist in carrying out the plans for encamping near Asheville, N.C.,
+whither the brothers went soon after the middle of May.
+By what seemed a hopeful coincidence he was tendered a commission
+to write an account of the region in a railroad interest,
+as he had done six years before with Florida.  This provided a monthly salary,
+which was to be the dependence of himself and family.
+The materials for this book were collected, and the book thoroughly shaped
+in the author's mind when July ended; but his increasing anguish
+kept him from dictating, often from all speech for hours,
+and he carried the plan away with him.
+
+A site was chosen on the side of Richmond Hill, three miles from Asheville.
+Clifford returned to Alabama, after seeing the tents pitched and floored,
+and Mrs. Lanier came with her infant to take her place as nurse
+for the invalid.  Early in July Mr. Lanier the father, with his wife,
+joined them in the encampment.  As the passing weeks
+brought no improvement to the sufferer he started, August 4th,
+on a carriage journey across the mountains with his wife,
+to test the climate of Lynn, Polk County, N. C.  There a deadly illness
+attacked him.  No return was possible, and Clifford was summoned by telegraph,
+and assisted his father in removing the encampment to Lynn.  Deceived by hope,
+and pressed by business cares, Clifford went home August 24th,
+and the father and his wife five days later, expecting to return soon.
+Mrs. Lanier's own words, as written in the brief "annals" of his life
+furnished me, will tell the end:
+
+==
+"We are left alone" (August 29th) "with one another.
+On the last night of the summer comes a change.  His love and immortal will
+hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week,
+until the forenoon of September 7th, and then falls the frost,
+and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission
+to the adored will of God."
+==
+
+So the tragedy ended, the manly struggle carried on
+with indomitable resolution against illness and want and care.
+Just when he seemed to have conquered success enough
+to assure him a little leisure to write his poems,
+then his feeble but resolute hold upon earth was exhausted.
+What he left behind him was written with his life-blood.
+High above all the evils of the world he lived in a realm of ideal serenity,
+as if it were the business of life to conquer difficulties.
+
+This is not the place for an essay on the genius of Sidney Lanier.
+It is enough to call attention to some marked points
+in his character and work.
+
+He had more than Milton's love for music.  He sung like a bard
+to the accompaniment of a harp.  He lived in sweet sounds:
+forever conscious of a ceaseless flow of melody which,
+if resisted for a while by business occupations, would swell again
+in its natural current and break at his bidding into audible music.
+
+We have the following recognition of his genius from Asger Hamerik,
+his Director for six years in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra of Baltimore:
+
+==
+"To him as a child in his cradle Music was given:  the heavenly gift
+to feel and to express himself in tones.  His human nature
+was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute, or the lyre of Apollo,
+needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty out into the world.
+It was indeed irresistible that he should turn with those poetical feelings
+which transcend language to the penetrating gentleness of the flute,
+or the infinite passion of the violin; for there was an agreement,
+a spiritual correspondence between his nature and theirs,
+so that they mutually absorbed and expressed each other.
+In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument,
+but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration.
+Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry;
+they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were,
+suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights
+which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees.
+No doubt his firm faith in these lofty idealities gave him the power
+to present them to our imaginations, and thus by the aid
+of the higher language of Music to inspire others with that sense of beauty
+in which he constantly dwelt.
+
+"His conception of music was not reached by an analytic study of note by note,
+but was intuitive and spontaneous; like a woman's reason:  he felt it so,
+because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required
+no more logical form of reasoning.
+
+"His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned --
+for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance
+the superiority of the momentary living inspiration
+to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship.
+His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art.
+
+"I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played
+the flute-concerto of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878:
+his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows,
+noble joys, the orchestra softly responding.  The audience was spellbound.
+Such distinction, such refinement!  He stood, the master, the genius."
+==
+
+In the one novel which he wrote at the age of twenty-five,
+he makes one of his characters say:
+
+==
+"To make a HOME out of a household, given the raw materials --
+to wit, wife, children, a friend or two, and a house --
+two other things are necessary.  These are a good fire and good music.
+And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year,
+I may say music is the one essential."  "Late explorers say they have found
+some nations that have no God; but I have not read of any that had no music."
+"Music means harmony, harmony means love, love means -- God!"
+==
+
+The theoretical relation between music and poetry would hardly
+have attracted his study had it not been that his mind
+was as truly philosophically and scientifically accurate,
+as it was poetically sensuous and imaginative.  In a letter
+to Mr. E. C. Stedman he complained that "in all directions
+the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism
+was without a scientific basis for even the most elementary of its judgments."
+
+Although the work was irksome to him, he could not go on
+writing at hap-hazard, trusting to his own mere taste to decide what was good,
+until he had settled for himself scientifically what are the laws
+of poetical construction.  This accounts for his exposition
+of the laws of beauty in that unique work, "The Science of English Verse",
+which was based on Dante's thought, "The best conceptions cannot be
+save where science and genius are."  The book is chiefly taken up
+with a discussion of rhythm and tone-color in verse; and it is
+well within the truth to say that it is the most complete and thorough
+original investigation of the formal element in poetry in existence.
+The rhythm he treated as the marking of definite time measurements,
+which could be indicated by bars in musical notation,
+having their regular time and their regular number of notes,
+with their proper accent.  To this time measurement Mr. Lanier gave
+the pre-eminence which Coleridge and other writers have given to accent.
+He conceived of a line of poetry as consisting of a definite number
+of bars (or feet), each bar containing, in dactylic metre,
+three equal "eighth notes", of which the first is accented,
+or in iambic metre (which has the same "triple" time),
+of one "eighth note", and one "quarter note", with the accent on the second.
+Thus the accented syllable is not necessarily "longer" than the unaccented,
+except as the rhythm happens to make it so.  This idea is very fully developed
+and with great wealth of curious Old English illustrations.
+Under the designation of "tone-color" he treats very suggestively
+of rhyme, alliteration, and vowel and consonant distribution,
+showing how the recurrence of euphonic vowels and consonants
+secures that rich variety of tone-color which music gives in orchestration.
+The work thus breaks away from the classic grammarian's tables
+of trochees and anapaests, and discusses the forms of poetry
+in the terms of music; and of both tone-color and of rhythm he would say,
+in the words of old King James, "the very touch-stone whereof is music."
+
+Illustrations of these technical beauties of musical rhythm,
+and vowel and consonant distribution, abound in Lanier's poetry.
+Such is the "Song of the Chattahoochee", which deserves a place
+beside Tennyson's "Brook".  It strikes a higher key,
+and is scarcely less musical.  Such passages are numerous
+in his "Sunrise on the Marshes", as in the lines beginning,
+
+    "Not slower than majesty moves,"
+
+or the other lines beginning,
+
+    "Oh, what if a sound should be made!"
+
+These investigations in the science of verse bore their fruit especially
+in the poems written during the last three or four years of his life,
+when his sense of the solemn sacredness of Art became more profound,
+and he acquired a greater ease in putting into practice his theory of verse.
+And this made him thoroughly original.  He was no imitator
+either of Tennyson or of Swinburne, though musically he is nearer to them
+than to any others of his day.  We constantly notice in his verse
+that dainty effect which the ear loves, and which comes
+from deft marshalling of consonants and vowels, so that they shall add their
+suppler and subtler reinforcement to the steady infantry tramp of rhythm.
+Of this delicate art, which is much more than mere alliteration,
+which is concerned with dominant accented vowels as well as consonants,
+with the easy flow of liquids and fricatives, and with
+the progressive opening or closing of the organs of articulation,
+the laws are not easy to formulate, but examples abound in Lanier's poems.
+
+Mr. Stedman, poet and critic, raises the question whether Lanier's
+extreme conjunction of the artistic with the poetic temperament,
+which he says no man has more clearly displayed, did not somewhat hamper
+and delay his power of adequate expression.  Possibly,
+but he was building not for the day, but for time.  He must work out
+his laws of poetry, even if he had almost to invent its language;
+for to him was given the power of analysis as well as of construction,
+and he was too conscientious to do anything else than to find out
+what was best and why, and then tell and teach it as he had learnt it,
+even if men said that his late spring was delaying bud and blossom.
+
+But it would be a great mistake to find in Lanier only, or chiefly,
+the artist.  He had the substance of poetry.  He possessed both elements,
+as Stedman says, "in extreme conjunction."  He overflowed with fancy.
+His imagination needed to be held in check.  This was recognized in "Corn",
+and appears more fully in "The Symphony", the first productions
+which gave him wide recognition as a poet.  Illustrations too much abound
+to allow selection.
+
+And for the substance of invention there needed, in Lanier's judgment,
+large and exact knowledge of the world's facts.  A poet must be
+a student of things, truths, and men.  His own studies were wide
+and his scholarship accurate.  He did not believe that art comes
+all by instinct, without work.  In one of his keen criticisms of poets
+he said of Edgar A. Poe, whom he esteemed more highly
+than his countrymen are wont to do:  "The trouble with Poe was,
+he did not KNOW enough.  He needed to know a good many more things
+in order to be a great poet."  Lanier had "a passion for the exact truth,"
+and all of it.
+
+The intense sacredness with which Lanier invested Art held him thrall
+to the highest ethical ideas.  To him the most beautiful thing of all
+was Right.  He loved the words, "the beauty of holiness",
+and it pleased him to reverse the phrase and call it "the holiness of beauty".
+When one reads Lanier, he is reminded of two writers, Milton and Ruskin.
+More than any other great English authors they are dominated by
+this beauty of holiness.  Lanier was saturated with it.
+It shines out of every line he wrote.  It is not that he never wrote
+a maudlin line, but that every thought was lofty.  That it must be so
+was a first postulate of his Art.  Hear his words to the students
+of Johns Hopkins University:
+
+==
+"Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination
+of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman;
+yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh,
+if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular
+the physical beauty suggests a moral ugliness, that sculptor --
+unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose --
+may as well give over his marble for paving-stones.
+Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work.
+For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived
+how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines
+which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire
+with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty -- that he, in short,
+who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy
+in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing,
+burn as one fire, shine as one light within him; he is not yet
+the great artist."
+==
+
+And he returns to the theme:
+
+==
+"Can not one say with authority to the young artist, whether working
+in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel:
+So far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere
+with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction
+that unless you are suffused -- soul and body, one might say --
+with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love;
+that is, the love of all things in their proper relation;
+unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty;
+unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with love;
+unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness;
+in a word, unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, goodness, and love,
+abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist."
+==
+
+Thus was it true, as was said of his work by his associate,
+Dr. Wm. Hand Browne, that "one thread of purpose runs through it all.
+This thread is found in his fervid love for his fellow-men,
+and his never ceasing endeavors to kindle an enthusiasm
+for beauty, purity, nobility of life, which he held it the poet's first duty
+to teach and to exemplify."  And so there came into his verse
+a solemn, worshipful element, dominating it everywhere,
+and giving loftiness to its beauty.  For he was the democrat whom he described
+in contrast to Whitman's mere brawny, six-footed, open-shirted hero,
+whose strength was only that of the biceps:
+
+==
+"My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure,
+the democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future,
+may have a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough
+to handle hell; he shall play ball with the earth;
+and albeit his stature may be no more than a boy's,
+he shall still be taller than the great redwoods of California;
+his height shall be the height of great resolution,
+and love, and faith, and beauty, and knowledge, and subtle meditation;
+his head shall be forever among the stars."
+==
+
+This standard he could not forget in his judgments of artists.
+There was something in Whitman which "refreshed him like harsh salt spray,"
+but to Whitman's lawlessness of art he was an utter foe.
+We find it written down in his notes:
+
+==
+"Whitman is poetry's butcher.  Huge raw collops slashed from the rump
+of poetry, and never mind gristle -- is what Whitman feeds our souls with."
+
+"As near as I can make it out, Whitman's argument seems to be, that,
+because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable,
+and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God."
+==
+
+So he says of Swinburne:
+
+==
+"He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold,
+but no food therein save pepper and salt."
+==
+
+And of William Morris:
+
+==
+"He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset,
+and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile."
+==
+
+Though not what would be called a religious writer,
+Lanier's large and deep thought took him to the deepest spiritual faiths,
+and the vastness of Nature drew him to a trust in the Infinite above us.
+Thus, his young search after God and truth brought him
+into the membership of the Presbyterian Church while at Oglethorpe College;
+and though in after years his creed became broader than that
+imposed by the Church he had joined on its clergy, he could not outgrow
+the simple faith and consecration which are all it requires of its membership.
+His college notebook records his earnestness;
+
+==
+"Liberty, patriotism, and civilization are on their knees
+before the men of the South, and with clasped hands and straining eyes
+are begging them to become Christians."
+==
+
+How naturally his large faith in God finds expression
+in his "Marshes of Glynn"; or his reverent discipleship
+of the great Artist and Master in his "Ballad of the Trees and the Master",
+or his "The Crystal", which was Christ.  Yet, with not a whit less
+of worshipfulness and consecration, there grew in him a repugnance
+to the sectarianism of the Churches which put him somewhat out of sympathy
+with their formal organizations.  He wrote, in what may have been
+a sketch for a poem:
+
+==
+"I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God.
+I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth.
+Then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground;
+and I looked and my cheek lay close to a violet.  Then my heart took courage,
+and I said:
+
+    `I know that thou art the word of my God, dear Violet:
+    And Oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads.
+    Measure what space a violet stands above the ground;
+    'Tis no further climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that.'"
+==
+
+It was this quality, high and consecrate, as of a palmer with his vow,
+this knightly valiance, this constant San Greal quest
+after the lofty in character and aim, this passion for Good and Love,
+which fellows him rather with Milton and Ruskin than with
+the less sturdily built poets of his day, and which puts him
+in sharpest contrast with the school led by Swinburne --
+with Rossetti and Morris as his followers hard after him --
+a school whose reed has a short gamut, and plays but two notes, Mors and Eros,
+hopeless death and lawless love.  But poetry is larger and finer
+than they know.  Its face is toward the world's future;
+it does not maunder after the flower-decked nymphs and yellow-skirted fays
+that have forever fled -- and good riddance -- their haunted springs
+and tangled thickets.  It can feed on its growing sweet and fresh faiths,
+but will draw foul contagion from the rank mists that float
+over old and cold fables.  For all knowledge is food, as faith is wine,
+to a genius like Lanier.  A poet genius has great common sense.
+He lives in to-day and to-morrow, not in yesterday.
+Such men were Shakespeare and Goethe.  The age of poetry is not past;
+there is nothing in culture or science hostile to it.
+Milton was one of the world's great poets, but he was
+the most cultured and scholarly and statesmanlike man of his day.
+He was no dreamer of dead dreams.  Neither was Lanier a dreamer.
+He came late to the opportunity he longed for, but when he came to it
+he was a tremendous student, not of music alone, but of language,
+of philosophy, and of science.  He loved science.  He was an inventor.
+He had all the instincts and ambitions of this nineteenth century.
+But that only made his range of poetic thought wider as his outlook
+became larger.  The world is opening to the poet with every question
+the crucible asks of the elements, with every spectrum
+the prism steals from a star.  The old he has and all the new.
+
+All this a man of Lanier's breadth understood fully,
+for he had a large capacity and he sought a full equipment.
+Perhaps the most remarkable feature of his gifts was their complete symmetry.
+It is hard to tell what register of perception, or sensibility,
+or wit, or will was lacking.  The constructive and the critical faculties,
+the imaginative and the practical, balanced each other.  His wit and humor
+played upon the soberer background of his more recognized qualities.
+The artist's withdrawn vision was at any need promptly exchanged
+for the exercise of that scrupulous exactitude called for in the routine
+of the law-office or the post-office clerkship or other business relations,
+or for the play of those energies exerted in camp or field.  There,
+so his comrades testify, the most wearing drudgeries of a soldier's life
+were always undertaken with notable alacrity and were thoroughly discharged,
+when he would as invariably return, the task being done, to the gentle region
+of his own high thoughts and the artist's realm of beauty.
+
+But how short was his day, and how slender his opportunity!
+From the time he was of age he waged a constant, courageous, hopeless fight
+against adverse circumstance for room to live and write.
+Much very dear, and sweet, and most sympathetic helpfulness
+he met in the city of his adoption, and from friends elsewhere,
+but he could not command the time and leisure which might have
+lengthened his life and given him opportunity to write the music and the verse
+with which his soul was teeming.  Yet short as was his literary life,
+and hindered though it were, its fruit will fill a large space
+in the garnering of the poetic art of our country.
+
+                                                       William Hayes Ward.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Mr. Lanier's published works, previous to the present volume,
+and exclusive of poems and essays published in literary journals,
+are the following:
+
+
+Tiger Lilies:  A novel.  16 mo, pp. v, 252.  Hurd & Houghton, New York, 1867.
+
+Florida:  Its Scenery, Climate and History.  12 mo, pp. 336.
+  J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, 1876.
+
+Poems.  Pp. 94.  J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, 1877.
+
+The Boy's Froissart.  Being Sir John Froissart's Chronicles of Adventure,
+  Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain, etc.  Edited for Boys.
+  Crown 8vo, pp. xxviii, 422.  Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1878.
+
+The Science of English Verse.  Crown 8vo, pp. xv, 315.
+  Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1880.
+
+The Boy's King Arthur.  Being Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur
+  and his Knights of the Round Table.  Edited for Boys.  Crown 8vo,
+  pp. xlviii, 404.  Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1880.
+
+The Boy's Mabinogion.  Being the Earliest Welsh Tales of King Arthur
+  in the famous Red Book of Hergest.  Edited for Boys.  Crown 8vo,
+  pp. xxiv, 378.  Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1881.
+
+The Boy's Percy.  Being Old Ballads of War, Adventure, and Love,
+  from Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
+  Edited for Boys.  Crown 8vo, pp. xxxii, 442.  Charles Scribner's Sons,
+  New York, 1882.
+
+The English Novel and the Principles of its Development.  Crown 8vo, pp. 293.
+  Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1883.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Poems of Sidney Lanier.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
+  | SUNRISE, the culminating poem, the highest vision of Sidney Lanier, |
+  |       was dedicated through his latest request to that friend       |
+  |          who indeed came into his life only near its close,         |
+  |           yet was at first meeting recognized by the poet           |
+  |                    as "the father of his spirit",                   |
+  |                          GEORGE WESTFELDT.                          |
+  |          When words were very few and the poem was unread,          |
+  |            even by any friend, the earnest bidding came:            |
+  |                        "Send him my SUNRISE,                        |
+  |        that he may know how entirely we are one in thought."        |
+  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Hymns of the Marshes.
+
+
+
+    I.  Sunrise.
+
+
+In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain
+ Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.
+The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;
+Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep,
+Interwoven with waftures of wild sea-liberties, drifting,
+ Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,
+    Came to the gates of sleep.
+Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-keep
+Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep,
+Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling:
+ The gates of sleep fell a-trembling
+Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter `Yes,'
+    Shaken with happiness:
+   The gates of sleep stood wide.
+
+I have waked, I have come, my beloved!  I might not abide:
+I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide
+   In your gospelling glooms, -- to be
+As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea.
+
+Tell me, sweet burly-bark'd, man-bodied Tree
+That mine arms in the dark are embracing, dost know
+From what fount are these tears at thy feet which flow?
+They rise not from reason, but deeper inconsequent deeps.
+    Reason's not one that weeps.
+   What logic of greeting lies
+Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?
+
+O cunning green leaves, little masters! like as ye gloss
+All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss
+The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan,
+            So,
+ (But would I could know, but would I could know,)
+With your question embroid'ring the dark of the question of man, --
+So, with your silences purfling this silence of man
+While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is under the ban,
+            Under the ban, --
+    So, ye have wrought me
+Designs on the night of our knowledge, -- yea, ye have taught me,
+            So,
+ That haply we know somewhat more than we know.
+
+    Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms,
+    Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,
+    Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves,
+    Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves,
+Oh, rain me down from your darks that contain me
+Wisdoms ye winnow from winds that pain me, --
+Sift down tremors of sweet-within-sweet
+That advise me of more than they bring, -- repeat
+Me the woods-smell that swiftly but now brought breath
+From the heaven-side bank of the river of death, --
+ Teach me the terms of silence, -- preach me
+ The passion of patience, -- sift me, -- impeach me, --
+            And there, oh there
+As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
+            Pray me a myriad prayer.
+
+   My gossip, the owl, -- is it thou
+That out of the leaves of the low-hanging bough,
+   As I pass to the beach, art stirred?
+    Dumb woods, have ye uttered a bird?
+
+          *    *    *    *    *
+
+Reverend Marsh, low-couched along the sea,
+ Old chemist, rapt in alchemy,
+    Distilling silence, -- lo,
+That which our father-age had died to know --
+ The menstruum that dissolves all matter -- thou
+Hast found it:  for this silence, filling now
+The globed clarity of receiving space,
+This solves us all:  man, matter, doubt, disgrace,
+Death, love, sin, sanity,
+Must in yon silence' clear solution lie.
+Too clear!  That crystal nothing who'll peruse?
+The blackest night could bring us brighter news.
+Yet precious qualities of silence haunt
+Round these vast margins, ministrant.
+Oh, if thy soul's at latter gasp for space,
+With trying to breathe no bigger than thy race
+Just to be fellow'd, when that thou hast found
+No man with room, or grace enough of bound
+To entertain that New thou tell'st, thou art, --
+'Tis here, 'tis here thou canst unhand thy heart
+And breathe it free, and breathe it free,
+By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty.
+
+The tide's at full:  the marsh with flooded streams
+Glimmers, a limpid labyrinth of dreams.
+Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies
+A rhapsody of morning-stars.  The skies
+Shine scant with one forked galaxy, --
+The marsh brags ten:  looped on his breast they lie.
+
+Oh, what if a sound should be made!
+Oh, what if a bound should be laid
+To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring, --
+To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string!
+I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam
+Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, --
+Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night,
+Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light,
+Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem
+ But a bubble that broke in a dream,
+If a bound of degree to this grace be laid,
+ Or a sound or a motion made.
+
+But no:  it is made:  list! somewhere, -- mystery, where?
+            In the leaves? in the air?
+In my heart? is a motion made:
+'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade.
+In the leaves 'tis palpable:  low multitudinous stirring
+Upwinds through the woods; the little ones, softly conferring,
+Have settled my lord's to be looked for; so; they are still;
+But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill, --
+And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river, --
+ And look where a passionate shiver
+ Expectant is bending the blades
+Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades, --
+And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,
+            Are beating
+The dark overhead as my heart beats, -- and steady and free
+Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea --
+   (Run home, little streams,
+   With your lapfulls of stars and dreams), --
+And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak,
+For list, down the inshore curve of the creek
+   How merrily flutters the sail, --
+And lo, in the East!  Will the East unveil?
+The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed
+A flush:  'tis dead; 'tis alive:  'tis dead, ere the West
+Was aware of it:  nay, 'tis abiding, 'tis unwithdrawn:
+ Have a care, sweet Heaven!  'Tis Dawn.
+
+Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is uprolled:
+ To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold
+Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the sea:
+The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee,
+ The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee,
+ Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee
+That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea.
+
+   Yet now the dew-drop, now the morning gray,
+   Shall live their little lucid sober day
+   Ere with the sun their souls exhale away.
+Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew
+The summ'd morn shines complete as in the blue
+Big dew-drop of all heaven:  with these lit shrines
+O'er-silvered to the farthest sea-confines,
+The sacramental marsh one pious plain
+Of worship lies.  Peace to the ante-reign
+Of Mary Morning, blissful mother mild,
+Minded of nought but peace, and of a child.
+
+Not slower than Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure
+Of motion, -- not faster than dateless Olympian leisure
+Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure, --
+The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling,
+   Forever revealing, revealing, revealing,
+Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, -- 'tis done!
+            Good-morrow, lord Sun!
+With several voice, with ascription one,
+The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul
+Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll,
+Cry good and past-good and most heavenly morrow, lord Sun.
+
+O Artisan born in the purple, -- Workman Heat, --
+Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet
+And be mixed in the death-cold oneness, -- innermost Guest
+At the marriage of elements, -- fellow of publicans, -- blest
+King in the blouse of flame, that loiterest o'er
+The idle skies yet laborest fast evermore, --
+Thou, in the fine forge-thunder, thou, in the beat
+Of the heart of a man, thou Motive, -- Laborer Heat:
+Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art yon sea's all news,
+With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues,
+Pearl-glint, shell-tint, ancientest perfectest hues
+Ever shaming the maidens, -- lily and rose
+Confess thee, and each mild flame that glows
+In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine,
+            It is thine, it is thine:
+
+Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl
+Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl
+In the magnet earth, -- yea, thou with a storm for a heart,
+Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part
+From part oft sundered, yet ever a globed light,
+Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright
+Than the eye of a man may avail of: --  manifold One,
+I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun:
+Old Want is awake and agog, every wrinkle a-frown;
+The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town:
+But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done;
+ I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun:
+How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run,
+            I am lit with the Sun.
+
+Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
+   Of traffic shall hide thee,
+Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
+            Hide thee,
+Never the reek of the time's fen-politics
+            Hide thee,
+And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
+And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
+ Labor, at leisure, in art, -- till yonder beside thee
+  My soul shall float, friend Sun,
+   The day being done.
+
+____
+Baltimore, December, 1880.
+
+
+
+   II.  Individuality.
+
+
+Sail on, sail on, fair cousin Cloud:
+Oh loiter hither from the sea.
+   Still-eyed and shadow-brow'd,
+Steal off from yon far-drifting crowd,
+And come and brood upon the marsh with me.
+
+Yon laboring low horizon-smoke,
+Yon stringent sail, toil not for thee
+   Nor me; did heaven's stroke
+The whole deep with drown'd commerce choke,
+No pitiless tease of risk or bottomry
+
+Would to thy rainy office close
+Thy will, or lock mine eyes from tears,
+   Part wept for traders'-woes,
+Part for that ventures mean as those
+In issue bind such sovereign hopes and fears.
+
+-- Lo, Cloud, thy downward countenance stares
+Blank on the blank-faced marsh, and thou
+   Mindest of dark affairs;
+Thy substance seems a warp of cares;
+Like late wounds run the wrinkles on thy brow.
+
+Well may'st thou pause, and gloom, and stare,
+A visible conscience:  I arraign
+   Thee, criminal Cloud, of rare
+Contempts on Mercy, Right, and Prayer, --
+Of murders, arsons, thefts, -- of nameless stain.
+
+(Yet though life's logic grow as gray
+As thou, my soul's not in eclipse.)
+   Cold Cloud, but yesterday
+Thy lightning slew a child at play,
+And then a priest with prayers upon his lips
+
+For his enemies, and then a bright
+Lady that did but ope the door
+   Upon the storming night
+To let a beggar in, -- strange spite, --
+And then thy sulky rain refused to pour
+
+Till thy quick torch a barn had burned
+Where twelve months' store of victual lay,
+   A widow's sons had earned;
+Which done, thy floods with winds returned, --
+The river raped their little herd away.
+
+What myriad righteous errands high
+Thy flames MIGHT run on!  In that hour
+   Thou slewest the child, oh why
+Not rather slay Calamity,
+Breeder of Pain and Doubt, infernal Power?
+
+Or why not plunge thy blades about
+Some maggot politician throng
+   Swarming to parcel out
+The body of a land, and rout
+The maw-conventicle, and ungorge Wrong?
+
+          What the cloud doeth
+          The Lord knoweth,
+          The cloud knoweth not.
+          What the artist doeth,
+          The Lord knoweth;
+          Knoweth the artist not?
+
+Well-answered! --  O dear artists, ye
+-- Whether in forms of curve or hue
+   Or tone your gospels be --
+Say wrong `This work is not of me,
+But God:'  it is not true, it is not true.
+
+Awful is Art because 'tis free.
+The artist trembles o'er his plan
+   Where men his Self must see.
+Who made a song or picture, he
+Did it, and not another, God nor man.
+
+My Lord is large, my Lord is strong:
+Giving, He gave:  my me is mine.
+   How poor, how strange, how wrong,
+To dream He wrote the little song
+I made to Him with love's unforced design!
+
+Oh, not as clouds dim laws have plann'd
+To strike down Good and fight for Ill, --
+   Oh, not as harps that stand
+In the wind and sound the wind's command:
+Each artist -- gift of terror! -- owns his will.
+
+For thee, Cloud, -- if thou spend thine all
+Upon the South's o'er-brimming sea
+   That needs thee not; or crawl
+To the dry provinces, and fall
+Till every convert clod shall give to thee
+
+Green worship; if thou grow or fade,
+Bring on delight or misery,
+   Fly east or west, be made
+Snow, hail, rain, wind, grass, rose, light, shade;
+What matters it to thee?  There is no thee.
+
+Pass, kinsman Cloud, now fair and mild:
+Discharge the will that's not thine own.
+   I work in freedom wild,
+But work, as plays a little child,
+Sure of the Father, Self, and Love, alone.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878-9.
+
+
+
+  III.  Marsh Song -- At Sunset.
+
+
+Over the monstrous shambling sea,
+   Over the Caliban sea,
+Bright Ariel-cloud, thou lingerest:
+Oh wait, oh wait, in the warm red West, --
+   Thy Prospero I'll be.
+
+Over the humped and fishy sea,
+   Over the Caliban sea
+O cloud in the West, like a thought in the heart
+Of pardon, loose thy wing, and start,
+   And do a grace for me.
+
+Over the huge and huddling sea,
+   Over the Caliban sea,
+Bring hither my brother Antonio, -- Man, --
+My injurer:  night breaks the ban;
+   Brother, I pardon thee.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1879-80.
+
+
+
+   IV.  The Marshes of Glynn.
+
+
+Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
+With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
+ Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, --
+            Emerald twilights, --
+            Virginal shy lights,
+Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
+When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
+Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
+ Of the heavenly woods and glades,
+That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
+    The wide sea-marshes of Glynn; --
+
+Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire, --
+Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
+Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves, --
+Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
+Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,
+Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good; --
+
+O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine,
+While the riotous noon-day sun of the June-day long did shine
+Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine;
+But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,
+And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,
+And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem
+Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, --
+Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
+And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
+ Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
+ And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
+ And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
+That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
+Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
+When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
+And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain
+Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, --
+
+Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
+ The vast sweet visage of space.
+To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,
+Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,
+ For a mete and a mark
+  To the forest-dark: --
+            So:
+Affable live-oak, leaning low, --
+Thus -- with your favor -- soft, with a reverent hand,
+(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
+Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
+On the firm-packed sand,
+            Free
+By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.
+
+ Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band
+ Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land.
+Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl
+As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows
+  the firm sweet limbs of a girl.
+Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,
+Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.
+And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?
+The world lies east:  how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!
+A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
+Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
+Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
+To the terminal blue of the main.
+
+Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
+ Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
+From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
+By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.
+
+Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
+Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
+Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
+Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
+God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
+And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.
+
+As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
+Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
+I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
+In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
+By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
+I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
+Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
+The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
+
+And the sea lends large, as the marsh:  lo, out of his plenty the sea
+Pours fast:  full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:
+Look how the grace of the sea doth go
+About and about through the intricate channels that flow
+    Here and there,
+            Everywhere,
+Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,
+And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,
+That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow
+ In the rose-and-silver evening glow.
+            Farewell, my lord Sun!
+The creeks overflow:  a thousand rivulets run
+'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;
+Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;
+Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
+And the sea and the marsh are one.
+
+How still the plains of the waters be!
+The tide is in his ecstasy.
+The tide is at his highest height:
+            And it is night.
+
+And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
+Roll in on the souls of men,
+But who will reveal to our waking ken
+The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
+            Under the waters of sleep?
+And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
+On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+Clover.
+
+Inscribed to the Memory of John Keats.
+
+
+
+Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields,
+My large unjealous Loves, many yet one --
+A grave good-morrow to your Graces, all,
+Fair tilth and fruitful seasons!
+                                  Lo, how still!
+The midmorn empties you of men, save me;
+Speak to your lover, meadows!  None can hear.
+I lie as lies yon placid Brandywine,
+Holding the hills and heavens in my heart
+For contemplation.
+                    'Tis a perfect hour.
+From founts of dawn the fluent autumn day
+Has rippled as a brook right pleasantly
+Half-way to noon; but now with widening turn
+Makes pause, in lucent meditation locked,
+And rounds into a silver pool of morn,
+Bottom'd with clover-fields.  My heart just hears
+Eight lingering strokes of some far village-bell,
+That speak the hour so inward-voiced, meseems
+Time's conscience has but whispered him eight hints
+Of revolution.  Reigns that mild surcease
+That stills the middle of each rural morn --
+When nimble noises that with sunrise ran
+About the farms have sunk again to rest;
+When Tom no more across the horse-lot calls
+To sleepy Dick, nor Dick husk-voiced upbraids
+The sway-back'd roan for stamping on his foot
+With sulphurous oath and kick in flank, what time
+The cart-chain clinks across the slanting shaft,
+And, kitchenward, the rattling bucket plumps
+Souse down the well, where quivering ducks quack loud,
+And Susan Cook is singing.
+                            Up the sky
+The hesitating moon slow trembles on,
+Faint as a new-washed soul but lately up
+From out a buried body.  Far about,
+A hundred slopes in hundred fantasies
+Most ravishingly run, so smooth of curve
+That I but seem to see the fluent plain
+Rise toward a rain of clover-blooms, as lakes
+Pout gentle mounds of plashment up to meet
+Big shower-drops.  Now the little winds, as bees,
+Bowing the blooms come wandering where I lie
+Mixt soul and body with the clover-tufts,
+Light on my spirit, give from wing and thigh
+Rich pollens and divine sweet irritants
+To every nerve, and freshly make report
+Of inmost Nature's secret autumn-thought
+Unto some soul of sense within my frame
+That owns each cognizance of the outlying five,
+And sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, all in one.
+
+Tell me, dear Clover (since my soul is thine,
+Since I am fain give study all the day,
+To make thy ways my ways, thy service mine,
+To seek me out thy God, my God to be,
+And die from out myself to live in thee) --
+Now, Cousin Clover, tell me in mine ear:
+Go'st thou to market with thy pink and green?
+Of what avail, this color and this grace?
+Wert thou but squat of stem and brindle-brown,
+Still careless herds would feed.  A poet, thou:
+What worth, what worth, the whole of all thine art?
+Three-Leaves, instruct me!  I am sick of price.
+Framed in the arching of two clover-stems
+Where-through I gaze from off my hill, afar,
+The spacious fields from me to Heaven take on
+Tremors of change and new significance
+To th' eye, as to the ear a simple tale
+Begins to hint a parable's sense beneath.
+The prospect widens, cuts all bounds of blue
+Where horizontal limits bend, and spreads
+Into a curious-hill'd and curious-valley'd Vast,
+Endless before, behind, around; which seems
+Th' incalculable Up-and-Down of Time
+Made plain before mine eyes.  The clover-stems
+Still cover all the space; but now they bear,
+For clover-blooms, fair, stately heads of men
+With poets' faces heartsome, dear and pale --
+Sweet visages of all the souls of time
+Whose loving service to the world has been
+In the artist's way expressed and bodied.  Oh,
+In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin,
+Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo,
+Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach,
+And Buddha (sweetest masters!  Let me lay
+These arms this once, this humble once, about
+Your reverend necks -- the most containing clasp,
+For all in all, this world e'er saw!) and there,
+Yet further on, bright throngs unnamable
+Of workers worshipful, nobilities
+In the Court of Gentle Service, silent men,
+Dwellers in woods, brooders on helpful art,
+And all the press of them, the fair, the large,
+That wrought with beauty.
+                           Lo, what bulk is here?
+Now comes the Course-of-things, shaped like an Ox,
+Slow browsing, o'er my hillside, ponderously --
+The huge-brawned, tame, and workful Course-of-things,
+That hath his grass, if earth be round or flat,
+And hath his grass, if empires plunge in pain
+Or faiths flash out.  This cool, unasking Ox
+Comes browsing o'er my hills and vales of Time,
+And thrusts me out his tongue, and curls it, sharp,
+And sicklewise, about my poets' heads,
+And twists them in, all -- Dante, Keats, Chopin,
+Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo,
+Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach,
+And Buddha, in one sheaf -- and champs and chews,
+With slantly-churning jaws, and swallows down;
+Then slowly plants a mighty forefoot out,
+And makes advance to futureward, one inch.
+So:  they have played their part.
+                                   And to this end?
+This, God?  This, troublous-breeding Earth?  This, Sun
+Of hot, quick pains?  To this no-end that ends,
+These Masters wrought, and wept, and sweated blood,
+And burned, and loved, and ached with public shame,
+And found no friends to breathe their loves to, save
+Woods and wet pillows?  This was all?  This Ox?
+"Nay," quoth a sum of voices in mine ear,
+"God's clover, we, and feed His Course-of-things;
+The pasture is God's pasture; systems strange
+Of food and fiberment He hath, whereby
+The general brawn is built for plans of His
+To quality precise.  Kinsman, learn this:
+The artist's market is the heart of man;
+The artist's price, some little good of man.
+Tease not thy vision with vain search for ends.
+The End of Means is art that works by love.
+The End of Ends . . . in God's Beginning's lost."
+
+____
+West Chester, Pa., Summer of 1876.
+
+
+
+
+The Waving of the Corn.
+
+
+
+ Ploughman, whose gnarly hand yet kindly wheeled
+Thy plough to ring this solitary tree
+ With clover, whose round plat, reserved a-field,
+In cool green radius twice my length may be --
+ Scanting the corn thy furrows else might yield,
+To pleasure August, bees, fair thoughts, and me,
+   That here come oft together -- daily I,
+   Stretched prone in summer's mortal ecstasy,
+Do stir with thanks to thee, as stirs this morn
+            With waving of the corn.
+
+ Unseen, the farmer's boy from round the hill
+Whistles a snatch that seeks his soul unsought,
+ And fills some time with tune, howbeit shrill;
+The cricket tells straight on his simple thought --
+ Nay, 'tis the cricket's way of being still;
+The peddler bee drones in, and gossips naught;
+   Far down the wood, a one-desiring dove
+   Times me the beating of the heart of love:
+And these be all the sounds that mix, each morn,
+            With waving of the corn.
+
+ From here to where the louder passions dwell,
+Green leagues of hilly separation roll:
+ Trade ends where yon far clover ridges swell.
+Ye terrible Towns, ne'er claim the trembling soul
+ That, craftless all to buy or hoard or sell,
+From out your deadly complex quarrel stole
+   To company with large amiable trees,
+   Suck honey summer with unjealous bees,
+And take Time's strokes as softly as this morn
+            Takes waving of the corn.
+
+____
+West Chester, Pa., 1876.
+
+
+
+
+The Song of the Chattahoochee.
+
+
+
+   Out of the hills of Habersham,
+   Down the valleys of Hall,
+I hurry amain to reach the plain,
+Run the rapid and leap the fall,
+Split at the rock and together again,
+Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
+And flee from folly on every side
+With a lover's pain to attain the plain
+   Far from the hills of Habersham,
+   Far from the valleys of Hall.
+
+   All down the hills of Habersham,
+   All through the valleys of Hall,
+The rushes cried `Abide, abide,'
+The willful waterweeds held me thrall,
+The laving laurel turned my tide,
+The ferns and the fondling grass said `Stay,'
+The dewberry dipped for to work delay,
+And the little reeds sighed `Abide, abide,
+   Here in the hills of Habersham,
+   Here in the valleys of Hall.'
+
+   High o'er the hills of Habersham,
+   Veiling the valleys of Hall,
+The hickory told me manifold
+Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall
+Wrought me her shadowy self to hold,
+The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine,
+Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign,
+Said, `Pass not, so cold, these manifold
+   Deep shades of the hills of Habersham,
+   These glades in the valleys of Hall.'
+
+   And oft in the hills of Habersham,
+   And oft in the valleys of Hall,
+The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
+Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
+And many a luminous jewel lone
+-- Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
+Ruby, garnet and amethyst --
+Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
+   In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
+   In the beds of the valleys of Hall.
+
+   But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
+   And oh, not the valleys of Hall
+Avail:  I am fain for to water the plain.
+Downward the voices of Duty call --
+Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
+The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
+And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
+And the lordly main from beyond the plain
+   Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
+   Calls through the valleys of Hall.
+
+____
+1877.
+
+
+
+
+From the Flats.
+
+
+
+   What heartache -- ne'er a hill!
+Inexorable, vapid, vague and chill
+The drear sand-levels drain my spirit low.
+With one poor word they tell me all they know;
+Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain,
+Do drawl it o'er again and o'er again.
+They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name:
+   Always the same, the same.
+
+   Nature hath no surprise,
+No ambuscade of beauty 'gainst mine eyes
+From brake or lurking dell or deep defile;
+No humors, frolic forms -- this mile, that mile;
+No rich reserves or happy-valley hopes
+Beyond the bend of roads, the distant slopes.
+Her fancy fails, her wild is all run tame:
+   Ever the same, the same.
+
+   Oh might I through these tears
+But glimpse some hill my Georgia high uprears,
+Where white the quartz and pink the pebble shine,
+The hickory heavenward strives, the muscadine
+Swings o'er the slope, the oak's far-falling shade
+Darkens the dogwood in the bottom glade,
+And down the hollow from a ferny nook
+   Bright leaps a living brook!
+
+____
+Tampa, Florida, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+The Mocking-Bird.
+
+
+
+Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray
+That o'er the general leafage boldly grew,
+He summ'd the woods in song; or typic drew
+The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay
+Of languid doves when long their lovers stray,
+And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew
+At morn in brake or bosky avenue.
+Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.
+Then down he shot, bounced airily along
+The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song
+Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again.
+Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain:
+How may the death of that dull insect be
+The life of yon trim Shakespeare on the tree?
+
+
+
+
+Tampa Robins.
+
+
+
+The robin laughed in the orange-tree:
+"Ho, windy North, a fig for thee:
+While breasts are red and wings are bold
+And green trees wave us globes of gold,
+ Time's scythe shall reap but bliss for me
+ -- Sunlight, song, and the orange-tree.
+
+Burn, golden globes in leafy sky,
+My orange-planets:  crimson I
+Will shine and shoot among the spheres
+(Blithe meteor that no mortal fears)
+ And thrid the heavenly orange-tree
+ With orbits bright of minstrelsy.
+
+If that I hate wild winter's spite --
+The gibbet trees, the world in white,
+The sky but gray wind over a grave --
+Why should I ache, the season's slave?
+ I'll sing from the top of the orange-tree
+ `Gramercy, winter's tyranny.'
+
+I'll south with the sun, and keep my clime;
+My wing is king of the summer-time;
+My breast to the sun his torch shall hold;
+And I'll call down through the green and gold
+ `Time, take thy scythe, reap bliss for me,
+ Bestir thee under the orange-tree.'"
+
+____
+Tampa, Florida, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+The Crystal.
+
+
+
+At midnight, death's and truth's unlocking time,
+When far within the spirit's hearing rolls
+The great soft rumble of the course of things --
+A bulk of silence in a mask of sound, --
+When darkness clears our vision that by day
+Is sun-blind, and the soul's a ravening owl
+For truth and flitteth here and there about
+Low-lying woody tracts of time and oft
+Is minded for to sit upon a bough,
+Dry-dead and sharp, of some long-stricken tree
+And muse in that gaunt place, -- 'twas then my heart,
+Deep in the meditative dark, cried out:
+
+"Ye companies of governor-spirits grave,
+Bards, and old bringers-down of flaming news
+From steep-wall'd heavens, holy malcontents,
+Sweet seers, and stellar visionaries, all
+That brood about the skies of poesy,
+Full bright ye shine, insuperable stars;
+Yet, if a man look hard upon you, none
+With total lustre blazeth, no, not one
+But hath some heinous freckle of the flesh
+Upon his shining cheek, not one but winks
+His ray, opaqued with intermittent mist
+Of defect; yea, you masters all must ask
+Some sweet forgiveness, which we leap to give,
+We lovers of you, heavenly-glad to meet
+Your largesse so with love, and interplight
+Your geniuses with our mortalities.
+
+Thus unto thee, O sweetest Shakespeare sole,
+A hundred hurts a day I do forgive
+('Tis little, but, enchantment! 'tis for thee):
+Small curious quibble; Juliet's prurient pun
+In the poor, pale face of Romeo's fancied death;
+Cold rant of Richard; Henry's fustian roar
+Which frights away that sleep he invocates;
+Wronged Valentine's unnatural haste to yield;
+Too-silly shifts of maids that mask as men
+In faint disguises that could ne'er disguise --
+Viola, Julia, Portia, Rosalind;
+Fatigues most drear, and needless overtax
+Of speech obscure that had as lief be plain;
+Last I forgive (with more delight, because
+'Tis more to do) the labored-lewd discourse
+That e'en thy young invention's youngest heir
+Besmirched the world with.
+
+                            Father Homer, thee,
+Thee also I forgive thy sandy wastes
+Of prose and catalogue, thy drear harangues
+That tease the patience of the centuries,
+Thy sleazy scrap of story, -- but a rogue's
+Rape of a light-o'-love, -- too soiled a patch
+To broider with the gods.
+
+                           Thee, Socrates,
+Thou dear and very strong one, I forgive
+Thy year-worn cloak, thine iron stringencies
+That were but dandy upside-down, thy words
+Of truth that, mildlier spoke, had mainlier wrought.
+
+So, Buddha, beautiful! I pardon thee
+That all the All thou hadst for needy man
+Was Nothing, and thy Best of being was
+But not to be.
+
+                Worn Dante, I forgive
+The implacable hates that in thy horrid hells
+Or burn or freeze thy fellows, never loosed
+By death, nor time, nor love.
+
+                               And I forgive
+Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars
+Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel,
+Immortals smite immortals mortalwise
+And fill all heaven with folly.
+
+                                 Also thee,
+Brave Aeschylus, thee I forgive, for that
+Thine eye, by bare bright justice basilisked,
+Turned not, nor ever learned to look where Love
+Stands shining.
+
+                 So, unto thee, Lucretius mine
+(For oh, what heart hath loved thee like to this
+That's now complaining?), freely I forgive
+Thy logic poor, thine error rich, thine earth
+Whose graves eat souls and all.
+
+                                 Yea, all you hearts
+Of beauty, and sweet righteous lovers large:
+Aurelius fine, oft superfine; mild Saint
+A Kempis, overmild; Epictetus,
+Whiles low in thought, still with old slavery tinct;
+Rapt Behmen, rapt too far; high Swedenborg,
+O'ertoppling; Langley, that with but a touch
+Of art hadst sung Piers Plowman to the top
+Of English songs, whereof 'tis dearest, now,
+And most adorable; Caedmon, in the morn
+A-calling angels with the cow-herd's call
+That late brought up the cattle; Emerson,
+Most wise, that yet, in finding Wisdom, lost
+Thy Self, sometimes; tense Keats, with angels' nerves
+Where men's were better; Tennyson, largest voice
+Since Milton, yet some register of wit
+Wanting; -- all, all, I pardon, ere 'tis asked,
+Your more or less, your little mole that marks
+You brother and your kinship seals to man.
+
+But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time,
+But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
+But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
+O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
+O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, --
+What `if' or `yet', what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
+What least defect or shadow of defect,
+What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
+Of inference loose, what lack of grace
+Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's, --
+Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
+Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?"
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+The Revenge of Hamish.
+
+
+
+It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay;
+ And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man,
+ Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran
+Down the hill-side and sifted along through the bracken and passed that way.
+
+Then Nan got a-tremble at nostril; she was the daintiest doe;
+ In the print of her velvet flank on the velvet fern
+ She reared, and rounded her ears in turn.
+Then the buck leapt up, and his head as a king's to a crown did go
+
+Full high in the breeze, and he stood as if Death had the form of a deer;
+ And the two slim does long lazily stretching arose,
+ For their day-dream slowlier came to a close,
+Till they woke and were still, breath-bound with waiting and wonder and fear.
+
+Then Alan the huntsman sprang over the hillock, the hounds shot by,
+ The does and the ten-tined buck made a marvellous bound,
+ The hounds swept after with never a sound,
+But Alan loud winded his horn in sign that the quarry was nigh.
+
+For at dawn of that day proud Maclean of Lochbuy to the hunt had waxed wild,
+ And he cursed at old Alan till Alan fared off with the hounds
+ For to drive him the deer to the lower glen-grounds:
+"I will kill a red deer," quoth Maclean, "in the sight of the wife
+  and the child."
+
+So gayly he paced with the wife and the child to his chosen stand;
+ But he hurried tall Hamish the henchman ahead:  "Go turn," --
+ Cried Maclean -- "if the deer seek to cross to the burn,
+Do thou turn them to me:  nor fail, lest thy back be red as thy hand."
+
+Now hard-fortuned Hamish, half blown of his breath with the height
+  of the hill,
+ Was white in the face when the ten-tined buck and the does
+ Drew leaping to burn-ward; huskily rose
+His shouts, and his nether lip twitched, and his legs were o'er-weak
+  for his will.
+
+So the deer darted lightly by Hamish and bounded away to the burn.
+ But Maclean never bating his watch tarried waiting below
+ Still Hamish hung heavy with fear for to go
+All the space of an hour; then he went, and his face was greenish and stern,
+
+And his eye sat back in the socket, and shrunken the eyeballs shone,
+ As withdrawn from a vision of deeds it were shame to see.
+ "Now, now, grim henchman, what is't with thee?"
+Brake Maclean, and his wrath rose red as a beacon the wind hath upblown.
+
+"Three does and a ten-tined buck made out," spoke Hamish, full mild,
+ "And I ran for to turn, but my breath it was blown, and they passed;
+ I was weak, for ye called ere I broke me my fast."
+Cried Maclean:  "Now a ten-tined buck in the sight of the wife and the child
+
+I had killed if the gluttonous kern had not wrought me a snail's own wrong!"
+ Then he sounded, and down came kinsmen and clansmen all:
+ "Ten blows, for ten tine, on his back let fall,
+And reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the bite of thong!"
+
+So Hamish made bare, and took him his strokes; at the last he smiled.
+ "Now I'll to the burn," quoth Maclean, "for it still may be,
+ If a slimmer-paunched henchman will hurry with me,
+I shall kill me the ten-tined buck for a gift to the wife and the child!"
+
+Then the clansmen departed, by this path and that; and over the hill
+ Sped Maclean with an outward wrath for an inward shame;
+ And that place of the lashing full quiet became;
+And the wife and the child stood sad; and bloody-backed Hamish sat still.
+
+But look! red Hamish has risen; quick about and about turns he.
+ "There is none betwixt me and the crag-top!" he screams under breath.
+ Then, livid as Lazarus lately from death,
+He snatches the child from the mother, and clambers the crag toward the sea.
+
+Now the mother drops breath; she is dumb, and her heart goes dead for a space,
+ Till the motherhood, mistress of death, shrieks, shrieks through the glen,
+ And that place of the lashing is live with men,
+And Maclean, and the gillie that told him, dash up in a desperate race.
+
+Not a breath's time for asking; an eye-glance reveals all the tale untold.
+ They follow mad Hamish afar up the crag toward the sea,
+ And the lady cries:  "Clansmen, run for a fee! --
+Yon castle and lands to the two first hands that shall hook him and hold
+
+Fast Hamish back from the brink!" -- and ever she flies up the steep,
+ And the clansmen pant, and they sweat, and they jostle and strain.
+ But, mother, 'tis vain; but, father, 'tis vain;
+Stern Hamish stands bold on the brink, and dangles the child o'er the deep.
+
+Now a faintness falls on the men that run, and they all stand still.
+ And the wife prays Hamish as if he were God, on her knees,
+ Crying:  "Hamish! O Hamish! but please, but please
+For to spare him!" and Hamish still dangles the child, with a wavering will.
+
+On a sudden he turns; with a sea-hawk scream, and a gibe, and a song,
+ Cries:  "So; I will spare ye the child if, in sight of ye all,
+ Ten blows on Maclean's bare back shall fall,
+And ye reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the bite of the thong!"
+
+Then Maclean he set hardly his tooth to his lip that his tooth was red,
+ Breathed short for a space, said:  "Nay, but it never shall be!
+ Let me hurl off the damnable hound in the sea!"
+But the wife:  "Can Hamish go fish us the child from the sea, if dead?
+
+Say yea! --  Let them lash ME, Hamish?" --  "Nay!" --  "Husband,
+  the lashing will heal;
+ But, oh, who will heal me the bonny sweet bairn in his grave?
+ Could ye cure me my heart with the death of a knave?
+Quick! Love!  I will bare thee -- so -- kneel!"  Then Maclean 'gan slowly
+  to kneel
+
+With never a word, till presently downward he jerked to the earth.
+ Then the henchman -- he that smote Hamish -- would tremble and lag;
+ "Strike, hard!" quoth Hamish, full stern, from the crag;
+Then he struck him, and "One!" sang Hamish, and danced with the child
+  in his mirth.
+
+And no man spake beside Hamish; he counted each stroke with a song.
+ When the last stroke fell, then he moved him a pace down the height,
+ And he held forth the child in the heartaching sight
+Of the mother, and looked all pitiful grave, as repenting a wrong.
+
+And there as the motherly arms stretched out with the thanksgiving prayer --
+ And there as the mother crept up with a fearful swift pace,
+ Till her finger nigh felt of the bairnie's face --
+In a flash fierce Hamish turned round and lifted the child in the air,
+
+And sprang with the child in his arms from the horrible height in the sea,
+ Shrill screeching, "Revenge!" in the wind-rush; and pallid Maclean,
+ Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain,
+Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked hold of dead roots
+  of a tree --
+
+And gazed hungrily o'er, and the blood from his back drip-dripped
+  in the brine,
+ And a sea-hawk flung down a skeleton fish as he flew,
+ And the mother stared white on the waste of blue,
+And the wind drove a cloud to seaward, and the sun began to shine.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+To Bayard Taylor.
+
+
+
+To range, deep-wrapt, along a heavenly height,
+ O'erseeing all that man but undersees;
+To loiter down lone alleys of delight,
+ And hear the beating of the hearts of trees,
+And think the thoughts that lilies speak in white
+ By greenwood pools and pleasant passages;
+
+With healthy dreams a-dream in flesh and soul,
+ To pace, in mighty meditations drawn,
+From out the forest to the open knoll
+ Where much thyme is, whence blissful leagues of lawn
+Betwixt the fringing woods to southward roll
+ By tender inclinations; mad with dawn,
+
+Ablaze with fires that flame in silver dew
+ When each small globe doth glass the morning-star,
+Long ere the sun, sweet-smitten through and through
+ With dappled revelations read afar,
+Suffused with saintly ecstasies of blue
+ As all the holy eastern heavens are, --
+
+To fare thus fervid to what daily toil
+ Employs thy spirit in that larger Land
+Where thou art gone; to strive, but not to moil
+ In nothings that do mar the artist's hand,
+Not drudge unriched, as grain rots back to soil, --
+ No profit out of death, -- going, yet still at stand, --
+
+Giving what life is here in hand to-day
+ For that that's in to-morrow's bush, perchance, --
+Of this year's harvest none in the barn to lay,
+ All sowed for next year's crop, -- a dull advance
+In curves that come but by another way
+ Back to the start, -- a thriftless thrift of ants
+
+Whose winter wastes their summer; O my Friend,
+ Freely to range, to muse, to toil, is thine:
+Thine, now, to watch with Homer sails that bend
+ Unstained by Helen's beauty o'er the brine
+Tow'rds some clean Troy no Hector need defend
+ Nor flame devour; or, in some mild moon's shine,
+
+Where amiabler winds the whistle heed,
+ To sail with Shelley o'er a bluer sea,
+And mark Prometheus, from his fetters freed,
+ Pass with Deucalion over Italy,
+While bursts the flame from out his eager reed
+ Wild-stretching towards the West of destiny;
+
+Or, prone with Plato, Shakespeare and a throng
+ Of bards beneath some plane-tree's cool eclipse
+To gaze on glowing meads where, lingering long,
+ Psyche's large Butterfly her honey sips;
+Or, mingling free in choirs of German song,
+ To learn of Goethe's life from Goethe's lips;
+
+These, these are thine, and we, who still are dead,
+ Do yearn -- nay, not to kill thee back again
+Into this charnel life, this lowlihead,
+ Not to the dark of sense, the blinking brain,
+The hugged delusion drear, the hunger fed
+ On husks of guess, the monarchy of pain,
+
+The cross of love, the wrench of faith, the shame
+ Of science that cannot prove proof is, the twist
+Of blame for praise and bitter praise for blame,
+ The silly stake and tether round the wrist
+By fashion fixed, the virtue that doth claim
+ The gains of vice, the lofty mark that's missed
+
+By all the mortal space 'twixt heaven and hell,
+ The soul's sad growth o'er stationary friends
+Who hear us from our height not well, not well,
+ The slant of accident, the sudden bends
+Of purpose tempered strong, the gambler's spell,
+ The son's disgrace, the plan that e'er depends
+
+On others' plots, the tricks that passion plays
+ (I loving you, you him, he none at all),
+The artist's pain -- to walk his blood-stained ways,
+ A special soul, yet judged as general --
+The endless grief of art, the sneer that slays,
+ The war, the wound, the groan, the funeral pall --
+
+Not into these, bright spirit, do we yearn
+ To bring thee back, but oh, to be, to be
+Unbound of all these gyves, to stretch, to spurn
+ The dark from off our dolorous lids, to see
+Our spark, Conjecture, blaze and sunwise burn,
+ And suddenly to stand again by thee!
+
+Ah, not for us, not yet, by thee to stand:
+ For us, the fret, the dark, the thorn, the chill;
+For us, to call across unto thy Land,
+ "Friend, get thee to the minstrels' holy hill,
+And kiss those brethren for us, mouth and hand,
+ And make our duty to our master Will."
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1879.
+
+
+
+
+A Dedication.  To Charlotte Cushman.
+
+
+
+As Love will carve dear names upon a tree,
+Symbol of gravure on his heart to be,
+
+So thought I thine with loving text to set
+In the growth and substance of my canzonet;
+
+But, writing it, my tears begin to fall --
+This wild-rose stem for thy large name's too small!
+
+Nay, still my trembling hands are fain, are fain
+Cut the good letters though they lap again;
+
+Perchance such folk as mark the blur and stain
+Will say, `It was the beating of the rain;'
+
+Or, haply these o'er-woundings of the stem
+May loose some little balm, to plead for them.
+
+____
+1876.
+
+
+
+
+To Charlotte Cushman.
+
+
+
+Look where a three-point star shall weave his beam
+Into the slumb'rous tissue of some stream,
+Till his bright self o'er his bright copy seem
+Fulfillment dropping on a come-true dream;
+So in this night of art thy soul doth show
+Her excellent double in the steadfast flow
+Of wishing love that through men's hearts doth go:
+At once thou shin'st above and shin'st below.
+E'en when thou strivest there within Art's sky
+(Each star must o'er a strenuous orbit fly),
+Full calm thine image in our love doth lie,
+A Motion glassed in a Tranquillity.
+So triple-rayed, thou mov'st, yet stay'st, serene --
+Art's artist, Love's dear woman, Fame's good queen!
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+The Stirrup-Cup.
+
+
+
+Death, thou'rt a cordial old and rare:
+Look how compounded, with what care!
+Time got his wrinkles reaping thee
+Sweet herbs from all antiquity.
+
+David to thy distillage went,
+Keats, and Gotama excellent,
+Omar Khayyam, and Chaucer bright,
+And Shakespeare for a king-delight.
+
+Then, Time, let not a drop be spilt:
+Hand me the cup whene'er thou wilt;
+'Tis thy rich stirrup-cup to me;
+I'll drink it down right smilingly.
+
+____
+Tampa, Florida, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+A Song of Eternity in Time.
+
+
+
+   Once, at night, in the manor wood
+   My Love and I long silent stood,
+   Amazed that any heavens could
+Decree to part us, bitterly repining.
+   My Love, in aimless love and grief,
+   Reached forth and drew aside a leaf
+   That just above us played the thief
+And stole our starlight that for us was shining.
+
+   A star that had remarked her pain
+   Shone straightway down that leafy lane,
+   And wrought his image, mirror-plain,
+Within a tear that on her lash hung gleaming.
+   "Thus Time," I cried, "is but a tear
+   Some one hath wept 'twixt hope and fear,
+   Yet in his little lucent sphere
+Our star of stars, Eternity, is beaming."
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1867.  Revised in 1879.
+
+
+
+
+Owl against Robin.
+
+
+
+Frowning, the owl in the oak complained him
+Sore, that the song of the robin restrained him
+Wrongly of slumber, rudely of rest.
+"From the north, from the east, from the south and the west,
+Woodland, wheat-field, corn-field, clover,
+Over and over and over and over,
+Five o'clock, ten o'clock, twelve, or seven,
+Nothing but robin-songs heard under heaven:
+    How can we sleep?
+
+`Peep!' you whistle, and `cheep! cheep! cheep!'
+Oh, peep, if you will, and buy, if 'tis cheap,
+And have done; for an owl must sleep.
+Are ye singing for fame, and who shall be first?
+Each day's the same, yet the last is worst,
+And the summer is cursed with the silly outburst
+Of idiot red-breasts peeping and cheeping
+By day, when all honest birds ought to be sleeping.
+Lord, what a din!  And so out of all reason.
+Have ye not heard that each thing hath its season?
+Night is to work in, night is for play-time;
+    Good heavens, not day-time!
+
+A vulgar flaunt is the flaring day,
+The impudent, hot, unsparing day,
+That leaves not a stain nor a secret untold, --
+Day the reporter, -- the gossip of old, --
+Deformity's tease, -- man's common scold --
+Poh!  Shut the eyes, let the sense go numb
+When day down the eastern way has come.
+'Tis clear as the moon (by the argument drawn
+From Design) that the world should retire at dawn.
+Day kills.  The leaf and the laborer breathe
+Death in the sun, the cities seethe,
+The mortal black marshes bubble with heat
+And puff up pestilence; nothing is sweet
+Has to do with the sun:  even virtue will taint
+(Philosophers say) and manhood grow faint
+In the lands where the villainous sun has sway
+Through the livelong drag of the dreadful day.
+What Eden but noon-light stares it tame,
+Shadowless, brazen, forsaken of shame?
+For the sun tells lies on the landscape, -- now
+Reports me the `what', unrelieved with the `how', --
+As messengers lie, with the facts alone,
+Delivering the word and withholding the tone.
+
+But oh, the sweetness, and oh, the light
+Of the high-fastidious night!
+Oh, to awake with the wise old stars --
+The cultured, the careful, the Chesterfield stars,
+That wink at the work-a-day fact of crime
+And shine so rich through the ruins of time
+That Baalbec is finer than London; oh,
+To sit on the bough that zigzags low
+            By the woodland pool,
+And loudly laugh at man, the fool
+That vows to the vulgar sun; oh, rare,
+To wheel from the wood to the window where
+A day-worn sleeper is dreaming of care,
+And perch on the sill and straightly stare
+Through his visions; rare, to sail
+Aslant with the hill and a-curve with the vale, --
+To flit down the shadow-shot-with-gleam,
+Betwixt hanging leaves and starlit stream,
+Hither, thither, to and fro,
+Silent, aimless, dayless, slow
+(`Aimless?  Field-mice?'  True, they're slain,
+But the night-philosophy hoots at pain,
+Grips, eats quick, and drops the bones
+In the water beneath the bough, nor moans
+At the death life feeds on).  Robin, pray
+    Come away, come away
+To the cultus of night.  Abandon the day.
+Have more to think and have less to say.
+And CANNOT you walk now?  Bah! don't hop!
+            Stop!
+Look at the owl, scarce seen, scarce heard,
+O irritant, iterant, maddening bird!"
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+A Song of the Future.
+
+
+
+        Sail fast, sail fast,
+    Ark of my hopes, Ark of my dreams;
+    Sweep lordly o'er the drowned Past,
+    Fly glittering through the sun's strange beams;
+        Sail fast, sail fast.
+Breaths of new buds from off some drying lea
+With news about the Future scent the sea:
+My brain is beating like the heart of Haste:
+I'll loose me a bird upon this Present waste;
+        Go, trembling song,
+    And stay not long; oh, stay not long:
+    Thou'rt only a gray and sober dove,
+    But thine eye is faith and thy wing is love.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+Opposition.
+
+
+
+Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
+ Complain no more; for these, O heart,
+Direct the random of the will
+ As rhymes direct the rage of art.
+
+The lute's fixt fret, that runs athwart
+ The strain and purpose of the string,
+For governance and nice consort
+ Doth bar his wilful wavering.
+
+The dark hath many dear avails;
+ The dark distils divinest dews;
+The dark is rich with nightingales,
+ With dreams, and with the heavenly Muse.
+
+Bleeding with thorns of petty strife,
+ I'll ease (as lovers do) my smart
+With sonnets to my lady Life
+ Writ red in issues from the heart.
+
+What grace may lie within the chill
+ Of favor frozen fast in scorn!
+When Good's a-freeze, we call it Ill!
+ This rosy Time is glacier-born.
+
+Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
+ Complain thou not, O heart; for these
+Bank-in the current of the will
+ To uses, arts, and charities.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1879-80.
+
+
+
+
+Rose-Morals.
+
+
+
+  I. -- Red.
+
+ Would that my songs might be
+  What roses make by day and night --
+Distillments of my clod of misery
+   Into delight.
+
+ Soul, could'st thou bare thy breast
+  As yon red rose, and dare the day,
+All clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest?
+   Say yea -- say yea!
+
+ Ah, dear my Rose, good-bye;
+  The wind is up; so; drift away.
+That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly,
+   I strive, I pray.
+
+
+  II. -- White.
+
+ Soul, get thee to the heart
+  Of yonder tuberose:  hide thee there --
+There breathe the meditations of thine art
+   Suffused with prayer.
+
+ Of spirit grave yet light,
+  How fervent fragrances uprise
+Pure-born from these most rich and yet most white
+   Virginities!
+
+ Mulched with unsavory death,
+  Grow, Soul! unto such white estate,
+That virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath,
+   Thy work, thy fate.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+Corn.
+
+
+
+To-day the woods are trembling through and through
+With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
+Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
+ The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
+ Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
+    A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
+ The copse-depths into little noises start,
+ That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
+ Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
+ The beech dreams balm, as a dreamer hums a song;
+ Through that vague wafture, expirations strong
+ Throb from young hickories breathing deep and long
+With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring
+    And ecstasy of burgeoning.
+ Now, since the dew-plashed road of morn is dry,
+ Forth venture odors of more quality
+ And heavenlier giving.  Like Jove's locks awry,
+        Long muscadines
+Rich-wreathe the spacious foreheads of great pines,
+And breathe ambrosial passion from their vines.
+ I pray with mosses, ferns and flowers shy
+ That hide like gentle nuns from human eye
+ To lift adoring perfumes to the sky.
+I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green
+Dying to silent hints of kisses keen
+As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.
+ I start at fragmentary whispers, blown
+ From undertalks of leafy souls unknown,
+ Vague purports sweet, of inarticulate tone.
+Dreaming of gods, men, nuns and brides, between
+Old companies of oaks that inward lean
+To join their radiant amplitudes of green
+ I slowly move, with ranging looks that pass
+ Up from the matted miracles of grass
+Into yon veined complex of space
+Where sky and leafage interlace
+ So close, the heaven of blue is seen
+ Inwoven with a heaven of green.
+
+I wander to the zigzag-cornered fence
+Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense,
+Contests with stolid vehemence
+ The march of culture, setting limb and thorn
+ As pikes against the army of the corn.
+
+There, while I pause, my fieldward-faring eyes
+Take harvests, where the stately corn-ranks rise,
+    Of inward dignities
+And large benignities and insights wise,
+    Graces and modest majesties.
+Thus, without theft, I reap another's field;
+Thus, without tilth, I house a wondrous yield,
+And heap my heart with quintuple crops concealed.
+
+Look, out of line one tall corn-captain stands
+Advanced beyond the foremost of his bands,
+ And waves his blades upon the very edge
+ And hottest thicket of the battling hedge.
+Thou lustrous stalk, that ne'er mayst walk nor talk,
+ Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
+ That leads the vanward of his timid time
+ And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme --
+Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
+By double increment, above, below;
+ Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
+ Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry
+ That moves in gentle curves of courtesy;
+Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense,
+    By every godlike sense
+Transmuted from the four wild elements.
+      Drawn to high plans,
+ Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
+Yet ever piercest downward in the mould
+    And keepest hold
+ Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
+    That gave thee birth;
+ Yea, standest smiling in thy future grave,
+    Serene and brave,
+ With unremitting breath
+ Inhaling life from death,
+Thine epitaph writ fair in fruitage eloquent,
+    Thyself thy monument.
+
+      As poets should,
+Thou hast built up thy hardihood
+With universal food,
+ Drawn in select proportion fair
+ From honest mould and vagabond air;
+From darkness of the dreadful night,
+    And joyful light;
+ From antique ashes, whose departed flame
+ In thee has finer life and longer fame;
+From wounds and balms,
+From storms and calms,
+From potsherds and dry bones
+   And ruin-stones.
+Into thy vigorous substance thou hast wrought
+Whate'er the hand of Circumstance hath brought;
+ Yea, into cool solacing green hast spun
+ White radiance hot from out the sun.
+So thou dost mutually leaven
+Strength of earth with grace of heaven;
+ So thou dost marry new and old
+ Into a one of higher mould;
+ So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold,
+    The dark and bright,
+And many a heart-perplexing opposite,
+      And so,
+ Akin by blood to high and low,
+Fitly thou playest out thy poet's part,
+Richly expending thy much-bruised heart
+ In equal care to nourish lord in hall
+    Or beast in stall:
+ Thou took'st from all that thou mightst give to all.
+
+O steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot
+Where thou wast born, that still repinest not --
+Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot! --
+ Deeply thy mild content rebukes the land
+ Whose flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand
+Of trade, for ever rise and fall
+With alternation whimsical,
+ Enduring scarce a day,
+ Then swept away
+By swift engulfments of incalculable tides
+Whereon capricious Commerce rides.
+Look, thou substantial spirit of content!
+Across this little vale, thy continent,
+ To where, beyond the mouldering mill,
+ Yon old deserted Georgian hill
+Bares to the sun his piteous aged crest
+    And seamy breast,
+ By restless-hearted children left to lie
+ Untended there beneath the heedless sky,
+ As barbarous folk expose their old to die.
+Upon that generous-rounding side,
+    With gullies scarified
+ Where keen Neglect his lash hath plied,
+Dwelt one I knew of old, who played at toil,
+And gave to coquette Cotton soul and soil.
+ Scorning the slow reward of patient grain,
+ He sowed his heart with hopes of swifter gain,
+ Then sat him down and waited for the rain.
+He sailed in borrowed ships of usury --
+A foolish Jason on a treacherous sea,
+Seeking the Fleece and finding misery.
+ Lulled by smooth-rippling loans, in idle trance
+ He lay, content that unthrift Circumstance
+ Should plough for him the stony field of Chance.
+Yea, gathering crops whose worth no man might tell,
+He staked his life on games of Buy-and-Sell,
+And turned each field into a gambler's hell.
+ Aye, as each year began,
+ My farmer to the neighboring city ran;
+Passed with a mournful anxious face
+Into the banker's inner place;
+Parleyed, excused, pleaded for longer grace;
+ Railed at the drought, the worm, the rust, the grass;
+ Protested ne'er again 'twould come to pass;
+ With many an `oh' and `if' and `but alas'
+Parried or swallowed searching questions rude,
+And kissed the dust to soften Dives's mood.
+At last, small loans by pledges great renewed,
+ He issues smiling from the fatal door,
+ And buys with lavish hand his yearly store
+ Till his small borrowings will yield no more.
+Aye, as each year declined,
+With bitter heart and ever-brooding mind
+He mourned his fate unkind.
+ In dust, in rain, with might and main,
+ He nursed his cotton, cursed his grain,
+ Fretted for news that made him fret again,
+Snatched at each telegram of Future Sale,
+And thrilled with Bulls' or Bears' alternate wail --
+In hope or fear alike for ever pale.
+ And thus from year to year, through hope and fear,
+ With many a curse and many a secret tear,
+ Striving in vain his cloud of debt to clear,
+      At last
+He woke to find his foolish dreaming past,
+ And all his best-of-life the easy prey
+ Of squandering scamps and quacks that lined his way
+    With vile array,
+From rascal statesman down to petty knave;
+Himself, at best, for all his bragging brave,
+A gamester's catspaw and a banker's slave.
+ Then, worn and gray, and sick with deep unrest,
+ He fled away into the oblivious West,
+    Unmourned, unblest.
+
+Old hill! old hill! thou gashed and hairy Lear
+Whom the divine Cordelia of the year,
+E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer --
+ King, that no subject man nor beast may own,
+ Discrowned, undaughtered and alone --
+Yet shall the great God turn thy fate,
+And bring thee back into thy monarch state
+    And majesty immaculate.
+ Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn,
+ Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn
+ Visions of golden treasuries of corn --
+Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart
+That manfully shall take thy part,
+      And tend thee,
+      And defend thee,
+With antique sinew and with modern art.
+
+____
+Sunnyside, Georgia, August, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+The Symphony.
+
+
+
+"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
+The Time needs heart -- 'tis tired of head:
+We're all for love," the violins said.
+"Of what avail the rigorous tale
+Of bill for coin and box for bale?
+Grant thee, O Trade! thine uttermost hope:
+Level red gold with blue sky-slope,
+And base it deep as devils grope:
+When all's done, what hast thou won
+Of the only sweet that's under the sun?
+Ay, canst thou buy a single sigh
+Of true love's least, least ecstasy?"
+Then, with a bridegroom's heart-beats trembling,
+All the mightier strings assembling
+Ranged them on the violins' side
+As when the bridegroom leads the bride,
+And, heart in voice, together cried:
+"Yea, what avail the endless tale
+Of gain by cunning and plus by sale?
+Look up the land, look down the land
+The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand
+Wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand
+Against an inward-opening door
+That pressure tightens evermore:
+They sigh a monstrous foul-air sigh
+For the outside leagues of liberty,
+Where Art, sweet lark, translates the sky
+Into a heavenly melody.
+`Each day, all day' (these poor folks say),
+`In the same old year-long, drear-long way,
+We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
+We sieve mine-meshes under the hills,
+And thieve much gold from the Devil's bank tills,
+To relieve, O God, what manner of ills? --
+The beasts, they hunger, and eat, and die;
+And so do we, and the world's a sty;
+Hush, fellow-swine:  why nuzzle and cry?
+"Swinehood hath no remedy"
+Say many men, and hasten by,
+Clamping the nose and blinking the eye.
+But who said once, in the lordly tone,
+"Man shall not live by bread alone
+But all that cometh from the Throne?"
+   Hath God said so?
+   But Trade saith "No:"
+And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say "Go!
+There's plenty that can, if you can't:  we know.
+Move out, if you think you're underpaid.
+The poor are prolific; we're not afraid;
+   Trade is trade."'"
+Thereat this passionate protesting
+Meekly changed, and softened till
+It sank to sad requesting
+And suggesting sadder still:
+"And oh, if men might some time see
+How piteous-false the poor decree
+That trade no more than trade must be!
+Does business mean, `Die, you -- live, I?'
+Then `Trade is trade' but sings a lie:
+'Tis only war grown miserly.
+If business is battle, name it so:
+War-crimes less will shame it so,
+And widows less will blame it so.
+Alas, for the poor to have some part
+In yon sweet living lands of Art,
+Makes problem not for head, but heart.
+Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it:
+Plainly the heart of a child could solve it."
+
+And then, as when from words that seem but rude
+We pass to silent pain that sits abrood
+Back in our heart's great dark and solitude,
+So sank the strings to gentle throbbing
+Of long chords change-marked with sobbing --
+Motherly sobbing, not distinctlier heard
+Than half wing-openings of the sleeping bird,
+Some dream of danger to her young hath stirred.
+Then stirring and demurring ceased, and lo!
+Every least ripple of the strings' song-flow
+Died to a level with each level bow
+And made a great chord tranquil-surfaced so,
+As a brook beneath his curving bank doth go
+To linger in the sacred dark and green
+Where many boughs the still pool overlean
+And many leaves make shadow with their sheen.
+ But presently
+A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
+Upon the bosom of that harmony,
+And sailed and sailed incessantly,
+As if a petal from a wild-rose blown
+Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone
+And boatwise dropped o' the convex side
+And floated down the glassy tide
+And clarified and glorified
+The solemn spaces where the shadows bide.
+From the warm concave of that fluted note
+Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float,
+As if a rose might somehow be a throat:
+"When Nature from her far-off glen
+Flutes her soft messages to men,
+   The flute can say them o'er again;
+   Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone,
+Breathes through life's strident polyphone
+The flute-voice in the world of tone.
+   Sweet friends,
+   Man's love ascends
+To finer and diviner ends
+Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends
+For I, e'en I,
+As here I lie,
+A petal on a harmony,
+Demand of Science whence and why
+Man's tender pain, man's inward cry,
+When he doth gaze on earth and sky?
+I am not overbold:
+   I hold
+Full powers from Nature manifold.
+I speak for each no-tongued tree
+That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
+And dumbly and most wistfully
+His mighty prayerful arms outspreads
+Above men's oft-unheeding heads,
+And his big blessing downward sheds.
+I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves,
+Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
+Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
+Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes,
+And briery mazes bounding lanes,
+And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
+And milky stems and sugary veins;
+For every long-armed woman-vine
+That round a piteous tree doth twine;
+For passionate odors, and divine
+Pistils, and petals crystalline;
+All purities of shady springs,
+All shynesses of film-winged things
+That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings;
+All modesties of mountain-fawns
+That leap to covert from wild lawns,
+And tremble if the day but dawns;
+All sparklings of small beady eyes
+Of birds, and sidelong glances wise
+Wherewith the jay hints tragedies;
+All piquancies of prickly burs,
+And smoothnesses of downs and furs
+Of eiders and of minevers;
+All limpid honeys that do lie
+At stamen-bases, nor deny
+The humming-birds' fine roguery,
+Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly;
+All gracious curves of slender wings,
+Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiralings,
+Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings;
+Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell
+Wherewith in every lonesome dell
+Time to himself his hours doth tell;
+All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones,
+Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans,
+And night's unearthly under-tones;
+All placid lakes and waveless deeps,
+All cool reposing mountain-steeps,
+Vale-calms and tranquil lotos-sleeps; --
+Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights,
+And warmths, and mysteries, and mights,
+Of Nature's utmost depths and heights,
+-- These doth my timid tongue present,
+Their mouthpiece and leal instrument
+And servant, all love-eloquent.
+I heard, when `"All for love"' the violins cried:
+So, Nature calls through all her system wide,
+`Give me thy love, O man, so long denied.'
+Much time is run, and man hath changed his ways,
+Since Nature, in the antique fable-days,
+Was hid from man's true love by proxy fays,
+False fauns and rascal gods that stole her praise.
+The nymphs, cold creatures of man's colder brain,
+Chilled Nature's streams till man's warm heart was fain
+Never to lave its love in them again.
+Later, a sweet Voice `Love thy neighbor' said;
+Then first the bounds of neighborhood outspread
+Beyond all confines of old ethnic dread.
+Vainly the Jew might wag his covenant head:
+`"All men are neighbors,"' so the sweet Voice said.
+So, when man's arms had circled all man's race,
+The liberal compass of his warm embrace
+Stretched bigger yet in the dark bounds of space;
+With hands a-grope he felt smooth Nature's grace,
+Drew her to breast and kissed her sweetheart face:
+Yea man found neighbors in great hills and trees
+And streams and clouds and suns and birds and bees,
+And throbbed with neighbor-loves in loving these.
+But oh, the poor! the poor! the poor!
+That stand by the inward-opening door
+Trade's hand doth tighten ever more,
+And sigh their monstrous foul-air sigh
+For the outside hills of liberty,
+Where Nature spreads her wild blue sky
+For Art to make into melody!
+Thou Trade! thou king of the modern days!
+   Change thy ways,
+   Change thy ways;
+Let the sweaty laborers file
+   A little while,
+   A little while,
+Where Art and Nature sing and smile.
+Trade! is thy heart all dead, all dead?
+And hast thou nothing but a head?
+I'm all for heart," the flute-voice said,
+And into sudden silence fled,
+Like as a blush that while 'tis red
+Dies to a still, still white instead.
+
+ Thereto a thrilling calm succeeds,
+Till presently the silence breeds
+A little breeze among the reeds
+That seems to blow by sea-marsh weeds:
+Then from the gentle stir and fret
+Sings out the melting clarionet,
+Like as a lady sings while yet
+Her eyes with salty tears are wet.
+"O Trade! O Trade!" the Lady said,
+"I too will wish thee utterly dead
+If all thy heart is in thy head.
+For O my God! and O my God!
+What shameful ways have women trod
+At beckoning of Trade's golden rod!
+Alas when sighs are traders' lies,
+And heart's-ease eyes and violet eyes
+   Are merchandise!
+O purchased lips that kiss with pain!
+O cheeks coin-spotted with smirch and stain!
+O trafficked hearts that break in twain!
+-- And yet what wonder at my sisters' crime?
+So hath Trade withered up Love's sinewy prime,
+Men love not women as in olden time.
+Ah, not in these cold merchantable days
+Deem men their life an opal gray, where plays
+The one red Sweet of gracious ladies'-praise.
+Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye --
+Says, `Here, you Lady, if you'll sell, I'll buy:
+Come, heart for heart -- a trade?  What! weeping? why?'
+Shame on such wooers' dapper mercery!
+I would my lover kneeling at my feet
+In humble manliness should cry, `O sweet!
+I know not if thy heart my heart will greet:
+I ask not if thy love my love can meet:
+Whate'er thy worshipful soft tongue shall say,
+I'll kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay:
+I do but know I love thee, and I pray
+To be thy knight until my dying day.'
+Woe him that cunning trades in hearts contrives!
+Base love good women to base loving drives.
+If men loved larger, larger were our lives;
+And wooed they nobler, won they nobler wives."
+
+There thrust the bold straightforward horn
+To battle for that lady lorn,
+With heartsome voice of mellow scorn,
+Like any knight in knighthood's morn.
+ "Now comfort thee," said he,
+    "Fair Lady.
+For God shall right thy grievous wrong,
+And man shall sing thee a true-love song,
+Voiced in act his whole life long,
+ Yea, all thy sweet life long,
+    Fair Lady.
+Where's he that craftily hath said,
+The day of chivalry is dead?
+I'll prove that lie upon his head,
+ Or I will die instead,
+    Fair Lady.
+Is Honor gone into his grave?
+Hath Faith become a caitiff knave,
+And Selfhood turned into a slave
+ To work in Mammon's cave,
+    Fair Lady?
+Will Truth's long blade ne'er gleam again?
+Hath Giant Trade in dungeons slain
+All great contempts of mean-got gain
+ And hates of inward stain,
+    Fair Lady?
+For aye shall name and fame be sold,
+And place be hugged for the sake of gold,
+And smirch-robed Justice feebly scold
+ At Crime all money-bold,
+    Fair Lady?
+Shall self-wrapt husbands aye forget
+Kiss-pardons for the daily fret
+Wherewith sweet wifely eyes are wet --
+ Blind to lips kiss-wise set --
+    Fair Lady?
+Shall lovers higgle, heart for heart,
+Till wooing grows a trading mart
+Where much for little, and all for part,
+ Make love a cheapening art,
+    Fair Lady?
+Shall woman scorch for a single sin
+That her betrayer may revel in,
+And she be burnt, and he but grin
+ When that the flames begin,
+    Fair Lady?
+Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,
+`We maids would far, far whiter be
+If that our eyes might sometimes see
+ Men maids in purity,'
+    Fair Lady?
+Shall Trade aye salve his conscience-aches
+With jibes at Chivalry's old mistakes --
+The wars that o'erhot knighthood makes
+ For Christ's and ladies' sakes,
+    Fair Lady?
+Now by each knight that e'er hath prayed
+To fight like a man and love like a maid,
+Since Pembroke's life, as Pembroke's blade,
+ I' the scabbard, death, was laid,
+    Fair Lady,
+I dare avouch my faith is bright
+That God doth right and God hath might.
+Nor time hath changed His hair to white,
+ Nor His dear love to spite,
+    Fair Lady.
+I doubt no doubts:  I strive, and shrive my clay,
+And fight my fight in the patient modern way
+For true love and for thee -- ah me! and pray
+ To be thy knight until my dying day,
+    Fair Lady."
+Made end that knightly horn, and spurred away
+Into the thick of the melodious fray.
+
+And then the hautboy played and smiled,
+And sang like any large-eyed child,
+Cool-hearted and all undefiled.
+   "Huge Trade!" he said,
+"Would thou wouldst lift me on thy head
+And run where'er my finger led!
+Once said a Man -- and wise was He --
+`Never shalt thou the heavens see,
+Save as a little child thou be.'"
+Then o'er sea-lashings of commingling tunes
+The ancient wise bassoons,
+   Like weird
+   Gray-beard
+Old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes,
+   Chanted runes:
+"Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss,
+The sea of all doth lash and toss,
+One wave forward and one across:
+But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest,
+And worst doth foam and flash to best,
+   And curst to blest.
+
+Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
+   Love, Love alone can pore
+   On thy dissolving score
+   Of harsh half-phrasings,
+    Blotted ere writ,
+   And double erasings
+    Of chords most fit.
+Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
+May read thy weltering palimpsest.
+To follow Time's dying melodies through,
+And never to lose the old in the new,
+And ever to solve the discords true --
+   Love alone can do.
+And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
+And ever Love hears the women's sighing,
+And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying,
+And ever wise childhood's deep implying,
+But never a trader's glozing and lying.
+
+And yet shall Love himself be heard,
+Though long deferred, though long deferred:
+O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
+Music is Love in search of a word."
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+My Springs.
+
+
+
+In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know
+Two springs that with unbroken flow
+Forever pour their lucent streams
+Into my soul's far Lake of Dreams.
+
+Not larger than two eyes, they lie
+Beneath the many-changing sky
+And mirror all of life and time,
+-- Serene and dainty pantomime.
+
+Shot through with lights of stars and dawns,
+And shadowed sweet by ferns and fawns,
+-- Thus heaven and earth together vie
+Their shining depths to sanctify.
+
+Always when the large Form of Love
+Is hid by storms that rage above,
+I gaze in my two springs and see
+Love in his very verity.
+
+Always when Faith with stifling stress
+Of grief hath died in bitterness,
+I gaze in my two springs and see
+A Faith that smiles immortally.
+
+Always when Charity and Hope,
+In darkness bounden, feebly grope,
+I gaze in my two springs and see
+A Light that sets my captives free.
+
+Always, when Art on perverse wing
+Flies where I cannot hear him sing,
+I gaze in my two springs and see
+A charm that brings him back to me.
+
+When Labor faints, and Glory fails,
+And coy Reward in sighs exhales,
+I gaze in my two springs and see
+Attainment full and heavenly.
+
+O Love, O Wife, thine eyes are they,
+-- My springs from out whose shining gray
+Issue the sweet celestial streams
+That feed my life's bright Lake of Dreams.
+
+Oval and large and passion-pure
+And gray and wise and honor-sure;
+Soft as a dying violet-breath
+Yet calmly unafraid of death;
+
+Thronged, like two dove-cotes of gray doves,
+With wife's and mother's and poor-folk's loves,
+And home-loves and high glory-loves
+And science-loves and story-loves,
+
+And loves for all that God and man
+In art and nature make or plan,
+And lady-loves for spidery lace
+And broideries and supple grace
+
+And diamonds and the whole sweet round
+Of littles that large life compound,
+And loves for God and God's bare truth,
+And loves for Magdalen and Ruth,
+
+Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete --
+Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet,
+-- I marvel that God made you mine,
+For when He frowns, 'tis then ye shine!
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+In Absence.
+
+
+
+  I.
+
+The storm that snapped our fate's one ship in twain
+ Hath blown my half o' the wreck from thine apart.
+O Love! O Love! across the gray-waved main
+ To thee-ward strain my eyes, my arms, my heart.
+I ask my God if e'en in His sweet place,
+ Where, by one waving of a wistful wing,
+My soul could straightway tremble face to face
+ With thee, with thee, across the stellar ring --
+Yea, where thine absence I could ne'er bewail
+ Longer than lasts that little blank of bliss
+When lips draw back, with recent pressure pale,
+ To round and redden for another kiss --
+    Would not my lonesome heart still sigh for thee
+    What time the drear kiss-intervals must be?
+
+
+  II.
+
+So do the mottled formulas of Sense
+ Glide snakewise through our dreams of Aftertime;
+So errors breed in reeds and grasses dense
+ That bank our singing rivulets of rhyme.
+By Sense rule Space and Time; but in God's Land
+ Their intervals are not, save such as lie
+Betwixt successive tones in concords bland
+ Whose loving distance makes the harmony.
+Ah, there shall never come 'twixt me and thee
+ Gross dissonances of the mile, the year;
+But in the multichords of ecstasy
+ Our souls shall mingle, yet be featured clear,
+    And absence, wrought to intervals divine,
+    Shall part, yet link, thy nature's tone and mine.
+
+
+  III.
+
+Look down the shining peaks of all my days
+ Base-hidden in the valleys of deep night,
+So shalt thou see the heights and depths of praise
+ My love would render unto love's delight;
+For I would make each day an Alp sublime
+ Of passionate snow, white-hot yet icy-clear,
+-- One crystal of the true-loves of all time
+ Spiring the world's prismatic atmosphere;
+And I would make each night an awful vale
+ Deep as thy soul, obscure as modesty,
+With every star in heaven trembling pale
+ O'er sweet profounds where only Love can see.
+    Oh, runs not thus the lesson thou hast taught? --
+    When life's all love, 'tis life:  aught else, 'tis naught.
+
+
+  IV.
+
+Let no man say, `He at his lady's feet
+ Lays worship that to Heaven alone belongs;
+Yea, swings the incense that for God is meet
+ In flippant censers of light lover's songs.'
+Who says it, knows not God, nor love, nor thee;
+ For love is large as is yon heavenly dome:
+In love's great blue, each passion is full free
+ To fly his favorite flight and build his home.
+Did e'er a lark with skyward-pointing beak
+ Stab by mischance a level-flying dove?
+Wife-love flies level, his dear mate to seek:
+ God-love darts straight into the skies above.
+    Crossing, the windage of each other's wings
+    But speeds them both upon their journeyings.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+Acknowledgment.
+
+
+
+  I.
+
+O Age that half believ'st thou half believ'st,
+ Half doubt'st the substance of thine own half doubt,
+And, half perceiving that thou half perceiv'st,
+ Stand'st at thy temple door, heart in, head out!
+Lo! while thy heart's within, helping the choir,
+ Without, thine eyes range up and down the time,
+Blinking at o'er-bright science, smit with desire
+ To see and not to see.  Hence, crime on crime.
+Yea, if the Christ (called thine) now paced yon street,
+ Thy halfness hot with His rebuke would swell;
+Legions of scribes would rise and run and beat
+ His fair intolerable Wholeness twice to hell.
+    `Nay' (so, dear Heart, thou whisperest in my soul),
+    `'Tis a half time, yet Time will make it whole.'
+
+
+  II.
+
+Now at thy soft recalling voice I rise
+ Where thought is lord o'er Time's complete estate,
+Like as a dove from out the gray sedge flies
+ To tree-tops green where cooes his heavenly mate.
+From these clear coverts high and cool I see
+ How every time with every time is knit,
+And each to all is mortised cunningly,
+ And none is sole or whole, yet all are fit.
+Thus, if this Age but as a comma show
+ 'Twixt weightier clauses of large-worded years,
+My calmer soul scorns not the mark:  I know
+ This crooked point Time's complex sentence clears.
+    Yet more I learn while, Friend! I sit by thee:
+    Who sees all time, sees all eternity.
+
+
+  III.
+
+If I do ask, How God can dumbness keep
+ While Sin creeps grinning through His house of Time,
+Stabbing His saintliest children in their sleep,
+ And staining holy walls with clots of crime? --
+Or, How may He whose wish but names a fact
+ Refuse what miser's-scanting of supply
+Would richly glut each void where man hath lacked
+ Of grace or bread? -- or, How may Power deny
+Wholeness to th' almost-folk that hurt our hope --
+ These heart-break Hamlets who so barely fail
+In life or art that but a hair's more scope
+ Had set them fair on heights they ne'er may scale? --
+    Somehow by thee, dear Love, I win content:
+    Thy Perfect stops th' Imperfect's argument.
+
+
+  IV.
+
+By the more height of thy sweet stature grown,
+ Twice-eyed with thy gray vision set in mine,
+I ken far lands to wifeless men unknown,
+ I compass stars for one-sexed eyes too fine.
+No text on sea-horizons cloudily writ,
+ No maxim vaguely starred in fields or skies,
+But this wise thou-in-me deciphers it:
+ Oh, thou'rt the Height of heights, the Eye of eyes.
+Not hardest Fortune's most unbounded stress
+ Can blind my soul nor hurl it from on high,
+Possessing thee, the self of loftiness,
+ And very light that Light discovers by.
+    Howe'er thou turn'st, wrong Earth! still Love's in sight:
+    For we are taller than the breadth of night.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1874-5.
+
+
+
+
+Laus Mariae.
+
+
+
+Across the brook of Time man leaping goes
+ On stepping-stones of epochs, that uprise
+Fixed, memorable, midst broad shallow flows
+ Of neutrals, kill-times, sleeps, indifferencies.
+So twixt each morn and night rise salient heaps:
+ Some cross with but a zigzag, jaded pace
+From meal to meal:  some with convulsive leaps
+ Shake the green tussocks of malign disgrace:
+And some advance by system and deep art
+ O'er vantages of wealth, place, learning, tact.
+But thou within thyself, dear manifold heart,
+ Dost bind all epochs in one dainty Fact.
+    Oh, sweet, my pretty sum of history,
+    I leapt the breadth of Time in loving thee!
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1874-5.
+
+
+
+
+Special Pleading.
+
+
+
+Time, hurry my Love to me:
+Haste, haste!  Lov'st not good company?
+ Here's but a heart-break sandy waste
+ 'Twixt Now and Then.  Why, killing haste
+Were best, dear Time, for thee, for thee!
+
+Oh, would that I might divine
+Thy name beyond the zodiac sign
+ Wherefrom our times-to-come descend.
+ He called thee `Sometime'.  Change it, friend:
+`Now-time' sounds so much more fine!
+
+Sweet Sometime, fly fast to me:
+Poor Now-time sits in the Lonesome-tree
+ And broods as gray as any dove,
+ And calls, `When wilt thou come, O Love?'
+And pleads across the waste to thee.
+
+Good Moment, that giv'st him me,
+Wast ever in love?  Maybe, maybe
+ Thou'lt be this heavenly velvet time
+ When Day and Night as rhyme and rhyme
+Set lip to lip dusk-modestly;
+
+Or haply some noon afar,
+-- O life's top bud, mixt rose and star,
+ How ever can thine utmost sweet
+ Be star-consummate, rose-complete,
+Till thy rich reds full opened are?
+
+Well, be it dusk-time or noon-time,
+I ask but one small boon, Time:
+ Come thou in night, come thou in day,
+ I care not, I care not:  have thine own way,
+But only, but only, come soon, Time.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+The Bee.
+
+
+
+What time I paced, at pleasant morn,
+   A deep and dewy wood,
+I heard a mellow hunting-horn
+   Make dim report of Dian's lustihood
+Far down a heavenly hollow.
+Mine ear, though fain, had pain to follow:
+   `Tara!' it twanged, `tara-tara!' it blew,
+   Yet wavered oft, and flew
+Most ficklewise about, or here, or there,
+A music now from earth and now from air.
+   But on a sudden, lo!
+   I marked a blossom shiver to and fro
+With dainty inward storm; and there within
+A down-drawn trump of yellow jessamine
+            A bee
+   Thrust up its sad-gold body lustily,
+All in a honey madness hotly bound
+            On blissful burglary.
+               A cunning sound
+In that wing-music held me:  down I lay
+In amber shades of many a golden spray,
+Where looping low with languid arms the Vine
+In wreaths of ravishment did overtwine
+Her kneeling Live-Oak, thousand-fold to plight
+Herself unto her own true stalwart knight.
+
+As some dim blur of distant music nears
+The long-desiring sense, and slowly clears
+   To forms of time and apprehensive tune,
+   So, as I lay, full soon
+Interpretation throve:  the bee's fanfare,
+Through sequent films of discourse vague as air,
+Passed to plain words, while, fanning faint perfume,
+The bee o'erhung a rich, unrifled bloom:
+   "O Earth, fair lordly Blossom, soft a-shine
+   Upon the star-pranked universal vine,
+      Hast nought for me?
+            To thee
+   Come I, a poet, hereward haply blown,
+   From out another worldflower lately flown.
+Wilt ask, `What profit e'er a poet brings?'
+He beareth starry stuff about his wings
+To pollen thee and sting thee fertile:  nay,
+If still thou narrow thy contracted way,
+   -- Worldflower, if thou refuse me --
+   -- Worldflower, if thou abuse me,
+   And hoist thy stamen's spear-point high
+   To wound my wing and mar mine eye --
+Nathless I'll drive me to thy deepest sweet,
+Yea, richlier shall that pain the pollen beat
+From me to thee, for oft these pollens be
+Fine dust from wars that poets wage for thee.
+But, O beloved Earthbloom soft a-shine
+Upon the universal Jessamine,
+      Prithee, abuse me not,
+      Prithee, refuse me not,
+Yield, yield the heartsome honey love to me
+      Hid in thy nectary!"
+And as I sank into a dimmer dream
+The pleading bee's song-burthen sole did seem:
+   "Hast ne'er a honey-drop of love for me
+      In thy huge nectary?"
+
+____
+Tampa, Florida, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+The Harlequin of Dreams.
+
+
+
+Swift, through some trap mine eyes have never found,
+ Dim-panelled in the painted scene of Sleep,
+ Thou, giant Harlequin of Dreams, dost leap
+Upon my spirit's stage.  Then Sight and Sound,
+Then Space and Time, then Language, Mete and Bound,
+ And all familiar Forms that firmly keep
+ Man's reason in the road, change faces, peep
+Betwixt the legs and mock the daily round.
+Yet thou canst more than mock:  sometimes my tears
+ At midnight break through bounden lids -- a sign
+  Thou hast a heart:  and oft thy little leaven
+Of dream-taught wisdom works me bettered years.
+ In one night witch, saint, trickster, fool divine,
+  I think thou'rt Jester at the Court of Heaven!
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+Street Cries.
+
+    Oft seems the Time a market-town
+     Where many merchant-spirits meet
+    Who up and down and up and down
+     Cry out along the street
+
+    Their needs, as wares; one THUS, one SO:
+     Till all the ways are full of sound:
+    -- But still come rain, and sun, and snow,
+     And still the world goes round.
+
+
+
+    I.  Remonstrance.
+
+
+ "Opinion, let me alone:  I am not thine.
+Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear
+ To feature me my Lord by rule and line.
+Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair,
+    Not one sweet inch:  nay, if thy sight is sharp,
+    Would'st count the strings upon an angel's harp?
+            Forbear, forbear.
+
+ "Oh let me love my Lord more fathom deep
+Than there is line to sound with:  let me love
+ My fellow not as men that mandates keep:
+Yea, all that's lovable, below, above,
+    That let me love by heart, by heart, because
+    (Free from the penal pressure of the laws)
+            I find it fair.
+
+ "The tears I weep by day and bitter night,
+Opinion! for thy sole salt vintage fall.
+ -- As morn by morn I rise with fresh delight,
+Time through my casement cheerily doth call
+    `Nature is new, 'tis birthday every day,
+    Come feast with me, let no man say me nay,
+            Whate'er befall.'
+
+ "So fare I forth to feast:  I sit beside
+Some brother bright:  but, ere good-morrow's passed,
+ Burly Opinion wedging in hath cried
+`Thou shalt not sit by us, to break thy fast,
+    Save to our Rubric thou subscribe and swear --
+    `Religion hath blue eyes and yellow hair:'
+            She's Saxon, all.'
+
+ "Then, hard a-hungered for my brother's grace
+Till well-nigh fain to swear his folly's true,
+ In sad dissent I turn my longing face
+To him that sits on the left:  `Brother, -- with you?'
+    -- `Nay, not with me, save thou subscribe and swear
+    `Religion hath black eyes and raven hair:'
+            Nought else is true.'
+
+ "Debarred of banquets that my heart could make
+With every man on every day of life,
+ I homeward turn, my fires of pain to slake
+In deep endearments of a worshipped wife.
+    `I love thee well, dear Love,' quoth she, `and yet
+    Would that thy creed with mine completely met,
+            As one, not two.'
+
+ "Assassin! Thief! Opinion, 'tis thy work.
+By Church, by throne, by hearth, by every good
+ That's in the Town of Time, I see thee lurk,
+And e'er some shadow stays where thou hast stood.
+    Thou hand'st sweet Socrates his hemlock sour;
+    Thou sav'st Barabbas in that hideous hour,
+            And stabb'st the good
+
+ "Deliverer Christ; thou rack'st the souls of men;
+Thou tossest girls to lions and boys to flames;
+ Thou hew'st Crusader down by Saracen;
+Thou buildest closets full of secret shames;
+    Indifferent cruel, thou dost blow the blaze
+    Round Ridley or Servetus; all thy days
+            Smell scorched; I would
+
+ "-- Thou base-born Accident of time and place --
+Bigot Pretender unto Judgment's throne --
+ Bastard, that claimest with a cunning face
+Those rights the true, true Son of Man doth own
+    By Love's authority -- thou Rebel cold
+    At head of civil wars and quarrels old --
+            Thou Knife on a throne --
+
+ "I would thou left'st me free, to live with love,
+And faith, that through the love of love doth find
+ My Lord's dear presence in the stars above,
+The clods below, the flesh without, the mind
+    Within, the bread, the tear, the smile.
+    Opinion, damned Intriguer, gray with guile,
+            Let me alone."
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878-9.
+
+
+
+   II.  The Ship of Earth.
+
+
+"Thou Ship of Earth, with Death, and Birth, and Life, and Sex aboard,
+ And fires of Desires burning hotly in the hold,
+I fear thee, O! I fear thee, for I hear the tongue and sword
+ At battle on the deck, and the wild mutineers are bold!
+
+"The dewdrop morn may fall from off the petal of the sky,
+ But all the deck is wet with blood and stains the crystal red.
+A pilot, GOD, a pilot! for the helm is left awry,
+ And the best sailors in the ship lie there among the dead!"
+
+____
+Prattville, Alabama, 1868.
+
+
+
+  III.  How Love Looked for Hell.
+
+
+"To heal his heart of long-time pain
+One day Prince Love for to travel was fain
+   With Ministers Mind and Sense.
+`Now what to thee most strange may be?'
+Quoth Mind and Sense.  `All things above,
+One curious thing I first would see --
+   Hell,' quoth Love.
+
+"Then Mind rode in and Sense rode out:
+They searched the ways of man about.
+   First frightfully groaneth Sense.
+`'Tis here, 'tis here,' and spurreth in fear
+To the top of the hill that hangeth above
+And plucketh the Prince:  `Come, come, 'tis here --'
+   `Where?' quoth Love --
+
+"`Not far, not far,' said shivering Sense
+As they rode on.  `A short way hence,
+   -- But seventy paces hence:
+Look, King, dost see where suddenly
+This road doth dip from the height above?
+Cold blew a mouldy wind by me'
+   (`Cold?' quoth Love)
+
+"`As I rode down, and the River was black,
+And yon-side, lo! an endless wrack
+   And rabble of souls,' sighed Sense,
+`Their eyes upturned and begged and burned
+In brimstone lakes, and a Hand above
+Beat back the hands that upward yearned --'
+   `Nay!' quoth Love --
+
+"`Yea, yea, sweet Prince; thyself shalt see,
+Wilt thou but down this slope with me;
+   'Tis palpable,' whispered Sense.
+-- At the foot of the hill a living rill
+Shone, and the lilies shone white above;
+`But now 'twas black, 'twas a river, this rill,'
+   (`Black?' quoth Love)
+
+"`Ay, black, but lo! the lilies grow,
+And yon-side where was woe, was woe,
+   -- Where the rabble of souls,' cried Sense,
+`Did shrivel and turn and beg and burn,
+Thrust back in the brimstone from above --
+Is banked of violet, rose, and fern:'
+   `How?' quoth Love:
+
+"`For lakes of pain, yon pleasant plain
+Of woods and grass and yellow grain
+   Doth ravish the soul and sense:
+And never a sigh beneath the sky,
+And folk that smile and gaze above --'
+`But saw'st thou here, with thine own eye,
+   Hell?' quoth Love.
+
+"`I saw true hell with mine own eye,
+True hell, or light hath told a lie,
+   True, verily,' quoth stout Sense.
+Then Love rode round and searched the ground,
+The caves below, the hills above;
+`But I cannot find where thou hast found
+   Hell,' quoth Love.
+
+"There, while they stood in a green wood
+And marvelled still on Ill and Good,
+   Came suddenly Minister Mind.
+`In the heart of sin doth hell begin:
+'Tis not below, 'tis not above,
+It lieth within, it lieth within:'
+   (`Where?' quoth Love)
+
+"`I saw a man sit by a corse;
+`Hell's in the murderer's breast:  remorse!'
+   Thus clamored his mind to his mind:
+Not fleshly dole is the sinner's goal,
+Hell's not below, nor yet above,
+'Tis fixed in the ever-damned soul --'
+   `Fixed?' quoth Love --
+
+"`Fixed:  follow me, would'st thou but see:
+He weepeth under yon willow tree,
+   Fast chained to his corse,' quoth Mind.
+Full soon they passed, for they rode fast,
+Where the piteous willow bent above.
+`Now shall I see at last, at last,
+   Hell,' quoth Love.
+
+"There when they came Mind suffered shame:
+`These be the same and not the same,'
+   A-wondering whispered Mind.
+Lo, face by face two spirits pace
+Where the blissful willow waves above:
+One saith:  `Do me a friendly grace --'
+   (`Grace!' quoth Love)
+
+"`Read me two Dreams that linger long,
+Dim as returns of old-time song
+   That flicker about the mind.
+I dreamed (how deep in mortal sleep!)
+I struck thee dead, then stood above,
+With tears that none but dreamers weep;'
+   `Dreams,' quoth Love;
+
+"`In dreams, again, I plucked a flower
+That clung with pain and stung with power,
+   Yea, nettled me, body and mind.'
+`'Twas the nettle of sin, 'twas medicine;
+No need nor seed of it here Above;
+In dreams of hate true loves begin.'
+   `True,' quoth Love.
+
+"`Now strange,' quoth Sense, and `Strange,' quoth Mind,
+`We saw it, and yet 'tis hard to find,
+   -- But we saw it,' quoth Sense and Mind.
+Stretched on the ground, beautiful-crowned
+Of the piteous willow that wreathed above,
+`But I cannot find where ye have found
+   Hell,' quoth Love."
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878-9.
+
+
+
+   IV.  Tyranny.
+
+
+   "Spring-germs, spring-germs,
+I charge you by your life, go back to death.
+This glebe is sick, this wind is foul of breath.
+   Stay:  feed the worms.
+
+   "Oh! every clod
+Is faint, and falters from the war of growth
+And crumbles in a dreary dust of sloth,
+   Unploughed, untrod.
+
+   "What need, what need,
+To hide with flowers the curse upon the hills,
+Or sanctify the banks of sluggish rills
+   Where vapors breed?
+
+   "And -- if needs must --
+Advance, O Summer-heats! upon the land,
+And bake the bloody mould to shards and sand
+   And dust.
+
+   "Before your birth,
+Burn up, O Roses! with your dainty flame.
+Good Violets, sweet Violets, hide shame
+   Below the earth.
+
+   "Ye silent Mills,
+Reject the bitter kindness of the moss.
+O Farms! protest if any tree emboss
+   The barren hills.
+
+   "Young Trade is dead,
+And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern
+And folds his arms that find no bread to earn,
+   And bows his head.
+
+   "Spring-germs, spring-germs,
+Albeit the towns have left you place to play,
+I charge you, sport not.  Winter owns to-day,
+   Stay:  feed the worms."
+
+____
+Prattville, Alabama, 1868.
+
+
+
+    V.  Life and Song.
+
+
+"If life were caught by a clarionet,
+ And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
+Should thrill its joy and trill its fret,
+ And utter its heart in every deed,
+
+"Then would this breathing clarionet
+ Type what the poet fain would be;
+For none o' the singers ever yet
+ Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,
+
+"Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
+ Or utterly bodied forth his life,
+Or out of life and song has wrought
+ The perfect one of man and wife;
+
+"Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
+ Might each express the other's all,
+Careless if life or art were long
+ Since both were one, to stand or fall:
+
+"So that the wonder struck the crowd,
+ Who shouted it about the land:
+`His song was only living aloud,
+ His work, a singing with his hand!'"
+
+____
+1868.
+
+
+
+   VI.  To Richard Wagner.
+
+
+"I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime.
+ All glory twinkled through some sweat of fight,
+From each tall chimney of the roaring time
+ That shot his fire far up the sooty night
+Mixt fuels -- Labor's Right and Labor's Crime --
+ Sent upward throb on throb of scarlet light
+Till huge hot blushes in the heavens blent
+ With golden hues of Trade's high firmament.
+
+"Fierce burned the furnaces; yet all seemed well,
+ Hope dreamed rich music in the rattling mills.
+`Ye foundries, ye shall cast my church a bell,'
+ Loud cried the Future from the farthest hills:
+`Ye groaning forces, crack me every shell
+ Of customs, old constraints, and narrow ills;
+Thou, lithe Invention, wake and pry and guess,
+ Till thy deft mind invents me Happiness.'
+
+"And I beheld high scaffoldings of creeds
+ Crumbling from round Religion's perfect Fane:
+And a vast noise of rights, wrongs, powers, needs,
+ -- Cries of new Faiths that called `This Way is plain,'
+-- Grindings of upper against lower greeds --
+ -- Fond sighs for old things, shouts for new, -- did reign
+Below that stream of golden fire that broke,
+ Mottled with red, above the seas of smoke.
+
+"Hark!  Gay fanfares from halls of old Romance
+ Strike through the clouds of clamor:  who be these
+That, paired in rich processional, advance
+ From darkness o'er the murk mad factories
+Into yon flaming road, and sink, strange Ministrants!
+ Sheer down to earth, with many minstrelsies
+And motions fine, and mix about the scene
+ And fill the Time with forms of ancient mien?
+
+"Bright ladies and brave knights of Fatherland;
+ Sad mariners, no harbor e'er may hold,
+A swan soft floating tow'rds a magic strand;
+ Dim ghosts, of earth, air, water, fire, steel, gold,
+Wind, grief, and love; a lewd and lurking band
+ Of Powers -- dark Conspiracy, Cunning cold,
+Gray Sorcery; magic cloaks and rings and rods;
+ Valkyries, heroes, Rhinemaids, giants, gods!
+
+     *    *    *    *    *
+
+"O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art,
+ No trifler thou:  Siegfried and Wotan be
+Names for big ballads of the modern heart.
+ Thine ears hear deeper than thine eyes can see.
+Voice of the monstrous mill, the shouting mart,
+ Not less of airy cloud and wave and tree,
+Thou, thou, if even to thyself unknown,
+ Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone."
+
+____
+1877.
+
+
+
+  VII.  A Song of Love.
+
+
+    "Hey, rose, just born
+    Twin to a thorn;
+Was't so with you, O Love and Scorn?
+
+    "Sweet eyes that smiled,
+    Now wet and wild;
+O Eye and Tear -- mother and child.
+
+    "Well:  Love and Pain
+    Be kinsfolk twain:
+Yet would, Oh would I could love again."
+
+
+
+
+To Beethoven.
+
+
+
+In o'er-strict calyx lingering,
+ Lay music's bud too long unblown,
+Till thou, Beethoven, breathed the spring:
+ Then bloomed the perfect rose of tone.
+
+O Psalmist of the weak, the strong,
+ O Troubadour of love and strife,
+Co-Litanist of right and wrong,
+ Sole Hymner of the whole of life,
+
+I know not how, I care not why, --
+ Thy music sets my world at ease,
+And melts my passion's mortal cry
+ In satisfying symphonies.
+
+It soothes my accusations sour
+ 'Gainst thoughts that fray the restless soul:
+The stain of death; the pain of power;
+ The lack of love 'twixt part and whole;
+
+The yea-nay of Freewill and Fate,
+ Whereof both cannot be, yet are;
+The praise a poet wins too late
+ Who starves from earth into a star;
+
+The lies that serve great parties well,
+ While truths but give their Christ a cross;
+The loves that send warm souls to hell,
+ While cold-blood neuters take no loss;
+
+Th' indifferent smile that nature's grace
+ On Jesus, Judas, pours alike;
+Th' indifferent frown on nature's face
+ When luminous lightnings strangely strike
+
+The sailor praying on his knees
+ And spare his mate that's cursing God;
+How babes and widows starve and freeze,
+ Yet Nature will not stir a clod;
+
+Why Nature blinds us in each act
+ Yet makes no law in mercy bend,
+No pitfall from our feet retract,
+ No storm cry out `Take shelter, friend;'
+
+Why snakes that crawl the earth should ply
+ Rattles, that whoso hears may shun,
+While serpent lightnings in the sky,
+ But rattle when the deed is done;
+
+How truth can e'er be good for them
+ That have not eyes to bear its strength,
+And yet how stern our lights condemn
+ Delays that lend the darkness length;
+
+To know all things, save knowingness;
+ To grasp, yet loosen, feeling's rein;
+To waste no manhood on success;
+ To look with pleasure upon pain;
+
+Though teased by small mixt social claims,
+ To lose no large simplicity,
+And midst of clear-seen crimes and shames
+ To move with manly purity;
+
+To hold, with keen, yet loving eyes,
+ Art's realm from Cleverness apart,
+To know the Clever good and wise,
+ Yet haunt the lonesome heights of Art;
+
+O Psalmist of the weak, the strong,
+ O Troubadour of love and strife,
+Co-Litanist of right and wrong,
+ Sole Hymner of the whole of life,
+
+I know not how, I care not why,
+ Thy music brings this broil at ease,
+And melts my passion's mortal cry
+ In satisfying symphonies.
+
+Yea, it forgives me all my sins,
+ Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme,
+And tunes the task each day begins
+ By the last trumpet-note of Time.
+
+____
+1876-7.
+
+
+
+
+An Frau Nannette Falk-Auerbach.
+
+
+
+Als du im Saal mit deiner himmlischen Kunst
+ Beethoven zeigst, und seinem Willen nach
+Mit den zehn Fingern fuehrst der Leute Gunst,
+ Zehn Zungen sagen was der Meister sprach.
+Schauend dich an, ich seh', dass nicht allein
+ Du sitzest:  jetzt herab die Toene ziehn
+Beethovens Geist:  er steht bei dir, ganz rein:
+ Fuer dich mit Vaters Stolz sein' Augen gluehn:
+Er sagt, "Ich hoerte dich aus Himmelsluft,
+ Die kommt ja naeher, wo ein Kuenstler spielt:
+Mein Kind (ich sagte) mich zur Erde ruft:
+ Ja, weil mein Arm kein Kind im Leben hielt,
+  Gott hat mir dich nach meinem Tod gegeben,
+  Nannette, Tochter! dich, mein zweites Leben!"
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+To Nannette Falk-Auerbach.
+
+
+
+Oft as I hear thee, wrapt in heavenly art,
+ The massive message of Beethoven tell
+With thy ten fingers to the people's heart
+ As if ten tongues told news of heaven and hell, --
+Gazing on thee, I mark that not alone,
+ Ah, not alone, thou sittest:  there, by thee,
+Beethoven's self, dear living lord of tone,
+ Doth stand and smile upon thy mastery.
+Full fain and fatherly his great eyes glow:
+ He says, "From Heaven, my child, I heard thee call
+(For, where an artist plays, the sky is low):
+ Yea, since my lonesome life did lack love's all,
+  In death, God gives me thee:  thus, quit of pain,
+  Daughter, Nannette! in thee I live again."
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+To Our Mocking-Bird.
+
+Died of a cat, May, 1878.
+
+
+
+  I.
+
+Trillets of humor, -- shrewdest whistle-wit, --
+ Contralto cadences of grave desire
+ Such as from off the passionate Indian pyre
+Drift down through sandal-odored flames that split
+About the slim young widow who doth sit
+ And sing above, -- midnights of tone entire, --
+ Tissues of moonlight shot with songs of fire; --
+Bright drops of tune, from oceans infinite
+Of melody, sipped off the thin-edged wave
+And trickling down the beak, -- discourses brave
+ Of serious matter that no man may guess, --
+ Good-fellow greetings, cries of light distress --
+  All these but now within the house we heard:
+  O Death, wast thou too deaf to hear the bird?
+
+
+  II.
+
+Ah me, though never an ear for song, thou hast
+ A tireless tooth for songsters:  thus of late
+ Thou camest, Death, thou Cat! and leap'st my gate,
+And, long ere Love could follow, thou hadst passed
+Within and snatched away, how fast, how fast,
+ My bird -- wit, songs, and all -- thy richest freight
+ Since that fell time when in some wink of fate
+Thy yellow claws unsheathed and stretched, and cast
+Sharp hold on Keats, and dragged him slow away,
+And harried him with hope and horrid play --
+ Ay, him, the world's best wood-bird, wise with song --
+ Till thou hadst wrought thine own last mortal wrong.
+  'Twas wrong! 'twas wrong! I care not, WRONG's the word --
+  To munch our Keats and crunch our mocking-bird.
+
+
+  III.
+
+Nay, Bird; my grief gainsays the Lord's best right.
+ The Lord was fain, at some late festal time,
+ That Keats should set all Heaven's woods in rhyme,
+And thou in bird-notes.  Lo, this tearful night,
+Methinks I see thee, fresh from death's despite,
+ Perched in a palm-grove, wild with pantomime,
+ O'er blissful companies couched in shady thyme,
+-- Methinks I hear thy silver whistlings bright
+Mix with the mighty discourse of the wise,
+ Till broad Beethoven, deaf no more, and Keats,
+'Midst of much talk, uplift their smiling eyes,
+ And mark the music of thy wood-conceits,
+  And halfway pause on some large, courteous word,
+  And call thee "Brother", O thou heavenly Bird!
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1878.
+
+
+
+
+The Dove.
+
+
+
+If haply thou, O Desdemona Morn,
+ Shouldst call along the curving sphere, "Remain,
+Dear Night, sweet Moor; nay, leave me not in scorn!"
+ With soft halloos of heavenly love and pain; --
+
+Shouldst thou, O Spring! a-cower in coverts dark,
+ 'Gainst proud supplanting Summer sing thy plea,
+And move the mighty woods through mailed bark
+ Till mortal heart-break throbbed in every tree; --
+
+Or (grievous `if' that may be `yea' o'er-soon!),
+ If thou, my Heart, long holden from thy Sweet,
+Shouldst knock Death's door with mellow shocks of tune,
+ Sad inquiry to make -- `When may we meet?'
+
+Nay, if ye three, O Morn! O Spring! O Heart!
+ Should chant grave unisons of grief and love;
+Ye could not mourn with more melodious art
+ Than daily doth yon dim sequestered dove.
+
+____
+Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+To ----, with a Rose.
+
+
+
+      I asked my heart to say
+Some word whose worth my love's devoir might pay
+      Upon my Lady's natal day.
+
+      Then said my heart to me:
+`Learn from the rhyme that now shall come to thee
+      What fits thy Love most lovingly.'
+
+      This gift that learning shows;
+For, as a rhyme unto its rhyme-twin goes,
+      I send a rose unto a Rose.
+
+____
+Philadelphia, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+On Huntingdon's "Miranda".
+
+
+
+The storm hath blown thee a lover, sweet,
+And laid him kneeling at thy feet.
+But, -- guerdon rich for favor rare!
+The wind hath all thy holy hair
+To kiss and to sing through and to flare
+Like torch-flames in the passionate air,
+    About thee, O Miranda.
+
+Eyes in a blaze, eyes in a daze,
+Bold with love, cold with amaze,
+Chaste-thrilling eyes, fast-filling eyes
+With daintiest tears of love's surprise,
+Ye draw my soul unto your blue
+As warm skies draw the exhaling dew,
+    Divine eyes of Miranda.
+
+And if I were yon stolid stone,
+Thy tender arm doth lean upon,
+Thy touch would turn me to a heart,
+And I would palpitate and start,
+-- Content, when thou wert gone, to be
+A dumb rock by the lonesome sea
+    Forever, O Miranda.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+Ode to the Johns Hopkins University.
+
+Read on the Fourth Commemoration Day, February, 1880.
+
+
+
+   How tall among her sisters, and how fair, --
+How grave beyond her youth, yet debonair
+As dawn, 'mid wrinkled Matres of old lands
+Our youngest Alma Mater modest stands!
+In four brief cycles round the punctual sun
+Has she, old Learning's latest daughter, won
+This grace, this stature, and this fruitful fame.
+   Howbeit she was born
+   Unnoised as any stealing summer morn.
+From far the sages saw, from far they came
+And ministered to her,
+Led by the soaring-genius'd Sylvester
+That, earlier, loosed the knot great Newton tied,
+And flung the door of Fame's locked temple wide.
+As favorable fairies thronged of old and blessed
+The cradled princess with their several best,
+      So, gifts and dowers meet
+      To lay at Wisdom's feet,
+These liberal masters largely brought --
+Dear diamonds of their long-compressed thought,
+Rich stones from out the labyrinthine cave
+Of research, pearls from Time's profoundest wave
+And many a jewel brave, of brilliant ray,
+   Dug in the far obscure Cathay
+      Of meditation deep --
+With flowers, of such as keep
+Their fragrant tissues and their heavenly hues
+Fresh-bathed forever in eternal dews --
+   The violet with her low-drooped eye,
+   For learned modesty, --
+The student snow-drop, that doth hang and pore
+Upon the earth, like Science, evermore,
+And underneath the clod doth grope and grope, --
+   The astronomer heliotrope,
+That watches heaven with a constant eye, --
+The daring crocus, unafraid to try
+(When Nature calls) the February snows, --
+   And patience' perfect rose.
+Thus sped with helps of love and toil and thought,
+Thus forwarded of faith, with hope thus fraught,
+In four brief cycles round the stringent sun
+This youngest sister hath her stature won.
+
+         Nay, why regard
+The passing of the years?  Nor made, nor marr'd,
+By help or hindrance of slow Time was she:
+O'er this fair growth Time had no mastery:
+So quick she bloomed, she seemed to bloom at birth,
+As Eve from Adam, or as he from earth.
+Superb o'er slow increase of day on day,
+Complete as Pallas she began her way;
+Yet not from Jove's unwrinkled forehead sprung,
+But long-time dreamed, and out of trouble wrung,
+Fore-seen, wise-plann'd, pure child of thought and pain,
+Leapt our Minerva from a mortal brain.
+
+And here, O finer Pallas, long remain, --
+Sit on these Maryland hills, and fix thy reign,
+And frame a fairer Athens than of yore
+   In these blest bounds of Baltimore, --
+   Here, where the climates meet
+That each may make the other's lack complete, --
+Where Florida's soft Favonian airs beguile
+The nipping North, -- where nature's powers smile, --
+Where Chesapeake holds frankly forth her hands
+Spread wide with invitation to all lands, --
+Where now the eager people yearn to find
+The organizing hand that fast may bind
+Loose straws of aimless aspiration fain
+   In sheaves of serviceable grain, --
+   Here, old and new in one,
+Through nobler cycles round a richer sun
+   O'er-rule our modern ways,
+O blest Minerva of these larger days!
+Call here thy congress of the great, the wise,
+The hearing ears, the seeing eyes, --
+Enrich us out of every farthest clime, --
+Yea, make all ages native to our time,
+   Till thou the freedom of the city grant
+   To each most antique habitant
+      Of Fame, --
+Bring Shakespeare back, a man and not a name, --
+Let every player that shall mimic us
+In audience see old godlike Aeschylus, --
+Bring Homer, Dante, Plato, Socrates, --
+Bring Virgil from the visionary seas
+Of old romance, -- bring Milton, no more blind, --
+Bring large Lucretius, with unmaniac mind, --
+Bring all gold hearts and high resolved wills
+To be with us about these happy hills, --
+   Bring old Renown
+To walk familiar citizen of the town, --
+Bring Tolerance, that can kiss and disagree, --
+Bring Virtue, Honor, Truth, and Loyalty, --
+Bring Faith that sees with undissembling eyes, --
+Bring all large Loves and heavenly Charities, --
+Till man seem less a riddle unto man
+And fair Utopia less Utopian,
+And many peoples call from shore to shore,
+`The world has bloomed again, at Baltimore!'
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+To Dr. Thomas Shearer.
+
+Presenting a portrait-bust of the author.
+
+
+
+Since you, rare friend! have tied my living tongue
+ With thanks more large than man e'er said or sung,
+So let the dumbness of this image be
+ My eloquence, and still interpret me.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+Martha Washington.
+
+Written for the "Martha Washington Court Journal".
+
+
+
+Down cold snow-stretches of our bitter time,
+ When windy shams and the rain-mocking sleet
+Of Trade have cased us in such icy rime
+ That hearts are scarcely hot enough to beat,
+Thy fame, O Lady of the lofty eyes,
+ Doth fall along the age, like as a lane
+Of Spring, in whose most generous boundaries
+ Full many a frozen virtue warms again.
+To-day I saw the pale much-burdened form
+ Of Charity come limping o'er the line,
+And straighten from the bending of the storm
+ And flush with stirrings of new strength divine,
+Such influence and sweet gracious impulse came
+Out of the beams of thine immortal name!
+
+____
+Baltimore, February 22d, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+Psalm of the West.
+
+
+
+Land of the willful gospel, thou worst and thou best;
+Tall Adam of lands, new-made of the dust of the West;
+Thou wroughtest alone in the Garden of God, unblest
+Till He fashioned lithe Freedom to lie for thine Eve on thy breast --
+ Till out of thy heart's dear neighborhood, out of thy side,
+ He fashioned an intimate Sweet one and brought thee a Bride.
+ Cry hail! nor bewail that the wound of her coming was wide.
+Lo, Freedom reached forth where the world as an apple hung red;
+`Let us taste the whole radiant round of it,' gayly she said:
+`If we die, at the worst we shall lie as the first of the dead.'
+ Knowledge of Good and of Ill, O Land! she hath given thee;
+ Perilous godhoods of choosing have rent thee and riven thee;
+ Will's high adoring to Ill's low exploring hath driven thee --
+ Freedom, thy Wife, hath uplifted thy life and clean shriven thee!
+Her shalt thou clasp for a balm to the scars of thy breast,
+Her shalt thou kiss for a calm to thy wars of unrest,
+Her shalt extol in the psalm of the soul of the West.
+ For Weakness, in freedom, grows stronger than Strength with a chain;
+ And Error, in freedom, will come to lamenting his stain,
+ Till freely repenting he whiten his spirit again;
+And Friendship, in freedom, will blot out the bounding of race;
+And straight Law, in freedom, will curve to the rounding of grace;
+And Fashion, in freedom, will die of the lie in her face;
+ And Desire flame white on the sense as a fire on a height,
+ And Sex flame white in the soul as a star in the night,
+ And Marriage plight sense unto soul as the two-colored light
+ Of the fire and the star shines one with a duplicate might;
+And Science be known as the sense making love to the All,
+And Art be known as the soul making love to the All,
+And Love be known as the marriage of man with the All --
+ Till Science to knowing the Highest shall lovingly turn,
+ Till Art to loving the Highest shall consciously burn,
+ Till Science to Art as a man to a woman shall yearn,
+            -- Then morn!
+When Faith from the wedding of Knowing and Loving shall purely be born,
+And the Child shall smile in the West, and the West to the East give morn,
+And the Time in that ultimate Prime shall forget old regretting and scorn,
+Yea, the stream of the light shall give off in a shimmer
+  the dream of the night forlorn.
+
+      Once on a time a soul
+       Too full of his dole
+In a querulous dream went crying from pole to pole --
+ Went sobbing and crying
+ For ever a sorrowful song of living and dying,
+ How `life was the dropping and death the drying
+ Of a Tear that fell in a day when God was sighing.'
+And ever Time tossed him bitterly to and fro
+As a shuttle inlaying a perilous warp of woe
+In the woof of things from terminal snow to snow,
+               Till, lo!
+                Rest.
+And he sank on the grass of the earth as a lark on its nest,
+And he lay in the midst of the way from the east to the west.
+Then the East came out from the east and the West from the west,
+ And, behold! in the gravid deeps of the lower dark,
+ While, above, the wind was fanning the dawn as a spark,
+ The East and the West took form as the wings of a lark.
+One wing was feathered with facts of the uttermost Past,
+And one with the dreams of a prophet; and both sailed fast
+And met where the sorrowful Soul on the earth was cast.
+ Then a Voice said:  `Thine, if thou lovest enough to use;'
+ But another:  `To fly and to sing is pain:  refuse!'
+ Then the Soul said:  `Come, O my wings!  I cannot but choose.'
+And the Soul was a-tremble like as a new-born thing,
+Till the spark of the dawn wrought a conscience in heart as in wing,
+Saying, `Thou art the lark of the dawn; it is time to sing.'
+
+Then that artist began in a lark's low circling to pass;
+And first he sang at the height of the top of the grass
+A song of the herds that are born and die in the mass.
+ And next he sang a celestial-passionate round
+ At the height of the lips of a woman above the ground,
+ How `Love was a fair true Lady, and Death a wild hound,
+ And she called, and he licked her hand and with girdle was bound.'
+And then with a universe-love he was hot in the wings,
+And the sun stretched beams to the worlds as the shining strings
+Of the large hid harp that sounds when an all-lover sings;
+ And the sky's blue traction prevailed o'er the earth's in might,
+ And the passion of flight grew mad with the glory of height
+ And the uttering of song was like to the giving of light;
+And he learned that hearing and seeing wrought nothing alone,
+And that music on earth much light upon Heaven had thrown,
+And he melted-in silvery sunshine with silvery tone;
+ And the spirals of music e'er higher and higher he wound
+ Till the luminous cinctures of melody up from the ground
+ Arose as the shaft of a tapering tower of sound --
+ Arose for an unstricken full-finished Babel of sound.
+But God was not angry, nor ever confused his tongue,
+For not out of selfish nor impudent travail was wrung
+The song of all men and all things that the all-lover sung.
+ Then he paused at the top of his tower of song on high,
+ And the voice of the God of the artist from far in the sky
+Said, `Son, look down:  I will cause that a Time gone by
+Shall pass, and reveal his heart to thy loving eye.'
+
+      Far spread, below,
+The sea that fast hath locked in his loose flow
+All secrets of Atlantis' drowned woe
+ Lay bound about with night on every hand,
+ Save down the eastern brink a shining band
+ Of day made out a little way from land.
+Then from that shore the wind upbore a cry:
+`Thou Sea, thou Sea of Darkness! why, oh why
+Dost waste thy West in unthrift mystery?'
+ But ever the idiot sea-mouths foam and fill,
+ And never a wave doth good for man or ill,
+ And Blank is king, and Nothing hath his will;
+And like as grim-beaked pelicans level file
+Across the sunset toward their nightly isle
+On solemn wings that wave but seldomwhile,
+ So leanly sails the day behind the day
+ To where the Past's lone Rock o'erglooms the spray,
+ And down its mortal fissures sinks away.
+
+   Master, Master, break this ban:
+    The wave lacks Thee.
+   Oh, is it not to widen man
+    Stretches the sea?
+   Oh, must the sea-bird's idle van
+    Alone be free?
+
+   Into the Sea of the Dark doth creep
+    Bjoerne's pallid sail,
+   As the face of a walker in his sleep,
+    Set rigid and most pale,
+   About the night doth peer and peep
+    In a dream of an ancient tale.
+
+   Lo, here is made a hasty cry:
+    `Land, land, upon the west! --
+   God save such land!  Go by, go by:
+    Here may no mortal rest,
+   Where this waste hell of slate doth lie
+    And grind the glacier's breast.'
+
+   The sail goeth limp:  hey, flap and strain!
+    Round eastward slanteth the mast;
+   As the sleep-walker waked with pain,
+    White-clothed in the midnight blast,
+   Doth stare and quake, and stride again
+    To houseward all aghast.
+
+   Yet as, `A ghost!' his household cry:
+    `He hath followed a ghost in flight.
+   Let us see the ghost' -- his household fly
+    With lamps to search the night --
+   So Norsemen's sails run out and try
+    The Sea of the Dark with light.
+
+   Stout Are Marson, southward whirled
+    From out the tempest's hand,
+   Doth skip the sloping of the world
+    To Huitramannaland,
+   Where Georgia's oaks with moss-beards curled
+    Wave by the shining strand,
+
+   And sway in sighs from Florida's Spring
+    Or Carolina's Palm --
+   What time the mocking-bird doth bring
+    The woods his artist's-balm,
+   Singing the Song of Everything
+    Consummate-sweet and calm --
+
+   Land of large merciful-hearted skies,
+    Big bounties, rich increase,
+   Green rests for Trade's blood-shotten eyes,
+    For o'er-beat brains surcease,
+   For Love the dear woods' sympathies,
+    For Grief the wise woods' peace,
+
+   For Need rich givings of hid powers
+    In hills and vales quick-won,
+   For Greed large exemplary flowers
+    That ne'er have toiled nor spun,
+   For Heat fair-tempered winds and showers,
+    For Cold the neighbor sun.
+
+   Land where the Spirits of June-Heat
+    From out their forest-maze
+   Stray forth at eve with loitering feet,
+    And fervent hymns upraise
+   In bland accord and passion sweet
+    Along the Southern ways: --
+
+"O Darkness, tawny Twin whose Twin hath ceased,
+ Thou Odor from the day-flower's crushing born,
+Thou visible Sigh out of the mournful East,
+ That cannot see her lord again till morn:
+O Leaves, with hollow palms uplifted high
+ To catch the stars' most sacred rain of light:
+O pallid Lily-petals fain to die
+ Soul-stung by subtle passion of the night:
+O short-breath'd Winds beneath the gracious moon
+ Running mild errands for mild violets,
+Or carrying sighs from the red lips of June
+ What wavering way the odor-current sets:
+O Stars wreathed vinewise round yon heavenly dells,
+ Or thrust from out the sky in curving sprays,
+Or whorled, or looped with pendent flower-bells,
+ Or bramble-tangled in a brilliant maze,
+Or lying like young lilies in a lake
+ About the great white Lily of the moon,
+Or drifting white from where in heaven shake
+ Star-portraitures of apple trees in June,
+Or lapp'd as leaves of a great rose of stars,
+ Or shyly clambering up cloud-lattices,
+Or trampled pale in the red path of Mars,
+ Or trim-set quaint in gardeners'-fantasies:
+O long June Night-sounds crooned among the leaves;
+ O whispered confidence of Dark and Green;
+O murmurs in old moss about old eaves;
+ O tinklings floating over water-sheen."
+
+   Then Leif, bold son of Eric the Red,
+    To the South of the West doth flee --
+   Past slaty Helluland is sped,
+    Past Markland's woody lea,
+   Till round about fair Vinland's head,
+    Where Taunton helps the sea,
+
+   The Norseman calls, the anchor falls,
+    The mariners hurry a-strand:
+   They wassail with fore-drunken skals
+    Where prophet wild grapes stand;
+   They lift the Leifsbooth's hasty walls
+    They stride about the land --
+
+   New England, thee! whose ne'er-spent wine
+    As blood doth stretch each vein,
+   And urge thee, sinewed like thy vine,
+    Through peril and all pain
+   To grasp Endeavor's towering Pine,
+    And, once ahold, remain --
+
+   Land where the strenuous-handed Wind
+    With sarcasm of a friend
+   Doth smite the man would lag behind
+    To frontward of his end;
+   Yea, where the taunting fall and grind
+    Of Nature's Ill doth send
+
+   Such mortal challenge of a clown
+    Rude-thrust upon the soul,
+   That men but smile where mountains frown
+    Or scowling waters roll,
+   And Nature's front of battle down
+    Do hurl from pole to pole.
+
+Now long the Sea of Darkness glimmers low
+With sails from Northland flickering to and fro --
+Thorwald, Karlsefne, and those twin heirs of woe,
+ Hellboge and Finnge, in treasonable bed
+ Slain by the ill-born child of Eric Red,
+ Freydisa false.  Till, as much time is fled,
+Once more the vacant airs with darkness fill,
+Once more the wave doth never good nor ill,
+And Blank is king, and Nothing works his will;
+ And leanly sails the day behind the day
+ To where the Past's lone Rock o'erglooms the spray,
+ And down its mortal fissures sinks away,
+As when the grim-beaked pelicans level file
+Across the sunset to their seaward isle
+On solemn wings that wave but seldomwhile.
+
+   Master, Master, poets sing;
+    The Time calls Thee;
+   Yon Sea binds hard on everything
+    Man longs to be:
+   Oh, shall the sea-bird's aimless wing
+    Alone move free?
+
+`Santa Maria', well thou tremblest down the wave,
+ Thy `Pinta' far abow, thy `Nina' nigh astern:
+Columbus stands in the night alone, and, passing grave,
+ Yearns o'er the sea as tones o'er under-silence yearn.
+Heartens his heart as friend befriends his friend less brave,
+ Makes burn the faiths that cool, and cools the doubts that burn: --
+
+    I.
+
+"'Twixt this and dawn, three hours my soul will smite
+ With prickly seconds, or less tolerably
+ With dull-blade minutes flatwise slapping me.
+Wait, Heart! Time moves. --  Thou lithe young Western Night,
+Just-crowned king, slow riding to thy right,
+ Would God that I might straddle mutiny
+ Calm as thou sitt'st yon never-managed sea,
+Balk'st with his balking, fliest with his flight,
+Giv'st supple to his rearings and his falls,
+ Nor dropp'st one coronal star about thy brow
+  Whilst ever dayward thou art steadfast drawn!
+Yea, would I rode these mad contentious brawls
+ No damage taking from their If and How,
+  Nor no result save galloping to my Dawn!
+
+    II.
+
+"My Dawn? my Dawn?  How if it never break?
+ How if this West by other Wests is pieced,
+ And these by vacant Wests on Wests increased --
+One Pain of Space, with hollow ache on ache
+Throbbing and ceasing not for Christ's own sake? --
+ Big perilous theorem, hard for king and priest:
+ `Pursue the West but long enough, 'tis East!'
+Oh, if this watery world no turning take!
+ Oh, if for all my logic, all my dreams,
+ Provings of that which is by that which seems,
+Fears, hopes, chills, heats, hastes, patiences, droughts, tears,
+Wife-grievings, slights on love, embezzled years,
+ Hates, treaties, scorns, upliftings, loss and gain, --
+ This earth, no sphere, be all one sickening plane!
+
+    III.
+
+"Or, haply, how if this contrarious West,
+ That me by turns hath starved, by turns hath fed,
+ Embraced, disgraced, beat back, solicited,
+Have no fixed heart of Law within his breast,
+Or with some different rhythm doth e'er contest
+ Nature in the East?  Why, 'tis but three weeks fled
+ I saw my Judas needle shake his head
+And flout the Pole that, east, he Lord confessed!
+ God! if this West should own some other Pole,
+ And with his tangled ways perplex my soul
+Until the maze grow mortal, and I die
+ Where distraught Nature clean hath gone astray,
+ On earth some other wit than Time's at play,
+Some other God than mine above the sky!
+
+    IV.
+
+"Now speaks mine other heart with cheerier seeming:
+ `Ho, Admiral! o'er-defalking to thy crew
+ Against thyself, thyself far overfew
+To front yon multitudes of rebel scheming?'
+Come, ye wild twenty years of heavenly dreaming!
+ Come, ye wild weeks since first this canvas drew
+ Out of vexed Palos ere the dawn was blue,
+O'er milky waves about the bows full-creaming!
+ Come set me round with many faithful spears
+  Of confident remembrance -- how I crushed
+  Cat-lived rebellions, pitfalled treasons, hushed
+Scared husbands' heart-break cries on distant wives,
+Made cowards blush at whining for their lives,
+ Watered my parching souls, and dried their tears.
+
+    V.
+
+"Ere we Gomera cleared, a coward cried,
+ `Turn, turn:  here be three caravels ahead,
+ From Portugal, to take us:  we are dead!'
+`Hold Westward, pilot,' calmly I replied.
+So when the last land down the horizon died,
+ `Go back, go back!' they prayed:  `our hearts are lead.' --
+ `Friends, we are bound into the West,' I said.
+Then passed the wreck of a mast upon our side.
+`See' (so they wept) `God's Warning!  Admiral, turn!' --
+ `Steersman,' I said, `hold straight into the West.'
+Then down the night we saw the meteor burn.
+ `So do the very heavens in fire protest:
+Good Admiral, put about!  O Spain, dear Spain!' --
+`Hold straight into the West,' I said again.
+
+    VI.
+
+"Next drive we o'er the slimy-weeded sea.
+ `Lo! herebeneath' (another coward cries)
+ `The cursed land of sunk Atlantis lies:
+This slime will suck us down -- turn while thou'rt free!' --
+`But no!' I said, `Freedom bears West for me!'
+ Yet when the long-time stagnant winds arise,
+ And day by day the keel to westward flies,
+My Good my people's Ill doth come to be:
+ `Ever the winds into the West do blow;
+ Never a ship, once turned, might homeward go;
+Meanwhile we speed into the lonesome main.
+ For Christ's sake, parley, Admiral!  Turn, before
+We sail outside all bounds of help from pain!' --
+ `Our help is in the West,' I said once more.
+
+    VII.
+
+"So when there came a mighty cry of `Land!'
+ And we clomb up and saw, and shouted strong
+ `Salve Regina!' all the ropes along,
+But knew at morn how that a counterfeit band
+Of level clouds had aped a silver strand;
+ So when we heard the orchard-bird's small song,
+ And all the people cried, `A hellish throng
+To tempt us onward by the Devil planned,
+Yea, all from hell -- keen heron, fresh green weeds,
+Pelican, tunny-fish, fair tapering reeds,
+ Lie-telling lands that ever shine and die
+ In clouds of nothing round the empty sky.
+Tired Admiral, get thee from this hell, and rest!' --
+`Steersman,' I said, `hold straight into the West.'
+
+    VIII.
+
+"I marvel how mine eye, ranging the Night,
+ From its big circling ever absently
+ Returns, thou large low Star, to fix on thee.
+`Maria!'  Star?  No star:  a Light, a Light!
+Wouldst leap ashore, Heart?  Yonder burns -- a Light.
+ Pedro Gutierrez, wake! come up to me.
+ I prithee stand and gaze about the sea:
+What seest?  `Admiral, like as land -- a Light!'
+Well!  Sanchez of Segovia, come and try:
+What seest?  `Admiral, naught but sea and sky!'
+ Well!  But *I* saw It.  Wait! the Pinta's gun!
+ Why, look, 'tis dawn, the land is clear:  'tis done!
+Two dawns do break at once from Time's full hand --
+God's, East -- mine, West:  good friends, behold my Land!"
+
+   Master, Master! faster fly
+   Now the hurrying seasons by;
+   Now the Sea of Darkness wide
+   Rolls in light from side to side;
+   Mark, slow drifting to the West
+   Down the trough and up the crest,
+   Yonder piteous heartsease petal
+   Many-motioned rise and settle --
+   Petal cast a-sea from land
+   By the awkward-fingered Hand
+   That, mistaking Nature's course,
+   Tears the love it fain would force --
+   Petal calm of heartsease flower
+   Smiling sweet on tempest sour,
+   Smiling where by crest and trough
+   Heartache Winds at heartsease scoff,
+   Breathing mild perfumes of prayer
+   'Twixt the scolding sea and air.
+
+   Mayflower, piteous Heartsease Petal!
+   Suavely down the sea-troughs settle,
+   Gravely breathe perfumes of prayer
+   'Twixt the scolding sea and air,
+   Bravely up the sea-hills rise --
+   Sea-hills slant thee toward the skies.
+   Master, hold disaster off
+   From the crest and from the trough;
+   Heartsease, on the heartache sea
+   God, thy God, will pilot thee.
+
+   Mayflower, Ship of Faith's best Hope!
+   Thou art sure if all men grope;
+   Mayflower, Ship of Hope's best Faith!
+   All is true the great God saith;
+   Mayflower, Ship of Charity!
+   Love is Lord of land and sea.
+   Oh, with love and love's best care
+   Thy large godly freightage bear --
+   Godly Hearts that, Grails of gold,
+   Still the blood of Faith do hold.
+
+   Now bold Massachusetts clear
+   Cuts the rounding of the sphere.
+   `Out the anchor, sail no more,
+   Lay us by the Future's shore --
+   Not the shore we sought, 'tis true,
+   But the time is come to do.
+   Leap, dear Standish, leap and wade;
+   Bradford, Hopkins, Tilley, wade:
+   Leap and wade ashore and kneel --
+   God be praised that steered the keel!
+   Home is good and soft is rest,
+   Even in this jagged West:
+   Freedom lives, and Right shall stand;
+   Blood of Faith is in the land.'
+
+Then in what time the primal icy years
+Scraped slowly o'er the Puritans' hopes and fears,
+Like as great glaciers built of frozen tears,
+ The Voice from far within the secret sky
+ Said, `Blood of Faith ye have?  So; let us try.'
+          And presently
+ The anxious-masted ships that westward fare,
+ Cargo'd with trouble and a-list with care,
+ Their outraged decks hot back to England bear,
+ Then come again with stowage of worse weight,
+ Battle, and tyrannous Tax, and Wrong, and Hate,
+ And all bad items of Death's perilous freight.
+
+ O'er Cambridge set the yeomen's mark:
+ Climb, patriot, through the April dark.
+ O lanthorn! kindle fast thy light,
+ Thou budding star in the April night,
+ For never a star more news hath told,
+ Or later flame in heaven shall hold.
+ Ay, lanthorn on the North Church tower,
+ When that thy church hath had her hour,
+ Still from the top of Reverence high
+ Shalt thou illume Fame's ampler sky;
+ For, statured large o'er town and tree,
+ Time's tallest Figure stands by thee,
+ And, dim as now thy wick may shine
+ The Future lights his lamp at thine.
+
+ Now haste thee while the way is clear,
+          Paul Revere!
+ Haste, Dawes! but haste thou not, O Sun!
+          To Lexington.
+
+ Then Devens looked and saw the light:
+ He got him forth into the night,
+ And watched alone on the river-shore,
+ And marked the British ferrying o'er.
+
+ John Parker! rub thine eyes and yawn:
+ But one o'clock and yet 'tis Dawn!
+ Quick, rub thine eyes and draw thy hose:
+ The Morning comes ere darkness goes.
+ Have forth and call the yeomen out,
+ For somewhere, somewhere close about
+ Full soon a Thing must come to be
+ Thine honest eyes shall stare to see --
+ Full soon before thy patriot eyes
+ Freedom from out of a Wound shall rise.
+
+ Then haste ye, Prescott and Revere!
+ Bring all the men of Lincoln here;
+ Let Chelmsford, Littleton, Carlisle,
+ Let Acton, Bedford, hither file --
+ Oh hither file, and plainly see
+ Out of a wound leap Liberty.
+
+ Say, Woodman April! all in green,
+ Say, Robin April! hast thou seen
+ In all thy travel round the earth
+ Ever a morn of calmer birth?
+ But Morning's eye alone serene
+ Can gaze across yon village-green
+ To where the trooping British run
+          Through Lexington.
+
+ Good men in fustian, stand ye still;
+ The men in red come o'er the hill.
+ `Lay down your arms, damned Rebels!' cry
+ The men in red full haughtily.
+ But never a grounding gun is heard;
+ The men in fustian stand unstirred;
+ Dead calm, save maybe a wise bluebird
+ Puts in his little heavenly word.
+ O men in red! if ye but knew
+ The half as much as bluebirds do,
+ Now in this little tender calm
+ Each hand would out, and every palm
+ With patriot palm strike brotherhood's stroke
+ Or ere these lines of battle broke.
+
+ O men in red! if ye but knew
+ The least of the all that bluebirds do,
+ Now in this little godly calm
+ Yon voice might sing the Future's Psalm --
+ The Psalm of Love with the brotherly eyes
+ Who pardons and is very wise --
+ Yon voice that shouts, high-hoarse with ire,
+          `Fire!'
+ The red-coats fire, the homespuns fall:
+ The homespuns' anxious voices call,
+ `Brother, art hurt?' and `Where hit, John?'
+ And, `Wipe this blood,' and `Men, come on,'
+ And, `Neighbor, do but lift my head,'
+ And `Who is wounded?  Who is dead?'
+ `Seven are killed.'  `My God! my God!'
+ `Seven lie dead on the village sod.
+ Two Harringtons, Parker, Hadley, Brown,
+ Monroe and Porter, -- these are down.'
+ `Nay, look!  Stout Harrington not yet dead!'
+ He crooks his elbow, lifts his head.
+ He lies at the step of his own house-door;
+ He crawls and makes a path of gore.
+ The wife from the window hath seen, and rushed;
+ He hath reached the step, but the blood hath gushed;
+ He hath crawled to the step of his own house-door,
+ But his head hath dropped:  he will crawl no more.
+ Clasp, Wife, and kiss, and lift the head:
+ Harrington lies at his doorstep dead.
+
+ But, O ye Six that round him lay
+ And bloodied up that April day!
+ As Harrington fell, ye likewise fell --
+ At the door of the House wherein ye dwell;
+ As Harrington came, ye likewise came
+ And died at the door of your House of Fame.
+
+        --------
+
+Go by, old Field of Freedom's hopes and fears;
+Go by, old Field of Brothers' hate and tears:
+Behold! yon home of Brothers' Love appears
+ Set in the burnished silver of July,
+ On Schuylkill wrought as in old broidery
+ Clasped hands upon a shining baldric lie,
+New Hampshire, Georgia, and the mighty ten
+That lie between, have heard the huge-nibbed pen
+Of Jefferson tell the rights of man to men.
+ They sit in the reverend Hall:  `Shall we declare?'
+ Floats round about the anxious-quivering air
+ 'Twixt narrow Schuylkill and broad Delaware.
+Already, Land! thou HAST declared:  'tis done.
+Ran ever clearer speech than that did run
+When the sweet Seven died at Lexington?
+ Canst legibler write than Concord's large-stroked Act,
+ Or when at Bunker Hill the clubbed guns cracked?
+ Hast ink more true than blood, or pen than fact?
+Nay, as the poet mad with heavenly fires
+Flings men his song white-hot, then back retires,
+Cools heart, broods o'er the song again, inquires,
+ `Why did I this, why that?' and slowly draws
+ From Art's unconscious act Art's conscious laws;
+ So, Freedom, writ, declares her writing's cause.
+All question vain, all chill foreboding vain.
+Adams, ablaze with faith, is hot and fain;
+And he, straight-fibred Soul of mighty grain,
+ Deep-rooted Washington, afire, serene --
+ Tall Bush that burns, yet keeps its substance green --
+ Sends daily word, of import calm yet keen,
+Warm from the front of battle, till the fire
+Wraps opposition in and flames yet higher,
+And Doubt's thin tissues flash where Hope's aspire;
+ And, `Ay, declare,' and ever strenuous `Ay'
+ Falls from the Twelve, and Time and Nature cry
+ Consent with kindred burnings of July;
+And delegate Dead from each past age and race,
+Viewless to man, in large procession pace
+Downward athwart each set and steadfast face,
+ Responding `Ay' in many tongues; and lo!
+ Manhood and Faith and Self and Love and Woe
+ And Art and Brotherhood and Learning go
+Rearward the files of dead, and softly say
+Their saintly `Ay', and softly pass away
+By airy exits of that ample day.
+ Now fall the chill reactionary snows
+ Of man's defect, and every wind that blows
+ Keeps back the Spring of Freedom's perfect Rose.
+Now naked feet with crimson fleck the ways,
+And Heaven is stained with flags that mutinies raise,
+And Arnold-spotted move the creeping days.
+ Long do the eyes that look from Heaven see
+ Time smoke, as in the spring the mulberry tree,
+ With buds of battles opening fitfully,
+Till Yorktown's winking vapors slowly fade,
+And Time's full top casts down a pleasant shade
+Where Freedom lies unarmed and unafraid.
+
+        --------
+
+   Master, ever faster fly
+   Now the vivid seasons by;
+   Now the glittering Western land
+   Twins the day-lit Eastern Strand;
+   Now white Freedom's sea-bird wing
+   Roams the Sea of Everything;
+   Now the freemen to and fro
+   Bind the tyrant sand and snow,
+   Snatching Death's hot bolt ere hurled,
+   Flash new Life about the world,
+   Sun the secrets of the hills,
+   Shame the gods' slow-grinding mills,
+   Prison Yesterday in Print,
+   Read To-morrow's weather-hint,
+   Haste before the halting Time,
+   Try new virtue and new crime,
+   Mould new faiths, devise new creeds,
+   Run each road that frontward leads,
+   Driven by an Onward-ache,
+   Scorning souls that circles make.
+   Now, O Sin! O Love's lost Shame!
+   Burns the land with redder flame:
+   North in line and South in line
+   Yell the charge and spring the mine.
+   Heartstrong South would have his way,
+   Headstrong North hath said him nay:
+   O strong Heart, strong Brain, beware!
+   Hear a Song from out the air:
+
+      I.
+
+"Lists all white and blue in the skies;
+ And the people hurried amain
+To the Tournament under the ladies' eyes
+ Where jousted Heart and Brain.
+
+      II.
+
+"`Blow, herald, blow!'  There entered Heart,
+ A youth in crimson and gold.
+`Blow, herald, blow!'  Brain stood apart,
+ Steel-armored, glittering, cold.
+
+      III.
+
+"Heart's palfrey caracoled gayly round,
+ Heart tra-li-raed merrily;
+But Brain sat still, with never a sound --
+ Full cynical-calm was he.
+
+      IV.
+
+"Heart's helmet-crest bore favors three
+ From his lady's white hand caught;
+Brain's casque was bare as Fact -- not he
+ Or favor gave or sought.
+
+      V.
+
+"`Blow, herald, blow!'  Heart shot a glance
+ To catch his lady's eye;
+But Brain looked straight a-front, his lance
+ To aim more faithfully.
+
+      VI.
+
+"They charged, they struck; both fell, both bled;
+ Brain rose again, ungloved;
+Heart fainting smiled, and softly said,
+ `My love to my Beloved.'"
+
+    Heart and Brain! no more be twain;
+    Throb and think, one flesh again!
+    Lo! they weep, they turn, they run;
+    Lo! they kiss:  Love, thou art one!
+
+        --------
+
+   Now the Land, with drying tears,
+   Counts him up his flocks of years,
+   "See," he says, "my substance grows;
+   Hundred-flocked my Herdsman goes,
+   Hundred-flocked my Herdsman stands
+   On the Past's broad meadow-lands,
+   Come from where ye mildly graze,
+   Black herds, white herds, nights and days.
+   Drive them homeward, Herdsman Time,
+   From the meadows of the Prime:
+   I will feast my house, and rest.
+   Neighbor East, come over West;
+   Pledge me in good wine and words
+   While I count my hundred herds,
+   Sum the substance of my Past
+   From the first unto the last,
+   Chanting o'er the generous brim
+   Cloudy memories yet more dim,
+   Ghostly rhymes of Norsemen pale
+   Staring by old Bjoerne's sail,
+   Strains more noble of that night
+   Worn Columbus saw his Light,
+   Psalms of still more heavenly tone,
+   How the Mayflower tossed alone,
+   Olden tale and later song
+   Of the Patriot's love and wrong,
+   Grandsire's ballad, nurse's hymn --
+   Chanting o'er the sparkling brim
+   Till I shall from first to last
+   Sum the substance of my Past."
+
+        --------
+
+Then called the Artist's God from in the sky:
+"This Time shall show by dream and mystery
+The heart of all his matter to thine eye.
+Son, study stars by looking down in streams,
+Interpret that which is by that which seems,
+And tell thy dreams in words which are but dreams."
+
+     I.
+
+  The Master with His lucent hand
+ Pinched up the atom hills and plains
+  O'er all the moiety of land
+ The ocean-bounded West contains:
+  The dust lay dead upon the calm
+  And mighty middle of His palm.
+
+     II.
+
+  And lo! He wrought full tenderly,
+ And lo! He wrought with love and might,
+  And lo! He wrought a thing to see
+ Was marvel in His people's sight:
+  He wrought His image dead and small,
+  A nothing fashioned like an All.
+
+     III.
+
+  Then breathed He softly on the dead:
+ "Live Self! -- thou part, yet none, of Me;
+  Dust for humility," He said,
+ "And my warm breath for Charity.
+  Behold my latest work, thou Earth!
+  The Self of Man is taking birth."
+
+     IV.
+
+  Then, Land, tall Adam of the West,
+ Thou stood'st upon the springy sod,
+  Thy large eye ranging self-possest,
+ Thy limbs the limbs of God's young god,
+  Thy Passion murmuring `I will' --
+  Lord of the Lordship Good-and-Ill.
+
+     V.
+
+  O manful arms, of supple size
+ To clasp a world or a waist as well!
+  O manful eyes, to front the skies
+ Or look much pity down on hell!
+  O manful tongue, to work and sing,
+  And soothe a child and dare a king!
+
+     VI.
+
+  O wonder!  Now thou sleep'st in pain,
+ Like as some dream thy soul did grieve:
+  God wounds thee, heals thee whole again,
+ And calls thee trembling to thine Eve.
+  Wide-armed, thou dropp'st on knightly knee:
+  `Dear Love, Dear Freedom, go with me!'
+
+
+     VII.
+
+  Then all the beasts before thee passed --
+ Beast War, Oppression, Murder, Lust,
+  False Art, False Faith, slow skulking last --
+ And out of Time's thick-rising dust
+  Thy Lord said, "Name them, tame them, Son;
+  Nor rest, nor rest, till thou hast done."
+
+     VIII.
+
+  Ah, name thou false, or tame thou wrong,
+ At heart let no man fear for thee:
+  Thy Past sings ever Freedom's Song,
+ Thy Future's voice sounds wondrous free;
+  And Freedom is more large than Crime,
+  And Error is more small than Time.
+
+     IX.
+
+  Come, thou whole Self of Latter Man!
+ Come o'er thy realm of Good-and-Ill,
+  And do, thou Self that say'st `I can,'
+ And love, thou Self that say'st `I will;'
+  And prove and know Time's worst and best,
+  Thou tall young Adam of the West!
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+At First.  To Charlotte Cushman.
+
+
+
+My crippled sense fares bow'd along
+ His uncompanioned way,
+And wronged by death pays life with wrong
+And I wake by night and dream by day.
+
+And the Morning seems but fatigued Night
+ That hath wept his visage pale,
+And the healthy mark 'twixt dark and light
+In sickly sameness out doth fail.
+
+And the woods stare strange, and the wind is dumb,
+ -- O Wind, pray talk again --
+And the Hand of the Frost spreads stark and numb
+As Death's on the deadened window-pane.
+
+Still dumb, thou Wind, old voluble friend?
+ And the middle of the day is cold,
+And the heart of eve beats lax i' the end
+As a legend's climax poorly told.
+
+Oh vain the up-straining of the hands
+ In the chamber late at night,
+Oh vain the complainings, the hot demands,
+The prayers for a sound, the tears for a sight.
+
+No word from over the starry line,
+ No motion felt in the dark,
+And never a day gives ever a sign
+Or a dream sets seal with palpable mark.
+
+And O my God, how slight it were,
+ How nothing, thou All! to thee,
+That a kiss or a whisper might fall from her
+Down by the way of Time to me:
+
+Or some least grace of the body of love,
+ -- Mere wafture of floating-by,
+Mere sense of unseen smiling above,
+Mere hint sincere of a large blue eye,
+
+Mere dim receipt of sad delight
+ From Nearness warm in the air,
+What time with the passing of the night
+She also passed, somehow, somewhere.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+A Ballad of Trees and the Master.
+
+
+
+Into the woods my Master went,
+Clean forspent, forspent.
+Into the woods my Master came,
+Forspent with love and shame.
+But the olives they were not blind to Him,
+The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
+The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
+When into the woods He came.
+
+Out of the woods my Master went,
+And He was well content.
+Out of the woods my Master came,
+Content with death and shame.
+When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
+From under the trees they drew Him last:
+'Twas on a tree they slew Him -- last
+When out of the woods He came.
+
+____
+Baltimore, November, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+A Florida Sunday.
+
+
+
+From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas
+ Oft come repenting tempests here to die;
+Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,
+ They shrive to priestly pines with many a sigh,
+Breathe salutary balms through lank-lock'd hair
+ Of sick men's heads, and soon -- this world outworn --
+Sink into saintly heavens of stirless air,
+ Clean from confessional.  One died, this morn,
+And willed the world to wise Queen Tranquil:  she,
+ Sweet sovereign Lady of all souls that bide
+In contemplation, tames the too bright skies
+ Like that faint agate film, far down descried,
+Restraining suns in sudden thoughtful eyes
+ Which flashed but now.  Blest distillation rare
+Of o'er-rank brightness filtered waterwise
+ Through all the earths in heaven -- thou always fair,
+Still virgin bride of e'er-creating thought --
+Dream-worker, in whose dream the Future's wrought --
+Healer of hurts, free balm for bitter wrongs --
+Most silent mother of all sounding songs --
+Thou that dissolvest hells to make thy heaven --
+Thou tempest's heir, that keep'st no tempest leaven --
+But after winds' and thunders' wide mischance
+Dost brood, and better thine inheritance --
+Thou privacy of space, where each grave Star
+As in his own still chamber sits afar
+To meditate, yet, by thy walls unpent,
+Shines to his fellows o'er the firmament --
+Oh! as thou liv'st in all this sky and sea
+That likewise lovingly do live in thee,
+So melt my soul in thee, and thine in me,
+ Divine Tranquillity!
+
+Gray Pelican, poised where yon broad shallows shine,
+Know'st thou, that finny foison all is mine
+In the bag below thy beak -- yet thine, not less?
+For God, of His most gracious friendliness,
+Hath wrought that every soul, this loving morn,
+Into all things may be new-corporate born,
+And each live whole in all:  I sail with thee,
+Thy Pelican's self is mine; yea, silver Sea,
+    In this large moment all thy fishes, ripples, bights,
+Pale in-shore greens and distant blue delights,
+White visionary sails, long reaches fair
+By moon-horn'd strands that film the far-off air,
+    Bright sparkle-revelations, secret majesties,
+Shells, wrecks and wealths, are mine; yea, Orange-trees,
+That lift your small world-systems in the light,
+Rich sets of round green heavens studded bright
+With globes of fruit that like still planets shine,
+Mine is your green-gold universe; yea, mine,
+White slender Lighthouse fainting to the eye
+That wait'st on yon keen cape-point wistfully,
+Like to some maiden spirit pausing pale,
+ New-wing'd, yet fain to sail
+    Above the serene Gulf to where a bridegroom soul
+Calls o'er the soft horizon -- mine thy dole
+Of shut undaring wings and wan desire --
+Mine, too, thy later hope and heavenly fire
+Of kindling expectation; yea, all sights,
+ All sounds, that make this morn -- quick flights
+Of pea-green paroquets 'twixt neighbor trees,
+Like missives and sweet morning inquiries
+From green to green, in green -- live oaks' round heads,
+Busy with jays for thoughts -- grays, whites and reds
+Of pranked woodpeckers that ne'er gossip out,
+But alway tap at doors and gad about --
+Robins and mocking-birds that all day long
+Athwart straight sunshine weave cross-threads of song,
+Shuttles of music -- clouds of mosses gray
+That rain me rains of pleasant thoughts alway
+From a low sky of leaves -- faint yearning psalms
+Of endless metre breathing through the palms
+That crowd and lean and gaze from off the shore
+Ever for one that cometh nevermore --
+Palmettos ranked, with childish spear-points set
+Against no enemy -- rich cones that fret
+High roofs of temples shafted tall with pines --
+Green, grateful mangroves where the sand-beach shines --
+Long lissome coast that in and outward swerves,
+The grace of God made manifest in curves --
+All riches, goods and braveries never told
+Of earth, sun, air and heaven -- now I hold
+Your being in my being; I am ye,
+ And ye myself; yea, lastly, Thee,
+God, whom my roads all reach, howe'er they run,
+My Father, Friend, Beloved, dear All-One,
+Thee in my soul, my soul in Thee, I feel,
+Self of my self.  Lo, through my sense doth steal
+Clear cognizance of all selves and qualities,
+Of all existence that hath been or is,
+Of all strange haps that men miscall of chance,
+And all the works of tireless circumstance:
+Each borders each, like mutual sea and shore,
+Nor aught misfits his neighbor that's before,
+Nor him that's after -- nay, through this still air,
+Out of the North come quarrels, and keen blare
+Of challenge by the hot-breath'd parties blown;
+Yet break they not this peace with alien tone,
+Fray not my heart, nor fright me for my land,
+-- I hear from all-wards, allwise understand,
+The great bird Purpose bears me twixt her wings,
+And I am one with all the kinsmen things
+That e'er my Father fathered.  Oh, to me
+All questions solve in this tranquillity:
+E'en this dark matter, once so dim, so drear,
+Now shines upon my spirit heavenly-clear:
+Thou, Father, without logic, tellest me
+How this divine denial true may be,
+-- How `All's in each, yet every one of all
+Maintains his Self complete and several.'
+
+____
+Tampa, Florida, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+To My Class:  On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness.
+
+
+
+If spicy-fringed pinks that blush and pale
+ With passions of perfume, -- if violets blue
+ That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, --
+If perfect roses, each a holy Grail
+Wherefrom the blood of beauty doth exhale
+ Grave raptures round, -- if leaves of green as new
+ As those fresh chaplets wove in dawn and dew
+By Emily when down the Athenian vale
+She paced, to do observance to the May,
+ Nor dreamed of Arcite nor of Palamon, --
+If fruits that riped in some more riotous play
+ Of wind and beam that stirs our temperate sun, --
+  If these the products be of love and pain,
+  Oft may I suffer, and you love, again.
+
+____
+Baltimore, Christmas, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+On Violet's Wafers, Sent Me When I Was Ill.
+
+
+
+Fine-tissued as her finger-tips, and white
+ As all her thoughts; in shape like shields of prize,
+ As if before young Violet's dreaming eyes
+Still blazed the two great Theban bucklers bright
+That swayed the random of that furious fight
+ Where Palamon and Arcite made assize
+ For Emily; fresh, crisp as her replies,
+That, not with sting, but pith, do oft invite
+ More trial of the tongue; simple, like her,
+Well fitting lowlihood, yet fine as well,
+ -- The queen's no finer; rich (though gossamer)
+In help to him they came to, which may tell
+   How rich that him SHE'LL come to; thus men see,
+   Like Violet's self e'en Violet's wafers be.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1881.
+
+
+
+
+Ireland.
+
+Written for the Art Autograph during the Irish Famine, 1880.
+
+
+
+Heartsome Ireland, winsome Ireland,
+ Charmer of the sun and sea,
+Bright beguiler of old anguish,
+ How could Famine frown on thee?
+
+As our Gulf-Stream, drawn to thee-ward,
+ Turns him from his northward flow,
+And our wintry western headlands
+ Send thee summer from their snow,
+
+Thus the main and cordial current
+ Of our love sets over sea, --
+Tender, comely, valiant Ireland,
+Songful, soulful, sorrowful Ireland, --
+ Streaming warm to comfort thee.
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+Under the Cedarcroft Chestnut.
+
+
+
+Trim set in ancient sward, his manful bole
+ Upbore his frontage largely toward the sky.
+We could not dream but that he had a soul:
+ What virtue breathed from out his bravery!
+
+We gazed o'erhead:  far down our deepening eyes
+ Rained glamours from his green midsummer mass.
+The worth and sum of all his centuries
+ Suffused his mighty shadow on the grass.
+
+A Presence large, a grave and steadfast Form
+ Amid the leaves' light play and fantasy,
+A calmness conquered out of many a storm,
+ A Manhood mastered by a chestnut-tree!
+
+Then, while his monarch fingers downward held
+ The rugged burrs wherewith his state was rife,
+A voice of large authoritative Eld
+ Seemed uttering quickly parables of life:
+
+`How Life in truth was sharply set with ills;
+ A kernel cased in quarrels; yea, a sphere
+Of stings, and hedge-hog-round of mortal quills:
+ How most men itched to eat too soon i' the year,
+
+`And took but wounds and worries for their pains,
+ Whereas the wise withheld their patient hands,
+Nor plucked green pleasures till the sun and rains
+ And seasonable ripenings burst all bands
+
+`And opened wide the liberal burrs of life.'
+ There, O my Friend, beneath the chestnut bough,
+Gazing on thee immerged in modern strife,
+ I framed a prayer of fervency -- that thou,
+
+In soul and stature larger than thy kind,
+ Still more to this strong Form might'st liken thee,
+Till thy whole Self in every fibre find
+ The tranquil lordship of thy chestnut tree.
+
+____
+Tampa, Florida, February, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+An Evening Song.
+
+
+
+Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands,
+ And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea,
+How long they kiss in sight of all the lands.
+        Ah! longer, longer, we.
+
+Now in the sea's red vintage melts the sun,
+ As Egypt's pearl dissolved in rosy wine,
+And Cleopatra night drinks all.  'Tis done,
+        Love, lay thine hand in mine.
+
+Come forth, sweet stars, and comfort heaven's heart;
+ Glimmer, ye waves, round else unlighted sands.
+O night! divorce our sun and sky apart
+        Never our lips, our hands.
+
+____
+1876.
+
+
+
+
+  -----------------------------------------------------------------
+  | "A Sunrise Song" leads a group of seven short poems           |
+  | overlooked in earlier editions.  Six of these, beginning with |
+  | "On a Palmetto", were unrevised pencillings of late date,     |
+  | excepting the lines of 1866 to J. D. H.                       |
+  -----------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+A Sunrise Song.
+
+
+
+Young palmer sun, that to these shining sands
+ Pourest thy pilgrim's tale, discoursing still
+Thy silver passages of sacred lands,
+ With news of Sepulchre and Dolorous Hill,
+
+Canst thou be he that, yester-sunset warm,
+ Purple with Paynim rage and wrack desire,
+Dashed ravening out of a dusty lair of Storm,
+ Harried the west, and set the world on fire?
+
+Hast thou perchance repented, Saracen Sun?
+ Wilt warm the world with peace and dove-desire?
+Or wilt thou, ere this very day be done,
+ Blaze Saladin still, with unforgiving fire?
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1881.
+
+
+
+
+On a Palmetto.
+
+
+
+Through all that year-scarred agony of height,
+Unblest of bough or bloom, to where expands
+His wandy circlet with his bladed bands
+Dividing every wind, or loud or light,
+To termless hymns of love and old despite,
+Yon tall palmetto in the twilight stands,
+Bare Dante of these purgatorial sands
+That glimmer marginal to the monstrous night.
+Comes him a Southwind from the scented vine,
+It breathes of Beatrice through all his blades,
+North, East or West, Guelph-wind or Ghibelline,
+'Tis shredded into music down the shades;
+All sea-breaths, land-breaths, systol, diastol,
+Sway, minstrels of that grief-melodious Soul.
+
+____
+1880.
+
+
+
+
+Struggle.
+
+
+
+My soul is like the oar that momently
+ Dies in a desperate stress beneath the wave,
+Then glitters out again and sweeps the sea:
+ Each second I'm new-born from some new grave.
+
+
+
+
+Control.
+
+
+
+O Hunger, Hunger, I will harness thee
+And make thee harrow all my spirit's glebe.
+Of old the blind bard Herve sang so sweet
+He made a wolf to plow his land.
+
+
+
+
+To J. D. H.
+
+(Killed at Surrey C. H., October, 1866.)
+
+
+
+     .    .    .    .    .
+
+Dear friend, forgive a wild lament
+ Insanely following thy flight.
+I would not cumber thine ascent
+ Nor drag thee back into the night;
+
+But the great sea-winds sigh with me,
+ The fair-faced stars seem wrinkled, old,
+And I would that I might lie with thee
+ There in the grave so cold, so cold!
+
+Grave walls are thick, I cannot see thee,
+ And the round skies are far and steep;
+A-wild to quaff some cup of Lethe,
+ Pain is proud and scorns to weep.
+
+My heart breaks if it cling about thee,
+ And still breaks, if far from thine.
+O drear, drear death, to live without thee,
+ O sad life -- to keep thee mine.
+
+     .    .    .    .    .
+
+
+
+
+Marsh Hymns.
+
+Between Dawn and Sunrise.
+
+
+
+Were silver pink, and had a soul,
+ Which soul were shy, which shyness might
+A visible influence be, and roll
+ Through heaven and earth -- 'twere thou, O light!
+
+O rhapsody of the wraith of red,
+ O blush but yet in prophecy,
+O sun-hint that hath overspread
+ Sky, marsh, my soul, and yonder sail.
+
+
+
+
+Thou and I.
+
+
+
+So one in heart and thought, I trow,
+That thou might'st press the strings and I might draw the bow
+And both would meet in music sweet,
+Thou and I, I trow.
+
+____
+1881.
+
+
+
+
+The Hard Times in Elfland.
+
+A Story of Christmas Eve.
+
+
+
+Strange that the termagant winds should scold
+ The Christmas Eve so bitterly!
+But Wife, and Harry the four-year-old,
+ Big Charley, Nimblewits, and I,
+
+Blithe as the wind was bitter, drew
+ More frontward of the mighty fire,
+Where wise Newfoundland Fan foreknew
+ The heaven that Christian dogs desire --
+
+Stretched o'er the rug, serene and grave,
+ Huge nose on heavy paws reclined,
+With never a drowning boy to save,
+ And warmth of body and peace of mind.
+
+And, as our happy circle sat,
+ The fire well capp'd the company:
+In grave debate or careless chat,
+ A right good fellow, mingled he:
+
+He seemed as one of us to sit,
+ And talked of things above, below,
+With flames more winsome than our wit,
+ And coals that burned like love aglow.
+
+While thus our rippling discourse rolled
+ Smooth down the channel of the night,
+We spoke of Time:  thereat, one told
+ A parable of the Seasons' flight.
+
+"Time was a Shepherd with four sheep.
+ In a certain Field he long abode.
+He stood by the bars, and his flock bade leap
+ One at a time to the Common Road.
+
+"And first there leapt, like bird on wing,
+ A lissome Lamb that played in the air.
+I heard the Shepherd call him `Spring':
+ Oh, large-eyed, fresh and snowy fair
+
+"He skipped the flowering Highway fast,
+ Hurried the hedgerows green and white,
+Set maids and men a-yearning, passed
+ The Bend, and gamboll'd out of sight.
+
+"And next marched forth a matron Ewe
+ (While Time took down a bar for her),
+Udder'd so large 'twas much ado
+ E'en then to clear the barrier.
+
+"Full softly shone her silken fleece
+ What stately time she paced along:
+Each heartsome hoof-stroke wrought increase
+ Of sunlight, substance, seedling, song,
+
+"In flower, in fruit, in field, in bird,
+ Till the great globe, rich fleck'd and pied,
+Like some large peach half pinkly furred,
+ Turned to the sun a glowing side
+
+"And hung in the heavenly orchard, bright,
+ None-such, complete.
+                       Then, while the Ewe
+Slow passed the Bend, a blur of light,
+ The Shepherd's face in sadness grew:
+
+"`Summer!' he said, as one would say
+ A sigh in syllables.  So, in haste
+(For shame of Summer's long delay,
+ Yet gazing still what way she paced),
+
+"He summoned Autumn, slanting down
+ The second bar.  Thereover strode
+A Wether, fleeced in burning brown,
+ And largely loitered down the Road.
+
+"Far as the farmers sight his shape
+ Majestic moving o'er the way,
+All cry `To harvest,' crush the grape,
+ And haul the corn and house the hay,
+
+"Till presently, no man can say,
+ (So brown the woods that line that end)
+If yet the brown-fleeced Wether may,
+ Or not, have passed beyond the Bend.
+
+"Now turn I towards the Shepherd:  lo,
+ An aged Ram, flapp'd, gnarly-horn'd,
+With bones that crackle o'er the snow,
+ Rheum'd, wind-gall'd, rag-fleec'd, burr'd and thorn'd.
+
+"Time takes the third bar off for him,
+ He totters down the windy lane.
+'Tis Winter, still:  the Bend lies dim.
+ O Lamb, would thou wouldst leap again!"
+
+Those seasons out, we talked of these:
+ And I (with inward purpose sly
+To shield my purse from Christmas trees
+ And stockings and wild robbery
+
+When Hal and Nimblewits invade
+ My cash in Santa Claus's name)
+In full the hard, hard times surveyed;
+ Denounced all waste as crime and shame;
+
+Hinted that "waste" might be a term
+ Including skates, velocipedes,
+Kites, marbles, soldiers, towers infirm,
+ Bows, arrows, cannon, Indian reeds,
+
+Cap-pistols, drums, mechanic toys,
+ And all th' infernal host of horns
+Whereby to strenuous hells of noise
+ Are turned the blessed Christmas morns;
+
+Thus, roused -- those horns! -- to sacred rage,
+ I rose, forefinger high in air,
+When Harry cried (SOME war to wage),
+ "Papa, is hard times ev'ywhere?
+
+"Maybe in Santa Claus's land
+ It isn't hard times none at all!"
+Now, blessed Vision! to my hand
+ Most pat, a marvel strange did fall.
+
+Scarce had my Harry ceased, when "Look!"
+ He cried, leapt up in wild alarm,
+Ran to my Comrade, shelter took
+ Beneath the startled mother's arm.
+
+And so was still:  what time we saw
+ A foot hang down the fireplace!  Then,
+With painful scrambling scratched and raw,
+ Two hands that seemed like hands of men
+
+Eased down two legs and a body through
+ The blazing fire, and forth there came
+Before our wide and wondering view
+ A figure shrinking half with shame,
+
+And half with weakness.  "Sir," I said,
+ -- But with a mien of dignity
+The seedy stranger raised his head:
+ "My friends, I'm Santa Claus," said he.
+
+But oh, how changed!  That rotund face
+ The new moon rivall'd, pale and thin;
+Where once was cheek, now empty space;
+ Whate'er stood out, did now stand in.
+
+His piteous legs scarce propped him up:
+ His arms mere sickles seemed to be:
+But most o'erflowed our sorrow's cup
+ When that we saw -- or did not see --
+
+His belly:  we remembered how
+ It shook like a bowl of jelly fine:
+An earthquake could not shake it now;
+ He HAD no belly -- not a sign.
+
+"Yes, yes, old friends, you well may stare:
+ I HAVE seen better days," he said:
+"But now, with shrinkage, loss and care,
+ Your Santa Claus scarce owns his head.
+
+"We've had such hard, hard times this year
+ For goblins!  Never knew the like.
+All Elfland's mortgaged!  And we fear
+ The gnomes are just about to strike.
+
+"I once was rich, and round, and hale.
+ The whole world called me jolly brick;
+But listen to a piteous tale.
+ Young Harry, -- Santa Claus is sick!
+
+"'Twas thus:  a smooth-tongued railroad man
+ Comes to my house and talks to me:
+`I've got,' says he, `a little plan
+ That suits this nineteenth century.
+
+"`Instead of driving, as you do,
+ Six reindeer slow from house to house,
+Let's build a Grand Trunk Railway through
+ From here to earth's last terminus.
+
+"`We'll touch at every chimney-top
+ (An Elevated Track, of course),
+Then, as we whisk you by, you'll drop
+ Each package down:  just think, the force
+
+"`You'll save, the time!  -- Besides, we'll make
+ Our millions:  look you, soon we will
+Compete for freights -- and then we'll take
+ Dame Fortune's bales of good and ill
+
+"`(Why, she's the biggest shipper, sir,
+ That e'er did business in this world!):
+Then Death, that ceaseless Traveller,
+ Shall on his rounds by us be whirled.
+
+"`When ghosts return to walk with men,
+ We'll bring 'em cheap by steam, and fast:
+We'll run a Branch to heaven! and then
+ We'll riot, man; for then, at last
+
+"`We'll make with heaven a contract fair
+ To call, each hour, from town to town,
+And carry the dead folks' souls up there,
+ And bring the unborn babies down!'
+
+"The plan seemed fair:  I gave him cash,
+ Nay, every penny I could raise.
+My wife e'er cried, `'Tis rash, 'tis rash:'
+ How could I know the stock-thief's ways?
+
+"But soon I learned full well, poor fool!
+ My woes began, that wretched day.
+The President plied me like a tool.
+ In lawyer's fees, and rights of way,
+
+"Injunctions, leases, charters, I
+ Was meshed as in a mighty maze.
+The stock ran low, the talk ran high:
+ Then quickly flamed the final blaze.
+
+"With never an inch of track -- 'tis true!
+ The debts were large . . . the oft-told tale.
+The President rolled in splendor new
+ -- He bought my silver at the sale.
+
+"Yes, sold me out:  we've moved away.
+ I've had to give up everything.
+My reindeer, even, whom I . . . pray,
+ Excuse me" . . . here, o'er-sorrowing,
+
+Poor Santa Claus burst into tears,
+ Then calmed again:  "my reindeer fleet,
+I gave them up:  on foot, my dears,
+ I now must plod through snow and sleet.
+
+"Retrenchment rules in Elfland, now;
+ Yes, every luxury is cut off.
+-- Which, by the way, reminds me how
+ I caught this dreadful hacking cough:
+
+"I cut off the tail of my Ulster furred
+ To make young Kris a coat of state.
+That very night the storm occurred!
+ Thus we became the sport of Fate.
+
+"For I was out till after one,
+ Surveying chimney-tops and roofs,
+And planning how it could be done
+ Without my reindeers' bouncing hoofs.
+
+"`My dear,' says Mrs. Claus, that night
+ (A most superior woman she!)
+`It never, never can be right
+ That you, deep-sunk in poverty,
+
+"`This year should leave your poor old bed,
+ And trot about, bent down with toys,
+(There's Kris a-crying now for bread!)
+ To give to other people's boys.
+
+"`Since you've been out, the news arrives
+ The Elfs' Insurance Company's gone.
+Ah, Claus, those premiums!  Now, our lives
+ Depend on yours:  thus griefs go on.
+
+"`And even while you're thus harassed,
+ I do believe, if out you went,
+You'd go, in spite of all that's passed,
+ To the children of that President!'
+
+"Oh, Charley, Harry, Nimblewits,
+ These eyes, that night, ne'er slept a wink.
+My path seemed honeycombed with pits.
+ Naught could I do but think and think.
+
+"But, with the day, my courage rose.
+ Ne'er shall my boys, MY boys (I cried),
+When Christmas morns their eyes unclose,
+ Find empty stockings gaping wide!
+
+"Then hewed and whacked and whittled I;
+ The wife, the girls and Kris took fire;
+They spun, sewed, cut, -- till by and by
+ We made, at home, my pack entire!"
+
+(He handed me a bundle, here.)
+ "Now, hoist me up:  there, gently:  quick!
+Dear boys, DON'T look for much this year:
+ Remember, Santa Claus is sick!"
+
+____
+Baltimore, December, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Dialect Poems.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A Florida Ghost.
+
+
+
+ Down mildest shores of milk-white sand,
+  By cape and fair Floridian bay,
+Twixt billowy pines -- a surf asleep on land --
+   And the great Gulf at play,
+
+ Past far-off palms that filmed to nought,
+  Or in and out the cunning keys
+That laced the land like fragile patterns wrought
+   To edge old broideries,
+
+ The sail sighed on all day for joy,
+  The prow each pouting wave did leave
+All smile and song, with sheen and ripple coy,
+   Till the dusk diver Eve
+
+ Brought up from out the brimming East
+  The oval moon, a perfect pearl.
+In that large lustre all our haste surceased,
+   The sail seemed fain to furl,
+
+ The silent steersman landward turned,
+  And ship and shore set breast to breast.
+Under a palm wherethrough a planet burned
+   We ate, and sank to rest.
+
+ But soon from sleep's dear death (it seemed)
+  I rose and strolled along the sea
+Down silver distances that faintly gleamed
+   On to infinity.
+
+ Till suddenly I paused, for lo!
+  A shape (from whence I ne'er divined)
+Appeared before me, pacing to and fro,
+   With head far down inclined.
+
+ `A wraith' (I thought) `that walks the shore
+  To solve some old perplexity.'
+Full heavy hung the draggled gown he wore;
+   His hair flew all awry.
+
+ He waited not (as ghosts oft use)
+  To be `dearheaven'd!' and `oh'd!'
+But briskly said:  "Good-evenin'; what's the news?
+   Consumption?  After boa'd?
+
+ "Or mebbe you're intendin' of
+  Investments?  Orange-plantin'?  Pine?
+Hotel? or Sanitarium?  What above
+   This yea'th CAN be your line?
+
+ "Speakin' of sanitariums, now,
+  Jest look 'ee here, my friend:
+I know a little story, -- well, I swow,
+   Wait till you hear the end!
+
+ "Some year or more ago, I s'pose,
+  I roamed from Maine to Floridy,
+And, -- see where them Palmettos grows?
+   I bought that little key,
+
+ "Cal'latin' for to build right off
+  A c'lossal sanitarium:
+Big surf!  Gulf breeze!  Jest death upon a cough!
+   -- I run it high, to hum!
+
+ "Well, sir, I went to work in style:
+  Bought me a steamboat, loaded it
+With my hotel (pyazers more'n a mile!)
+   Already framed and fit,
+
+ "Insured 'em, fetched 'em safe around,
+  Put up my buildin', moored my boat,
+COM-plete! then went to bed and slept as sound
+   As if I'd paid a note.
+
+ "Now on that very night a squall,
+  Cum up from some'eres -- some bad place!
+An' blowed an' tore an' reared an' pitched an' all,
+   -- I had to run a race
+
+ "Right out o' bed from that hotel
+  An' git to yonder risin' ground,
+For, 'twixt the sea that riz and rain that fell,
+   I pooty nigh was drowned!
+
+ "An' thar I stood till mornin' cum,
+  Right on yon little knoll of sand,
+FreQUENTly wishin' I had stayed to hum
+   Fur from this tarnal land.
+
+ "When mornin' cum, I took a good
+  Long look, and -- well, sir, sure's I'm ME --
+That boat laid right whar that hotel had stood,
+   And HIT sailed out to sea!
+
+ "No:  I'll not keep you:  good-bye, friend.
+  Don't think about it much, -- preehaps
+Your brain might git see-sawin', end for end,
+   Like them asylum chaps,
+
+ "For here *I* walk, forevermore,
+  A-tryin' to make it gee,
+How one same wind could blow my ship to shore
+   And my hotel to sea!"
+
+____
+Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn.
+
+By Sidney and Clifford Lanier.
+
+[Not long ago a certain Georgia cotton-planter, driven to desperation
+by awaking each morning to find that the grass had
+quite outgrown the cotton overnight, and was likely to choke it,
+in defiance of his lazy freedmen's hoes and ploughs,
+set the whole State in a laugh by exclaiming to a group of fellow-sufferers:
+"It's all stuff about Cincinnatus leaving the plough to go into politics
+FOR PATRIOTISM; he was just a-runnin' from grass!"
+
+This state of things -- when the delicate young rootlets of the cotton
+are struggling against the hardier multitudes of the grass-suckers --
+is universally described in plantation parlance by the phrase "in the grass";
+and Uncle Jim appears to have found in it so much similarity
+to the condition of his own ("Baptis'") church, overrun, as it was,
+by the cares of this world, that he has embodied it in the refrain
+of a revival hymn such as the colored improvisator of the South
+not infrequently constructs from his daily surroundings.
+He has drawn all the ideas of his stanzas from the early morning phenomena of
+those critical weeks when the loud plantation-horn is blown before daylight,
+in order to rouse all hands for a long day's fight against the common enemy
+of cotton-planting mankind.
+
+In addition to these exegetical commentaries, the Northern reader
+probably needs to be informed that the phrase "peerten up" means substantially
+`to spur up', and is an active form of the adjective "peert"
+(probably a corruption of `pert'), which is so common in the South,
+and which has much the signification of "smart" in New England, as e.g.,
+a "peert" horse, in antithesis to a "sorry" -- i.e., poor, mean, lazy one.]
+
+
+
+Solo. --    Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's riz,
+             De sleepin'-time is pas';
+            Wake up dem lazy Baptissis,
+Chorus. --      Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
+                Dey's mightily in de grass.
+
+Ole Mahster's blowed de mornin' horn,
+ He's blowed a powerful blas';
+O Baptis' come, come hoe de corn,
+    You's mightily in de grass, grass,
+    You's mightily in de grass.
+
+De Meth'dis team's done hitched; O fool,
+ De day's a-breakin' fas';
+Gear up dat lean ole Baptis' mule,
+    Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
+    Dey's mightily in de grass.
+
+De workmen's few an' mons'rous slow,
+ De cotton's sheddin' fas';
+Whoop, look, jes' look at de Baptis' row,
+    Hit's mightily in de grass, grass,
+    Hit's mightily in de grass.
+
+De jay-bird squeal to de mockin'-bird:  "Stop!
+ Don' gimme none o' yo' sass;
+Better sing one song for de Baptis' crop,
+    Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
+    Dey's mightily in de grass."
+
+And de ole crow croak:  "Don' work, no, no;"
+ But de fiel'-lark say, "Yaas, yaas,
+An' I spec' you mighty glad, you debblish crow,
+    Dat de Baptissis's in de grass, grass,
+    Dat de Baptissis's in de grass!"
+
+Lord, thunder us up to de plowin'-match,
+ Lord, peerten de hoein' fas',
+Yea, Lord, hab mussy on de Baptis' patch,
+    Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
+    Dey's mightily in de grass.
+
+____
+1876.
+
+
+
+
+"Nine from Eight".
+
+
+
+I was drivin' my two-mule waggin,
+With a lot o' truck for sale,
+Towards Macon, to git some baggin'
+(Which my cotton was ready to bale),
+And I come to a place on the side o' the pike
+Whar a peert little winter branch jest had throw'd
+The sand in a kind of a sand-bar like,
+And I seed, a leetle ways up the road,
+A man squattin' down, like a big bull-toad,
+On the ground, a-figgerin' thar in the sand
+With his finger, and motionin' with his hand,
+   And he looked like Ellick Garry.
+And as I driv up, I heerd him bleat
+To hisself, like a lamb:  "Hauh? nine from eight
+   Leaves nuthin' -- and none to carry?"
+
+And Ellick's bull-cart was standin'
+A cross-wise of the way,
+And the little bull was a-expandin',
+Hisself on a wisp of hay.
+But Ellick he sat with his head bent down,
+A-studyin' and musin' powerfully,
+And his forrud was creased with a turrible frown,
+And he was a-wurken' appearently
+A 'rethmetic sum that wouldn't gee,
+Fur he kep' on figgerin' away in the sand
+With his finger, and motionin' with his hand,
+   And I seed it WAS Ellick Garry.
+And agin I heard him softly bleat
+To hisself, like a lamb:  "Hauh? nine from eight
+   Leaves nuthin' -- and none to carry!"
+
+I woa'd my mules mighty easy
+(Ellick's back was towards the road
+And the wind hit was sorter breezy)
+And I got down off'n my load,
+And I crep' up close to Ellick's back,
+And I heerd him a-talkin' softly, thus:
+"Them figgers is got me under the hack.
+I caint see how to git out'n the muss,
+Except to jest nat'ally fail and bus'!
+My crap-leen calls for nine hundred and more.
+My counts o' sales is eight hundred and four,
+   Of cotton for Ellick Garry.
+Thar's eight, ought, four, jest like on a slate:
+Here's nine and two oughts --  Hauh? nine from eight
+   Leaves nuthin' -- and none to carry.
+
+"Them crap-leens, oh, them crap-leens!
+I giv one to Pardman and Sharks.
+Hit gobbled me up like snap-beans
+In a patch full o' old fiel'-larks.
+But I thought I could fool the crap-leen nice,
+And I hauled my cotton to Jammel and Cones.
+But shuh! 'fore I even had settled my price
+They tuck affidavy without no bones
+And levelled upon me fur all ther loans
+To the 'mount of sum nine hundred dollars or more,
+And sold me out clean for eight hundred and four,
+   As sure as I'm Ellick Garry!
+And thar it is down all squar and straight,
+But I can't make it gee, fur nine from eight
+   Leaves nuthin' -- and none to carry."
+
+Then I says "Hello, here, Garry!
+However you star' and frown
+Thare's somethin' fur YOU to carry,
+Fur you've worked it upside down!"
+Then he riz and walked to his little bull-cart,
+And made like he neither had seen nor heerd
+Nor knowed that I knowed of his raskilly part,
+And he tried to look as if HE wa'nt feared,
+And gathered his lines like he never keered,
+And he driv down the road 'bout a quarter or so,
+And then looked around, and I hollered "Hello,
+   Look here, Mister Ellick Garry!
+You may git up soon and lie down late,
+But you'll always find that nine from eight
+   Leaves nuthin' -- and none to carry."
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1870.
+
+
+
+
+"Thar's more in the Man than thar is in the Land".
+
+
+
+I knowed a man, which he lived in Jones,
+Which Jones is a county of red hills and stones,
+And he lived pretty much by gittin' of loans,
+And his mules was nuthin' but skin and bones,
+And his hogs was flat as his corn-bread pones,
+And he had 'bout a thousand acres o' land.
+
+This man -- which his name it was also Jones --
+He swore that he'd leave them old red hills and stones,
+Fur he couldn't make nuthin' but yallerish cotton,
+And little o' THAT, and his fences was rotten,
+And what little corn he had, HIT was boughten
+And dinged ef a livin' was in the land.
+
+And the longer he swore the madder he got,
+And he riz and he walked to the stable lot,
+And he hollered to Tom to come thar and hitch
+Fur to emigrate somewhar whar land was rich,
+And to quit raisin' cock-burrs, thistles and sich,
+And a wastin' ther time on the cussed land.
+
+So him and Tom they hitched up the mules,
+Pertestin' that folks was mighty big fools
+That 'ud stay in Georgy ther lifetime out,
+Jest scratchin' a livin' when all of 'em mought
+Git places in Texas whar cotton would sprout
+By the time you could plant it in the land.
+
+And he driv by a house whar a man named Brown
+Was a livin', not fur from the edge o' town,
+And he bantered Brown fur to buy his place,
+And said that bein' as money was skace,
+And bein' as sheriffs was hard to face,
+Two dollars an acre would git the land.
+
+They closed at a dollar and fifty cents,
+And Jones he bought him a waggin and tents,
+And loaded his corn, and his wimmin, and truck,
+And moved to Texas, which it tuck
+His entire pile, with the best of luck,
+To git thar and git him a little land.
+
+But Brown moved out on the old Jones' farm,
+And he rolled up his breeches and bared his arm,
+And he picked all the rocks from off'n the groun',
+And he rooted it up and he plowed it down,
+Then he sowed his corn and his wheat in the land.
+
+Five years glid by, and Brown, one day
+(Which he'd got so fat that he wouldn't weigh),
+Was a settin' down, sorter lazily,
+To the bulliest dinner you ever see,
+When one o' the children jumped on his knee
+And says, "Yan's Jones, which you bought his land."
+
+And thar was Jones, standin' out at the fence,
+And he hadn't no waggin, nor mules, nor tents,
+Fur he had left Texas afoot and cum
+To Georgy to see if he couldn't git sum
+Employment, and he was a lookin' as hum-
+Ble as ef he had never owned any land.
+
+But Brown he axed him in, and he sot
+Him down to his vittles smokin' hot,
+And when he had filled hisself and the floor
+Brown looked at him sharp and riz and swore
+That, "whether men's land was rich or poor
+Thar was more in the MAN than thar was in the LAND."
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1869.
+
+
+
+
+Jones's Private Argyment.
+
+
+
+That air same Jones, which lived in Jones,
+   He had this pint about him:
+He'd swear with a hundred sighs and groans,
+That farmers MUST stop gittin' loans,
+   And git along without 'em:
+
+That bankers, warehousemen, and sich
+   Was fatt'nin' on the planter,
+And Tennessy was rotten-rich
+A-raisin' meat and corn, all which
+   Draw'd money to Atlanta:
+
+And the only thing (says Jones) to do
+   Is, eat no meat that's boughten:
+`But tear up every I, O, U,
+And plant all corn and swear for true
+   To quit a-raisin' cotton!'
+
+Thus spouted Jones (whar folks could hear,
+   -- At Court and other gatherin's),
+And thus kep' spoutin' many a year,
+Proclaimin' loudly far and near
+   Sich fiddlesticks and blatherin's.
+
+But, one all-fired sweatin' day,
+   It happened I was hoein'
+My lower corn-field, which it lay
+'Longside the road that runs my way
+   Whar I can see what's goin'.
+
+And a'ter twelve o'clock had come
+   I felt a kinder faggin',
+And laid myself un'neath a plum
+To let my dinner settle sum,
+   When 'long come Jones's waggin,
+
+And Jones was settin' in it, SO:
+   A-readin' of a paper.
+His mules was goin' powerful slow,
+Fur he had tied the lines onto
+   The staple of the scraper.
+
+The mules they stopped about a rod
+   From me, and went to feedin'
+'Longside the road, upon the sod,
+But Jones (which he had tuck a tod)
+   Not knowin', kept a-readin'.
+
+And presently says he:  "Hit's true;
+   That Clisby's head is level.
+Thar's one thing farmers all must do,
+To keep themselves from goin' tew
+   Bankruptcy and the devil!
+
+"More corn! more corn! MUST plant less ground,
+   And MUSTN'T eat what's boughten!
+Next year they'll do it:  reasonin's sound:
+(And, cotton will fetch 'bout a dollar a pound),
+   THARFORE, I'LL plant ALL cotton!"
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1870.
+
+
+
+
+The Power of Prayer; or, The First Steamboat up the Alabama.
+
+By Sidney and Clifford Lanier.
+
+
+
+You, Dinah!  Come and set me whar de ribber-roads does meet.
+De Lord, HE made dese black-jack roots to twis' into a seat.
+Umph, dar!  De Lord have mussy on dis blin' ole nigger's feet.
+
+It 'pear to me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June.
+I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de fiddle soon!
+Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in de moon.
+
+Well, ef dis nigger IS been blind for fo'ty year or mo',
+Dese ears, DEY sees the world, like, th'u' de cracks dat's in de do'.
+For de Lord has built dis body wid de windows 'hind and 'fo'.
+
+I know my front ones IS stopped up, and things is sort o' dim,
+But den, th'u' DEM, temptation's rain won't leak in on ole Jim!
+De back ones show me earth enough, aldo' dey's mons'ous slim.
+
+And as for Hebben, -- bless de Lord, and praise His holy name --
+DAT shines in all de co'ners of dis cabin jes' de same
+As ef dat cabin hadn't nar' a plank upon de frame!
+
+Who CALL me?  Listen down de ribber, Dinah!  Don't you hyar
+Somebody holl'in' "Hoo, Jim, hoo?"  My Sarah died las' y'ar;
+IS dat black angel done come back to call ole Jim f'om hyar?
+
+My stars, dat cain't be Sarah, shuh!  Jes' listen, Dinah, NOW!
+What KIN be comin' up dat bend, a-makin' sich a row?
+Fus' bellerin' like a pawin' bull, den squealin' like a sow?
+
+De Lord 'a' mussy sakes alive, jes' hear, -- ker-woof, ker-woof --
+De Debble's comin' round dat bend, he's comin' shuh enuff,
+A-splashin' up de water wid his tail and wid his hoof!
+
+I'se pow'ful skeered; but neversomeless I ain't gwine run away:
+I'm gwine to stand stiff-legged for de Lord dis blessed day.
+YOU screech, and swish de water, Satan!  I'se a gwine to pray.
+
+O hebbenly Marster, what thou willest, dat mus' be jes' so,
+And ef Thou hast bespoke de word, some nigger's bound to go.
+Den, Lord, please take ole Jim, and lef young Dinah hyar below!
+
+'Scuse Dinah, 'scuse her, Marster; for she's sich a little chile,
+She hardly jes' begin to scramble up de homeyard stile,
+But dis ole traveller's feet been tired dis many a many a mile.
+
+I'se wufless as de rotten pole of las' year's fodder-stack.
+De rheumatiz done bit my bones; you hear 'em crack and crack?
+I cain'st sit down 'dout gruntin' like 'twas breakin' o' my back.
+
+What use de wheel, when hub and spokes is warped and split, and rotten?
+What use dis dried-up cotton-stalk, when Life done picked my cotton?
+I'se like a word dat somebody said, and den done been forgotten.
+
+But, Dinah!  Shuh dat gal jes' like dis little hick'ry tree,
+De sap's jes' risin in her; she do grow owdaciouslee --
+Lord, ef you's clarin' de underbrush, don't cut her down, cut me!
+
+I would not proud persume -- but I'll boldly make reques';
+Sence Jacob had dat wrastlin'-match, I, too, gwine do my bes';
+When Jacob got all underholt, de Lord he answered Yes!
+
+And what for waste de vittles, now, and th'ow away de bread,
+Jes' for to strength dese idle hands to scratch dis ole bald head?
+T'ink of de 'conomy, Marster, ef dis ole Jim was dead!
+
+Stop; -- ef I don't believe de Debble's gone on up de stream!
+Jes' now he squealed down dar; -- hush; dat's a mighty weakly scream!
+Yas, sir, he's gone, he's gone; -- he snort way off, like in a dream!
+
+O glory hallelujah to de Lord dat reigns on high!
+De Debble's fai'ly skeered to def, he done gone flyin' by;
+I know'd he couldn' stand dat pra'r, I felt my Marster nigh!
+
+You, Dinah; ain't you 'shamed, now, dat you didn' trust to grace?
+I heerd you thrashin' th'u' de bushes when he showed his face!
+You fool, you think de Debble couldn't beat YOU in a race?
+
+I tell you, Dinah, jes' as shuh as you is standin' dar,
+When folks starts prayin', answer-angels drops down th'u' de a'r.
+YAS, DINAH, WHAR 'OULD YOU BE NOW, JES' 'CEPTIN' FUR DAT PRA'R?
+
+____
+Baltimore, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Unrevised Early Poems.
+
+These unrevised poems are not necessarily exponents of Mr. Lanier's
+later teaching, but are offered as examples of his youthful spirit,
+his earlier methods and his instructive growth.  To many friends
+they present in addition a wealth of dear associations.
+But, putting Mr. Lanier upon trial as an artist, it is fair to remember
+that probably none of these poems would have been republished by him
+without material alterations, the slightest of which
+no other hand can be authorized to make.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Jacquerie.  A Fragment.
+
+
+
+  Chapter I.
+
+Once on a time, a Dawn, all red and bright
+Leapt on the conquered ramparts of the Night,
+And flamed, one brilliant instant, on the world,
+Then back into the historic moat was hurled
+And Night was King again, for many years.
+-- Once on a time the Rose of Spring blushed out
+But Winter angrily withdrew it back
+Into his rough new-bursten husk, and shut
+The stern husk-leaves, and hid it many years.
+-- Once Famine tricked himself with ears of corn,
+And Hate strung flowers on his spiked belt,
+And glum Revenge in silver lilies pranked him,
+And Lust put violets on his shameless front,
+And all minced forth o' the street like holiday folk
+That sally off afield on Summer morns.
+-- Once certain hounds that knew of many a chase,
+And bare great wounds of antler and of tusk
+That they had ta'en to give a lord some sport,
+-- Good hounds, that would have died to give lords sport --
+Were so bewrayed and kicked by these same lords
+That all the pack turned tooth o' the knights and bit
+As knights had been no better things than boars,
+And took revenge as bloody as a man's,
+Unhoundlike, sudden, hot i' the chops, and sweet.
+-- Once sat a falcon on a lady's wrist,
+Seeming to doze, with wrinkled eye-lid drawn,
+But dreaming hard of hoods and slaveries
+And of dim hungers in his heart and wings.
+Then, while the mistress gazed above for game,
+Sudden he flew into her painted face
+And hooked his horn-claws in her lily throat
+And drove his beak into her lips and eyes
+In fierce and hawkish kissing that did scar
+And mar the lady's beauty evermore.
+-- And once while Chivalry stood tall and lithe
+And flashed his sword above the stricken eyes
+Of all the simple peasant-folk of France:
+While Thought was keen and hot and quick,
+And did not play, as in these later days,
+Like summer-lightning flickering in the west
+-- As little dreadful as if glow-worms lay
+In the cool and watery clouds and glimmered weak --
+But gleamed and struck at once or oak or man,
+And left not space for Time to wave his wing
+Betwixt the instantaneous flash and stroke:
+While yet the needs of life were brave and fierce
+And did not hide their deeds behind their words,
+And logic came not 'twixt desire and act,
+And Want-and-Take was the whole Form of life:
+While Love had fires a-burning in his veins,
+And hidden Hate could flash into revenge:
+Ere yet young Trade was 'ware of his big thews
+Or dreamed that in the bolder afterdays
+He would hew down and bind old Chivalry
+And drag him to the highest height of fame
+And plunge him thence in the sea of still Romance
+To lie for aye in never-rusted mail
+Gleaming through quiet ripples of soft songs
+And sheens of old traditionary tales; --
+On such a time, a certain May arose
+From out that blue Sea that between five lands
+Lies like a violet midst of five large leaves,
+Arose from out this violet and flew on
+And stirred the spirits of the woods of France
+And smoothed the brows of moody Auvergne hills,
+And wrought warm sea-tints into maidens' eyes,
+And calmed the wordy air of market-towns
+With faint suggestions blown from distant buds,
+Until the land seemed a mere dream of land,
+And, in this dream-field Life sat like a dove
+And cooed across unto her dove-mate Death,
+Brooding, pathetic, by a river, lone.
+Oh, sharper tangs pierced through this perfumed May.
+Strange aches sailed by with odors on the wind
+As when we kneel in flowers that grow on graves
+Of friends who died unworthy of our love.
+King John of France was proving such an ache
+In English prisons wide and fair and grand,
+Whose long expanses of green park and chace
+Did ape large liberty with such success
+As smiles of irony ape smiles of love.
+Down from the oaks of Hertford Castle park,
+Double with warm rose-breaths of southern Spring
+Came rumors, as if odors too had thorns,
+Sharp rumors, how the three Estates of France,
+Like old Three-headed Cerberus of Hell
+Had set upon the Duke of Normandy,
+Their rightful Regent, snarled in his great face,
+Snapped jagged teeth in inch-breadth of his throat,
+And blown such hot and savage breath upon him,
+That he had tossed great sops of royalty
+Unto the clamorous, three-mawed baying beast.
+And was not further on his way withal,
+And had but changed a snarl into a growl:
+How Arnold de Cervolles had ta'en the track
+That war had burned along the unhappy land,
+Shouting, `since France is then too poor to pay
+The soldiers that have bloody devoir done,
+And since needs must, pardie! a man must eat,
+Arm, gentlemen! swords slice as well as knives!'
+And so had tempted stout men from the ranks,
+And now was adding robbers' waste to war's,
+Stealing the leavings of remorseless battle,
+And making gaunter the gaunt bones of want:
+How this Cervolles (called "Arch-priest" by the mass)
+Through warm Provence had marched and menace made
+Against Pope Innocent at Avignon,
+And how the Pope nor ate nor drank nor slept,
+Through godly fear concerning his red wines.
+For if these knaves should sack his holy house
+And all the blessed casks be knocked o' the head,
+HORRENDUM! all his Holiness' drink to be
+Profanely guzzled down the reeking throats
+Of scoundrels, and inflame them on to seize
+The massy coffers of the Church's gold,
+And steal, mayhap, the carven silver shrine
+And all the golden crucifixes?  No! --
+And so the holy father Pope made stir
+And had sent forth a legate to Cervolles,
+And treated with him, and made compromise,
+And, last, had bidden all the Arch-priest's troop
+To come and banquet with him in his house,
+Where they did wassail high by night and day
+And Father Pope sat at the board and carved
+ Midst jokes that flowed full greasily,
+And priest and soldier trolled good songs for mass,
+And all the prayers the Priests made were, `pray, drink,'
+And all the oaths the Soldiers swore were, `drink!'
+Till Mirth sat like a jaunty postillon
+Upon the back of Time and urged him on
+With piquant spur, past chapel and past cross:
+How Charles, King of Navarre, in long duress
+By mandate of King John within the walls
+Of Crevacoeur and then of strong Alleres,
+In faithful ward of Sir Tristan du Bois,
+Was now escaped, had supped with Guy Kyrec,
+Had now a pardon of the Regent Duke
+By half compulsion of a Paris mob,
+Had turned the people's love upon himself
+By smooth harangues, and now was bold to claim
+That France was not the Kingdom of King John,
+But, By our Lady, his, by right and worth,
+And so was plotting treason in the State,
+And laughing at weak Charles of Normandy.
+Nay, these had been like good news to the King,
+Were any man but bold enough to tell
+The King what [bitter] sayings men had made
+And hawked augmenting up and down the land
+Against the barons and great lords of France
+That fled from English arrows at Poictiers.
+POICTIERS, POICTIERS:  this grain i' the eye of France
+Had swelled it to a big and bloodshot ball
+That looked with rage upon a world askew.
+Poictiers' disgrace was now but two years old,
+Yet so outrageous rank and full was grown
+That France was wholly overspread with shade,
+And bitter fruits lay on the untilled ground
+That stank and bred so foul contagious smells
+That not a nose in France but stood awry,
+Nor boor that cried not FAUGH! upon the air.
+
+
+  Chapter II.
+
+Franciscan friar John de Rochetaillade
+With gentle gesture lifted up his hand
+And poised it high above the steady eyes
+Of a great crowd that thronged the market-place
+In fair Clermont to hear him prophesy.
+Midst of the crowd old Gris Grillon, the maimed,
+-- A wretched wreck that fate had floated out
+From the drear storm of battle at Poictiers.
+A living man whose larger moiety
+Was dead and buried on the battle-field --
+A grisly trunk, without or arms or legs,
+And scarred with hoof-cuts over cheek and brow,
+Lay in his wicker-cradle, smiling.
+                                    "Jacques,"
+Quoth he, "My son, I would behold this priest
+That is not fat, and loves not wine, and fasts,
+And stills the folk with waving of his hand,
+And threats the knights and thunders at the Pope.
+Make way for Gris, ye who are whole of limb!
+Set me on yonder ledge, that I may see."
+Forthwith a dozen horny hands reached out
+And lifted Gris Grillon upon the ledge,
+Whereon he lay and overlooked the crowd,
+And from the gray-grown hedges of his brows
+Shot forth a glance against the friar's eye
+That struck him like an arrow.
+                                Then the friar,
+With voice as low as if a maiden hummed
+Love-songs of Provence in a mild day-dream:
+"And when he broke the second seal, I heard
+The second beast say, Come and see.
+                                     And then
+Went out another horse, and he was red.
+And unto him that sat thereon was given
+To take the peace of earth away, and set
+Men killing one another:  and they gave
+To him a mighty sword."
+                         The friar paused
+And pointed round the circle of sad eyes.
+"There is no face of man or woman here
+But showeth print of the hard hoof of war.
+Ah, yonder leaneth limbless Gris Grillon.
+Friends, Gris Grillon is France.
+                                  Good France; my France,
+Wilt never walk on glory's hills again?
+Wilt never work among thy vines again?
+Art footless and art handless evermore?
+-- Thou felon, War, I do arraign thee now
+Of mayhem of the four main limbs of France!
+Thou old red criminal, stand forth; I charge
+-- But O, I am too utter sorrowful
+To urge large accusation now.
+                               Nathless,
+My work to-day, is still more grievous.  Hear!
+The stains that war hath wrought upon the land
+Show but as faint white flecks, if seen o' the side
+Of those blood-covered images that stalk
+Through yon cold chambers of the future, as
+The prophet-mood, now stealing on my soul,
+Reveals them, marching, marching, marching.  See!
+There go the kings of France, in piteous file.
+The deadly diamonds shining in their crowns
+Do wound the foreheads of their Majesties
+And glitter through a setting of blood-gouts
+As if they smiled to think how men are slain
+By the sharp facets of the gem of power,
+And how the kings of men are slaves of stones.
+But look!  The long procession of the kings
+Wavers and stops; the world is full of noise,
+The ragged peoples storm the palaces,
+They rave, they laugh, they thirst, they lap the stream
+That trickles from the regal vestments down,
+And, lapping, smack their heated chaps for more,
+And ply their daggers for it, till the kings
+All die and lie in a crooked sprawl of death,
+Ungainly, foul, and stiff as any heap
+Of villeins rotting on a battle-field.
+ 'Tis true, that when these things have come to pass
+Then never a king shall rule again in France,
+For every villein shall be king in France:
+And who hath lordship in him, whether born
+In hedge or silken bed, shall be a lord:
+And queens shall be as thick i' the land as wives,
+And all the maids shall maids of honor be:
+And high and low shall commune solemnly:
+And stars and stones shall have free interview.
+But woe is me, 'tis also piteous true
+That ere this gracious time shall visit France,
+Your graves, Beloved, shall be some centuries old,
+And so your children's, and their children's graves
+And many generations'.
+                        Ye, O ye
+Shall grieve, and ye shall grieve, and ye shall grieve.
+Your Life shall bend and o'er his shuttle toil,
+A weaver weaving at the loom of grief.
+Your Life shall sweat 'twixt anvil and hot forge,
+An armorer working at the sword of grief.
+Your Life shall moil i' the ground, and plant his seed,
+A farmer foisoning a huge crop of grief.
+Your Life shall chaffer in the market-place,
+A merchant trading in the goods of grief.
+Your Life shall go to battle with his bow,
+A soldier fighting in defence of grief.
+By every rudder that divides the seas,
+Tall Grief shall stand, the helmsman of the ship.
+By every wain that jolts along the roads,
+Stout Grief shall walk, the driver of the team.
+Midst every herd of cattle on the hills,
+Dull Grief shall lie, the herdsman of the drove.
+Oh Grief shall grind your bread and play your lutes
+And marry you and bury you.
+                             -- How else?
+Who's here in France, can win her people's faith
+And stand in front and lead the people on?
+Where is the Church?
+                      The Church is far too fat.
+Not, mark, by robust swelling of the thews,
+But puffed and flabby large with gross increase
+Of wine-fat, plague-fat, dropsy-fat.
+                                      O shame,
+Thou Pope that cheatest God at Avignon,
+Thou that shouldst be the Father of the world
+And Regent of it whilst our God is gone;
+Thou that shouldst blaze with conferred majesty
+And smite old Lust-o'-the-Flesh so as by flame;
+Thou that canst turn thy key and lock Grief up
+Or turn thy key and unlock Heaven's Gate,
+Thou that shouldst be the veritable hand
+That Christ down-stretcheth out of heaven yet
+To draw up him that fainteth to His heart,
+Thou that shouldst bear thy fruit, yet virgin live,
+As she that bore a man yet sinned not,
+Thou that shouldst challenge the most special eyes
+Of Heaven and Earth and Hell to mark thee, since
+Thou shouldst be Heaven's best captain, Earth's best friend,
+And Hell's best enemy -- false Pope, false Pope,
+The world, thy child, is sick and like to die,
+But thou art dinner-drowsy and cannot come:
+And Life is sore beset and crieth `help!'
+But thou brook'st not disturbance at thy wine:
+And France is wild for one to lead her souls;
+But thou art huge and fat and laggest back
+Among the remnants of forsaken camps.
+Thou'rt not God's Pope, thou art the Devil's Pope.
+Thou art first Squire to that most puissant knight,
+Lord Satan, who thy faithful squireship long
+Hath watched and well shall guerdon.
+                                      Ye sad souls,
+So faint with work ye love not, so thin-worn
+With miseries ye wrought not, so outraged
+By strokes of ill that pass th' ill-doers' heads
+And cleave the innocent, so desperate tired
+Of insult that doth day by day abuse
+The humblest dignity of humblest men,
+Ye cannot call toward the Church for help.
+The Church already is o'erworked with care
+Of its dyspeptic stomach.
+                           Ha, the Church
+Forgets about eternity.
+                         I had
+A vision of forgetfulness.
+                            O Dream
+Born of a dream, as yonder cloud is born
+Of water which is born of cloud!
+                                  I thought
+I saw the moonlight lying large and calm
+Upon the unthrobbing bosom of the earth,
+As a great diamond glittering on a shroud.
+A sense of breathlessness stilled all the world.
+Motion stood dreaming he was changed to Rest,
+And Life asleep did fancy he was Death.
+A quick small shadow spotted the white world;
+Then instantly 'twas huge, and huger grew
+By instants till it did o'ergloom all space.
+I lifted up mine eyes -- O thou just God!
+I saw a spectre with a million heads
+Come frantic downward through the universe,
+And all the mouths of it were uttering cries,
+Wherein was a sharp agony, and yet
+The cries were much like laughs:  as if Pain laughed.
+Its myriad lips were blue, and sometimes they
+Closed fast and only moaned dim sounds that shaped
+Themselves to one word, `Homeless', and the stars
+Did utter back the moan, and the great hills
+Did bellow it, and then the stars and hills
+Bandied the grief o' the ghost 'twixt heaven and earth.
+The spectre sank, and lay upon the air,
+And brooded, level, close upon the earth,
+With all the myriad heads just over me.
+I glanced in all the eyes and marked that some
+Did glitter with a flame of lunacy,
+And some were soft and false as feigning love,
+And some were blinking with hypocrisy,
+And some were overfilmed by sense, and some
+Blazed with ambition's wild, unsteady fire,
+And some were burnt i' the sockets black, and some
+Were dead as embers when the fire is out.
+A curious zone circled the Spectre's waist,
+Which seemed with strange device to symbol Time.
+It was a silver-gleaming thread of day
+Spiral about a jet-black band of night.
+This zone seemed ever to contract and all
+The frame with momentary spasms heaved
+In the strangling traction which did never cease.
+I cried unto the spectre, `Time hath bound
+Thy body with the fibre of his hours.'
+Then rose a multitude of mocking sounds,
+And some mouths spat at me and cried `thou fool',
+And some, `thou liest', and some, `he dreams':  and then
+Some hands uplifted certain bowls they bore
+To lips that writhed but drank with eagerness.
+And some played curious viols, shaped like hearts
+And stringed with loves, to light and ribald tunes,
+ And other hands slit throats with knives,
+And others patted all the painted cheeks
+In reach, and others stole what others had
+Unseen, or boldly snatched at alien rights,
+And some o' the heads did vie in a foolish game
+OF WHICH COULD HOLD ITSELF THE HIGHEST, and
+OF WHICH ONE'S NECK WAS STIFF THE LONGEST TIME.
+ And then the sea in silence wove a veil
+Of mist, and breathed it upward and about,
+And waved and wound it softly round the world,
+And meshed my dream i' the vague and endless folds,
+And a light wind arose and blew these off,
+And I awoke.
+              The many heads are priests
+That have forgot eternity:  and Time
+ Hath caught and bound them with a withe
+Into a fagot huge, to burn in hell.
+-- Now if the priesthood put such shame upon
+Your cry for leadership, can better help
+Come out of knighthood?
+                         Lo! you smile, you boors?
+You villeins smile at knighthood?
+                                   Now, thou France
+That wert the mother of fair chivalry,
+Unclose thine eyes, unclose thine eyes, here, see,
+Here stand a herd of knaves that laugh to scorn
+Thy gentlemen!
+                O contumely hard,
+O bitterness of last disgrace, O sting
+That stings the coward knights of lost Poictiers!
+I would --" but now a murmur rose i' the crowd
+Of angry voices, and the friar leapt
+From where he stood to preach and pressed a path
+Betwixt the mass that way the voices came.
+
+
+  Chapter III.
+
+Lord Raoul was riding castleward from field.
+At left hand rode his lady and at right
+His fool whom he loved better; and his bird,
+His fine ger-falcon best beloved of all,
+Sat hooded on his wrist and gently swayed
+To the undulating amble of the horse.
+Guest-knights and huntsmen and a noisy train
+Of loyal-stomached flatterers and their squires
+Clattered in retinue, and aped his pace,
+And timed their talk by his, and worked their eyes
+By intimation of his glance, with great
+And drilled precision.
+                        Then said the fool:
+"'Twas a brave flight, my lord, that last one! brave.
+Didst note the heron once did turn about,
+And show a certain anger with his wing,
+And make as if he almost dared, not quite,
+To strike the falcon, ere the falcon him?
+A foolish damnable advised bird,
+Yon heron!  What?  Shall herons grapple hawks?
+God made the herons for the hawks to strike,
+And hawk and heron made he for lords' sport."
+"What then, my honey-tongued Fool, that knowest
+God's purposes, what made he fools for?"
+                                          "For
+To counsel lords, my lord.  Wilt hear me prove
+Fools' counsel better than wise men's advice?"
+"Aye, prove it.  If thy logic fail, wise fool,
+I'll cause two wise men whip thee soundly."
+                                             "So:
+`Wise men are prudent:  prudent men have care
+For their own proper interest; therefore they
+Advise their own advantage, not another's.
+But fools are careless:  careless men care not
+For their own proper interest; therefore they
+Advise their friend's advantage, not their own.'
+Now hear the commentary, Cousin Raoul.
+This fool, unselfish, counsels thee, his lord,
+Go not through yonder square, where, as thou see'st
+Yon herd of villeins, crick-necked all with strain
+Of gazing upward, stand, and gaze, and take
+With open mouth and eye and ear, the quips
+And heresies of John de Rochetaillade."
+Lord Raoul half turned him in his saddle round,
+And looked upon his fool and vouchsafed him
+What moiety of fastidious wonderment
+A generous nobleness could deign to give
+To such humility, with eye superb
+Where languor and surprise both showed themselves,
+Each deprecating t'other.
+                           "Now, dear knave,
+Be kind and tell me -- tell me quickly, too, --
+Some proper reasonable ground or cause,
+Nay, tell me but some shadow of some cause,
+Nay, hint me but a thin ghost's dream of cause,
+(So will I thee absolve from being whipped)
+Why I, Lord Raoul, should turn my horse aside
+From riding by yon pitiful villein gang,
+Or ay, by God, from riding o'er their heads
+If so my humor serve, or through their bodies,
+Or miring fetlocks in their nasty brains,
+Or doing aught else I will in my Clermont?
+Do me this grace, mine Idiot."
+                                "Please thy Wisdom
+An thou dost ride through this same gang of boors,
+'Tis my fool's-prophecy, some ill shall fall.
+Lord Raoul, yon mass of various flesh is fused
+And melted quite in one by white-hot words
+The friar speaks.  Sir, sawest thou ne'er, sometimes,
+Thine armorer spit on iron when 'twas hot,
+And how the iron flung the insult back,
+Hissing?  So this contempt now in thine eye,
+If it shall fall on yonder heated surface
+May bounce back upward.  Well:  and then?  What then?
+Why, if thou cause thy folk to crop some villein's ears,
+So, evil falls, and a fool foretells the truth.
+Or if some erring crossbow-bolt should break
+Thine unarmed head, shot from behind a house,
+So, evil falls, and a fool foretells the truth."
+"Well," quoth Lord Raoul, with languid utterance,
+"'Tis very well -- and thou'rt a foolish fool,
+Nay, thou art Folly's perfect witless man,
+Stupidity doth madly dote on thee,
+And Idiocy doth fight her for thy love,
+Yet Silliness doth love thee best of all,
+And while they quarrel, snatcheth thee to her
+And saith `Ah! 'tis my sweetest No-brains:  mine!'
+-- And 'tis my mood to-day some ill shall fall."
+And there right suddenly Lord Raoul gave rein
+And galloped straightway to the crowded square,
+-- What time a strange light flickered in the eyes
+Of the calm fool, that was not folly's gleam,
+But more like wisdom's smile at plan well laid
+And end well compassed.  In the noise of hoofs
+Secure, the fool low-muttered:  "`Folly's love!'
+So:  `Silliness' sweetheart:  no-brains:'  quoth my Lord.
+Why, how intolerable an ass is he
+Whom Silliness' sweetheart drives so, by the ear!
+Thou languid, lordly, most heart-breaking Nought!
+Thou bastard zero, that hast come to power,
+Nothing's right issue failing!  Thou mere `pooh'
+That Life hath uttered in some moment's pet,
+And then forgot she uttered thee!  Thou gap
+In time, thou little notch in circumstance!"
+
+
+  Chapter IV.
+
+Lord Raoul drew rein with all his company,
+And urged his horse i' the crowd, to gain fair view
+Of him that spoke, and stopped at last, and sat
+Still, underneath where Gris Grillon was laid,
+And heard, somewhile, with languid scornful gaze,
+The friar putting blame on priest and knight.
+But presently, as 'twere in weariness,
+He gazed about, and then above, and so
+Made mark of Gris Grillon.
+                            "So, there, old man,
+Thou hast more brows than legs!"
+                                  "I would," quoth Gris,
+"That thou, upon a certain time I wot,
+Hadst had less legs and bigger brows, my Lord!"
+Then all the flatterers and their squires cried out
+Solicitous, with various voice, "Go to,
+Old Rogue," or "Shall I brain him, my good Lord?"
+Or, "So, let me but chuck him from his perch,"
+Or, "Slice his tongue to piece his leg withal,"
+Or, "Send his eyes to look for his missing arms."
+But my Lord Raoul was in the mood, to-day,
+Which craves suggestions simply with a view
+To flout them in the face, and so waved hand
+Backward, and stayed the on-pressing sycophants
+Eager to buy rich praise with bravery cheap.
+"I would know why," -- he said -- "thou wishedst me
+Less legs and bigger brows; and when?"
+                                        "Wouldst know?
+Learn then," cried Gris Grillon and stirred himself,
+In a great spasm of passion mixed with pain;
+"An thou hadst had more courage and less speed,
+Then, ah my God! then could not I have been
+That piteous gibe of a man thou see'st I am.
+Sir, having no disease, nor any taint
+Nor old hereditament of sin or shame,
+-- But, feeling the brave bound and energy
+Of daring health that leaps along the veins --
+As a hart upon his river banks at morn,
+-- Sir, wild with the urgings and hot strenuous beats
+Of manhood's heart in this full-sinewed breast
+Which thou may'st even now discern is mine,
+-- Sir, full aware, each instant in each day,
+Of motions of great muscles, once were mine,
+And thrill of tense thew-knots, and stinging sense
+Of nerves, nice, capable and delicate:
+-- Sir, visited each hour by passions great
+That lack all instrument of utterance,
+Passion of love -- that hath no arm to curve;
+Passion of speed -- that hath no limb to stretch;
+Yea, even that poor feeling of desire
+Simply to turn me from this side to that,
+(Which brooded on, into wild passion grows
+By reason of the impotence that broods)
+Balked of its end and unachievable
+Without assistance of some foreign arm,
+-- Sir, moved and thrilled like any perfect man,
+O, trebly moved and thrilled, since poor desires
+That are of small import to happy men
+Who easily can compass them, to me
+Become mere hopeless Heavens or actual Hells,
+-- Sir, strengthened so with manhood's seasoned soul,
+I lie in this damned cradle day and night,
+Still, still, so still, my Lord:  less than a babe
+In powers but more than any man in needs;
+Dreaming, with open eye, of days when men
+Have fallen cloven through steel and bone and flesh
+At single strokes of this -- of that big arm
+Once wielded aught a mortal arm might wield,
+Waking a prey to any foolish gnat
+That wills to conquer my defenceless brow
+And sit thereon in triumph; hounded ever
+By small necessities of barest use
+Which, since I cannot compass them alone,
+Do snarl my helplessness into mine ear,
+Howling behind me that I have no hands,
+And yelping round me that I have no feet:
+So that my heart is stretched by tiny ills
+That are so much the larger that I knew
+In bygone days how trifling small they were:
+-- Dungeoned in wicker, strong as 'twere in stone;
+-- Fast chained with nothing, firmer than with steel;
+-- Captive in limb, yet free in eye and ear,
+Sole tenant of this puny Hell in Heaven:
+-- And this -- all this -- because I was a man!
+For, in the battle -- ha, thou know'st, pale-face!
+When that the four great English horsemen bore
+So bloodily on thee, I leapt to front
+To front of thee -- of thee -- and fought four blades,
+Thinking to win thee time to snatch thy breath,
+And, by a rearing fore-hoof stricken down,
+ Mine eyes, through blood, my brain, through pain,
+-- Midst of a dim hot uproar fainting down --
+Were 'ware of thee, far rearward, fleeing!  Hound!"
+
+
+  Chapter V.
+
+Then, as the passion of old Gris Grillon
+A wave swift swelling, grew to highest height
+And snapped a foaming consummation forth
+With salty hissing, came the friar through
+The mass.  A stillness of white faces wrought
+A transient death on all the hands and breasts
+Of all the crowd, and men and women stood,
+One instant, fixed, as they had died upright.
+Then suddenly Lord Raoul rose up in selle
+And thrust his dagger straight upon the breast
+Of Gris Grillon, to pin him to the wall;
+But ere steel-point met flesh, tall Jacques Grillon
+Had leapt straight upward from the earth, and in
+The self-same act had whirled his bow by end
+With mighty whirr about his head, and struck
+The dagger with so featly stroke and full
+That blade flew up and hilt flew down, and left
+Lord Raoul unfriended of his weapon.
+                                      Then
+The fool cried shrilly, "Shall a knight of France
+Go stabbing his own cattle?"  And Lord Raoul,
+Calm with a changing mood, sat still and called:
+"Here, huntsmen, 'tis my will ye seize the hind
+That broke my dagger, bind him to this tree
+And slice both ears to hair-breadth of his head,
+To be his bloody token of regret
+That he hath put them to so foul employ
+As catching villainous breath of strolling priests
+That mouth at knighthood and defile the Church."
+The knife  .   .   .   .   .  [Rest of line lost.]
+To place the edge  .   .   .  [Rest of line lost.]
+Mary! the blood! it oozes sluggishly,
+Scorning to come at call of blade so base.
+Sathanas!  He that cuts the ear has left
+The blade sticking at midway, for to turn
+ And ask the Duke "if 'tis not done
+Thus far with nice precision," and the Duke
+Leans down to see, and cries, "'tis marvellous nice,
+Shaved as thou wert ear-barber by profession!"
+Whereat one witling cries, "'tis monstrous fit,
+In sooth, a shaven-pated priest should have
+A shaven-eared audience;" and another,
+"Give thanks, thou Jacques, to this most gracious Duke
+That rids thee of the life-long dread of loss
+Of thy two ears, by cropping them at once;
+And now henceforth full safely thou may'st dare
+The powerfullest Lord in France to touch
+An ear of thine;" and now the knave o' the knife
+Seizes the handle to commence again, and saws
+And . . ha!  Lift up thine head, O Henry!  Friend!
+'Tis Marie, walking midway of the street,
+As she had just stepped forth from out the gate
+Of the very, very Heaven where God is,
+Still glittering with the God-shine on her!  Look!
+And there right suddenly the fool looked up
+And saw the crowd divided in two ranks.
+Raoul pale-stricken as a man that waits
+God's first remark when he hath died into
+God's sudden presence, saw the cropping knave
+A-pause with knife in hand, the wondering folk
+All straining forward with round-ringed eyes,
+And Gris Grillon calm smiling while he prayed
+The Holy Virgin's blessing.
+                             Down the lane
+Betwixt the hedging bodies of the crowd,
+[Part of line lost.]  .   .   .   .  majesty
+[Part of line lost.]  .   .  a spirit pacing on the top
+Of springy clouds, and bore straight on toward
+The Duke.  On him her eyes burned steadily
+With such gray fires of heaven-hot command
+As Dawn burns Night away with, and she held
+Her white forefinger quivering aloft
+At greatest arm's-length of her dainty arm,
+In menace sweeter than a kiss could be
+And terribler than sudden whispers are
+That come from lips unseen, in sunlit room.
+So with the spell of all the Powers of Sense
+That e'er have swayed the savagery of hot blood
+Raying from her whole body beautiful,
+She held the eyes and wills of all the crowd.
+Then from the numbed hand of him that cut,
+The knife dropped down, and the quick fool stole in
+And snatched and deftly severed all the withes
+Unseen, and Jacques burst forth into the crowd,
+And then the mass completed the long breath
+They had forgot to draw, and surged upon
+The centre where the maiden stood with sound
+Of multitudes of blessings, and Lord Raoul
+Rode homeward, silent and most pale and strange,
+Deep-wrapt in moody fits of hot and cold.
+                         (End of Chapter V.)
+     .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1868.
+
+
+
+Song for "The Jacquerie".
+
+
+   May the maiden,
+   Violet-laden
+Out of the violet sea,
+   Comes and hovers
+   Over lovers,
+Over thee, Marie, and me,
+   Over me and thee.
+
+   Day the stately,
+   Sunken lately
+Into the violet sea,
+   Backward hovers
+   Over lovers,
+Over thee, Marie, and me,
+   Over me and thee.
+
+   Night the holy,
+   Sailing slowly
+Over the violet sea,
+   Stars uncovers
+   Over lovers,
+Stars for thee, Marie, and me,
+   Stars for me and thee.
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1868.
+
+
+
+Song for "The Jacquerie".
+
+Betrayal.
+
+
+The sun has kissed the violet sea,
+ And burned the violet to a rose.
+O Sea! wouldst thou not better be
+ Mere violet still?  Who knows? who knows?
+    Well hides the violet in the wood:
+    The dead leaf wrinkles her a hood,
+    And winter's ill is violet's good;
+    But the bold glory of the rose,
+    It quickly comes and quickly goes --
+    Red petals whirling in white snows,
+            Ah me!
+
+The sun has burnt the rose-red sea:
+ The rose is turned to ashes gray.
+O Sea, O Sea, mightst thou but be
+ The violet thou hast been to-day!
+    The sun is brave, the sun is bright,
+    The sun is lord of love and light;
+    But after him it cometh night.
+    Dim anguish of the lonesome dark! --
+    Once a girl's body, stiff and stark,
+    Was laid in a tomb without a mark,
+            Ah me!
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1868.
+
+
+
+Song for "The Jacquerie".
+
+
+       The hound was cuffed, the hound was kicked,
+       O' the ears was cropped, o' the tail was nicked,
+(All.)    Oo-hoo-o, howled the hound.
+       The hound into his kennel crept;
+       He rarely wept, he never slept.
+       His mouth he always open kept
+          Licking his bitter wound,
+             The hound,
+(All.)       U-lu-lo, HOWLED THE HOUND.
+
+       A star upon his kennel shone
+       That showed the hound a meat-bare bone.
+(All.)    O hungry was the hound!
+       The hound had but a churlish wit.
+       He seized the bone, he crunched, he bit.
+       "An thou wert Master, I had slit
+          Thy throat with a huge wound,"
+             Quo' hound.
+(All.)       O, angry was the hound.
+
+       The star in castle-window shone,
+       The Master lay abed, alone.
+(All.)    Oh ho, why not? quo' hound.
+       He leapt, he seized the throat, he tore
+       The Master, head from neck, to floor,
+       And rolled the head i' the kennel door,
+          And fled and salved his wound,
+             Good hound!
+(All.)       U-lu-lo, HOWLED THE HOUND.
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1868.
+
+
+
+
+The Golden Wedding of Sterling and Sarah Lanier, September 27, 1868.
+
+By the Eldest Grandson.
+
+
+
+A rainbow span of fifty years,
+Painted upon a cloud of tears,
+In blue for hopes and red for fears,
+   Finds end in a golden hour to-day.
+Ah, YOU to our childhood the legend told,
+"At the end of the rainbow lies the gold,"
+And now in our thrilling hearts we hold
+   The gold that never will pass away.
+
+Gold crushed from the quartz of a crystal life,
+Gold hammered with blows of human strife,
+Gold burnt in the love of man and wife,
+   Till it is pure as the very flame:
+Gold that the miser will not have,
+Gold that is good beyond the grave,
+Gold that the patient and the brave
+   Amass, neglecting praise and blame.
+
+O golden hour that caps the time
+Since, heart to heart like rhyme to rhyme,
+You stood and listened to the chime
+   Of inner bells by spirits rung,
+That tinkled many a secret sweet
+Concerning how two souls should meet,
+And whispered of Time's flying feet
+   With a most piquant silver tongue.
+
+O golden day, -- a golden crown
+For the kingly heads that bowed not down
+To win a smile or 'scape a frown,
+   Except the smile and frown of Heaven!
+Dear heads, still dark with raven hair;
+Dear hearts, still white in spite of care;
+Dear eyes, still black and bright and fair
+   As any eyes to mortals given!
+
+Old parents of a restless race,
+You miss full many a bonny face
+That would have smiled a filial grace
+   Around your Golden Wedding wine.
+But God is good and God is great.
+His will be done, if soon or late.
+Your dead stand happy in yon Gate
+   And call you blessed while they shine.
+
+So, drop the tear and dry the eyes.
+Your rainbow glitters in the skies.
+Here's golden wine:  young, old, arise:
+   With cups as full as our souls, we say:
+"Two Hearts, that wrought with smiles through tears
+This rainbow span of fifty years,
+Behold how true, true love appears
+   True gold for your Golden Wedding day!"
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, September, 1868.
+
+
+
+
+Strange Jokes.
+
+
+
+Well:  Death is a huge omnivorous Toad
+Grim squatting on a twilight road.
+He catcheth all that Circumstance
+   Hath tossed to him.
+He curseth all who upward glance
+   As lost to him.
+
+Once in a whimsey mood he sat
+And talked of life, in proverbs pat,
+To Eve in Eden, -- "Death, on Life" --
+   As if he knew!
+And so he toadied Adam's wife
+   There, in the dew.
+
+O dainty dew, O morning dew
+That gleamed in the world's first dawn, did you
+And the sweet grass and manful oaks
+   Give lair and rest
+To him who toadwise sits and croaks
+   His death-behest?
+
+Who fears the hungry Toad?  Not I!
+He but unfetters me to fly.
+The German still, when one is dead,
+   Cries out "Der Tod!"
+But, pilgrims, Christ will walk ahead
+   And clear the road.
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, July, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+Nirvana.
+
+
+
+Through seas of dreams and seas of phantasies,
+Through seas of solitudes and vacancies,
+And through my Self, the deepest of the seas,
+    I strive to thee, Nirvana.
+
+Oh long ago the billow-flow of sense,
+Aroused by passion's windy vehemence,
+Upbore me out of depths to heights intense,
+    But not to thee, Nirvana.
+
+By waves swept on, I learned to ride the waves.
+I served my masters till I made them slaves.
+I baffled Death by hiding in his graves,
+    His watery graves, Nirvana.
+
+And once I clomb a mountain's stony crown
+And stood, and smiled no smile and frowned no frown,
+Nor ate, nor drank, nor slept, nor faltered down,
+    Five days and nights, Nirvana.
+
+Sunrise and noon and sunset and strange night
+And shadow of large clouds and faint starlight
+And lonesome Terror stalking round the height,
+    I minded not, Nirvana.
+
+The silence ground my soul keen like a spear.
+My bare thought, whetted as a sword, cut sheer
+Through time and life and flesh and death, to clear
+    My way unto Nirvana.
+
+I slew gross bodies of old ethnic hates
+That stirred long race-wars betwixt States and States.
+I stood and scorned these foolish dead debates,
+    Calmly, calmly, Nirvana.
+
+I smote away the filmy base of Caste.
+I thrust through antique blood and riches vast,
+And all big claims of the pretentious Past
+    That hindered my Nirvana.
+
+Then all fair types, of form and sound and hue,
+Up-floated round my sense and charmed anew.
+-- I waved them back into the void blue:
+    I love them not, Nirvana.
+
+And all outrageous ugliness of time,
+Excess and Blasphemy and squinting Crime
+Beset me, but I kept my calm sublime:
+    I hate them not, Nirvana.
+
+High on the topmost thrilling of the surge
+I saw, afar, two hosts to battle urge.
+The widows of the victors sang a dirge,
+    But I wept not, Nirvana.
+
+I saw two lovers sitting on a star.
+He kissed her lip, she kissed his battle-scar.
+They quarrelled soon, and went two ways, afar.
+    O Life!  I laughed, Nirvana.
+
+And never a king but had some king above,
+And never a law to right the wrongs of Love,
+And ever a fanged snake beneath a dove,
+    Saw I on earth, Nirvana.
+
+But I, with kingship over kings, am free.
+I love not, hate not:  right and wrong agree:
+And fangs of snakes and lures of doves to me
+    Are vain, are vain, Nirvana.
+
+So by mine inner contemplation long,
+By thoughts that need no speech nor oath nor song,
+My spirit soars above the motley throng
+    Of days and nights, Nirvana.
+
+O Suns, O Rains, O Day and Night, O Chance,
+O Time besprent with seven-hued circumstance,
+I float above ye all into the trance
+    That draws me nigh Nirvana.
+
+Gods of small worlds, ye little Deities
+Of humble Heavens under my large skies,
+And Governor-Spirits, all, I rise, I rise,
+    I rise into Nirvana.
+
+The storms of Self below me rage and die.
+On the still bosom of mine ecstasy,
+A lotus on a lake of balm, I lie
+    Forever in Nirvana.
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1869.
+
+
+
+
+  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
+  | The two poems which follow "The Raven Days" have not               |
+  | been included in earlier editions.  All three are calls            |
+  | from those desperate years for the South just after the Civil War. |
+  | The reader of to-day, seeing that forlorn period                   |
+  | in the just perspective of half a century, will not wonder         |
+  | at the tone of anguished remonstrance; but, rather,                |
+  | that so few notes of mourning have come from a poet                |
+  | who missed nothing of what the days of Reconstruction              |
+  | brought to his people.                                             |
+  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+The Raven Days.
+
+
+
+Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken,
+ And but the ghosts of homes to us remain,
+And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token
+ From friend to friend of an unspoken pain.
+
+O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
+ Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks
+Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow,
+ Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks.
+
+Ye float in dusky files, forever croaking.
+ Ye chill our manhood with your dreary shade.
+Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,
+ We lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.
+
+O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
+ Will ever any warm light come again?
+Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow
+ Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?
+
+____
+Prattville, Alabama, February, 1868.
+
+
+
+
+Our Hills.
+
+
+
+    Dear Mother-Earth
+    Of Titan birth,
+Yon hills are your large breasts, and often I
+Have climbed to their top-nipples, fain and dry
+To drink my mother's-milk so near the sky.
+
+    O ye hill-stains,
+    Red, for all rains!
+The blood that made you has all bled for us,
+The hearts that paid you are all dead for us,
+The trees that shade you groan with lead, for us!
+
+    And O, hill-sides,
+    Like giants' brides
+Ye sleep in ravine-rumpled draperies,
+And weep your springs in tearful memories
+Of days that stained your robes with stains like these!
+
+    Sleep on, ye hills!
+    Weep on, ye rills!
+The stainers have decreed the stains shall stay.
+They chain the hands might wash the stains away.
+They wait with cold hearts till we "rue the day".
+
+    O Mother-Earth
+    Of Titan birth,
+Thy mother's-milk is curdled with aloe.
+-- Like hills, Men, lift calm heads through any woe,
+And weep, but bow not an inch, for any foe!
+
+    Thou Sorrow-height
+    We climb by night,
+Thou hast no hell-deep chasm save Disgrace.
+To stoop, will fling us down its fouled space:
+Stand proud!  The Dawn will meet us, face to face,
+For down steep hills the Dawn loves best to race!
+
+
+
+
+Laughter in the Senate.
+
+
+
+In the South lies a lonesome, hungry Land;
+He huddles his rags with a cripple's hand;
+He mutters, prone on the barren sand,
+    What time his heart is breaking.
+
+He lifts his bare head from the ground;
+He listens through the gloom around:
+The winds have brought him a strange sound
+    Of distant merrymaking.
+
+Comes now the Peace so long delayed?
+Is it the cheerful voice of Aid?
+Begins the time his heart has prayed,
+    When men may reap and sow?
+
+Ah, God!  Back to the cold earth's breast!
+The sages chuckle o'er their jest;
+Must they, to give a people rest,
+    Their dainty wit forego?
+
+The tyrants sit in a stately hall;
+They jibe at a wretched people's fall;
+The tyrants forget how fresh is the pall
+    Over their dead and ours.
+
+Look how the senators ape the clown,
+And don the motley and hide the gown,
+But yonder a fast-rising frown
+    On the people's forehead lowers.
+
+____
+1868.
+
+
+
+
+Baby Charley.
+
+
+
+He's fast asleep.  See how, O Wife,
+Night's finger on the lip of life
+Bids whist the tongue, so prattle-rife,
+   Of busy Baby Charley.
+
+One arm stretched backward round his head,
+Five little toes from out the bed
+Just showing, like five rosebuds red,
+   -- So slumbers Baby Charley.
+
+Heaven-lights, I know, are beaming through
+Those lucent eyelids, veined with blue,
+That shut away from mortal view
+   Large eyes of Baby Charley.
+
+O sweet Sleep-Angel, throned now
+On the round glory of his brow,
+Wave thy wing and waft my vow
+   Breathed over Baby Charley.
+
+I vow that my heart, when death is nigh,
+Shall never shiver with a sigh
+For act of hand or tongue or eye
+   That wronged my Baby Charley!
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, December, 1869.
+
+
+
+
+A Sea-Shore Grave.  To M. J. L.
+
+By Sidney and Clifford Lanier.
+
+
+
+O wish that's vainer than the plash
+ Of these wave-whimsies on the shore:
+"Give us a pearl to fill the gash --
+ God, let our dead friend live once more!"
+
+O wish that's stronger than the stroke
+ Of yelling wave and snapping levin;
+"God, lift us o'er the Last Day's smoke,
+ All white, to Thee and her in Heaven!"
+
+O wish that's swifter than the race
+ Of wave and wind in sea and sky;
+Let's take the grave-cloth from her face
+ And fall in the grave, and kiss, and die!
+
+Look!  High above a glittering calm
+ Of sea and sky and kingly sun,
+She shines and smiles, and waves a palm --
+ And now we wish -- Thy will be done!
+
+____
+Montgomery, Alabama, 1866.
+
+
+
+
+Souls and Rain-Drops.
+
+
+
+Light rain-drops fall and wrinkle the sea,
+Then vanish, and die utterly.
+One would not know that rain-drops fell
+If the round sea-wrinkles did not tell.
+
+So souls come down and wrinkle life
+And vanish in the flesh-sea strife.
+One might not know that souls had place
+Were't not for the wrinkles in life's face.
+
+
+
+
+Nilsson.
+
+
+
+A rose of perfect red, embossed
+With silver sheens of crystal frost,
+Yet warm, nor life nor fragrance lost.
+
+High passion throbbing in a sphere
+That Art hath wrought of diamond clear,
+-- A great heart beating in a tear.
+
+The listening soul is full of dreams
+That shape the wondrous-varying themes
+As cries of men or plash of streams.
+
+Or noise of summer rain-drops round
+That patter daintily a-ground
+With hints of heaven in the sound.
+
+Or noble wind-tones chanting free
+Through morning-skies across the sea
+Wild hymns to some strange majesty.
+
+O, if one trope, clear-cut and keen,
+May type the art of Song's best queen,
+White-hot of soul, white-chaste of mien,
+
+On Music's heart doth Nilsson dwell
+As if a Swedish snow-flake fell
+Into a glowing flower-bell.
+
+____
+New York, 1871.
+
+
+
+
+Night and Day.
+
+
+
+The innocent, sweet Day is dead.
+Dark Night hath slain her in her bed.
+O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed!
+ -- Put out the light, said he.
+
+A sweeter light than ever rayed
+From star of heaven or eye of maid
+Has vanished in the unknown Shade.
+ -- She's dead, she's dead, said he.
+
+Now, in a wild, sad after-mood
+The tawny Night sits still to brood
+Upon the dawn-time when he wooed.
+ -- I would she lived, said he.
+
+Star-memories of happier times,
+Of loving deeds and lovers' rhymes,
+Throng forth in silvery pantomimes.
+ -- Come back, O Day! said he.
+
+____
+Montgomery, Alabama, 1866.
+
+
+
+
+A Birthday Song.  To S. G.
+
+
+
+For ever wave, for ever float and shine
+Before my yearning eyes, oh! dream of mine
+Wherein I dreamed that time was like a vine,
+
+A creeping rose, that clomb a height of dread
+Out of the sea of Birth, all filled with dead,
+Up to the brilliant cloud of Death o'erhead.
+
+This vine bore many blossoms, which were years.
+Their petals, red with joy, or bleached by tears,
+Waved to and fro i' the winds of hopes and fears.
+
+Here all men clung, each hanging by his spray.
+Anon, one dropped; his neighbor 'gan to pray;
+And so they clung and dropped and prayed, alway.
+
+But I did mark one lately-opened bloom,
+Wherefrom arose a visible perfume
+That wrapped me in a cloud of dainty gloom.
+
+And rose -- an odor by a spirit haunted --
+And drew me upward with a speed enchanted,
+Swift floating, by wild sea or sky undaunted,
+
+Straight through the cloud of death, where men are free.
+I gained a height, and stayed and bent my knee.
+Then glowed my cloud, and broke and unveiled thee.
+
+"O flower-born and flower-souled!" I said,
+"Be the year-bloom that breathed thee ever red,
+Nor wither, yellow, down among the dead.
+
+"May all that cling to sprays of time, like me,
+Be sweetly wafted over sky and sea
+By rose-breaths shrining maidens like to thee!"
+
+Then while we sat upon the height afar
+Came twilight, like a lover late from war,
+With soft winds fluting to his evening star.
+
+And the shy stars grew bold and scattered gold,
+And chanting voices ancient secrets told,
+And an acclaim of angels earthward rolled.
+
+____
+Montgomery, Alabama, October, 1866.
+
+
+
+
+Resurrection.
+
+
+
+Sometimes in morning sunlights by the river
+ Where in the early fall long grasses wave,
+Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver
+ And sigh as if just blown across a grave.
+
+And then I pause and listen to this sighing.
+ I look with strange eyes on the well-known stream.
+I hear wild birth-cries uttered by the dying.
+ I know men waking who appear to dream.
+
+Then from the water-lilies slow uprises
+ The still vast face of all the life I know,
+Changed now, and full of wonders and surprises,
+ With fire in eyes that once were glazed with snow.
+
+Fair now the brows old Pain had erewhile wrinkled,
+ And peace and strength about the calm mouth dwell.
+Clean of the ashes that Repentance sprinkled,
+ The meek head poises like a flower-bell.
+
+All the old scars of wanton wars are vanished;
+ And what blue bruises grappling Sense had left
+And sad remains of redder stains are banished,
+ And the dim blotch of heart-committed theft.
+
+O still vast vision of transfigured features
+ Unvisited by secret crimes or dooms,
+Remain, remain amid these water-creatures,
+ Stand, shine among yon water-lily blooms.
+
+For eighteen centuries ripple down the river,
+ And windy times the stalks of empires wave,
+-- Let the winds come from the moor and sigh and shiver,
+ Fain, fain am I, O Christ, to pass the grave.
+
+
+
+
+To ----.
+
+
+
+ The Day was dying; his breath
+Wavered away in a hectic gleam;
+And I said, if Life's a dream, and Death
+And Love and all are dreams -- I'll dream.
+
+ A mist came over the bay
+Like as a dream would over an eye.
+The mist was white and the dream was grey
+And both contained a human cry,
+
+ The burthen whereof was "Love",
+And it filled both mist and dream with pain,
+And the hills below and the skies above
+Were touched and uttered it back again.
+
+ The mist broke:  down the rift
+A kind ray shot from a holy star.
+Then my dream did waver and break and lift --
+Through it, O Love, shone thy face, afar.
+
+ So Boyhood sets:  comes Youth,
+A painful night of mists and dreams;
+That broods till Love's exquisite truth,
+The star of a morn-clear manhood, beams.
+
+____
+Boykin's Bluff, Virginia, 1863.
+
+
+
+
+The Wedding.
+
+
+
+O marriage-bells, your clamor tells
+ Two weddings in one breath.
+SHE marries whom her love compels:
+ -- And I wed Goodman Death!
+My brain is blank, my tears are red;
+Listen, O God: --  "I will," he said: --
+And I would that I were dead.
+Come groomsman Grief and bridesmaid Pain
+Come and stand with a ghastly twain.
+My Bridegroom Death is come o'er the meres
+To wed a bride with bloody tears.
+Ring, ring, O bells, full merrily:
+Life-bells to her, death-bells to me:
+O Death, I am true wife to thee!
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+The Palm and the Pine.
+
+From the German of Heine.
+
+
+
+In the far North stands a Pine-tree, lone,
+ Upon a wintry height;
+It sleeps:  around it snows have thrown
+ A covering of white.
+
+It dreams forever of a Palm
+ That, far i' the Morning-land,
+Stands silent in a most sad calm
+ Midst of the burning sand.
+
+____
+Point Lookout Prison, 1864.
+
+
+
+
+Spring Greeting.
+
+From the German of Herder.
+
+
+
+All faintly through my soul to-day,
+As from a bell that far away
+Is tinkled by some frolic fay,
+   Floateth a lovely chiming.
+Thou magic bell, to many a fell
+And many a winter-saddened dell
+Thy tongue a tale of Spring doth tell,
+   Too passionate-sweet for rhyming.
+
+Chime out, thou little song of Spring,
+Float in the blue skies ravishing.
+Thy song-of-life a joy doth bring
+   That's sweet, albeit fleeting.
+Float on the Spring-winds e'en to my home:
+And when thou to a rose shalt come
+That hath begun to show her bloom,
+   Say, I send her greeting!
+
+____
+Point Lookout Prison, 1864.
+
+
+
+
+The Tournament.
+
+
+
+  Joust First.
+
+
+    I.
+
+Bright shone the lists, blue bent the skies,
+ And the knights still hurried amain
+To the tournament under the ladies' eyes,
+ Where the jousters were Heart and Brain.
+
+    II.
+
+Flourished the trumpets:  entered Heart,
+ A youth in crimson and gold.
+Flourished again:  Brain stood apart,
+ Steel-armored, dark and cold.
+
+    III.
+
+Heart's palfrey caracoled gayly round,
+ Heart tra-li-ra'd merrily;
+But Brain sat still, with never a sound,
+ So cynical-calm was he.
+
+    IV.
+
+Heart's helmet-crest bore favors three
+ From his lady's white hand caught;
+While Brain wore a plumeless casque; not he
+ Or favor gave or sought.
+
+    V.
+
+The herald blew; Heart shot a glance
+ To find his lady's eye,
+But Brain gazed straight ahead his lance
+ To aim more faithfully.
+
+    VI.
+
+They charged, they struck; both fell, both bled.
+ Brain rose again, ungloved,
+Heart, dying, smiled and faintly said,
+ "My love to my beloved!"
+
+____
+Camp French, Wilmington, N.C., May, 1862.
+
+
+
+  Joust Second.
+
+
+    I.
+
+A-many sweet eyes wept and wept,
+ A-many bosoms heaved again;
+A-many dainty dead hopes slept
+ With yonder Heart-knight prone o' the plain.
+
+    II.
+
+Yet stars will burn through any mists,
+ And the ladies' eyes, through rains of fate,
+Still beamed upon the bloody lists
+ And lit the joust of Love and Hate.
+
+    III.
+
+O strange! or ere a trumpet blew,
+ Or ere a challenge-word was given,
+A knight leapt down i' the lists; none knew
+ Whether he sprang from earth or heaven.
+
+    IV.
+
+His cheek was soft as a lily-bud,
+ His grey eyes calmed his youth's alarm;
+Nor helm nor hauberk nor even a hood
+ Had he to shield his life from harm.
+
+    V.
+
+No falchion from his baldric swung,
+ He wore a white rose in its place.
+No dagger at his girdle hung,
+ But only an olive-branch, for grace.
+
+    VI.
+
+And "Come, thou poor mistaken knight,"
+ Cried Love, unarmed, yet dauntless there,
+"Come on, God pity thee! --  I fight
+ Sans sword, sans shield; yet, Hate, beware!"
+
+    VII.
+
+Spurred furious Hate; he foamed at mouth,
+ His breath was hot upon the air,
+His breath scorched souls, as a dry drought
+ Withers green trees and burns them bare.
+
+    VIII.
+
+Straight drives he at his enemy,
+ His hairy hands grip lance in rest,
+His lance it gleams full bitterly,
+ God! -- gleams, true-point, on Love's bare breast!
+
+    IX.
+
+Love's grey eyes glow with a heaven-heat,
+ Love lifts his hand in a saintly prayer;
+Look!  Hate hath fallen at his feet!
+ Look!  Hate hath vanished in the air!
+
+    X.
+
+Then all the throng looked kind on all;
+ Eyes yearned, lips kissed, dumb souls were freed;
+Two magic maids' hands lifted a pall
+ And the dead knight, Heart, sprang on his steed.
+
+    XI.
+
+Then Love cried, "Break me his lance, each knight!
+ Ye shall fight for blood-athirst Fame no more!"
+And the knights all doffed their mailed might
+ And dealt out dole on dole to the poor.
+
+    XII.
+
+Then dove-flights sanctified the plain,
+ And hawk and sparrow shared a nest.
+And the great sea opened and swallowed Pain,
+ And out of this water-grave floated Rest!
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson.
+
+    "Order A. P. Hill to prepare for battle."
+    "Tell Major Hawks to advance the Commissary train."
+    "Let us cross the river and rest in the shade."
+
+
+
+The stars of Night contain the glittering Day
+And rain his glory down with sweeter grace
+Upon the dark World's grand, enchanted face --
+    All loth to turn away.
+
+And so the Day, about to yield his breath,
+Utters the stars unto the listening Night,
+To stand for burning fare-thee-wells of light
+    Said on the verge of death.
+
+O hero-life that lit us like the sun!
+O hero-words that glittered like the stars
+And stood and shone above the gloomy wars
+    When the hero-life was done!
+
+The phantoms of a battle came to dwell
+I' the fitful vision of his dying eyes --
+Yet even in battle-dreams, he sends supplies
+    To those he loved so well.
+
+His army stands in battle-line arrayed:
+His couriers fly:  all's done:  now God decide!
+-- And not till then saw he the Other Side
+    Or would accept the shade.
+
+Thou Land whose sun is gone, thy stars remain!
+Still shine the words that miniature his deeds.
+O thrice-beloved, where'er thy great heart bleeds,
+    Solace hast thou for pain!
+
+____
+Georgia, September, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+To Wilhelmina.
+
+
+
+A white face, drooping, on a bending neck:
+ A tube-rose that with heavy petal curves
+ Her stem:  a foam-bell on a wave that swerves
+Back from the undulating vessel's deck.
+
+From out the whitest cloud of summer steals
+ The wildest lightning:  from this face of thine
+ Thy soul, a fire-of-heaven, warm and fine,
+In marvellous flashes its fair self reveals.
+
+As when one gazes from the summer sea
+ On some far gossamer cloud, with straining eye,
+ Fearing to see it vanish in the sky,
+So, floating, wandering Cloud-Soul, I watch thee.
+
+____
+Montgomery, Alabama, 1866.
+
+
+
+
+Wedding-Hymn.
+
+
+
+Thou God, whose high, eternal Love
+ Is the only blue sky of our life,
+Clear all the Heaven that bends above
+ The life-road of this man and wife.
+
+May these two lives be but one note
+ In the world's strange-sounding harmony,
+Whose sacred music e'er shall float
+ Through every discord up to Thee.
+
+As when from separate stars two beams
+ Unite to form one tender ray:
+As when two sweet but shadowy dreams
+ Explain each other in the day:
+
+So may these two dear hearts one light
+ Emit, and each interpret each.
+Let an angel come and dwell to-night
+ In this dear double-heart, and teach!
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, September, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+In the Foam.
+
+
+
+Life swelleth in a whitening wave,
+And dasheth thee and me apart.
+I sweep out seaward: --  be thou brave.
+    And reach the shore, Sweetheart.
+
+Beat back the backward-thrusting sea.
+Thy weak white arm his blows may thwart,
+Christ buffet the wild surge for thee
+    Till thou'rt ashore, Sweetheart.
+
+Ah, now thy face grows dim apace,
+And seems of yon white foam a part.
+Canst hear me through the water-bass,
+    Cry:  "To the Shore, Sweetheart?"
+
+Now Christ thee soothe upon the Shore,
+My lissome-armed sea-Britomart.
+I sweep out seaward, never more
+    To find the Shore, Sweetheart.
+
+____
+Prattville, Alabama, December, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+Barnacles.
+
+
+
+My soul is sailing through the sea,
+But the Past is heavy and hindereth me.
+The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells
+That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells
+   About my soul.
+The huge waves wash, the high waves roll,
+Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole
+   And hindereth me from sailing!
+
+Old Past let go, and drop i' the sea
+Till fathomless waters cover thee!
+For I am living but thou art dead;
+Thou drawest back, I strive ahead
+   The Day to find.
+Thy shells unbind!  Night comes behind,
+I needs must hurry with the wind
+   And trim me best for sailing.
+
+____
+Macon, Georgia, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+Night.
+
+
+
+Fair is the wedded reign of Night and Day.
+Each rules a half of earth with different sway,
+Exchanging kingdoms, East and West, alway.
+
+Like the round pearl that Egypt drunk in wine,
+The sun half sinks i' the brimming, rosy brine:
+The wild Night drinks all up:  how her eyes shine!
+
+Now the swift sail of straining life is furled,
+And through the stillness of my soul is whirled
+The throbbing of the hearts of half the world.
+
+I hear the cries that follow Birth and Death.
+I hear huge Pestilence draw his vaporous breath:
+"Beware, prepare, or else ye die," he saith.
+
+I hear a haggard student turn and sigh:
+I hear men begging Heaven to let them die:
+And, drowning all, a wild-eyed woman's cry.
+
+So Night takes toll of Wisdom as of Sin.
+The student's and the drunkard's cheek is thin:
+But flesh is not the prize we strive to win.
+
+Now airy swarms of fluttering dreams descend
+On souls, like birds on trees, and have no end.
+O God, from vulture-dreams my soul defend!
+
+Let fall on Her a rose-leaf rain of dreams,
+All passionate-sweet, as are the loving beams
+Of starlight on the glimmering woods and streams.
+
+____
+Montgomery, Alabama, April, 1866.
+
+
+
+
+June Dreams, in January.
+
+
+
+"So pulse, and pulse, thou rhythmic-hearted Noon
+ That liest, large-limbed, curved along the hills,
+In languid palpitation, half a-swoon
+ With ardors and sun-loves and subtle thrills;
+
+"Throb, Beautiful! while the fervent hours exhale
+ As kisses faint-blown from thy finger-tips
+Up to the sun, that turn him passion-pale
+ And then as red as any virgin's lips.
+
+"O tender Darkness, when June-day hath ceased,
+ -- Faint Odor from the day-flower's crushing born,
+-- Dim, visible Sigh out of the mournful East
+ That cannot see her lord again till morn:
+
+"And many leaves, broad-palmed towards the sky
+ To catch the sacred raining of star-light:
+And pallid petals, fain, all fain to die,
+ Soul-stung by too keen passion of the night:
+
+"And short-breath'd winds, under yon gracious moon
+ Doing mild errands for mild violets,
+Or carrying sighs from the red lips of June
+ What aimless way the odor-current sets:
+
+"And stars, ringed glittering in whorls and bells,
+ Or bent along the sky in looped star-sprays,
+Or vine-wound, with bright grapes in panicles,
+ Or bramble-tangled in a sweetest maze,
+
+"Or lying like young lilies in a lake
+ About the great white Lotus of the moon,
+Or blown and drifted, as if winds should shake
+ Star blossoms down from silver stems too soon,
+
+"Or budding thick about full open stars,
+ Or clambering shyly up cloud-lattices,
+Or trampled pale in the red path of Mars,
+ Or trim-set in quaint gardener's fantasies:
+
+"And long June night-sounds crooned among the leaves,
+ And whispered confidence of dark and green,
+And murmurs in old moss about old eaves,
+ And tinklings floating over water-sheen!"
+
+Then he that wrote laid down his pen and sighed;
+And straightway came old Scorn and Bitterness,
+Like Hunnish kings out of the barbarous land,
+And camped upon the transient Italy
+That he had dreamed to blossom in his soul.
+"I'll date this dream," he said; "so:  `Given, these,
+On this, the coldest night in all the year,
+From this, the meanest garret in the world,
+In this, the greatest city in the land,
+To you, the richest folk this side of death,
+By one, the hungriest poet under heaven,
+-- Writ while his candle sputtered in the gust,
+And while his last, last ember died of cold,
+And while the mortal ice i' the air made free
+Of all his bones and bit and shrunk his heart,
+And while soft Luxury made show to strike
+Her gloved hands together and to smile
+What time her weary feet unconsciously
+Trode wheels that lifted Avarice to power,
+-- And while, moreover, -- O thou God, thou God --
+His worshipful sweet wife sat still, afar,
+Within the village whence she sent him forth
+Into the town to make his name and fame,
+Waiting, all confident and proud and calm,
+Till he should make for her his name and fame,
+Waiting -- O Christ, how keen this cuts! -- large-eyed,
+With Baby Charley till her husband make
+For her and him a poet's name and fame.'
+-- Read me," he cried, and rose, and stamped his foot
+Impatiently at Heaven, "read me this,"
+(Putting th' inquiry full in the face of God)
+"Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,
+But cannot dream us bread?  Why, now, can I
+Make, aye, create this fervid throbbing June
+Out of the chill, chill matter of my soul,
+Yet cannot make a poorest penny-loaf
+Out of this same chill matter, no, not one
+For Mary though she starved upon my breast?"
+ And then he fell upon his couch, and sobbed,
+And, late, just when his heart leaned o'er
+The very edge of breaking, fain to fall,
+God sent him sleep.
+                     There came his room-fellow,
+Stout Dick, the painter, saw the written dream,
+Read, scratched his curly pate, smiled, winked, fell on
+The poem in big-hearted comic rage,
+Quick folded, thrust in envelope, addressed
+To him, the critic-god, that sitteth grim
+And giant-grisly on the stone causeway
+That leadeth to his magazine and fame.
+ Him, by due mail, the little Dream of June
+Encountered growling, and at unawares
+Stole in upon his poem-battered soul
+So that he smiled, -- then shook his head upon 't
+-- Then growled, then smiled again, till at the last,
+As one that deadly sinned against his will,
+He writ upon the margin of the Dream
+A wondrous, wondrous word that in a day
+Did turn the fleeting song to very bread,
+-- Whereat Dick Painter leapt, the poet wept,
+And Mary slept with happy drops a-gleam
+Upon long lashes of her serene eyes
+From twentieth reading of her poet's news
+Quick-sent, "O sweet my Sweet, to dream is power,
+And I can dream thee bread and dream thee wine,
+And I will dream thee robes and gems, dear Love,
+To clothe thy holy loveliness withal,
+And I will dream thee here to live by me,
+Thee and my little man thou hold'st at breast,
+-- Come, Name, come, Fame, and kiss my Sweetheart's feet!"
+
+____
+Georgia, 1869.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Notes to Poems.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    I.  Sunrise.
+
+`Sunrise', Mr. Lanier's latest completed poem, was written
+while his sun of life seemed fairly at the setting,
+and the hand which first pencilled its lines had not strength
+to carry nourishment to the lips.
+
+The three `Hymns of the Marshes' which open this collection
+are the only written portions of a series of six `Marsh Hymns'
+that were designed by the author to form a separate volume.
+
+The `Song' of the Marshes, `At Sunset', does not belong to this group,
+but is inserted among the `Hymns' as forming a true accord with them.
+
+
+   IV.  The Marshes of Glynn.
+
+The salt marshes of Glynn County, Georgia, immediately around
+the sea-coast city of Brunswick.
+
+
+Clover.
+
+`Clover' is placed as the initial poem of a volume which was left
+in orderly arrangement among the author's papers.  His own grouping
+in that volume has been followed as far as possible in this fuller collection.
+
+
+The Mocking-Bird.
+
+    " . . . yon trim Shakespeare on the tree"
+
+leads back, almost twenty years from its writing,
+to the poet's college note-book where we find the boy reflecting:
+"A poet is the mocking-bird of the spiritual universe.
+In him are collected all the individual songs of all individual natures."
+
+
+Corn.
+
+`Corn' will hold a distinct interest for those who study
+the gathering forces in the author's growth:  for it was the first outcome
+of his consciously-developing art-life.  This life, the musician's and poet's,
+he entered upon -- after years of patient denial and suppression --
+in September, 1873, uncertain of his powers but determined to give them wing.
+
+His "fieldward-faring eyes took harvest" "among the stately corn-ranks",
+in a portion of middle Georgia sixty miles to the north of Macon.
+It is a high tract of country from which one looks across the lower reaches
+to the distant Blue Ridge mountains, whose wholesome breath, all unobstructed,
+here blends with the woods-odors of the beech, the hickory and the muscadine:
+a part of a range recalled elsewhere by Mr. Lanier, as "that ample stretch
+of generous soil, where the Appalachian ruggednesses calm themselves
+into pleasant hills before dying quite away into the sea-board levels" --
+where "a man can find such temperances of heaven and earth --
+enough of struggle with nature to draw out manhood, with enough of bounty
+to sanction the struggle -- that a more exquisite co-adaptation
+of all blessed circumstances for man's life need not be sought."
+
+
+My Springs.
+
+Of this newly-written poem Mr. Lanier says in a letter of March, 1874:
+"Of course, since I have written it to print I cannot make it such
+as *I* desire in artistic design:  for the forms of to-day
+require a certain trim smugness and clean-shaven propriety
+in the face and dress of a poem, and I must win a hearing
+by conforming in some degree to these tyrannies, with a view
+to overturning them in the future.  Written so, it is not nearly so beautiful
+as I would have it; and I therefore have another still in my heart,
+which I will some day write for myself."
+
+
+  VII.  A Song of Love.
+
+`A Song of Love', like `Betrayal', belongs to the early plan
+of `The Jacquerie'.  It was written for one of the Fool's songs and,
+after several recastings, took its present shape in 1879.
+
+
+To Nannette Falk-Auerbach.
+
+This sonnet was originally written in the German and published
+in a German daily of Baltimore, while the author's translation
+appeared at the same time in the Baltimore `Gazette'.
+
+
+To Our Mocking-Bird.
+
+The history of this bird's life is given at length under the title of "Bob",
+in `The Independent' of August 3, 1882, and will show that he deserved
+to be immortal -- as we hope he is.
+
+
+Ode to the Johns Hopkins University.
+
+    " . . . the soaring genius'd Sylvester
+    That earlier loosed the knot great Newton tied,"
+
+An algebraic theorem announced by Newton was demonstrated and extended
+by Sylvester.  -- Sidney Lanier.
+
+
+A Ballad of Trees and the Master.
+
+`A Ballad of Trees and the Master' was conceived as an interlude
+of the latest `Hymn of the Marshes', `Sunrise', although written earlier.
+In the author's first copy and first revision of that `Hymn',
+the `Ballad' was incorporated, following the invocation to the trees
+which closes with:
+
+                    "And there, oh there
+    As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
+    Pray me a myriad prayer."
+
+In Mr. Lanier's final copy the `Ballad' is omitted.
+It was one of several interludes which he at first designed,
+but, for some reason, afterwards abandoned.
+
+
+To My Class:  On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness.
+
+A class in English Literature, composed of young girls
+who had been studying with Mr. Lanier `The Knighte's Tale' of Chaucer.
+
+The sonnet `On Violet's Wafers' was addressed to a member of the same class,
+and is similarly conceived.
+
+
+Under the Cedarcroft Chestnut.
+
+"This chestnut-tree (at Cedarcroft, the estate of Mr. Bayard Taylor,
+in Pennsylvania), is estimated to be more than eight hundred years old."
+-- Sidney Lanier, 1877.
+
+Hard by stood its mate, apparently somewhat younger.
+It is related in a letter of 1882, from Mrs. Taylor, that in 1880,
+a year after Mr. Taylor's death, one of these majestic trees
+gave the first signs of decay:  while his comrade lingered two years longer --
+to follow as closely the footsteps of Mr. Lanier:  the two,
+faithful-hearted "to their master and to him who sang of them."
+
+
+A Florida Ghost.
+
+The incidents recorded of this storm are matter of history
+in and around Tampa.
+
+
+"Nine from Eight".
+
+The local expression "under the hack" is kindly explained
+by an authority in middle Georgia dialect, Richard Malcolm Johnston,
+author of `The Dukesborough Tales' and other Georgia stories.  He says:
+
+"`Under the hack' is a well-known phrase among the country-people,
+and is applied, generally in a humorous sense, to those who have been cowed
+by any accident.  A man who is overruled by his wife,
+I have often heard described as `under the hack':  `She's got him
+under the hack.'  So, when a man has lost spirit from any cause,
+he is said to be `under the hack'.  The phrase is possibly derived
+from `hackle', an instrument used in the breaking of flax."
+
+
+"Thar's more in the Man than thar is in the Land".
+
+"Jones" designates Jones County, Ga., one of the counties
+adjoining Bibb County, in which Macon is located.
+
+
+The Jacquerie.  A Fragment.
+
+Although `The Jacquerie' remained a fragment for thirteen years
+Mr. Lanier's interest in the subject never abated.  Far on in this interval
+he is found planning for leisure to work out in romance
+the story of that savage insurrection of the French peasantry,
+which the Chronicles of Froissart had impressed upon his boyish imagination.
+
+
+To ----.
+
+The era of verse-writing with Mr. Lanier reopens in this dream
+of the Virginia bay where poet's reveries and war's awakenings
+continually alternated.
+
+He presents it for a friend's criticism -- at the age of twenty-one --
+in these words:  "I send you a little poem which sang itself through me
+the other day.  'Tis the first I've written in many years."
+
+
+Night.
+
+This poem was not published by the writer and the simile of the second verse
+was appropriated to `An Evening Song'.  This partial repetition --
+like that of portions of `The Tournament' and of `A Dream of June',
+which occur in the `Psalm of the West' -- will be pardoned as affording
+a favorable opportunity to observe Mr. Lanier's growth in artistic form.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Centennial Cantata.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Centennial Meditation of Columbia.  1776-1876.  A Cantata.
+
+     <Musical Annotations, in angled brackets, precede each section.>
+
+
+
+     <Full chorus:  sober, measured and yet majestic progressions of chords.>
+
+From this hundred-terraced height,
+Sight more large with nobler light
+Ranges down yon towering years.
+Humbler smiles and lordlier tears
+ Shine and fall, shine and fall,
+While old voices rise and call
+Yonder where the to-and-fro
+Weltering of my Long-Ago
+Moves about the moveless base
+Far below my resting-place.
+
+     <Chorus:  the sea and the winds mingling their voices with human sighs.>
+
+Mayflower, Mayflower, slowly hither flying,
+Trembling westward o'er yon balking sea,
+Hearts within `Farewell dear England' sighing,
+Winds without `But dear in vain' replying,
+Gray-lipp'd waves about thee shouted, crying
+        "No!  It shall not be!"
+
+     <Quartette:  a meagre and despairing minor.>
+
+Jamestown, out of thee --
+Plymouth, thee -- thee, Albany --
+Winter cries, `Ye freeze:'  away!
+Fever cries, `Ye burn:'  away!
+Hunger cries, `Ye starve:'  away!
+Vengeance cries, `Your graves shall stay!'
+
+     <Full chorus:  return of the `motive' of the second movement,
+      but worked up with greater fury, to the climax of the shout
+      at the last line.>
+
+Then old Shapes and Masks of Things,
+Framed like Faiths or clothed like Kings
+Ghosts of Goods once fleshed and fair,
+Grown foul Bads in alien air --
+War, and his most noisy lords,
+Tongued with lithe and poisoned swords --
+Error, Terror, Rage and Crime,
+All in a windy night of time
+Cried to me from land and sea,
+        `No!  Thou shalt not be!'
+
+     <A rapid and intense whisper-chorus.>
+
+            Hark!
+Huguenots whispering `yea' in the dark,
+Puritans answering `yea' in the dark!
+`Yea' like an arrow shot true to his mark,
+Darts through the tyrannous heart of Denial.
+Patience and Labor and solemn-souled Trial,
+        Foiled, still beginning,
+        Soiled, but not sinning,
+Toil through the stertorous death of the Night,
+Toil when wild brother-wars new-dark the Light,
+Toil, and forgive, and kiss o'er, and replight.
+
+     <Chorus of jubilation, until the appeal of the last two lines
+      introduces a tone of doubt:  it then sinks to `pianissimo'.>
+
+Now Praise to God's oft-granted grace,
+Now Praise to Man's undaunted face,
+Despite the land, despite the sea,
+I was:  I am:  and I shall be --
+How long, Good Angel, O how long?
+Sing me from Heaven a man's own song!
+
+     <Basso solo:  the good Angel replies:>
+
+"Long as thine Art shall love true love,
+Long as thy Science truth shall know,
+Long as thine Eagle harms no Dove,
+Long as thy Law by law shall grow,
+Long as thy God is God above,
+Thy brother every man below,
+So long, dear Land of all my love,
+Thy name shall shine, thy fame shall glow!"
+
+     <Full chorus:  jubilation and welcome.>
+
+O Music, from this height of time my Word unfold:
+In thy large signals all men's hearts Man's heart behold:
+Mid-heaven unroll thy chords as friendly flags unfurled,
+And wave the world's best lover's welcome to the world.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Note to the Cantata.
+
+
+
+The annotated musical directions which here accompany `The Cantata',
+arranged for the composer's use, were first sent with the newly-completed text
+in a private letter to Mr. Gibson Peacock, of Philadelphia.
+
+I am enabled to give these annotations and the author's own introduction
+to his work through the kindness of Mr. Peacock:  the friend who,
+while yet an entire stranger, awakened and led the public recognition
+of Mr. Lanier's place in the world of art.                  M. D. L.
+
+
+                                        "Baltimore, January 18, 1876.
+
+" . . .  The enclosed will show you partly what I have been doing. . . .
+The Centennial Commission has invited me to write a poem
+which shall serve as the text for a Cantata (the music to be by Dudley Buck,
+of New York), to be sung at the opening of the Exhibition,
+under Thomas' direction. . . .  I've written the enclosed.
+Necessarily I had to think out the musical conceptions as well as the poem,
+and I have briefly indicated these along the margin of each movement.
+I have tried to make the whole as simple and as candid
+as a melody of Beethoven's:  at the same time expressing
+the largest ideas possible, and expressing them in such a way
+as could not be offensive to any modern soul.  I particularly hope
+you'll like the Angel's song, where I have endeavored to convey,
+in one line each, the philosophies of Art, of Science, of Power,
+of Government, of Faith, and of Social Life.  Of course I shall not expect
+that this will instantly appeal to tastes peppered and salted
+by [certain of our contemporary writers]; but one cannot forget Beethoven,
+and somehow all my inspiration came in these large and artless forms,
+in simple Saxon words, in unpretentious and purely intellectual conceptions,
+while nevertheless I felt, all through, the necessity of making
+a genuine song -- and not a rhymed set of good adages -- out of it.
+I adopted the trochees of the first movement because they COMPEL
+a measured, sober, and meditative movement of the mind;
+and because, too, they are not the genius of our language.
+When the troubles cease, and the land emerges as a distinct unity,
+then I fall into our native iambics. . . ."
+
+
+                                        "Baltimore, January 25, 1876.
+
+"My Dear Friend: --  Your praise, and your wife's, give me a world of comfort.
+I really do not believe anything was ever written under an equal number
+of limitations; and when I first came to know all the conditions of the poem
+I was for a moment inclined to think that no genuine work
+could be produced under them.
+
+"As for the friend who was the cause of the compliment, it was, directly,
+Mr. Taylor. . . .  INDIRECTLY, YOU are largely concerned in it. . . .
+I fancy [all] this must have been owing much to the reputation
+which you set a-rolling so recently. . . .
+
+"So, God bless you both.
+
+                              "Your friend,       S. L."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[End of original text.]
+
+
+
+
+Differences between the editions of 1891 & 1916 (printings of 1898 & 1918).
+
+
+
+Other than errors resulting from corruption of the plates over 20 years,
+the following differences are the only changes:
+
+
+1)  The 1898 copy was printed by Trow's Printing and Bookbinding Company,
+New York.  The 1918 copy was printed by The Scribner Press.
+
+
+2)  The dedication of the poem "Sunrise", at the beginning of this volume,
+is in the 1918 copy, but not in the 1898 copy.
+
+
+3)  In the 1898 copy, the last line of "From the Flats" is:
+
+      "`Lull' sings a little brook!"
+
+In the 1918 copy the last line has been changed to:
+
+      "Bright leaps a living brook!"
+
+
+4)  In the 1898 copy, the 5th line of "Laus Mariae" is:
+
+      "So mixt each morn and night rise salient heaps:"
+
+In the 1918 copy the 5th line has been changed to:
+
+      "So twixt each morn and night rise salient heaps:"
+
+
+5)  The footnote to "The Raven Days" (preceding it in this etext)
+is in the 1918 copy, but not in the 1898 copy.
+
+
+6)  Two poems, "Our Hills" and "Laughter in the Senate",
+are in the 1918 copy, but not in the 1898 copy.
+
+
+
+
+Other notes to the text:
+
+
+
+1)  The Charlotte Cushman referred to in several poems
+is most likely Charlotte Saunders Cushman, an American actress, 1816-76.
+
+
+2)  In "The Hard Times in Elfland", the last line of the 50th stanza
+read in the original as:
+
+    "Thus we become the sport of Fate."
+
+This has been changed to:
+
+    "Thus we became the sport of Fate."
+
+This is because, in context, the past tense seems to fit better,
+and therefore this change allows the text to flow better.
+It should not alter the content in any meaningful sense.
+
+
+3)  Several mentions are made in this text to Shakespeare.
+The variant spelling `Shakspere' was originally used in some occurrences.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Poems of Sidney Lanier.
+