fyxmll Uttiumitg pilrtJatJg 6603 PS 1919.H36P7""""'™"'' '■"'"^ .Ppems, Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tile Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022499317 POEMS BY BflEV. T. HEMPSTEAD. NEW f|OKK: PUBLISHED B^M. "W. DODD, 606 BE^DWAT. Ig5 9. EnteTed according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by T. HEMPSTEAD, In the Clerk's Office of the District Conrt of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. fU3^^ EDWARD O. JENKINS, printer & Stertotsper, No. 26 FbANKFOET STEBBIi CONTENTS. Faos ODE TO GENIUS - - - 7 GOD IN MATTER 18 THE PINE -- 21 A DAT BY THE DELAWARE 2i A SUMMER 8T0EM 26 THE MOCKING BIRD 29 HALF-'WAT ... . . 84 A GREETING 89 HEREAETEK 41 MY WIFE 47 A WINTER NIGHT - - . 61 UNNOTICED HEROSS 65 A BED EITER SCENE 68 ODE TO THE CROCODILE 81 THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN 8T THIRST NOT FOE FAME 91 EMIGRAYIT 96 OLD MAX 99 MARY DEAD ... jdg GOD IN SPRING 109 OUR LITTLE WILLIE ... ng MY EARLY FRIENDS .... 117 THE HILLS OF THE DELAWARE - ... 124 THE RATTLESNAKE . . ... 123 CONTENTS. Pass BIE JOHN FKANKLIN - 188 WHEN I AM GONE 184 THE OLD MAN'S 8T0ET - - ... 137 BEADDOCK'S FIELD - .... 143 THE COMET - ...... 155^ COAL - - - ... 168 THE OMNI30IENCE OF* GOD 178 BONNET 177 THE KINQ-BIED 178 SUNLIGHT ... 181 BANTAM LAKE - 164 MY UNKNOWN WIFE - - • ... 186 IMMOETALITY - - - 191 MY PET BQUIRKEL 197 OUE FIEST-BOEN . - - - - 202 THE VOYAGERS . - 205 EVENING ... . . 209 CHICKA-DEE.DEE 212 THE PATH ... 218 EAETH GIVES HEE BEAUTIFUL TO ME 220 STANZAS - - 228 DEATH 225 SPUING - - - - 227 SHADOWS ON THE WALL - • - - . 228 THE TKOPICS - - - 280 THE SOUTHERN MOSS -' ■ 282 THE MISSISSIPPI ... . . • . - 284 ODE TO GENIUS. IKSCEIBED TO Q. D. PBENTICE. Thb everlasting murmurs of the hills, The grand, electric monologues of mountains, And all the regal sea of sound that fills The deep old woods, the rocky dash of fountains Attend thy steps, empyreal spirit, thou. Around whose kingly brow. Shine ivy-cluster, rose and myrtle wreath. With all things of rich hue and odorous breath. God hath rained on thee Heaven's invisible rain, Baptized thee in the dew By angels kept for His elected few. And given to thee a sceptre and domain, Whose tenants are the cataracts, clouds and stars, The streams and soft-eyed companies of flowers By waysides and in dim, bird-hiding bowers— And sunset looking through her opal bars On her retreating hUls andvales. Where still the fringe of ner wide banner trails, (7) 8 ODE TO GENIUS. In purple mist and silver heraldry — These are thy ministers and bring to thee Their holocaust of strength and bloom and glory. The free or fettered rills, The brave, stark wintet hills, The crags that in the clang of storms grow hoary, Tet bow not to the scythe of Death Who smites and levels all — The crags whose jaws have seized the very breath Which ebbed and bubbled from the ghastly hps Of many a realm and splendid dynasty. Curdling it from unmorrowing echpse In granite-ribbed and adamantine wall, Bow down the reverent knee, Bright Spirit, unto thee ; The gray and everlasting rocks. And hollow caverns whose grim darkness locks The fiery secrets of the universe Come to thy call — The glorious generations Of former worlds leap from their marble graves And unto thee rehearse The mighty poem of the lost creations In God's first flint-bound volume writ ; the waves Lay bare their treasures and unseal their caves ODE TO GENIUS. ( Before thy burning eye In living, magical transparency. Like Israel's glorious leader thou dost stretch Thy wand across the rushing tide of years And roll it back, and from its chambers fetch To life its lovely wrecks and smiles and tears ; The sweeping tide of things Speeds onward with a vast, usurping coll Unto some distant, stO receding. goal — We hear the dismal clash of wings, (Dark Libitina's, Queen of Funerals,) The cries, the laughter, shrieks and thundering falls Of self-stabbed kingdoms and blood-turreted walls — The brown-cheeked Autumns and the violet Springs, Aspects and customs, cities, names, opinions. States and dominions. Religions, churches, creeds. Dreams, arts and victories, like dull rotting weeds. Roll on with mournful, unrelenting sweep. Across the dim tremeable Deep — Like cloud pursuing cloud, and shadow, shade. They disappear, and like a leaf all fade ; Thou tremblest not, but standest o'er their grave, Smiling at death's all-sapping wave. 1* 10 ODE TO GENIUS. Great Ocean roars And all Ms foam-helmed ranks and black battalions pours, Which heat and beat and beat Against the mountain's adamantine seat, Whose sun-bright forehead from its bleak repose, Smiles o'er a world of undissolving snows Upon the stream of wrecks that welters by ; So thou unmoved dost gaze On earth's death-haunted nights and wreckful days, For thou dost never die. The lyre, the lyre, Its hoarded thunders and its rushing fire, That fi-om theii- slumbers shake the dreaming nations With fiery gleams and long reverberations, The lyre, the lyre is thine. And thine to sweep its mystic strings, Till from its dim Eolian chambers springs A world of glorious beauty, symmetries, Rainbows, calms and sanctities. Spring Edens, Summer royalties. Fairer sunsets, heavenly dreams, Richer crreen and brio-hter streams. ODE TO GENIUS. 11 All things tremble, all tMngs bow Before thy awfuUy majestic brow Save Goodness ; Cowardice and gloomy Fear Shrink backward, cowering from thy look severe, One burning glance. One levelled lance From that sunbeamy eye. And Bribery and Avarice, Grim Tyranny and Prejudice, And Wrong and Folly fly ; And Pride and dull Pretension melt away Like night before the golden wheels of day. Great dread and anguish seize the shivering nations As frost, the rivers ; hope and faith are flown ; No voice to lull the heart's vast trepidations. And hui'iicanes seem drinking up the sun ! N"o hand to curb the all-engulphing sea Which huge misrule and fire-brand anarchy Across the smileless, childless hearthstones pour In rage, crushed rights, drawn swords and smoking gore. Volcanic scars and leafless desolations — Thou risest, and thy strong, world-thrilling word O'er the wild shriek of elements is heard. And all the surging peoples flow to thee As rivers to the sea ! 12- ODE TO GENIUS. And when Time's fierce annihilating plough Has drained the world of thrones And crumbled down its monumental stones, Still thou shalt stand as now, The lightning in thy hand, the rainbow round thy brow. GOD IN MATTER. O'be the green world's roar aad silence, thundering ■waves and creeping rills, Rumbling marts and manless deserts. Tropic isles and Arctic hUls, O'er the graveyard's quiet keeping and its tvtIIow- shaded sod. Through the amethystine woodlands, roll the whispers of our God. Just behind the crystal shadow which the waves and mountains fling, Just behind the forms and splendors which the leaves and seasons bring, Changeless, passionless, eternal, smiling, our great Far ther stands, And in order and in glory evermore the work expands ; He whose breath first blew o'er chaos sees not as His creatures see, AU to Him in hght is open, all to them is mystery ; (13) 14 GOD IN MATTER. Dream not, gloomy unbeliever, tliat the little blade but, grows, And no wiser friend and sovereign than the clouds and breezes knows. Say not earth is chance-begotten, through her shining path to run Far from Him who scooped her .oceans as the centre from the sun ; Be not bold to utter maxims thou hast not the power to trace Back through Time's involving shadows unto Truth's high dweUing-place — From the hour when first o'er chaos rolled the all-creat- ing breath. And the beauteous worlds came singing from their marble sea of death, Evermore our Father worketh wondrous things in earth and sky, Step by step, from small to greatest, onward through infinity. Myriad years ere our prime Mother grasped the sad, mysterious fruit. From whose touch the sunshine darkened and the Angel harps grew mute. Did the rainbow clasp the valley, roll the bannered thunder-shower ; GOD IN MATTER. 15 Forests faded with the summer and the whii-lwind's wing had power ; Ages ere the palm-tree rustled 'gainst the shining Eden walls, Pairing birds iu groves and twilights had their nests and madrigals, Solemn flew the linked seasons, billows frothed upon the strand, And the falling robes of Autumn shadowed all the stretching land, Just as pensive dawned October, just as soft the banks of May, But the names the Angels gave them with their steps have passed away ; Back within the hoary Ages ere the great Orion^s birth. Ere the primal vapor rolling, shaped itself to star or earth. From His inmost place of splendor looked the all- creating Word, Down the waste of frozen silence by no breath of being stirred, Sudden through the hollow darkness rushed the sound, " let there be light"— And the mighty worlds rose shining from the Stygian gulph of Night. 16 GOD IN MATTER. Fiota the Night's unsounded darkness, forth on life exulting hurled, Wheels into its rushing circuit choiring globe and tidal world. Till from Nothing's blank abysses at our God's resist- less call, Leaps to form oiir beauteous planet vdth her flowers and music all ; Whilst the pall of darkness wrapped her lay she thus in death, alone — Vast confusion ; land and billow, cloud and rock and island one ; Then, as day by day in silence broods the dove upon her nest With her form upon her birdlings tenderly and warmly pressed. So the Spirit's snowy pinions trembled o'er the waste abyss, ,; Till from disharmonious being rose the seats of life and bliss. Not thus ended God's great mission in the boundless field of toil. Ceased He not to gather trophies from the land of golden spoil. GOD IN MATTER. 17 Wondrous act, to call from nothing, rushing world and tender flower, Jnst as vast the act that guards them, paints and waters for an hour ; And where'er a dew-drop glistens or a glow-worm gilds the sod, Moves the all-arranging finger, and the silence whis- pers " God ;" Dullest ears may hear the cadence where a fountain's murmurs rise. Infant sight may read the symbol on the nights of winter skies, Dullest ears may hear the pulses of the wide, effulgent plan, 'Midst the muttering snows of Hecla and the palms of Kordofan — Evermore the sound is swelling upward through abys- mal space, " Labor," sing the joyous planets wheeling through their fiery race, " Labor, labor," roars the tempest down the concave's inky wall, " Labor," shouts the cracking whirlwind to Niagara's giant call. Suns beyond the farthest azure roll and glitter and expire — 18 GOD IN MATTER. Races, realms, and domes and mountains drowned iu seas of roaring fire ! From the pulseless gulphs of embers hills of riper beau- ty rise, And a second landscape freshens in the smile of softer skies ; Through the flashing constellations, down the palpitat- ing blue. Which the veil of darkness shadows but to dazzle with the view, Through the city's surging trouble and the waves' eternal strife. Rolls the golden stream of progress, life from death and death from life ; — Nought in earth or sky is useless, naught so fragile, rude, or small But must claim its place elected in the growing tem- ple-wall, Farther back within the Ages than the Seraph's tongue may count, Farther o'er Time's snow-white ridges than the human mind can mount, Chief among the starry armies great Orion blazed and shone And the galaxy, unnoticed, decked with gems her re^al zone ; GOD IN MATTER. 19 Farther back in hoary cycles than the reach of Thought can tell, Nursed in slime and locked in darkness grew to shape the ■wrinkled shell, Ages rolled and floods descended,rivers roared through altered course, Central fires and pent volcanoes urged their subterra- nean force, Mountains rose where islands vanished and that rock- protected form Sleeps in ever-during granite high above the wasting storm ; Miles below where fighting billows foam before the whirlwind's sweep. Toil and die the nameless nations of the myriad-peo- pled deep. Taught by that mysterious instinct which to them is God and law, They are piling prouder structures than the tribes of Nilus saw — Works stupendous, magic labors, passing human skill, unseen, Yet to rise in harvest-valleys and the wealth of Sum- mer's green, Wbere the zeal of other Britons shall the tide of com- merce pour, 20 GOD IN MATTER. Other Miltons grow immortal, broader Londons throb and roar ; In the ice-cliffs of Spitzbergen birds are twittering o'er their young, And the petrel's wing across the ocean's midway surge is flung, Thistle foots descend for moisture through Sahara'^ flashing sand, Seafowl scream in feathered cities on the beach of Graham's Land, Seals along the sands of Shetland glisten in the autumn ray, Sheltered by the jagged foreland, just above the cha- fing spray ; Prom the slime of black morasses lethal vapors gush and flow, Parent of the rose and Uly, mother of the Promise- Bow — Thus along the crystal cycles like a fountain's moon- light fall. Run the signals of the Maker, forming, painting, lov- ing all ; There is utterance in the desert and a spirit in the crowd. And the thunder roars " Jehovah" and the silence whispers " God." THE PINE. Wild clarion of the bleak, fire-plundered hills ! That drownest with thy blast the shouting rills, What time the bellowiag gales around thee sweep, And dash the strong oak from his granite-steep. Hurling him down the thundrous, void abyss, To choke the clamorous cataract's greedy hiss. His bulk thrown crosswise on its frothy lips Where down the blue rock's deep-scarred brow it dips, Awftilly beautiful in thy strength art thou, Loud-harping crag-king ! Frost winds sere the brow And drift the honors of each proud compeer — Maple and larch — ^through the pale atmosphere, And down the wailful glooms that hear a tale Of murdered lilies from each rifled vale. Not so the arrowy tempest bursts on thee. Robed in thy emerald eternity ! Defiant, thou dost stretch thy sinewy arms To the fierce north, shaking a thousand swarms [21] 22 THE PINE. Of wing&d dirges from thy shivering cells, Wherein the soul of Music heaves and swells Like tides within the hollow of the sea, Or the throne-rooking shout whose trumpet tells A nation bounding from its fetters free. Great organist ! that all night long dost blow Athwart 'the inaccessible, crackling snow That robes the frozen hills, thy souled hymns And deep-tongued ps3ans, till the silence swims "With a vague, boundless chaos, bUlowing round, Of melancholy, sweet, funereal sound ; Beautiful from the Pentelicus of old, With flower and polished flute and rich vine-fold, The breathless marble leaped to life and form As if with all the soul that planned it, warm ; Beneath the sounding chisel rose and shone Amidst the splendors of the Parthenon, Meet honor to a virgin Deity — Yet what are all results of toU to thee. All Greek or Roman art, imperial tree ! For never yet hath mortal man seen rise. From the rough quarry to rejoicing skies, Column of such magnificence as thine, O memory-haunting pine. Green, ocean-throated, immemorial pine 1 Rock-nursed apocalypse of that secret Power THE PINE. 23 Which wove thy crown and the small violet-flower With the same breath, and gave them life and hue, Strength, odor, glory, sunlight, and the dew, Well did the ancient bid thy banners wave Above the jaws of the appalling grave ; Thou wast a symbol true, Thou, the dark cypress and the gloomy yew, A fitting type of man from birth to death. Of his vain eminence and quick-flown breath ; When he lies down no more he loves or knows The autumn pomp or glory of the rose ! Not as for dormant seed or withered flower, Doth May's aU-jubUant Resurrection hour Wait at man's ashy tomb With other wreaths, new beauty and new bloom, Nor yet at thine, O hollow-fluting, silver-bannered pine I And when, with panting blow. The woodman lays thee low, A glorious wreck along the roaring wild. No more thy prisoned root Shall rear the verdant shoot Or to the heavens thy lordly crown be piled, With wrenching storms to play And tear the black cloud's thunder-fringe away. A DAY BY THE DELAWARE. The wild winds of the noi-thern hills Bound by me like the mountain roe, — My bosom at their passing thrills, I bless them as they come and go ; Thrice joyous winds, ye come with psalms And odors from the woods and caves. Ye come like conquerors bearing palms For breaking hearts and sorrow's slaves. Sweet vales of green, bright summer days. Ye woods, ye open books of God 1 Writ on the boughs, the silver haze. The running brook and balmy sod ; Could ye, in hues thus glorious drest. Shine on through all the rolling year. With you my troubled heart could rest. And find its final Eden here. (24) A DAY BY THE DELAWARE. 25 Ye thralls of dusty mart and street, Te prisoners of the dull brick wall, Come where these emerald shadows meet, Stand where these babbling waters call ; Come, bathe your brows in these free airs. And gaze o'er hill and grove and plain. In these cool dews wash out your cares. And ye shall wear your strength again. Green hiUs of Delaware, ye stand Like gods to guard the noble stream. Whose waters like a battle brand Around your hoary barriers gleam ; The torrent of the sunset flows. To dash your brows in golden foam. And like an eye above them glows — The clasp of God's blue temjile dome. The mists of evening, thin and gray. Around the western peaks are curled, And one by one the steps of day Slope downward from the dreaming world ; I hear my heart's long buried peals Ring faintly up the gathering gloom. While through my lifted window steals The incense of the locust bloom. 2 A SUMMER STORM. Billow on, billow on, triumphant storm, Spread out on the hills thy awful form, With a hollow jar and a midnight frown. On the streams and the vales come rolling down. Stretch hither thy black, tremendous wing, Thou terrible, darkly glorious thing ! The fainting woods and the lifeless lea Lift up imploring eyes to thee. And the waters turn with a silent prayer To thy mustering hosts in the stifled air. With an earthquake tread and a wrathful eye The storm in his might is towering nigh : His wild forerunner, the hurrying gale. Rolls round the mountain and down the vale. And a d'lll blue mist like a sudden sea, Is boiling and warping across the hill, Where the van of the tempest in wild-eyed glee, Is bending the boughs to its rushing wiU ; (26^ A SUMMEK STORM. 27 Nearer and nearer, and still more near, Like an army with shout and brand and spear. And streaming plmnes and banners unfurled, He is rushing down on the cowering world ; And the dust is dashed and the forest reels, From the rapid rush of his clanging wheels ; By the sounds like an ocean's distant moan, By the wrestling pine-trees' deeper tone. By the ruffled silver of many leaves. From the rock-nursed oak to the vine of the eaves. By the fiery gleams and the gathering gloom. Like the hour of a nation's judgment .doom. By the trickling drop on the window pane, I know the march of the roaring rain. He is come, he is come, the tall grass kneels In the path of his royal chariot wheels ; The brooks go by with a song and shout. Like warriors to victory rushing out ; And they hedge the groves with a band of foam As they leap from the doors of their mountain home. With the war of waters, the roar and din. The cope of the heavens is miniog in ; Over the meadow and over the com. Is the dripping car of the conqueror borne. And his joy is hymned and his glory sung By the roll of the thunder's crashing tongue. 28 A SUMMER STOKM. The crooked blade of the lightning springs From its sheath of cloud, on the regal oak, Its hissing edge on the pine tree rings. And his glorious shaft streams up in smoke. He comes, he comes, the hemlocks bend To his irresistible, rocking blast. And the maples groan as his wings descend, And the hosts of the rain go roaring past. He is g'one, he is gone, with a dying roar. To break on the rocks of eternity's shore ; All living things wear a softer snule, The human bosom hath less of guile, The singing bird hath a mellower note, A richer glory is poured abroad, And holier hymns through the desert float For the love and the truth and the rain of God, THE MOCKING-BIRD. The morn comes tripping up the sky. And dancing o'er the daedal earth, Whose woods and streams, beneath his eye, Leap upward to a glorious birth — A second youth of life and song, As sweet and fair, as when along Creation's morning hiUs pealed out The rolling hymn, the boundless shout, Poured from the lips of spotless ones — Jehovah's crowned and radiant sons. From out the alder chirps the wren. The partridge whistles from the glen, Up floats a gush of laughter gay. From children at their early play, Where the thick woodbine's odorous torch Beams through the planter's shaded porch. And the bold king-bird's angry cry Jars like a battle trumpet by ; But who is he that all night long, (29) 80 THE MOCKING-BIRD. Has poured his matchless music-storm, And with the glory of his song, Made the dead heart of silence wai-m ; Nor yet, though mom's triumphant rays, On bough and roof and woodland blaze. Forgets in golden floods to pour The tide of his unequaled lore ? Far in the deep and whispering night — Great hoary mother of the stars, Whilst o'er the wall — a solemn light — The round moon slants her silver bars, Ah, then a wild and sudden strain Comes like a cloud of golden rain, So sweet, so strange and wild a tone Steals down the midnight dim and lone ; — So sweet and clear its accents come Across the still night's holy gloom, I deem some angel form hath strayed Earthward from courts that shine on high. Once more to walk the fragrant shade, And link again the earth and sky. Perched on yon topmost, glittering thorn, Brave leader of the choiring throng, THE MOCKING-BIRD. 31 His breast against the cheek of mom, Exults the hero of my song ; His dark eye flashing in the sun, From swelling throat and amorous bill, The music-tides leap up and run In radiant wave and lisping rill, — O, not a love-chant e'er was sung, A vesper or a matin rung From roof or bough, by airy tongue ; — O, not a joyous note or strain Along the summer gale is rolled. But, tangled in that wondrous brain, Is stored like sands of native gold, To be, from his green, dewy throne. In rippling mirth or anthem-tone. Poured forth to tremble, burn and die Along the lonely, listening sky. And brighter grow the maiden's eyes, And children clap their hands to hear Such wUd, imperial melodies, As well might suit a siuless sphere. Exulting with an airy bound. As tired of earth's familiar ground, With shining, barred and fanlike wings, He, toward the gorgeous welkin springs ; 32 THE MOCKING-BIRD. There hangs like an entranced cloud, The shower and music's pearly shroud, Then downward to his perch, that bends Beneath his royal feet, descends, As if with joy's deep vintage drunk. He to his earthly bower had sunk ; Thus newly perched, he sings and sings, And round his breezy challenge flings. And forth his tuneful discord rings. From quick to slow, from gay to grave, With wave succeeding crystal wave ; Now from the tall oak's crowning bough, He pours his silver rain, and now. From mossy roof and garden pale With sweetness loads the dizzy gale, Now o'er the furrowed fields afar, Curves downward like a shooting star That from its pathway backward pours An anthem toward the eternal shores ; Now on the lowly cotton-crest His broad and gleaming pinions rest. And shaking with his quivering plumes. The gold-dust from its yellow blooms, With rosy storm and silver shower. To silence charms the noonday hour, Till rocks and woods and valleys green, And hills with shining brooks between — THE MOCKINa-BIBD. 83 All in the bright horizon's rim, In that melodious ocean swim. AU spirits of sweet sound that dwell Deep in the jSute's voluptuous cell, And all the lute-like sounds that sleep Far in the wildwood dark and deep, The blue bird's trill, the noisy wren, The partridge piping fi-om the glen, The martin calling from the eaves, The red-bird from his throne of leaves. The lark that toward his nestlings pours A greeting as he sunward soars, All breathe and burn within thy lay, Wild warbler on the Southern spray. And crown thee first of tuneful throngs, Bird of the thousand silver songs ! HALF-WAY. Some silver lines begin to show Amidst the brown like threads of snow Along December hills, While every bright-eyed bird that sings Has flown, to break with dappled wings, The glass of Southern riUs. Ah, thirty-fom-, brave thirty-four ! One green, revolving summer more WUl set my hurrying feet Upon the mid-way, rounding slope Of seventy years, while radiant Hope And pensive memory meet. O, fleeting months ! O, wasting years ! Sad days ! and nights of haunting fears 1 Ye came and ye are gone — Ye brought and broke some blessed dreams. Ye dried some cool, refreshing streams, And left the dusty stone ! (34) HALF-WAY. 35 Backward — my path lies dim ia storms — Dark-muffling palls and spectral forms And poisoned blossoms wave ; StUl, as I count each vanished foe And severing hand, I grieve to know The worst was not the grave. Not saddest are the bells that toll Some patient, loved, and lovely soul, Back to its mansion fled ; Grief hath a deeper grief than all The grave can bring — the heavy pall That wraps the living dead ! True, there are spots like myrtle isles, That bloom and send their golden smiles Down o'er the surging storms, Green banks and vales — the whispering grove. And flowers of woman's holier love. And childhood's lily forms ; A falling eye, a sweet, young face, A soft tone in a shady place Girt by a jasmine wall ; The trance of quiet Sabbath hours — Ah, royal gems, dear, painted flowers, Trampled and withered all ! 36 HALF-WAT. Yet who laments that all are gone ? — Pours on the cold, memorial stone Grief's wild, tumultuous tides ? What soul so hopeless, poor, and vain To tread life's weary road again For all the gems it hides ? To drink the scorn, to feel the shame That eats away the heart like flame, With not a face to love ; To hear a thousand clarions call Away to Glory's crowning hall. Without the power to move — I crave it not ! yet thanks to Thee, Lord of the lily, heart, and sea. For life, though held in pain ; I yearn, am blind, I faint, I pine. Yet, yet the glorious task is mine A better land to gain. Green spread for me the Summer hiUs, Soft hangs the bridal blue that fills The noon's imperial arch, Mine are the songs of bird and blast, The softer memories of the Past — The stars' triumphal march. HALF-WAY. 37 'Tis mine the brooklet's maze to trace, Look on the regal human face Still redolent of God ; In gentle word and quiet deed, To swathe some hearts that ache or bleed, Uproot the thistle and venomous weed. And strew the olive and myrtle seed. As violets strew the sod. For these, to Thee, be incense given. First, Highest, Brightest, King of Heaven, And Lord of quick and dead ! Thanks, for the desert's wasted springs, As for the fount that nearest sings, And to the soft wind's idle wings. Dissolves in diamond whorls and lings, As if it heard -Thy tread ! Thanks, for the glory of the rose — The mantle of the mountain snows — Thanks, for the tyrant's brazen blows, And for the scorner's scorn ; Thanks, when the good and lovely bow In death, as for the Blessed Brow That wore the Crown of Thorn ! 38 HALF-WAY. In the lashed slave's unpitied groans, In rooms where the starved orphan moans, In the heart's crushing stone — Tea, in the mighty sobs that knoll The breaking of the Golden Bowl, Great God, Thy will is done. A GREETING. Mt heart is leaning to thee, old friend, From the bleak New England hills. And through the mist of the tingling snows. And over the frozen riUs ; The fields are white as an infant's shroitd. And the days are cold and drear, And the shriek of the blast in the naked boughs, Is a fearful sound to hear. But far, far off in the milder South — In the land of the bloom and bee. And of noble men that never again May open their hearts to me, Is a gentler breeze and a bluer sky, The stars have a sweeter ray. And the nights of the balmy winter time. Show soft as an April day, (39) 40 A GEEETING. I think of the pleasant paths, old friend, I trod in summer with thee Through the rustling maize and the dark old wood. And under the stately tree. They are gone, all gone ! and naught remains But the scent of a withered rose, Yet my heart is leaning to thee, old friend, From the foot of the Northern snows. I sit alone in my silent room, In the moanuig and dark night hours, And dream of the woods and the mossy hills, And yearn for the time of flowers ; And thought goes wandering far away To the land of the bird and bee, And the leafy paths of the wilderness That I roved, old friend, with thee. Few barks may traverse the fateful deeps. With broad sails side by side. The terror of black Typhoon will blow. And asunder in tears we ride ; But what though garments are drenched in brine, And shattered both helm and mast. If our feet from the wreckful strand, go up To the Amaranth hills at last ? HEREAFTER. The billows of eternity dash by With glories, hallelujahs, odors, thrones. And meet, on its enormous strand, no ■wreck, No gory footprints of insatiate death — Dead ? yes, I passed what all men hold as death, I heard the wails and ravings of my wife, I knew my mother bowed upon my couch And hid her face amid the drapery With that most bitter cry which in it hath A sound of gravel on a coffin lid ; The heavy odor of medicinal drugs Grew faint, a rankling clangor smote my ear Like bells in dreams and all grew stUl and dark. Heavens ! I beheve a moment gone my lip Was warmed into a smile to think if this Be the fell triumph of the charnel King, That men should tremble, shriek and be appalled At the grim thunder of his iron door ; But I will pause ; these clouds and glorious hills (41) 42 HEREAFTEE. Seem not as those which sleep in earthly beams, And the innumerable throng who press Thick as the hoai'se gale roUs autumnal leaves, Look not as those who drink of mortal springs — Their eyes are solemn, as with warring hopes, Awful inquiry and dread prescience fraught. Dead, yet alive ! with breath, Umb, heart and eyes, Dead, yet through death's appalling crash I rise ; Yes, this is the eternal gale that flies Over the bowed heads of the golden flowers And stirs these semblances of earthly bowers ; Ah, banished from the earth. Its music and its mirth, The rain-dance on its multitudinous leaves. The jasper splendor of its autumn eves, Gone from its laws, its love, its scorn and shame, AJl that enchanted in the feverish game Of honor, eminence, lust, hypocrisy ; Yet I. see not what fancy feared to see, I find not here all that I thought to find — The ungainly phantoms of the earthly mind ; Where are the dooming Judgment's awful forms. The Almighty heel that crushes human worms ? Where is the Omnipotent and unknown One, Where the Incarnate Son ? HEEEAFTEE. 43 Where are the immaculate, beatific host, The rainbow forehead of the Holy Ghost ? As yet I see them not, I see a world, Its sapphire, glorious vault above unfurled. The nurse of hill, vale, mountain, flower and tree, Light, sound, magnificence and mystery ; How like to all I saw and doted on In that dim world of phantasies now gone ! Phantasies ? Great God ! the only one is Death Who shrieks in the crazed ear, " there is no breath No human voice, no human form, No cloud or field with mellow sunlight warm, No toil, no change, no motion. No ^rove, no temple, forest, tide or ocean Beyond earth's little space of blood and trade Along whose verge we wander gropingly Like men who fight the darkness with a torch." WeU I remember now, a mighty fever That boiled and hissed and struggled like a river Of molten metal through my brain, while I Lay down and moaned and wept and feared to die ; I heard the sobs grow fainter in my room, Some lurid flashes shot athwart the gloom. Then came a dull, cold night without a gleam Or faint delusion of a wandering dream, 44 HEREAFTER. Then, o'er the heavy Lethe that around My heart had settled and its pulses drowned, There came a voice faint as the hreath of streams Borne to the soul from the pale land of dreams. That loud and louder grew, and rising, broke Into a silver peal, and I awoke, Awoke to breathe, to feel my pulse heat on, To think, remember, hunger, walk and thirst, A living, hoping, fearing, perfect man. How the great human sea is hither rolled From every realm and vault and ocean-cave ! The young, the old, the crowned, the slave. Pale, delicate -veined women, warriors bold — Christ ! how they stream and stream. Far inward thick as pebbles on the shore, And rapid as the trances of a dream. Surging and roUiug inward ever, evermore ; Not one in seventy of the throng who come Hither to their new home But inly says " I dreamed. Morn through the portals of the Orient streamed, I woke to the stale, common, endless story Of revel, wrong, crushed hopes and empty glory, Gold, tilth, love, commerce, ravage, death and birth. On some strange shore, some foreign clime of earth p- HEREAFTER. 45 By life and flowers of life is death belied And none will say "I died," And I, the dead-alive, Who thrffsgh that dark, tremendous wreck survive, Which even the glorious Lord of life appalled, Still as of old, with change and toil must strive. With staggering doubt and awful mystery walled- Each looks into another's eyes And clasps or shuddering flies ; All as they are, foul, dark or bright, appear, No venomous, smiles, no masquerading here ! ■ None dare the net to catch a brother weave. These gales have never rolled the sound " deceive" — I will see who was worthy of ray trust, For half the throng are sorcerers, thieves and liars, Even with these awful beacons red before, And Death's tremendous, iron door behind ; Hark ! what a voice streams down the charmed gales, Half zephyr, half cathedral sound that seems The birth-hour shout of young eternities ! It billows through these labyrinthine bowers And drowns my vision with a tide of flowers And chokes my path with rose and lily drifts — Sweet leaves, dear hues ! the same, the same, O God ! With which I wooed and won my soft-eyed Mary, Whose charms will cloy another's love or lust. 46 HEREAFTEE. While I shall be to her the dream of a dream, A disembodied, homeless, passionless voice, Like her, who, slighted of Narcissus' love. Pined oif into a melancholy sound -, To waU and wander through abysmal space. That shout rolls on and tosses the gold boughs, And trembles down the ruby-fronted vales, Then up the vistas of the amber clouds And odorous caverns of the rosy air, Rolls like a silver-mouth6d ocean boom ! The swarming worlds, the daedal universe Lie mapped out awfully before my feet. Harmonious chaos, splendors infinite — Dominions, thrones, unbounded breadth and height Of ether, tremulous with deity And streaked with golden sands of hoary stars, Their green sides palpitating with the love That decorates, ensouls and fashions all — I must away, God knows to what seltwrought. Thrice blessed or blood-curdling destinies. MY WIFE. Deae name ! first breathed in Paradise, And warbled down the rosy air, And wafted through the stainless skies And up the silver vault, to where The Heavenly splendors burn and glow Around the Triune Mystery — I ne'er, in mortal time, may know The sweetness that is hid in thee. On all the hills o'er which the wind Rolls with its thousand-harping sound. Is not so sweet a cadence shrined. Is not so rich a music found As in that single holy name Of " wife," first breathed by angel lips, Ere they with eyes of golden flame. Beheld the night of Sin's eclipse. In tears and pain and blighting dew. Fall cold around the Primal Two. (47) 48 MY WIFE. Dear is the name of " friend " to those Who saU this bleak, tempestuous sea Of Human Life, while keenly hlows The gale of black Adversity, And sweetly up the gulph of years Returns the holy accent " mother," And " sister " calms our chOdish fears, And manly is the sound " my brother ;" Yet, yet I know a sound as sweet. With heavenly music more complete ; And richer than the golden song Of birds upon the gate of Dawn, While glancing wings the branches throng, And June trips with her roses on. Is that one word, with mystic art Which binds us to some kindred heart. " My wife " hath trembled from the red And reeking lips of him whose thought Ne'er soared above the miry bed Where the dull swine lies down to rot ; And the hoarse libertine hath drunk In maudlin triumph to that name. Which in his blighted soul hath sunk Still deeper the hot bolt of shame, MY WIFE. 49 O wedded Love ! O symbol bright, Of that most holy, deathless tie, Which links the chosen sons of light To Him who chose for them to die ; May he whose soul ne'er rose above The miser's dust, a brute's desire, Through Love's green paths of myrtle rove. Or to his pearly heights aspire, Or breathe the sacred balm that springs Like incense from his silver wings ? No ! let him wear his crown of dust, His purest love is gilded lust ! My gentle wife, I sometimes fear That Heaven hath poured too large a good On one so frail and vile as I, To feed me thus on angel's food. And drench me in the rosy wine Of love so pure and deep as thine ; And well I know a fearful thing It is, to win a human heart Around our own to twine and cling With strength which only Death can pait. Cheeks I have seen more like the rose, And forms more delicate to view, And foreheads more hke mountain snows, And locks that glanced a brighter hue, 8 50 MY WIFE. And yet, of high or lowly hirth, On all our green and lovely earth, There's not a lip that shames the rose, Nor brow, though like the Alpine snows. And bound with half the diadems Snatched from the deep, relentless sea — There's not a form, though locked in gems, Half, half so beautiful to me As that dear eye and brow of thine, Because thy woman's heart is mine. Afar from thee, beloved one. Yet, yet thy calm, sweet face I see, And o'er the distance wide and lone, Thought wanders yearning back to thee, Like some lost bird that seeks her nest. While night is hovering o'er the west. O, come to me ! the woods are sere On Housatonic's regal hills. Yet the bright robin's note I hear. And Spring hath loosed the shouting rills ; Soon, soon the clover-sandaled May Her cheek upon the buds will lay. And every bough and turf shall be A temple and a shrine to thee, And bid the gentle stranger haU To velvet bank and mossy vale. A WINTER NIGHT. A GLOBious bard has sung the evening wind In tones that warble like a brook in June ; But had he wrapped the " drapery of his couch About him " in this bleak and haunted room, This antique, melancholy, moaning room, Where I lie down to dream, but not to sleep, And, half afraid, see my expiring lamp Shoot its vague, ghastly flicker o'er the walls Like the thin robes of spectres in a dance Around a felon's grave, and flare and bend Before the insolent and prying gust ; Had that sweet bard lain down to sleep and dream In this antique, dim, melancholy room. He would have heard a wilder voice than leaves Kissing each other's foreheads in the dusk Of summer eves, or dance of fluting breeze, Or hoarser murmur of the restless waves. Roar, roar! Great God, how Thou dost make the winds, (61) 52 A VflNTER NIGHT. The free, -wide-winged, thundering winds of heaven, A mighty organ-pipe to roll Thy praise. Thy power and glory through the frighted world ! Shuddering, I draw my weary frame behind Its pillowy shield, responsive to the jar. The thrill, and horror of the oak-ribbed walls And shivering pines far out upon the waste That writhe and groan at every wounded nerve. The air boils as it never boiled before, Since God threw wide the windows of the sky And hurled such deluge do%\Ti of darkness, haU, And thundrous rain, as blanched the carnage-blots From out the old world's guilt-bedraggled skirts, Tossing her rock-walled hills as winds, dead leaves. Whelming her vineyards, towers, and golden vales. Her temples, herds, and thrones, within a gulph Of slimy, voiceless, starless nothingness. Rave, rave, ye winds ! and clarion the name, The power, and terror of your master, God ! For there is One that holds you in His hand Or bids you forth to pile the world with wrecks. To-night my soul is leaning toward the shrine Of that resplendent, sweet idolatry Which drew the hearts and hoary forms of Slid, The glorious bards and wild-eyed priestesses That roamed amidst Dodona's oaks and heard, A WINTER NIGHT. 5i In Tempe's olive shades, the song of nymphs, And charmful pipings of voluptuous Pan, And saw in clouds and the red path of storms The wrathful brow and lifted arm of Jove. Their prescient eyes interpreted the light Of the Undying Dream, the Life to come ; And in the cahn or rufiBed elements, In streams that wandered through the solemn groves, In flowers and stars and sighing autumn winds That shook the fruitage from the mellow boughs, And shouting War that blackens the green hills And dashes all their limpid purls with blood. They saw a living likeness of themselves In passion, love, and the grim lust of power; And I, to-night, can deem the cag6d winds Have issued forth, at the loud signal-blow Of their great lord against his dungeon walls. In wrath and vengeance, bearing sword and shield, The lofty front and fiery blood of gods. To seize and tear the royal ermine folds That robe the rocky shoulders of the hiUs ! That jar again ! Heavens ! when did mortal ear Rock on the surges of so fierce a wail ? Or Fancy eddy down the boiling gulph Of sound so iron-tongued and thunder-barbed ? All, all the groans that rocked old Cannas's hills. 54 A WIXTEB KIGHT. The black-lipped cannon whose tremendous growl Rent the dun sulphur-dome of Waterloo, Were Zephyr-notes beside your mountain harp, O ! awful shades and hollow-bugling winds ! Hell from beneath is moved to walk the earfh And flute her drunken joy along the crags ! The stars have toppled from their diamond thrones And drowned their fiery foreheads in the sea Of frozen darkness and chaotic night — The keen gusts seize the burly, spectral drifts And scourge them forth in sheets of tingling fog, TiU the wide atmosphere and haggard fields Seem one black sea of hungry, wrangling sound, And this bleak hUl, the lone, beleaguered isle. On which the frosty billows warp and clang Like some enormous, grim, funereal bell. Rung by the red and bony hands of ghouls, To peal their triumph o'er a shattered world ! And I, in trembling, ask the distant woods, The hissing, trenchant snows and my own heart. How shall another summer morning burst Or violet open in the icy vales ? UNNOTICED HEROES. Woods have their tlossoms which we ne'er behold, And skies their worlds whose light is never shown, Ocean, its treasures of unnoted gold. And earth her heroes that are all unknown. You meet them as you pass, and heed them not, You may not know what hosts before them fell ; You ra.ay not count the battles they have fought — The wreaths that crown them are invisible. Yet they have fought and conquered ; they have bent Night after night beside the couch of pain. They have confronted scorn and death, and lent Their blood to make the stricken whole again. They have been pilgrims to that desert shrine Which Sorrow rears in the bleak realm, Despair ; Oft have they struggled in that gloomy mme Where only dust is made the toiler's share. [f>5] 56 UNNOTICED HEROES. They have beheld their sweetest hopes decay, Oft have they seen their brightest dreams depart ; Have seen their golden idols turned to clay, And many bear within, a broken heart. Their veiled and mighty scars they ever bear. Those scars that lie deep-burned into the soul. Won where the flaming eyes of vengeance glare, And the tumultuous fires of passion roll. They have been victors ! they have conquered fields Earth's dreaded Hannibal's could never win ; They have struck down the sword Ambition wields. And trampled Lust and chained the hands of Sin. They have won captives ! their sweet tones have brought The erring back to Virtue's flowery path ; Their own, and others' hearts submission taught To God's high will, and smoothed the brow of wrath. They drink the dregs of trembling, but their moans And anguished wails they stifle in the breast, They say there is an Ear that hears their groans And in His house the weary will find rest. UNNOTICED HEROES. 57 Want, grief, the scorn of men on them descend — They only say it is His righteous will ; With chastened spirits to that will they bend, Believing, striving, hoping, loving stOl. O, there are daUy martyrdoms that we Heed not — the sufferers are to us unknown. But angels from the walls of Eden see How glorious are the laurels they have won 1 8* A RED RIVER SCENE, PART I. ExiLBD from home, with sadly pensive mind, Through pathless woods my lonely course I wind, The sun darts round a fierce meridian ray. The buzzard's shadow swims across my way A winged Hot upon the ripply gold Of Heaven's warm blush spread o'er the parched mould — Through sundered boughs and blue-eyed vistas rolled ; Alone, alone, in the wild woods am I ; I, with my soul, the branches and the sky. The owl's large eyes upon me gloat and stare, Dull, vague, misformed to front the simmering glare ; The glossy deer, upstarting with a bound. Fades Uke a moonbeam o'er the rustling ground ; The fox has paused, looks back, then disappears Deep in the wild cane's green and tapering spears ; The swollen creeks, that seem to wait or sleep, (58) A RED KIVEIt SCENE. 59 Round the stained trunks like huge, red serpents creep ; More dense and blind my sultry pathway grows, The straggling brambles tear my face and clothes. Till now, emei-ged beneath the wrathful sun. While toil's salt rivers down my temples run. And from his blaze some denser branches shield. Before me spreads a Southern Cotton Field — Acres that half great London scarce could fill. How level, gray, monotonous, and still ! Forests of sapless ti-unks and mouldering trees That piecemeal drop, and vibrate in the breeze ; A hawk flaps, screaming, up the torrid air, A squirrel rustles to his leafy lair, Eying the loathly banquet spread for him. The vulture lolls upon the blasted limb ; O'er the long furrows lusty negroes bow, And ebon women guide the trenching plough. While thus, well-pleased, I view the bloomless scene That next June-showers shall robe in gorgeous green. And, ere October's moan for summer tolls, Shall heave, a univei-se of streaming bolls. The forms which Fancy's air-built temple throng, Still strive in verse and glide in rustic song. 60 A KED RIVER SCENE. PAST II. THE COTTON GIN. When kings are dead and thrones are hurled, Whit- ney, to the dust, And names that shook the earth like storms are cased in eating rust, When honest worth shall wear the crown by noble strivings won, And Cagsar shall but Caesar be, and Attila but Hun, When purer love shall warm the hearts and sway the wiUs of men. And Risen Christ, with shining steps, shall tread the waves again, Thy name shall roll, a holy sound, through earth's bewildered story, . And burn in her blue vault of fame, a royal star in glory. There steals upon my soul a sound, a clear, prophetic tone, Like gales on which a thousand pines out-roll their brazen moan. It comes from stars, and winds and leaves, from all the glorious Past A RED KIVEK SCENE. 61 Hath locked witliin her dusky womb of silence, cold and vast. " Though blood may gush, and ramparts quake, and sworded conquerors wear The laurels wove from trophies won by the red battle- glare, A greener wreath, a brighter crown is woven for his brow, Who, through long years of toil and pain, an earnest soul shall bow. And lay his life an offering on that most holy shrme Reared to the sun-eyed goddess Truth, and Charity divine." Afai" within our Southern clime, a taper plant is grow- ing. Upon whose crest the fair, rich blooms like yellow moons are glowing. And ere departing autunm suns the whispering woods imbrown. There sleeps within the seamed boll a little world of down, And, locked from bird and sun and storm, within its royal cell. Unseen, the lai-ge, thick-rinded seed lies wrapped and guarded well. 62 A KED RIVER SCENE. What plastic skill, what cunning hand, what keen, vic- torious eye. Shall through great N"ature's secret paths in anxious silence pry, To wake & Power whose roaring wheels and iron teeth may tear The prisoned seed from out its cell, so wondrous white and fair, Till the soft fibres, stoutly pressed in ranks of huge, brown bales, Shall crowd earth's marts and dam her wharves and speck her waves with sails ? Amidst the balmy Southern vales, to seek a future home, Alone, from bleak New England hUls, a pensive youth has come; There lies a shadow on his brow that looks the throne of Thought, From ancient tomes and starry eves and Autumn splendors caught. And he in gorgeous dreams has held high converse with the dead Who soared in rhyme, or to the fight their clanging legions led ; In things that speak not he has heard a meaning and a song, A RED RIVER SCENE. 68 A music ttrough the silence rolled, more anthem-like and strong Than when above entranced throngs the thundrous organ soars, And hallelujahs shake the dome and the great chancel roars ; To him, the calm, the prophet-eyed, the wonder stands revealed, The golden gate is open thrown, the mystery un- sealed ; Amidst the noisy world unknown, with keen, unflinch- ing gaze. He threads the pearly paths of art, explores her secret maze. Till, in the spirit's chambers -wrought, by pain and silence nursed, Like May along the barren hills, the Cotton Gin hath burst, Whose roaring wheels and teeth of steel with ranks of lusty bales. Shall crowd our marts and dam our wharves and speck the waves with sails. Now Labor lifts her weary head, hope soaring in her- eye. From mountain ledge to ocean strand her sounds of triumph fly ; 64 A RED RIVER SCENE. O, what a sea of yellow blooms is heaving o'er the plain! O, what a roar of tearing wheels is surging through my brain ! As when in power the wrathful storm comes down with crashing sound ; And leagues on leagues of shattered oaks lie warping o'er the ground, The mossy empire of the woods rolls backward from the view — At every stroke the woodman wields streams in a lake of blue ! Let Hudson rear his royal hills and roll his crystal waters Through banks whose lovely green is pressed by Free- dom's loveliest daughters, Let proud 'New England vaunt her names in godlike deeds renowned, Her noble arts, her brows with more than Delphic laurel bound. And, boasting, count her endless leagues of thunder- shouting rails. O'er which the harnessed Titan, Steam, in flame and vapor wails. Yet we, who look on fairer skies and breathe a softer clime. A RED RIVER SCENE. 65 And wanting half her laureled brows and mountain peaks sublime — We still an equal wreath may share, we claim the vital soul Of broader fame and larger power in the downy Cot- ton Boll! Right onward in its dauntless might the giant impulse rushes, Where'er a mart with commerce roars or wayside fountain gushes, By wave and crag, from shore to shore, from clime to clime, is rolled. And over strand and wharf and wall, is foaming up in gold; Before, the old woods drift away like clouds adown the wind. While groves of spires and blossomed fields are spark- ling up behind, From swamp and cave and tangled brake the savage wolf is driven, And realms, by Summer beam unpierced, are to the morning given ; Up nameless streams, through plunging trunks and matted willows crashing, With oaken ribs and nerves of steel a mammoth form fs dashing. •66 A RED KIVEE SCENE. Whose foaming wheels and hissing breath shall bear the royal spoil, O Whitney, fast through storm and shine, of thy heroic toil, Where far into the lonely night a thousand wiudows blaze, A thousand whirling shafts to toil theu' stormy paean raise — Where far into the dusky night the water-wheel is roaring, And smoke-wreaths from a million throats are through the moonlight soaring ! Then fill to him whose name of Fame's most honored page is part ! Fill high to him whose bosom bears the planter's noble heart ! Hurrah ! hurrah ! for him whose hand upturns the yellow soil. And, bloodless, from the generous field bears off the downy spoil. Which, more to twine earth's brow with bays than Caesar's host, avails. And walls her streams with factories and specks her waves with sails ! A KED RIVER SCENE. 67 PART III. Once more among the old, majestic woods And twinkling shadows, where tanned Autumn floods With her brown tresses all the sobbing vales. And charms her own sad ear with twilight tales Of dying glories ; beautiful and grand These aged oaks their murmuring vault expand — Columns the sculptor's steel ne'er rung upon, Fairer than graced the ancient Parthenon ; One hour amidst this soft Arcadian gloom. Ascending incense and perennial bloom In solemn worship ; glorious round me stands This leafy fane whose walls no human hands Have wreathed in pensile beauty ; silence old And twilight here their haunted empire hold Over the clasping boughs and gold-eyed flowers ; Toward the blue stars this vast cathedral towers How breathlessly and calm ! save when the gales. That lash earth's mountain brows and swell her sails, Stream landward, panting from their viewless race O'er the salt foam, and blow an ocean-bass From these great organ-pipes ; far from this scene The sons of avarice and pride convene. 68 A RED RIVER SCENE. And blood-stained Treachery and scowling Hate And wild-eyed Murder meet in loud debate, Grim Envy watches and Oppression galls, Revenge pursues and rabid Hunger calls. Far other sights my footsteps welcome here. Far other music chains my pensive ear, The valleys where no harmful feet intrude, The odorous calm, the hoary solitude. The sinuous bayous arched with willow bowers, The sculptured hickories swathed in trumpet-flowers, The sapless trunks where giant growths of vine Like fierce, enormous anacondas twine, Deep in the wood imbed each mighty fold. And with the grasp of death their victim hold ; The green magnolia on whose regal crest The rose and lily's wedded glories rest — The hum of bees, the flash of rapid wings. The gloomy moss that round the cypress clings And down the mid-day twilight sighs and swings, The timid quail, the turtle's plaintive moan. With all that charmed the soul of Audubon, — All bid my heart through toil's long night survive. All say it is a fearful thing to live, All in mysterious language breathe to me Sweet prophecies of immortality. A RKU RIVEK SCENE. 69 And whilst they bid my soul before Him fall, Lift me still nearer to the All-in- AU. And yet where God this unhewn temple rears, There have been breaking hearts and burning tears ;] Here did the myrtle turn to weeping yew, And, draped in woe, there dawns upon my view. As pensive, through these hoary shades I rove, A mournful legend of unhappy love. One hundred years, in gloom and splendor flown, Have worn the record from the graveyard stone. Since one with regal mien, whose name no more On earth is spoken, reached this woodland shore ; With friends, with goodness and his God at war. He from his childhood's vale had wandered far. With fearless step, strong arm and deadly aim. Through brake and fen pursued the flying game. Upon his casque, proud waved a snow-white plume, His cheek was tinged with youth's unwithered bloom. Beamed through the liquid azure of his eye, A soul which wildest perils could defy, A manly grace in every movement shone, A native music flowed in every tone. Whilst round his brow, hiding his temples fair, In golden luxury beamed the flowing hair. In dreams, awake, alone, amidst the throng. 70 A RED KIVER SCENS. He bore the memory of a fearful wrong Done to a gentle maid who gave her heart, Saw in that gift, peace, hope and heaven depart. And from the phrenzy-fires that scorched her brain. Now cursed the false one, now, her clanking chain. And like the wretch who first with brother's gore And ghastly murder stained earth's virgin shore. To whom through life's alternate storm and calm. His God showed mercy but the more to damn; Or that thrice-perjured one whose impious tongue. Strange words of scorn and bitter mockery flung On Him, who fain would rest beside his door. Whilst to the fatal Mount His cross He bore, Like these, outcast from God, from love and home. Panting for rest, yet ever doomed to roam, He lived to know that when the murderer's ear Shall cease his victim's piteous moan to hear. When silence, night and breezs and leaf and flood Shall cease to murmur " fiend" and shriek of blood. When guilt may flee the great Avenger's eye. Then Hell may change to Heaven and God may lie, Pie lived to feel that when God's thunders burst Upon the perjured head, the last, the worst Is not the blazing home, the foemin's blade, Nor the huge dungeon's dank, abysmal shade, But evei-more to walk with pallid fear, A RED KIVER SCENE.. 71 Till her ■wild eyes the heart to stubble sere, To tremble at a sound, to feel, to know In God, a stern. Almighty, deadly foe. Whose wrath may nevermore the wretch forgive, But bids him still through swelling dangers live, Down Sin's long maze and lotus vales run on. Till he, his life, his love, and Hell are one I Still roved the red man unmolested here. And in his covert struck the rapid deer, Still met the warriors, cui-led the wigwam smoke, And war's fierce yell the midnight silence broke. The fair-haired exile from his childhood's land. The forest men received with generous hand ; Among their dusky bands he long delayed. Lived as they lived, their warlike sports essayed, Joined in the march to meet the oouohant foe. And drew in friendly strife the twanging bow. Born in these dense, untraversed shades^ was one "Whose brow and graceful limbs to look upon Was like the burst of spring ; she was a child Of nature, reared amidst the leafy wild ; Her dusky form a savage vegture wore. Yet in her breast a woman's heart she bore ; A chieftain's daughter, in her soft, dark eye, The glories lay, of summer's midnight sky, 72 A BED RIVER SCENE. For her, apart, the youthful warrior sighed, For her his blade in hostile gore was dyed, For her in thickest wood and sunbright deU, The savage bear and crouching panther fell ; All empty toil ! her virgin heart to gain. Vain was each art, each peril dared in vain. To these rude climes the youthful stranger came, She gazed, she loved him with no vagrant flame ; The stolen glance, the half-averted eye, The cheek-suffusing blush when he was nigh. Things which betray the soft, confiding heart More plain than pen can tell, or lips impart. Were not unraai-ked by him ; soon at his side Smiling, she stood, the dark-eyed, dark-haired bride. Poor human love ! when did its current run Without a rock, a fall, beneath the sun ? When wind through daisied meads and singing bowers, Without a dragon lurking in the flowers ? Three summer moons upon their nuptials shone. Each saw the tie that knit their spirits, grown More deeply tender, beautiful and strong ; The mocking bird poured round a sweeter song, The ancient woods put on a youthful green, The royal holly wore a richer sheen, A EED KIVER SCENE. 73 Around their hearts a second life was shed, Since Love had hid them in his myrtle bed. When on the autumn hills the oak grew sere, And woodlands faded in the fading year, Forward, through vaulted vale and velvet glade, With restless eye, the lithe-limbed hunter strayed. Till, spent with toil, the fierce, red sunset found His form recumbent on the rustling ground, And while the mists of slumber o'er him stole, A troop of busy phantoms thronged his soul. His youthful home with all its singing rills. Far off among the fair, New England hills. The fount that bubbled at his father's door. The latticed porch with woodbine braided o'er, The garden walk with morning glories gay, The swallow barn, the scent of garnered hay. The well-worn path that through the orchard strayed, The distant slope imbrowned with chestnut shade. All rose around him with resistless power. And softer light than in his childhood's hour. All bade no more through wilds and deserts roam. And beckoned back to friendship, love and home. Sobbing, he wakes, while down his visage stream The copious drops of that remorseful dream ; An iron hand seems on his soul to lie, No prayers can soften and no feet can fly, 4 74 A KED RIVER SCENE. In these rude climes no more must he abide, Farewell his woodland haunts, his Indian bride ! Beside his wigwam door at set of sun, With altered mien he met his wedded one. With tones assumed, and pain he ill conceals, In hurried words the mournful truth reveals, That though the doom may burn and break the hea On earth they evermore must walk apart. For He who ruled the wave and storm, denied The forest's child should be the white-man's bride ! O God ! the wreck, the death, the deathless pain To love and know that we have loved in vain ! To bow, adore, to yield our holiest trust. And see our worship poured on common dust ! — When death bears off the idol of the heart, And from our dream of bliss we wildly start. And know that to our arms, ah, nevermore Can tears or time the banished form restore ; That he who claims our lost is one whose ear Is deaf to sorrow's moan and manhood's tear ; This, this vsdll chill the heart and cloud the brow With grief to which the proudest neck must bow : Yet o'er the grave a softening light is cast. And half the storm that shook our souls is past. To think that he who stilled the lovely breath, A BED iUVER SCENE. 75 And crushed our idol, was the Reaper, Death ; The dust that seals the dear, departed eyes, All access to a rival's tongue denies, Hope whispers that the heart which loved us here, May still love on within that distant sphere To which, from death, the viewless spirit rose To shine superior to all mortal foes ; There God may yet unite the golden chain Which He, in seeming wrath, has snapped in twain, In purer air and converse doubly sweet, Our eyes, the changeless, holy dead, may meet. And the torn heart, at Love's deep fountain know An ecstacy of bliss unfound below. But when the soul on wilder waves is tost, Those waves which wail above the "living lost," When all the soul's free worship, honor, truth, The strength of manhood and the flush of youth. When heart and thought and toil, we freely give, TiU in one human glance alone we live, — To yield the heart's best wine in holy trust, And find that incense poured on sordid dust ; 'Tis then we bow the head and taste of woe, The callous sons of traffic never know ; To feel that they on whom our love was shed Like water, though alive, to us are dead, That they whose tones we prized our lives above, 76 A BED BIVER SCENE. Have never loved us, haply, could not love ! In dreams by night, in vague regrets by day, To feel our better manhood waste away. To mark the summer's glorious train go by, Powerless to stir the ear or charm the eye. To feel, though spring returns and birds sing on, A vernal freshness from the soul is gone, "Which no pursuit or change, or triumph, more Can to the spirit's arid waste restore ; — Ah, this is heart-break, this. Great God, is grief From which we do not hope, or ask relief. Thus knew and felt the stricken Indian bride. The Dryad of the woods, the chieftain's pride. She heard, was mute, and dropt her dizzy head Upon her breast, her heart within was dead — Those words to her were dirge and tolling bell "Which rung to hope, farewell, a wild farewell. She lived, she moved, but through an altered scene, The flowers no more were what the flowers had been The earth grew dark beneath her mighty wrong. The mocking-bird forgot his golden song. The stately woods put off their smiling green, The fair magnolia lost his royal sheen, Her eye grew dim, joy from the forest fled — Since love had died, her heart hadlbroke, was dead 1 A RED RIVER SCENE. 77 She reasoned on her woes as one whose soul Has caught its language from the hollow roU Of thunder and black wind and bannered storms, And rapturously has clasped the rushing forms Of Night and Tempest, heard the awful tread. In leaves and billows, of the mighty dead, Who, with -wild eyes, and looks baptized in gore, Return by night to walk the earthly shore ; She knew that far away, beneath the sun. While he descends to rest, his journey done, And his bright looks like golden banners flow Out o'er the boundless floods that roll below. Rose, with its thrilling sounds, its flashing rills, Its sweet aromas, its empurpled hills And waving vales, in matchless bloom outspread, The green Elysium of the glorious dead. Hard by, through murmuring vaults and tangled shade Of moss-bound oak, and cypress colonnade. With hollow sighs, and Stygian-dark, and cold. The torrent of the deep, red waters rolled. Through whose hoarse waves, the road, she murmured, lay To that far world of bright, eternal day. One gorgeous night to this tremendous door That darkly oped on Death's appalling shore. 78 A RED RIVER SCENE. She came with her sad eyes ; from night's high noon TJpon her deed looked down the soft-eyed moon, As if to hear its doom, the world grew still. All save the lone, complaining whippoorwill ; A cypress, fatal tree ! its shadow threw, And on her locks distilled its lethal dew ; A moment on the crumbling brink she stood, A moment gazed upon the whirling flood That seemed with airy lips to murmur, " Come, Cool thy hot brows in my Lethean foam. Haste from the weary eye, the aching heart, The arrow's fiery wound, desertion's smart. Come, listen to the reed-like sounds that dwell Beneath the wave in many a golden shell, Forget the false one's tones, life's sickly dream, My love, and wed the Spirit of the Stream ; And when for twelve slow moons thy feet have strayed Through my bright halls by hands unearthly made, When thou hast breathed the odorous gales that blow A hundred leagues these rushing tides below, In wonder trod my pearly palace floor. With lily sands and diamonds sprinkled o'er. Till the keen woes which thy torn heart assail. Shall melt like clouds that sweep the autumn vale. My waves shall waft thee to the mountams grand, And glorious vallevs of the Hunter-Land." A RED RIVER SCENE. 79 It said, and straight, beneath the pallid light, From dark the waters changed to snowy white, They whirled, they rung, they rose her limbs to meet, They dashed her brow with spray and clasped her feet ; — She heard, she plunged, she might no longer stay, "When lips so silvery bade her come away, The floods, to clasp their beauteous prize, divide, Then, moaning, round her close and calmly glide As when no broken heart lay hid below, Cold as their waves and dead to mortal woe. The shuddering slaves relate a fearful tale. That when the full moon rounds her shining sail, Just as she climbs the far horizon's verge. And shadows dark in neighboring shadows merge, "With downcast eye and melancholy mien, The Indian maid may still, at times, be seen ; Beside the turbid stream she strays along, Oft looks behind and trills a mournful song. Then stops and gazes on the rolling wave. And sinks again within her watery grave ; But woe to him by whom the dark-haired bride Is seen along the shimmering night to glide ! 80 A RED RIVEB SCENE. With her sad song and dark, dejected eye, She comes to tell him that the grave is nigh ; That even now the unseen powers of air. For him the shroud and funeral chant prepare, The graveyard of its cold, mute guest is sure, No arm can shield him and no art can cure. And ere another moon shall glimmer o'er. His ghost will hail her on the Spirit's Shore. ODE TO THE CROCODILE, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, and Lyell have told That cycling Eons to their grave have rolled Since thou didst plant thy foot By earthly flags, and shoot Like a piratic bark across the bubbling flood, Fierce dweller of the Ganges and the Nile, O iron-jawed, enormous crocodile ! Eyes diligent of blood, Eyes surly like a hog, ^ Bulk Uke a sodden log, Bellona, what a tail ! Both sword and scythe and catapult and flail, A countenance audacious, Throat, like Niagara's, voracious, A maw as deep and frightfully capacious, As his of old, who vainly thought to feast On good Ulysses like a fleecy beast ! Great king of all the lizard peoples, thou Of the fierce, deathful eye and craggy brow, 4* (81) 82 ODE TO THE CROCODILE. I gaze on thee in awe ; gigantic brute ! O huge, columnar, brazen-mailed fruit Of God's primeval planting ! Who in slime. Upon the Tropic slopes of infant Time First gave thee growth to be the regent one Of streams, and yawn and bathe within His sun The youthful sun from which no human eye Had shrunk, keen-dazzling up that virgin sky. Men dread, and shuddering, from thy presence flee. Yet around thy stark, prodigious bulk, I see A tint of strange and savage beauty cast, Th^ blurred leaf of an Iliad from the Past ; A leaf from that dim life-world, painted, spanned. By greater than our glorious Homer's hand ; Yea, men's prophetic eyes may read in thee A marvelous and sublime theophany ; Steel-rinded waif from that mysterious crypt Of time which every eye save God's hath slipt. Drowning our own in keen and painful wonder At all the marvels pent within or under. In thy huge sides and crashing jaws there lies A bell-peal from the dead eternities. O, thou art older than the tombs and hills, Than this ripe" harvest of dusk pines that fills The valley lands and up the mountain sides, Rolls in green seas and palpitating tides, ODE TO THE CliOCODILE. 83 Grand with the vast, centurial organ-moan From all its lordly undulations blown — Thou art before the birds, the flowers and rocks, Or Andes with their snows and long cloud-locks Flung back and streaming down the clarion storm — Their eyes upturned to search the radiant form Of the star-building God, the Happy, who "Weaveth His palace roof of golden blue — O Christ, that was a grand and gorgeous world, Whose waters by those sinewy arms were whirled ; Far off in those green, cryptic vales of Time, The sands were bloody but not red with crime ; Throned on the mountains of imperial song, Milton was unapproachable, but wrong, Death came into the world ere man had sinned — That monster's greedy, skinless jaws had grinnecL Their hellish pleasure o'er the graves ere man Or snake or bird or saurian began — "We do not understand that glorious Book On which with bent-browed, awful thoughts, we look, It shines through flickering mist upon our eyes In types and beautiful correspondencies ; Yea, ere that glittering dandy, called the Devil, First of the craft, with words so deadly civil. Strolled down the pansy-paved and palm-crowned Eden, Where Eve in naked glory bent a-weeding 84 ODE TO THE CROCODILE. Roses, while plundering bees buzzed in and out The lily's bell-like, golden-mUky spout. Death rose and with his scythe and ravenous tooth. Mowed down earth's gloriously gigantic youth — The races of the mountain and the brine. The mollusk, fern and mellow-^thundered pine Yielded their places unto thee and thine ; But thou with other unique, monstrous cattle Who roared and tustled in that long, old battle. Yea, thou with them, thy huge co-mates, art changed. Mates who that world in awful beauty ranged — Whose night-long bellow shook the winds and hills. Whose thirst snuflfed up the rivers and the rills Like a Sahara, or as Syrian skies, Sodom, with her quick, thorn-sharp agonies. O Jove ! I sometimes cry, what would I give To pierce tlie dead millenniums and live With thee in thy old haunts of shore and water. And see the beauty, strength and bubbling slaughtei', But for one hour, which deluged that old world, And down its crags and through its vales were hurled In song and foam and thunder ; I should see The glorious Titan's which right regally Proved that old world the workshop of our God And on the leaf, the mountain, wave and sod. Showed His great footprints radiantly bright. ODE TO THE CBOCODILE. 85 Now broken, dim or hid from mortal sight ; I should behold thee there with all thy kind, Things of the mighty jaw and steely rind. With bristling teeth hedging the rnshy shores, And tempesting the deep with sail-broad oars ; And I should shudder at the earthquake tread — As if the quick had met me from the dead— Of Megatherium — ^Pluto ! what a track He made, and shadow cast ! if from that back One had down-slipped the monstrous fall had broke And sent him shuddering from, his fleshly yoke ; Of bats I should behold the swooping king And hear the flutter of the nine-yard wing Of Pterodactyl ; how should I recoil Seeing the brown lake, round the paddles boil, Of Cetiosaur, lank reptilian whale ! EnaUosaur's hiss would make me quail. From Icthyosaur I should haply run, Great Plesiosaur I should strive to shun. In Megalosaur I should say the Devil Had scrambled from his den to work me evil ; And I should gaze on hippopotami. Huge, plank-horned elks and grim rhinoceri. On Mammoths and unwieldy Mylodons Panting beneath their palpitating tons Of iron, muscle, dull brute blood and bones ; 86 ODE TO THE CROCODILE. And I should walk through mosses tall as pines Whose forms lie sealed up in. our hills and mines, Should gaze on conifers and fluted ferns, Whose soul in our flushed parlors glows and burns. In the huge-rivetted furnace fumes and roars. Pushes our navies, weaves and rolls and bores ; God, how much breath, what glorious limbs didst Thou Crush out with the annihilating plough Which tore that grand old world ! no more to be^ — Thou bringest back no perished dynasty ; Well, these have been, and they are gone, all gone ! Save that they gnash upon us from the stone, And bristle from the cave in tooth and bone. They lived, they ran, they flew and roared and thun. dered, Swam, dug, slept, lurked and bled and fought and plundered. And they are gone into the dark, no more To vex the wave or crowd the rushy shore — And man — Oh death, the grave ! who shall disperse Your awful shadow from the universe 1 THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN. . Beautiful, beneficent beside the streams, In the ■wooded covert of the hills, And in the silent vales of leaves. Dull-red, and withered leaves. Which turn their shrivelled bosoms Vainly to the lips of light-footed winds, Thou wakest and walkest again. Singing thy songs of wonder and deity, Strewing thy floor with royal emerald. Gay Spirit of the Sun. Sweet counsellor of the wise. Whisperer of strange and secret lore, To the echoing hearts of the thoughtful, Who stray by dells and mountains, And grand old archways of the mossy woods, Tell me, whither hast thou wandered, From our meadows and waters Bearing the motion and splendor ? Over what groves of palm, (87) 88 THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN. Ever musical, ever green, ever shining, Over what stretching pampas, Grand with their liquid undulations, Bright in their everlastiog verdure, And yellow and crimson bUlows of dahlias Hast thgu roved, O spirit, "With thy Uly-sandaled feet And thy roses and pseans, AU of them glorious ? I have felt thy breathings, I have heard the rustle of thy garments And thy airy flutings in the dells And by the willow-fringed brooks As thou rovest invisible. I hail thee and bless thee, In thy glowing hands Cometh the latest Apocalypse of God Open to be read of all ; I hail thee, coming in might and mystery. Coming with beautiful glimpses . Of the kingdoms beyond death — Tliine are the vision and prophecy, Thine the rapt John and the Revelation ; The wells of Hope spring in thy footprints, • Thou speakest the fullness of the blessed dead. THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN". 89 Thou paintest the heart of the Infinite "With its billows and tides of encompassing love^ With violets thou fillest the hands of the children Who sit upon the blossomy knolls Like kings on purple thrones ; Thou preaohest the Resurrection. Silent, imperial architect ! Who ever reared the column like thee, Who ever polished the delicate spire. Who ever wi'ought the Corinthian vine Or moulded the breathing marble ? Away from the crafty city. The dust, the shelves, and wheels, Thou callest my feet to the dells and wilds And the thin, gray tent of the shadows ; Here as the wind tides eddy by, Faint as the tones of the trumpeter fay, Where these fairer than Gothic arches ascend, Crowned with days like the days of the Phoenix, I see the rifling of the graves By the conquering Angel's hand ; The Hebrew's wondrous rod in these dry trunks And withered branches buds again, the bright Unfathomable miracle of Spring Flows on, encircling like a silvery arm The dreaming splendors of the woiid, the dead 90 THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN. Are round me with the glory of their locks And salutations on their parting lips, At the passing of thy golden wings, Sweet Angel of the Covenant. THIRST NOT FOR FAME. O WAHDEEEE o'cr life's ■wreckful seas, Thou, tossed and drenched in breating waves, Now borne before the favoring breeze, Now hurled upon a strand of graves — Curb down that fierce, o'ermastering flame. Seek not renown, thirst not for fame ! The king of trees, whose glories show High o'er the meaner ranks around, Is first amidst the storm to strew. With wide and blackened wrecks, the ground ; His prouder brow and loftier form. Those limbs in which the birds of heaven Found shelter from the rushing storm. These soonest by the blast are riven — The hot, tremendous bolt of death. The sword-flash of God's burning breath ! WUd roared the storm across his brow, He braved the shattering tempest well, (91) 92 THIRST NOT FOR FAME. While round his quiet root below, The violet hung her purple hell ; She felt the breath of sister flowers Float round her on the morning hours, She saw the crowns and splendid eyes Of stars look down the midnight skies, She heard the tempest's iron wing Clang o'er the lofty forest king ; She heard his big arms groan and quiver, She saw the blast his fibres shiver, The lightning's hot and sudden river RoU round him like a flood in spring' ; Thou who in glory's halls wouldst shine, Fear, lest the monarch's doom be thine ; Curb down that wild, o'ermastering flame. Seek not renown, thirst not for fame ! Thirst not for fame ! the way is bleak And thorny which thy feet must climb, If thou the immortal cotirts wouldst seek, High on the morning hills of time ; To be the first, to wear the crown. To fix the vain crowd's roving eye, A name along the far hills blown A moment, then ia dust to lie ; To hear the city's surging street THIRST NOT FOR FAME. 93 The echo of thy name repeat ; To hear thy sounding triumphs rung From the black, roaring lips of bells, And breathed by childhood's lisping tongue Down all the quiet, silver dells — In these is hid a mighty charm Shall work thy thirsty spirit harm ; Heed not that gilded meteor beam, O ! launch not on that fever-stream. Strive not for fame ! Ah, waste not so The glory and the wine of life ; Crush not that warm, auroral glow. In earth's all-maddening battle-strife ! Go, scale the height, and grasp the prize, Stretch onward to that beckoning goal, Yet know the flame shall scorch thine eyes, Yet know the soar is on thy soul. Aye, scale the height ! but what shall be The guerdon of that strife to thee ? The shout whose wave, tornado-loud. Storms upward round the billowing crowd. The victor's wreath, the name in song Embalmed, and thundered by the throng, That fiery word, that giant thought Which rocked, like some fierce Tropic wind, The oak-boughs of the human mind. 94 THIRST NOT FOR FAME.. What peace, what rapture have they brought ? The trembling hand, the blasted brain, Long days of fear, and nights of pain. The eye which sees no secret hid Beneath the sunset's golden lid ; Affection's myrtle clusters sere, The ear too dull and cold to hear The lily's hymn, the wisdom words Poured from the rippling throat of birds ; That stormy restlessness of heart. That inward, sleepless, rankling smart Which not all earth, nor yet the full Blaze of the Heavenly hills can lull — Such are thy crown, thy glory, bliss, Strong wrestler in a game like this. O, statesman in the Senate-hall, Thou watchman, pacing Zion's wall. Curb down that haughty, lurid flame, Seek not renown, thirst not for fame ! EMIGRAVIT. Ah, broken, broken is the golden bowl S The silver cord is severed, And the ethereal dweller Within the wondr'ous palace, The fine, frail palace of clay. Is launched upon the deep. The Shadowy and Irremeable Ocean, Battling with the storms And tides of the Hereafter. Searcher of unsounded mysteries, Whither is the gentle spirit flown, Now that the walls are broken down. And the moth and the night-wind have entered ? What silence and barren desolations Appal her wanderings, What wildernesses of green worlds With crowns of amaranth. And robes of woven beams shall hail her, (95) 96 EMIGEAVIT. Swinging their rosy censers In silver-throated triumph ? Early they called her — "Went she at the return of flowers And many-song^ d birds, What time the virgin grass Pierces the dull, brown leaves With transparent, tender spears ; With the lily on her brow And the yellow light on her locks, Went she to the City of the Silent, The mighty and marble Capital of Death ; Our footsteps fall slower. Our hearts moan like autumn, And rustle like dead leaves, Since she departed — O how we loved her ! She whose life on earth Was a Sabbath melody. Was as the fall of fountains Sentinelled by bending roses, Hemmed by the fringings of May, Gold of odorous clover and bands of pansies, O how we loved her ! She whose young eyes rested On the white columns of the Temple, Beautiftd, EMIGEAVIT. 97 That shines and shines evermore In the nave of the Heavenly Hills, With the music of her steps, And the glory of her brows, Is gone, is gone Unto the pale Metropolis of death ! The bell, the bell ! that howls to the clouds From a throat of thundering rust. Is roaring and surging and sobbing — Is drenching the thirsty air With billows of iron foam. Dropping its big and brazen tears On the beard of the sorrowing pines — Saying fearful is the sleep of sleeps. The leaden-lidded slumber of Death, Saying the Angel of the Flowers is flown, To come no more — ^no more ! No, no ! over the Sea of Shadows, Into the golden and Twelve-gated City, The palace of our Lord hath she entered Victress ; her from the ari-ow of slander And the duU sickness^ of the heart The gem-bright streets have taken — Ye that tread the living pearl. Open the Everlasting Gates ! 5 EMIGRAVIT. Fill the golden ah- with a psean, The tearless, groanless air of Heaven, And with a diadem crown her, The worthy and beautiful. OLD MAX. Old Max had watched the bursting leaves, And heard the swallows around the eaves, And seen the ripened ears, And rustling shocks of the autumn grain, The kindling grass and the balmy rain Of more than seventy years. His heart was soft, and his soul o'erflowed With gentle thoughts, and though the road Of life was rugged and steep. Some lilies were ever waving around. And amidst the thistles and sands he found Some delicate sheaves to reap. He had loved the godlike human face, The trustful smile and the artless grace Of the simple and sinless child, The clouds and sweet unsyllabled words Of the dreaming brooks and the early birds. And the bank where the violet smiled. (99) 100 OLD MAX. But he leaned to his staff and tottered now, And his ag&d locks were a tuft of snow On a stately and blasted oak, His ear was dull and his eye was dim, And the hills and the garnished clouds, to him Were drowned in a silver smoke. The midpummer green was on the hills, The midsummer light was on the riUs That slept in its smile and dreamed ; And through the vines and in at the door, And over the wall and the sanded floor, Like a wave of molten and golden ore. The banner of Morning streamed. Old Max sat down by the cottage door With woodbine tangled and braided o'er, And a shadow upon him stole — The wing of a bahny, prescient sleep. Of a slumber soft, far-seeing and deep. Went rustling through his soul. He woke — " Come hither, good wife, I pray," He said, " what a vision I've had to-day ! Come, draw your chair to mine, And hear my strange and beautiful dream, OLD MAX. -101 So beautiful that its pictures seem All bathed in a glow divine. O, many a pleasant dream I've had, And some were fearful and some were sad, And woke me to sob and pray ; But never had I a dream so bright. So clothed in a rushing and living light, As the vision that came to day. It was a calm, sweet hour like this, The rosy air ran o'er with the bliss Of the boughs, the birds and sky. The hills had a youthful and silvery light, The blossomy gale, a spirit's flight. As it eddied and wai'bled by. On my hazy eye in a moment rose. Fearful and gloomy, and grim and close, A wall that cut the Heaven, While midway opened a shadowy gate, AU frowning, mouldy and strong and great. Like a rock by earthquake riven. And one drew nigh with a saintly look, A look as fair as an open book. 102 OLB MAX. As fair as the face of a running brook, And bade, me follow on Right through the wall and the frowning gate, The door so sombre and gloomy-great, And the stars and hills were gone ! The stars and hiUs of earth were gone, But another earth around me shone, With its other sun and stars ; Its vault was filled with a softer noon, And the Uly hands of a brighter moon Were braiding their silver bars. Earth's fairest things were gathered there, But aJl a thousand-fold more fair Than aught we see or dream. The glorious fountains rippled and sung A psalm-like peal that made me young With the sound and the golden gleam ; The things I saw no art hath shown, No thought conceived nor book made known. Not the tongue of Christ, nor by holy John In the Patmian Isle were seen — The strength and the gorgeous symmetry. The beauty of cloud and bloom of tree. And the splendor of living green. OLD MAX. 103 A wind blew out of the rosy hills, That spangled the plains, the boughs and rUls, With fiery, musical gold ; I felt the kiss of the Heavenly gales, I saw the glory upon the vales Which mortals never behold ; I saw afar in that wondrous clime The ancient dead and the lost of time, The banished from cold and rain ; And they said to grow, in that country, old. Is ever to wear the locks of gold, To have a glorious youth enfold / The brow with a light and bloom untold, And never to weep again. I heard the rolling of hymns, and then High-browed, majestic and regal men, With a morning smile drew nigh, As if they never had felt a pain, An ache at the heart, or fire in the brain, And never had sought or yearned in vain. And never had heaved a sigh. I clasped again our blue-eyed Joe, On the grass of his little grave, you know 104 OLD MAX. The rain has beat and the crisping snow Of forty winters shone ; I met him, not as we saw him last, With his sweet eye closing and fading fast, Thin hands and a stifled moan ; But he stood a man, and he wore a crown, Which dazzled my eye to look upon, And the radiant hours went by O'er the everlasting groves and springs In seeing and doing all lovely things, And'swelling the joys and the gloryings Of the land of the cloudless sky. Old Maud, that went decrepit and bowed, With an eye so hard and a tone so loud, And to the folds of her pallid shrond For fifty summers is gone, Whose locks were sprinkled with sorrow's rime And gray with trouble before then- time, Had a brow like the dappled dawn." He ceased, and his agfed chin was prest With a helpless weight on his wrinkled breast. And a coldness wrapped his eye ; In his palsied ear was a brazen sound, OLD MAX. 105 A frozen im8t crept over the ground And shrouded the summer sky. They hollowed a grave, and tolled a bell, On the winds and the harvest hills to tell How invisible hands one morning fell And shattered the Bowl of Gold ; But they have never called the old man dead, Ah, no, he is only gone, they said. Gone up the beautiful hUls to tread. To sit with Moses and learn of Paul, And shine with the army of martyrs all, Where never a bell is tolled. 5* MARY DEAD. The beautiful, the loved is gone, The cherished long and fair is dead ; Our God has sealed the dust upon The gentle hand, the youthful head ; Ah, faded is our royal rose. Our myrtle bloom lies pale and low. While death above her glory strows The yew leaf and the cypress bough. O softly tread the darkened room, Where pale and cold our myi-tle lies ; Come, weep the night that shrouds her bloom. And kiss the dust from oflF her eyes ; For earth hath not a form so fair, A heart so pure, a step so light. Such luxury of golden hair As death has borne away to-night. (106) MARY DEAD. 107 O think upon the summer-time, O think upon the tinted flowers, And dream beneath some fairer clime. Where softer flow the rosy hours, And hid the smiling lawn be green ; The blossom wave, the fountain shine, And make thy home a fairy scene. With music and the trailing vine. But o'er the summer's royal glow. The glory and the balm of spring ; The mantling vine, the fountain's flow. The rapture of the trembling string, A gloom will steal, a haunting voice, Like winds that through a ruin moan — " Ah, nevermore shall ye rejoice — The beautiful and loved is gone !" The dirge is sung — ^the shadow falls O'er all of her that we could see, But not o'er that which treads the halls Of light and immortality. O joy for her ! whose footsteps rise To tread the angel's starry home, But woe for us ! whose heavy eyes Must count the snows upon her tomb. 108 MART DEAB. On lip and brow and maiden form, The silence falls, the dust is strown, But high o'er earthly sun and storm The soul o'ersweeps the far unknown ; With shining hand and forehead fair. Calls us those azure halls to tread, And shine with her, a Seraph there — The beautiful — our Mary dead. GOD IN SPRING. HosAiTNAS to Thy Deity for this, Giver of bursting leaves and song and bloom, And the gold opulence of flowers, 'which is A type of man's sure triumph o'er the tomb ! 0, goodly are these ranks of sunny days "VVhich the warm breath of budding woodlands bring; We fling our care away one hour to gaze 'Neath the soft; eyelids of Thy angel, Spring, And lift his silver wing. We win bow down before his face as one Who comes with tidings from the only King — Yea, he is Thine ; Thy hands did weave this crown, These golden garlands round his temples fling ; All mute things know his presence and give praise, The woodbine yearns around his arms to cling Morn weaves his palace from her inmost rays, And sweet birds nestle in his hair and sing, " God of the purple Spring !" [1091 110 GOD IN SPRING. We thank Thee for the morning's vestal blaze, And evening with her looks of soher brown ; We thank Thee for the emerald Summer days And Autumn with her nights of weary moan ; We thank Thee for the quiet Sabbath hours, Which speak for man a fairer blossoming, We thank Thee for the sunset's burnished towers, But more, more than for these, with all they bring, We thank Thee for the Spring ! Angel, thy splendors never could have shone Upon the Orient Uz as here they shine, Else her immortal bard from thee had known A softer music for his glorious line ; He would have seen the bursting of the graves. He would have heard their mouldy silence ring With pseans like the noise of many waves, And ocean's oozy charnels throb and sing Through the green gates of Spring. What is so sweet as clover by the way. So fresh as violets lifting the dead leaves ? What is so downy as a beechen spray. So musical as swallows round the eaves ? What is so queenly as the jasmine bells. Between whose walls the bee forgets his sting ? GOD IN SPRIK-G. Ill Yet these are thine, all these, the spicy dells, The balm, the glorious tints, the caroling, O rosy-footed Spring ! Lover of mossy banks, we welcome thee Back to the orchard paths and yearning hills — Come, hang thy mantle on the crownless tree, And scatter dappled pinks and daffodils ; And we will wreathe thy brow and clasp thy knees With blooms, prefer our fresh thank-offering Of gentle moods, new hopes, while glossy bees Hum through the delicate urns that roll and swing Around thy limbs, O Spring ! The royal blue-bird whose soft vest was dipped Long in the August firmament's rich wave, And the fine robin of thy dews have sipped, And league to sing the blossoms from their grave ; All spirits of the amber-budded boughs Call thee sweet names, Bridegroom of Flowers and King, The distant valleys and the near hedge-rows, The silvery vault and glimmering mountains sing To, delicious Spring ! Great Pan reclined in odorous shades and woke The echoes of the hills, long, long ago, 112 GOD IN SPEING. And white-armed Dryads danced beneath the oak Nor marked the rapid seasons o'er them flow, The Oreads tripped along the mountain ways, But all are past, gone is the Satyr king, A purer breath the grove and woodland sways, And with a better Name the flute-notes ring Of lily-bosomed Spring. Hosannas for the birds and flowers, O God ! I see Thee in the bloom and mellow beams, Tet I am sad even where so lately trod Thy radiant feet and woke the sleeping streams ; Our bosoms for a purer region yearn. We feel the flutter of the immortal wing 'Gainst its clay walls ; unsatisfied we turn From Summer's crown and the fresh tints that fling A glory round the Spring. OUR LITTLE WILLIE. OuE little Willie's step is gone, Our little Willie's eye is dim, The grave another flower has won, The damp brown earth is heaped on him ; We saw it in his thoughtful eye. And by his strange, deep words we knew Too soon our Willie's path would lie Along yon radiant fields of blue. O, can it be that we shall hear The music of that voice no more, And see forever disappear The incarnate brightness from our door ! That we in dreams must smile and sigh And think that Willie still is ours. Then wake to know that on his eye No more shall burst the earthly flowers ? (113) 114 OUR LITTLE WILLIE. The silver lilies guard the brook, The silver lilies star the dell, As coy within her shaded nook. The violet hangs her purple hell ; The sunset burns upon the hills, The wavelets break upon the shore, As lightly leap the shining riils Our Willie's eye shall see no more. We saw the raptures not of earth O'erflow his dreamy, azure eye, Of golden thoughts, we saw the birth. For this dim world too deep and high ; And when we laid our Willie down To sleep, we kissed him with a kiss. As if his eye would greet the dawn Within a brighter world than this. Thus, day by day, we marked his eye. And what we feared we did not speak. We only said, " the birds will fly. And paler grows our Willie's cheek." We idly turned our rustling books And dreamed a vagne, dim dream of ill. And 'midst the flowers and by the brooks. We watched our little WilHe still. OUR LITTLE WILLIE. 115 Across our hearts there crept a fear As rose the night wind's hollow moan, "We heard beneath its cadence drear, A sadder and a wilder tone, — A tolling bell ; but day and night, The lilies bloomed along the vale. We only said, — " his locks are bright And Willie's cheek is growing pale." The hours pursued the flying hours Across the turbid glass of Time, And still he loved the earthly flowers, And still he trod this earthly clime ; We saw the infant hues of Spring Into the rich, dark Summer fkde, We saw the red-bird's fiery wing Flash through a veil of thicker shade. The rich, green Summer flowed along Into the Autumn sad and pale, The birds poured round a parting song That sadder made each sobbing gale ; And while we heard the airy knell Of Summer's bloom and Summer's mirt.h, At noon around our pathway fell A shadow darkening all the earth. 116 OUR LITTLE WILLIE. Across that shadow-gloom we heard The fitful rustle of a pall, The flapping of Death's ebon bird, The fresh earth on a coffin fall ; We miss some locks of sunny hair, And one sweet voice's breezy sound, A lip, as any rose's fair. And still the shadow wraps us round. And yet we do not think him gone — Not gone, but only " sent before," "We only say that he is flown Where but the Seraph's wing may soar ; That still he lives, and while our tears Bedew the little paths he trod. Each moment where he is, but bears Him nearer to the heart of God. MY EARLY FRIENDS. A SHADOW falls, a blight descends on all the joys of earth, And evermore a bnrial chant is mingling with their mirth. All earthly things are hastening on to their appointed ends, Till dust, at last, with kindred dust, within the shadow Mends : Forever, as the globe along her starry cycle rolls. Within the soul Time's hollow bell some shattered idol toUs, And though with Him, who sits on high, whose golden Throne around. Shine Seraphim, and Cherubim, the beautiful and crowned. There is no change, no funeral train, no sad array of death, Though all the universe at once groan out its dying breath, (117) 118 MY EARLY FRIENDS. With US below, while yet the winds through heaven's blue arches range, There must be tears and breaking hearts and weari- ness and change. Where ar^ my friends, where now are gone the dear familiar faces, That held within my heart, so well, their high and holy places ? Whose eyes were as the early light upon the opening flower. As woodbine to the roving bee, as music to the bower ? What cloud has overcast their eyes, why have they learned to range. Or is it I that so forget — O, is it I that change ? Ah, I have lived to feel the power, the ivy -touch of Time, Across my heart his shadow falls, upon my locks, his rime ; Mine is not now the fresh, young heart it was in days agone. While on youth's purple mountains danced the kind- lings of the dawn ; Where are my friends, where now are gone the dear familiar faces. That nobly held within my heart theii" green and gol- den places ? MY EARLY FRIENDS. 119 Some o'er the dark tempestuous wave their distant way are taking, Some sleep the sleep that knows no dream, no moan- ing and no waking, And some, who walk among the flowers, survive with hearts as cold As those above whose final throb the clashing bell has tolled ; And some, whose love still burns for me, are sundered from my eye By leagues on leagues the swallow's wing might scarcely dare to try ; Far back along the garnered fields of the gray reaper, Time, Like birds that seek their last year's nest within some distant clime. Thought wanders o'er the lonely shrines to sleepless memory dear. And from their lustre wipes the rust of many a sap- ping year ; Around me rise the sylvan hills in rich familiar green. And onward stretch the grassy slopes with shining brooks between. Still there the broad old chestnut gleams in whose luxuriant shade, 120 MY EARLY FRIENDS. I sought, at noon, the smooth, brown nuts and gayly laughed and played ; They come, they come, the merry band, the young the light of heart. Beneath whose feet, along the turf, the blue-eyed vio- lets start ; And one there stands around whose lips the youthful graces play, More bright than smiles the rose of June, more beauti- ful than May, The hazel dell and willowy nook return upon my view, With all their blessed memories of sunlight, birds, and dew; Again there steals across my brow that thrilling sense of spring. Such as alone our Northern hills and Northern breezes bring ; The peach and apple blooms I haU with that upgush- ing joy. Which only stirs the veins of one, and he the dream- ing boy ; Upon the purple bough I mark the robin's well-wrought nest. And straining o'er the rim two bright eyes and a ruddy breast ; MY EARLY FRIENDS. 121 Afar like seas of rippled gold the meadow lands ex- tend, Whose bands of glad-eyed butter-cups with fringed daisies blend ; Once more with crimsoned hands I bend o'er the lush strawberry beds, Amidst the perfume floating up from soft, rich clover heads, Adown the vale long, twinkling swaths lie stretched in green array. And crowded barns are showering out the balm of garnered hay ; Now o'er the lea, now up the hill, rolls on the loaded wain And lusty scythes are flashing out amidst the bending grain; When from the school, I, light of heart, once more have homeward run, A mother's tender smile is mine, a sister's silvery tone ; Ah, whither float the shadows swift that sweep the autumn lands. And whither fades the name that's traced along the ocean sands ? I sometimes yearn to know if, when that awful day shall rise, 122 MY EARLY FRIENDS. Whose trump shall rouse the shrouded dead to pass the Great Assize, Our God will bring the buried Past, to day immortal, back. With all the flowers and stars that hung above its winding track. And with those stars and blossoms crown the holy and the blest. As through the golden gate they pass to their eternal rest ; Those blessed hours are with the dead, those dearest forms are gone. And now their sad, reproachful ghosts across my memory moan ! And some, who still are with the flowers, to me are dead or cold As are the brows o'er which the bell its brazen dirge has rolled ; And some, who live and love me still, are sundered from my eye By leagues on leagues the swallow's wing might scarcely dare to try ; Gone are the dear young friends that roved a merry band with me, The clover dell, the singing brook, the soft and shaven lea; MY EARLY FRIENDS. 123 They haunt the sunshine of the day, they rise upon my dreams With all the glory of the Past, the murmur of its streams, Through the long night within my soul their mourn- ful vigils keep, And from my eyelids chase away the downy-fingered sleep ; O, I will weave a cypress wreath for those I vainly mourn And bid it twine for evermore round Friendship's holy urn! THE HILLS OF THE DELAWARE. No glorious bard hath ever touched his lyre, Hills of the fount and crag, in praise of yon, Or sung in accents mellow as the tints That settle round your brows on autumn eves, Your beauty and your glory ; yet are these The dower which God hath given to clothe your vales And roll in streams along your jagged sides. The spring breathes on you from the odorous South, And silvers o'er your boughs and stars your dells With blossoms strangely beautiful ; the wren Chatters beside the thicket and darts in And out perpetually ; the delicate moss Trails, gleaming, o'er your perpendicular crags. And with its soft veil hides their cloven jaws ; A wild, free fragrance from the swelling buds Of maple, brier and birch and fanlike fern. Loads all the pulses of the early gale — A perfume that will vie with those which greet The traveller whose homesick footsteps thread The far Sabean groves ; the squirrel bounds (124) THE HILLS OF THE DELAWARE. 125 Prom branch to branch amid your shadows, low And dull, like thunder muffled in its cloud. The pheasant's rapid drum rolls through the gloom. From -prostrate trunk thick-robed in yielding moss ; The social red-breast on the swinging bough Here builds her mud-wrought castle, and all day Broods on her smooth, blue eggs, whilst her large cyr Peers o'er the rough, brown edge upon the head Of him who from the city's weary noise Has come to stir the quiet of these shades With loiteiing step ; the timid deer lifts up His craggy head, snuffing the fluttering gale. And with a bound across the dim ravines. And up the steep and down the pebbly gorge, Shoots like an arrow ; waters cool and sweet As ever glittered through Arcadian mead, Fountains that never fail, and living streams, Gush through the twisted roots of oak and beech. Or trickle from the seams of bald, old rocks, — Seams that were scarred into their flinty brows In some old war that shook the dreaming earth Long ere her valleys were the dwellmg-place Of man or saurian ; and he whose eye Can feast on architecture's mellowest lines. And the strong column's breathing symmetry, — Here let him rove, and gaze on fairer forms 126 THE HILLS OF DELAWARE. Than gleamed ai-ound the lordly fane of her Whose praise rolled like a river through the streets Of ancient Ephesus — yea, prouder shafts Than in Pentelic marble rose and shone From the eternal Parthenon. No axe Rung on their sides, no sounding chisel fell, Yet beauty clothes them as a dewy veil — Shines in each curve and breathes in every line ; Unhewn they stand, their architect was God ! And when the gorgeous-tinted Summer comes To rear her tent amid these winding aialea And pointed arches, he who wanders here Need wonder not why the deep heart of man Hath ever peopled the old glorious woods With more than human forms, bright nymphs and fauns, Dryads and fair and gentle deities Who wake the hoary shades with whispering sounds And snatches of unearthly melody. And when the Wind-king rises in his power And blows his trumpet from the topmost crags. Calling his viewless squadrons to swift war Against the homes of men, the waves and woods, Then a prophetic thrill stirs aU the aisles Of the old wilderness, — a biUowy wail Rises from the green ocean of the leaves, THE HILLS OF DELAWARE. 12 7 And far along the wakening tree tops runs ; A note of challenge from the bearded pines Rings out to meet the winds that come in might, With shouts and billows of exultant sound : — Trunks writhe before the blast, and with a groan Sink to their graves ; the mighty hemlock flings His arm against the front of the unseen Assaulting bands in vain ; he yields, he bows Before the invader with a giant's death That shakes the solitude ; while o'er the vale. With all its universe of surging boughs ; And o'er the purple edges of the world. Far off the rushing diapason dies. And Autumn, bright-hued mourner at the bier Of Summer, emulous of yonder gold And jasper tints that tremble round the gate Of Sunset, or like banners flow and swing From the far battlements, as if the gods Held festival within the courts of heaven, — Autumn with all her gold and amethyst, And rainbow waifs and waves, walks o'er your brows. As she walks not the realms of olive, lime. And the perpetual palm ; and Winter sits With frost and icicle and robe of pearl. Hills of the Delaware, upon your tops, A glory and a diadem to see. THE RATTLESNAKE. Eaeth hath a thousand tongues that sing An unrecorded melody, And many a loathly, creeping thing Hath beauty that we cannot see — A veiled or slighted majesty ; A slow-paced worm that all deride, A look, a breeze may dash aside, The arm of strength, the crown of pride ; A breath too faint to lift the flower, A moonbeam or a tone hath power To crush us in the evil hour, As bold and thoughtful men will tell. Who thread the wild and pierce the dell, And climb the cliffs and splintered rocks. Rent by the old-world Vulcan-shocks, "Where thou, dread mountain king, dost lie, With spotted mail and flaming eye, And thy huge, quivering volume rolled In purple spire and bristling fold. Within thy walls of matted brake, Grim-couchant, terrible Rattlesnake ! (128) THE EATTLESXAKE. 129 To hail the portals of the grave 'Midst roaring gun and ringing glaive, 'Midst limbs by foamiag chargers trod, And grappling hands and slippery sod. And long, loud-bolted cannon-ode — To hear the howl, the hiss and clash Of waves on waves that madly dash, Then to our boiling foam-couch leap From blue Niagara's thunder-steep ; To see at midnight, flashing nigh, Powerless to parley or to fly — The couchant tiger's lurid eye, Then meet the quick, tremendous bound That dashes out our gasping breath In pattering blood-gouts o'er the ground — O, this is horror, this is death Which he who blanchless meets, must feel His brain engirt with triple steel. And earth hath many a gloomy path Steep-slanting to the realm of Death, Less mighty than the whirlwind's wrath. Or tiger's bound or volleyed scath Of battle's blue, vindictive breath ; And in our dells and by the rills, And on the rock-embattled hills, And deep within the lonely wood 6* 130 THE RATTLESNAKE. Where the young panther moans for food, There have been shrieks and eyes grew dim, That saw the branches round them swim, And felt a sudden shadow fall As from the concave's vestal wall, And mossy plain and vaulted blue Go rocking from their dizzy view, Where thou, beside the mouldering trunk, That in the moist, dark earth hath sunk. And by the cleft thy bower dost make. Death-darting, fiery Rattlesnake ! Fierce dweller 'midst the rocky glades. And lonely, damp, enormous shades Of hoary oaks and clarion pines. And chaos of gigantic vines, That, when the night- winds on them ro*, Their leafy hallelujahs pour. As if, upon their golden cars. To chain the ear of rushing stars, Appalling worm ! thy home is where The wild wolf makes his dreary lair — 'Midst crimson moss and cypress shade, And brambles' thorny palisade — The hunter from his pathway starts, His pulses fly with wilder bound, THE KATTLESNAKE. 131 As thy fierce eye upon him darts, Like lightning leaping from the ground, Where through the sundered boughs, in gold, A blush from Morning's cheek hath rolled, In which, with trickling venom warm. Gleams, like a brand, thy lurking form. While thy quick rattle — quick and keen, Rings through the lonely sylvan scene. But if, of danger unaware. His foot impinge thy curtained lair*, Thy fang disclosed, thy form dilate With kindling ire and instant fate. Thou launchest on the unheeding foe, God ! what a last, electric blow. That sends the rocks, the hills and sky In misty ruin reeling by ! Thy glittering coils to men disclose A symbol of all mortal woes— Down through the long, dim ages gone, Thought roves in gloom and silence on, To where the Eden rills and bowers To rapture charmed the radiant hours. And where, beside the Mystic Tree, Lay One who wore a shape like thee. And chained with lotus- words the ear 132 THE RATTLESNAKE. Of her who could not choose but hear. Yet, reptile, round whose savage home, Men pause and shudder as they roam, Upon thy fiery shape I gaze In reverent awe of Him whose ways Alike, are with the infant's woes. And earthquake's hoarse. Titanic throes ; And in thy folds and burning eyes — Like brewing storms in Tropic skies, A fierce, barbaric beauty lies, And tells that He whose hand hath piled Andes' serene, tremendous brows In domes of everlasting snows. Amidst the swoop, the growl and clang Of whirlwinds' wings unmoved to hang, Hath made thee terrible and wild. And tipped with death thy gleaming fang. SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. Long have we looked for thy returning sail Across the bleak north foam, O brave Sir John ; Long watched, from o'er the wave, thy bark to haU, And grasp the mystery of that realm unknown ; We yearn to greet thee back, O tempest-tossed ! From thy own eloquent Kps to hear, to know The gloom and splendor of the starry frost. The secrets of the everlasting snow ; Ah me ! when thou dost o'er the deeps return, Thou shalt bring braver tidings to our shore Than of the thundery ice, the frost, the roar Of Northern storms : thou, of that distant bourne Which holds our loved and lost, shalt bring the key That locks fi-om mortal view death's awful mystery. (183) WHEN I AM GONE. Thb round, green earth Will roll and roll, And warm to birth Soul after soul ; The wind will roar, The wind will wail, Grim clouds will pour Rain, snow and hail, Niagara thunder, And childhood wonder. When I am gone. The sun wiU rise On bustling trade, On Hope's young eyes, On War's red blade — God knows how long His race will run, (184) WHEN I AM GONE. Igg How steadfast, strong, Is the great, red Sun ; And woods will glimmer, And ivy shimmer. When I am gone. In cities proud, ' With their streets a-glow, The throbbing crowd Lite a wave will flow : The gay will laugh, The sad repine. Despair will quaff The amber wine. Therefrom to borrow A charm for sorrow, When I am gone. The bird wUl sing From the bending spray, The lily spring By the woodland way ; What seemed as gold But dross wUl prove. And hearts grow cold And woman love. 136 WHEN I AM GONE. And moonbeams twinkle, And fountains tinkle, When I am gone. And youths and maids By moonlit streams — In whispering shades, Will weave love dreams, Lone hearts in pain Will moan and bleed, And worth in vain Will claim its meed, And domes' will crumble, And billows rumble. When I am gone. THE OLD MAN'S STORY. In Boston streets were whispered fears, And anxious brows and woman's tears, But the solemn night fell broad and still, While the fearless heart and the iron will Were gathered apart on Bunker Hill, Where the banner of Freedom flew ; All night was a hollow and boding sound Of cleaving steel in the pebbly ground. There were hoary heads and horny hands. From the mountain paths, and the harvest lands Had poured their resolute, yeoman bands. Brave Spartan souls and true. All night the watching stars looked down On the murmuring wave and the sleeping town, But sleep to the toiler's eye oame none. For ere the set of to-morrow's sun Must a bolt be launched and a blast be blown To bow the lordly head ; 'Neath the sleepless stars and the muffling shades With a panther's tread and a sound of spades, (137) 138 THE OLD man's STORY. We toiled till a rampart strong and high Arose, whence the leaden hail might fly On the foe that should dare our wrath defy When the Orient gates grew red. In the shrouding dark our fortress grew As a seed will pierce to the breeze and dew In a single night, and the halmy hay We piled from the lawn that round us lay, To hold the waves of the foe at bay, As they glittered and billowed on ; A thousand from furrow and field we stood, No trembling slaves, no craven brood ; We knew that the tread of Death was nigh, That the hour for the strong on the turf to lie, Of the ghastly limb and the glassy eye. Would come with the coming dawn. Slow rolled the fearful night away From earth and main, and the early ray Burst over the hills and the purple sea. The crowding roofs and the velvet lea. As if no dying or wrong could be In a world so bright and fair ; In the city then, with the rousing foe, There was arming and rushing to and fro. THE OLD man's STORY. 1'39 The loud command and the stormy beat Of drums and the clang of steel-clad feet, And the dash of steeds through the surging street, And the trumpet's grating blare. With the hostile bands and their leaders brave, There was hasting down to the level wave ; 'Neath the sulphury pall and the volleyed roar. There was speeding the narrow waters O'er ; Their prows have jarred on the fatal shore Where the Rebel has ta'en his stand ; On the thin, gray air of morning comes A scream of fifes and a storm of drums — On our fate ten thousand dim eyes gaze, And white, white lips a prayer upraise To God, who the battle and biUow stays. And shivers the tyrant's band. It was a glorious sight to see Those shining men, like a ruby sea. All billowing up where the Rebel foe Like angry lions were crouching low, With a scythe of fire at a breath to mow Their ranks like yellow grain, Like warping jasper the columns gleamed. In gold and crimson the banners streamed, 140 Like a river of pearl was the music poured. The eddying smoke o'er the waters soared, And the cannon upon our rampart roared Again, again, again. With a measured tread and a dauntless eye, To our front the hostile ranks drew nigh, On our lion bands a stillness came, A tremor ran through the martial frame, Each eye had a prisoned and lurid flame, A glitter of Etna fire ; Up the sloping green with a Wenchless eye, The foe to the waiting foe drew nigh ; Erom end to end of the steep redoubt, A roar and a burning storm burst out, A sound like Earthquake's hungry shout When realms in his jaws expire. When the blaze and the rocking din were o'er, There was rushing back to the quaking shore, For the hail-stone blast and the fiery rain Had burst on the foemen not in vain, And tho furrowed earth was heaped with slain, Where the tempest's scythe had been. Again, again, up the smooth hillside, Rolls the flashing columns' tremendous tide, THE OLD man's STORY. 141 But the Rebel guns have blazed once more With a redder storm and a fiercer roar, And a ruddier sea of the Briton's gore Has foamed on the broken green. They sank in the teeth of that mowing rain, They roUed and struggled in mortal pain. They reeled and they dropped, they rose and they fell Through spouting gore with a frantic yell, They leaped to the greedy jaws of hell From the smoke of Bunker HUl ; Again, again, with a fiery eye The rallying foe to the foe drew nigh With thrust for thrust and gun to gun 'Neath the thunder-wing of the war-cloud dun Was the bloody field from the Rebels won, And the battle-roar grew still. There were breakiag hearts when the strife was o'er For the light of eyes that should come no more, But the Rebel people were glad that day. For the foe that dumb in the death-sleep lay. For the fetter of tyranny rent away, And the blast of battle's God, From the Briton's stronger arm we fled. But his flower on the smoking turf lay dead, 142 THE OLD MAN'S STOBY. And monarchs a glanee of terror threw Where the Patriot blood was dropped like dew, And the palm of Liberty sprung and grew On the red N"ew England sod. BKADDOCK'S FIELD. Said one whose temples shone like frosts upon the autumn plain Where only withered stalks, to tell of summer's pride, remain, " Many and many a year has flown, my locks with time are white — Locks that around my infant brow hung like the plumes of Night, This ear is didl, this arm is weak, these eyes with age are dim, That heard the roar, that strove, that gazed upon the carnage grim ; I was a youth, I loved my gun, a sword, the books that tell Of plains where war's hot, crashing bolts on frantic thousands feU ; It was upon those fearful days when o'er the far fron- tier The death-whoop at the dead of night smote on the settler's ear; (143) 1-ii braddock's field. To fatter, mother, sister, friend, we spake the low fare- well, With nodding plume and jarring drum down many a savage dell, O'er rock and plain and roaring stream, by sunlight and by star, To meet the lurking foe in fight we wandered long and far, "While foremost in our daring band, in manly bloom rode on. Bold Braddock and the stately form of brave, young Washington ; TUl on a time, one balmy morn within the ringing June, While woods put on their richest hues, brooks sang their blithest tune. Where blue Monongahela shone through banks of pleasant green. We stood and saw his smile leap up the clasping boughs between ; It was a lonely spot and wild, where never white-man's tread Had come to scare the browsing deer or crush the violet's head. But where, as down the verdant wilds, the river slid and foamed. beaddock's field. 145 The beaver reared his mimic town, the bear and otter roamed, And all the sounds that stirred the gloom were but the panther's howl. The clamor of the wheeling crow, or sob of hooded owl — I said within my soldier's heart that it were well to lie In such a spot, so still and green, when o'er my swim" ming eye. Amidst the roar and crack of guns, by scalping knife or baU, The winter of the grave should come that ever comes on all. Down by the river's marge we toiled through all the summer day, Then turaed into the neighboring hills, a steep and rocky way — Our step was free, our thoughts were light, as step and thought should be Of those who, for their homes and wives march on to victory, And, dreaming, see the conflict o'er and through the war-cloud dun, Hear, bursting round, the fierce huzza which says the day is won ! 146 bbaddock's riELD. But sometimes o'er our warrior pride a ghastly glimpse would come, Of limbs gnawed by the snarling wolf and of the lonely home, And, darkling on the soul, a dull, blue lip would whis- per well, How death might lurk in summer leaves, and from the mossy dell The rifle launch its bloody hail and roar the savage yell. Farther and farther on we toiled with cannon, blade and plume. Till round us, liLj a mighty wing, hung the old forest gloom ; The woodflowers gave a pleasant smell, the wind went laughing by. We heard its footfall on the boughs betwixt us and the sky ; Huge, glistening pines and beeches wove an ebon dome of shade Through which the sun, in fiery globes and golden islets, played Upon the leaves, the dull, dead leaves that crackled to our tread — That crackle shot across my soul a shudder and a dread, beaddock's hrld. 147 My heart grew sick, a viewless hand seemed on my shoulder laid That held me back until I grew of leaf and breeze afraid, A whisper came that ran and moaned through all that leafy place, And said I never, nevermore should see my mother's face! Up through a lonesome dell we wound where smooth, green mosses o'er The twisted roots and rough, brown stones had spread a yielding floor ; Luxuriant o'er the broad hillside the knotted laurel grew. And sharp, gray rocks against the limbs their wrinkled brows upthrew ; And now a stillness came that seemed the very winds to fill, No murmur trembled in the dell, no whisper on the hm. The silence tingled on our ears it was so deep and still: And nothing told how, lurking round, all burning for the fray. Eight hundred painted savages with leveled rifles lay, Till, flashing from a cavemed rock, on leaf and blade and plume, 148 bkaddock's field. A solitary musket-flash lit up the woody gloom ; And he who next before me walked with one tremen- dous leap, Sank down upon the hollow stones in the unwaking sleep ; We started, bent our eager gaze along the bordering shade, Where'er the matted vines a hold for couchant foe had made ; A moment — and from rock and air and earth there burst a yell, Such as the gnashing fiends may ring from the red jaws of hell — A roar as when in earthquake's lips a mountain splits and sways, And oceans leap their rocky bourne, and cities crash and blaze ! We stood like men and storm for storm back on the foe returned. Till one red, hissing wall of fire the reeling valley burned. And down as roars the trampling hail upon the tender grain. So rushed upon our startled band that murderous bat- tle rain ; braddock's field. 149 And madly back, through storm for storm, our bullets smote like rain, They dashed amidst a viewless foe as harmlessly and vain Girt in by death, with quivering hearts, yet unsubdued and brave, We stood, recoiled, rushed on and wheeled each o'er his open grave ! From rock and brake and blasted trunk, behind, aside, before, The havoc rushed, the deluge blazed and boiled the savage roar ; Our friends, our foes, woods, earth, and sky grew a tremendous one. That reeked in gore and rocked in flame and round us yawned and spun ; There seized our sinking hearts, of life, one wild and lurid thought. So fierce, tyrannic and intense, we knew not that we fought, Nor heeded, though at every step we stumbled o'er the slain. How long our weeping wives and babes would look for us in vain ; We saw the end, we knew our doom, we felt as men whose last 150 beaddock's field. Of mortal days and griefs and joys sweeps by them to the past ; Earth rocked beneath our feet, her flowers, her moun- tains and her skies, Her summer green and autumn pomp went mocking from our eyes, On lifted sword and gun and Umb, with duU and shivering sound, I heard the whistling bullets crash and from the beeches bound ; Down sank my brother at my side, sank with a mighty groan That smote upon my ear above the battle's drowning moan — O Heaven ! it was a sight to freeze, most murderous and appalling. To see in troops like helpless beasts one's comrades round him falling. And through their sumless agonies on God and Jesus calling ; From gaping breast and shattered brow to see the hot blood spouting, And the soul take wing amidst the din, the carnage, and the shouting ! And now, as still in redder wrath the roaring tempest fell. braddock's field. 151 We broke, we flew and left oiu* slain within that bloody dell! Then rose a yell that rocked the hills and as we forward dashed Like frighted deer, through brain and limb the smok. ing hatchet crashed ; I stumbled in the race and fell; a howl, a tiger bound And then a huge and brawny hand had pinned me to the ground ! That fearful, dark hand seized my hair, I felt the gleam- ing blade Assail the locks with which my sainted mother's hand had played ; My eye grew dark, I have a sense, a memory vague and dull, How that cold, glittering edge at last creaked on my naked skull ; I know no more — if pulseless heart, stilled breath and darkened eye Are death, beneath that blade I died as much as man may die ; I woke to know that yet I lived and that the foe were gone, And I was left with ghastly men and howling wolves alone — 162 braddock's field. To know that, sped by unseen hands, before his deed was done, A ball across his prostrate foe had stretched the forest's son, Stretched on my neck the dark, huge breast where gaped a mighty wound. Whence as the blood came bubbling through it baked me to the ground ; I woke to learn of better things which God had kept for me, For in the New Jerusalem no more shall fighting be. THE COMET, Led by no hand along thy fiery path Save the Omnipotent, from out the gulphs, The caverns of illimitable space, From night's remotest and unsounded seas Whose every drop is some resplendent sun, Thou rushest forth in mystery and awe, rover of the grand and solemn heavens ! What thousands turn the wondering gaze to thee At this calm hour, where thou dost sheathe thy pale, Tremendous sword in the abyss of stars ! With quivering nerve the rapt astronomer Poises the mighty tube and flings a rein. An unseen curb upon thy flaming jaws To bring thee nigh that he may read thy birth. And trace the inscription on thy fiery brow And map thy journey through the starry fields. The prattling child, through the dim window pane. Whilst tvrilight settles on the crimson hills, Lifts his moist eye and wonders what thou art. (153) 7* 154 THE COMET. And tanned, unlettered men whose horny hands, With honest toil, have earned the bread that makes Their lowly homes a shrine for happiness. Pause by the way and turn a thoughtful glance Upon the fiery stranger. The old man Upon whose eyes the yeai's have spread a film That flings a haze across the mid-day sun, Turns half in vain to where thy streaming locks Leave on the vault their track of hairy fire. Nay, what art thou that blazest on our eyes So strangely and so wildly — so unlike The heavenly host, the planets, the sweet moon. And earth, with all her clouds and streams and groves. That run their dazzling, everlasting round Without a pause, a jar, a moment lost, Or note discordant in the glorious scale ? Thou rushest down, unbidden and alone, Upon the night from out the frosty space. The gulphs of being, the untrodden realms Known but to God. What couldst thou tell of them, If power were thine to carve thy history In words of flame along the evening vault ? What royal hieroglyphics dost thou bring, What radiant prophecies, what omens, sounds Prom the eternities, if our cold ears THE COMET. 155 Could hear, and our dull eyes interpret, them ? Where is thy birthplace, what thy errand here Bathing thy sides in the cool waves of night, Whilst the great hurricane of God's swift breath Streams o'er thy brow and blows thy fiery locks Backward in floods of pallid flame to bend Across the headlands of the universe ? What is thy pui-pose in that glorious plan Which knows no jars or discords? where the bourne To which thou sweepest onward with a speed That baffles contemplation ? Dost thou come To tell us of our littleness, that we Have lost communion with the Invisible ? To tell us that our lives are dry and poor And ghastly with our vices ? that, like thine, Our path is wayward, wild, far, far away From Him who is the Centre and the Sun Of peace, joy, glory, immortality? Is this the lesson thou wouldst downward pour Upon the world from thy mysterious track? A lesson that already hath been carved In darkness, carnage, smoke, despair and grief, On rock and flower, on every foot of earth And man's most aching' heart ? Art thou a type Of our sad world with all its multitudes Of homeless, blind, despairing, hungry souls, 156 THE COMET. Crying for light yet cleaving to the dark, Writhing beneath the thirst that bums their lips, Yet turning madly from the Blessed Fount That sparkles at their feet ? O, art thou such, Pale rover of the night, and art thou here To tell the oft-reverberated tale That we are smitten, banished from the songs And flowers of life's primeval harmonies ? That we are fallen from beauty, strength and lov- — That our thoughts, blind, discordant, walk no m.v:e The bright, melodious highway of the stars. But, like thee, broken from the Central Sun And Fount, whose every beam and wave is life, They wander chartless, hopeless, down the void Of night and clouds and everlasting storms ? Does the ethereal tract thou rovest look Ground unfamiliar to thine eye, or hath Thy flaming bulk traveled the selfsame round In the dim ages gone, so long ago That all the sand-grains which the moaning sea Breathes on and tosses from his frothy lips. Must fail to equal the stupendous lapse ? Hereafter shall the children of the earth Behold thy quivering, vast, ill-omened lamp Blazoning the night, or does the mystic path THE COMET. 157 Thou treadest, darkling, seek the unknown realms, The seas of crude, unformed, chaotic worlds. The fathomless tracts, the awful solitudes. Whence neither chance, nor years, nor G9d's high will Shall give thee to men's eyes forevermore ? Thou answerest not save with thy fiery hair That streams and quivers up the starry dome As if in winds that o'er thy forehead blow From the eternities ! thou sweepest on To thy uncharted and mysterious goal — Even while I gaze thy splendor fades away From the cold Heavens — ^into the solemn depths, Without a sound, thou sinkest and art gone. COAL. At the hour when eve or silence, in the pensive realm of thought, Hath, to trace God's ways of wonder, a completer vision wrought, I have asked the winds and mountains, asked the star- revealing Night, With her soundless gulphs of darkness and her crowns of ruddy light, Which of all the regal secrets of the rock, the air and deep, ShaU, as sumless ages onward, with their tears and trophies sweep. Rise to heal the wounds of nations by the iiend. Oppression, trod. And to palsied hands and bosoms, summon back the banished God, Till a new, upon the ashes of the former, world shall blooin. As the May dethrones the winter, as a lily crowns a tomb ; (158) COAL. 159 And a shout comes from the mountains, leaves and waves and rocks reply, And the prescient Night gives answer from her starred infinity, Up old Ocean's twilight caverns long, responsive echoes roU, And the silence and the whirlwind give the torrent- answer " coal !" Goal is King, henceforth, of nations, of the senate, schoolroom, mart, On the stern highways of traffic and in Woman's softer heart. He shall verify the fable of the royal Age of Gold, When a villa with its fountains for a poet's love was sold. He shall consecrate the kingdoms mad with war's incessant gong, Drown the murderous blare of cannon, break the tyrant's iron thong ; Coal shall plough the midway ocean, turn the spindle, pile the tower. Sow the rock and reap the desert, whet the scythe and plant the flower. Coal shall turn the rumbling millstone, speed the shut- tle, whirl the saw, Blow the forge and spin the cotton, polish, dig and lift and draw ; 160 COAL. Coal shall crowd the wave with navies, joint the cofSn, square the beam And, to do his bidding, summon forth the harnessed Typhon, Steam ; Gold into a groom is fallen and in yellow trappings •light, Stands at the rich banquet pouring red wine to his helmfed knight ; Brave King-Coal shall stand the sponsor for the infant at the font, Be the Babel-tower whose windings men to power and fame shall mount ; Great King-Coal shall be a rival in the maiden's love- sick eyes, 'Gainst attorney, poet, priest, with all their vows and burning sighs! Then from out his sombre palace rolls the grimy Mon- arch's voice Down the rosy gales of morning like an infant world's rejoice. When from night's blank gulph it rushes with a shout like meeting tides, With its robe of queenly verdure rippling down its lustrous sides. And like strangled thunder quivering round his rock- roofed, ebon throne, COAL. 161 Over town and wharf and ocean thus its hollow accents run — In the bosom of the mountains I have waited age on age, Spelling out strange hieroglyphics from Fate's mystic," iron page. Hearing sounds and clarion whispers from the wide abyss whence rolls Planet after planet glorious with its flowers and yearn- ing souls. Hearing streams of mystic music wander round me through the dark, Smoothing even the brow of horror, like the raptures of a lark, Hearing, sunward, through the gloom, the silent sprout- ing of the pine, And the oak-roots sturdy fibres round the splintered granite twine, Through the solemn-paced millenniums, through the golden-granuled rock. Love's great pulses throbbing slowly like the ticking of a clock ; I beheld the Future open like a temple vast and dim. Thronged by phantoms, plagues, convulsions, priests and warriors, gory-grim ; Dark the van-way, but the postern plunged within a sea of stars, 162 COAL. All the columns hung with trophies from the wrecks of giant wars — Bloody in the light that slanted through the huge, black window bars ; Then the vision grew to clearer, valleys glimmered as they spread, Full of eager life and motion, where the living trod the dead. Where men rose and smote their brothers, raving for a crumb of bread ; Weak men bowed before the stronger, lifting up a ghastly gaze, With a speechless prayer for respite to the dark and grinding days, Armfed hosts rolled through the mountains smiting kingdoms, shaking thrones. Till the sweet breath of the woodlands eddied in the storm of groans. All with Fate were wrestling weakly, prisoned, hesitat- ing numb — Standing in a gorgeous temple, as the gods they wor- shiped, dumb ; Each mistrustful of his brother, where he should be honored, loathed. Faithless, earthly-sensual, crying " wherewithal shall I be clothed.?" COAL, 163 Each, amidst the war of interests, falling wounded by the way, As upon his march to Mecca falls the pilgrim worn and gray, And from where he stumbled, bleeding, and by feet of iron trod, Asking of his fallen brother if he still believed in God ! Stars and elements grew hostile — ^thought beheld her bloom expire In the long, unhoping struggle with the thistle and the brier ; Cold and heat and breeze and blossom leagued to pierce the toiler, man, Saying that his birthright ended where his tugging life began — Ended in an endless slumber, a Lethean, blank abyss, And the black womb of a barren, atheistic nothing- ness ! Age by age I lay and pondered, lay and wore my rocky bands, Pelt my heart lean outward, yearning toward the streams and sunny lands, Saw the weary nations' struggling for a good they might not reach. Striving for the soul's free utterance in a faint and broken speech, 16J: COAL. Through the cold, gray rock above me, heard the rus- tle of the leaf. Heard the whispers of the lilies and the autumn's. hoUow grief, Heard the growling of the lions and the brazen feet of storms. Heard their wet wings trailing, flapping on the bare crag's seamed forms, Heard the clang of manufactures rolling up from spirfed towns, Saw the smoke from giant cities wrap the cattle on the downs ; Saw the big drops slant like hail-stones from the hot, red brow of Toil, Telling of a hopeless warfare with the hardness of the soil — Saying, hard had been the grapple with the hardness of the soil ; Saw the pallid worker shrinking from his heartless task undone Through the arrows of the Northwind and the ardors of the sun ; I beheld the forest flying from the woodman's roaring stroke rill the army of the harvest from its ashen grave awoke, COAL. 165 With its spears and yellow banners slanting from the western gale, As from gold Apollos forehead slants the comet's lurid traU; Rivers fled their channels, leaving leagues of gray and crisped stone, And the water-wheel grew silent, rifled of its showery zone ; " Fuel, ftiel, or we perish !" loud the wailful cry arose Through the groaning of the ice-wind and the terror of the snows, Then my heart grew warm with pity when I saw them warring Weakly, With the wasting and the famine and the hail that smote them bleakly. Then I loved them, longed to help them, longed to tell them where I lay. Teaming for the floods and breezes and the goodly light of day. Longed to tell them of my minion^ Steam, the thun- der-throated god. How he lurked in riUs and dew-beads, how he laughed to see them plod, How he danced in the morasses and in hollows of the trees. From the glassy dip of cataracts blowing fumes like amber bees, 166 COAL. How he wrestled, ran and swaggered, saying lie the glohe could puU ; With the shoulders of a lion and the thick neck of a hull, Vaunting he could rive an iceherg as a cannon rives a skull ; Thus I sat and watched the toilers from my cavern day by day, Longed to help them, yearned to tell them of the future's greener way. Longed to tell them what a prophet 'neath the roots slept unrevealed, What a silver-worded poet dreamed beneath the leaves, concealed. What a right-arm of a giant lay imprisoned in a rock. Waiting till the key of fate should thunder in the flinty look, Heard the waxen pine-cone falling on the brown leaves overhead, Felt the small birds plucking jnosses round their cal- low young to spread. Tried to breathe into their ears the wondrous mys- tery of the hUls, Tried to tell it to the blossoms, to the thistle-plumes and rills, Hoping they would bear my secret to the watchers on the wall. COAL.' 167 Till they came and roused the prophet, broke the giant's rocky thrall ; Ages rolled, they found me, called me, snapped the chain that bound me fast. And with streaming torches chased the darkness of my cave at last, — To my grimy lair I bade them welcome with a rocking blast, As when frighted barks fly landward through the storm-king's roaring laughter And across the man^d billows black Typhoon runs bellowing after ; Saying " brothers, I will be your servant in the house of toil, I wiU do your delving, weaving, lift and spin and sweat and moil, I will smelt your gold and copper, mix your brass and edge your steel. Of the barks that bear your merchants, I will urge the ponderous wheel With a fiery, whirling torment like the torment of Ixion, With the smoke and clang of Vulcan and the big aim of Orion, Yet, ere I shall rise to help you, bear your burdens, bore and roll. Treasure well the words and visions of the king and prophet. Coal. 168 COAL. Ages gone, within the darkness of the royal, elder world, Where your harvests nod and rustle, billows roared and fountains curled, Where the bUlows war, were mountains, where the mountains glitter, waves. Waves for valleys, vales for billows, each in turn, are mutual graves ; Underneath the primal Ocean, with his robe of Avrin- kled blue. With the sturgeon and the starfish my lone infancy I knew; Darkly rolled my youthful cycles in that cradle-hall of brine, Till the brittle pine-cone found me, came and laid its cheek to mine, Till the fluted fern-tree found me, laid its faded face on mine. Till the oak-tree of the mountain sought me, darkling down the wave. And the cypress, palm and laurel came and made my arms their grave ; Ages flew, and through my slumber plunged a storm of pealing sound. As when Earthquake's fiery spasms, waves and domes and i-ocks confound ; COAL. 169 Then I felt my prison shooting from the realms of night and slime To the highway of the smishine, to the breeze and eagle's clime, Heard the roaring, splitting, cracking, felt the huge Cyclopic lifting. As when down the throat of Chaos half a shattered globe is drifting. Through a storm-rent of my prison, saw the golden dance of light On the forehead of the woodlands, on the valleys broad and bright, Saw the clouds, around the temples of the fii'st-born mountains, curled, Saw the gorgeous generations of the buried, ancient world — All the giant animation of the glorious, elder world — Saw the mammoth to the cedar lean his rough enor- mous form. Making all the fibres quiver like the onset of a storm, Saw the ponderous megatherium through the marshes pant and roll, In the dark earth, prying, diving, burrowing like a downy mole, Jove ! a coach-and-four might rattle down his subter- ranean hole ! 8 170 COAL. Heard the mylodon at twilight, in the woodlands dense and dim, Toiling up the odorous birch-tree, craunohing hark and hud and limb. Saw the brave old saurians plunge and welter through the murky tide. Fire-eyed, glorious, golden pythons down the shadows flash and glide — He that flounders in the Niger crawls a pigmy by their side ; Saw the forest from the shingle rise with fringe of purple bloom. Then, the foamy march of waves that rushed to dig its miry tomb ; Felt the earthquake's wrinkled pebble, felt the grim. Titanic boulder Down the blue abysses rolling from the iceberg's wel- tering shoulder ; — Down the dsedal tide of change beheld the ranks of being pass. Like the dappled wings of shadows down the hiUs of summer grass, Each, than that which reigned before it, more resplen- dent in its kind, Each a thought to beauty leaping from the dread^ Omnific Mind ; — COAL. 171 Grade on wondrous grade, ascending through the boundless realm of forms, From the agaric and alga to the oak's tremendous arms, To the pine and cedar's glory, to the banian's million stems. King of trees, with jewelled satraps and their vassal diadems ; Grade on shining grade upspringing from the embryon of the briae. From the monad and the moUusk to the human form divine. All are changed ; the skies grow hoary and the glo- rious Titans sleep In the flashing revolutions of men's hearts, the rocks and deep. Psyche robs the cheek of Venus, Polyphemus wrestles blind. And the crushing locks of Samson wreathe the awful brow of Mind ; Down the forward, purple vistas, down the lustrous vales of Time, > Broad and bright my vision wanders, grasping tide and man and chme ; Slowly through the twilight rises promise of the better day. 172 COAL. Whence the dearth and sword are banished and the storm is blown away, Where God's feet are heard in Eden and returns the Age of Gold, As it rippled down the valleys ere the wreckful Deluge rolled, Oome it shall, with crowns and cymbals, though its dawning waits afar. Fainter than the blush of twilight, fainter than a dying star — When the child among the mountains with his little heart of pride. Wondering at the sands and pebbles, at the stream- let's laughing glide. When the child among the mountains, to his silver shout shall hear Softer greeting fi-om the pine-cUffs and the caverns high and drear. When men learn the harder lesson fraught with a sublimer lore Than our Avon's silver singer smelted from his spuit's ore. Learn, amidst the war of peril and of passion, to forgive^ And, the vice that chains him loathing, bid the blind offender hve, COAL. 173 When men let the fortress crumble, let the sword and cannon rust, Live for love and gentle uses as they live for gain and lust, Know the clime to which we travel round about our footsteps lies, "With its swarming populations, streams and hills and sun and skies, That beneath the visual letter a subUmer meaning dwells, As the kernel lies in ambush, locked within its husky- cells, That the World of Souls is but a fairer counterfeit of earth. With its living men and mountains, flowers and forests, rain and dearth. When the tones of barren teacners cease the turbid tide to swell. Making Heaven a sea of shadows and a vacuum of Hell, Then shall sprout the roots of Eden, to the grave and cradle come The crowns, new wine and purple clusters of the gold Millennium ! Onward through the sundering shadows rise the ranks of infant Ages, 174 COAL. Over each its angel bending, turning silver-lettered pages, Pages fraught with triumphs richer than the roaring Formn knew, Or the shouts of Mantinea or the blaze of Waterloo ; Proudly up the golden vistas flash the shining rows of towns, With then- velvet fringe of meadow and their rolUng vapor-crowns. City's hum and factory's clamor, roar of forge and pant of steam. Life of wharves and ring of hammer up the gales of morning stream, Other Londons gleam and thunder with the billowing tide of trade, AU their princes, domes and splendors safe within the oUve shade ; Outward rolls the wave of Commerce circling round the sanded Isles, Bearing freight of gracious uses and its heritage of smiles ; They are dreamers who would teach us that the Uving Word is sealed, That the prophet's eye is darkened to the treasnre unrevealed ; COAL. 175 Evermore Isaiah's harp is surging down the clouded air, Moses climbs the rocks of Nebo with a mute and awful prayer, Every Morse with trenchant lightning challenging the race of Time, Every solemn poet toiling up the pearly stairs of rhyme, Every new Napoleon rising with his fiery brain and sword. Is another John in Patmos bowing down before the Lord, Sealing silver hallelujahs dropt from the Eternal Word, Walking through the Golden City, hand in hand with Christ, the Lord ; Great King Coal is white-browed Venus in the lover's ardent eyes, Grhii King Coal from Burke and Byron bears the tender-glancing prize. For a foot so regal never hath the aulic marble trod, Coal is Hercules, Orion, Hermes with his golden rod, Coal is Chrysostom, Columbus, Homer, Newton, Truth and God. THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. Theeb is an Eye that evermore beholds me, Counting each motion of my secret heart, A mighty arm that evermore enfolds me. Whene'er my wayward feet woul^ rove apart From that iUumiaed path the Perfect trod ; No fluttering leaf in aU the unpruned woods, No dewy drop on aU the morning sod. No covert act of night's hlack solitudes ; — No glorious fancy from the mind is flown, No pious wish was ever cradled there, No cankering griefs to the loud world unknown, No hue or cloud, no shape of earth or air. No faded glance or sound, but all are shrined Within the adamant of the Eternal Mind. (176) SONNET. To-DAT I wandered in the autumn woods, The ancient forest, where the Almighty rears A temple, in the unpruned solitudes. Grand with the crowning of the eternal Tears — A shrine where His stiU voice on mortal ears In deeper truth and melody may fall Than in the bartering street and crowded hall — How gracefiiUy these unhewn columns rise ! How full of triumph these old arches tower! How richly all the sculptor's magic lies Upon them, while at this most silent hour Rolls in the sunset's vast and golden dower ! As if the angels' robes were trailing down All evil, gloom and tear's in heavenly light to drown. (177) 8* THE KING-BIRD, There's a daring bird with a savage note And a piercing eye and a soft brown coat ; There's a small, brave bird with a quivering wing, And a breast that glistens in silvery white ; AU summer the boughs with his triumph ring. And the breezes throb with his keen delight ; His dauntless mien and sturdy mould Bespeak him warrior fierce and bold ; King of the meadow and king of the tree, And lord of the air and grove is he. And the songsters look with a troubled eye As the wing of the king-bird dashes by. A giant oak hangs over the way. The lightning scathed its crown at a blow, All summer its limbs look bare and gray. All winter, white with the feathery snow ; A hawk in his fierce, wild beauty there Has furled his wing at the noon of day, (178) THE KING -BIRD. 179 And through the fields and the glimmering air, His quick eye searches the heedless prey ; But the little warrior from bough or stalk, Hath marked the place of the burly hawk. He is gone as thought and the lightning go ; With a clanging note and blow on blow, His bill descends on the taloned foe, Who with sudden pain and an angry shriek Darts off from the small marauder's beak, And the gentlest shrink and the boldest cower From the king-bird's wrath and stroke of power. His challenge rings from the mossy wall And the curve of the maple's topmost stem. And you hear his harsh, defiant caU From the mullein's yeUow diadem ; He trembles above the wayside flower, He sits on the stone-pile's toppling tower. O'er the clovered field and wind-rowed hay In chase of the foe and the wing6d prey, Like an arrow to death, he darts away ; On the tufted knoll and down by the rill Tou hear the savage snap of his bill. As the sharded beetle, the dragon-fly And the outlawed drone-bee glisten by ; The eagle that loves the windy height, 180 THE KING -BIRD. And the keen-eyed crow in his earthward flight, Cleave the airy ocean with swifter wings As the tyrant forth from his covert springs, And the bird must come with triple mail And a wing to vie with the whirlwind gale, • Tea, strong must he be that dares infest With a beak of plunder the Mng-bii-d's nest. SUNLIGHT. Again the thick cloud gathers, darkly rolling Down the tempestuous air. My soul rocks to the distant bitter tolling Over her loved and fair, But earth's unnoticed heroes, saints, apostles Before me rise, and I must not despair. And now my thoughts go up to that most holy Land where the Lord doth reign, And His bright worshipers in reverence lowly, Bow on the pearly plain ; No broken ties nor the Great King's displeasure, Nor the sad grave shall make them weep again. Some who have loved me here with pure affection, Have reached that pleasant shore ; Back to earth's weary days and dumb dejection. They shall return no more. But ever in the courts, where fall no shadows. Before the Lord their praiseful hearts outpour. (181) 182 SUNLIGHT. The things that most we love on earth are fleeting, And wither day hy day ; The hearts to which our own are fondly beating, Cannot with us delay. And we must go and at their graves lamenting, Give back our loveliest blossoms, clay to clay ! Time after time ia aU departed ages, To that high world have gone. Meek men, whose deeds upon fame's glorious pages, Are nameless and unknown — But they unto the Lord of Love ascended. Who placed upon their brows a fadeless crown. Beautiful maidens whose bright presence round us Sunshine and odors cast, Children, that with their sweet ways lured and bound us. Then to the angels passed. WUl grow so beautiful I shall not know them, When in that sinless world we meet at last. And while I thiak, as tie by tie is riven, Which bound me here so weU, That even now on the green hills of Heaven, My form is gone to dwell. In two or one pure heart, O, this is triumph, And peace and joy more than the tongue can tell ! SUNLIGHT. 183 To think the Lord of that far country loves me, "With some that round him how, And to the glorious King in words approves me. So abject, lost and low — Not Milton's fame, nor great Napoleon's glory- Could equal brightness round my pathway throw ! BANTAM LAKE O, BEAUTiruL stand the wooded hills Round Bantam's bosom of silver blue, That steals from the wall of the firmament Its robe of royal Tyfian hue ; The white clouds smile from the crystal vault On the clouds that smile in the depths below And over the glorious nether dome, Like spirits of beauty, come and go. Who robed thee in glory and endless youth ? Who made thee a bed in the mossy hUls, Who fringeth thy skiits with living green. And feedeth thy heart with a thousand rills ? It is he who curbeth the rushing stars, And counteth the leaves and the beaded grass, Who weaveth the oak his regaJ crown, And maketh the plague and the hail to pass. He hath hollowed thy place above the deep. Like an eaglet's home in the skyey rocks, (184) BANTAM LAKE. 185 High over the roar of the black salt wave, And the clang of the bellowing whirlwind shocks Sweet Lake ! by a marge as green as thine, In the haunted darkness of ages gone, A conqueror marshaled his helmed hosts, While the foe, to trample his might, rolled on. A mist crept up from the silver wave And darkened the crags and drowned the sky. And fell like a shroud on the conqueror's bands, And hid his spears from the Roman's eye ; A trumpet pealed on the savage hills. Then a storm of sound like a shattered world, A roar as if Etna called aloud, And rocks by the wrathful gods were hurled. The Roman Eagles were bowed and torn, In the storm of swords and the fiery rain, And the rills of the vale ran gory red. And the clear blue wave had a fearful stain. There was wailing afar on the Aventine, And wringing of hands by hoary men. And the Roman wives through the tangled vine. Looked out for a sight of their lords in vain. MY UNKNOWN WIFE. RrLLS of rich moonlight through my room ai'e stream- ing, Peopling the voiceless air with fairy life, And I through fancy's halls am roving, dreaming Of thee, my future, fair, unwedded wife ; Whatever skies above thy path a*-e bending. Whatever flowers around thy feet are shed, Whate'er the prayers thy heart is upward sending. My warmest benediction on thy head — God bless thee, 0, my wife ! In life's wide journeyings have I never met thee, Ne'er listened to the music of thy tongue ? What pleasures now delight, what ills beset thee, I What secret woes have thy soft bosom wrung ? Who is thy father, who the tender mother. That led thee up in love and holy truth ? Who is thy sister, who thy manly brother ? Who were the friends and playmates of thy youth. My dear, unwedded wife ? (186) MY UNKNOWN WIFE. 187 Where shall these pallid moonbeams watch thee sleep, ing, What snow-white drapery veils thy heaving breast ? Which of God's angels in his saintly keeping Shall rock so rich a treasure to her rest ? What are thy thoughts of this dark house of sorrow, In which we vainly strive and hppe and pray ? What thy anticipations of to-morrow, Thy mingled memories of the vanished day. My loved and lovely wife ? Hast thou once fondly loved and been forsaken, Showeiing thy heart's deep treasures all in vain. Or calmly waited some sweet tone to waken The melody of love's delicious pain ? Hast thou known sorrow, seen thy loved and dearest Go to the grave's cold slumber, one by one — Heard " dust to dust," of all sad sounds the drearest, Breathed o'er thy beautiful, and dead, thy own. My wife, my stricken wife ? What are the beauteous forms that rove the bright- est Along that strange, deep world, thy woman's heart ? The lovely forms in which thou more delightest Than all the pageantries of wealth and art ? 188 MY UNKNOWN WIFE. Do the bright birds and opening violets woo thee To trace the babbling brook and mossy dell, Whilst leaves and the green silence whisper to thee Secrets no living tongue could speak so well ? O, art thou such, my wife ? I, too, have loved \^e shades, the silver rushing, And lute-like cadence of the vernal gale. And hung in rapture on the ruddy blushing To life, of the fair children of the vale ; I know that thou art beautiful ; thy spirit Baptized in God's night-solemn harmonies — What are the crowns and thrones that kings inherit To the soft love-light in those brimming eyes, My wife, my radiant wife ? What is the beauty with which God hath crowned, thee? Hast thou the aspect pf some Orient queen ? Have nature's plastic fingers thrown around thee The grace and music of a matchless mien ? 'Tis thus to me — around thy form a splendor — A mild, transcendent radiance floats and burns So calm, so pure, so eloquent, and tender, To rise and meet thy own my spirit yearns, My fair, unwedded wife ! MY UNKNOWN WIPE. 189 The looks that o'er thy snowy temples -wander — Wear they the raven's or the sunbeam's hue ? Thine eyes, where the bright soul comes forth to ponder, The midnight's tinge, or day's meridian blue ? I know not — ^yet thine own has all the glory That trembles round Aurora's radiant brow ; Not all the goddess forms of Grecian story To me are half so beautiful as thou ? My own, my future wife. Unstained art thou by wrong and earth-born passion, A lamb of the Great Shepherd's starry fold ; "No minion in the halls of sordid fashion. Bought with a smile, and for a bauble sold ; The things that move the vain are weak to shake thee' Thy eyes are straining toward another goal, Where the Lord Christ unto his side shall take thee. While shouts ascend and hallelujahs roll, God's chosen child, my wife ! Do thy rich lips stiU wear the vermeil beauty Given by young girlhood's free and rosy blood ? Or have long years and toilsome, heavenward duty Brought the ripe tinge of royal womanhood ? I know not, yet I know that I shall love thee For thy calm, saint-like eyes, and woman's heart. 190 MY UNKNOWN WIFE. And for God's glorious works around, above thee, Of which thou art so fair and bright a part, My wife, my unknown wife I I think, in dreams I sometime may have seen thee. For in our dreams the soul is wondrous wise ; And thin the shadowy veU that falls to screen thee Prom the deep gaze of her phophetic eyes ; Through clouds and years my heart to thine is lean- ing- Yearning its riches at thy feet to pour, And striving to unveil the sumless meaning Of the great joy to be its future store In thee, my unknown wife ! Yes, though thou knowest me not, I yet shall meet thee. My gentle wife, in God's appointed time. When, heart to heart, my soul shall rise to greet thee With new-born life — a hope and faith sublime ; And know that He who marks the falling sparrow, And robes the summer lilies, guards his own. And leads, through strength and weakness, bliss and sorrow, Their feet in paths which they had never known, My fair, unwedded wife I IMMORTALITY. Father of life ! whose sleepless eye Sees age on age successive roll, Past, future, bright, dark, deep, or high, One present, comprehended whole ; Incense unto Thy awful name. For timely rains, the seasons' birth, The glories of the starry frame. The love and loveliness of earth. We bless Thee for the human face Where still thine image dimly shines, The eye to see, the skiU to trace The wonders of thy vast designs ; We bless Thee for the feeling heart Whence streams of sympathy may flow. The lips that can a balm impart To still the moan of human woe — The rosy morn, the bending fields, Where floats the reaper's evening song ; The hearing ear, the arm that shields Our hearths from the oppressor's wrong: (191) 193 IMMOKTALITY. But more than all, to read, to know, Upon the Rolls which cannot lie, The awful truth, to bliss or woe, Of man's immortal destiny. Still might the changing years have hung Their twinkling green on blade and tree, Cool shades and budding dells, have rung With Spring's delicious melody ; Gay Fancy's pinions still might sweep Through years and scenes and realms afar. Bright Science range the airy deep, And glance from rolling star to star. And still, from waves and night's black arch, Each opening bud and breathing sod. The thunder's dread and cloudy march. Might roll the awful sound of "God;" And yet no voice from breeze or wave, From bii'd or dream or flower or tree, But that the grim, relentless grave Should claim at last the victory. Some dream that Spring's reviving bloom, The fears that rack the murderer's breast. The silk-worm's death and bursting tomb, The large desire that will not rest. IMMORTALITY. 193 That fearful shrinking from the thought No more to think, to feel, to be, FuU plain to reason's eye have taught Man's endless immortality. Then why those dismal doubts that threw Their shadow o'er great Plato's mind. Or his whom proffered hemlock slew, While tyranny and hate combined ? Like birds o'er Being's boundless sea, They flew, they pierced the dark unknown. Yet feared man's last dread sleep might be A dreamless and eternal one. They saw the conqueror's mail-clad form Pass from their halls with requiem high, The cloud no mother's prayer might charm. Steal o'er her infant's laughing eye, — And dropt the tear they could not hide. As wrinkled age and childhood gay. And beauty's bloom and manhood's pride Swept darkly down the common way. They saw the cheek yield up its bloom. The eye with more than years grow dim. And heard the swift death-angel's plume. But not the wings of Cherubim ; 9 194 IMMOETALITT. They saw the spirit's nohle powers Stretch onward to some distant goal, But while they strewed the corse with flowers, They trembled for the absent soul. The truth is here — aii-, earth and sky, And godlike reason's starward flight, And Spring's revolving mystery And grasp of glorious Stagyrite, Are vain to wing one certain gleam From o'er death's dark, dividing wave, Of hell or heaven or thought or dream Beyond the sure and dismal grave. For aU that wisdom's search can show We think and move while yet we may, We see our dearest pleasures go. Or turn from present griefs away — Right on life's gilded phantom sweeps. Then comes the trackless, dread unknown, We launch upon those awful deeps Without a chart, at night — alone ! But we, who turn the heavenly page — We live, we know, we think as men. We feel the creeping chills of age. We love, we smile, we kneel to pain. IMMOETALITY. 195 Then comes, at last, the night of fears, Just as our fathers bowed, we bow, But oh, amidst the groans, the tears That burst and drop for us, we know O'er yon high realm of golden stars We yet may walk and sing and shine. Where sin with God no longer wars. And love for love forgets to pine ; Hear from the lips we long have missed, " O joy ! my lost, to clasp thee here ! Caught up from Time's lone, wintry waste, A wrecked and pallid mariner." The lifeless hand shaU be alive. The eye to long-lost lustre wake. The rose upon the cheek revive. The dust into hosannas break; Our God the captive's bars shall rend, Undimmed the glorious Past appear, Yet His tremendous voice shall send Its death-dispelling thunders here. A few short years with men and care. Then to the dust, the shroud and worm, To mingle with the unbounded air ! To roll in mist upon the storm ! 196 IMMORTALITy. The long, long leaden sleep of years — Then for the stars ! who would not die When death the empty shade appears, And Heaven the vast reality ? MY PET SQUIRREL. Tenant of the wildwood, Reared in man's abode, Thoughtless little subject Of the love of God, Rover 'midat the branches, Climber of the tree, I, a thing immortal, Tet may learn of thee. What is thy being's purpose ? Wherefore wast thou made ? Why hath the One All-Knowing Such skUi on thee displayed ? — On thee, but fit to chatter Deep in some oaken shade, And shrink from human footsteps Into thy nest, afraid ? What hath that subtle instinct With which thy brain is fraught, Of semblance to proud reason. Of sisterhood to thought ? (197) 198 MY PET SQUIBEEL. Formed but to be extinguished Like vapor on the sky, Why did God make thee nimbler And happier than I ? For one so evanescent, Born but to feast and die. Wherefore this nice apparel, This lustre of the eye ? These ■wondrous adaptations. These limbs so finely -wrought. Denied to those who revel In the majesty of thought ? I answer : He that made thee Beyond our ken, is wise ; His thoughts are not as our thoughts, His are no mortal eyes ; He, as it pleased, hath formed thee. Wild, timid, swift and free. And clothed thy limbs with beauty That He might dwell in thee. Somewhat of human nature In all thy ways I see. Yes, Pet, thy " ruling passion" Is — curiosity ; MY PET SQUIREBL. 199 Thou, too, like men, art selfish, And lovest to he free, And, wholesome laws disdaining. Art ever on a spree ! What is thy small brain thinking ? Or does it think at all ? What are thy thoughts of great things. Of pretty things, or small ? Does the almond thou art nibhiing, Or the candle, unto thee, The shadow, or the sunshine, Seem as it seems to me ? . Scrambling up the bed-post. Rattling o'er the floor. Busy on the mantel. Scratching at the door, Perched upon the table. Looking very queer. Little paw in rapid Motion at thy ear ; Turning now Sir Bookworm, Diving into lore That has puzzled sages A century or more, 200 MY P;.T SQUIRREL^ Fumbling now, the !N^ ational Intelligencer- — now, 'MongBt the leaves of Byron Kicking up a " row," Sitting on my knee now, Looking vpry "wise, AU thy lusty squirrelhood Dancing in thy eyes, Stealing to my pockets To take a pleasant doze, In thy furry mantle Folding up thy nose. IsTo remorse of conscience, No " falling into love," To find the smiling idol More tiger than a dove, O'er disregarded duty No bitter tears to weep, Of withered hopes and broken ties, No thoughts to murder sleep. Happy, happy mortal ! Not a thing to rue, By creditors unhaunted, Never getting " blue," MY PET SQUIRREL. 201 Romping o'er my paper, Nestling in the bed, — The sweetest nuts be thine, Pet, And blessings on thy head ! Stay, — on thy lot, fine creature, I'U moralize no more, Thou mortal, I undying, Yet death for each in store. Thou, to sport on a moment, Then melt in empty air ; I, through yon starry wUdemess An endless journey — where? OUR FIRST-BORN. Tht eyes, thy soft blue eyes, are just begiimiiig, My little one, to open with a smile. Having no tinge of cold mistrust or sinning, No token of the spirit's inner guile ; Oh ! it is beautiful to watch the traces Of infant being, slowly, day by day. Like flower-scents from their waxen, rosy vases, Into expression through their coils find way. Thy innocent smUes to me are guides and teachers. More than great bards, with all their glorious books, Whose grand, imperial eyes, and godlike features. Shine down from time's grey, immemorial nooks ; More than the music of their golden numbers Thy artless ways with sweetness fill my soul, And half the gloom that wraps, the load that cumbers My spirit, have the power afar to roll. Fondly I watch the spirit's tender mansion, Through whose small, fringed windows, softly blue. Fresh tokens of the prisoned soul's expansion Day after day come rippling into view ; (202) OUE FIKST-BOEN. 203 I count each pledge, each royal intimation And tint auroral of the budding mind, And see in them God's newest revelation. In tiny leaves and fragile covers shrined. To thy young brow I turn in fear and wonder. Over my bosom creeps a thrill of awe, Whilst on the hidden fires within I ponder, That lie in keeping of that mystic law Which blows to flame the unseen, slumbering passions, Clothes the unplumed desires with fearful might. And, as the years roll by, the spirit fashions To deeds of darkness or of heavenly light. I tremble as I stand and think that round thee Thick loom the clouds of woman's sorrowing lot, That God's sure hand hath in the sad sheaf bound thee With love-lies-bleeding and forget-me-not. I faintly trace thy future way, extending Far down the valleys of the toilsome years, Whilst thy full eyes their glance are backward sending To life's fair morn, dim with the mist of tears. ! there are evil tongues and gulphs of danger, That stand to gird with death thy opening path. And hands to stab, and wiles to snare the stranger. And stony hearts, and man's consuming wrath. 204 OUR FIKST-BOEN. Wilt thou not need the arm Divine to hold thee Down the steep rocks, and up the hill of thorns, While grief henumbs, and the black storms enfold thee, Grieving for thy lost girlhood's golden morns ? What is thy doom, reserved in sacred keeping. By Him, the only great, and good, and true ? Is it the doom in which the hours of weeping Outnumber those of joy's baptismal dew? Wilt thou from earth with wasting age fade slowly, Or dust upon thy infant shroud be strown ? I know not, yet I know that God, the Holy, Shall lead the blind by paths they had not known. Sometimes a shadow floats across my vision, A little coffin with a drooping pall. While something says, a flower's may be thy mission. And God soon need thee where no shadows fall. With how much brightness would the days go o'er me. How much would earth still hold for me to lose, Were only left, to tell thy fleeting story, An empty cradle and two little shoes? Thy soft, sweet breath upon my forehead falling, Thy tender arms outstretched to come to mine. Thy eloquent, yet inarticulate calling For firmer steps and stronger hands than thine, OTJE FIRST-BORN. 205 Thy tender palms, ttat in their silken tightness Thy fragile playthings hold, thy rippling laugh, The rays of dawning intellectual brightness Of which thy infant soul begins to quaff — Sliould these be quenched, ah me! hencerforth forever Would not a glory from my path be gone, And a perpetual, wasting, secret fever Consume me, thinking of the absent one ? Would not my daily paths be ground enchanted By gleams and voices from a distant land, And every day, and all my dreams, be haunted By the white waving of a little hand ? O ! there are mothers that will know my meaning, Though man's more stern and rugged nature faU ; Ever fond woman's heart to this is leaning, Whilst his grows hard amidst the wave and gale, — But I will trust Him — He whose hand hath given These two small silken palms to clasp my own, Hath for us both, when heart and flesh are riven, A place of meeting near the great white throne. THE VOYAGERS. TO P. C. E. My friend, we two are mariners To that mysterious shore "Whence all the thousands who depart, Return to us no more, To tell the darkness of the way, The tempests and the calms, To tell the wonders of the place. The glories and the psalms. The ship in which we all must go Will soon in port appear ; With raven sails and death-like glide. That bark will enter here ; And we shall hear the captain's voice, " Come down, to-day we sail I" And some will joy to go away. And some will shriek and wail. Six thousand years that fatal bark Has rode across the deeps, [306] THE VOTAGBBS. 207 And to and fro the yielding waves With gloomy prow she sweeps. Oh, there is terror when she comes, And weeping when she goes ; How soon in port her hull will loom, No human being knows — And you and I, when she shall come, WiU speedily be borne From all the treasures we have won, The honors we have worn. "We both shall be across the deep Blown rapidly away From aU the beauty of the night, The brightness of the day ; We shall give up the Summer fields, Their groves and breezy tones. Our pleasant homes, our friends and wives. And our dear little ones. When we are gone, the mountain streams Will just as sweetly flow. And birds will build in boughs above And in the grass below ; The woods of Spring will be as sweet, The Autumn hills with gold As bright, in the rich sun-floods round Their bannered shoulders rolled : 208 THE VOYAGEES. But "we shall heed them not, — our place Will be upon the wave, Or in the unknown realm beyond, The realm without a grave. I may remain while you are gone On board that mystic ship. Upon whose decks a silence reigns That seals each mortal lip : — And you will swiftly cross the tide, And you wiU tread the shore Where they who leave the port of time Live on and die no more : — And you will look on other scenes, And drink of other springs. And walk through wonders that surpass Our best imaginings. Yet sometimes, from that distant clime, Your thoughts will backward turn To one that lingers here, whose heart Has never ceased to yearn For something better than the light On earthly flower or vale, And stands forever on the wharf And watches for a sail. EVENING. The moon is rolling up the east, The stars are in the sky, And through the fading linden boughs The sad night-breezes sigh. Still night is here, and one by one The village lights depart, • Strange shapes are stealing through my brain, A sadness o'er my heart. Now gladly to its rest again Sinks down the weary head. The maid to dream of slighted pride, The widow Of the dead. The owlet from his lonely nook Flaps through the dusky gloom. The bat flits like an evil thought Across my silent room. 209] 210 EVENING. The lamp shoots o'er the ghastly wall A pale, inconstant light ; The night rules o'er the weary earth, And silence o'er the night. This is the calm and holy hour When they that " went before," Return with their dear eyes to bless Our sinking hearts once more. And there was one of hoary locks And holy light of eye, — I heard the bell toll sad and slow, I saw the hearse roll by. And one, a glorious, fair-haired girl, — Her laugh was like the sea When breaking on a strand of pearl, — Has come to smile on me, From the pale kingdoms of the grave, Has come to smile on me. And one, a radiant, youthful form, Passed from our little band To die amidst the battle's roar • Down by the Southern strand. EVENING. 211 Thus strange, wild fancies, strange and sad, Come glimmering o'er my brain. And these, the dear remembered dead. Are with me once again. There is the same enchaining smile And glory on each brow, And with the same sweet, earnest eyes They rise to meet me now. And I am calm as those dear looks. For in those looks and eyes A light burns that has rolled to me Down the eternities. Sweet is the hour that pours a balm Upon the weary head. The deep and holy hour that links The living and the dead. CHICKA-DEE-DEE. There's a brave little bird in the green old wood, He hops and flutters from limb to limb, Where the branches sway, and the dead leaves fall, And rustle through shadows broad and dim ; Spring breathes her delicate odors there. The violet smiles by the winding riU, And the cells of many a hidden flower The breeze with a wandering perfume fill; But little cares he. Brave Chicka-dee-dee, For the violet's eye or the winding rill, And ever the note Prom his swelling throat Is Chicka-dee-dee, is Chicka-dee-dee. The woodpecker's bill in the spongy pine Hath rounded a hole all hollow and deep. Sir Chickardee-dee hath chosen its cell His brood from the jay and the owl to keep ; He hath lined the floor with emerald moss. And woof of the silvery thistle down, [212] CHICKA.-DEE-DBE. 213 And he hides away in its dusky walls From the hungry hawk and the tempest's frown ; A monarch is he, Small Chicka^dee-dee, With his cell of the silvery thistle down, And the measured note From his swelling throat Is Chickardee-dee, still Chickardee-dee. The Autumn days fall misty and damp On rustling valley and lonely hiU, Away on the plaia the lordly blast Is piping its chorus loud and chill, The withered leaves fall down iu showers. Choking the brooks, bright, yellow and red — Sad, withered leaves ! they are weaving the shroud And heaping the grave of the Summer dead ; But Uttle recks he. King Chicka-dee-dee, Of leaves in yellow and purple showers. And ever the note From his kingly throat Is Chickardee-dee, brave Chicka-dee-dee. In the churchyard gather a stricken band, They are bearing the widow's hope away, 214 CHICKA-DEE-DEE. Wild sobs are shaking the frosty gale, Her golden idol is common clay I In the noisy town is a mansion fine, A proud and bejeweled bride within. Without, in pain, on the marble steps. Lies, moaning, a child of shame and sin ; But little cares he. Bold Chicka-dee-dee, For jeweled bride and her mansion fine. And ever the note From his swelling throat Is Chicka-dee-dee, brave Chicka-dee-dee. There are spirits that thirst for earthly fame, And spirits that pine for a heart to love, There are hands that toil for the yellow gold. And some for the Golden Land above ; The warrior marshals his whiskered clans — Rude Russ and Cossack and fiery Frank Push on to the weltering feast of Death With sabre and cannon, in blazing rank ; But little heeds he. Bright Chicka-dee-dee, Rude Russ or Cossack or shouting Frank, And musical still. From his tiny bill. Trills Chicka-dee-dee, fine Chicka-dee-dee. THE PATH, This quiet path that turns away Through twilight from the glowing day, And leaves the common, beaten road, And every sign of man's abode, Goes winding down, and round the hill. Through shadows pensive, broad, and still, And then is lost within a vale "Whose violets open to the gale. Sent by the Summer's rosy hours To dally with the woodland flowers. I know it well : ah, thirty years. With aU their train of ills and fears And banishments, have not effaced The path my infant footsteps traced, Nor hidden from my inner sight The radiant tints and fresher light That trembled round, and left a trace Of heaven upon this leafy place ; (215) 216 THE PATH. Lightly hath change above it past Since long ago, I trod it last ; Here still, amidst the balmy days Of clover blooms and tasseled maize, The arrowy sunbeams never pass To the abysses of the grass — As softly here the silence sleeps. As gently o'er the south wind creeps, As sweetly through the aspen sighs Its love-words and its low replies — As far from winter's frosty harm. In streams as rich, in hues as warm, Along the twinkling turf is rolled The noonday's cup of molten gold ; The violet, from its verdant nook, Upturns its pensive, human look. With eyes as tender, soft and blue. As liquid with the early dew. As when in life's just-opening days I wandered here to dream and gaze, And commune with the fields and sky Through childhood's ear and childhood's eye. Dear, shady path ! thou art the same As when in other years I came To press thy tender green, a child In love with all the fair and wild ; THE PATH. 217 But I — O life, O manhood, tears, O wasting days and months and years ! Ye all have come, and glided o'er. And I, a dreaming boy, no more Shall wander forth to hail the hours Of singing birds and golden flowers, And gaze upon the works of Him Who sitteth o'er the Seraphim. Remembered spot ! I come to thee, As one who on the wild, wild sea. Tear after year has made his home Amidst the roar, the clash and foam Of waves which typify the life, The fears, the tremblings and the strife For shelter and for bread, of one Who battles, bleeds and falls — alone : Oh, I am changed — mine is not now That smooth and fair and careless brow With which, by summer airs caressed, Thy green and tufted sward I pressed ; Time, who cements and shatters tombs, And tarnishes the lily blooms. And rolls upon his rapid flood Alike the worthless and the good, In bearing oif the young and fair With frost has sprinkled o'er my hair, 218 THE PATH. And from my brow and from my cheek Has borne the rose's tinted streak, — While, cowering in his northern gale, A man world-weary, worn and pale, I come to hear the western breeze Sing through my childhood's favorite trees, And press this unforgotten sod. Still radiant with the steps of God. Heart-desolate, and doomed to roam Far from the pleasant light of home, And bound to life's relentless war Whose very triumphs leave a soar Upon the soul no after-day Of crystal showers can wash away, — I, in another path, have known The grief which turns the heart to stone ; Have seen the heavens hang as brass Through which no agony might pass To God's kind ear — have seen, below, The earth a waste of iron grow, And felt the parching fever-pain Roll like an army through my brain ! Through all, sweet path ! I live to stand And clasp the loving, great right hand Of God in. thee, and these soft airs Thr* wander down heaven's azui-ed stairs. THE PATH. 219 As if to kiss my brow unknown To those who guard its radiant Throne. What though the blotting hand of time Untarnished leave thy blushing prime ? Yet thou from earth shalt pass away With all her tender, loved and gay ; The plough thy velvet turf shall tear, Thy breast the heavy wheel shall wear, No more the tiny wren shall hide Among the brambles at thy side, No more the sumac's crimson cones Shine in the late November suns, No more, as if a glowing flake, Blown from the sunset's golden lake To dazzle here, the fire-bird's wing Its gleam athwart thy leaves shall fling, No more the quivering bob-o'link Upon thy grassy robe shall sink As if, with all the weight, oppressed. Of music locked within his breast. And bowed with all the tuneful tides That swell beneath his panting sides. He might not pause in upper air To pour their melting sweetness there — And steam-cars o'er thy altered place. Shall thunder in their smoking race. EARTH GIVES HER BEAUTIFUL TO ME I HAVE no ships upon the deep To sail to foreign lands, And bring their freight of silks and gold, And diamonds from the sands ; I have no stores upon Broadway, In Wall street I have none, And when the rich are counted o'er My. name is never one, — Yet whether on the land or sea, Earth gives her beautiful to me. I have no share in all the wealth Of California's mines, No deep, wide cellars stored with casks Of keen and sparkling ^nes, No rolls of hundred dollar bills Locked up in vault or chest, No fine gold watch with massy chain. To glitter on my vest, — Yet whether on the land or sea, Earth gives her beautiful to me. EARTH GIVES HER BEAUTIFUL TO ME. 221 I own no factories in the East, No prairies in the West, No Schuylkill mountain, with a world Of coal within its breast. No fields of yellow wheat are mine. No acres broad and green, Beside whose streams, in summer-time A hundred herds are seen ; But whether herds or corn there be, Earth gives her beautiful to me. The poor are ever in our world. This weary world below. But in the kingdom of our Lord 'Twill be no longer so : Then why should I bemoan my lot, And envy men their weal. Whilst to my eyes the valleys bring A joy they cannot feel, And earth, through voice and beam and tree, Still gives her beautiful to me. The world's essential gold is not Pound sparkling in the sands. Its richest gems are never seen On princely brows and hands ; 223 EARTH GIVES HRK BEAUTIFUL TO ME. The roses by the rich man's door, The greenness of his fields, The many founts of happiness The glorious sunlight yields, — These are my wealth, with all that sea And earth keep beautiful for me. The impress of God's loving hand, The circuit of the hills. With all the glory of the Spring Which that green circuit fills. The wonders of this present world, The music and the bloom. With the still whispers from a world — A better world to come, — All these may yet my portion be. Though power and gold are not for me. STANZAS. TO P , SINGING. Oh, Lady, sing that song again, And wake again the breathing strings f Let Music pour her silver rain And give to slumbering fancy wings! Oh, sing again ! and with the lay Blend all thy free, exultant soul, Till o'er my own, like bursting day, Its waves of gorgeous triumph roll. Sing on ! it wafts me far away Up Memory's dim and stormy stream, And other fountains round me play. And other glances on me beam ; The dead and absent round me rise — Life courses on with nobler bound — I feel the glow of faded skies, And rove on youth's enchanted ground. C223) 224 STANZAS. And whilst tby tones around me rise I deem the soul like thine should be One through whose secret Eden sighs A ceaseless, golden melody — Whose voice should be the seal and sign Of all that's holy, fair and true, And bid along our pathways shine The flush of Youth's eternal dew. Sing on ! the hardest nature bows To Music's high, subduing spell, Grim Envy smooths his scowling brows While soft her raptures round him swell : Great Orpheus swept his royal lyre — HiUs bowed, and demons held their breath, And Vengeance felt her wrath expire Through all the doleful realm of Death. Oh ! woman's eye a lovelier light, — Her brow a nobler glory wears. When lofty thought in gentler might. The throne with soft affection shares ; Then lady, wake that strain again With all thy free, exultant soul. And bid its showers of silver rain Through fancy's listening empire roll ! DEATH. Wb shudder at thy name, Imperial Death ! Thy faintest whisper calls an icy fear Through all our veins, and scares our feehle breath, And yet we dread thee least when thou art near ; We dread thee least, because we know thee not As nearer to our steps in deed than thought ; Thy grim insatiate jaws we strive to shun, And to them, helpless, blind and headlong run. A fever holds us — how it revels, burns And surges through our veins ! a glowing river. Big with Vesuvian fire-rain — wildly turns The eye from man to man for help ; we shiver Down looking on that bottomless, black abyss. We live, we greet the living, drink the bliss Of earth-o'er-sweeping gales; we talk of flowers, The age, love, patriotism, death, the showers That dropped last night or now are slanting down Upon the smoking roofs of all the town : We gossip of the crops, France, England, Spain, (325) 226 DEATH. The latest murder, and the last great fire That sucked up ten score dwellings in its ire As Arab sands suck up the crystal rain ; We talk of railroads, stocks, the ayes and nays In Senate on the all-absorbing bill. The warlike signs, convulsions, vast dismays That crowd the East ; of famine, drought, or will Of miser dying, formed to cheat his heirs. Of what the pulpit, what the press declares ; Of foreign trade, elections, creeds and forms, Castes, intellectual triumphs, moral storms — We go to slumber, thinking in the morning To rise to common comforts and adorning, We lay us down unhaunted by a fear, — Are we not sound, then how can he be near? Then headache, dizziness, a gush of blood. An angry hour, a cup of wine, a flood, A stagnant heart, a wave of pallid coldness Topples our pride and quenches all our boldness ; Then other faces, scenes, strange skies, strange air. And we are standing — ^where ? SPRING. As fortli I stray beneath the mellow skies To watch the blushful foreheads of the clouds, Where, wakened by the South wmd's ardent sighs, Young violets have burst their tender shrouds, I think of Christ and Lazarus : around, And far along the dumb, expectant hills, In valleys where the cataract's foamy sound The heavens with his continuous anthem fills, Goes on the Resurrection. God will send A softer breath along the earth to-night ; Her pulses will grow warm, and lilies bend Over her many streams ; in richer light, Blossoms with shadowy eyes will star the vales, And song and odor fill the wandering gales. [227] SHADOWS ON THE WALL. When evening through the silent room Creeps with her pensive weight of gloom, And lamps are lighted in the hall, And shadows dance from waU to wall, Our little one, with curious eyes. With look half joy and half surprise. Pursues the phantoms as they chase Each other in their airy race. Strange, goblin-shaped, fantastic things. Grim vampires with broad, iron wings. Ghosts of unhappy men that go To prison in the realms below ; Huge ghouls, and wolves with famine gaunt, And ships with their tall masts aslant In the blue ice that rims the shore Of Greenland or ^yikl Labrador. As each dark, unsubstantial shape Tries some life-breathing form to ape. She seems to think all things that please The eye, her little hands may sei?;e, (228) SHADOWS Oy THE AVALL. 229 She never has been taught to know How much of human life is show, Nor what the difference may be 'Twixt substance and reality. Upon her head the lamp-beams fall, Shoot past, and tremble on the wall, And there an ebon image stands Sculptured in air by airy hands. Joy thrills her frame, — ^her baby laugh Comes like the laugh of rUls that quaff The life of the wild hills, then flee In silver chariots to the sea. Forward she leans with eager eyes In which a world of wonder lies. Her tender hands are stretched to clasp The phantom that eludes her grasp, But she is not alone, — the eyes On which the film of seventy lies, Pursue the shadows here and there. And hands are stretched to clasp — the air I THE TROPICS. SwHKT are my dreams of you, O reahns Of everlasting bloom ! The voices of your spicy woods Are floating through my room; Though mountains rise and oceans roll And deserts glare between, They cannot quench your hues, nor hide Your soft, unfading green ; To sense afar, in spirit nigh, I see them with the spirit's eye. From Northern shores to those blue streams Depart the feathery choir ; There the flamingo stoops to quench Her wiug of crimson fire ; There are the deep, mysterious sounds Which thrill the ear of night, The plains whose billowy herbage glows With a supernal light, And ranks of leafy crests arise, Like those of man's lost Paradise. (230) THE TROPICS. 231 Bright is the robe of beams that shines Along those flowery hills, And boundless is the gush of song That all the valleys fills ; The groves are beautiful that bend Above the placid wave, Whose stainless depths and bloomy rim The sands of silver pave ; Grand is the music of the sea, And stately towers the cocoa tree. There rise the hills I pine to see. And spread the glorious plains ; There hangs the bloom on shrub and tree, There lie the green domains That have with sweet disquiet filled My boy's, my manhood's soul, There Orinoco's eddies gleam, There Nile and Ganges roll, There is the giant life that heaves Through that green world of fruits and leaves. I shall behold them yet — my eyes Shall wander o'er their bloom, My ears shall hear the rush of wings Along their verdant gloom ; 232 THE TROPICS. Where parrots glisten on the bough, And serpents gleam below, And tigers in the thicket crouch, My restless feet shall go ; I yet shall hear the lion's roar Its horror down the midnight pour. I hear a secret voice that sings, I yet shall breathe the gales Whose pilfering wing has brushed the flowers In dim, Brazilian vales, ShaU see the constellations burn No Northern eyes behold. The mighty vines with clusters bend, Of purple, green and gold ; Shall hear the sea-wind's evening psalms Ring through the tops of regal palms. THE SOUTHERN" MOSS. Theee is a little tangled plant that grows Within our Southern clime. And in the fanning breezes hangs and flows Round the scarred brows of Time — THE SODTHERN MOSS. 233 Where'er at noonday along broad morasses The forest walks are dim, And murmuring pines lift up their bearded masses, And blasted oaks look grim ; Far in the old wood's damp and dense recesses, Where the brown shadows seem Like living things, its undulating tresses Like tattered banners stream. iNot formed within wise Nature's wonted law, N"o tender roots are found, No knotted fibres shooting down to draw Their moisture from the ground. The slender stems not like the violet spi-ing Amidst the odorous grass, Up from their delicate, broken urns to fling An incense as you pass. But high o'er hunter's path and trampled sod The tangled masses cling ; From lofty trunks and rough, huge branches, God Has made its folds to swing. The little flower that on its locks has birth, Half turns its dim blue eye- 234 THE MISSISSIPPI. Upon the withered leaves that strew the earth, And half upon the sky ; The squirrel dai-ts along the reaching limb From dawn to daylight's wane ; Amidst the twinkling world of threads, for him The hunter looks in vain. The red-bird, singing, 'gainst the tassels gray Presses her fiery breast, And tears with her strong beak the stems away, To weave them round her nest. THE MISSISSIPPI. One thousand miles, by night and day, have I Rode the Ohio's wave, and heard the dash Of his sweet waters round our sundering prow That hurled them backward in a ridge of foam, Or drove them, flashing, with curved necks to lave The thick and twisted roots of the old woods That bloom and moan and throw along the tide Their still, transparent shadows ; — I have gazed Upon the majesty that robes his form As with a silvery garment — I have laid THE MISSISSIPPI. 235 My head upon his murmuring breast, while Night Sat on the hills and decked her brow with stars, Or round her shoulders threw a gauze of thin And trembling moonbeams, while she heard the moan Of mighty forests and the wail of seas Send their lone music down her pearly halls. But now there rushes on my vision one Upon whose form the hand of God has set The seal of His more dread omnipotence. What thoughts press on my dizzy brain, and crowd Its chambers with a vague oppressive awe. As for the first I gaze along thy deep, Dark tides, and hear thy rolling water's plunge, Thund'rous and hollow, round our rocking keel, Tremendous Mississippi ! As I bend Down from the quivering bark with' which I rush Upon the watery world that boils below, Eddy on eddy, wave that chases wave. Rapid and bottomless, black with sand and leaves And crumbling twigs of sycamore that grew Beside the marge, and fell amid the storms Of Pepin and Itasca, or were plucked At dusk, by Indian woman's hand, to weave Her wigwam roof, I feel as if my feet Stood helpless, on the awful verge that slopes Above the Eternal World. A heavy sound 236 THE MISSISSIPPI. Rolls up the spii-it's startled oovridors, Smiting its ear, as when the roar of waves, That fight with everlasting storms and fling Their wounded heads on some rock-guarded isle, Comes surging down the jeweled halls of night, Hollow and deep and vast. That mighty sound Wafts me afar — I stand beneath the skies Where this enormous artery, that throbs And thunders round me, wells amid the rocks And oaken solitudes where savage hands Still bend the twanging bow, and just beneath The mantle of the snows that flash and drift Along the Rocky Mountains. I behold Where leaps his infant stream, all cold and clear, In some sweet dell, laving the yellow roots Of elm and beech that see their silky stems Twinkle and dance within the crystal pool, Save when from leaning twig the globfed dew, Or falling insect, mars the limpid scene, And breaks the sweet illusion. Timidly The nimble deer comes down to lave and cool Her sculptured limbs within the silver tide. Along the slender channel, dark, smooth stones Make little islets where strange weeds and moss Blossom and die, and form a reeking soil Whereon the brittle water-cress shoots up THE MISSISSIPPI. 337 Its taper stalk, and bears its pale, white flower. Downward my thoughts pursue the swelling stream Along the shady dell ; receding banks Slope to the growing brook ; gray beeches lift, And hoary pines, along the bordering hills. Their fair, majestic columns ; on the marge. All day the glossy bee bends down the flowers. Yellow and blue and gold, watched by the eye And watered by the tender hand of God, Amidst the untrained solitudes ; huge rocks Lift up their brown, steep palisades, starred With silver or with tawny lichens, while The breeze that murmurs from the stretching shades Comes with the scent of blossoms. Farther down. Wondering, I stray beside the sinuous rill — The vale expands, and from the neighboring slopes Down leap the sister streams to join the tide That now no longer purls a timid rill. But foams and rolls, a regal river's bulk. Rapid and wild and strong. Through banks abrupt, Where woven shadows turn the noon to night, It rushes with the flash, the dizzy plunge. The joy and thunder of the cataract, — Now deepens to a broad, majestic lake, Beside whose edge, from overlooking clifi^s. The dappled lily and harmonious pine 238 THE MISSISSIPPI. Look down upon their moveless images, Carved in the living crystal ; — now, by green, Wide fields and undulating slopes that bear The juicy cane and snowy cotton down By stately mansions where the planter's hand With pleasing care embowers his ample porch With matted vines- and odorous jessamine, Down winding, rolls the ever gathering mass, Till now it foams in thy tremendous wave, O mightiest stream poured from God's open hand ! Night draws her dense and solemn curtains round— The free South wind, that runs across the deck, Blows o'er the flood the bitter smell of ferns And osiers nurtured in the crowded woods Of Arkansaw ; the groan and haughty clang Of wheels and shafts from their oak prison rush Smiting the pitchy garments of the night Defiantly ; the scattered lights that gleam From rooms where careworn women watch beside Their dying husbands or their children dead. Vainly pursue me on my tortuous way Through the oblivion of smothering fogs, — My thoughts float up the mighty ranks of years. And hear, deep rolling through their hoary aisles, The hollow bell of Time. What centuries THE MISSISSIPPI. 239 Have dropped before his scythe, or worn the snow On their majestic brows, since first the sun Beheld his image flashing from thy wave ? A voice from thy resistless torrent comes, " Myriads of ages ! " while thy crowded ranks Of cypress, oak and towering cotton-wood, Back o'er thy turbid eddies roll the sound "Myriads of ages !" As the drops that whirl Within thy bosom, or the tawny sands That toss and roll through all thy depths and mar The glory of thy brow, have been the years That o'er thy waves have swept, in sun or storm, Tornado, plague. Spring beams or Autumn pomp, Tet left thee bounding in eternal youth ! Thousands of years ere our first Parent stretched Her hand to seize the interdicted fruit, Or ere the ring of Jubal's primal harp Stirred the far silence of the olden world, Grandly sonorous, did each wing&d air That wandered o'er thee bear a loftier strain Than his,— a mighty, mingled moan of waves And woods, — a wild, vast anthem floating up To God, shaking His grand, untarnished fane. The lone and desert blue. The cayman lurked Voracious, on thy reedy banks, and shut His clanking jaws on the unwary prey : 240 THE MISSISSIPPI. The prairie-roving bison, which the Ark That jarred upon the crags of Ararat, Within its floating, mimic universe Held not, ere yet God's guardian cherub stood With awful mien and circling blade of fire That blazed above the blasted Paradise, With lusty limbs breasted thy murky tides, Shook the thick deluge from his shaggy front And plunged into the flowery wilderness. The roaming mastodon, that stood in size A temple's bulk, drank of thy rushing wave ; Thy plashy margin trembled to his tread: Against the oak whose rugged rind inlocked The wiry strength which forty summers lent, The monster leaned his dark, enormous bulk ; The sinewy bole swayed to the ponderous mass, As when the moaning storm comes down in wrath Upon the slender willow. Tremblingly, The savage wolf cowered in his sheltering brake, The panther sought his lair with panting speed, When, at the still of night, that crushing tramp And hoi-rid bellow shook the vapory gloom.