Poems of James Russell Lowell Part 30

How lonely is the sea's perpetual swing, The melancholy wash of endless waves, The sigh of some grim monster undescried, Fear-painted on the canvas of the dark, Shifting on his uneasy pillow of brine!

Yet night brings more companions than the day To this drear waste; new constellations burn, And fairer stars, with whose calm height my soul Finds nearer sympathy than with my herd Of earthen souls, whose vision's scanty ring Makes me its prisoner to beat my wings Against the cold bars of their unbelief, Knowing in vain my own free heaven beyond.

O G.o.d! this world, so crammed with eager life, That comes and goes and wanders back to silence Like the idle wind, which yet man's shaping mind Can make his drudge to swell the longing sails Of highest endeavor,--this mad, unthrift world, Which, every hour, throws life enough away To make her deserts kind and hospitable, Lets her great destinies be waved aside By smooth, lip-reverent, formal infidels, Who weigh the G.o.d they not believe with gold, And find no spot in Judas, save that he, Driving a duller bargain than he ought, Saddled his guild with too cheap precedent.

O Faith! if thou art strong, thine opposite Is mighty also, and the dull fool's sneer Hath ofttimes shot chill palsy through the arm, Just lifted to achieve its crowning deed, And made the firm-based heart, that would have quailed The rack or f.a.got, shudder like a leaf Wrinkled with frost, and loose upon its stem.

The wicked and the weak, by some dark law, Have a strange power to shut and rivet down Their own horizon round us, to unwing Our heaven-aspiring visions, and to blur With surly clouds the Future's gleaming peaks, Far seen across the brine of thankless years.

If the chosen soul could never be alone In deep mid-silence, open-doored to G.o.d, No greatness ever had been dreamed or done; Among dull hearts a prophet never grew; The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

The old world is effete; there man with man Jostles, and, in the brawl for means to live, Life is trod under-foot,--Life, the one block Of marble that's vouchsafed wherefrom to carve Our great thoughts, white and G.o.d-like, to shine down The future, Life, the irredeemable block, Which one o'er-hasty chisel-dint oft mars, Scanting our room to cut the features out Of our full hope, so forcing us to crown With a mean head the perfect limbs, or leave The G.o.d's face glowing o'er a satyr's trunk, Failure's brief epitaph.

Yes, Europe's world Reels on to judgment; there the common need, Losing G.o.d's sacred use, to be a bond 'Twixt Me and Thee, sets each one scowlingly O'er his own selfish h.o.a.rd at bay; no state, Knit strongly with eternal fibres up Of all men's separate and united weals, Self-poised and sole as stars, yet one as light.

Holds up a shape of large Humanity To which by natural instinct every man Pays loyalty exulting, by which all Mould their own lives, and feel their pulses filled With the red fiery blood of the general life, Making them mighty in peace, as now in war They are, even in the flush of victory, weak, Conquering that manhood which should them subdue.

And what gift bring I to this untried world?

Shall the same tragedy be played anew, And the same lurid curtain drop at last On one dread desolation, one fierce crash Of that recoil which on its makers G.o.d Lets Ignorance and Sin and Hunger make, Early or late? Or shall that commonwealth Whose potent unity and concentric force Can draw these scattered joints and parts of men Into a whole ideal man once more, Which sucks not from its limbs the life away, But sends it flood-tide and creates itself Over again in every citizen, Be there built up? For me, I have no choice; I might turn back to other destinies, For one sincere key opes all Fortune's doors; But whoso answers not G.o.d's earliest call, Forfeits or dulls that faculty supreme Of lying open to his genius Which makes the wise heart certain of its ends.

Here am I; for what end G.o.d knows, not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul: Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea, The beating heart of this great enterprise, Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death; This have I mused on, since mine eye could first Among the stars distinguish and with joy Rest on that G.o.d-fed Pharos of the north, On some blue promontory of heaven lighted That juts far out into the upper sea; To this one hope my heart hath clung for years, As would a foundling to the talisman Hung round his neck by hands he knew not whose.

A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside, Yet he therein can feel a virtue left By the sad pressure of a mother's hand, And unto him it still is tremulous With palpitating haste and wet with tears, The key to him of hope and humanness, The coa.r.s.e sh.e.l.l of life's pearl, Expectancy.

This hope hath been to me for love and fame, Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth, Building me up as in a thick-ribbed tower, Wherewith enwalled my watching spirit burned, Conquering its little island from the Dark, Sole as a scholar's lamp, and heard men's steps, In the far hurry of the outward world, Pa.s.s dimly forth and back, sounds heard in dream As Ganymede by the eagle was s.n.a.t.c.hed up From the gross sod to be Jove's cupbearer, So was I lifted by my great design: And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye Fades not that broader outlook of the G.o.ds; His life's low valleys overbrow earth's clouds, And that Olympian spectre of the past Looms towering up in sovereign memory, Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of doom.

Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird, Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede, Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends Great days have ever such a morning-red, On such a base great futures are built up, And aspiration, though not put in act, Comes back to ask its plighted troth again, Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying moon.

While other youths perplexed their mandolins, Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine In the loose glories of her lover's hair, And wile another kiss to keep back day, I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laoc.o.o.n, Did of my hope a dryad mistress make, Whom I would woo to meet me privily, Or underneath the stars, or when the moon Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls.

O days whose memory tames to fawning down The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck!

I know not when this hope enthralled me first, But from my boyhood up I loved to hear The tall-pine-forests of the Apennine Murmur their h.o.a.ry legends of the sea, Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld; The sudden dark of tropic night shut down O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes, The while a pair of herons trailingly Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred By any but the Northwind's hurrying keels.

And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds To my world-seeking heart paid fealty, And catered for it as the Cretan bees Brought honey to the baby Jupiter, Who in his soft hand crushed a violet, G.o.d-like foremusing the rough thunder's gripe; Then did I entertain the poet's song, My great Idea's guest, and, pa.s.sing o'er That iron bridge the Tuscan built to h.e.l.l, I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains Whose adamantine links, his manacles, The western main shook growling, and still gnawed.

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale Of happy Atlantis, and heard Bjorne's keel Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland sh.o.r.e: For I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity.

Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude In caves and desert places of the earth, Where their own heart-beat was the only stir Of living thing that comforted the year; But the bald pillar-top of Simeon, In midnight's blankest waste, were populous, Matched with the isolation drear and deep Of him who pines among the swarm of men, At once a new thought's king and prisoner, Feeling the truer life within his life, The fountain of his spirit's prophecy, Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop, In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears.

He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell Widens beyond the circles of the stars, And all the sceptred spirits of the past Come thronging in to greet him as their peer; But in the market-place's glare and throng He sits apart, an exile, and his brow Aches with the mocking memory of its crown.

But to the spirit select there is no choice; He cannot say, This will I do, or that, For the cheap means putting Heaven's ends in p.a.w.n, And bartering his bleak rocks, the freehold stern Of destiny's first-born, for smoother fields That yield no crop of self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for G.o.d.

The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child.

Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn, are the right mother-milk To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind, And break a pathway to those unknown realms That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled; Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the pa.s.sion of great hearts; These are their stay, and when the leaden world Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings his patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe,-- One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, One soul against the flesh of all mankind.

Thus ever seems it when my soul can hear The voice that errs not; then my triumph gleams, O'er the blank ocean beckoning, and all night My heart flies on before me as I sail; Far on I see my lifelong enterprise, Which rose like Ganges mid the freezing snows Of a world's sordidness, sweep broadening down, And, gathering to itself a thousand streams, Grow sacred ere it mingle with the sea; I see the ungated wall of chaos old, With blocks Cyclopean hewn of solid night, Fade like a wreath of unreturning mist Before the irreversible feet of light;-- And lo, with what clear omen in the east On day's gray threshold stands the eager dawn, Like young Leander rosy from the sea Glowing at Hero's lattice!

One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me.

G.o.d, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded; Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off His cheek-swollen mates, and from the leaning mast Fortune's full sail strains forward!

One poor day!-- Remember whose and not how short it is!

It is G.o.d's day, it is Columbus's.

A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, Is more than time enough to find a world.

1844.

AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG.

The tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies, Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art, They seemed to struggle lightward from a st.u.r.dy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak, Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone, Sprang from his heart this hymn to G.o.d, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint, harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light; And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.

Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared onward red as blood, Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beneath the eddying flood; For miles away, the fiery spray poured down its deadly rain, And back and forth the billows sucked, and paused, and burst again.

From square to square with tiger leaps panted the l.u.s.tful fire, The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire; And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea.

Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look; His soul had trusted G.o.d too long to be at last forsook; He could not fear, for surely G.o.d a pathway would unfold Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old.

But scarcely can he cross himself, or on his good saint call, Before the sacrilegious flood o'erleaped the churchyard wall; And, ere a _pater_ half was said, mid smoke and crackling glare, His island tower scarce juts its head above the wide despair.

Upon the peril's desperate peak his heart stood up sublime; His first thought was for G.o.d above, his next was for his chime; "Sing now and make your voices heard in hymns of praise," cried he, "As did the Israelites of old, safe walking through the sea!

"Through this red sea our G.o.d hath made the pathway safe to sh.o.r.e; Our promised land stands full in sight; shout now as ne'er before!"

And as the tower came crushing down, the bells, in clear accord, Pealed forth the grand old German hymn,--"All good souls, praise the Lord!"

THE SOWER.

I saw a Sower walking slow Across the earth, from east to west; His hair was white as mountain snow, His head drooped forward on his breast.

With shrivelled hands he flung his seed, Nor ever turned to look behind; Of sight or sound he took no heed; It seemed he was both deaf and blind.

His dim face showed no soul beneath, Yet in my heart I felt a stir, As if I looked upon the sheath That once had clasped Excalibur.

I heard, as still the seed he cast, How, crooning to himself, he sung,-- "I sow again the holy Past, The happy days when I was young.

"Then all was wheat without a tare, Then all was righteous, fair, and true; And I am he whose thoughtful care Shall plant the Old World in the New.

"The fruitful germs I scatter free, With busy hand, while all men sleep; In Europe now, from sea to sea, The nations bless me as they reap."

Then I looked back along his path, And heard the clash of steel on steel, Where man faced man, in deadly wrath, While clanged the tocsin's hurrying peal.

The sky with burning towns flared red, Nearer the noise of fighting rolled, And brothers' blood, by brothers shed, Crept, curdling, over pavements cold.

Then marked I how each germ of truth Which through the dotard's fingers ran Was mated with a dragon's tooth Whence there sprang up an armed man.

I shouted, but he could not hear; Made signs, but these he could not see; And still, without a doubt or fear, Broadcast he scattered anarchy.

Long to my straining ears the blast Brought faintly back the words he sung:-- "I sow again the holy Past, The happy days when I was young."