The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 19

The c.o.c.k's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Pa.s.sed breezily on by all his flapping mates, 30 Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now.

Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the shingly s.h.a.g-bark's bough Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40 Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, With distant eye broods over other sights, 60 Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky; The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the sunshine h.o.a.rded 'neath her favoring eye. 70

The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush; The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, Ere the rain fall, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is ma.s.sed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A p.r.i.c.kly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.

Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot, Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires, Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires; 90 In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

Below, the Charles, a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond-- Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, 100 From every season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare; Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free On them its largess of variety, For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.

In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green, O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet: Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen, There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet; And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd, 110 As if the silent shadow of a cloud Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.

All round, upon the river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide.

In Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see, 120 As, step by step, with measured swing, they pa.s.s, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the wiry gra.s.s; Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of bra.s.s.

Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink.

And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, 130 A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops.

Another change subdues them in the Fall, But saddens not; they still show merrier tints, Though sober russet seems to cover all; When the first sunshine through their dew-drops glints, Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across, Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss, As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints. 140

Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest, Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill, While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west, Glow opposite;--the marshes drink their fill And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade, Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simonds' darkening hill.

Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts, Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates, And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts, 150 While firmer ice the eager boy awaits, Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire, And until bedtime plays with his desire, Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;--

Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail, By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night, 'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail, Giving a pretty emblem of the day When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, 160 And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's cramping mail.

And now those waterfalls the ebbing river Twice every day creates on either side Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they shiver In gra.s.s-arched channels to the sun denied; High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow, The silvered flats gleam frostily below, Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the gla.s.sy tide.

But crowned in turn by vying seasons three, Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; 170 This glory seems to rest immovably,-- The others were too fleet and vanishing; When the hid tide is at its highest flow.

O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything.

The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, 180 White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway.

But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the sh.o.r.es is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.

Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, 190 With leaden pools between or gullies bare, The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice; No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff Down crackles riverward some thaw-sapped cliff, Or when the close-wedged fields of ice crunch here and there.

But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: Here nothing harsh or rugged intervenes; The early evening with her misty dyes 200 Smooths off the ravelled edges of the nigh, Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, And tones the landscape down, and soothes the wearied eyes.

There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green; There, in red brick, which softening time defies, Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories:-- How with my life knit up is every well-known scene! 210

Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow To outward sight, and through your marshes wind; Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago, Your twin flows silent through my world of mind: Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray!

Before my inner sight ye stretch away, And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.

Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, 220 Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise, Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died, Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.

_Virgilium vidi tantum_,--I have seen But as a boy, who looks alike on all, That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;-- Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame That thither many times the Painter came;-- 230 One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,-- Our only sure possession is the past; The village blacksmith died a month ago, And dim to me the forge's roaring blast; Soon fire-new mediaevals we shall see Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree, And that hewn down, perhaps, the beehive green and vast.

How many times, prouder than king on throne, Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's, 240 Panting have I the creaky bellows blown, And watched the pent volcano's red increase, Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down By that hard arm voluminous and brown, From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.

Dear native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,--to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250 The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds of gold away.

So palpable, I've seen those unshorn few, The six old willows at the causey's end (Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor drew), Through this dry mist their checkering shadows send, Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn thread, Where streamed through leafy c.h.i.n.ks the trembling red, Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes blend.

Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er, 260 Beneath the awarded crown of victory, Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer; Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet _collegisse juvat_, I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had,-- It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee!

Nearer art thou than simply native earth, My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie; A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, Something of kindred more than sympathy; 270 For in thy bounds I reverently laid away That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, That t.i.tle I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky,

That portion of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be;-- The Artist saw his statue of the soul Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the impoverished seasons roll. 280

THE GROWTH OF THE LEGEND

A FRAGMENT

A legend that grew in the forest's hush Slowly as tear-drops gather and gush, When a word some poet chanced to say Ages ago, in his careless way, Brings our youth back to us out of its shroud Clearly as under yon thunder-cloud I see that white sea-gull. It grew and grew, From the pine-trees gathering a sombre hue, Till it seems a mere murmur out of the vast Norwegian forests of the past; 10 And it grew itself like a true Northern pine, First a little slender line, Like a mermaid's green eyelash, and then anon A stem that a tower might rest upon, Standing spear-straight in the waist-deep moss, Its bony roots clutching around and across, As if they would tear up earth's heart in their grasp Ere the storm should uproot them or make them unclasp; Its cloudy boughs singing, as suiteth the pine, To snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine, 20 Till they straightened and let their staves fall to the floor, Hearing waves moan again on the perilous sh.o.r.e Of Vinland, perhaps, while their prow groped its way 'Twixt the frothed gnashing tusks of some ship-crunching bay.

So, pine-like, the legend grew, strong-limbed and tall, As the Gypsy child grows that eats crusts in the hall; It sucked the whole strength of the earth and the sky, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, all brought it supply; 'Twas a natural growth, and stood fearlessly there, True part of the landscape as sea, land, and air; 30 For it grew in good times, ere the fashion it was To force these wild births of the woods under gla.s.s, And so, if 'tis told as it should be told, Though 'twere sung under Venice's moonlight of gold, You would hear the old voice of its mother, the pine, Murmur sealike and northern through every line, And the verses should grow, self-sustained and free, Round the vibrating stem of the melody, Like the lithe moonlit limbs of the parent tree.

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food 40 For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood, The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing From Michael's white shoulder, is hewn and defaced By iconoclast axes in desperate waste, And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Ca.s.sandra-like, crooning its mystical song?

Then the legends go with them,--even yet on the sea A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree, And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core 50 With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.

Yes, wherever the pine-wood has never let in, Since the day of creation, the light and the din Of manifold life, but has safely conveyed From the midnight primeval its armful of shade, And has kept the weird Past with its child-faith alive Mid the hum and the stir of To-day's busy hive.

There the legend takes root in the age-gathered gloom, And its murmurous boughs for their sagas find room.

Where Aroostook, far-heard, seems to sob as he goes 60 Groping down to the sea 'neath his mountainous snows; Where the lake's frore Sahara of never-tracked white, When the crack shoots across it, complains to the night With a long, lonely moan, that leagues northward is lost, As the ice shrinks away from the tread of the frost; Where the lumberers sit by the log-fires that throw Their own threatening shadows far round o'er the snow, When the wolf howls aloof, and the wavering glare Flashes out from the blackness the eyes of the bear, When the wood's huge recesses, half-lighted, supply 70 A canvas where Fancy her mad brush may try, Blotting in giant Horrors that venture not down Through the right-angled streets of the brisk, whitewashed town, But skulk in the depths of the measureless wood Mid the Dark's creeping whispers that curdle the blood, When the eye, glanced in dread o'er the shoulder, may dream, Ere it shrinks to the camp-fire's companioning gleam, That it saw the fierce ghost of the Red Man crouch back To the shroud of the tree-trunk's invincible black; There the old shapes crowd thick round the pine-shadowed camp, 80 Which shun the keen gleam of the scholarly lamp, And the seed of the legend finds true Norland ground, While the border-tale's told and the canteen flits round.

A CONTRAST

Thy love thou sendest oft to me, And still as oft I thrust it back; Thy messengers I could not see In those who everything did lack, The poor, the outcast and the black.