The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 23

II

Hear him but speak, and you will feel The shadows of the Portico 50 Over your tranquil spirit steal, To modulate all joy and woe To one subdued, subduing glow; Above our squabbling business-hours, Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers, His nature satirizes ours; A form and front of Attic grace, He shames the higgling market-place, And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.

What throbbing verse can fitly render 60 That face so pure, so trembling-tender?

Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words, As full of motion as a nest That palpitates with unfledged birds; 'Tis likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs, White with the angel's coming gleam, And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans, 70 And larger destinies seem man's; You conjure from his glowing face The omen of a fairer race; With one grand trope he boldly spans The gulf wherein so many fall, 'Twixt possible and actual; His first swift word, talaria-shod, Exuberant with conscious G.o.d, Out of the choir of planets blots The present earth with all its spots. 80

Himself unshaken as the sky, His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high Systems and creeds pellmell together; 'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye, While trees uprooted splinter by, The dumb turmoil of stormy weather; Less of iconoclast than shaper, His spirit, safe behind the reach Of the tornado of his speech, Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper. 90

So great in speech, but, ah! in act So overrun with vermin troubles, The coa.r.s.e, sharp-cornered, ugly fact Of life collapses all his bubbles: Had he but lived in Plato's day, He might, unless my fancy errs, Have shared that golden voice's sway O'er barefooted philosophers.

Our nipping climate hardly suits The ripening of ideal fruits: 100 His theories vanquish us all summer, But winter makes him dumb and dumber; To see him mid life's needful things Is something painfully bewildering; He seems an angel with clipt wings Tied to a mortal wife and children, And by a brother seraph taken In the act of eating eggs and bacon.

Like a clear fountain, his desire Exults and leaps toward the light, 110 In every drop it says 'Aspire!'

Striving for more ideal height; And as the fountain, falling thence, Crawls baffled through the common gutter, So, from his speech's eminence, He shrinks into the present tense, Unkinged by foolish bread and b.u.t.ter.

Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds Not all of life that's brave and wise is; He strews an ampler future's seeds, 120 'Tis your fault if no harvest rises; Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught That all he is and has is Beauty's?

By soul the soul's gains must be wrought, The Actual claims our coa.r.s.er thought, The Ideal hath its higher duties.

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO

Can this be thou who, lean and pale, With such immitigable eye Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale, And note each vengeance, and pa.s.s by Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance Cast backward one forbidden glance, And saw Francesca, with child's glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee And with proud hands control its fiery prance?

With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow, And eye remote, that inly sees Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now In some sea-lulled Hesperides, Thou movest through the jarring street, Secluded from the noise of feet By her gift-blossom in thy hand, Thy branch of palm from Holy Land;-- No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.

Yet there is something round thy lips That prophesies the coming doom, The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse Notches the perfect disk with gloom; A something that would banish thee, And thine untamed pursuer be, From men and their unworthy fates, Though Florence had not shut her gates, And Grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.

Ah! he who follows fearlessly The beckonings of a poet-heart Shall wander, and without the world's decree, A banished man in field and mart; Harder than Florence' walls the bar Which with deaf sternness holds him far From home and friends, till death's release, And makes his only prayer for peace, Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong war!

ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD

Death never came so nigh to me before, Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused Of calm and peace and safe forgetfulness, Of folded hands, closed eyes, and heart at rest, And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf, Of faults forgotten, and an inner place Kept sacred for us in the heart of friends; But these were idle fancies, satisfied With the mere husk of this great mystery, And dwelling in the outward shows of things. 10 Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams, Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom, With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content: 'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer G.o.d The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.

True is it that Death's face seems stern and cold, When he is sent to summon those we love, 20 But all G.o.d's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after other lift their frowning masks, And we behold the seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of G.o.d.

With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer; this was meant When Jesus touched the blind man's lids with clay.

Life is the jailer, Death the angel sent 30 To draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

He flings not ope the ivory gate of Rest,-- Only the fallen spirit knocks at that,-- But to benigner regions beckons us, To destinies of more rewarded toil.

In the hushed chamber, sitting by the dead, It grates on us to hear the flood of life Whirl rustling onward, senseless of our loss.

The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps; 40 The locust's shrill alarum stings the ear; Hard by, the c.o.c.k shouts l.u.s.tily; from farm to farm, His cheery brothers, telling of the sun, Answer, till far away the joyance dies: We never knew before how G.o.d had filled The summer air with happy living sounds; All round us seems an overplus of life, And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.

It is most strange, when the great miracle Hath for our sakes been done, when we have had 50 Our inwardest experience of G.o.d, When with his presence still the room expands, And is awed after him, that naught is changed, That Nature's face looks unacknowledging, And the mad world still dances heedless on After its b.u.t.terflies, and gives no sign.

'Tis hard at first to see it all aright: In vain Faith blows her trump to summon back Her scattered troop: yet, through the clouded gla.s.s Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look 60 Undazzled on the kindness of G.o.d's face; Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through.

It is no little thing, when a fresh soul And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scope For good, not gravitating earthward yet, But circling in diviner periods, Are sent into the world,--no little thing, When this unbounded possibility Into the outer silence is withdrawn.

Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread 70 Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim!

How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child's!

He bends above _thy_ cradle now, or holds His warning finger out to be thy guide; Thou art the nursling now; he watches thee Slow learning, one by one, the secret things Which are to him used sights of every day; He smiles to see thy wondering glances con 80 The gra.s.s and pebbles of the spirit-world, To thee miraculous; and he will teach Thy knees their due observances of prayer.

Children are G.o.d's apostles, day by day Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace; Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone.

To me, at least, his going hence hath given Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies, And opened a new fountain in my heart For thee, my friend, and all: and oh, if Death 90 More near approaches meditates, and clasps Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand, G.o.d, strengthen thou my faith, that I may see That 'tis thine angel, who, with loving haste, Unto the service of the inner shrine, Doth waken thy beloved with a kiss.

EURYDICE

Heaven's cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Bathing in gra.s.s, with thirsty eye I suck the last drop of the sky; With each hot sense I draw to the lees The quickening out-door influences, And empty to each radiant comer A supernaculum of summer: Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice Could bring enchantment so profuse, 10 Though for its press each grape-bunch had The white feet of an Oread.

Through our coa.r.s.e art gleam, now and then, The features of angelic men: 'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint; The dauber's botch no more obscures The mighty master's portraitures.

And who can say what luckier beam The hidden glory shall redeem, 20 For what chance clod the soul may wait To stumble on its n.o.bler fate, Or why, to his unwarned abode, Still by surprises comes the G.o.d?

Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross, May meditate a whole youth's loss, Some windfall joy, we know not whence, Redeem a lifetime's rash expense, And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark, 29 Stripped of their simulated dark, Mountains of gold that pierce the sky, Girdling its valleyed poverty.

I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return, With olden heats my pulses burn,-- Mine be the self-forgetting sweep, The torrent impulse swift and wild, Wherewith Taghkanic's rockborn child Dares gloriously the dangerous leap.

And, in his sky-descended mood, Trans.m.u.tes each drop of sluggish blood, 40 By touch of bravery's simple wand, To amethyst and diamond, Proving himself no b.a.s.t.a.r.d slip, But the true granite-cradled one, Nursed with the rock's primeval drip, The cloud-embracing mountain's son!

Prayer breathed in vain I no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday; For plated wares of Sheffield stamp We gave the old Aladdin's lamp; 'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went 51 That undesigned abandonment, That wise, unquestioning content, Which could erect its microcosm Out of a weed's neglected blossom, Could call up Arthur and his peers By a low moss's clump of spears, Or, in its shingle trireme launched, Where Charles in some green inlet-branched, Could venture for the golden fleece 60 And dragon-watched Hesperides, Or, from its ripple-shattered fate, Ulysses' chances re-create?

When, heralding life's every phase, There glowed a G.o.ddess-veiling haze, A plenteous, forewarning grace, Like that more tender dawn that flies Before the full moon's ample rise?

Methinks thy parting glory shines Through yonder grove of singing pines; 70 At that elm-vista's end I trace Dimly thy sad leave-taking face, Eurydice! Eurydice!

The tremulous leaves repeat to me Eurydice! Eurydice!

No gloomier Orcus swallows thee Than the unclouded sunset's glow; Thine is at least Elysian woe; Thou hast Good's natural decay, And fadest like a star away 80 Into an atmosphere whose shine With fuller day o'ermasters thine, Entering defeat as 't were a shrine; For us,--we turn life's diary o'er To find but one word,--Nevermore.

SHE CAME AND WENT

As a twig trembles, which a bird Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent, So is my memory thrilled and stirred;-- I only know she came and went.

As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, The blue dome's measureless content,-- So my soul held, that moment's heaven;-- I only know she came and went.

As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps The orchards full of bloom and scent, So clove her May my wintry sleeps;-- I only know she came and went.

An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays;-- I only know she came and went

Oh, when the room grows slowly dim, And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went.

THE CHANGELING

I had a little daughter, And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature.

Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair; For it was as wavy and golden, And as many changes took, As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover, How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, And dimpled her wholly over, Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her veins to me!

She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth, And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cage-door.