The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 79

Dr. Johnson's st.u.r.dy self-respect led him to invent the Bookseller as a subst.i.tute for the Patron. My relations with you have enabled me to discover how pleasantly the Friend may replace the Bookseller. Let me record my sense of many thoughtful services by a.s.sociating your name with a poem which owes its appearance in this form to your partiality.

Cordially yours,

J.R. LOWELL.

CAMBRIDGE, _November_ 29, 1869.

Far through the memory shines a happy day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense, And simply perfect from its own resource, As to a bee the new campanula's Illuminate seclusion swung in air.

Such days are not the prey of setting suns, Nor ever blurred with mist of afterthought; Like words made magical by poets dead, Wherein the music of all meaning is The sense hath garnered or the soul divined, 10 They mingle with our life's ethereal part, Sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore, By beauty's franchise disenthralled of time.

I can recall, nay, they are present still, Parts of myself, the perfume of my mind, Days that seem farther off than Homer's now Ere yet the child had loudened to the boy, And I, recluse from playmates, found perforce Companionship in things that not denied Nor granted wholly; as is Nature's wont, 20 Who, safe in uncontaminate reserve, Lets us mistake our longing for her love, And mocks with various echo of ourselves.

These first sweet frauds upon our consciousness, That blend the sensual with its imaged world, These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn, Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thought Can overtake the rapture of the sense, To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. 30 Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl, Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely: at a flash We s.n.a.t.c.h the essential grace of meaning out, And that first pa.s.sion beggars all behind, Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. 40 Who, seeing once, has truly seen again The gray vague of unsympathizing sea That dragged his Fancy from her moorings back To sh.o.r.es inhospitable of eldest time, Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered powers, Pitiless seignories in the elements, Omnipotences blind that darkling smite, Misgave him, and repaganized the world?

Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, 50 Perplex the eye with pictures from within.

This hath made poets dream of lives foregone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing half-revealed.

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous redbreast boding rain: The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm; But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the acc.u.mulate thrill 60 That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves between.

I know not how it is with other men, Whom I but guess, deciphering myself; For me, once felt is so felt nevermore.

The fleeting relish at sensation's brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine.

One spring I knew as never any since: All night the surges of the warm southwest Boomed intermittent through the wallowing elms, 70 And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song: One summer hour abides, what time I perched, Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, Denouncing me an alien and a thief: One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest, 80 When in the lane I watched the ash-leaves fall, Balancing softly earthward without wind, Or twirling with directer impulse down On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost, While I grew pensive with the pensive year: And once I learned how marvellous winter was, When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, I creaked adventurous o'er the spangled crust That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly 90 In ghastly solitude about the pole, And gleam relentless to the unsetting sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain Were painted with these sovran images; And later visions seem but copies pale From those unfading frescos of the past, Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me Parted from Nature by the joy in her That doubtfully revealed me to myself. 100 Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate; And paradise was paradise the more, Known once and barred against satiety.

What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see, Our own reaction upon what we feel; The world's a woman to our shifting mood, Feeling with us, or making due pretence And therefore we the more persuade ourselves To make all things our thought's confederates, 110 Conniving with us in whate'er we dream.

So when our Fancy seeks a.n.a.logies, Though she have hidden what she after finds, She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise.

I find my own complexion everywhere; No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, The rapture of its life made visible, The mystery of its yearning realized, As the first babe to the first woman born; 120 No falcon ever felt delight of wings As when, an eyas, from the stolid cliff Loosing himself, he followed his high heart To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could trans.m.u.te her darkness into pearl; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coa.r.s.e constancy of hoyden blush? 130 What the full summer to that wonder new?

But, if in nothing else, in us there is A sense fastidious hardly reconciled To the poor makeshifts of life's scenery, Where the same slide must double all its parts, Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre, I blame not in the soul this daintiness, Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird, In things indifferent by sense purveyed; It argues her an immortality 140 And dateless incomes of experience, This unthrift housekeeping that will not brook A dish warmed-over at the feast of life, And finds Twice stale, served with whatever sauce.

Nor matters much how it may go with me Who dwell in Grub Street and am proud to drudge Where men, my betters, wet their crust with tears; Use can make sweet the peach's shady side, That only by reflection tastes of sun.

But she, my Princess, who will sometimes deign 150 My garret to illumine till the walls, Narrow and dingy, scrawled with hackneyed thought (Poor Richard slowly elbowing Plato out), Dilate and drape themselves with tapestries Nausikaa might have stooped o'er, while, between, Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, send Her only image on through deepening deeps With endless repercussion of delight,-- Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul, That sometimes almost gives me to believe 160 I might have been a poet, gives at least A brain dasaxonized, an ear that makes Music where none is, and a keener pang Of exquisite surmise outleaping thought,-- Her will I pamper in her luxury: No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choice Shall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams, Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall be The invitiate firstlings of experience, Vibrations felt but once and felt life long: 170 Oh, more than half-way turn that Grecian front Upon me, while with self-rebuke I spell, On the plain fillet that confines thy hair In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, The _Naught in overplus_, thy race's badge!

One feast for her I secretly designed In that Old World so strangely beautiful To us the disinherited of eld,-- A day at Chartres, with no soul beside To roil with pedant prate my joy serene 180 And make the minster shy of confidence.

I went, and, with the Saxon's pious care, First ordered dinner at the pea-green inn, The flies and I its only customers.

Eluding these, I loitered through the town, With hope to take my minster unawares In its grave solitude of memory.

A pretty burgh, and such as Fancy loves For bygone grandeurs, faintly rumorous now Upon the mind's horizon, as of storm 190 Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof, That mingle with our mood, but not disturb.

Its once grim bulwarks, tamed to lovers' walks, Look down unwatchful on the sliding Eure, Whose listless leisure suits the quiet place, Lisping among his shallows homelike sounds At Concord and by Bankside heard before.

Chance led me to a public pleasure-ground, Where I grew kindly with the merry groups, And blessed the Frenchman for his simple art 200 Of being domestic in the light of day.

His language has no word, we growl, for Home; But he can find a fireside in the sun, Play with his child, make love, and shriek his mind, By throngs of strangers undisprivacied.

He makes his life a public gallery, Nor feels himself till what he feels comes back In manifold reflection from without; While we, each pore alert with consciousness, Hide our best selves as we had stolen them, 210 And each bystander a detective were, Keen-eyed for every c.h.i.n.k of undisguise.

So, musing o'er the problem which was best,-- A life wide-windowed, shining all abroad, Or curtains drawn to shield from sight profane The rites we pay to the mysterious I,-- With outward senses furloughed and head bowed I followed some fine instinct in my feet, Till, to unbend me from the loom of thought, Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes 220 Confronted with the minster's vast repose.

Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat, That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs, Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, Spume-sliding down the baffled dec.u.man, It rose before me, patiently remote From the great tides of life it breasted once, Hearing the noise of men as in a dream.

I stood before the triple northern port, 230 Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings, Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch, Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say, _Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so n.o.bly realized as this._ I seem to have heard it said by learned folk Who drench you with aesthetics till you feel As if all beauty were a ghastly bore, 240 The faucet to let loose a wash of words, That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore worse; But, being convinced by much experiment How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies, I give thanks For a new relish, careless to inquire My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please, n.o.bly, I mean, nor renegade to art.

The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, 250 The one thing finished in this hasty world, Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout As if a miracle could be encored.

But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals half-divined as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern, 260 Imagination's very self in stone!

With one long sigh of infinite release From pedantries past, present, or to come, I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth.

Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream, Builders of aspiration incomplete, So more consummate, souls self-confident, Who felt your own thought worthy of record In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, 270 After long exile, to the mother-tongue.

Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome Of men invirile and disnatured dames That poison sucked from the Attic bloom decayed, Shrank with a shudder from the blue-eyed race Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, And from the dregs of Romulus express Such wine as Dante poured, or he who blew Roland's vain blast, or sang the Campeador In verse that clanks like armor in the charge, 280 Homeric juice, though brimmed in Odin's horn.

And they could build, if not the columned fane That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, Something more friendly with their ruder skies: The gray spire, molten now in driving mist, Now lulled with the incommunicable blue; The carvings touched to meaning new with snow, Or commented with fleeting grace of shade; The statues, motley as man's memory, Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, 290 History and legend meeting with a kiss Across this bound-mark where their realms confine; The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow, Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer, Meet symbol of the senses and the soul, And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thought Of life and death, and doom, life's equal fee,-- These were before me: and I gazed abashed, Child of an age that lectures, not creates, Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, 300 And twittering round the work of larger men, As we had builded what we but deface.

Far up the great bells wallowed in delight, Tossing their clangors o'er the heedless town, To call the worshippers who never came, Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes.

I entered, reverent of whatever shrine Guards piety and solace for my kind Or gives the soul a moment's truce of G.o.d, And shared decorous in the ancient rite 310 My sterner fathers held idolatrous.

The service over, I was tranced in thought: Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me, Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint, Or brick mock-pious with a marble front; Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, The cl.u.s.tered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, Through which the organ blew a dream of storm, Though not more potent to sublime with awe And shut the heart up to tranquillity, 320 Than aisles to me familiar that o'erarch The conscious silences of brooding woods, Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk:, Yet here was sense of undefined regret, Irreparable loss, uncertain what: Was all this grandeur but anachronism, A sh.e.l.l divorced of its informing life, Where the priest housed him like a hermit-crab, An alien to that faith of elder days That gathered round it this fair shape of stone? 330 Is old Religion but a spectre now, Haunting the solitude of darkened minds, Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day?

Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt, Since Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite And stretched electric threads from mind to mind?

Nay, did Faith build this wonder? or did Fear, That makes a fetish and misnames it G.o.d (Blockish or metaphysic, matters not), Contrive this coop to shut its tyrant in, 340 Appeased with playthings, that he might not harm?

I turned and saw a beldame on her knees; With eyes astray, she told mechanic beads Before some shrine of saintly womanhood, Bribed intercessor with the far-off Judge: Such my first thought, by kindlier soon rebuked, Pleading for whatsoever touches life With upward impulse: be He nowhere else, G.o.d is in all that liberates and lifts, In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles: 350 Blessed the natures sh.o.r.ed on every side With landmarks of hereditary thought!

Thrice happy they that wander not life long Beyond near succor of the household faith, The guarded fold that shelters, not confines!

Their steps find patience In familiar paths, Printed with hope by loved feet gone before Of parent, child, or lover, glorified By simple magic of dividing Time.

My lids were moistened as the woman knelt, 360 And--was it will, or some vibration faint Of sacred Nature, deeper than the will?-- My heart occultly felt itself in hers, Through mutual intercession gently leagued.

Or was it not mere sympathy of brain?

A sweetness intellectually conceived In simpler creeds to me impossible?

A juggle of that pity for ourselves In others, which puts on such pretty masks And snares self-love with bait of charity? 370 Something of all it might be, or of none: Yet for a moment I was s.n.a.t.c.hed away And had the evidence of things not seen; For one rapt moment; then it all came back, This age that blots out life with question-marks, This nineteenth century with its knife and gla.s.s That make thought physical, and thrust far off The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old, To voids spa.r.s.e-sown with alienated stars.

'Tis irrecoverable, that ancient faith, 380 Homely and wholesome, suited to the time, With rod or candy for child-minded men: No theologic tube, with lens on lens Of syllogism transparent, brings it near,-- At best resolving some new nebula, Or blurring some fixed-star of hope to mist.

Science was Faith once; Faith were Science now, Would she but lay her bow and arrows by And arm her with the weapons of the time.

Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought. 390 For there's no virgin-fort but self-respect, And Truth defensive hath lost hold on G.o.d.

Shall we treat Him as if He were a child That knew not his own purpose? nor dare trust The Rock of Ages to their chemic tests, Lest some day the all-sustaining base divine Should fail from under us, dissolved in gas?

The armed eye that with a glance discerns In a dry blood-speck between ox and man Stares helpless at this miracle called life, 400 This shaping potency behind the egg, This circulation swift of deity, Where suns and systems inconspicuous float As the poor blood-disks in our mortal veins.

Each age must worship its own thought of G.o.d, More or less earthy, clarifying still With subsidence continuous of the dregs; Nor saint nor sage could fix immutably The fluent image of the unstable Best, Still changing in their very hands that wrought: 410 To-day's eternal truth To-morrow proved Frail as frost-landscapes on a window-pane.

Meanwhile Thou smiledst, inaccessible, At Thought's own substance made a cage for Thought, And Truth locked fast with her own master-key; Nor didst Thou reck what image man might make Of his own shadow on the flowing world; The climbing instinct was enough for Thee.

Or wast Thou, then, an ebbing tide that left Strewn with dead miracle those eldest sh.o.r.es, 420 For men to dry, and dryly lecture on, Thyself thenceforth incapable of flood?

Idle who hopes with prophets to be s.n.a.t.c.hed By virtue in their mantles left below; Shall the soul live on other men's report, Herself a pleasing fable of herself?

Man cannot be G.o.d's outlaw if he would, Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense But Nature stall shall search some crevice out With messages of splendor from that Source 430 Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures.

This life were brutish did we not sometimes Have intimation clear of wider scope, Hints of occasion infinite, to keep The soul alert with n.o.ble discontent And onward yearnings of unstilled desire; Fruitless, except we now and then divined A mystery of Purpose, gleaming through The secular confusions of the world, Whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours, 440 No man can think nor in himself perceive, Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, Or on the hillside, always unforwarned.

A grace of being, finer than himself, That beckons and is gone,--a larger life Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse Of s.p.a.cious circles luminous with mind, To which the ethereal substance of his own Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, Touched to a sudden glory round the edge, 450 Who that hath known these visitations fleet Would strive to make them trite and ritual?

I, that still pray at morning and at eve, Loving those roots that feed us from the past, And prizing more than Plato things I learned At that best academe, a mother's knee, Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt That perfect disenthralment which is G.o.d; Nor know I which to hold worst enemy, 460 Him who on speculation's windy waste Would turn me loose, stript of the raiment warm By Faith contrived against our nakedness, Or him who, cruel-kind, would fain obscure, With painted saints and paraphrase of G.o.d, The soul's east-window of divine surprise, Where others worship I but look and long; For, though not recreant to my fathers' faith, Its forms to me are weariness, and most That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, 470 Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable, Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze.

Words that have drawn transcendent meanings up From the best pa.s.sion of all bygone time, Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse, Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed in martyr-fires, Can they, so consecrate and so inspired, By repet.i.tion wane to vexing wind?

Alas! we cannot draw habitual breath In the thin air of life's supremer heights, 480 We cannot make each meal a sacrament, Nor with our tailors be disbodied souls,-- We men, too conscious of earth's comedy, Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate, And only for great stakes can be sublime!

Let us be thankful when, as I do here, We can read Bethel on a pile of stones, And, seeing where G.o.d _has_ been, trust in Him.

Brave Peter Fischer there in Nuremberg, Moulding Saint Sebald's miracles in bronze, 490 Put saint and stander-by in that quaint garb Familiar to him in his daily walk, Not doubting G.o.d could grant a miracle Then and in Nuremberg, if so He would; But never artist for three hundred years Hath dared the contradiction ludicrous Of supernatural in modern clothes.

Perhaps the deeper faith that is to come Will see G.o.d rather in the strenuous doubt, Than in the creed held as an infant's hand 500 Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein.

Say it is drift, not progress, none the less, With the old s.e.xtant of the fathers' creed, We shape our courses by new-risen stars, And, still lip-loyal to what once was truth, Smuggle new meanings under ancient names, Unconscious perverts of the Jesuit, Time.

Change is the mask that all Continuance wears To keep us youngsters harmlessly amused; Meanwhile some ailing or more watchful child, 510 Sitting apart, sees the old eyes gleam out, Stern, and yet soft with humorous pity too.

Whilere, men burnt men for a doubtful point, As if the mind were quenchable with fire, And Faith danced round them with her war-paint on, Devoutly savage as an Iroquois; Now Calvin and Servetus at one board Snuff in grave sympathy a milder roast, And o'er their claret settle Comte unread.

f.a.got and stake were desperately sincere: 520 Our cooler martyrdoms are done in types; And flames that shine in controversial eyes Burn out no brains but his who kindles them.

This is no age to get cathedrals built: Did G.o.d, then, wait for one in Bethlehem?

Worst is not yet: lo, where his coming looms, Of earth's anarchic children latest born, Democracy, a t.i.tan who hath learned To laugh at Jove's old-fashioned thunder-bolts,-- Could he not also forge them, if he would? 530 He, better skilled, with solvents merciless, Loosened in air and borne on every wind, Saps unperceived: the calm Olympian height Of ancient order feels its bases yield, And pale G.o.ds glance for help to G.o.ds as pale.

What will be left of good or worshipful, Of spiritual secrets, mysteries, Of fair religion's guarded heritage, Heirlooms of soul, pa.s.sed downward unprofaned From eldest Ind? This Western giant coa.r.s.e, 540 Scorning refinements which he lacks himself, Loves not nor heeds the ancestral hierarchies, Each rank dependent on the next above In ordinary gradation fixed as fate.

King by mere manhood, nor allowing aught Of holier unction than the sweat of toil; In his own strength sufficient; called to solve, On the rough edges of society, Problems long sacred to the choicer few, And improvise what elsewhere men receive 550 As gifts of deity; tough foundling reared Where every man's his own Melchisedek, How make him reverent of a King of kings?

Or Judge self-made, executor of laws By him not first discussed and voted on?

For him no tree of knowledge is forbid, Or sweeter if forbid. How save the ark, Or holy of holies, unprofaned a day From his unscrupulous curiosity That handles everything as if to buy, 560 Tossing aside what fabrics delicate Suit not the rough-and-tumble of his ways?

What hope for those fine-nerved humanities That made earth gracious once with gentler arts, Now the rude hands have caught the trick of thought And claim an equal suffrage with the brain?