The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 81

V

Our fathers found her in the woods Where Nature meditates and broods, The seeds of unexampled things Which Time to consummation brings Through life and death and man's unstable moods; They met her here, not recognized, 80 A sylvan huntress clothed in furs, To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed, Nor dreamed what destinies were hers: She taught them bee-like to create Their simpler forms of Church and State; She taught them to endue The past with other functions than it knew, And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate; Better than all, she fenced them in their need With iron-handed Duty's sternest creed, 90 'Gainst Self's lean wolf that ravens word and deed.

VI

Why cometh she hither to-day To this low village of the plain Far from the Present's loud highway, From Trade's cool heart and seething brain?

Why cometh she? She was not far away.

Since the soul touched it, not in vain, With pathos of Immortal gain, 'Tis here her fondest memories stay.

She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge 100 Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps, Dear to both Englands; near him he Who wore the ring of Canace; But most her heart to rapture leaps Where stood that era-parting bridge, O'er which, with footfall still as dew, The Old Time pa.s.sed into the New; Where, as your stealthy river creeps, He whispers to his listening weeds Tales of sublimest homespun deeds. 110 Here English law and English thought 'Gainst the self-will of England fought; And here were men (coequal with their fate), Who did great things, unconscious they were great.

They dreamed not what a die was cast With that first answering shot; what then?

There was their duty; they were men Schooled the soul's inward gospel to obey, Though leading to the lion's den.

They felt the habit-hallowed world give way 120 Beneath their lives, and on went they, Unhappy who was last.

When b.u.t.trick gave the word, That awful idol of the unchallenged Past, Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong, Fell crashing; if they heard it not, Yet the earth heard, Nor ever hath forgot, As on from startled throne to throne, Where Superst.i.tion sate or conscious Wrong, 130 A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown.

Thrice venerable spot!

River more fateful than the Rubicon!

O'er those red planks, to s.n.a.t.c.h her diadem, Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them, And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.

VII

Think you these felt no charms In their gray homesteads and embowered farms?

In household faces waiting at the door Their evening step should lighten up no more? 140 In fields their boyish feet had known?

In trees their fathers' hands had set, And which with them had grown, Widening each year their leafy coronet?

Felt they no pang of pa.s.sionate regret For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own?

These things are dear to every man that lives, And life prized more for what it lends than gives.

Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet; And yet the enduring half they chose, 151 Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king, The invisible things of G.o.d before the seen and known: Therefore their memory inspiration blows With echoes gathering on from zone to zone; For manhood is the one immortal thing Beneath Time's changeful sky, And, where it lightened once, from age to age, Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, That length of days is knowing when to die. 160

VIII

What marvellous change of things and men!

She, a world-wandering orphan then, So mighty now! Those are her streams That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels Of all that does, and all that dreams, Of all that thinks, and all that feels, Through s.p.a.ces stretched from sea to sea; By idle tongues and busy brains, By who doth right, and who refrains, Here are our losses and our gains; 170 Our maker and our victim she.

IX

Maiden half mortal, half divine, We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks Our hearts were filled with pride's tumultuous wine; Better to-day who rather feels than thinks.

Yet will some graver thoughts intrude, And cares of sterner mood; They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deeps Where discrowned empires o'er their ruins brood, 179 And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps, I hear the voice as of a mighty wind From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined, 'I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide With men whom dust of faction cannot blind To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind; With men by culture trained and fortified, Who bitter duty to sweet l.u.s.ts prefer, Fearless to counsel and obey.

Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword, Not to be drawn in pa.s.sion or in play, 190 But terrible to punish and deter; Implacable as G.o.d's word, Like it, a shepherd's crook to them that blindly err.

Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints, Offshoots of that one stock whose patient sense Hath known to mingle flux with permanence, Rated my chaste denials and restraints Above the moment's dear-paid paradise: Beware lest, shifting with Time's gradual creep, The light that guided shine into your eyes. 200 The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep; Be therefore timely wise, Nor laugh when this one steals, and that one lies, As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies, Till the deaf Fury comes your house to sweep!'

I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow; Ye shall not be prophetic now, Heralds of ill, that darkening fly Between my vision and the rainbowed sky, Or on the left your hoa.r.s.e forebodings croak 210 From many a blasted bough On Yggdrasil's storm-sinewed oak, That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou; Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast; For I have loved as those who pardon most.

X

Away, ungrateful doubt, away!

At least she is our own to-day.

Break into rapture, my song, Verses, leap forth in the sun, Bearing the joyance along 220 Like a train of fire as ye run!

Pause not for choosing of words, Let them but blossom and sing Blithe as the orchards and birds With the new coming of spring!

Dance in your jollity, bells; Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums; Answer, ye hillside and dells; Bow, all ye people! She comes, Radiant, calm-fronted, as when 230 She hallowed that April day.

Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay.

Softener and strengthener of men, Freedom, not won by the vain, Not to be courted in play, Not to be kept without pain.

Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay, Handmaid and mistress of all, Kindler of deed and of thought, Thou that to hut and to hall 240 Equal deliverance brought!

Souls of her martyrs, draw near, Touch our dull lips with your fire, That we may praise without fear Her our delight, our desire, Our faith's inextinguishable star, Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, Our present, our past, our to be, Who will mingle her life with our dust 249 And makes us deserve to be free!

UNDER THE OLD ELM

POEM READ AT CAMBRIDGE ON THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF WASHINGTON'S TAKING COMMAND OF THE AMERICAN ARMY, 3D JULY, 1775

I

1.

Words pa.s.s as wind, but where great deeds were done A power abides transfused from sire to son: The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear, That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run, With sure impulsion to keep honor clear.

When, pointing down, his father whispers, 'Here, Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely great, Whose soul no siren pa.s.sion could unsphere, Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.'

Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust, 10 Once known to men as pious, learned, just, And one memorial pile that dares to last: But Memory greets with reverential kiss No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this, Touched by that modest glory as it past, O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed These hundred years its monumental shade.

2.

Of our swift pa.s.sage through this scenery Of life and death, more durable than we, What landmark so congenial as a tree 20 Repeating its green legend every spring, And, with a yearly ring, Recording the fair seasons as they flee, Type of our brief but still-renewed mortality?

We fall as leaves: the immortal trunk remains, Builded with costly juice of hearts and brains Gone to the mould now, whither all that be Vanish returnless, yet are procreant still In human lives to come of good or ill, And feed unseen the roots of Destiny. 30

II

1.

Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names They should eternize, but the place Where shining souls have pa.s.sed imbibes a grace Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their fames Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace, Pungent, pathetic, sad with n.o.bler aims, That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames.

This insubstantial world and fleet Seems solid for a moment when we stand On dust enn.o.bled by heroic feet 40 Once mighty to sustain a tottering land, And mighty still such burthen to upbear, Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely were: Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot, Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot, No more a pallid image and a dream, But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.

2.

Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hint To raise long-buried days from tombs of print; 50 'Here stood he,' softly we repeat, And lo, the statue shrined and still In that gray minster-front we call the Past, Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill, Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit.

It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last, Its features human with familiar light, A man, beyond the historian's art to kill, Or sculptor's to efface with patient chisel-blight.

3.

Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught 60 Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loom Present and Past commingle, fruit and bloom Of one fair bough, inseparably wrought Into the seamless tapestry of thought.

So charmed, with undeluded eye we see In history's fragmentary tale Bright clues of continuity, Learn that high natures over Time prevail, And feel ourselves a link in that entail That binds all ages past with all that are to be. 70

III

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