Death

Quel, che d' odore e di color vincea.

THE LAUREL, IN WHOM HE PLACED ALL HIS JOY HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM HIM TO ADORN HEAVEN.


    That which in fragrance and in hue defied
The odoriferous and lucid East,
Fruits, flowers and herbs and leaves, and whence the West
Of all rare excellence obtain'd the prize,
My laurel sweet, which every beauty graced,
Where every glowing virtue loved to dwell,
Beheld beneath its fair and friendly shade
My Lord, and by his side my Goddess sit.
Still have I placed in that beloved plant
My home of choicest thoughts: in fire, in frost
Shivering or burning, still I have been bless'd.
The world was of her perfect honours full
When God, his own bright heaven therewith to grace,
Reclaim'd her for Himself, for she was his.

Yet again another, ere his crowning year,
Gone from friends that here may look for him no more.
Never now for him shall hope set wide the door,
Hope that hailed him hither, fain to greet him here.
All the gracious garden-flowers he held so dear,
Oldworld English blossoms, all his homestead store,
Oldworld grief had strewn them round his bier of yore,
Bidding each drop leaf by leaf as tear by tear;
Rarer lutes than mine had borne more tuneful token,
Touched by subtler hands than echoing time can wrong,
Sweet as flowers had strewn his graveward path along.
Now may no such old sweet dirges more be spoken,
Now the flowers whose breath was very song are broken,
Nor may sorrow find again so sweet a song.

Great dignity ever attends great grief,
And silently walks beside it;
And I always know when I see such woe
That Invisible Helpers guide it.
And I know deep sorrow is like a tide,
It cannot ever be flowing;
The high-water mark in the night and the dark -
Then dawn, and the outward going.

But the people who pull at my heart-strings hard
Are the ones whom destiny hurries
Through commonplace ways to the end of their days,
And pesters with paltry worries.
The peddlers who trudge with a budget of wares
To the door that is slammed unkindly;
The vendor who stands with his shop in his hands
Where the hastening hosts pass blindly;

The woman who holds in her poor flat purse
The price of her rent-room only,
While her starved eye feeds on the comfort...

        1.

        THOU art of this world, Christ. Thou know'st it all;
        Thou know'st our evens, our morns, our red and gray;
        How moons, and hearts, and seasons rise and fall;
        How we grow weary plodding on the way;
        Of future joy how present pain bereaves,
        Rounding us with a dark of mere decay,
        Tossed with a drift Of summer-fallen leaves.

        2.

        Thou knowest all our weeping, fainting, striving;
        Thou know'st how very hard it is to be;
        How hard to rouse faint will not yet reviving;
        To do the pure thing, trusting all to thee;
        To hold thou art there, for all no face we see;
        How hard to think, through cold and dark and dearth,
        That thou art nearer ...

The year has been a tedious one--
A weary round of toil and sorrow,
And, since it now at last is gone,
We say farewell and hail the morrow.

Yet o'er the wreck which time has wrought
A sweet, consoling ray is shimmered--
The one but compensating thought
That literary life has glimmered.

Struggling with hunger and with cold
The world contemptuously beheld 'er;
The little thing was one year old--
But who'd have cared had she been elder?

Time, never wand'ring from his annual round,
Bids Zephyr breathe the Spring, and thaw the ground;
Bleak Winter flies, new verdure clothes the plain,
And earth assumes her transient youth again.
Dream I, or also to the Spring belong
Increase of Genius, and new pow'rs of song?
Spring gives them, and, how strange soere it seem,
Impels me now to some harmonious theme.
Castalia's fountain and the forked hill[1]
By day, by night, my raptur'd fancy fill,
My bosom burns and heaves, I hear within
A sacred sound that prompts me to begin,
Lo! Phoebus comes, with his bright hair he blends
The radiant laurel wreath; Phoebus descends;
I mount, and, undepress'd by cumb'rous clay,
Through cloudy regions win my easy way;
Rapt through poetic shadowy haunts I fly:

Hate is the cask of the Danaïdes;
Vengeance, distraught, has red and brawny arms,
With which she hurls into her empty dark
Buckets of blood and tears from dead men's eyes.

Satan makes secret holes through which will fly
Out of these depths a thousand years of pain,
Though Hate will use her victims once again,
Resuscitating them to squeeze them dry.

Hate is a drunkard in a tavern's depths
Who feels a constant thirst, from drinking born,
That thrives and multiplies like Hydra's heads.

But happy drinkers know their conqueror,
And Hate is dealt a bitter fate, unable
Ever to fall asleep under the table.

The play is Life; and this round earth,
The narrow stage whereon
We act before an audience
Of actors dead and gone.

There is a figure in the wings
That never goes away,
And though I cannot see his face,
I shudder while I play.

His shadow looms behind me here,
Or capers at my side;
And when I mouth my lines in dread,
Those scornful lips deride.

Sometimes a hooting laugh breaks out,
And startles me alone;
While all my fellows, wondering
At my stage-fright, play on.

I fear that when my Exit comes,
I shall encounter there,
Stronger than fate, or time, or love,
And sterner than despair,

The Final Critic of the craft,
As stage tradition tells;
And yet--perhaps 'twill only be
The jester with his bells.

WILLIAM CHILDS BREWER, died Jan. 24th, 1862, aged 7 years, and GEORGE CLEVELAND BREWER, aged 5 years, at Springfield, Mass., Feb. 4th, 1862.


The noble boy amid his sports
    Droop'd like a smitten flower
That feels the frost-king's fatal shaft,
    And withers in its bower.

But then a younger darling sank
    In childhood's rosy bloom,
And those whose hearts were one from birth,
    Were brothers in the tomb.

Not in the tomb. Ah no! They rose
    Through Christ their Saviour's love,
In his blest presence to cement
    Their deathless bond of love.

Are they not dwelling side by side?
    Have they not 'scaped the strife,
The snares, the sins, the woes that stain
    This pilgrimage of life?

Oh heart of sorrowing ...

Not heaving from my ribb'd breast only;
Not in sighs at night, in rage, dissatisfied with myself;
Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs;
Not in many an oath and promise broken;
Not in my wilful and savage soul's volition;
Not in the subtle nourishment of the air;
Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists;
Not in the curious systole and diastole within, which will one day cease;
Not in many a hungry wish, told to the skies only;
Not in cries, laughter, defiances, thrown from me when alone, far in the wilds;
Not in husky pantings through clench'd teeth;
Not in sounded and resounded words - chattering words, echoes, dead words;
Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,
Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day;
Nor in the limb...

WRITTEN IN NOVEMBER, 1693


Thrice, with a prophet's voice, and prophet's power,
    The Muse was called in a poetic hour,
And insolently thrice the slighted maid
Dared to suspend her unregarded aid;
Then with that grief we form in spirits divine,
Pleads for her own neglect, and thus reproaches mine.
    Once highly honoured! false is the pretence
You make to truth, retreat, and innocence!
Who, to pollute my shades, bring'st with thee down
The most ungenerous vices of the town;
Ne'er sprung a youth from out this isle before
I once esteem'd, and loved, and favour'd more,
Nor ever maid endured such courtlike scorn,
So much in mode, so very city-born;
'Tis with a foul design the Muse you send,
Like a cast mistress, to your wicked friend;
But find s...

I.

            Lo! at my feet,
        A something pale of hue;
        A something sad to view;
    Dead or alive I dare not call it sweet.


II.

            Not white as snow;
        Not transient as a tear!
        A warrior left it here,
    It was his passport ere he met the foe.


III.

            Here is a name,
        A word upon the book;
        If ye but kneel to look,
    Ye'll find the letters "Sachal" on the same.


IV.

            His Land to cherish,
        He died at twenty-seven.
        There are no wars in Heaven,
    But when he fought he gain'd the right to perish.


V.

            Where was he born?
        In France, at Puy le Dôme.

    The miser lay on his lonely bed;
            Life's candle was burning dim.
His heart in an iron chest was hid
Under heaps of gold and an iron lid;
    And whether it were alive or dead
            It never troubled him.

    Slowly out of his body he crept.
            He said, "I am just the same!
Only I want my heart in my breast;
I will go and fetch it out of my chest!"
    Through the dark a darker shadow he leapt,
        Saying "Hell is a fabled flame!"

    He opened the lid. Oh, Hell's own night!
        His ghost-eyes saw no gold!--
Empty and swept! Not a gleam was there!
In goes his hand, but the chest is bare!
    Ghost-fingers, aha! have only might
    To close, not to clasp and hold!

    But his heart he saw, and he ...

Dear love, life has dewy mornings,
    And the shadeless blaze of noon,
Flowers, that we stop to gather,
    That fade from our hands so soon

Dear love, there are meetings, partings,
    We have sunshine, we have shade,
There's no continuing city
    That our human hands have made

We go onward, joy and sorrow
    Checkers all the path we tread,
But our Father loves His children
    And with loving care they're led.

Dear love, His great wisdom chooseth
    The path that we both have trod,
And through storm, and calm, and sunshine,
    We rest in the hand of God

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

I just had turned the classic page.
    And traced that happy period over,
When blest alike were youth and age,
And love inspired the wisest sage,
    And wisdom graced the tenderest lover.

Before I laid me down to sleep
    Awhile I from the lattice gazed
Upon that still and moonlight deep,
    With isles like floating gardens raised,
For Ariel there his sports to keep;
While, gliding 'twixt their leafy shores
The lone night-fisher plied his oars.

I felt,--so strongly fancy's power
Came o'er me in that witching hour,--
As if the whole bright scenery there
    Were lighted by a Grecian sky,
And I then breathed the blissful air
    That late had thrilled to Sappho's sigh.

Thus, waking, dreamt I,--and when Sleep
    Came o'er my ...

Beato in sogno, e di languir contento.

THOUGH SO LONG LOVE'S FAITHFUL SERVANT, HIS ONLY REWARD HAS BEEN TEARS.


    Happy in visions, and content to pine,
Shadows to clasp, to chase the summer gale,
On shoreless and unfathom'd sea to sail,
To build on sand, and in the air design,
The sun to gaze on till these eyes of mine
Abash'd before his noonday splendour fail,
To chase adown some soft and sloping vale,
The wingèd stag with maim'd and heavy kine;
Weary and blind, save my own harm to all,
Which day and night I seek with throbbing heart,
On Love, on Laura, and on Death I call.
Thus twenty years of long and cruel smart,
In tears and sighs I've pass'd, because I took
Under ill stars, alas! both bait and hook.

MACGREGOR.

The Soul, of late a lovely sleeping child,
Spreads sudden wings and stands in radiant guise,
Eyed like the morn and bent upon the skies;
Her the blue gulf dismays not, nor the wild
Horizons with the wrecks of thunder piled;
Storm has she known, and how its murmur dies
Starlike through stainless heavens she would rise
And be no more with cloudy dreams beguiled.
Was sleep not sweet? sweet till on sleeping ears
Earth's voices broke in discord. Now she hears
Far, far away diviner music move;
Nor shall her wing be sated of its flight,
Nor shall her eyes be weary of the night,
While round her sweep the singing stars of Love.