Freedom

To the God of all sure mercies let my blessing rise today,
From the scoffer and the cruel He hath plucked the spoil away;
Yes, he who cooled the furnace around the faithful three,
And tamed the Chaldean lions, hath set His handmaid free!

Last night I saw the sunset melt though my prison bars,
Last night across my damp earth-floor fell the pale gleam of stars;
In the coldness and the darkness all through the long night-time,
My grated casement whitened with autumn's early rime.

Alone, in that dark sorrow, hour after hour crept by;
Star after star looked palely in and sank adown the sky;
No sound amid night's stillness, save that which seemed to be
The dull and heavy beating of the pulses of the sea;

All night I sat unsleeping, for I knew that on the morrow
T...

    O, gentle shade of quiet woods,
        Where nature dwells in leafy halls,
        I love the sacred voice that falls
    In music o'er thy solitudes!
    Within thine arms the weary heart
        Is hidden from the toils of men,
    And pleasure makes ambition start
        Into a nobler life again.

    Among the fragrant shadows throng
        With all the riches of their truth,
        Glad echoes from the days of youth
    And mingle into laughing song;
    While angel fingers touch the keys
        That slumber in the silent breast,
    Till mem'ry wakes her lullabies
        And childhood fancies rock to rest.

    Again the hours of early joy
        Upon the aged years intrude,
        And dance amid the summer wood
    T...

Beside the brook the boy reclined
And wove his flowery wreath,
And to the waves the wreath consigned
The waves that danced beneath.
"So fleet mine hours," he sighed, "away
Like waves that restless flow:
And so my flowers of youth decay
Like those that float below."

"Ask not why I, alone on earth,
Am sad in life's young time;
To all the rest are hope and mirth
When spring renews its prime.
Alas! the music Nature makes,
In thousand songs of gladness
While charming all around me, wakes
My heavy heart to sadness."

"Ah! vain to me the joys that break
From spring, voluptuous are;
For only one 't is mine to seek
The near, yet ever far!
I stretch my arms, that shadow-shape
In fond embrace to hold;
Still doth the shade the clas...

Great are the myths - I too delight in them;
Great are Adam and Eve - I too look back and accept them;
Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages, inventors, rulers, warriors, and priests.
Great is Liberty! great is Equality! I am their follower;
Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft! where you sail, I sail,
I weather it out with you, or sink with you.

Great is Youth - equally great is Old Age - great are the Day and Night;
Great is Wealth - great is Poverty - great is Expression - great is Silence.

Youth, large, lusty, loving - Youth, full of grace, force, fascination!
Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination?

Day, full-blown and splendid - Day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter,
The Night ...

        I said this morning, as I leaned and threw
    My shutters open to the Spring's surprise,
        "Tell me, O Earth, how is it that in you
    Year after year the same fresh feelings rise?
        How do you keep your young exultant glee?
        No more those sweet emotions come to me.

        "I note through all your fissures how the tide
    Of healthful life goes leaping as of old;
        Your royal dawns retain their pomp and pride;
    Your sunsets lose no atom of their gold.
        How can this wonder be?" My soul's fine ear
        Leaned, listening, till a small voice answered near:

        "My days lapse never over into night;
    My nights encroach not on the rights of dawn.
        I rush not breathless after some delight;
    I wa...

Dark lies the earth, and bright with worlds the sky:
That soft, large, lustrous star, that first outshone,
Still holds us spelled with potent sorcery.


Dilating, shrinking, lightening, it hath won
Our spirit with its strange strong influence,
And sways it as the tides beneath the moon.


What impulse this, o'ermastering heart and sense?
Exalted, thrilled, the freed soul fain would soar
Unto that point of shining prominence,


Craving new fields and some unheard-of shore,
Yea, all the heavens, for her activity,
To mount with daring flight, to hover o'er


Low hills of earth, flat meadows, level sea,
And earthly joy and trouble.    In this hour
Of waning light and sound, of mystery,


Of shadowed love and beauty-veil...

O say, dear sister, are you coming
    Forth to the fields with me?
The very air is gaily ringing
    With hum of bird and bee,
And crowds of swallows now are chirping
    Up in our ancient thorn,
And earth and air are both rejoicing,
    On this gay summer morn.

Shall we hie unto the streamlet's side
    To seek our little boat,
And, plying our oars with right good will,
    Over its bright waves float?
Or shall we loll on the grassy bank
    For hours dreamy, still,
To draw from its depths some silv'ry prize,
    Reward of angler's skill?

I do not talk of the tempting game
    The forest covers hide,
So dear to the sportsman - plovers shy,
    Pheasants with eye of pride,
For I know your timid nature shrinks
    From flas...

Against the cold pale sky
The elm tree company rose high.
All the fine hues of day
That flowered so bold had died away.
Only chill blue, faint green,
And deepening dark blue were seen.

There swinging on a bough
That hung or floated broad and low.
The lamp of evening, bright
With more than planetary light,
Was beautiful and free--
A white bird swaying on the tree.

You watched and I watched,
Our eyes and hearts so surely matched.
We saw the white bird leap, leap
Shining in his journey steep
Through that vast cold sky.
Our hearts knew his unuttered cry--

A cry of free delight
Spreading over the clustering night.
Pole Hill grave and stark
Stared at the valley's tidal dark,
The Darent glimmered wan;
But that eage...

The foaming stream from out the rock
With thunder roar begins to rush,
The oak falls prostrate at the shock,
And mountain-wrecks attend the gush.
With rapturous awe, in wonder lost,
The wanderer hearkens to the sound;
From cliff to cliff he hears it tossed,
Yet knows not whither it is bound:
'Tis thus that song's bright waters pour
From sources never known before.

In union with those dreaded ones
That spin life's thread all-silently,
Who can resist the singer's tones?
Who from his magic set him free?
With wand like that the gods bestow,
He guides the heaving bosom's chords,
He steeps it in the realms below,
He bears it, wondering, heavenward,
And rocks it, 'twixt the grave and gay,
On feeling's scales that trembling sway.

As whe...

At noon, upon the mountain's purple height,
Above the pine-woods and the clouds it shone
No larger than the small white dome of shell
Left by the fledgling wren when wings are born.
By night it joined the company of heaven,
And, with its constant light, became a star.
A needle-point of light, minute, remote,
It sent a subtler message through the abyss,
Held more significance for the seeing eye
Than all the darkness that would blot it out,
Yet could not dwarf it.
                        High in heaven it shone,
Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and dreams
Of man's adventurous mind.
                            Up there, I knew
The explorers of the sky, the pioneers
Of science, now made ready to attack
That darkness once again, and win new worlds.

The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar,
Sleeps or feigns slumber,
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of time.
This poor tooting, creaking cricket,
Pan, half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;
'T is his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps and Andes cold;
Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.



Come search the wood for flowers,--
Wild tea and wild pea,
Grapevine and succory,
Coreopsis
And liatris,
Flaunting in their bowers;
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn...

[1]

While one philosopher[2] affirms
That by our senses we're deceived,
Another[3] swears, in plainest terms,
The senses are to be believed.
The twain are right. Philosophy
Correctly calls us dupes whene'er
Upon mere senses we rely.
But when we wisely rectify
The raw report of eye or ear,
By distance, medium, circumstance,
In real knowledge we advance.
These things hath nature wisely plann'd -
Whereof the proof shall be at hand.
I see the sun: its dazzling glow
Seems but a hand-breadth here below;
But should I see it in its home,
That azure, star-besprinkled dome,
Of all the universe the eye,
Its blaze would fill one half the sky.
The powers of trigonometry
Have set my mind from blunder free.

And has the Spring's all glorious eye
No lesson to the mind?
The birds that cleave the golden sky--
Things to the earth resigned--
Wild flowers that dance to every wind--
Do they no memory leave behind?

Aye, flowers! The very name of flowers,
That bloom in wood and glen,
Brings Spring to me in Winter's hours,
And childhood's dreams again.
The primrose on the woodland lea
Was more than gold and lands to me.

The violets by the woodland side
Are thick as they could thrive;
I've talked to them with childish pride
As things that were alive:
I find them now in my distress--
They seem as sweet, yet valueless.

The cowslips on the meadow lea,
How have I run for them!
I looked with wild and childish glee
Upon each golden gem:

All your wonderful inventions,
    All your houses vast and tall,
All your great gun-fronted vessels,
    Every fort and every wall,
With the passing of the ages,
    They shall pass and they shall fall.

As you sit among the idols
    That your avarice gave birth,
As you count the hoarded treasures
    That you think of priceless worth,
Time is digging tombs to hide them
    In the bosom of the earth.

There shall come a great convulsion
    Or a rushing tidal wave,
Or a sound of mighty thunders
    From a subterranean cave,
And a boasting world's possessions
    Shall be buried in one grave.

From the Centuries of Silence
    We are bringing back again
Buried vase and bust and column
    And the gods they worshipped th...

His weary warfare done, his woes forgot,
Freedom! thy son, oppress'd so long, is free:
He seeks the realms where tyranny is not,
And those shall hail him who have died for thee!
Immortal TELL! receive a soul like thine,
Who scorn'd obedience to usurp'd command:
Who rose a giant from a sphere indign,
To tear the rod from proud oppression's hand.
Alas! no victor-wreaths enzon'd his brow,
But freedom long his hapless fate shall mourn;
Her holy tears shall nurse the laurel-bough,
Whose green leaves grace his consecrated urn.
Nursed by these tears, that bough shall rise sublime,
And bloom triumphant 'mid the wrecks of time!

What shall the leader be in that great day
When we who sleep and dream that we are slaves
Shall wake and know that Liberty is ours?
Mark well that word - not yours, not mine, but ours.
For through the mingling of the separate streams
Of individual protest and desire,
In one united sea of purpose, lies
The course to Freedom.

        When Progression takes
Her undisputed right of way, and sinks
The old traditions and conventions where
They may not rise, what shall the leader be?

No mighty warrior skilled in crafts of war,
Sowing earth's fertile furrows with dead men
And staining crimson God's cerulean sea,
To prove his prowess to a shuddering world.

Nor yet a monarch with a silly crown
Perched on an empty head, an in-bred heir
To sens...

Not vainly did old poets tell,
Nor vainly did old genius paint
God's great and crowning miracle,
The hero and the saint!

For even in a faithless day
Can we our sainted ones discern;
And feel, while with them on the way,
Our hearts within us burn.

And thus the common tongue and pen
Which, world-wide, echo Channing's fame,
As one of Heaven's anointed men,
Have sanctified his name.

In vain shall Rome her portals bar,
And shut from him her saintly prize,
Whom, in the world's great calendar,
All men shall canonize.

By Narragansett's sunny bay,
Beneath his green embowering wood,
To me it seems but yesterday
Since at his side I stood.

The slopes lay green with summer rains,
The western wind blew fresh and free,

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all's poetry with him.
Rhyme and music flow in plenty
For the lad of one-and-twenty,
But Spring for him is no more now
Than daisies to a munching cow;
Just a cheery pleasant season,
Daisy buds to live at ease on.
He's forgotten how he smiled
And shrieked at snowdrops when a child,
Or wept one evening secretly
For April's glorious misery.
Wisdom made him old and wary
Banishing the Lords of Faery.
Wisdom made a breach and battered
Babylon to bits: she scattered
To the hedges and ditches
All our nursery gnomes and witches.
Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,
Drag their treasures from the shelves.
Jack the Giant-killer's gone,
Mother Goose a...