Freedom

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,
And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song;
Nor can remembrance, Mathew! bring to view
A fate more pleasing, a delight more true
Than that in which the brother Poets joy'd,
Who with combined powers, their wit employ'd
To raise a trophy to the drama's muses.
The thought of this great partnership diffuses
Over the genius loving heart, a feeling
Of all that's high, and great, and good, and healing.

Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee
Past each horizon of fine poesy;
Fain would I echo back each pleasant note
As o'er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float
'Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted,
Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted:
But 'tis impossible, far different cares
Beckon me sternly fr...

Youth is the time when hearts are large,
And stirring wars
Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn
To the blade it draws.
If woman incite, and duty show
(Though made the mask of Cain),
Or whether it be Truth's sacred cause,
Who can aloof remain
That shares youth's ardor, uncooled by the snow
Of wisdom or sordid gain?

The liberal arts and nurture sweet
Which give his gentleness to man--
Train him to honor, lend him grace
Through bright examples meet--
That culture which makes never wan
With underminings deep, but holds
The surface still, its fitting place,
And so gives sunniness to the face
And bravery to the heart; what troops
Of generous boys in happiness thus bred--
Saturnians through life's Tempe led,
Went from the North an...

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach ...

The beaver cut his timber
With patient teeth that day,
The minks were fish-wards, and the crows
Surveyors of highway,

When Keezar sat on the hillside
Upon his cobbler’s form,
With a pan of coals on either hand
To keep his waxed-ends warm.

And there, in the golden weather,
He stitched and hammered and sung;
In the brook he moistened his leather,
In the pewter mug his tongue.

Well knew the tough old Teuton
Who brewed the stoutest ale,
And he paid the goodwife’s reckoning
In the coin of song and tale.

The songs they still are singing
Who dress the hills of vine,
The tales that haunt the Brocken
And whisper down the Rhine.

Woodsy and wild and lonesome,
The swift stream wound away,
Through birches and scar...

At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide
Robe in gray mist, and through the greening hills
The hoot-owl calls his mate, and whippoorwills
Clamor from every copse and orchard-side,
I watched the red star rising in the East,
And while his fellows of the flaming sign
From prisoning daylight more and more released,
Lift their pale lamps, and, climbing higher, higher,
Out of their locks the waters of the Line
Shaking in clouds of phosphorescent fire,
Rose in the splendor of their curving flight,
Their dolphin leap across the austral night,
From windows southward opening on the sea
What eyes, I wondered, might be watching, too,
Orbed in some blossom-laden balcony.
Where, from the garden to the rail above,
As though a lover's greeting to his love
Should bo...

In the fair morning of his life,
    When his pure heart lay in his breast,
    Panting, with all that wild unrest
To plunge into the great world's strife

That fills young hearts with mad desire,
    He saw a sunset. Red and gold
    The burning billows surged and rolled,
And upward tossed their caps of fire.

He looked. And as he looked, the sight
    Sent from his soul through breast and brain
    Such intense joy, it hurt like pain.
His heart seemed bursting with delight.

So near the Unknown seemed, so close
    He might have grasped it with his hand.
    He felt his inmost soul expand,
As sunlight will expand a rose.

One day he heard a singing strain -
    A human voice, in bird-like trills.
    He paused, and little raptur...

You flung your taunt across the wave
We bore it as became us,
Well knowing that the fettered slave
Left friendly lips no option save
To pity or to blame us.

You scoffed our plea. “Mere lack of will,
Not lack of power,” you told us
We showed our free-state records; still
You mocked, confounding good and ill,
Slave-haters and slaveholders.

We struck at Slavery; to the verge
Of power and means we checked it;
Lo!—presto, change! its claims you urge,
Send greetings to it o’er the surge,
And comfort and protect it.

But yesterday you scarce could shake,
In slave-abhorring rigor,
Our Northern palms for conscience’ sake
To-day you clasp the hands that ache
With “walloping the nigger!”*

O Englishmen!—in hope and creed,
In...

In lonely gardens deserted - unseen -
Oh! lovely lilacs of purple and white,
You are dipping down through a mist of green;
For the morning sun's delight.
And the velvet bee, all belted with black,
Drinks deep of the wine which your flagons hold,
Clings close to your plumes while he fills his pack
With a load of burnished gold.

You hide the fences with blossoms of snow,
And sweeten the shade of castle towers;
Over low, grey gables you brightly blow,
Like amethysts turned to flowers.
The tramp on the highway - ragged and bold -
Wears you close to his heart with jaunty air;
You rest in my lady's girdle of gold,
And are held against her hair.

In God's own acre your tender flowers,
Bend down to the grasses and seem to sigh
For those who count ...

Blithe dreams arise to greet us,
And life feels clean and new,
For the old love comes to meet us
In the dawning and the dew.
O'erblown with sunny shadows,
O'ersped with winds at play,
The woodlands and the meadows
Are keeping holiday.
Wild foals are scampering, neighing,
Brave merles their hautboys blow:
Come! let us go a-maying
As in the Long-Ago.

Here we but peak and dwindle:
The clank of chain and crane,
The whir of crank and spindle
Bewilder heart and brain;
The ends of our endeavour
Are merely wealth and fame,
Yet in the still Forever
We're one and all the same;
Delaying, still delaying,
We watch the fading west:
Come! let us go a-maying,
Nor fear to take the best.

Yet beautiful and spacious
The wis...

I dreamed a Voice, of one God-authorised,
Cried loudly thro' the world, 'Disarm!    Disarm!'
And there was consternation in the camps;
And men who strutted under braid and lace
Beat on their medalled breasts, and wailed, 'Undone!'
The word was echoed from a thousand hills,
And shop and mill, and factory and forge,
Where throve the awful industries of death,
Hushed into silence.    Scrawled upon the doors,
The passer read, 'Peace bids her children starve.'
But foolish women clasped their little sons
And wept for joy, not reasoning like men.

Again the Voice commanded:    'Now go forth
And build a world for Progress and for Peace.
This work has waited since the earth was shaped;
But men were fighting, and they could not toil.
The needs of life outnumber nee...

I must do as you do? Your way I own
    Is a very good way. And still,
There are sometimes two straight roads to a town,
    One over, one under the hill.

You are treading the safe and the well-worn way,
    That the prudent choose each time;
And you think me reckless and rash to-day,
    Because I prefer to climb.

Your path is the right one, and so is mine.
    We are not like peas in a pod,
Compelled to lie in a certain line,
    Or else be scattered abroad.

'Twere a dull old world, methinks, my friend,
    If we all went just one way;
Yet our paths will meet no doubt at the end,
    Though they lead apart to-day.

You like the shade, and I like the sun;
    You like an even pace,
I like to mix with the crowd and run,
  ...

Duan First.[1]


    The sun had clos'd the winter day,
    The curlers quat their roaring play,
    An' hunger'd maukin ta'en her way
        To kail-yards green,
    While faithless snaws ilk step betray
        Whare she has been.

    The thresher's weary flingin'-tree
    The lee-lang day had tired me;
    And when the day had closed his e'e
        Far i' the west,
    Ben i' the spence, right pensivelie,
        I gaed to rest.

    There, lanely, by the ingle-cheek,
    I sat and ey'd the spewing reek,
    That fill'd, wi' hoast-provoking smeek,
        The auld clay biggin';
    An' heard the restless rattons squeak
        About the riggin'.

    All in this mottie, misty clime,
    I backward m...

Faint-gazing on the burning orb of day,
When Afric's injured son expiring lay,
His forehead cold, his labouring bosom bare,
His dewy temples, and his sable hair,
His poor companions kissed, and cried aloud,
Rejoicing, whilst his head in peace he bowed:
Now thy long, long task is done,
Swiftly, brother, wilt thou run,
Ere to-morrow's golden beam
Glitter on thy parent stream,
Swiftly the delights to share,
The feast of joy that waits thee there.
Swiftly, brother, wilt thou ride
O'er the long and stormy tide,
Fleeter than the hurricane,
Till thou see'st those scenes again,
Where thy father's hut was reared,
Where thy mother's voice was heard;
Where thy infant brothers played
Beneath the fragrant citron shade;
Where through green savannahs wide...

Or, from that Sea of Time,
Spray, blown by the wind - a double winrow-drift of weeds and shells;
(O little shells, so curious-convolute! so limpid-cold and voiceless!
Yet will you not, to the tympans of temples held,
Murmurs and echoes still bring up - Eternity's music, faint and far,
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim - strains for the Soul of the Prairies,
Whisper'd reverberations - chords for the ear of the West, joyously sounding
Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable;)
Infinitessimals out of my life, and many a life,
(For not my life and years alone I give - all, all I give;) 10
These thoughts and Songs - waifs from the deep - here, cast high and dry,
Wash'd on America's shores.


Currents of starting a Continent new,
Overtures sent to the sol...

Some of my friends (for friends I must suppose
All, who, not daring to appear my foes,
Feign great good will, and, not more full of spite
Than full of craft, under false colours fight),
Some of my friends (so lavishly I print),
As more in sorrow than in anger, hint
(Though that indeed will scarce admit a doubt)
That I shall run my stock of genius out,
My no great stock, and, publishing so fast,
Must needs become a bankrupt at the last.
'The husbandman, to spare a thankful soil,
Which, rich in disposition, pays his toil
More than a hundredfold, which swells his store
E'en to his wish, and makes his barns run o'er,
By long Experience taught, who teaches best,
Foregoes his hopes a while, and gives it rest:
The land, allow'd its losses to repair,
Refresh'd, a...

I knew it the first of the Summer -
    I knew it the same at the end -
That you and your love were plighted,
    But couldn't you be my friend?
Couldn't we sit in the twilight,
    Couldn't we walk on the shore,
With only a pleasant friendship
    To bind us, and nothing more?

There was never a word of nonsense
    Spoken between us two,
Though we lingered oft in the garden
    Till the roses were wet with dew.
We touched on a thousand subjects -
    The moon and the stars above;
But our talk was tinctured with science,
    With never a hint of love.

"A wholly platonic friendship,"
    You said I had proved to you,
"Could bind a man and a woman
    The whole long season through,
With never a thought of folly,
    Though bo...

While the earth is dark and grey
    How I laugh within:    I know
In my breast what ardours gay
    From the morning overflow.

Though the cheek be white and wet
    In my heart no fear may fall:
There my chieftain leads, and yet
    Ancient battle-trumpets call.

Bend on me no hasty frown
    If my spirit slight your cares:
Sunlike still my joy looks down
    Changing tears to beamy airs.

Think me not of fickle heart
    If with joy my bosom swells
Though your ways from mine depart:
    In the true are no farewells.

What I love in you I find
    Everywhere.    A friend I greet
In each flower and tree and wind--
    Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet.

What to you are bolts and bars
    Are to me the hands that...

No Muse will I invoke; for she is fled!
Lo! where she sits, breathing, yet all but dead.
She loved the heavens of old, she thought them fair;
And dream'd of Gods in Tempe's golden air.
For her the wind had voice, the sea its cry;
She deem'd heroic Greece could never die.
Breathless was she, to think what nymphs might play
In clear green depths, deep-shaded from the day;
She thought the dim and inarticulate god
Was beautiful, nor knew she man a sod;
But hoped what seem'd might not be all untrue,
And feared to look beyond the eternal blue.
But now the heavens are bared of dreams divine.
Still murmurs she, like Autumn, _This was mine!_
How should she face the ghastly, jarring Truth,
That questions all, and tramples without ruth?
And still she clings to Ida of her...