Freedom

Now lonely is the wood:
    No flower now lingers, none!
The virgin sisterhood
    Of roses, all are gone;
Now Autumn sheds her latest leaf;
And in my heart is grief.

Ah me, for all earth rears,
    The appointed bound is placed!
After a thousand years
    The great oak falls at last:
And thou, more lovely, canst not stay,
Sweet rose, beyond thy day.

Our life is not the life
    Of roses and of leaves;
Else wherefore this deep strife,
    This pain, our soul conceives?
The fall of ev'n such short-lived things
To us some sorrow brings.

And yet, plant, bird, and fly
    Feel no such hidden fire.
Happy they live; and die
    Happy, with no desire.
They in their brief life have fulfill'd
All Nature in them will'...

A wild spring upland all this charmed page,
Where, in the early dawn, the maenads rage,
Mad, chaste, and lovely! This, a darker spot
Where lone Antigone bewails her lot.
Death for her spouse, her bridal-bed the tomb.
And this, again, is some rich palace-room.
Where Phsedra pines: "0 woodlands! 0, the sea!"
Or some sweet walk of Sappho, beauteously
Built o'er with rose, with bloom of purple grapes!
They are all here, the ancient Attic shapes
Of passion, beauty, terror, love, and shame;
Proud shadows, you do summon them by name:
Achaean princes, Helen, the young god.
Fair Dionysus, CEdipus, who trod
Such ways of doom! Aye, these and more than these
You call across the ages and the seas!
And each one, answering, doth dream he lists
To the great voices of old...

On the isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school.
Over sails that not in vain
Wooed the west-wind's steady strain,
Line of coast that low and far
Stretched its undulating bar,
Wings aslant along the rim
Of the waves they stooped to skim,
Rock and isle and glistening bay,
Fell the beautiful white day.

Said the Master to the youth
"We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are reaching, through His laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause,
Him, the endless, unbegun,
The Unnamable, the One
Light of all our light the Source,
Life of life, and Force of force.
As with fingers of the blind,
We are groping here to find...

When winter's cold and summer's heat
Shall come and go again,
A hundred years will be complete
Since Marion crossed the main,
And brought unto this wild retreat
His dark-eyed wife of Spain.

He was the founder of a free
And independent band,
Who lit the fires of liberty
The revolution fanned:--
His patent of nobility
Read in the ransomed land!

Around his deeds a lustre throngs,
A heritage designed
To teach the world to spurn the wrongs
Once threatened all mankind:--
To his posterity belongs
The peerage of the mind.

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose heards with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lye.

Alas! upon some starry height,
The Gods of Excellence to please,
This hand of mine will never smite
The Harp of High Serenities.
Mere minstrel of the street am I,
To whom a careless coin you fling;
But who, beneath the bitter sky,
Blue-lipped, yet insolent of eye,
Can shrill a song of Spring;
A song of merry mansard days,
The cheery chimney-tops among;
Of rolics and of roundelays
When we were young . . . when we were young;
A song of love and lilac nights,
Of wit, of wisdom and of wine;
Of Folly whirling on the Heights,
Of hunger and of hope divine;
Of Blanche, Suzette and Celestine,
And all that gay and tender band
Who shared with us the fat, the lean,
The hazard of Illusion-land;
When scores of Philistines we slew
As mightily wi...

’Tis said that when
The hands of men
Tamed this primeval wood,
And hoary trees with groans of woe,
Like warriors by an unknown foe,
Were in their strength subdued,
The virgin Earth
Gave instant birth
To springs that ne’er did flow
That in the sun
Did rivulets run,
And all around rare flowers did blow
The wild rose pale
Perfumed the gale
And the queenly lily adown the dale
(Whom the sun and the dew
And the winds did woo),
With the gourd and the grape luxuriant grew.

So when in tears
The love of years
Is wasted like the snow,
And the fine fibrils of its life
By the rude wrong of instant strife
Are broken at a blow
Within the heart
Do springs upstart
Of which it doth now know,
And strange, sweet dreams,...

    Great natures live apart; the mountain gray
        May call no comrade to his lonely side;
    The giant ocean, wrapped in storm and spray,
        Has no companion for her endless tide;
        The forest monarch, where his parents died,
    Can find no brother in his lofty sway,
        And mighty rivers chafe their margins wide
    Where infant rills and childish fountains play.

    So heroes live; no raptured blossoms start
        Where rugged heights of human glory end;
        No tender songs of loving beauty blend
    Their chorus in the great man's peerless heart;
    Fate fills their souls with magnitude, and art
        Supplies their lives with no congenial friend.

The dying words of Goethe.

"Light! more light! the shadows deepen,
    And my life is ebbing low,
Throw the windows widely open:
    Light! more light! before I go.

"Softly let the balmy sunshine
    Play around my dying bed,
E'er the dimly lighted valley
    I with lonely feet must tread.

"Light! more light! for Death is weaving
    Shadows 'round my waning sight,
And I fain would gaze upon him
    Through a stream of earthly light."

Not for greater gifts of genius;
    Not for thoughts more grandly bright,
All the dying poet whispers
    Is a prayer for light, more light.

Heeds he not the gathered laurels,
    Fading slowly from his sight;
All the poet's aspirations
    Centre in that prayer for light.
<...

        Wild years that are to be
    The sad completion of my weary life,
    In ghostly mantles of despairing strife
    Your phanton dimness darkly shadows me!
    Gaunt demons dancing from your horrid halls
    Entwine my soul in gloomy arms of woe,
    While mystic fancies to my madness show
        The monsters on your walls.

        Your forms are skeletons,
    Whose bony hands with mortal fingers play,
    Where grinning skulls are heaping on the way,
    And airy specters meet the timid ones;
    Death drops his arrows from your sullen skies,
    Destruction dances in your noisome shades,
    And in the dreadful darkness of your glades
        The horrid shriekings rise.

        There in your cycles are
    Dark valleys where my wear...

Ye in the age gone by,
Who ruled the world a world how lovely then!
And guided still the steps of happy men
In the light leading-strings of careless joy!
Ah, flourished then your service of delight!
How different, oh, how different, in the day
When thy sweet fanes with many a wreath were bright,
O Venus Amathusia!

Then, through a veil of dreams
Woven by song, truth's youthful beauty glowed,
And life's redundant and rejoicing streams
Gave to the soulless, soul where'r they flowed
Man gifted nature with divinity
To lift and link her to the breast of love;
All things betrayed to the initiate eye
The track of gods above!

Where lifeless fixed afar,
A flaming ball to our dull sense is given,
Phoebus Apollo, in his golden car,
In silent glo...

But, in that fiery zone
She upriseth not alone,
Over all the bloody fields
Glitter Amazonian shields;
While through the mists of years
Another form appears,
And as I bow my head
Already you have said: -
    'Tis France!

Welcome to France!
From sea to sea,
With heart and hand!
Welcome to all within the land -
Thrice welcome let her be!

And to France
The Union here to-day
Gives the right of this array,
And folds her to her breast
As the friend that she loves best.
Yes to France.
The proud Ruler of the West
Bows her sun-illumined crest,
Grave and slow,
In a passion of fond memories of
One hundred years ago!

France's colors wave again
High above this tented plain,
Stream and flaunt, and blaze...

Verse, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee -
Both were mine! Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!
When I was young? - Ah, woeful When!
Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands
How lightly then it flashed along,
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in't together.

Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
O the joys! that came down shower-like,
Of Friendshi...

    They will find in this life who are grieved with its gladness
        No songs for the heart and no hopes for the soul,
    But will faint in the glooms where the dirges of sadness
        In tremulous murmurs of wretchedness roll;
    For the sweets of this earth never lavish their kisses
        Where lives in the valleys of rapture repine;
    In the tortures they mourn who denounce all the blisses,--
        They weep in the shadow that rail at the shine.

    In the fields that are fair with the blooms of the clover,
        No garlands are grown for the arbors of shade
    Where the woes of the wood in their darkness hang over
        The grasses that wave with the winds of the glade;
    From the chimes of the breezes there echo no measures
        That gladd...

I

Veteran memories rally to muster
Here at the call of the old battle days:
Cavalry clatter and cannon's hoarse bluster:
All the wild whirl of the fight's broken maze:
Clangor of bugle and flashing of sabre,
Smoke-stifled flags and the howl of the shell,
With earth for a rest place and death for a neighbor,
And dreams of a charge and the deep rebel yell.
Stern was our task in the field where the reaping
Spared the ripe harvest, but laid our men low:
Grim was the sorrow that held us from weeping:
Awful the rush of the strife's ebb and flow.
Swift came the silence - our enemy hiding
Sudden retreat in the cloud-muffled night:
Swift as a hawk-pounce our hill-and-dale riding;
Hundreds on hundreds we caught in their flight!
Hard and incessant the danger a...

"Succinctæ sacra Dianæ."

Ovid


I.

There the ragged sunlight lay
Tawny on thick ferns and gray
On dark waters: dimmer,
Lone and deep, the cypress grove
Bowered mystery and wove
Braided lights, like those that love
On the pearl plumes of a dove
Faint to gleam and glimmer.

II.

There centennial pine and oak
Into stormy cadence broke:
Hollow rocks gloomed, slanting,
Echoing in dim arcade,
Looming with long moss, that made
Twilight streaks in tatters laid:
Where the wild hart, hunt-affrayed,
Plunged the water, panting.

III.

Poppies of a sleepy gold
Mooned the gray-green darkness rolled
DOWN its vistas, making
Wisp-like blurs of flame. And pale
Stole the dim deer down the vale...

O thou, by Nature taught
To breathe her genuine thought
In numbers warmly pure, and sweetly strong;
Who first on mountains wild,
In Fancy, loveliest child,
Thy babe, or Pleasure's, nurs'd the pow'rs of song!

Thou, who with hermit heart,
Disdain'st the wealth of art,
And gauds, and pageant weeds, and trailing pall,
But com'st a decent maid,
In Attic robe array'd,
O chaste, unboastful nymph, to thee I call!

By all the honey'd store
On Hybla's thymy shore;
By all her blooms, and mingled murmurs dear;
By her whose lovelorn woe
In ev'ning musings slow
Sooth'd sweetly sad Electra's poet's ear:

By old Cephisus deep,
Who spread his wavy sweep
In warbled wand'rings round thy green retreat;
On whose enamell'd side,
When ho...

The Kings go by with jewled crowns;
Their horses gleam, their banners shake, their spears are many.
The sack of many-peopled towns
Is all their dream:
The way they take
Leaves but a ruin in the brake,
And, in the furrow that the plowmen make,
A stampless penny, a tale, a dream.

The Merchants reckon up their gold,
Their letters come, their ships arrive, their freights are glories;
The profits of their treasures sold
They tell and sum;
Their foremen drive
Their servants, starved to half-alive,
Whose labors do but make the earth a hive
Of stinking stories; a tale, a dream.

The Priests are singing in their stalls,
Their singing lifts, their incense burns, their praying clamors;
Yet God is as the sparrow falls,
The ivy drifts;
The vo...