Identity

A man once read with mind surprised
Of the way that people were "hypnotised";
By waving hands you produced, forsooth,
A kind of trance where men told the truth!
His mind was filled with wond'ring doubt;
He grabbed his hat and he started out,
He walked the street and he made a "set"
At the first half-dozen folk he met.
He "tranced" them all, and without a joke
'Twas much as follows the subjects spoke:

First Man

"I am a doctor, London-made,
Listen to me and you'll hear displayed
A few of the tricks of the doctor's trade.
'Twill sometimes chance when a patient's ill
That a dose, or draught, or a lightning pill,
A little too strong or a little too hot,
Will work its way to a vital spot.
And then I watch with a sickly grin
While the patie...

No personal; a God divinely crowned
With gold and raised upon a golden throne
Deep in a golden glory, whence he nods
Man this or that, and little more than man!

And shalt thou see Him individual?
Not till the freed intelligence hath sought
Ten hundred hundred years to rise and love,
Piercing the singing cycles under God,
Their iridescent evolutions orbed
In wild prismatic splendors, shall it see
Through God-propinquity become a god
See, lightening out of spheric harmonies,
Resplendencies of empyrean light,
Prisms and facets of ten million beams
Starring a crystal of berainbowed rays,
And in this - eyes of burning sapphire, eyes
Deep as the music of the beautiful;
And o'er the eyes, limpid hierarchal brows,
As they were lilies of seraphic fire;<...

STRANGER! the MAN OF NATURE lies not here:
Enshrin'd far distant by his [1] rival's side
His relics rest, there by the giddy throng
With blind idolatry alike revered!
Wiselier directed have thy pilgrim feet
Explor'd the scenes of Ermenonville. ROUSSEAU
Loved these calm haunts of Solitude and Peace;
Here he has heard the murmurs of the stream,
And the soft rustling of the poplar grove,
When o'er their bending boughs the passing wind
Swept a grey shade. Here if thy breast be full,
If in thine eye the tear devout should gush,
His SPIRIT shall behold thee, to thine home
From hence returning, purified of heart.

La vita del mie amor.


This heart of flesh feeds not with life my love:
        The love wherewith I love thee hath no heart;
        Nor harbours it in any mortal part,
        Where erring thought or ill desire may move.
When first Love sent our souls from God above,
        He fashioned me to see thee as thou art--
        Pure light; and thus I find God's counterpart
        In thy fair face, and feel the sting thereof.
As heat from fire, from loveliness divine
        The mind that worships what recalls the sun
        From whence she sprang, can be divided never:
And since thine eyes all Paradise enshrine,
        Burning unto those orbs of light I run,
        There where I loved thee first to dwell for ever.

Rest, warrior, rest! thine hour is past, -
Thy longest war-whoop, and thy last,
Still rings upon the rushing blast,
    That o'er thy grave sweeps drearily.

Rest, warrior, rest! thy haughty brow,
Beneath the hand of death bends low,
Thy fiery glance is quenched now,
    In the cold grave's obscurity.

Rest, warrior, rest! thy rising sun
Is set in blood, thy day is done;
Like lightning flash thy race is run,
    And thou art sleeping peacefully.

Rest, warrior, rest! thy foot no more
The boundless forest shall explore,
Or trackless cross the sandy shore,
    Or chase the red deer rapidly.

Rest, warrior, rest! thy light canoe,
Like thy choice arrow, swift and true,
Shall part no more the waters blue,
    That sparkle round it...

Over a mountain slope with lentisk, and with abounding
Arbutus, and the red oak overtufted, ’mid a noontide
Now glowing fervidly, the Leto-born, the divine one,
Artemis, Arcadian wood-rover, alone, hunt-weary,
Unto a dell cent’ring many streamlets her foot unerring
Had guided. Platanus with fig-tree shaded, a hollow,
Shaded a waterfall, where pellucid yet abundant
Streams from perpetual full-flowing sources a current:
Lower on either bank in sunshine flowered the oleanders:
Plenteous under a rock green herbage here to the margin
Grew with white poplars overcrowning. She thither arrived,
Unloosening joyfully the vest enfolded upon her,
Swift her divine shoulders discovering, swiftly revealing
Her maidenly bosom and all her beauty beneath it,
To the river water overflowin...

When other friends are round thee,
And other hearts are thine--
When other bays have crowned thee,
More fresh and green than mine--
Then think how sad and lonely
This doating heart will be,
Which, while it beats, beats only,
Beloved one, for thee!

Yet do not think I doubt thee,
I know thy truth remains;
I would not live without thee,
For all the world contains.
Thou art the start that guides me
Along life's troubled sea;
And whatever fate betides me,
This heart still turns to thee.

|Air| "The days we went a-gipsying."

I would all womankind were dead,
    Or banished o'er the sea;
For they have been a bitter plague
    These last six weeks to me:
It is not that I'm touched myself,
    For that I do not fear;
No female face hath shown me grace
    For many a bygone year.
        But 'tis the most infernal bore,
            Of all the bores I know,
        To have a friend who's lost his heart
            A short time ago.

Whene'er we steam it to Blackwall,
    Or down to Greenwich run,
To quaff the pleasant cider cup,
    And feed on fish and fun;
Or climb the slopes of Richmond Hill,
    To catch a breath of air:
Then, for my sins, he straight begins
    To rave about his fair.
        Oh, 'tis ...

1.

The Land stood still to listen all that day,
And 'mid the hush of many a wrangling tongue,
Forth from the cannon's mouth the signal rung,
That from the earth a man had pass'd away--
A mighty Man, that over many a field
Roll'd back the tide of Battle on the foe,--
Thus far, no further, shall thy billows go.
Who Freedom's falchion did right nobly wield,
Like potter's vessel smiting Tyrants down,
And from Earth's strongest snatching Victory's crown;
Upon the anvil of each Battle-plain,
Still beating swords to ploughshares. All is past,--
The glory, and the labour, and the pain--
The Conqueror is conquer'd here at last.


2.

Yet other men have wrought, and fought, and won,
Cutting with crimson sword Fame's Gordian knot,
And, dyin...

    If a man who turnips cries
    Cries not when his father dies,
    It is a proof that he would rather
    Have a turnip than his father.

("Vous qui ne savez pas combien l'enfance est belle.")


Sweet sister, if you knew, like me,
The charms of guileless infancy,
No more you'd envy riper years,
Or smiles, more bitter than your tears.

But childhood passes in an hour,
As perfume from a faded flower;
The joyous voice of early glee
Flies, like the Halcyon, o'er the sea.

Enjoy your morn of early Spring;
Soon time maturer thoughts must bring;
Those hours, like flowers that interclimb,
Should not be withered ere their time.

Too soon you'll weep, as we do now,
O'er faithless friend, or broken vow,
And hopeless sorrows, which our pride
In pleasure's whirl would vainly hide.

Laugh on! unconscious of thy doom,
All innocence and opening bloom;
Laugh on...

To no one Muse does she her glance confine,
But has an eye, at once, to all the Nine!

"The Fairies must have come," I said,
"For through the moist leaves, brown and dead,
The Primroses are pushing up,
And here's a scarlet Fairy-cup.
They must have come, because I see
A single Wood Anemone,
The flower that everybody knows
The Fairies use to scent their clothes.
And hark! The South Wind blowing, fills
The trumpets of the Daffodils.
They MUST have come!"

        Then loud to me
Sang from a budding cherry tree,
A cheerful Thrush . . . "I say! I say!
The Fairy Folk are on their way.
Look out! Look out! Beneath your feet,
Are all their treasures: Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!
They could not carry them, you see,
Those caskets crammed with witchery,
So ready for the first Spring dance,
They sent their Luggage in Advance!"

When down the Hartz the echoes swarm
He rides beneath the sounding storm
With mad "halloo!" and wild alarm
Of hound and horn - a wonder,
With his hunter black as night,
Ban-dogs fleet and fast as light,
And a stag as silver white
Drives before, like mist, in flight,
Glimmering 'neath the bursten thunder.

The were-wolf shuns his ruinous track,
Long-howling hid in braken black;
Around the forests reel and crack
And mountain torrents tumble;
And the spirits of the air
Whistling whirl with scattered hair,
Teeth that flash and eyes that glare,
'Round him as he chases there
With a noise of rains that rumble.

From thick Thuringian thickets growl
Fierce, fearful monsters black and foul;
And close before him a stritch-owl
Wails like...

[Read at Reunion of the G. A. T., Madison, Wis., July 4, 1872.]

After the battles are over,
    And the war drums cease to beat,
And no more is heard on the hillside
The sound of hurrying feet,
Full many a noble action,
    That was done in the days of strife
By the soldier is half forgotten,
    In the peaceful walks of life.

Just as the tangled grasses,
    In Summer's warmth and light,
Grow over the graves of the fallen
    And hide them away from sight,
So many an act of valour,
    And many a deed sublime,
Fade from the mind of the soldier
    O'ergrown by the grass of time

Not so should they be rewarded,
    Those noble deeds of old!
They should live for ever and ever,
    When the heroes' hearts are cold.
Then ...

Within the soul are throned two powers,
One, Love; one, Hate. Begot of these,
And veiled between, a presence towers,
The shadowy keeper of the keys.

With wild command or calm persuasion
This one may argue, that compel;
Vain are concealment and evasion--
For each he opens heaven and hell.

Look how the rainbow doth appear
But in one only hemisphere;
So likewise after our decease
No more is seen the arch of peace.
That cov'nant's here, the under-bow,
That nothing shoots but war and woe.

When Peter Wanderwide was young
He wandered everywhere he would:
All that he approved was sung,
And most of what he saw was good.

When Peter Wanderwide was thrown
By Death himself beyond Auxerre,
He chanted in heroic tone
To priests and people gathered there:

"If all that I have loved and seen
Be with me on the Judgment Day,
I shall be saved the crowd between
From Satan and his foul array.

"Almighty God will surely cry,
'St. Michael! Who is this that stands
With Ireland in his dubious eye,
And Perigord between his hands,

"'And on his arm the stirrup-thongs,
And in his gait the narrow seas,
And in his mouth Burgundian songs,
But in his heart the Pyrenees?'

"St. Michael then will answer right
(And not withou...