CHORUS OF SPIRITS:

FIRST SPIRIT:
Palace-roof of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now, and which wert then
Of the Present and the Past,
Of the eternal Where and When,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever-canopying dome,
Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth's company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,
Heaven! for thou art the abode
Of that Power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature see...

The thoughts that rain their steady glow
Like stars on life’s cold sea,
Which others know, or say they know
They never shone for me.

Thoughts light, like gleams, my spirit’s sky,
But they will not remain.
They light me once, they hurry by,
And never come again.

Set your face toward the darkness tell of deserts weird and wide,
Where unshaken woods are huddled, and low, languid waters glide;
Turn and tell of deserts lonely, lying pathless, deep and vast,
Where in utter silence ever Time seems slowly breathing past
Silence only broken when the sun is flecked with cloudy bars,
Or when tropic squalls come hurtling underneath the sultry stars!
Deserts thorny, hot and thirsty, where the feet of men are strange,
And eternal Nature sleeps in solitudes which know no change.

Weakened with their lengthened labours, past long plains of stone and sand,
Down those trackless wilds they wandered, travellers from a far-off land,
Seeking now to join their brothers, struggling on with faltering feet,
For a glorious work was finished, and a noble task comp...

He lay awake, with a harassed air,
And she, in her cloud of loose lank hair,
    Seemed trouble-tried
As the dawn drew in on their faces there.

The chamber looked far over the sea
From a white hotel on a white-stoned quay,
    And stepping a stride
He parted the window-drapery.

Above the level horizon spread
The sunrise, firing them foot to head
    From its smouldering lair,
And painting their pillows with dyes of red.

"What strange disquiets have stirred you, dear,
This dragging night, with starts in fear
    Of me, as it were,
Or of something evil hovering near?"

"My husband, can I have fear of you?
What should one fear from a man whom few,
    Or none, had matched
In that late long spell of delays undue!"

H...

I CANNOT live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sevres pleases,
Old ones crack.

I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other's gaze down, --
You could not.

And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus',
That new grace

Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.

They'd judge us -- how?
For you served Heaven, you know,
Or soug...

The days go by, the days go by,
Sadly and wearily to die:
Each with its burden of small cares,
Each with its sad gift of gray hairs
For those who sit, like me, and sigh,
“The days go by! The days go by!”

Ah, nevermore on shining plumes,
Shedding a rain of rare perfumes
That men call memories, they are borne
As in life’s many-visioned morn,
When Love sang in the myrtle-blooms,
Ah, nevermore on shining plumes!

Where is my life? Where is my life?
The morning of my youth was rife
With promise of a golden day.
Where have my hopes gone? Where are they,
The passion and the splendid strife?
Where is my life? Where is my life?

My thoughts take hue from this wild day,
And, like the skies, are ashen gray;
The sharp rain, falling cons...

Four summers coined their golden light in leaves,
Four wasteful autumns flung them to the gale,
Four winters wore the shroud the tempest weaves,
The fourth wan April weeps o'er hill and vale;

And still the war-clouds scowl on sea and land,
With the red gleams of battle staining through,
When lo! as parted by an angel's hand,
They open, and the heavens again are blue!

Which is the dream, the present or the past?
The night of anguish or the joyous morn?
The long, long years with horrors overcast,
Or the sweet promise of the day new-born?

Tell us, O father, as thine arms infold
Thy belted first-born in their fast embrace,
Murmuring the prayer the patriarch breathed of old, -
"Now let me die, for I have seen thy face!"

Tell us, O mother, - ...

All the west, whereon the sunset sealed the dead year's glorious grave
Fast with seals of light and fire and cloud that light and fire illume,
Glows at heart and kindles earth and heaven with joyous blush and bloom,
Warm and wide as life, and glad of death that only slays to save.
As a tide-reconquered sea-rock lies aflush with the influent wave
Lies the light aflush with darkness, lapped about by lustrous gloom,
Even as life with death, and fame with time, and memory with the tomb
Where a dead man hath for vassals Fame the serf and Time the slave.
Far from earth as heaven, the steadfast light withdrawn, superb, suspense,
Burns in dumb divine expansion of illimitable flower:
Moonrise whets the shadow's edges keen as noontide: hence and thence
Glows the presence from us passing, shines...

Died at Hartford, December 30th, 1861.


Sorrow and Joy collude. One mansion hears
The children shouting o'er their Christmas Tree,
While in the next resound the widow's wail
And weeping of the fatherless. So walk
Sickness and health. One rounds the cheek at morn,
The other with a ghost-like movement glides
Unto the nightly couch, and lo! the wheels
Of life drive heavily, and all its springs
Revolving in mysterious mechanism
Are troubled.
                    And how slight the instrument
That sometimes sends the strong man to his tomb,
Revealing that the glory of his prime,
Is as the flower of grass.

                    Of this we thought
When looking on the face that lay so calm
And comely in its narrow coffin-bed,
Remembering how th...

They meet to say farewell: Their way
Of saying this is hard to say. -
    He holds her hand an instant, wholly
    Distressed - and she unclasps it slowly.

He bends his gaze evasively
Over the printed page that she
    Recurs to, with a new-moon shoulder
    Glimpsed from the lace-mists that enfold her.

The clock, beneath its crystal cup,
Discreetly clicks - "Quick!    Act!    Speak up!"
    A tension circles both her slender
    Wrists - and her raised eyes flash in splendor,

Even as he feels his dazzled own. -
Then, blindingly, round either thrown,
    They feel a stress of arms that ever
    Strain tremblingly - and "Never!    Never!"

Is whispered brokenly, with half
A sob, like a belated laugh, -
    While cloyingly their ...

"Return!"--no, never, while the withering hand
Of bigot power is on that hapless land;
While, for the faith my fathers held to God,
Even in the fields where free those fathers trod,
I am proscribed, and--like the spot left bare
In Israel's halls, to tell the proud and fair
Amidst their mirth, that Slavery had been there[1]--
On all I love, home, parents, friends, I trace
The mournful mark of bondage and disgrace!
No!--let them stay, who in their country's pangs
See naught but food for factions and harangues;
Who yearly kneel before their masters' doors
And hawk their wrongs, as beggars do their sores:
Still let your .            .            .            .[2]
            .            .            .            .            .
Still hope a...

The wan light of a stormy dawn
Gleamed on a tossing ship:
It was the In Memoriam
Upon a mourning trip.

Wild waves were on the windward bow,
And breakers on the lee;
And through her sides the women heard
The seething of the sea.

“O Captain!” cried a widow fair,
Her plump white hands clasped she,
“Thinkst thou, if drowned in this dread storm,
That savèd we shall be?”

“You speak in riddles, lady dear,
How savèd can we be
If we are drowned?” “Alas, I mean
In Paradise!” said she.

“O I’ve sailed North, and I’ve sailed South”
(He was a godless wight),
“But boy or man, since my days began,
That shore I ne’er did sight!”

The Captain told the First Mate bold
What that fair lady said;
The First Mate sneered in h...

"Rather be dead than praised," he said,
That hero, like a hero dead,
In this slack-sinewed age endued
With more than antique fortitude!

"Rather be dead than praised!" Shall we,
Who loved thee, now that Death sets free
Thine eager soul, with word and line
Profane that empty house of thine?

Nay,--let us hold, be mute. Our pain
Will not be less that we refrain;
And this our silence shall but be
A larger monument to thee.

We were apart: yet, day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be;
I bade it keep the world away,
And grow a home for only thee:
Nor fear’d but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day more tried, more true.

The fault was grave: I might have known,
What far too soon, alas, I learn’d
The heart can bind itself alone,
And faith is often unreturn’d.
Self-sway’d our feelings ebb and swell:
Thou lov’est no more: Farewell! Farewell!

Farewell! and thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didn’t depart
From thy remote and spherèd course
To haunt the place where passions reign,
Back to thy solitude again!

Back, with the conscious thrill of shame
Which Luna felt, that summer night,
Flash through he...

Weep with me, all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom a tear you shed,
Death's self is sorry.
'Twas a child that so did thrive
In grace and feature,
As Heaven and Nature seemed to strive
Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen
When Fates turned cruel,
Yet three filled zodiacs had he been
The stage's jewel;
And did act (what now we moan)
Old men so duly,
As, sooth, the Parcae thought him one,
He played so truly.
So, by error, to his fate
They all consented;
But viewing him since (alas, too late),
They have repented,
And have sought (to give new birth)
In baths to steep him;
But, being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.

'The Government of India has been pleased to sanction the infliction of a fine of ..., etc.'


To him that reads with careless eyes
My present theme affords
But little scope for enterprise
In buttering one's lords:
Fines, he would urge, have always bulked
Largely to Those that rule,
For, plainly, every man They mulct
Contributes to the pool.

But when in ages dead and gone
Our fathers fought with Sin,
However hard they laid it on,
They didn't rub it in;
While These not only bring to bear
Their dark prerogatives,
But diabolically air
The pleasure that it gives!

Here is the Iron Hand that builds
Our realms beyond the sea;
No suaviter in modo gilds
Their fortiter in re;
Here is no washy velvet glo...

In this sombre garden close
What has come and passed, who knows?
What red passion, what white pain
Haunted this dim walk in vain?

Underneath the ivied wall,
Where the silent shadows fall,
Lies the pathway chill and damp
Where the world-quit dreamers tramp.

Just across, where sunlight burns,
Smiling at the mourning ferns,
Stand the roses, side by side,
Nodding in their useless pride.

Ferns and roses, who shall say
What you witness day by day?
Covert smile or dropping eye,
As the monks go pacing by.

Has the novice come to-day
Here beneath the wall to pray?
Has the young monk, lately chidden,
Sung his lyric, sweet, forbidden?

Tell me, roses, did you note
That pale father's throbbing throat?
Did you hear ...

Silent I sat, dejected, and alone,
Making in thought the public woes my own,
When, first, arose the image in my breast
Of England's sufferings by that scourge, the pest.3
How death, his fun'ral torch and scythe in hand,
Ent'ring the lordliest mansions of the land,
Has laid the gem-illumin'd palace low,
And level'd tribes of Nobles at a blow.
I, next, deplor'd the famed fraternal pair4
Too soon to ashes turn'd and empty air,
The Heroes next, whom snatch'd into the skies
All Belgia saw, and follow'd with her sighs;
But Thee far most I mourn'd, regretted most,
Winton's chief shepherd and her worthiest boast;
Pour'd out in tears I thus complaining said
Death, next in pow'r to Him who rules the Dead!
Is't not enough that all the woodlands yiel...