Chapter I: SAW her last night at a party

(The elegant party at Mead’s),
And looking remarkably hearty
For a widow so young in her weeds;
Yet I know she was suffering sorrow
Too deep for the tongue to express--
Or why had she chosen to borrow
So much from the language of dress?

Her shawl was as sable as night;
And her gloves were as dark as her shawl;
And her jewels--that flashed in the light--
Were black as a funeral pall;
Her robe had the hue of the rest,
(How nicely it fitted her shape!)
And the grief that was heaving her breast
Boiled over in billows of crape!

What tears of vicarious woe,
That else might have sullied her face,
Were kindly permitted to flow
In ripples of ebony lace
While even her fan, in its play,
Had quite a lugubrious scope,
And seemed to be waving away
The ghost of the angel of Hope!

Yet rich as the robes of a queen
Was the sombre apparel she wore;
I’m certain I never had seen
Such a sumptuous sorrow before;
And I couldn’t help thinking the beauty,
In mourning the loved and the lost,
Was doing her conjugal duty
Altogether regardless of cost!

One surely would say a devotion
Performed at so vast an expense
Betrayed an excess of emotion
That was really something immense;
And yet, as I viewed, at my leisure,
Those tokens of tender regard,
I thought: It is scarce without measure--
The sorrow that goes by the yard!

Ah, grief is a curious passion;
And yours--I am sorely afraid
The very next phase of the fashion
Will find it beginning to fade;
Though dark are the shadows of grief,
The morning will follow the night;
Half-tints will betoken relief,
Till joy shall be symboled in white!

Ah, well! it were idle to quarrel
With fashion, or aught she may do;
And so I conclude with a moral
And metaphor--warranted new:
When measles come handsomely out,
The patient is safest, they say;
And the sorrow is mildest, no doubt,
That works in a similar way!
_John Godfrey Saxe._

THERE IS NO GOD

“THERE is no God,” the wicked saith,
“And truly it’s a blessing,
For what he might have done with us
It’s better only guessing.”

“There is no God,” a youngster thinks,
“Or really, if there may be,
He surely didn’t mean a man
Always to be a baby.”

“There is no God, or if there is,”
The tradesman thinks, “’twere funny
If he should take it ill in me
To make a little money.”

“Whether there be,” the rich man says
“It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
Are not in want of victual.”

Some others, also, to themselves,
Who scarce so much as doubt it,
Think there is none, when they are well,
And do not think about it.

But country folks who live beneath
The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson’s wife,
And mostly married people;

Youths green and happy in first love,
So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
Calls guilt, in first confusion;

And almost every one when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like him.
_Arthur Hugh Clough._

THE LATEST DECALOGUE

THOU shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency.
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse.
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend.
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall.
Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it.
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it’s so lucrative to cheat.
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly.
Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
_Arthur Hugh Clough._

FROM “A FABLE FOR CRITICS”

“THERE is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified
As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,
Save when by reflection ’tis kindled o’ nights,
With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation
(There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation);
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on;
He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on;
Unqualified merits, I’ll grant, if you choose, he has ’em,
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.

* * * * *
“Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,
Some scholar who’s hourly expecting his learning,
Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth
May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd’s worth.
No, don’t be absurd, he’s an excellent Bryant;
But, my friends, you’ll endanger the life of your client
By attempting to stretch him up into a giant.

* * * * *

“There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart
Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,
And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect
Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;
There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swing
Of the true lyric bard, and all that kind of thing;
And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)
From the very same cause that has made him a poet--
A fervour of mind which knows no separation
’Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,
As my pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing
If ’twere I, or mere wind, through her tripod was blowing;
Let his mind once get head in its favourite direction,
And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,
While, borne with the rush of the metre along,
The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,
Content with the whirl and delirium of song;
Then his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes,
And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,
Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats,
When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,
And can ne’er be repeated again any more
Than they could have been carefully plotted before:
Like old What’s-his-name there at the battle of Hastings
(Who, however, gave more than mere rhythmical bastings),
Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights
For reform and whatever they call human rights,
Both singing and striking in front of the war,
And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor:
_Anne haec_, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,
_Vestis filii tui_, O leather-clad Fox?
Can that be my son, in the battle’s mid din,
Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in
To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,
With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly’s spring
Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?

* * * * *

“There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,
So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,
Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;
’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,
With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,
Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,
With a single anemone trembly and rathe;
His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,
That a suitable parallel sets one to seek--
He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;
When nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
So, to fill out her model, a little she spared
From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man.
The success of her scheme gave her so much delight,
That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight;
Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay,
She sang to her work in her sweet, childish way,
And found, when she’d put the last touch to his soul,
That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.

* * * * *

“There’s Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit--
A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit
The electrical tingles of hit after hit;
In long poems ’tis painful sometimes, and invites
A thought of the way the new telegraph writes,
Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully,
As if you got more than you’d title to rightfully,
And you find yourself hoping its wild Father Lightning
Would flame in for a second and give you a fright’ning.
He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,
But many admire it, the English pentameter,
And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse,
With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse,
Nor e’er achieved aught in’t so worthy of praise
As the tribute of Holmes to the grand ‘Marseillaise.’
You went crazy, last year, over Bulwer’s ‘New Timon’;
Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on,
Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,
He could ne’er reach the best point and vigour of Holmes.
His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric
Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric
In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes
That are trodden upon are your own or your foes.”
_James Russell Lowell._

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