Chapter IV

"Come, oh, come! No longer shall language be dumb! Thy vision shall grasp-- As one doth the glittering hasp Of a dagger made splendid with gems and with gold-- The wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely. And out of the stark Eternity, awful and dark, Immensity silent and cold,-- Universe-shaking as trumpets, or thunderous metals That cymbal; yet pensive and pearly And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals, Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,-- The majestic music of Death, where he plays On the organ of eons and days."

_Music_

Thou, oh, thou! Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum! thou Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow! Music, who by the plangent waves, Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves, Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars, Touchest reverberant bars Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;-- Keeping regret and memory awake, And all the immortal ache Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days In retrospection!--now, oh, now, Interpreter and heart-physician, thou, Who gazest on the heaven and the hell Of life, and singest each as well, Touch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips, Or thy melodious lips, This sickness named my soul, Making it whole, As is an echo of a chord, Or some symphonic word, Or sweet vibrating sigh, That deep, resurgent still doth rise and die On thy voluminous roll; Part of the beauty and the mystery That axles Earth with song; and as a slave, Swings it around and 'round on each sonorous pole, 'Mid spheric harmony, And choral majesty, And diapasoning of wind and wave; And speeds it on its far elliptic way 'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day.-- O cosmic cry Of two eternities, wherein we see The phantasms, Death and Life, At endless strife Above the silence of a monster grave.

_Jotunheim_

I

Beyond the Northern Lights, in regions haunted Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted, And pale as Loki in his cavern when The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones, I saw the phantasms of gigantic men, The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones; Great blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's And evening's colors,--wild prismatic tones Of boreal beauty.--Like the three gray Norns, Silence and solitude and terror loomed Around them where they labored. Walls arose, Vast as the Andes when creation boomed Insurgent fire; and through the rushing snows Enormous battlements of tremendous ice, Bastioned and turreted, I saw arise.

II

But who can sing the workmanship gigantic
That reared within its coruscating dome
The roaring fountain, hurling an Atlantic
Of streaming ice that flashed with flame and foam?
An opal spirit, various and many formed,--
In whose clear heart reverberant fire stormed,--
Seemed its inhabitant; and through pale halls,
And deep diaphanous walls,
And corridors of whiteness.
Auroral colors swarmed,
As rosy-flickering stains,
Or lambent green, or gold, or crimson, warmed
The pulsing crystal of the spirit's veins
With ever-changing brightness.
And through the Arctic night there went a voice,
As if the ancient Earth cried out, "Rejoice!
My heart is full of lightness!"

III

Here well might Thor, the god of war, Harness the whirlwinds to his car, While, mailed in storm, his iron arm Heaves high his hammer's lava-form, And red and black his beard streams back, Like some fierce torrent scoriac, Whose earthquake light glares through the night Around some dark volcanic height; And through the skies Valkyrian cries Trumpet, as battleward he flies, Death in his hair and havoc in his eyes.

IV

Still in my dreams I hear that fountain flowing;
Beyond all seeing and beyond all knowing;
Still in my dreams I see those wild walls glowing
With hues, Aurora-kissed;
And through huge halls fantastic phantoms going.
Vast shapes of snow and mist,--
Sonorous clarions of the tempest blowing,--
That trail dark banners by,
Cloudlike, underneath the sky
Of the caverned dome on high,
Carbuncle and amethyst.--
Still I hear the ululation
Of their stormy exultation,
Multitudinous, and blending
In hoarse echoes, far, unending;
And, through halls of fog and frost,
Howling back, like madness lost
In the moonless mansion of
Its own demon-haunted love.

V

Still in my dreams I hear the mermaid singing; The mermaid music at its portal ringing; The mermaid song, that hinged with gold its door, And, whispering evermore, Hushed the ponderous hurl and roar And vast æolian thunder Of the chained tempests under The frozen cataracts that were its floor.-- And, blinding beautiful, I still behold The mermaid there, combing her locks of gold, While, at her feet, green as the Northern Seas, Gambol her flocks of seals and walruses; While, like a drift, her dog--a Polar bear-- Lies by her, glowering through his shaggy hair.