Chapter II

High on the farm-house hearth, the first autumn fire was kindled;
Scintillant hickory bark and dryest limbs of the beech-tree
Burned, where all summer long the boughs of asparagus flourished.
Wild were the children with mirth, and grouping and clinging
together,
Danced with the dancing flame, and lithely swayed with its humor;
Ran to the window-panes, and peering forth into the darkness,
Saw there another room, flame-lit, and with frolicking children.
(Ah! by such phantom hearths, I think that we sit with our
first-loves!)
Sometimes they tossed on the floor, and sometimes they hid in the
corners,
Shouting and laughing aloud, and never resting a moment,
In the rude delight, the boisterous gladness of childhood,--
Cruel as summer sun and singing-birds to the heartsick.
Clement sat in his chair unmoved in the midst of the hubbub,
Rapt, with unseeing eyes; and unafraid in their gambols,
By his tawny beard the children caught him, and clambered
Over his knees, and waged a mimic warfare across them,
Made him their battle-ground, and won and lost kingdoms upon him.
Airily to and fro, and out of one room to another
Passed his cousin, and busied herself with things of the household,
Nonchalant, debonair, blithe, with bewitching housewifely
importance,
Laying the cloth for the supper, and bringing the meal from the
kitchen;
Fairer than ever she seemed, and more than ever she mocked him,
Coming behind his chair, and clasping her fingers together
Over his eyes in a girlish caprice, and crying, "Who is it?"
Vexed his despair with a vision of wife and of home and of
children,
Calling his sister's children around her, and stilling their
clamor,
Making believe they were hers. And Clement sat moody and silent,
Blank to the wistful gaze of his mother bent on his visage
With the tender pain, the pitiful, helpless devotion
Of the mother that looks on the face of her son in his trouble,
Grown beyond her consoling, and knows that she cannot befriend him.
Then his cousin laughed, and in idleness talked with the children;
Sometimes she turned to him, and then when the thistle was falling,
Caught it and twined it again in her hair, and called it her
keepsake,
Smiled, and made him ashamed of his petulant gift there, before
them.
But, when the night was grown old and the two by the hearthstone
together
Sat alone in the flickering red of the flame, and the cricket
Carked to the stillness, and ever, with sullen throbs of the
pendule
Sighed the time-worn clock for the death of the days that were
perished,--
It was her whim to be sad, and she brought him the book they were
reading.
"Read it to-night," she said, "that I may not seem to be going."
Said, and mutely reproached him with all the pain she had wrought
him.
From her hand he took the volume and read, and she listened,--
All his voice molten in secret tears, and ebbing and flowing,
Now with a faltering breath, and now with impassioned abandon,--
Read from the book of a poet the rhyme of the fatally sundered,
Fatally met too late, and their love was their guilt and their
anguish,
But in the night they rose, and fled away into the darkness,
Glad of all dangers and shames, and even of death, for their love's
sake.
Then, when his voice brake hollowly, falling and fading to
silence,
Thrilled in the silence they sat, and durst not behold one another,
Feeling that wild temptation, that tender, ineffable yearning,
Drawing them heart to heart. One blind, mad moment of passion
With their fate they strove; but out of the pang of the conflict,
Through such costly triumph as wins a waste and a famine,
Victors they came, and Love retrieved the error of loving.
So, foreknowing the years, and sharply discerning the future,
Guessing the riddle of life, and accepting the cruel solution,--
Side by side they sat, as far as the stars are asunder.
Carked the cricket no more, but while the audible silence
Shrilled in their ears, she, suddenly rising and dragging the
thistle
Out of her clinging hair, laughed mockingly, casting it from her:
"Perish the thorns and splendor,--the bloom and the sweetness are
perished.
Dreary, respectable calm, polite despair, and one's Duty,--
These and the world, for dead Love!--The end of these modern
romances!
Better than yonder rhyme?... Pleasant dreams and good night, Cousin
Clement."

BY THE SEA.

I walked with her I love by the sea,
The deep came up with its chanting waves,
Making a music so great and free
That the will and the faith, which were dead in me,
Awoke and rose from their graves.

Chanting, and with a regal sweep
Of their 'broidered garments up and down
The strand, came the mighty waves of the deep,
Dragging the wave-worn drift from its sleep
Along the sea-sands bare and brown.

"O my soul, make the song of the sea!" I cried.
"How it comes, with its stately tread,
And its dreadful voice, and the splendid pride
Of its regal garments flowing wide
Over the land!" to my soul I said.

My soul was still; the deep went down.
"What hast thou, my soul," I cried,
"In thy song?" "The sea-sands bare and brown,
With broken shells and sea-weed strown,
And stranded drift," my soul replied.

SAINT CHRISTOPHER.

In the narrow Venetian street,
On the wall above the garden gate
(Within, the breath of the rose is sweet,
And the nightingale sings there, soon and late),

Stands Saint Christopher, carven in stone,
With the little child in his huge caress,
And the arms of the baby Jesus thrown
About his gigantic tenderness;

And over the wall a wandering growth
Of darkest and greenest ivy clings,
And climbs around them, and holds them both
In its netted clasp of knots and rings,

Clothing the saint from foot to beard
In glittering leaves that whisper and dance
To the child, on his mighty arm upreared,
With a lusty summer exuberance.

To the child on his arm the faithful saint
Looks up with a broad and tranquil joy;
His brows and his heavy beard aslant
Under the dimpled chin of the boy,

Who plays with the world upon his palm,
And bends his smiling looks divine
On the face of the giant mild and calm,
And the glittering frolic of the vine.

He smiles on either with equal grace,--
On the simple ivy's unconscious life,
And the soul in the giant's lifted face,
Strong from the peril of the strife:

For both are his own,--the innocence
That climbs from the heart of earth to heaven,
And the virtue that gently rises thence
Through trial sent and victory given.

Grow, ivy, up to his countenance,
But it cannot smile on my life as on thine;
Look, Saint, with thy trustful, fearless glance,
Where I dare not lift these eyes of mine.

Venice, 1863.

ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,

Who died, "with the first song of the birds," Wednesday morning,
April 27, 1864.

I.

In the early morning when I wake
At the hour that is sacred for his sake,

And hear the happy birds of spring
In the garden under my window sing,

And through my window the daybreak blows
The sweetness of the lily and rose,

A dormant anguish wakes with day,
And my heart is smitten with strange dismay:

Distance wider than thine, O sea,
Darkens between my brother and me!

II.

A scrap of print, a few brief lines,
The fatal word that swims and shines

On my tears, with a meaning new and dread,
Make faltering reason know him dead,

And I would that my heart might feel it too,
And unto its own regret be true;

For this is the hardest of all to bear,
That his life was so generous and fair,

So full of love, so full of hope,
Broadening out with ample scope,

And so far from death, that his dying seems
The idle agony of dreams

To my heart, that feels him living yet,--
And I forget, and I forget.

III.

He was almost grown a man when he passed
Away, but when I kissed him last

He was still a child, and I had crept
Up to the little room where he slept,

And thought to kiss him good-by in his sleep;
But he was awake to make me weep

With terrible homesickness, before
My wayward feet had passed the door.

Round about me clung his embrace,
And he pressed against my face his face,

As if some prescience whispered him then
That it never, never should be again.

IV.

Out of far-off days of boyhood dim,
When he was a babe and I played with him,

I remember his looks and all his ways;
And how he grew through childhood's grace,

To the hopes, and strifes, and sports, and joys,
And innocent vanity of boys;

I hear his whistle at the door,
His careless step upon the floor,

His song, his jest, his laughter yet,--
And I forget, and I forget.

V.

Somewhere in the graveyard that I know,
Where the strawberries under the chestnuts grow,

They have laid him; and his sisters set
On his grave the flowers their tears have wet;

And above his grave, while I write, the song
Of the matin robin leaps sweet and strong

From the leafy dark of the chestnut-tree;
And many a murmuring honey-bee

On the strawberry blossoms in the grass
Stoops by his grave and will not pass;

And in the little hollow beneath
The slope of the silent field of death,

The cow-bells tinkle soft and sweet,
And the cattle go by with homeward feet,

And the squirrel barks from the sheltering limb,
At the harmless noises not meant for him;

And Nature, unto her loving heart
Has taken our darling's mortal part,

Tenderly, that he may be,
Like the song of the robin in the tree,

The blossoms, the grass, the reeds by the shore,
A part of Summer evermore.

VI.

I write, and the words with my tears are wet,--
But I forget, O, I forget!

Teach me, Thou that sendest this pain,
To know and feel my loss and gain!

Let me not falter in belief
On his death, for that is sorest grief:

O, lift me above this wearing strife,
Till I discern his deathless life,

Shining beyond this misty shore,
A part of Heaven evermore.

Venice, Wednesday Morning, at Dawn, May 16, 1864.

THANKSGIVING.

I.

Lord, for the erring thought
Not into evil wrought:
Lord, for the wicked will
Betrayed and baffled still:
For the heart from itself kept,
Our thanksgiving accept.