Chapter X: Act II: Evening. The Summit of Etna (1)

EMPEDOCLES.

Alone!
On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste,
Crowned by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth,
Round which the sullen vapor rolls,--alone!
Pausanias is far hence, and that is well,
For I must henceforth speak no more with man.
He has his lesson too, and that debt’s paid;
And the good, learned, friendly, quiet man,
May bravelier front his life, and in himself
Find henceforth energy and heart. But I,--
The weary man, the banished citizen,
Whose banishment is not his greatest ill,
Whose weariness no energy can reach,
And for whose hurt courage is not the cure,--
What should I do with life and living more?

No, thou art come too late, Empedocles!
And the world hath the day, and must break thee,
Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live:
Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine.
And being lonely thou art miserable;
For something has impaired thy spirit’s strength,
And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy.
Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself,
O sage! O sage! Take, then, the one way left;
And turn thee to the elements, thy friends,
Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers,
And say: Ye servants, hear Empedocles,
Who asks this final service at your hands!
Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid
The last spark of man’s consciousness with words;
Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world,
Be disarrayed of their divinity;
Before the soul lose all her solemn joys,
And awe be dead, and hope impossible,
And the soul’s deep eternal night come on,--
Receive me, hide me, quench me, take me home!

_He advances to the edge of the crater. Smoke and fire break forth with a loud noise, and CALLICLES is heard below singing_:--

The lyre’s voice is lovely everywhere;
In the court of gods, in the city of men,
And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain-glen,
In the still mountain air.

Only to Typho it sounds hatefully,--
To Typho only, the rebel o’erthrown,
Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone,
To embed them in the sea.
Wherefore dost thou groan so loud?
Wherefore do thy nostrils flash,
Through the dark night, suddenly,
Typho, such red jets of flame?
Is thy tortured heart still proud?
Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash?
Still alert thy stone-crushed frame?
Doth thy fierce soul still deplore
Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills,
And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore?
Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep
The fight which crowned thine ills,
Thy last mischance on this Sicilian deep?
Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair,
Where erst the strong sea-currents sucked thee down,
Never to cease to writhe, and try to rest,
Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair?
That thy groans, like thunder prest,
Begin to roll, and almost drown
The sweet notes whose lulling spell
Gods and the race of mortals love so well,
When through thy caves thou hearest music swell?

But an awful pleasure bland
Spreading o’er the Thunderer’s face,
When the sound climbs near his seat,
The Olympian council sees;
As he lets his lax right hand,
Which the lightnings doth embrace,
Sink upon his mighty knees.
And the eagle, at the beck
Of the appeasing, gracious harmony,
Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,
Nestling nearer to Jove’s feet;
While o’er his sovran eye
The curtains of the blue films slowly meet.
And the white Olympus-peaks
Rosily brighten, and the soothed gods smile
At one another from their golden chairs,
And no one round the charmed circle speaks.
Only the loved Hebe bears
The cup about, whose draughts beguile
Pain and care, with a dark store
Of fresh-pulled violets wreathed and nodding o’er;
And her flushed feet glow on the marble floor.

EMPEDOCLES.

He fables, yet speaks truth!
The brave impetuous heart yields everywhere
To the subtle, contriving head;
Great qualities are trodden down,
And littleness united
Is become invincible.

These rumblings are not Typho’s groans, I know!
These angry smoke-bursts
Are not the passionate breath
Of the mountain-crushed, tortured, intractable Titan king;
But over all the world
What suffering is there not seen
Of plainness oppressed by cunning,
As the well-counselled Zeus oppressed
That self-helping son of earth!
What anguish of greatness,
Railed and hunted from the world,
Because its simplicity rebukes
This envious, miserable age!

I am weary of it.
--Lie there, ye ensigns
Of my unloved pre-eminence
In an age like this!
Among a people of children,
Who thronged me in their cities,
Who worshipped me in their houses,
And asked, not wisdom,
But drugs to charm with,
But spells to mutter
All the fool’s-armory of magic! Lie there,
My golden circlet,
My purple robe!

CALLICLES (_from below_).

As the sky-brightening south-wind clears the day,
And makes the massed clouds roll,
The music of the lyre blows away
The clouds which wrap the soul.

Oh that fate had let me see
That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,
That famous, final victory
When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire!

When, from far Parnassus’ side,
Young Apollo, all the pride
Of the Phrygian flutes to tame,
To the Phrygian highlands came;
Where the long green reed-beds sway
In the rippled waters gray
Of that solitary lake
Where Mæander’s springs are born;
Where the ridged pine-wooded roots
Of Messogis westward break,
Mounting westward, high and higher.
There was held the famous strife;
There the Phrygian brought his flutes,
And Apollo brought his lyre;
And, when now the westering sun
Touched the hills, the strife was done,
And the attentive muses said,--
“Marsyas, thou art vanquishèd!”
Then Apollo’s minister
Hanged upon a branching fir
Marsyas, that unhappy Faun,
And began to whet his knife.
But the Mænads, who were there,
Left their friend, and with robes flowing
In the wind, and loose dark hair
O’er their polished bosoms blowing,
Each her ribboned tambourine
Flinging on the mountain-sod,
With a lovely frightened mien
Came about the youthful god.
But he turned his beauteous face
Haughtily another way,
From the grassy sun-warmed place
Where in proud repose he lay,
With one arm over his head,
Watching how the whetting sped.

But aloof, on the lake-strand,
Did the young Olympus stand,
Weeping at his master’s end;
For the Faun had been his friend.
For he taught him how to sing,
And he taught him flute-playing.
Many a morning had they gone
To the glimmering mountain lakes,
And had torn up by the roots
The tall crested water-reeds
With long plumes and soft brown seeds,
And had carved them into flutes,
Sitting on a tabled stone
Where the shoreward ripple breaks.
And he taught him how to please
The red-snooded Phrygian girls,
Whom the summer evening sees
Flashing in the dance’s whirls
Underneath the starlit trees
In the mountain villages.
Therefore now Olympus stands,
At his master’s piteous cries
Pressing fast with both his hands
His white garment to his eyes,
Not to see Apollo’s scorn.--
Ah, poor Faun, poor Faun! ah, poor Faun!

EMPEDOCLES.

And lie thou there,
My laurel bough!
Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there!
Though thou hast been my shade in the world’s heat,
Though I have loved thee, lived in honoring thee,
Yet lie thou there,
My laurel bough!

I am weary of thee.
I am weary of the solitude
Where he who bears thee must abide,--
Of the rocks of Parnassus,
Of the gorge of Delphi,
Of the moonlight peaks, and the caves.
Thou guardest them, Apollo!
Over the grave of the slain Pytho,
Though young, intolerably severe!
Thou keepest aloof the profane,
But the solitude oppresses thy votary.
The jars of men reach him not in thy valley,
But can life reach him?
Thou fencest him from the multitude:
Who will fence him from himself?
He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents,
And the beating of his own heart;
The air is thin, the veins swell,
The temples tighten and throb there--
Air! air!

Take thy bough, set me free from my solitude;
I have been enough alone!

Where shall thy votary fly, then? back to men?
But they will gladly welcome him once more,
And help him to unbend his too tense thought,
And rid him of the presence of himself,
And keep their friendly chatter at his ear,
And haunt him, till the absence from himself,
That other torment, grow unbearable;
And he will fly to solitude again,
And he will find its air too keen for him,
And so change back; and many thousand times
Be miserably bandied to and fro
Like a sea-wave, betwixt the world and thee,
Thou young, implacable god! and only death
Shall cut his oscillations short, and so
Bring him to poise. There is no other way.

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends
In all the Italian cities like ourselves;
When with elated hearts we joined your train,
Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth.[16]
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us;
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eased,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then,--
The sports of the country-people,
A flute-note from the woods,
Sunset over the sea;
Seed-time and harvest,
The reapers in the corn,
The vinedresser in his vineyard,
The village-girl at her wheel.

Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content!
But he who has outlived his prosperous days;
But he whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exiled age is thrown,--
Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change,
But, in a world he loves not, must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute’s breathing-space allowed
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy,--
Joy and the outward world must die to him,
As they are dead to me.

_A long pause, during which EMPEDOCLES remains motionless, plunged in thought. The night deepens. He moves forward, and gazes around him, and proceeds_:--

And yon, ye stars,
Who slowly begin to marshal,
As of old, in the fields of heaven,
Your distant, melancholy lines!
Have you, too, survived yourselves?
Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You too once lived;
You too moved joyfully,
Among august companions,
In an older world, peopled by gods,
In a mightier order,
The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven.
But now ye kindle
Your lonely, cold-shining lights,
Unwilling lingerers
In the heavenly wilderness,
For a younger, ignoble world;
And renew, by necessity,
Night after night your courses,
In echoing, unneared silence,
Above a race you know not,
Uncaring and undelighted,
Without friend and without home;
Weary like us, though not
Weary with our weariness.

No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,
No languor, no decay! languor and death,
They are with me, not you! ye are alive,--
Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride
Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world,
That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount
Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand,--
Thou, too, brimmest with life! the sea of cloud,
That heaves its white and billowy vapors up
To moat this isle of ashes from the world,
Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down,
O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads
To Etna’s Lipareän sister-fires
And the long dusky line of Italy,--
That mild and luminous floor of waters lives,
With held-in joy swelling its heart: I only,
Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has failed,
I, who have not, like these, in solitude
Maintained courage and force, and in myself
Nursed an immortal vigor,--I alone
Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read
In all things my own deadness.

_A long silence. He continues_:--

Oh that I could glow like this mountain!
Oh that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea!
Oh that my soul were full of light as the stars!
Oh that it brooded over the world like the air!

But no, this heart will glow no more; thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,--
But a naked, eternally restless mind!

_After a pause_:--

To the elements it came from,
Every thing will return,--
Our bodies to earth,
Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air:
They were well born, they will be well entombed.
But mind?...

And we might gladly share the fruitful stir
Down in our mother earth’s miraculous womb;
Well would it be
With what rolled of us in the stormy main;
We might have joy, blent with the all-bathing air,
Or with the nimble, radiant life of fire.

But mind, but thought,
If these have been the master part of us,--
Where will _they_ find their parent element?
What will receive _them_, who will call _them_ home?
But we shall still be in them, and they in us;
And we shall be the strangers of the world;
And they will be our lords, as they are now,
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled forever; and still thought and mind
Will hurry us with them on their homeless march
Over the unallied unopening earth,
Over the unrecognizing sea; while air
Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth,
And fire repel us from its living waves.
And then we shall unwillingly return
Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life:
And in our individual human state
Go through the sad probation all again,
To see if we will poise our life at last,
To see if we will now at last be true
To our own only true, deep-buried selves,
Being one with which, we are one with the whole world;
Or whether we will once more fall away
Into the bondage of the flesh or mind,
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze
Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power.
And each succeeding age in which we are born
Will have more peril for us than the last;
Will goad our senses with a sharper spur,
Will fret our minds to an intenser play,
Will make ourselves harder to be discerned.
And we shall struggle a while, gasp and rebel;
And we shall fly for refuge to past times,
Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness;
And the reality will pluck us back,
Knead us in its hot hand, and change our nature.
And we shall feel our powers of effort flag,
And rally them for one last fight--and fail;
And we shall sink in the impossible strife,
And be astray forever.
Slave of sense
I have in no wise been; but slave of thought?
And who can say: I have been always free,
Lived ever in the light of my own soul?
I cannot; I have lived in wrath and gloom,
Fierce, disputatious, ever at war with man,
Far from my own soul, far from warmth and light;
But I have not grown easy in these bonds,
But I have not denied what bonds these were.
Yea, I take myself to witness,
That I have loved no darkness,
Sophisticated no truth,
Nursed no dlusion,
Allowed no fear!

And therefore, O ye elements! I know know--
Ye know it too--it hath been granted me
Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.
I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud
Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.

Is it but for a moment?
--Ah, boil up, ye vapors!
Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!
My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!

[_He plunges into the crater._

CALLICLES (_from below_).

Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame.

Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee;
But where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea,--

Where the moon-silvered inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,--
Oh, speed, and rejoice!

On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks:
On the cliff-side the pigeons
Roost deep in the rocks.

In the moonlight the shepherds,
Soft lulled by the rills,
Lie wrapped in their blankets
Asleep on the hills.

--What forms are these coming
So white through the gloom?
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flowered broom?

What sweet-breathing presence
Out-perfumes the thyme?
What voices enrapture
The night’s balmy prime?

’Tis Apollo comes leading
His choir, the Nine.
The leader is fairest,
But all are divine.

They are lost in the hollows!
They stream up again!
What seeks on this mountain
The glorified train?

They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus,
Their endless abode.

--Whose praise do they mention?
Of what is it told?
What will be forever,
What was from of old.

First hymn they the Father
Of all things; and then,
The rest of immortals,
The action of men.

The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.

_BACCHANALIA; OR, THE NEW AGE._

I.

The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths; the ringing wain,
The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms,
All housed within the sleeping farms.
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height,
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day foregoes.
And on the pure horizon far,
See, pulsing with the first-born star,
The liquid sky above the hill!
The evening comes, the fields are still.

Loitering and leaping,
With saunter, with bounds,
Flickering and circling
In files and in rounds,
Gayly their pine-staff green
Tossing in air,
Loose o’er their shoulders white
Showering their hair,
See! the wild Mænads
Break from the wood,
Youth and Iacchus
Maddening their blood.
See! through the quiet land
Rioting they pass,
Fling the fresh heaps about,
Trample the grass,
Tear from the rifled hedge
Garlands, their prize;
Fill with their sports the field,
Fill with their cries.

Shepherd, what ails thee, then?
Shepherd, why mute?
Forth with thy joyous song!
Forth with thy flute!
Tempts not the revel blithe?
Lure not their cries?
Glow not their shoulders smooth?
Melt not their eyes?
Is not, on cheeks like those,
Lovely the flush?
--_Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush!_

II.

The epoch ends, the world is still.
The age has talked and worked its fill.
The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,
The famous men of war have fought,
The famous speculators thought,
The famous players, sculptors, wrought,
The famous painters filled their wall,
The famous critics judged it all.
The combatants are parted now;
Uphung the spear, unbent the bow,
The puissant crowned, the weak laid low.
And in the after-silence sweet,
Now strifes are hushed, our ears doth meet,
Ascending pure, the bell-like fame
Of this or that down-trodden name,
Delicate spirits, pushed away
In the hot press of the noonday.
And o’er the plain, where the dead age
Did its now-silent warfare wage,--
O’er that wide plain, now wrapped in gloom,
Where many a splendor finds its tomb,
Many spent fames and fallen nights nights--
The one or two immortal lights
Rise slowly up into the sky,
To shine there everlastingly,
Like stars over the bounding hill.
The epoch ends, the world is still.

Thundering and bursting
In torrents, in waves,
Carolling and shouting
Over tombs, amid graves,
See! on the cumbered plain
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the new age.
Bards make new poems,
Thinkers new schools,
Statesmen new systems,
Critics new rules.
All things begin again;
Life is their prize;
Earth with their deeds they fill,
Fill with their cries.

Poet, what ails thee, then?
Say, why so mute?
Forth with thy praising voice!
Forth with thy flute!
Loiterer! why sittest thou
Sunk in thy dream?
Tempts not the bright new age?
Shines not its stream?
Look, ah! what genius,
Art, science, wit!
Soldiers like Cæsar,
Statesmen like Pitt!
Sculptors like Phidias,
Raphaels in shoals,
Poets like Shakspeare,--
Beautiful souls!
See, on their glowing cheeks
Heavenly the flush!
--_Ah! so the silence was!
So was the hush!_

The world but feels the present’s spell:
The poet feels the past as well;
Whatever men have done, might do,
Whatever thought, might think it too.

_EPILOGUE TO LESSING’S LAOCOÖN._

One morn as through Hyde Park we walked,
My friend and I, by chance we talked
Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön;
And after we a while had gone
In Lessing’s track, and tried to see
What painting is, what poetry,--
Diverging to another thought,
“Ah!” cries my friend, “but who hath taught
Why music and the other arts
Oftener perform aright their parts
Than poetry? why she, than they,
Fewer fine successes can display?

“For ’tis so, surely! Even in Greece,
Where best the poet framed his piece,
Even in that Phœbus-guarded ground
Pausanias on his travels found
Good poems, if he looked, more rare
(Though many) than good statues were--
For these, in truth, were everywhere.
Of bards full many a stroke divine
In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line,
The land of Ariosto showed;
And yet, e’en there, the canvas glowed
With triumphs, a yet ampler brood,
Of Raphael and his brotherhood.
And nobly perfect, in our day
Of haste, half-work, and disarray,
Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong,
Hath risen Goethe’s, Wordsworth’s song;
Yet even I (and none will bow
Deeper to these) must needs allow,
They yield us not, to soothe our pains,
Such multitude of heavenly strains
As from the kings of sound are blown,--
Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.”

While thus my friend discoursed, we pass
Out of the path, and take the grass.
The grass had still the green of May,
And still the unblackened elms were gay;
The kine were resting in the shade,
The flies a summer murmur made.
Bright was the morn, and south the air;
The soft-couched cattle were as fair
As those which pastured by the sea,
That old-world morn, in Sicily,
When on the beach the Cyclops lay,
And Galatea from the bay
Mocked her poor lovelorn giant’s lay.
“Behold,” I said, “the painter’s sphere!
The limits of his art appear.
The passing group, the summer morn,
The grass, the elms, that blossomed thorn,--
Those cattle couched, or, as they rise,
Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes,--
These, or much greater things, but caught
Like these, and in one aspect brought!
In outward semblance he must give
A moment’s life of things that live;
Then let him choose his moment well,
With power divine its story tell.”

Still we walked on, in thoughtful mood,
And now upon the bridge we stood.
Full of sweet breathings was the air,
Of sudden stirs and pauses fair.
Down o’er the stately bridge the breeze
Came rustling from the garden-trees,
And on the sparkling waters played;
Light-plashing waves an answer made,
And mimic boats their haven neared.
Beyond, the abbey-towers appeared,
By mist and chimneys unconfined,
Free to the sweep of light and wind;
While through their earth-moored nave below,
Another breath of wind doth blow,
Sound as of wandering breeze--but sound
In laws by human artists bound.
“The world of music!” I exclaimed,--
“This breeze that rustles by, that famed
Abbey, recall it! what a sphere,
Large and profound, hath genius here!
The inspired musician, what a range,
What power of passion, wealth of change!
Some source of feeling he must choose,
And its locked fount of beauty use,
And through the stream of music tell
Its else unutterable spell;
To choose it rightly is his part,
And press into its inmost heart.

“_Miserere, Domine!_
The words are uttered, and they flee.
Deep is their penitential moan,
Mighty their pathos, but ’tis gone.
They have declared the spirit’s sore,
Sore load, and words can do no more.
Beethoven takes them then,--those two
Poor, bounded words,--and makes them new;
Infinite makes them, makes them young;
Transplants them to another tongue,
Where they can now, without constraint,
Pour all the soul of their complaint,
And roll adown a channel large
The wealth divine they have in charge.
Page after page of music turn,
And still they live, and still they burn,
Eternal, passion-fraught, and free,--
_Miserere, Domine!_”

Onward we moved, and reached the ride
Where gayly flows the human tide.
Afar, in rest the cattle lay;
We heard, afar, faint music play;
But agitated, brisk, and near,
Men, with their stream of life, were here.
Some hang upon the rails, and some
On foot behind them go and come.
This through the ride upon his steed
Goes slowly by, and this at speed.
The young, the happy, and the fair,
The old, the sad, the worn, were there;
Some vacant and some musing went,
And some in talk and merriment.
Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells!
And now and then, perhaps, there swells
A sigh, a tear--but in the throng
All changes fast, and hies along.
Hies, ah! from whence, what native ground?
And to what goal, what ending, bound?
“Behold at last the poet’s sphere!
But who,” I said, “suffices here?

“For, ah! so much he has to do,--
Be painter and musician too!
The aspect of the moment show,
The feeling of the moment know!
The aspect not, I grant, express
Clear as the painter’s art can dress;
The feeling not, I grant, explore
So deep as the musician’s lore:
But clear as words can make revealing,
And deep as words can follow feeling.
But, ah! then comes his sorest spell
Of toil,--he must life’s _movement_ tell!
The thread which binds it all in one,
And not its separate parts alone.
The _movement_ he must tell of life,
Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife;
His eye must travel down, at full,
The long, unpausing spectacle;
With faithful, unrelaxing force
Attend it from its primal source,
From change to change and year to year
Attend it of its mid-career,
Attend it to the last repose
And solemn silence of its close.

“The cattle rising from the grass,
His thought must follow where they pass;
The penitent with anguish bowed,
His thought must follow through the crowd.
Yes! all this eddying, motley throng
That sparkles in the sun along,--
Girl, statesman, merchant, soldier bold,
Master and servant, young and old,
Grave, gay, child, parent, husband, wife,--
He follows home, and lives their life.

“And many, many are the souls
Life’s movement fascinates, controls.
It draws them on, they cannot save
Their feet from its alluring wave;
They cannot leave it, they must go
With its unconquerable flow.
But ah! how few, of all that try
This mighty march, do aught but die!
For ill-endowed for such a way,
Ill-stored in strength, in wits, are they.
They faint, they stagger to and fro,
And wandering from the stream they go;
In pain, in terror, in distress,
They see, all round, a wilderness.
Sometimes a momentary gleam
They catch of the mysterious stream;
Sometimes, a second’s space, their ear
The murmur of its waves doth hear;
That transient glimpse in song they say,
But not as painter can portray;
That transient sound in song they tell,
But not as the musician well.
And when at last their snatches cease,
And they are silent and at peace,
The stream of life’s majestic whole
Hath ne’er been mirrored on their soul.

“Only a few the life-stream’s shore
With safe unwandering feet explore;
Untired its movement bright attend,
Follow its windings to the end.
Then from its brimming waves their eye
Drinks up delighted ecstasy,
And its deep-toned, melodious voice
Forever makes their ear rejoice.
They speak! the happiness divine
They feel runs o’er in every line;
Its spell is round them like a shower;
It gives them pathos, gives them power.
No painter yet hath such a way,
Nor no musician made, as they,
And gathered on immortal knolls
Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.
Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach
The charm which Homer, Shakspeare, teach.
To these, to these, their thankful race
Gives, then, the first, the fairest place;
And brightest is their glory’s sheen,
For greatest hath their labor been.”

_PERSISTENCY OF POETRY._

Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.

_A CAUTION TO POETS._

What poets feel not, when they make,
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in _its_ turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating.

_THE YOUTH OF NATURE._

Raised are the dripping oars,
Silent the boat! The lake,
Lovely and soft as a dream,
Swims in the sheen of the moon.
The mountains stand at its head
Clear in the pure June-night,
But the valleys are flooded with haze.
Rydal and Fairfield are there;
In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead.
So it is, so it will be for aye.
Nature is fresh as of old,
Is lovely; a mortal is dead.

The spots which recall him survive,
For he lent a new life to these hills.
The Pillar still broods o’er the fields
Which border Ennerdale Lake,
And Egremont sleeps by the sea.
The gleam of The Evening Star
Twinkles on Grasmere no more,
But ruined and solemn and gray
The sheepfold of Michael survives;
And far to the south, the heath
Still blows in the Quantock coombs,
By the favorite waters of Ruth.
These survive! Yet not without pain,
Pain and dejection to-night,
Can I feel that their poet is gone.

He grew old in an age he condemned.
He looked on the rushing decay
Of the times which had sheltered his youth;
Felt the dissolving throes
Of a social order he loved;
Outlived his brethren, his peers;
And, like the Theban seer,
Died in his enemies’ day.

Cold bubbled the spring of Tilphusa,
Copais lay bright in the moon,
Helicon glassed in the lake
Its firs, and afar rose the peaks
Of Parnassus, snowily clear;
Thebes was behind him in flames,
And the clang of arms in his ear,
When his awe-struck captors led
The Theban seer to the spring.
Tiresias drank and died.
Nor did reviving Thebes
See such a prophet again.

Well may we mourn, when the head
Of a sacred poet lies low
In an age which can rear them no more!
The complaining millions of men
Darken in labor and pain;
But he was a priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we saw with his eyes, and were glad.
He is dead, and the fruit-bearing day
Of his race is past on the earth;
And darkness returns to our eyes.

For, oh! is it you, is it you,
Moonlight, and shadow, and lake,
And mountains, that fill us with joy,
Or the poet who sings you so well?
Is it you, O beauty, O grace,
O charm, O romance, that we feel,
Or the voice which reveals what you are?
Are ye, like daylight and sun,
Shared and rejoiced in by all?
Or are ye immersed in the mass
Of matter, and hard to extract,
Or sunk at the core of the world
Too deep for the most to discern?
Like stars in the deep of the sky,
Which arise on the glass of the sage,
But are lost when their watcher is gone.

“They are here,”--I heard, as men heard
In Mysian Ida the voice
Of the mighty Mother, or Crete,
The murmur of Nature, reply,--
“Loveliness, magic, grace,
They are here! they are set in the world,
They abide; and the finest of souls
Hath not been thrilled by them all,
Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.
The poet who sings them may die,
But they are immortal and live,
For they are the life of the world.
Will ye not learn it, and know,
When ye mourn that a poet is dead,
That the singer was less than his themes,
Life, and emotion, and I?

“More than the singer are these.
Weak is the tremor of pain
That thrills in his mournfullest chord
To that which once ran through his soul.
Cold the elation of joy
In his gladdest, airiest song,
To that which of old in his youth
Filled him and made him divine.
Hardly his voice at its best
Gives us a sense of the awe,
The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom,
Of the unlit gulf of himself.

“Ye know not yourselves; and your bards--
The clearest, the best, who have read
Most in themselves--have beheld
Less than they left unrevealed.
Ye express not yourselves: can ye make
With marble, with color, with word,
What charmed you in others re-live?
Can thy pencil, O artist! restore
The figure, the bloom of thy love,
As she was in her morning of spring?
Canst thou paint the ineffable smile
Of her eyes as they rested on thine?
Can the image of life have the glow,
The motion of life itself?

“Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me,
The mateless, the one, will ye know?
Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell
Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast,
My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift
To have rendered the gleam of my skies,
To have echoed the moan of my seas,
Uttered the voice of my hills?
When your great ones depart, will ye say,--
_All things have suffered a loss,_
_Nature is hid in their grave_?

“Race after race, man after man,
Have thought that my secret was theirs,
Have dreamed that I lived but for them,
That they were my glory and joy.
--They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!
I remain.”

_THE YOUTH OF MAN._

We, O Nature, depart:
Thou survivest us! This,
This, I know, is the law.
Yes! but, more than this,
Thou who seest us die
Seest us change while we live;
Seest our dreams, one by one,
Seest our errors depart;
Watchest us, Nature! throughout
Mild and inscrutably calm.

Well for us that we change!
Well for us that the power
Which in our morning prime
Saw the mistakes of our youth,
Sweet, and forgiving, and good,
Sees the contrition of age!

Behold, O Nature, this pair!
See them to-night where they stand,
Not with the halo of youth
Crowning their brows with its light,
Not with the sunshine of hope,
Not with the rapture of spring,
Which they had of old, when they stood
Years ago at my side
In this self-same garden, and said,--
“We are young, and the world is ours;
Man, man is king of the world!
Fools that these mystics are
Who prate of Nature! but she
Hath neither beauty, nor warmth,
Nor life, nor emotion, nor power.
But man has a thousand gifts,
And the generous dreamer invests
The senseless world with them all.
Nature is nothing; her charm
Lives in our eyes which can paint,
Lives in our hearts which can feel.”

Thou, O Nature, wast mute,
Mute as of old! Days flew,
Days and years; and Time
With the ceaseless stroke of his wings
Brushed off the bloom from their soul.
Clouded and dim grew their eye,
Languid their heart--for youth
Quickened its pulses no more.
Slowly, within the walls
Of an ever-narrowing world,
They drooped, they grew blind, they grew old.
Thee, and their youth in thee,
Nature! they saw no more.

Murmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world!
Make, oh, make yourselves felt
To the dying spirit of youth!
Come, like the breath of the spring!
Leave not a human soul
To grow old in darkness and pain!
Only the living can feel you,
But leave us not while we live!

Here they stand to-night,--
Here, where this gray balustrade
Crowns the still valley; behind
In the castled house with its woods
Which sheltered their childhood; the sun
On its ivied windows; a scent
From the gray-walled gardens, a breath
Of the fragrant stock and the pink,
Perfumes the evening air.
Their children play on the lawns.
They stand and listen; they hear
The children’s shouts, and at times,
Faintly, the bark of a dog
From a distant farm in the hills.
Nothing besides! in front
The wide, wide valley outspreads
To the dim horizon, reposed
In the twilight, and bathed in dew,
Cornfield and hamlet and copse
Darkening fast; but a light,
Far off, a glory of day,
Still plays on the city-spires;
And there in the dusk by the walls,
With the gray mist marking its course
Through the silent, flowery land,
On, to the plains, to the sea,
Floats the imperial stream.

Well I know what they feel!
They gaze, and the evening wind
Plays on their faces; they gaze,--
Airs from the Eden of youth
Awake and stir in their soul;
The past returns: they feel
What they are, alas! what they were.
They, not Nature, are changed.
Well I know what they feel!

Hush, for tears
Begin to steal to their eyes!
Hush, for fruit
Grows from such sorrow as theirs!

And they remember,
With piercing, untold anguish,
The proud boasting of their youth.
And they feel how Nature was fair.
And the mists of delusion,
And the scales of habit,
Fall away from their eyes;
And they see, for a moment,
Stretching out like the desert
In its weary, unprofitable length,
Their faded, ignoble lives.

While the locks are yet brown on thy head,
While the soul still looks through thine eyes,
While the heart still pours
The mantling blood to thy cheek,
Sink, O youth, in thy soul!
Yearn to the greatness of Nature;
Rally the good in the depths of thyself!

_PALLADIUM._

Set where the upper streams of Simois flow,
Was the Palladium, high ’mid rock and wood;
And Hector was in Ilium, far below,
And fought, and saw it not; but there it stood!

It stood, and sun and moonshine rained their light
On the pure columns of its glen-built hall.
Backward and forward rolled the waves of fight
Round Troy; but while this stood, Troy could not fall.

So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul.
Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air;
Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll:
We visit it by moments, ah, too rare!

Men will renew the battle in the plain
To-morrow: red with blood will Xanthus be;
Hector and Ajax will be there again,
Helen will come upon the wall to see.

Then we shall rust in shade, or shine in strife,
And fluctuate ’twixt blind hopes and blind despairs,
And fancy that we put forth all our life,
And never know how with the soul it fares.

Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high,
Upon our life a ruling effluence send;
And when it fails, fight as we will, we die;
And, while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.

_PROGRESS._

The Master stood upon the mount, and taught.
He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes;
“The old law,” they said, “is wholly come to naught:
Behold the new world rise!”

“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw
The old law observed by scribes and Pharisees?
I say unto you, see ye keep that law
More faithfully than these!

“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!
Think not that I to annul the law have willed:
No jot, no tittle, from the law shall pass
Till all have been fulfilled.”

So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.
And what, then, shall be said to those to-day,
Who cry aloud to lay the old world low
To clear the new world’s way?

“Religious fervors! ardor misapplied!
Hence, hence!” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind!
But keep him self-immersed, pre-occupied,
And lame the active mind.”

Ah! from the old world let some one answer give:
“Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?
I say unto you, see that _your_ souls live
A deeper life than theirs!

“Say ye, ‘The spirit of man has found new roads,
And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein’?
Leave, then, the cross as ye have left carved gods,
But guard the fire within!

“Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll,
And no man may the other’s hurt behold;
Yet each will have one anguish,--his own soul
Which perishes of cold.”

Here let that voice make end; then let a strain
From a far lonelier distance, like the wind
Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again
These men’s profoundest mind:--

“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
Forever doth accompany mankind,
Hath looked on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.

“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?
Which has not fallen on the dry heart like rain?
Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man,--
_Thou must be born again!_

“Children of men! not that your age excel
In pride of life the ages of your sires,
But that _ye_ think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,
The Friend of man desires.”

_REVOLUTIONS._

Before man parted for this earthly strand,
While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood,
God put a heap of letters in his hand,
And bade him make with them what word he could.

And man has turned them many times; made Greece,
Rome, England, France; yes, nor in vain essayed
Way after way, changes that never cease!
The letters have combined, something was made.

But ah! an inextinguishable sense
Haunts him that he has not made what he should;
That he has still, though old, to recommence,
Since he has not yet found the word God would.

And empire after empire, at their height
Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on;
Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,
And drooped, and slowly died upon their throne.

One day, thou say’st, there will at last appear
The word, the order, which God meant should be.
--Ah! we shall know _that_ well when it comes near;
The band will quit man’s heart, he will breathe free.

_SELF-DEPENDENCE._

Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be,
At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.

And a look of passionate desire
O’er the sea and to the stars I send:
“Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me,
Calm me, ah, compose me to the end!

Ah, once more,” I cried, “ye stars, ye waters,
On my heart your mighty charm renew;
Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you,
Feel my soul becoming vast like you!”

From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,
Over the lit sea’s unquiet way,
In the rustling night-air came the answer,--
“Wouldst thou _be_ as these are? _Live_ as they.

“Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
Undistracted by the sights they see,
These demand not that the things without them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.

“And with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silvered roll;
For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.

“Bounded by themselves, and unregardful
In what state God’s other works may be,
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.”

O air-born voice! long since, severely clear,
A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear,--
“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he
Who finds himself loses his misery!”

_MORALITY._

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.
But tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.

Then, when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost bask in Nature’s eye,
Ask how _she_ viewed thy self-control,
Thy struggling, tasked morality,--
Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air,
Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.

And she, whose censure thou dost dread,
Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek,
See, on her face a glow is spread,
A strong emotion on her cheek!
“Ah, child!” she cries, “that strife divine,
Whence was it, for it is not mine?

“There is no effort on _my_ brow;
I do not strive, I do not weep:
I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy, and when I will, I sleep.
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once--but where?

“I knew not yet the gauge of time,
Nor wore the manacles of space;
I felt it in some other clime,
I saw it in some other place.
’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,
And lay upon the breast of God.”

_A SUMMER NIGHT._

In the deserted, moon-blanched street,
How lonely rings the echo of my feet!
Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,
Silent and white, unopening down,
Repellent as the world; but see,
A break between the housetops shows
The moon! and lost behind her, fading dim
Into the dewy dark obscurity
Down at the far horizon’s rim,
Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!

And to my mind the thought
Is on a sudden brought
Of a past night, and a far different scene.
Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep
As clearly as at noon;
The spring-tide’s brimming flow
Heaved dazzlingly between;
Houses, with long white sweep,
Girdled the glistening bay;
Behind, through the soft air,
The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.
That night was far more fair--
But the same restless pacings to and fro,
And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,
And the same bright, calm moon.

And the calm moonlight seems to say,--
_Hast thou, then, still the old unquiet breast,_
_Which neither deadens into rest,_
_Nor ever feels the fiery glow_
_That whirls the spirit from itself away,_
_But fluctuates to and fro,_
_Never by passion quite possessed,_
_And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway?_
And I, I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield, and be
Like all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison, and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair,
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port, he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind; and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave, must man be one?

Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!
Clearness divine!
Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign
Of languor, though so calm, and though so great
Are yet untroubled and unpassionate;
Who, though so noble, share in the world’s toil,
And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!
I will not say that your mild deeps retain
A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain
Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain;
But I will rather say that you remain
A world above man’s head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul’s horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency!
How it were good to live there, and breathe free;
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still!

_THE BURIED LIFE._

Light flows our war of mocking words; and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne;
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?

I knew the mass of men concealed
Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Tricked in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love! doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchained;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be,--
By what distractions he would be possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity,--
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us,--to know
Whence our lives come, and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves,--
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on forever unexpressed.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but ’tis not true!
And then we will no more be racked
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah, yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Only--but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed,--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.

A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur, and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.