To the familiar things we call our own,
And with the other, resolute of will, 55
Grope in the dark for what the day will bring.
Boston
ST. BOTOLPH’S Town! Hither across the plains
And fens of Lincolnshire, in garb austere,
There came a Saxon monk, and founded here
A Priory, pillaged by marauding Danes,
So that thereof no vestige now remains; 5
Only a name, that, spoken loud and clear,
And echoed in another hemisphere,
Survives the sculptured walls and painted panes.
St. Botolph’s Town! Far over leagues of land
And leagues of sea looks forth its noble tower, 10
And far around the chiming bells are heard;
So may that sacred name forever stand
A landmark, and a symbol of the power,
That lies concentred in a single word.
St. John’s, Cambridge
The memorial chapel of St. John’s, erected by Robert Means Mason in connection with the Episcopal Theological School, stands close by the home of Mr. Longfellow.
I STAND beneath the tree, whose branches shade
Thy western window, Chapel of St. John!
And hear its leaves repeat their benison
On him, whose hand thy stones memorial laid;
Then I remember one of whom was said 5
In the world’s darkest hour, “Behold thy son!”
And see him living still, and wandering on
And waiting for the advent long delayed.
Not only tongues of the apostles teach
Lessons of love and light, but these expanding 10
And sheltering boughs with all their leaves implore,
And say in language clear as human speech,
“The peace of God, that passeth understanding,
Be and abide with you forevermore!”
Moods
OH that a Song would sing itself to me
Out of the heart of Nature, or the heart
Of man, the child of Nature, not of Art,
Fresh as the morning, salt as the salt sea,
With just enough of bitterness to be 5
A medicine to this sluggish mood, and start
The life-blood in my veins, and so impart
Healing and help in this dull lethargy!
Alas! not always doth the breath of song
Breathe on us. It is like the wind that bloweth 10
At its own will, not ours, nor tarrieth long;
We hear the sound thereof, but no man knoweth
From whence it comes, so sudden and swift and strong,
Nor whither in its wayward course it goeth.
Woodstock Park
HERE in a little rustic hermitage
Alfred the Saxon King, Alfred the Great,
Postponed the cares of king-craft to translate
The Consolations of the Roman sage.
Here Geoffrey Chaucer in his ripe old age 5
Wrote the unrivalled Tales, which soon or late
The venturous hand that strives to imitate
Vanquished must fall on the unfinished page.
Two kings were they, who ruled by right divine,
And both supreme; one in the realm of Truth, 10
One in the realm of Fiction and of Song.
What prince hereditary of their line,
Uprising in the strength and flush of youth,
Their glory shall inherit and prolong?
The Four Princesses at Wilna
A Photograph
SWEET faces, that from pictured casements lean
As from a castle window, looking down
On some gay pageant passing through a town,
Yourselves the fairest figures in the scene;
With what a gentle grace, with what serene 5
Unconsciousness ye wear the triple crown
Of youth and beauty and the fair renown
Of a great name, that ne’er hath tarnished been!
From your soft eyes, so innocent and sweet,
Four spirits, sweet and innocent as they, 10
Gaze on the world below, the sky above;
Hark! there is some one singing in the street;
“Faith, Hope, and Love! these three, he seems to say;
“These three; and greatest of the three is Love.”
Holidays
THE HOLIEST of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows; —
The happy days unclouded to their close; 5
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air, 10
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are; — a fairy tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.
Wapentake
To Alfred Tennyson
POET! I come to touch thy lance with mine;
Not as a knight, who on the listed field
Of tourney touched his adversary’s shield
In token of defiance, but in sign
Of homage to the mastery, which is thine, 5
In English song; nor will I keep concealed,
And voiceless as a rivulet frost-congealed,
My admiration for thy verse divine.
Not of the howling dervishes of song,
Who craze the brain with their delirious dance, 10
Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart!
Therefore to thee the laurel-leaves belong,
To thee our love and our allegiance,
For thy allegiance to the poet’s art.
The Broken Oar
“November 13, 1864. Stay at home and ponder upon Dante. I am frequently tempted to write upon my work the inscription found upon an oar cast on the coast of Iceland, —
Oft war ek dasa durek [char]ro thick.
Oft was I weary when I tugged at thee.”
ONCE upon Iceland’s solitary strand
A poet wandered with his book and pen,
Seeking some final word, some sweet Amen,
Wherewith to close the volume in his hand. 5
The billows rolled and plunged upon the sand,
The circling sea-gulls swept beyond his ken,
And from the parting cloud-rack now and then
Flashed the red sunset over sea and land
Then by the billows at his feet was tossed 10
A broken oar; and carved thereon he read:
“Oft was I weary, when I toiled at thee;”
And like a man, who findeth what was lost,
He wrote the words, then lifted up his head,
And flung his useless pen into the sea. 15
The Cross of Snow
IN the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white 5
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines 10
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
ULTIMA THULE
CONTENTS
To G. W. G.
POEMS
Bayard Taylor
The Chamber over the Gate
From my Arm-Chair
Jugurtha
The Iron Pen
Robert Burns
Helen of Tyre
Elegiac
Old St. David’s at Radnor
FOLK-SONGS
The Sifting of Peter
Maiden and Weathercock
The Windmill
The Tide rises, the Tide falls
SONNETS
My Cathedral
The Burial of the Poet
Night
L’ENVOI
The Poet and his Songs
Dedication
The collection of poems under this title was published in 1880. The volume bore on the title-page these lines from Horace (Lib. I., Carmen XXX., Ad Apollinem): —
Precor, integrâ
Cum mente, nec turpem senectam
Degere, nec citharâ carentem.
The dedication is to his life-long friend, George Washington Greene, who himself dedicated his Life of Nathanael Greene to Mr. Longfellow in words which give a glowing picture of the aspirations of the two in the days of their young manhood.
To G. W. G.
WITH favoring minds, o’er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.
How far since then the ocean streams 5
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!
Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades, 10
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?
Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest 15
From the unending, endless quest.
POEMS
Bayard Taylor
DEAD he lay among his books!
The peace of God was in his looks.
As the statues in the gloom
Watch o’er Maximilian’s tomb,
So those volumes from their shelves 5
Watched him, silent as themselves.
Ah! his hand will nevermore
Turn their storied pages o’er;
Nevermore his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet. 10
Let the lifeless body rest!
He is gone, who was its guest;
Gone, as travellers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.
Traveller! in what realms afar, 15
In what planet, in what star,
In what vast, aerial space,
Shines the light upon thy face?
In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet to-night? 20
Poet! thou, whose latest verse
Was a garland on thy hearse;
Thou hast sung, with organ tone,
In Deukalion’s life, thine own;
On the ruins of the Past 25
Blooms the perfect flower at last.
Friend! but yesterday the bells
Rang for thee their loud farewells;
And to-day they toll for thee,
Lying dead beyond the sea; 30
Lying dead among thy books,
The peace of God in all thy looks!
The Chamber over the Gate
Written October 30, 1878. Suggested to the poet when writing a letter of condolence to the Bishop of Mississippi, whose son, the Rev. Duncan C. Green, had died at his post at Greenville, Mississippi, September 15, during the prevalence of yellow fever.
IS it so far from thee
Thou canst no longer see,
In the Chamber over the Gate,
That old man desolate,
Weeping and wailing sore 5
For his son, who is no more?
O Absalom, my son!
Is it so long ago
That cry of human woe
From the walled city came, 10
Calling on his dear name,
That it has died away
In the distance of to-day?
O Absalom, my son!
There is no far or near, 15
There is neither there nor here,
There is neither soon nor late,
In that Chamber over the Gate,
Nor any long ago
To that cry of human woe, 20
O Absalom, my son!
From the ages that are past
The voice sounds like a blast,
Over seas that wreck and drown,
Over tumult of traffic and town; 25
And from ages yet to be
Come the echoes back to me,
O Absalom, my son!
Somewhere at every hour
The watchman on the tower 30
Looks forth, and sees the fleet
Approach of the hurrying feet
Of messengers, that bear
The tidings of despair.
O Absalom, my son! 35
He goes forth from the door,
Who shall return no more.
With him our joy departs;
The light goes out in our hearts;
In the Chamber over the Gate 40
We sit disconsolate.
O Absalom, my son!
That ‘t is a common grief
Bringeth but slight relief;
Ours is the bitterest loss, 45
Ours is the heaviest cross;
And forever the cry will be
“Would God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son!”
From my Arm-Chair
To the Children of Cambridge
Who Presented to Me, on My Seventy-Second Birthday, February 27, 1879, This Chair Made from the Wood of the Village Blacksmith’s Chestnut Tree.
Mr. Longfellow had this poem, which he wrote on the same day, printed on a sheet, and was accustomed to give a copy to each child who visited him and sat in the chair.
AM I a king, that I should call my own
This splendid ebon throne?
Or by what reason, or what right divine,
Can I proclaim it mine?
Only, perhaps, by right divine of song 5
It may to me belong;
Only because the spreading chestnut tree
Of old was sung by me.
Well I remember it in all its prime,
When in the summer-time 10
The affluent foliage of its branches made
A cavern of cool shade.
There, by the blacksmith’s forge, beside the street,
Its blossoms white and sweet
Enticed the bees, until it seemed alive, 15
And murmured like a hive.
And when the winds of autumn, with a shout,
Tossed its great arms about,
The shining chestnuts, bursting from the sheath,
Dropped to the ground beneath. 20
And now some fragments of its branches bare,
Shaped as a stately chair,
Have by my hearthstone found a home at last,
And whisper of the past.
The Danish king could not in all his pride 25
Repel the ocean tide,
But, seated in this chair, I can in rhyme
Roll back the tide of Time.
I see again, as one in vision sees,
The blossoms and the bees, 30
And hear the children’s voices shout and call,
And the brown chestnuts fall.
I see the smithy with its fires aglow,
I hear the bellows blow,
And the shrill hammers on the anvil beat 35
The iron white with heat!
And thus, dear children, have ye made for me
This day a jubilee,
And to my more than threescore years
and ten
Brought back my youth again. 40
The heart hath its own memory, like the mind,
And in it are enshrined
The precious keepsakes, into which is wrought
The giver’s loving thought.
Only your love and your remembrance could 45
Give life to this dead wood,
And make these branches, leafless now so long,
Blossom again in song.
Jugurtha
HOW cold are thy baths, Apollo!
Cried the African monarch, the splendid,
As down to his death in the hollow
Dark dungeons of Rome he descended,
Uncrowned, unthroned, unattended; 5
How cold are thy baths, Apollo!
How cold are thy baths, Apollo!
Cried the Poet, unknown, unbefriended,
As the vision, that lured him to follow,
With the mist and the darkness blended, 10
And the dream of his life was ended;
How cold are thy baths, Apollo!
The Iron Pen
Written June 20, 1879. The pen was made of a bit of iron from the prison of Bonnivard at Chillon; the handle of wood from the Frigate Constitution, and bound with a circlet of gold, inset with three precious stones from Siberia, Ceylon, and Maine. It was a gift from Miss Helen Hamlin, of Bangor, Maine.
I THOUGHT this Pen would arise
From the casket where it lies —
Of itself would arise and write
My thanks and my surprise.
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 83
