Mists uprising, clouds impending,
Filled them with a sense of fear,
Formless, nameless, never ending.
* * * * * 135
Sundown
THE SUMMER sun is sinking low;
Only the tree-tops redden and glow:
Only the weathercock on the spire
Of the neighboring church is a flame of fire
All is in shadow below. 5
O beautiful, awful summer day,
What hast thou given, what taken away?
Life and death, and love and hate,
Homes made happy or desolate,
Hearts made sad or gay! 10
On the road of life one mile-stone more!
In the book of life one leaf turned o’er!
Like a red seal is the setting sun
On the good and the evil men have done, —
Naught can to-day restore! 15
Chimes
SWEET chimes! that in the loneliness of night
Salute the passing hour, and in the dark
And silent chambers of the household mark
The movements of the myriad orbs of light!
Through my closed eyelids, by the inner sight, 5
I see the constellations in the are
Of their great circles moving on, and hark!
I almost hear them singing in their flight.
Better than sleep it is to lie awake,
O’er-canopied by the vast starry dome 10
Of the immeasurable sky; to feel
The slumbering world sink under us, and make
Hardly an eddy, — a mere rush of foam
On the great sea beneath a sinking keel.
Four by the Clock
“Nahant, September 8, 1880, four o’clock in the morning.”
FOUR by the clock! and yet not day;
But the great world rolls and wheels away,
With its cities on land, and its ships at sea,
Into the dawn that is to be!
Only the lamp in the anchored bark 5
Sends its glimmer across the dark,
And the heavy breathing of the sea
Is the only sound that comes to me.
Auf Wiedersehen
In Memory of J. T. F.
In April, 1881, Mr. Longfellow notes in his diary: “A sorrowful and distracted week. Fields died on Sunday, the 24th. Palfrey died on Tuesday. Two intimate friends in one week!” The poem was written April 30, 1881.
UNTIL we meet again! That is the meaning
Of the familiar words, that men repeat
At parting in the street.
Ah yes, till then! but when death intervening
Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain 5
We wait for the Again!
The friends who leave us do not feel the sorrow
Of parting, as we feel it, who must stay
Lamenting day by day,
And knowing, when we wake upon the morrow, 10
We shall not find in its accustomed place
The one beloved face.
It were a double grief, if the departed,
Being released from earth, should still retain
A sense of earthly pain; 15
It were a double grief, if the true-hearted,
Who loved us here, should on the farther shore
Remember us no more.
Believing, in the midst of our afflictions,
That death is a beginning, not an end, 20
We cry to them, and send
Farewells, that better might be called predictions,
Being fore-shadowings of the future, thrown
Into the vast Unknown.
Faith overleaps the confines of our reason, 25
And if by faith, as in old times was said,
Women received their dead
Raised up to life, then only for a season
Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain
Until we meet again! 30
Elegiac Verse
Written at various times, mostly between April and July, 1881. In the notes at the end of the volume will be found further examples.
I
PERADVENTURE of old, some bard in Ionian Islands,
Walking alone by the sea, hearing the wash of the waves,
Learned the secret from them of the beautiful verse elegiac,
Breathing into his song motion and sound of the sea.
For as the wave of the sea, upheaving in long undulations, 5
Plunges loud on the sands, pauses, and turns, and retreats,
So the Hexameter, rising and singing, with cadence sonorous,
Falls; and in refluent rhythm back the Pentameter flows.
II
Not in his youth alone, but in age, may the heart of the poet
Bloom into song, as the gorse blossoms in autumn and spring. 10
III
Not in tenderness wanting, yet rough are the rhymes of our poet;
Though it be Jacob’s voice, Esau’s, alas! are the hands.
IV
Let us be grateful to writers for what is left in the inkstand;
When to leave off is an art only attained by the few.
V
How can the Three be One? you ask me; I answer by asking, 15
Hail and snow and rain, are they not three, and yet one?
VI
By the mirage uplifted, the land floats vague in the ether,
Ships and the shadows of ships hang in the motionless air;
So by the art of the poet our common life is uplifted,
So, transfigured, the world floats in a luminous haze. 20
VII
Like a French poem is Life; being only perfect in structure
When with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
VIII
Down from the mountain descends the brooklet, rejoicing in freedom;
Little it dreams of the mill hid in the valley below;
Glad with the joy of existence, the child goes singing and laughing, 25
Little dreaming what toils lie in the future concealed.
IX
As the ink from our pen, so flow our thoughts and our feelings
When we begin to write, however sluggish before.
X
Like the Kingdom of Heaven, the Fountain of Youth is within us;
If we seek it elsewhere, old shall we grow in the search. 30
XI
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it;
Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.
XII
Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;
While we are speaking the word, it is already the Past.
XIII
In the twilight of age all things seem strange and phantasmal, 35
As between daylight and dark ghost-like the landscape appears.
XIV
Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;
Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.
The City and the Sea
THE PANTING City cried to the Sea,
“I am faint with heat, — Oh breathe on me!”
And the Sea said, “Lo, I breathe! but my breath
To some will be life, to others death!”
As to Prometheus, bringing ease 5
In pain, come the Oceanides,
So to the City, hot with the flame
Of the pitiless sun, the east wind came.
It came from the heaving breast of the deep,
Silent as dreams are, and sudden as sleep. 10
Life-giving, death-giving, which will it be;
O breath of the merciful, merciless Sea?
Memories
OFT I remember those whom I have known
In other days, to whom my heart was led
As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
But absent, and their memories overgrown
&
nbsp; With other thoughts and troubles of my own, 5
As graves with grasses are, and at their head
The stone with moss and lichens so o’erspread,
Nothing is legible but the name alone.
And is it so with them? After long years,
Do they remember me in the same way, 10
And is the memory pleasant as to me?
I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears?
Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay,
And yet the root perennial may be.
Hermes Trismegistus
As Seleucus narrates, Hermes describes the principles that rank as wholes in two myriads of books; or, as we are informed by Manetho, he perfectly unfolded these principles in three myriads six thousand five hundred and twenty-five volumes.…
… Our ancestors dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes. — IAMBLICUS.
STILL through Egypt’s desert places
Flows the lordly Nile,
From its banks the great stone faces
Gaze with patient smile.
Still the pyramids imperious 5
Pierce the cloudless skies,
And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,
Solemn, stony eyes.
But where are the old Egyptian
Demi-gods and kings? 10
Nothing left but an inscription
Graven on stones and rings.
Where are Helios and Hephæstus,
Gods of eldest eld?
Where is Hermes Trismegistus, 15
Who their secrets held?
Where are now the many hundred
Thousand books he wrote?
By the Thaumaturgists plundered,
Lost in lands remote; 20
In oblivion sunk forever,
As when o’er the land
Blows a storm-wind, in the river
Sinks the scattered sand.
Something unsubstantial, ghostly, 25
Seems this Theurgist,
In deep meditation mostly
Wrapped, as in a mist.
Vague, phantasmal, and unreal
To our thought he seems, 30
Walking in a world ideal,
In a land of dreams.
Was he one, or many, merging
Name and fame in one,
Like a stream, to which, converging, 35
Many streamlets run?
Till, with gathered power proceeding,
Ampler sweep it takes,
Downward the sweet waters leading
From unnumbered lakes. 40
By the Nile I see him wandering,
Pausing now and then,
On the mystic union pondering
Between gods and men;
Half believing, wholly feeling, 45
With supreme delight,
How the gods, themselves concealing,
Lift men to their height.
Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,
In the thoroughfare 50
Breathing, as if consecrated,
A diviner air;
And amid discordant noises,
In the jostling throng,
Hearing far, celestial voices 55
Of Olympian song.
Who shall call his dreams fallacious?
Who has searched or sought
All the unexplored and spacious
Universe of thought? 60
Who, in his own skill confiding,
Shall with rule and line
Mark the border-land dividing
Human and divine?
Trismegistus! three times greatest! 65
How thy name sublime
Has descended to this latest
Progeny of time!
Happy they whose written pages
Perish with their lives, 70
If amid the crumbling ages
Still their name survives!
Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately
Found I in the vast,
Weed-encumbered, sombre, stately, 75
Grave-yard of the Past;
And a presence moved before me
On that gloomy shore,
As a waft of wind, that o’er me
Breathed, and was no more. 80
To the Avon
FLOW on, sweet river! like his verse
Who lies beneath this sculptured hearse;
Nor wait beside the churchyard wall
For him who cannot hear thy call.
Thy playmate once; I see him now 5
A boy with sunshine on his brow,
And hear in Stratford’s quiet street
The patter of his little feet.
I see him by thy shallow edge
Wading knee-deep amid the sedge; 10
And lost in thought, as if thy stream
Were the swift river of a dream.
He wonders whitherward it flows;
And fain would follow where it goes,
To the wide world, that shall erelong 15
Be filled with his melodious song.
Flow on, fair stream! That dream is o’er;
He stands upon another shore;
A vaster river near him flows,
And still he follows where it goes. 20
President Garfield
“E venni dal martirio a questa pace.”
Paradiso, XV. 148.
THESE words the poet heard in Paradise,
Uttered by one who, bravely dying here,
In the true faith was living in that sphere
Where the celestial cross of sacrifice
Spread its protecting arms athwart the skies; 5
And set thereon, like jewels crystal clear,
The souls magnanimous, that knew not fear,
Flashed their effulgence on his dazzled eyes.
Ah me! how dark the discipline of pain,
Were not the suffering followed by the sense 10
Of infinite rest and infinite release!
This is our consolation; and again
A great soul cries to us in our suspense,
“I came from martyrdom unto this peace!”
My Books
SADLY as some old mediæval knight
Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield,
The sword two-handed and the shining shield
Suspended in the hall, and full in sight,
While secret longings for the lost delight 5
Of tourney or adventure in the field
Came over him, and tears but half concealed
Trembled and fell upon his beard of white,
So I behold these books upon their shelf,
My ornaments and arms of other days; 10
Not wholly useless, though no longer used,
For they remind me of my other self,
Younger and stronger, and the pleasant ways
In which I walked, now clouded and confused.
Mad River
In the White Mountains
TRAVELLER.
WHY dost thou wildly rush and roar,
Mad River, O Mad River?
Wilt thou not pause and cease to pour
Thy hurrying, headlong waters o’er
This rocky shelf forever? 5
What secret trouble stirs thy breast?
Why all this fret and flurry?
Dost thou not know that what is best
In this too restless world is rest
From over-work and worry? 10
THE RIVER.
What wouldst thou in these mountains seek,
O stranger from the city?
Is it perhaps some foolish freak
Of thine, to put the words I speak
Into a plaintive ditty? 15
TRAVELLER.
Yes; I would learn of thee thy song,
With all its flowing numbers,
And in a voice as fresh and strong
As thine is, sing it all day long,
And hear it in my slumbers. 20
THE RIVER.
A brooklet nameless and unknown
Was I at first, resembling
A little child, that all alone
Comes venturing down the stairs of stone,
Irresolute and trembling. 25
Later, by wayward fancies led,
For the wide world I panted;
Out of the forest, dark and dread,
Across the open fields I fled,
Like one pursued and haunted. 30
I tossed my arms, I sang aloud,
My voice exultant blending
With thunder from the passing cloud,
The wind, the forest bent and bowed,
The rush of rain descending. 35
I heard the distant ocean call,
Imploring and entreating;
Drawn onward, o’er this rocky wall
I plunged, and the loud waterfall
Made answer to the greeting. 40
And now, beset with many ills,
A toilsome life I follow;
Compelled to carry from the hills
These logs to the impatient mills
Below there in the hollow. 45
Yet something ever cheers and charms
The rudeness of my labors;
Daily I water with these arms
The cattle of a hundred farms,
And have the birds for neighbors. 50
Men call me Mad, and well they may,
When, full of rage and trouble,
I burst my banks of sand and clay,
And sweep their wooden bridge away,
Like withered reeds or stubble. 55
Now go and write thy little rhyme,
As of thine own creating.
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 86
