Thomas R. Lounsbury, ed. (1838–1915). Yale Book of American Verse. 1912.
James Russell Lowell 1819–1891
James Russell Lowell136 Credidimus Jovem Regnare
O
When nobody had any Views,
Nor, while the cloudscape of his mind
By every breeze was new designed,
Insisted all the world should see
Camels or whales where none there be!
O happy days, when men received
From sire to son what all believed,
And left the other world in bliss,
Too busy with bedevilling this!
Beset by doubts of every breed
In the last bastion of my creed,
With shot and shell for Sabbath-chime,
I watch the storming-party climb,
Panting (their prey in easy reach),
To pour triumphant through the breach
In wall that shed like snowflakes tons
Of missiles from old-fashioned guns,
But crumble ’neath the storm that pours
All day and night from bigger bores.
There, as I hopeless watch and wait
The last life-crushing coil of Fate,
Despair finds solace in the praise
Of those serene dawn-rosy days
Ere microscopes had made us heirs
To large estates of doubts and snares,
By proving that the title-deeds,
Once all-sufficient for men’s needs,
Are palimpsests that scarce disguise
The tracings of still earlier lies,
Themselves as surely written o’er
An older fib erased before.
That in the landlocked Past repose, Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes From bloom-flushed boughs untimely flakes; Where morning’s eyes see nothing strange, No crude perplexity of change, And morrows trip along their ways Secure as happy yesterdays. Then there were rulers who could trace Through heroes up to gods their race, Pledged to fair fame and noble use By veins from Odin filled or Zeus, And under bonds to keep divine The praise of a celestial line. Then priests could pile the altar’s sods, With whom gods spake as they with gods, And everywhere from haunted earth Broke springs of wonder, that had birth In depths divine beyond the ken And fatal scrutiny of men; Then hills and groves and streams and seas Thrilled with immortal presences, Not too ethereal for the scope Of human passion’s dream or hope. And King No-Credit reigns instead, Whose officers, morosely strict, Poor Fancy’s tenantry evict, Chase the last Genius from the door, And nothing dances any more. Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do, Drumming the Old One’s own tattoo, And, if the oracles are dumb, Have we not mediums? Why be glum? Fly thither? Why, the very air Is full of hindrance and despair! Fly thither? But I cannot fly; My doubts enmesh me if I try,— Each lilliputian, but, combined, Potent a giant’s limbs to bind. This world and that are growing dark; A huge interrogation mark, The Devil’s crook episcopal, Still borne before him since the Fall, Blackens with its ill-omened sign The old blue heaven of faith benign. All ask at once, all wait reply. Men feel old systems cracking under ’em; Life saddens to a mere conundrum Which once Religion solved, but she Has lost—has Science found?—the key. The mighty hunter long ago, Whose horn and hounds the peasant hears Still when the Northlights shake their spears? Science hath answers twain, I ’ve heard; Choose which you will, nor hope a third; Whichever box the truth be stowed in, There ’s not a sliver left of Odin. Either he was a pinchbrowed thing, With scarcely wit a stone to fling, A creature both in size and shape Nearer than we are to the ape, Who hung sublime with brat and spouse By tail prehensile from the boughs, And, happier than his maimed descendants, The culture-curtailed independents, Could pluck his cherries with both paws, And stuff with both his big-boned jaws; Or else the core his name enveloped Was from a solar myth developed, Which, hunted to its primal shoot, Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root, Thereby to instant death explaining The little poetry remaining. The thing evades, we hug a name; Nay, scarcely that,—perhaps a vapor Born of some atmospheric caper. All Lempriere’s fables blur together In cloudy symbols of the weather, And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas But to illustrate such hypotheses. With years enough behind his back, Lincoln will take the selfsame track, And prove, hulled fairly to the cob, A mere vagary of Old Prob. Give the right man a solar myth, And he ’ll confute the sun therewith. They make things admirably plain, But one hard question will remain: If one hypothesis you lose, Another in its place you choose, But, your faith gone, O man and brother, Whose shop shall furnish you another? One that will wash, I mean, and wear, And wrap us warmly from despair? While they are clearing up our puzzles, And clapping prophylactic muzzles On the Actæon’s hounds that sniff Our devious track through But and If, Would they ’d explain away the Devil And other facts that won’t keep level, But rise beneath our feet or fail, A reeling ship’s deck in a gale! God vanished long ago, iwis, A mere subjective synthesis; A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears, Too homely for us pretty dears, Who want one that conviction carries, Last make of London or of Paris. He gone, I felt a moment’s spasm, But calmed myself with Protoplasm, A finer name, and, what is more, As enigmatic as before; Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease Minds caught in the Symplegades Of soul and sense, life’s two conditions, Each baffled with its own omniscience. The men who labor to revise Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise, And print it without foolish qualms Instead of God in David’s psalms: Noll had been more effective far Could he have shouted at Dunbar, “Rise, Protoplasm!” No dourest Scot Had waited for another shot. A secret unforgivingness, And shudder at the saving chrism Whose best New Birth is Pessimism; My soul—I mean the bit of phosphorus That fills the place of what that was for us— Can’t bid its inward bores defiance With the new nursery-tales of science. What profits me, though doubt by doubt, As nail by nail, be driven out, When every new one, like the last, Still holds my coffin-lid as fast? Would I find thought a moment’s truce, Give me the young world’s Mother Goose With life and joy in every limb, The chimney-corner tales of Grimm! Cannot explain to me why ducks lay, Or, rather, how into their eggs Blunder potential wings and legs With will to move them and decide Whether in air or lymph to glide. Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing That Something Else set all agoing? Farther and farther back we push From Moses and his burning bush; Cry, “Art Thou there?” Above, below, All Nature mutters yes and no! ’T is the old answer: we ’re agreed Being from Being must proceed, Life be Life’s source. I might as well Obey the meeting-house’s bell, And listen while Old Hundred pours Forth through the summer-opened doors, From old and young. I hear it yet, Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet, While the gray minister, with face Radiant, let loose his noble bass. Waked all the echoes of the soul, And in it many a life found wings To soar away from sordid things. Church gone and singers too, the song Sings to me voiceless all night long, Till my soul beckons me afar, Glowing and trembling like a star. Will any scientific touch With my worn strings achieve as much? I don’t object, not I, to know My sires were monkeys, if ’t was so; I touch my ear’s collusive tip And own the poor-relationship. That apes of various shapes and sizes Contained their germs that all the prizes Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin. Who knows but from our loins may spring (Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing As much superior to us As we to Cynocephalus? It wipes no dimness from the glass Where I am flattening my poor nose, In hope to see beyond my toes. Though I accept my pedigree, Yet where, pray tell me, is the key That should unlock a private door To the Great Mystery, such no more? Each offers his, but one nor all Are much persuasive with the wall That rises now, as long ago, Between I wonder and I know, Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep At the veiled Isis in its keep. Where is no door, I but produce My key to find it of no use. Yet better keep it, after all, Since Nature ’s economical, And who can tell but some fine day (If it occur to her) she may, In her good-will to you and me, Make door and lock to match the key?