| |
“THE HEART OF ALL THE SCENE”
’T WAS one of the charmëd days | |
| When the genius of God doth flow, | |
| The wind may alter twenty ways, | |
| A tempest cannot blow; | |
| It may blow north, it still is warm; | 5 |
| Or south, it still is clear; | |
| Or east, it smells like a clover-farm; | |
| Or west, no thunder fear. | |
| The musing peasant lowly great | |
| Beside the forest water sate; | 10 |
| The rope-like pineroots crosswise grown | |
| Composed the network of his throne; | |
| The wide lake, edged with sand and grass, | |
| Was burnished to a floor of glass, | |
| Painted with shadows green and proud | 15 |
| Of the tree and of the cloud. | |
| He was the heart of all the scene; | |
| On him the sun looked more serene; | |
| To hill and cloud his face was known,— | |
| It seemed the likeness of their own; | 20 |
| They knew by secret sympathy | |
| The public child of earth and sky. | |
| “You ask,” he said, “what guide | |
| Me through trackless thickets led, | |
| Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. | 25 |
| I found the water’s bed. | |
| The watercourses were my guide; | |
| I travelled grateful by their side, | |
| Or through their channel dry; | |
| They led me through the thicket damp, | 30 |
| Through brake and fern, the beavers’ camp, | |
| Through beds of granite cut my road, | |
| And their resistless friendship showed: | |
| The falling waters led me, | |
| The foodful waters fed me, | 35 |
| And brought me to the lowest land, | |
| Unerring to the ocean sand. | |
| The moss upon the forest bark | |
| Was pole-star when the night was dark; | |
| The purple berries in the wood | 40 |
| Supplied me necessary food; | |
| For Nature ever faithful is | |
| To such as trust her faithfulness. | |
| When the forest shall mislead me, | |
| When the night and morning lie, | 45 |
| When sea and land refuse to feed me, | |
| ’T will be time enough to die; | |
| Then will yet my mother yield | |
| A pillow in her greenest field, | |
| Nor the June flowers scorn to cover | 50 |
| The clay of their departed lover.” | |
| |
“THE UNDERSONG”
HEED the old oracles, | |
| Ponder my spells; | |
| Song wakes in my pinnacles | |
| When the wind swells. | 55 |
| Soundeth the prophetic wind, | |
| The shadows shake on the rock behind, | |
| And the countless leaves of the pine are strings | |
| Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. | |
| Hearken! Hearken! | 60 |
| If thou wouldst know the mystic song | |
| Chanted when the sphere was young. | |
| Aloft, abroad, the pæan swells; | |
| O wise man! hear’st thou half it tells? | |
| O wise man! hear’st thou the least part? | 65 |
| ’T is the chronicle of art. | |
| To the open air it sings | |
| Sweet the genesis of things, | |
| Of tendency through endless ages, | |
| Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages, | 70 |
| Of rounded worlds, of space and time, | |
| Of the old flood’s subsiding slime, | |
| Of chemic matter, force and form, | |
| Of poles and powers, cold, wet and warm: | |
| The rushing metamorphosis | 75 |
| Dissolving all that fixture is, | |
| Melts things that be to things that seem, | |
| And solid nature to a dream. | |
| O, listen to the undersong, | |
| The ever old, the ever young; | 80 |
| And, far within those cadent pauses, | |
| The chorus of the ancient Causes! | |
| Delights the dreadful Destiny | |
| To fling his voice into the tree, | |
| And shock thy weak ear with a note | 85 |
| Breathed from the everlasting throat. | |
| In music he repeats the pang | |
| Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang. | |
| O mortal! thy ears are stones; | |
| These echoes are laden with tones | 90 |
| Which only the pure can hear; | |
| Thou canst not catch what they recite | |
| Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right, | |
| Of man to come, of human life, | |
| Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife. | 95 |
| |
“THE MIGHTY HEART”
COME learn with me the fatal song | |
| Which knits the world in music strong; | |
| Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes, | |
| Of things with things, of times with times, | |
| Primal chimes of sun and shade, | 100 |
| Of sound and echo, man and maid, | |
| The land reflected in the flood, | |
| Body with shadow still pursued. | |
| For Nature beats in perfect tune, | |
| And rounds with rhyme her every rune, | 105 |
| Whether she work in land or sea, | |
| Or hide underground her alchemy. | |
| Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, | |
| Or dip thy paddle in the lake, | |
| But it carves the bow of beauty there, | 110 |
| And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. | |
| The wood is wiser far than thou; | |
| The wood and wave each other know, | |
| Not unrelated, unaffied, | |
| But to each thought and thing allied, | 115 |
| Is perfect Nature’s every part, | |
| Rooted in the mighty Heart. | |
| But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed, | |
| Whence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed, | |
| Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded? | 120 |
| Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded? | |
| Who thee divorced, deceived and left? | |
| Thee of thy faith who hath bereft, | |
| And torn the ensigns from thy brow, | |
| And sunk the immortal eye so low? | 125 |
| Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender, | |
| Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender | |
| For royal man;—they thee confess | |
| An exile from the wilderness,— | |
| The hills where health with health agrees, | 130 |
| And the wise soul expels disease. | |
| Hark! in thy ear I will tell the sign | |
| By which thy hurt thou mayst divine. | |
| When thou shalt climb the mountain cliff, | |
| Or see the wide shore from thy skiff, | 135 |
| To thee the horizon shall express | |
| But emptiness on emptiness; | |
| There lives no man of Nature’s worth | |
| In the circle of the earth; | |
| And to thine eye the vast skies fall, | 140 |
| Dire and satirical, | |
| On clucking hens and prating fools, | |
| On thieves, on drudges, and on dolls. | |
| And thou shalt say to the Most High, | |
| “Godhead! all this astronomy, | 145 |
| And fate and practice and invention, | |
| Strong art and beautiful pretension, | |
| This radiant pomp of sun and star, | |
| Throes that were, and worlds that are, | |
| Behold! were in vain and in vain; | 150 |
| It cannot be,—I will look again. | |
| Surely now will the curtain rise, | |
| And earth’s fit tenant me surprise; | |
| But the curtain doth not rise, | |
| And Nature has miscarried wholly | 155 |
| Into failure, into folly.” | |
| |
| Alas! thine is the bankruptcy, | |
| Blessed Nature so to see. | |
| Come, lay thee in my soothing shade, | |
| And heal the hurts which sin has made. | 160 |
| I see thee in the crowd alone; | |
| I will be thy companion. | |
| Quit thy friends as the dead in doom, | |
| And build to them a final tomb; | |
| Let the starred shade that nightly falls | 165 |
| Still celebrate their funerals, | |
| And the bell of beetle and of bee | |
| Knell their melodious memory. | |
| Behind thee leave thy merchandise, | |
| Thy churches and thy charities; | 170 |
| And leave thy peacock wit behind; | |
| Enough for thee the primal mind | |
| That flows in streams, that breathes in wind; | |
| Leave all thy pedant lore apart; | |
| God hid the whole world in thy heart. | 175 |
| |
