At once a new thought's king and prisoner, Aches with the mocking memory of its crown. For the cheap means putting Heaven's ends in pawn, And bartering his bleak rocks, the freehold stern A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, And patience all the passion of great hearts; Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, Thus ever seems it when my soul can hear Far on I see my lifelong enterprise, Which rose like Ganges 'mid the freezing snows I see the ungated wall of chaos old, One day more These muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me: God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded; mast Fortune's full sail strains forward! One poor day! Remember whose and not how short it is! A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, 1844. AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG. THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies, Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries; You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art, They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart. Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak, Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke; And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone, Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone. It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines. Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light; And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells. Surge leaping after surge, the fire roared onward red as blood, Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beneath the eddying flood; For miles away, the fiery spray poured down its deadly rain, And back and forth the billows sucked, and paused, and burst again. From square to square with tiger leaps panted the lustful fire, The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire; And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea. Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look; His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook ; He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfold Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once he did of old. But scarcely can he cross himself, or on his good saint call, Before the sacrilegious flood o'erleaped the churchyard wall; |