And then one light among the rest
Where squadrons lie at mooring.

How tell to what heaven-hallowed seat
The eagle bent his courses?
The waves that on its bases beat,
The gales that round it weave and fleet,
Are life's creative forces.

Here was the bird's primeval nest,

High on a promontory Star-pharosed, where she takes her rest To brood new æons 'neath her breast, The future's unfledged glory.

I know not how, but I was there
All feeling, hearing, seeing;
It was not wind that stirred my hair
But living breath, the essence rare
Of unembodied being.

And in the nest an egg of gold

Lay soft in self-made lustre ; Gazing whereon, what depths untold Within, what marvels manifold, Seemed silently to muster!

Daily such splendors to confront
Is still to me and you sent?

It glowed as when Saint Peter's front,
Illumed, forgets its stony wont,

And seems to throb translucent.

One saw therein the life of man,
(Or so the poet found it,)
The yolk and white, conceive who can,
Were the glad earth, that, floating, span
In the glad heaven around it.

I knew this as one knows in dream,
Where no effects to causes

Are chained as in our work-day scheme,
And then was wakened by a scream

That seemed to come from Baucis.

"Bless Zeus!" she cried, "I'm safe below!"

First pale, then red as coral; And I, still drowsy, pondered slow, And seemed to find, but hardly know, Something like this for moral.

Each day the world is born anew For him who takes it rightly;

Not fresher that which Adam knew, Not sweeter that whose moonlit dew Entranced Arcadia nightly.

Rightly? That's simply: 't is to see

Some substance casts these shadows
Which we call Life and History,
That aimless seem to chase and flee
Like wind-gleams over meadows.

Simply? That's nobly: 't is to know
That God may still be met with,
Nor groweth old, nor doth bestow
These senses fine, this brain aglow,
To grovel and forget with.

Beauty, Herr Doctor, trust in me,
No chemistry will win you;
Charis still rises from the sea;
If you can't find her, might it be
Because you seek within you?

As if it had a way to fuse
The golden sunlight into juice.
Hopeless my mental pump I try:
The boxes hiss, the tube is dry;
As those petroleum wells that spout
Awhile like M. C.'s then give out,
My spring, once full as Arethusa,
Is a mere bore as dry's Creusa ;
And yet you ask me why I'm glum,
And why my graver Muse is dumb.
Ah me! I've reasons manifold
Condensed in one, — I'm getting old!

When life, once past its fortieth year,
Wheels up its evening hemisphere,

The mind's own shadow, which the boy

Saw onward point to hope and joy,
Shifts round, irrevocably set
Tow'rd morning's loss and vain re-
gret,

And, argue with it as we will,
The clock is unconverted still.

"But count the gains," I hear you say,

"Which far the seeming loss outweigh;

Friendships built firm 'gainst flood and wind

On rock-foundations of the mind;
Knowledge instead of scheming hope;
For wild adventure, settled scope;
Talents, from surface-ore profuse,
Tempered and edged to tools for use;
Judgment, for passion's headlong
whirls;

Old sorrows crystalled into pearls ;
Losses by patience turned to gains,
Possessions now, that once were pains;
Joy's blossom gone, as go it must,
To ripen seeds of faith and trust;
Why heed a snow-flake on the roof
If fire within keep Age aloof
Though blundering north-winds push

and strain

With palms benumbed against the pane?"

Each quicksand safe to build a fame on; Believe that prudence snug excels Youth's gross of verdant spectacles, Through which earth's withered stubble

seen

Looks autumn-proofas painted green, -
I side with Moses 'gainst the masses,
Take you the drudge, give me the
glasses !

And, for your talents shaped with practice,

Convince me first that such the fact is;
Let whoso likes be beat, poor fool,
On life's hard stithy to a tool,
Be whoso will a ploughshare made,
Let me remain a jolly blade!

What's Knowledge, with her stocks. and lands,

To gay Conjecture's yellow strands? What's watching her slow flocks in

crease

To ventures for the golden fleece? What her deep ships, safe under lee, To youth's light craft, that drinks the

sea,

For Flying Islands making sail,
And failing where 't is gain to fail?
Ah me! Experience (so we 're told),
Time's crucible, turns lead to gold;
Yet what's experience won but dross,
Cloud-gold transmuted to our loss?
What but base coin the best event
To the untried experiment?

'T was an old couple, says the poet, That lodged the gods and did not know it;

Youth sees and knows them as they

were

Before Olympus' top was bare;

From Swampscot's flats his eye divine
Sees Venus rocking on the brine,
With lucent limbs, that somehow scat-
ter a

Charm that turns Doll to Cleopatra ;
Bacchus (that now is scarce induced
To give Eld's lagging blood a boost),
With cymbals' clang and pards to draw
him,

Divine as Ariadne saw him, Storms through Youth's pulse with all his train

And wins new Indies in his brain;

Apollo (with the old a trope,
A sort of finer Mister Pope),
Apollo but the Muse forbids;
At his approach cast down thy lids,
And think it joy enough to hear
Far off his arrows singing clear;
He knows enough who silent knows
The quiver chiming as he goes;
He tells too much who e'er betrays
The shining Archer's secret ways.

Dear Friend, you're right and I am wrong;

My quibbles are not worth a song,
And I sophistically tease

My fancy sad to tricks like these.
I could not cheat you if I would;
You know me and my jesting mood,
Mere surface-foam, for pride concealing
The purpose of my deeper feeling.
I have not spilt one drop of joy
Poured in the senses of the boy,
Nor Nature fails my walks to bless
With all her golden inwardness;
And as blind nestlings, unafraid,
Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade
By which their downy dream is stirred,
Taking it for the mother-bird,
So, when God's shadow, which is light,
Unheralded, by day or night,
My wakening instincts falls across,
Silent as sunbeams over moss,
In my heart's nest half-conscious things
Stir with a helpless sense of wings,
Lift themselves up, and tremble long
With premonitions sweet of song.

Be patient, and perhaps (who knows?) These may be winged one day like those;

If thrushes, close-embowered to sing, Pierced through with June's delicious sting;

If swallows, their half-hour to run
Star-breasted in the setting sun.
At first they 're but the unfledged

(And there's where I shall beat them hollow,

If he is not a courtly St. John,

But, as West said, a Mohawk Injun.)
A poem 's like a cruise for whales :
Through untried seas the hunter sails,
His prow dividing waters known
To the blue iceberg's hulk alone:
At last, on farthest edge of day,
He marks the smoky puff of spray;
Then with bent oars the shallop flies
To where the basking quarry lies;
Then the excitement of the strife,
The crimsoned waves, ah, this is life!

But, the dead plunder once secured
And safe beside the vessel moored,
All that had stirred the blood before
Is so much blubber, nothing more,
(I mean no pun, nor image so
Mere sentimental verse, you know,)
And all is tedium, smoke, and soil,
In trying-out the noisome oil.

Yes, this is life! And so the bard
Through briny deserts, never scarred
Since Noah's keel, a subject seeks,
And lies upon the watch for weeks;
That once harpooned and helpless ¡y.
ing,

What follows is but weary trying.

Now I've a notion, if a poet
Beat

up for themes, his verse will show

it ;

I wait for subjects that hunt me,
By day or night won't let me be,
And hang about me like a curse,
Till they have made me into verse,
From line to line my fingers tease
Beyond my knowledge, as the bees
Build no new cell till those before
With limpid summer-sweet run o'er ;
Then, if I neither sing nor shine,
Is it the subject's fault, or mine?

AN EMBER PICTURE.

How strange are the freaks of memory
The lessons of life we forget,
While a trifle, a trick of color,
In the wonderful web is set, --

Fate tried his bastions, she but forced a door

Leading to sweeter manhood and more sound.

Even as a wind-waved fountain's sway. ing shade

Seems of mixed race, a gray wraith shot with sun,

So through his trial faith translucent rayed

Till darkness, half disnatured so, betrayed

A heart of sunshine that would fain o'errun.

Surely if skill in song the shears may stay

And of its purpose cheat the charmed abyss,

If our poor life be lengthened by a lay, He shall not go, although his presence

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY.

"COME forth!" my catbird calls to me, "And hear me sing a cavatina That, in this old familiar tree,

Shall hang a garden of Alcina. "These buttercups shall brim with wine Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic; May not New England be divine?

My ode to ripening summer classic? "Or, if to me you will not hark,

By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing Till all the alder-coverts dark

Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

"Come out beneath the unmastered sky,

With its emancipating spaces, And learn to sing as well as I, Without premeditated graces.

"What boot your many-volumed gains, Those withered leaves forever turning,

To win, at best, for all your pains,

A nature mummy-wrapt in learning? "The leaves wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out! with me the oriole cries,

Escape the demon that pursues you! And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise, Still hiding, farther onward wooes you."

"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,

Has poured from that syringa thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays

To which I hold a season-ticket,

"A season-ticket cheaply bought

With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul hast caught With morn and evening voluntaries,

"Deem me not faithless, if all day

Among my dusty books I linger, No pipe, like thee, for June to play With fancy-led, half-conscious finger. "A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies,

Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

"I ask no ampler skies than those

His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,

And does not Doña Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars, A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing, Then silence deep with breathless stars, And overhead a white hand flashing.