L'ENVOI. TO THE MUSE. WHITHER? Albeit I follow fast, Not where thou art, but where thou wast, Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind! I haunt the pine-dark solitudes, With soft brown silence carpeted, And plot to snare thee in the woods: Peace I o'ertake, but thou art fled ! I find the rock where thou didst rest, The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; All Nature with thy parting thrills, Like branches after birds new-flown; Thy passage hill and hollow fills With hints of virtue not their own; In dimples still the water slips Where thou hast dipt thy finger-tips; Just, just beyond, forever burn Gleams of a grace without return; Upon thy shade I plant my foot, And through my frame strange raptures shoot; All of thee but thyself I grasp; I seem to fold thy luring shape, One mask and then another drops, Sometimes with flooded ear I list, stone Thy inspiration deep is blown; Through mountains, forests, open downs, Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns, Thy gathering fugue goes rolling on From Maine to utmost Oregon; For thou hast slipt from it and me And all thine organ-pipes left dumb, Most mutable Perversity! I Not weary yet, I still must seek, Their cramped ideal soaring free; 'T was thou didst bear the fire about, That, like the springing of a mine Sent up to heaven the street-long shout; Full well I know that thou wast here, It was thy breath that brushed my ear. But vainly in the stress and whirl I dive for thee, the moment's pearl. Through every shape thou well canst Afar its silent Alpine kin: I track thee over carpets deep Dr the flail-heart of Autumn beats; I follow allwhere for thy sake. Find where, scarce yet unmoving, lies, Warm from thy limbs, thy last disguise; But thou another shape hast donned, And lurest still just, just beyond! But here a voice, I know not whence, Thrills clearly through my inward sense, Saying: "See where she sits at home While thou in search of her dost roam! All summer long her ancient wheel Whirls humming by the open door, Or, when the hickory's social zeal Sets the wide chimney in a roar, Close-nestled by the tinkling hearth, It modulates the household mirth With that sweet serious undertone Of duty, music all her own; Still as of old she sits and spins Our hopes, our sorrows, and our sins; With equal care she twines the fates Of cottages and mighty states; She spins the earth, the air, the sea, The maiden's unschooled fancy free, The boy's first love, the man's first grief, The budding and the fall o' the leaf; The piping west-wind's snowy care The stamp and warrant of her art; "Harass her not: thy heat and stir Be something better than thy verse; low, And find the Listener's science still Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!" き Το MR. JAMES T. FIELDS. MY DEAR FIELDS: Dr. Johnson's sturdy self-respect led him to invent the Bookseller as a substitute for the Patron. My relations with you have enabled me to discover how pleasantly the Friend may replace the Bookseller. Let me record my sense of many thoughtful services by associating your name with a poem which owes its appearance in this form to your partiality. Cordially yours, J. R. LOWELL. CAMBRIDGE, November 29, 1869. THE CATHEDRAL. FAR through the memory shines a happy day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense, And simply perfect from its own resource, As to a bee the new campanula's Nor ever blurred with mist of after These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn, Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thought Can overtake the rapture of the sense, To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl. Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, And that first passion beggars all behind, Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. Who, seeing once, has truly seen again The gray vague of unsympathizing sea That dragged his Fancy from her moorings back To shores inhospitable of eldest time, Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered powers, Pitiless seignories in the elements, Omnipotences blind that darkling smite, Misgave him, and repaganized the world? Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, Perplex the eye with pictures from within. This hath made poets dream of lives foregone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; I know not how it is with other men, Whom I but guess, deciphering myself; For me, once felt is so felt nevermore. The fleeting relish at sensation's brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine. One spring I knew as never any since : All night the surges of the warm southwest Boomed intermittent through the shuddering elms, And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of While I grew pensive with the pensive year: And once I learned how marvellous winter was, When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, I creaked adventurous o'er the spangled crust That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly In ghastly solitude about the pole, sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain Were painted with these sovran images: And later visions seem but copies pale From those unfading frescos of the past, Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me Parted from Nature by the joy in her That doubtfully revealed me to myself Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate; And paradise was paradise the more, Known once and barred against satiety. What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see, Our own reaction upon what we feel; The world's a woman to our shifting mood, Feeling with us, or making due pre tence; And therefore we the more persuade ourselves To make all things our thought's confederates, Conniving with us in whate'er we dream So when our Fancy seeks analogies, Though she have hidden what she after finds, She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise. I find my own complexion everywhere: No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, The rapture of its life made visible, The mystery of its yearning realized, As the first babe to the first woman born |