How could poet ever tower, If his passions, hopes, and fears, If his triumphs and his tears, Kept not measure with his people? Boom, cannon, boom to all the winds and waves !

Clash out, glad bells, from every rocking steeple !

Banners, adance with triumph, bend your staves!

And from every mountain-peak

Let beacon-fire to answering beacon speak,

Katahdin tell Monadnock, Whiteface
he,

And so leap on in light from sea to sea,
Till the glad news be sent
Across a kindling continent,
Making earth feel more firm and air breathe
braver:

"Be proud! for she is saved, and all have helped to save her!

She that lifts up the manhood of the poor,

She of the open soul and open door, With room about her hearth for all mankind!

The fire is dreadful in her eyes no more;

From her bold front the helm she doth unbind,

Sends all her handmaid armies back to spin,

And bids her navies, that so lately hurled

Their crashing battle, hold their thunders in,

Swimming like birds of calm along the unharmful shore.

No challenge sends she to the elder world,

That looked askance and hated; a light

scorn

Plays o'er her mouth, as round her mighty knees

She calls her children back, and waits the morn

Of nobler day, enthroned between her subject seas."

XII

Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!

Thy God, in these distempered days, Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways,

And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace!

Bow down in prayer and praise! No poorest in thy borders but may now Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow.

O Beautiful! my Country! ours once

more !

Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,

And letting thy set lips,

Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare,
What words divine of lover or of poet
Could tell our love and make thee know it,
Among the Nations bright beyond com-
pare?

What were our lives without thee?
What all our lives to save thee?

We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee,
But ask whatever else, and we will dare!

TO THE MUSE

WHITHER? Albeit I follow fast, In all life's circuit I but find,

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,
And vague air to my bosom clasp,
Thou lithe, perpetual Escape!

One mask and then another drops,
And thou art secret as before:

Sometimes with flooded ear I list,
And hear thee, wondrous organist,
From mighty continental stops
A thunder of new music pour;
Through pipes of earth and air and 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;
The factory-wheels in cadence hum,
From brawling parties concords come;
All this I hear, or seem to hear,
But when, enchanted, I draw near
To mate with words the various theme,
Life seems a whiff of kitchen steam,
History an organ-grinder's thrum,

For thou hast slipt from it and me And all thine organ-pipes left dumb, Most mutable Perversity!

Not weary yet, I still must seek,

And hope for luck next day, next week;
I

go to see the great man ride,
Shiplike, the swelling human tide
That floods to bear him into port,
Trophied from Senate-hall and Court;
Thy magnetism, I feel it there,
Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare,
Making the Mob a moment fine
With glimpses of their own Divine,
As in their demigod they see

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

run,

Proteus, 'twixt rise and set of sun,
Well pleased with logger-camps in Maine

As where Milan's pale Duomo lies
A stranded glacier on the plain,
Its peaks and pinnacles of ice
Melted in many a quaint device,
And sees, above the city's din,
Afar its silent Alpine kin:

I track thee over carpets deep
To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep;
Across the sand of bar-room floors
Mid the stale reek of boosing boors;
Where browse the hay-field's fragrant
heats,

Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats;
I dog thee through the market's throngs
To where the sea with myriad tongues
Laps the green edges of the pier,
And the tall ships that eastward steer,
Curtsy their farewells to the town,
O'er the curved distance lessening down;
I follow allwhere for thy sake,
Touch thy robe's hem, but ne'er o'ertake,
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 For her their cloudy fleeces spare, Or from the thorns of evil times She can glean wool to twist her rhymes; Morning and noon and eve supply To her their fairest tints for dye, But ever through her twirling thread There spires one line of warmest red, Tinged from the homestead's genial heart,

The stamp and warrant of her art; With this Time's sickle she outwears, And blunts the Sisters' baffled shears.

"Harass her not: thy heat and stir
But greater coyness breed in her;
Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost,
Thy long apprenticeship not lost,
Learning at last that Stygian Fate
Unbends to him that knows to wait.
The Muse is womanish, nor deigns
Her love to him that pules and plains;
With proud, averted face she stands
To him that wooes with empty hands.
Make thyself free of Manhood's guild;
Pull down thy barns and greater build;

The wood, the mountain, and the plain
Wave breast-deep with the poet's grain;
Pluck thou the sunset's fruit of gold,
Glean from the heavens and ocean old;
From fireside lone and trampling street
Let thy life garner daily wheat;
The epic of a man rehearse,
Be something better than thy verse;
Make thyself rich, and then the Muse
Shall court thy precious interviews,
Shall take thy head upon her knee,
And such enchantment lilt to thee,
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow
From farthest stars to grass-blades low,
And find the Listener's science still
Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!"

CAMBRIDGE, November 29, 1869.

J. R. LOWELL.

The Cathedral was printed first in The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1870, but was shortly after published in a volume by itself with changes and additions. The poem was wrought at apparently with something of the loving enthusiasm which we are wont to ascribe to the builders of actual cathedrals. It was written in the summer of 1869 and returned to frequently before publication. When in the midst of the work he wrote to Mr. Howells, then editor of the Atlantic," Up to time indeed! The fear is not about time, but space. You won't have room in your menagerie for such a displease yousaurus. The verses if stretched end to end in a continuous line would go clear round the cathedral they celebrate, and nobody (I fear) the wiser. I can't tell yet what they are. There seems a bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted glass - but I have not copied it out yet, nor indeed read it over

consecutively." A little later he wrote to Miss Norton: "I hope it is good, for it fairly trussed me at last and bore me up as high as my poor lungs will bear into the heaven of invention. I was happy writing it, and so steeped in it that if I had written to you it would have been in blank verse. It is a kind of religious poem, and is called A Day at Chartres. I can't tell yet how it will stand. Already I am beginning to to-you know what I mean to taste my champagne next morning."

The poem received some comment from two distinguished critics, Mr. Leslie Stephen and Mr. Ruskin. To the former Lowell wrote: "I am glad you liked The Cathedral and sorry for anything in it you did n't like. The name was none of my choosing. I called it A Day at Chartres, and Fields rechristened it. You see with my name the episode of the Britons comes in naturally enough (it is historical, by the

way). The truth is, I had no notion of being satirical, but wrote what I did just as I might have said it to you in badinage. But of course the tone is lost in print. Anyhow, there is one Englishman I am fond enough of to balance any spite I might have against others, as you know. But I have n't a particle. If I had met two of my own countrymen at Chartres I should have been quite as free with them." In reply to some advice and strictures of Mr. Ruskin, he wrote to Mr. Norton: "I am glad to find that the poem sticks. Those who liked it at first like it still, some of them better than ever, some extravagantly. At any rate it wrote itself; all of a sudden it was there, and that is something in its favor. Now Ruskin wants me to go over it with a file. That is just what I did. I wrote in pencil, then copied it out in

ink, and worked over it as I never worked over anything before. I may fairly say there is not a word in it over which I have not thought, not an objection which I did not foresee and maturely consider. Well, in my second copy I made many changes, as I thought for the better, and then put it away in my desk to cool for three weeks or so. When I came to print it, I put back, I believe, every one of the original readings which I had changed. Those which had come to me were far better than those I had come at. Only one change I made (for the worse), in order to escape a rhyme that had crept in without my catching it." Ruskin made some verbal criticism, which Lowell proceeded to examine, and the reader will find the discussion in the notes at the end of this volume.

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 moor-
ings back

To shores inhospitable of eldest time,
Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered
powers,

Pitiless seiguories 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;

So Memory cheats us, glimpsing halfrevealed.

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous redbreast boding rain: The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm; But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill

That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves be

tween.

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 wallowing
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 song:
One summer hour abides, what time I
perched,

Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,

And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, Denouncing me an alien and a thief:

One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest, When in the lane I watched the ash-leaves

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 pretence;
And therefore we the more persuade our-
selves

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;
No falcon ever felt delight of wings
As when, an eyas, from the stolid cliff
Loosing himself, he followed his high heart
To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind;
And I believe the brown earth takes delight
In the new snowdrop looking back at her,
To think that by some vernal alchemy
It could transmute her darkness into pearl;
What is the buxom peony after that,
With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush?
What the full summer to that wonder new?

But, if in nothing else, in us there is
A sense fastidious hardly reconciled
To the poor makeshifts of life's scenery,
Where the same slide must double all its
parts,

Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for
Tyre.

I blame not in the soul this daintiness,
Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird,
In things indifferent by sense purveyed;