And they who do their souls no wrong, But keep at eve the faith of morn, Shall daily hear the angel-song, "To-day the Prince of Peace is born!" MY PORTRAIT GALLERY OFT round my hall of portraiture I gaze, By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy, From stainless quarries of deep - buried days. There, as I muse in soothing melancholy, Your faces glow in more than mortal youth, Companions of my prime, now vanished wholly, The loud, impetuous boy, the low-voiced maiden, Now for the first time seen in flawless truth. Ah, never master that drew mortal breath Can match thy portraits, just and generous Death, Whose brush with sweet regretful tints is laden! Thou paintest that which struggled here below Half understood, or understood for woe, Mak'st round the sacred front an aureole glow Woven of that light that rose on Easter morning. PAOLO TO FRANCESCA I WAS with thee in Heaven: I cannot tell If years or moments, so the sudden bliss, When first we found, then lost, us in a kiss, Abolished Time, abolished Earth and Hell, Left only Heaven. Then from our blue there fell The dagger's flash, and did not fall amiss, For nothing now can rob my life of this, That once with thee in Heaven, all else is well. Us, undivided when man's vengeance came, God's half-forgives that doth not here divide; And, were this bitter whirl-blast fanged with flame, To me 't were summer, we being side by side: This granted, I God's mercy will not blame, For, given thy nearness, nothing is denied. SONNET SCOTTISH BORDER The following letter to Mr. Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in which this sonnet was printed, is a little out of proportion as a head-note to a poem of fourteen lines, but it is too characteristic and too indicative of Lowell's extreme solicitude over his verse to be omitted. "There was one verse in the Border sonnet which, when I came to copy it, worried me with its lack of just what I wanted. Only one? you will say. Yes, all; but never mind - this one most. Instead of 'Where the shy ballad could its leaves unfold' read 'dared its blooms.' I had liefer ‘cup,' but cup is already metaphoric when applied to flowers, and Bottom the Weaver would be sure to ask in one of the many journals he edits 'How unfold a cup? Does he mean one of those pocket drinking-cups - leathern inconveniences that always stick when you try to unfold 'em?' Damn Bottom! We ought not to think of him, but then the Public is made up of him, and I wish him to know that I was thinking of a flower. Besides, the sonnet is, more than any other kind of verse, a deliberate composition, and 'susceptible of a high polish," as the dendrologists say of the woods of certain trees. Or shall we say 'grew in secret bold'? I write both on the opposite leaf, that you may choose one to paste over and not get the credit of tinkering my rhymes. With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze. How much of all my past is dumb with her, And of my future, too, for with her went Half of that world I ever cared to please! DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES In a letter to his daughter from Madrid, July 26, 1878, Lowell wrote of Queen Mercedes: Anything more tragic than the circumstances of her death it would be hard to imagine. She was actually receiving extreme unction while the guns were firing in honor of her eighteenth birthday, and four days later we saw her dragged to her dreary tomb at the Escorial, followed by the coach and its eight white horses in which she had driven in triumph from the church to the palace on the day of her wedding. The poor brutes tossed their snowy plumes as haughtily now as then. Her death is really a great public loss. She was amiable, intelligent, and simple - not beautiful but good-looking- and was already becoming popular.' HERS all that Earth could promise or bestow, Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years, Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears, When, the day's swan, she swam along the cheers Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago? The guns were shouting Io Hymen then That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom; The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb. Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it blind, Knowing what life is, what our humankind? Yet was his free of motion as the wind, And held both worlds, of spirit and sense, in fee. In charmed communion with his dual mind He wandered Spain, himself both knight and hind, Redressing wrongs he knew must ever be. His humor wise could see life's long deceit, Man's baffled aims, nor therefore both despise; His knightly nature could ill fortune greet Like an old friend. Whose ever such kind eyes That pierced so deep, such scope, save his whose feet By Avon ceased 'neath the same April's skies? Than that what pleased him earliest still should please: And who hath incomes safe from chance as these, Gone in a moment, yet for life his own? All other gold is slave of earthward laws; This to the deeps of ether takes its flight, And on the topmost leaves makes glorious pause Of parting pathos ere it yield to night: So linger, as from me earth's light withdraws, Dear touch of Nature, tremulously bright! PESSIMOPTIMISM YE little think what toil it was to build Of Ill by that wherewith best days are filled; A world whose every atom is self-willed, Whose corner-stone is propt on artifice, Whose joy is shorter-lived than woman's kiss, Whose wisdom hoarded is but to be spilled. Yet this is better than a life of caves, Whose highest art was scratching on a bone, Or chipping toilsome arrowheads of flint; Better, though doomed to hear while Cleon raves, To see wit's want eterned in paint or stone, And wade the drain-drenched shoals of daily print. THE BRAKES WHAT Countless years and wealth of brain were spent To bring us hither from our caves and huts, And trace through pathless wilds the deepworn ruts Of faith and habit, by whose deep in dent Prudence may guide if genius be not lent, |