ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD

This poem was printed in the Democratic Review, October, 1844, and the friend was doubtless C. F. Briggs. See the letter of consolation addressed to him in August, Letters I. 78-81.

DEATH never came so nigh to me before, Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused

Of calm and peace and safe forgetfulness, Of folded hands, closed eyes, and heart at rest,

And slumber sound beneath a flowery turf,
Of faults forgotten, and an inner place
Kept sacred for us in the heart of friends;
But these were idle fancies, satisfied
With the mere husk of this great mystery,
And dwelling in the outward shows of
things.

Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams,

Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth

Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to

farm to farm,

His cheery brothers, telling of the sun,
Answer, till far away the joyance dies:
We never knew before how God had filled
The summer air with happy living sounds;
All round us seems an overplus of life,
And yet the one dear heart lies cold and
still.

It is most strange, when the great miracle Hath for our sakes been done, when we have had

Our inwardest experience of God, When with his presence still the room expands,

And is awed after him, that naught is changed,

That Nature's face looks unacknowledging, And the mad world still dances heedless on After its butterflies, and gives no sign. "T is hard at first to see it all aright: In vain Faith blows her trump to summon back

Her scattered troop: yet, through the

clouded glass

Of our own bitter tears, we learn to look Undazzled on the kindness of God's face; Earth is too dark, and Heaven alone shines through.

It is no little thing, when a fresh soul
And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured

scope

For good, not gravitating earthward yet,
But circling in diviner periods,

Are sent into the world, -no little thing,
When this unbounded possibility
Into the outer silence is withdrawn.
Ah, in this world, where every guiding
thread

Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death,

The visionary hand of Might-have-been
Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim!

How changed, dear friend, are thy part and thy child's!

He bends above thy cradle now, or holds His warning finger out to be thy guide; Thou art the nursling now; he watches thee

Slow learning, one by one, the secret things Which are to him used sights of every day; He smiles to see thy wondering glances

con

The grass and pebbles of the spirit-world,
To thee miraculous; and he will teach
Thy knees their due observances of prayer.
Children are God's apostles, day by day
Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and
peace;

Nor hath thy babe his mission left undone.
To me, at least, his going hence hath given
Serener thoughts and nearer to the skies,
And opened a new fountain in my heart
For thee, my friend, and all: and oh, if
Death

More near approaches meditates, and clasps Even now some dearer, more reluctant hand,

God, strengthen thou my faith, that I may

see

That 't is thine angel, who, with loving haste,

Unto the service of the inner shrine,
Doth waken thy beloved with a kiss.

EURYDICE

HEAVEN'S cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye

I suck the last drop of the sky;

With each hot sense I draw to the lees
The quickening out-door influences,
And empty to each radiant comer

A supernaculum of summer:

Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice
Could bring enchantment so profuse,

Though for its press each grape-bunch had
The white feet of an Oread.

Through our coarse art gleam, now and then,

The features of angelic men:
'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint
Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint;
The dauber's botch no more obscures
The mighty master's portraitures.

And who can say what luckier beam
The hidden glory shall redeem,
For what chance clod the soul may wait
To stumble on its nobler fate,
Or why, to his unwarned abode,
Still by surprises comes the God?
Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross,
May meditate a whole youth's loss,
Some windfall joy, we know not whence,
Redeem a lifetime's rash expense,
And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark,
Stripped of their simulated dark,
Mountains of gold that pierce the sky,
Girdling its valleyed poverty.

I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return,
With olden heats my pulses burn,
Mine be the self-forgetting sweep,
The torrent impulse swift and wild,
Wherewith Taghkanic's rockborn child
Dares gloriously the dangerous leap,
And, in his sky-descended mood,
Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood,
By touch of bravery's simple wand,
To amethyst and diamond,
Proving himself no bastard slip,
But the true granite-cradled one,
Nursed with the rock's primeval drip,
The cloud-embracing mountain's son !

As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven,
The blue dome's measureless content,
So my soul held that moment's heaven; -
I only know she came and went.

As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps
The orchards full of bloom and scent,
So clove her May my wintry sleeps; -
I only know she came and went.

An angel stood and met my gaze,

Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.

Oh, when the room grows slowly dim, And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went.

THE CHANGELING

I HAD a little daughter,

And she was given to me To lead me gently backward

To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature, Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her,
But to me she was wholly fair,
And the light of the heaven she came from
Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;
For it was as wavy and golden,

And as many changes took,
As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples
On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling

Upon me, her kneeling lover,

How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids,

And dimpled her wholly over,
Till her outstretched hands smiled also,
And I almost seemed to see
The very heart of her mother

Sending sun through her veins to me!

She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,

And it hardly seemed a day,
When a troop of wandering angels
Stole my little daughter away;
Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari
But loosed the hampering strings,
And when they had opened her cage-door,
My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling,
A little angel child,

That seems like her bud in full blossom,
And smiles as she never smiled:
When I wake in the morning, I see it
Where she always used to lie,
And I feel as weak as a violet

Alone 'neath the awful sky.

As weak, yet as trustful also;
For the whole year long I see
All the wonders of faithful Nature

Still worked for the love of me;
Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,
Rain falls, suns rise and set,
Earth whirls, and all but to prosper
A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast:

Yet it lies in my little one's cradle

And sits in my little one's chair,

And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.