THE BURIED LIFE

LIGHT flows our war of mocking words,

and yet,

Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll,
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest.
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost
soul.

Alas! is even love too weak

To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame
reproved;

I knew they lived and moved

Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves-and yet

The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love !-doth a like spell benumb

Our hearts, our voices?-must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;
For that which seals them hath been
deep-ordain'd!

Fate, which foresaw

How frivolous a baby man would beBy what distractions he would be possess'd,

How he would pour himself in every strife,

And well-nigh change his own identity-That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being's law, Bade through the deep recesses of our

breast

The unregarded river of our life

Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see

The buried stream, and seem to be

power;

But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves

Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course
through our breast,

But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well-but 'tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;

Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and

forlorn.

WRITTEN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

In this lone, open glade I lie,
Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye.
Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-
trees stand!

Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries
come!

Sometimes a child will cross the glade
To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day's employ.
Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.

Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out,

And, eased of basket and of rod,
Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout.

In the huge world, which roars hard by,
Be others happy if they can!
But in my helpless cradle I
Was breathed on by the rural Pan.

I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,
Think often, as I hear them rave,
That peace has left the upper world
And now keeps only in the grave.

Yet here is peace for ever new!
When I who watch them am away,
Still all things in this glade go through
The changes of their quiet day.

Then to their happy rest they pass!
The flowers upclose, the birds are fed,
The night comes down upon the grass,
The child sleeps warmly in his bed.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
The will to neither strive nor cry,
The power to feel with others give!
Calm, calm me more! nor let me die
Before I have begun to live. 1852.

THE FUTURE

A WANDERER is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time;
Brimming with wonder and joy
He spreads out his arms to the light,
Rivets his gaze on the banks of the
stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.

Whether he wakes

Where the snowy mountainous pass,
Echoing the screams of the eagles,
Hems in its gorges the bed

Of the new-born clear-flowing stream;
Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain :
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea--
As is the world on the banks,
So is the mind of the man.

Vainly does each, as he glides,
Fable and dream

Of the lands which the river of Time
Had left ere he woke on its breast.
Or shall reach when his eyes have been
closed.

Only the tract where he sails
He wots of; only the thoughts,
Raised by the objects he passes, are his.

Who can see the green earth any more
As she was by the sources of Time?
Who imagines her fields as they lay
In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought. [breast.
The tribes who then roam'd on her
Her vigorous, primitive sons?

And we say that repose has fled
For ever the course of the river of Time.
That cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker, incessanter line;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream,
Flatter the plain where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead.
That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,

Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply, the river of Time

As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream--
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the gray expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with
foam

As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man
on its
breast-

As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,

As the stars come out, and the night

wind

Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

1852.

STANZAS IN MEMORY OF THE

AUTHOR OF "OBERMANN "1

IN front the awful Alpine track
Crawls up its rocky stair;

The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it, in the air.

1 The author of Obermann, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, has little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France he is almost unknown. But the profound inwardness, the austere sincerity, of his principal work, Obermann, the delicate feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many passages of it, have attracted and charmed some of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain number of spirits whom they touch and interest.

Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: Eternité, deviens mon asile!

The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,-Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though Obermann, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of al writers he is the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinizing. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of Obermann; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but more fully bringing to light, -all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.

Beside Obermann there is one other of Senancour's works which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting its title is, Libres Méditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu. (Arnold's note. The passage of George Sand alluded to may be found in her Questions d'Art et de Littérature. Sainte-Beuve has several times written of Senancour especially in his Portraits Contemporains, Vol. I, and in Chateaubriand et son Groupe littéraire, Chap. 14.)

Behind are the abandon'd baths 1
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley-paths,
The mists are on the Rhone-

The white mists rolling like a sea!
I hear the torrents roar.

-Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more!

I turn thy leaves! I feel their breath
Once more upon me roll;

That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.

Fly hence, poor wretch, whoe'er thou art,
Condemn'd to cast about,

All shipwreck in thy own weak heart, For comfort from without!

A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.

Yes, though the virgin mountain-air
Fresh through these pages blows;
Though to these leaves the glaciers spare
The soul of their white snows;

Though here a mountain-murmur swells
Of many a dark-bough'd pine;
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high-pasturing kine-

Yet, through the hum of torrent lone,
And brooding mountain-bee,
There sobs I know not what ground-tone
Of human agony.

Is it for this, because the sound
Is fraught too deep with pain,
That, Obermann! the world around
So little loves thy strain?

Some secrets may the poet tell, For the world loves new ways; To tell too deep ones is not wellIt knows not what he says.

Yet, of the spirits who have reign'd In this our troubled day,

I know but two, who have attain'd Save thee, to see their way.

1 The Baths of Leuk. This poem was conceived, and partly composed, in the valley going down from the foot of the Gemmi Pass towards the Rhone. (Arnold.)

By England's lakes, in gray old age,
His quiet home one keeps;
And one, the strong much-toiling sage,
In German Weimar sleeps.

But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken From half of human fate;

And Goethe's course few sons of men
May think to emulate.

For he pursued a lonely road,
His eyes on Nature's plan;
Neither made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man.

Strong was he, with a spirit free
From mists, and sane, and clear;
Clearer, how much! than ours-yet we
Have a worse course to steer.

For though his manhood bore the blast
Of a tremendous time,

Yet in a tranquil world was pass'd
His tenderer youthful prime.

But we, brought forth and rear'd in hours
Of change, alarm, surprise-
What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?

Like children bathing on the shore,
Buried a wave beneath,

The second wave succeeds, before
We have had time to breathe.

Too fast we live, too much are tried,
Too harass'd, to attain

Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide

And luminous view to gain.

And then we turn, thou sadder sage,
To thee! we feel thy spell!
-The hopeless tangle of our age,
Thou too hast scann'd it well!

Immoveable thou sittest, still
As death, composed to bear!
Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill,
And icy thy despair.

Yes, as the son of Thetis said,

I hear thee saying now:

Greater by far than thou are dead;

Strive not! die also thou!

Ah! two desires toss about

The poet's feverish blood.

One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

The glow, he cries, the thrill of life, Where, where do these abound?— Not in the world, not in the strife Of men, shall they be found.

He who hath watch'd, not shared, the strife,

Knows how the day hath gone.

He only lives with the world's life,
Who hath renounced his own.

To thee we come, then! Clouds are roll'd
Where thou, O seer! art set;

Thy realm of thought is drear and cold-
The world is colder yet!

And thou hast pleasures, too, to share
With those who come to thee-
Balms floating on thy mountain-air,
And healing sights to see.

How often, where the slopes are green
On Jaman, hast thou sate

By some high chalet-door, and seen
The summer-day grow late;

And darkness steal o'er the wet grass
With the pale crocus starr'd,

And reach that glimmering sheet of glass

Beneath the piny sward,

Lake Leman's waters, far below!
And watch'd the rosy light

Fade from the distant peaks of snow;
And on the air of night

Heard accents of the eternal tongue
Through the pine branches play-
Listen'd, and felt thyself grow young!
Listen'd and wept- -Away!

Away the dreams that but deceive
And thou, sad guide, adieu!

I go, fate drives me ; but I leave
Half of my life with you.

We, in some unknown Power's employ,
Move on a rigorous line;

Can neither, when we will, enjoy,
Nor, when we will, resign.

I in the world must live; but thou,
Thou melancholy shade!

Wilt not, if thou canst see me now,
Condemn me, nor upbraid.

For thou art gone away from earth,
And place with those dost claim,
The Children of the Second Birth,
Whom the world could not tame;

And with that small, transfigured band,
Whom many a different way
Conducted to their common land,
Thou learn'st to think as they.

Christian and pagan, king and slave,
Soldier and anchorite,

Distinctions we esteem so grave,
Are nothing in their sight.

They do not ask, who pined unseen,
Who was on action hurl'd,

Whose one bond is, that all have been
Unspotted by the world.

There without anger thou wilt see
Him who obeys thy spell

No more, so he but rest, like thee,
Unsoil'd-and so, farewell.

Farewell!-Whether thou now liest near
That much-loved inland sea,

The ripples of whose blue waves cheer
Vevey and Meillerie :

And in that gracious region bland,
Where with clear-rustling wave
The scented pines of Switzerland
Stand dark round thy green grave,

Between the dusty vineyard-walls
Issuing on that green place
The early peasant still recalls
The pensive stranger's face,

And stoops to clear thy moss-grown date
Ere he plods on again ;--

Or whether, by maligner fate,
Among the swarms of men,

Where between granite terraces
The blue Seine rolls her wave,
The Capital of Pleasure sees
The hardly-heard-of grave;-

Farewell! Under the sky we part,
In the stern Alpine dell.

O unstrung will! O broken heart!
A last, a last farewell!

REQUIESCAT

STREW on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew!
In quiet she reposes;

Ah, would that I did too!

Her mirth the world required; She bathed it in smiles of glee. But her heart was tired, tired, And now they let her be.

1852.