WHAT RABBI JEHOSHA SAID. - A WINTER-EVENING HYMN. 877
Hardest heart would call it very awful When thou look'st at us and seest-0, what?
If we move away, thou sittest gazing With those vague eyes at the selfsame spot,
And thou mutterest, thy hands thou wringest,
Seeing something, us thou seest not.
Strange it is that, in this open bright
Thou shouldst sit in such a narrow cell;
In God's still memory folded deep; The bravely dumb that did their deed, And scorned to blot it with a name, Men of the plain heroic breed, That loved Heaven's silence more than fame.
Strange it is that thou shouldst be so Such lived not in the past alone,
Where those are who love thee all so
Not so much of thee is left among us As the hum outliving the hushed bell.
RABBI JEHOSHA used to say That God made angels every day, Perfect as Michael and the rest First brooded in creation's nest, Whose only office was to cry Hosanna / once, and then to die; Or rather, with Life's essence blent, To be led home from banishment.
Rabbi Jehosha had the skill To know that Heaven is in God's will; And doing that, though for a space One heart-beat long, may win a grace As full of grandeur and of glow As Princes of the Chariot know.
"T were glorious, no doubt, to be One of the strong-winged Hierarchy, To burn with Seraphs, or to shine With Cherubs, deathlessly divine; Yet I, perhaps, poor earthly clod, Could I forget myself in God, Could I but find my nature's clew Simply as birds and blossoms do, And but for one rapt moment know Tis Heaven must come, not we must go, Should win my place as near the throne As the pearl-angel of its zone, And God would listen mid the throng For my one breath of perfect song, That, in its simple human way, Said all the Host of Heaven could say.
But thread to-day the unheeding
To serve in Vulcan's clangorous smithy Prometheus (primal Yankee) found, And, when he had tampered with thee, (Too confiding little maid !) In a reed's precarious hollow To our frozen earth conveyed: For he swore I know not what; Endless ease should be thy lot, Pleasure that should never falter, Lifelong play, and not a duty Save to hover o'er the altar, Vision of celestial beauty, Fed with precious woods and spices; Then, perfidious! having got Thee in the net of his devices, Sold thee into endless slavery, Made thee a drudge to boil the pot, Thee, Helios' daughter, who dost bear His likeness in thy golden hair; Thee, by nature wild and wavery, Palpitating, evanescent
As the shade of Dian's crescent, Life, motion, gladness, everywhere!
Fathom deep men bury thee In the furnace dark and still, There, with dreariest mockery, Making thee eat, against thy will, Blackest Pennsylvanian stone; But thou dost avenge thy doom, For, from out thy catacomb, Day and night thy wrath is blown In a withering simoon, And, adown that cavern drear, Thy black pitfall in the floor, Staggers the lusty antique cheer, Despairing, and is seen no more!
Elfish I may rightly name thee; We enslave, but cannot tame thee; With fierce snatches, now and then, Thou pluckest at thy right again, And thy down-trod instincts savage To stealthy insurrection creep, While thy wittol masters sleep, And burst in undiscerning ravage: Then how thou shak'st thy bacchant locks!
While brazen pulses, far and near, Throb thick and thicker, wild with fear And dread conjecture, till the drear Disordered clangor every steeple rocks ¦
But when we make a friend of thee,
And admit thee to the hall On our nights of festival,
Then, Cinderella, who could see In thee the kitchen's stunted thrall? Once more a Princess lithe and tall, Thou dancest with a whispering tread, While the bright marvel of thy head In crinkling gold floats all abroad, And gloriously dost vindicate The legend of thy lineage great, Earth-exiled daughter of the Pythian god!
Now in the ample chimney-place, To honor thy acknowledged race, We crown thee high with laurel good, Thy shining father's sacred wood, Which, guessing thy ancestral right, Sparkles and snaps its dumb delight, And, at thy touch, poor outcast one, Feels through its gladdened fibres go The tingle and thrill and vassal glow Of instincts loyal to the sun.
O thou of home the guardian Lar, And, when our earth hath wandered far Into the cold, and deep snow covers The walks of our New England lovers, Their sweet secluded evening-star! 'T was with thy rays the English Muse Ripened her mild domestic hues; 'T was by thy flicker that she conned The fireside wisdom that enrings With light from heaven familiar things; By thee she found the homely faith In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay'th, When Death, extinguishing his torch, Gropes for the latch-string in the porch; The love that wanders not beyond His earliest nest, but sits and sings While children smooth his patient wings;
Therefore with thee I love to read Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs
Life in the withered words! how swift recede
Time's shadows! and how glows again Through its dead mass the incandescent
Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred, The aspirations unattained,
The rhythms so rathe and delicate, They bent and strained
And broke, beneath the sombre weight Of any airiest mortal word.
What warm protection dost thou bend Round curtained talk of friend with friend,
While the gray snow-storm, held aloof, To softest outline rounds the roof,
Or the rude North with baffled strain Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane! Now the kind nymph to Bacchus born By Morpheus' daughter, she that seems Gifted upon her natal morn
By him with fire, by her with dreams, Nicotia, dearer to the Muse Than all the grape's bewildering juice, We worship, unforbid of thee; And, as her incense floats and curls In airy spires and wayward whirls, Or poises on its tremulous stalk A flower of frailest revery, So winds and loiters, idly free, The current of unguided talk, Now laughter-rippled, and now caught In smooth, dark pools of deeper thought. Meanwhile thou mellowest every word, A sweetly unobtrusive third; For thou hast magic beyond wine, To unlock natures each to each; The unspoken thought thou canst divine;
Thou fill'st the pauses of the speech With whispers that to dream-land reach And frozen fancy-springs unchain In Arctic outskirts of the brain; Sun of all inmost confidences, To thy rays doth the heart unclose Its formal calyx of pretences,
That close against rude day's offences, And open its shy midnight rose !
Thou holdest not the master key With which thy Sire sets free the mystic
Of Past and Future: not for common fates
Do they wide open fling,
And, with a far-heard ring,
Even as I sing, it turns to pain, And with vain tears my eyelids throb and swell:
Enough; I come not of the race That hawk their sorrows in the marketplace.
Earth stops the ears I best had loved to please;
Then break, ye untuned chords, or rust in peace!
As if a white-haired actor should come back
| Some midnight to the theatre void and black,
And there rehearse his youth's great part
Mid thin applauses of the ghosts, So secms it now: ye crowd upon my heart,
And I bow down in silence, shadowy hosts!
How struggles with the tempest's swells That warning of tumultuous bells! The fire is loose! and frantic knells Throb fast and faster,
Swing back their willing valves melo- As tower to tower confusedly tells
And when the storm o'erwhelms the wнO HAD SENT ME A SEVEN-POUND
I watch entranced as, o'er and o'er,
The light revolves amid the roar
So still and saintly,
FIT for an Abbot of Theleme,
For the whole Cardinals' College, or
Now large and near, now more and The Pope himself to see in dream
Withdrawing faintly.
This, too, despairing sailors see Flash out the breakers 'neath their lee In sudden snow, then lingeringly Wane tow'rd eclipse,
While through the dark the shuddering
And is it right, this mood of mind That thus, in revery enshrined, Can in the world mere topics find For musing stricture, Seeing the life of humankind Only as picture?
Before his lenten vision gleam,
He lies there, the sogdologer!
His precious flanks with stars besprent, Worthy to swim in Castaly! The friend by whom such gifts are sent, For him shall bumpers full be spent,
His health be Luck his fast ally!
I see him trace the wayward brook Amid the forest mysteries, Where at their shades shy aspens look, Or where, with many a gurgling crook, It croons its woodland histories.
The events in line of battle go; In vain for me their trumpets blow As unto him that lieth low
I see leaf-shade and sun-fleck lend Their tremulous, sweet vicissitude smooth, dark pool, to crinkling bend,
In death's dark arches,
And through the sod hears throbbing
O Duty, am I dead to thee In this my cloistered ecstasy, In this lone shallop on the sea
That drifts tow'rd Silence?
And are those visioned shores I see But sirens' islands?
My Dante frowns with lip-locked mien, As who would say, "'T is those, I ween, Whom lifelong armor-chafe makes lean That win the laurel";
With amorous solicitude!)
I see him step with caution due, Soft as if shod with moccasins,
Grave as in church, for who plies you, Sweet craft, is safe as in a pew
From all our common stock o' sins
The unerring fly I see him cast,
That as a rose-leaf falls as soft, A flash! a whirl! he has him fast! We tyros, how that struggle last Confuses and appalls us oft. Unfluttered he: calm as the sky
Looks on our tragi-comedies,
This way and that he lets him fly, A sunbeam-shuttle, then to die
Thy high-heaped canvas shoreward yearning!
Lands him, with cool aplomb, at Thou first reveal'st to us thy face
The friend who gave our board such gust, Life's care may he o'erstep it half, And, when Death hooks him, as he must, He'll do it handsomely, I trust, And John H- write his epitaph!
O, born beneath the Fishes' sign, Of constellations happiest, May he somewhere with Walton dine, May Horace send him Massic wine,
And Burns Scotch drink, the nap- piest !
And when they come his deeds to weigh, And how he used the talents his, One trout-scale in the scales he'll lay (If trout had scales), and 't will outsway The wrong side of the balances.
SPIRIT, that rarely comest now And only to contrast my gloom, Like rainbow-feathered birds that
A moment on some autumn bough That, with the spurn of their farewell, Sheds its last leaves, - thou once didst dwell
With me year-long, and make intense To boyhood's wisely vacant days Their fleet but all-sufficing grace
Of trustful inexperience,
While soul could still transfigure sense, And thrill, as with love's first caress, At life's mere unexpectedness. Days when my blood would leap and
As full of sunshine as a breeze,
Or spray tossed up by Summer seas That doubts if it be sea or sun! Days that flew swiftly like the band
That played in Grecian games at strife, And passed from eager hand to hand
The onward-dancing torch of life! Wing-footed thou abid'st with him Who asks it not; but he who hath Watched o'er the waves thy waning path, Shall nevermore behold returning
Turned o'er the shoulder's parting grace, A moment glimpsed, then seen no
Nymph of the unreturning feet,
How may I win thee back? But no, I do thee wrong to call thee so; 'Tis I am changed, not thou art fleet : The man thy presence feels again, Not in the blood, but in the brain, Spirit, that lov'st the upper air Serene and passionless and rare,
Such as on mountain heights we find And wide-viewed uplands of the mind;
Or such as scorns to coil and sing Round any but the eagle's wing
Of souls that with long upward beat Have won an undisturbed retreat Where, poised like winged victories, They mirror in relentless eyes
The life broad-basking 'neath their feet, -
Man ever with his Now at strife, Pained with first gasps of earthly air, Then praying Death the last to spare, Still fearful of the ampler life.
Not unto them dost thou consent Who, passionless, can lead at ease A life of unalloyed content
A life like that of land-locked seas, Who feel no elemental gush Of tidal forces, no fierce rush
Of storm deep-grasping scarcely spent "Twixt continent and continent. Such quiet souls have never known Thy truer inspiration, thou
Who lov'st to feel upon thy brow Spray from the plunging vessel thrown Grazing the tusked lee shore, the cliff That o'er the abrupt gorge holds its breath,
Where the frail hair-breadth of an if Is all that sunders life and death: These, too, are cared-for, and round these Bends her mild crook thy sister Peace; These in unvexed dependence lie,
Each 'neath his strip of household sky; O'er these clouds wander, and the blue Hangs motionless the whole day through;
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