Sensation glimmers through its rest, It speaks unmanacled by words, As full of motion as a nest
That palpitates with unfledged birds; 'Tis likest to Bethesda's stream, Forewarned through all its thrilling springs, White with the angel's coming gleam, And rippled with his fanning wings.
Hear him unfold his plots and plans, And larger destinies seem man's; You conjure from his glowing face The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans The gulf wherein so many fall, 'Twixt possible and actual; His first swift word, talaria-shod, Exuberant with conscious God, Out of the choir of planets blots The present earth with all its spots.
Himself unshaken as the sky,
His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high Systems and creeds pellmell together; 'Tis strange as to a deaf man's eye, While trees uprooted splinter by,
The dumb turmoil of stormy weather; Less of iconoclast than shaper,
His spirit, safe behind the reach Of the tornado of his speech,
Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper.
So great in speech, but, ah! in act So overrun with vermin troubles, The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact Of life collapses all his bubbles: Had he but lived in Plato's day,
He might, unless my fancy errs, Have shared that golden voice's sway O'er barefooted philosophers. Our nipping climate hardly suits The ripening of ideal fruits:
His theories vanquish us all summer, But winter makes him dumb and dumber; To see him 'mid life's needful things Is something painfully bewildering; He seems an angel with clipt wings Tied to a mortal wife and children, And by a brother seraph taken In the act of eating eggs and bacon. Like a clear fountain, his desire Exults and leaps toward the light, In every drop it says "Aspire!" Striving for more ideal height; And as the fountain, falling thence,
Crawls baffled through the common gutter, So, from his speech's eminence,
He shrinks into the present tense, Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.
Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds Not all of life that's brave and wise is; He strews an ampler future's seeds, 'Tis your fault if no harvest rises; Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught That all he is and has is Beauty's? By soul the soul's gains must be wrought, The Actual claims our coarser thought, The Ideal hath its higher duties.
ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO.
CAN this be thou who, lean and pale, With such immitigable eye
Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale, And note each vengeance, and pass by Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance Cast backward one forbidden glance,
And saw Francesca, with child's glee, Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee And with proud hands control its fiery prance?
With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow, And eye remote, that inly sees Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now In some sea-lulled Hesperides, Thou movest through the jarring street, Secluded from the noise of feet
By her gift-blossom in thy hand, Thy branch of palm from Holy Land ;- No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.
Yet there is something round thy lips That prophesies the coming doom, The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse Notches the perfect disk with gloom; A something that would banish thee, And thine untamed pursuer be,
From men and their unworthy fates,
Though Florence had not shut her gates,
And grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.
Ah! he who follows fearlessly
The beckonings of a poet-heart
Shall wander, and without the world's decree, A banished man in field and mart; Harder than Florence' walls the bar Which with deaf sternness holds him far From home and friends, till death's release, And makes his only prayer for peace,
Like thine, scarred veteran of a lifelong war!
ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD.
DEATH never came so nigh to me before, Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused Of calm and peace and deep 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 bloom, With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content: 'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed.
True is it that Death's face seems stern and cold, When he is sent to summon those we love, But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after other lift their frowning masks, And we behold the seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God. With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer; this was meant When Jesus touched the blind man's lids with clay.
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