OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
As in the case of Hood, the fun in Holmes is always jostling the pathos. After some comic picture or grotesque phrase or quick thrust, the reader comes suddenly upon a stanza of perfect beauty of form with the gentlest touch of natural feeling. To illustrate this, it may be pardonable to quote even from so well known a poem as “The Last Leaf:”
I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches and all that
Are so queer.
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
The last stanza is a pearl so perfect that one can not conceive it as having been made; it seems that it must have been created.—Francis H. Underwood.
It is difficult to imagine the time when any of the characteristic poems of Holmes will slumber on the shelves of antiquaries. They must be eternally new to the new generations, because they are founded in nature, constructed with art, animated by the noblest qualities of intellect and feeling—uniting the wit of Heine with the freshness of Beranger—and are finished as few poems have been finished since the odes of Horace.—Scribner’s Monthly.
The Prisoned Nautilus.
This is the ship of pearl, which poets feign,—
Sails the unshadow’d main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wreck’d is the ship of pearl!
And every chamber’d cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies reveal’d,—
Its iris’d ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unseal’d!
Year after year behold the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast
Till thou at length are free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.
“The Boys.”
Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has take him out, without making a noise,
Hang the Almanac’s cheat, and the Catalogue’s spite!
Old Time is a liar! We’re twenty to-night!
We’re twenty! We’re twenty! Who says we are more?
He’s tipsy,—young jackanapes! show him the door!
“Gray temples at twenty?” Yes! white if we please;
Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there’s nothing can freeze!
Was it snowing I spoke of? Excuse the mistake!
Look close,—you will see not a sign of a flake!
We want some new garlands for those we have shed,—
And these are white roses in place of the red.
We’ve a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told,
Of talking (in public) as if we were old:—
That boy we call “Doctor” and this we call “Judge;”
It’s a neat little fiction,—of course it’s all fudge.
That fellow’s the “Speaker,”—the one on the right;
“Mr. Mayor,” my young one, how are you to-night?
That’s our “Member of Congress,” we say when we chaff;
There’s the “Reverend” What’s-his-name?—don’t make me laugh.
That boy with the grave mathematical look
Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
And the Royal Society thought it was true!
So they chose him right in,—a good joke it was too!
There’s a boy, we pretend, with a three-decker brain,
That could harness a team with a logical chain;
When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
We called him “The Justice,” but now he’s “The Squire.”
And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith,—
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith;
But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,—
Just read on his medal, “My country,” “of thee!”
You hear that boy laughing?—You think he’s all fun;
But the angels laugh too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!
Yes, we’re boys, always playing with tongue or with pen;
And I sometimes have asked, shall we ever be men?
Shall we always be youthful, and laughing and gay,
Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
Then here’s to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
The stars of its winter, the dews of its May!
And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
Dear Father, take care of thy children, The Boys.
Conscience.
Nature has placed thee on a changeful tide,
To breast its waves, but not without a guide.
Yet, as the needle will forget its aim,
Jarred by the fury of the electric flame,
As the true current it will falsely feel
Warped from its axis by a freight of steel;
So will thy Conscience lose its balanced truth,
If passion’s lightning fall upon its youth;
So the pure effluence quit its sacred hold,
Girt round too deeply with magnetic gold.
Go to yon town where busy science plies
Her vast antennæ, feeling through the skies,—
That little vernier on whose slender lines
The midnight taper trembles as it shines,
A silent index, tracks the planets march
In all their wanderings through the ethereal arch,
Tells through the mist where dazzled Mercury burns,
And marks the spot where Uranus returns.
So, till by wrong or negligence effaced,
The living index, which thy Maker traced,
Repeats the line each starry virtue draws
Through the wide circuit of creation’s laws.
Still tracks unchanged the everlasting ray
Where the dark shadows of temptation stray;
But, once defaced, forgets the orbs of light,
And leaves thee wandering o’er the expanse of night.