XIII
Carry him out! more room! come up behind!
One peephole vacant! now the show’s at height.
Strange, that our predecessors—though not blind—
Ne’er fully saw or understood the sight,
Withal so anxious to display their light
For our illumination! But away:
Our time for all such questioning is quite
Too limited. Enough, while yet ’tis day,
To use the precious hours. Let night come when it may.
THE FELLOWSHIP OF HUMANITY
As one who, late at eve returning home
Under the stars, hears on the common road
A fellow-footstep fall, and sees one come
Dimly, he knows not whom, nor can forebode;
But cries to him ‘God speed thee,’ and is glad
Hearing his restful answer through the night,
And dreams of love, and though his heart be sad
Feels darkly some strange instinct of delight;
So I to thee. If on this earthly way
Our paths had lain together, I perchance
In the sweet sunlight had beheld thy day
And known thee as thou art—as in a trance,—
And loved thee, and thou me. But seeing now
Sad night compels us, and our way is won
Through ignorance and blindness to the brow
Of that fair mountain of the morning Sun
Whence Truth is manifest, let us remain
In word and action strangers, yet in heart
One and well-known by every joy and pain
That makes divine our little human part.
THE FELLOWSHIP OF SUFFERING
O weary child of man, O mortal friend,
Afar, unseen, by road or river-bend,
By mountain, plain, or city, still the same,
Human, unfriended, with the piercing flame
Of endless sorrow in thine aching heart:
Hear me, for unto thee my spirit yearns;
Touch me, behold me, where the twilight turns,
Uplifting white arms to the tireless morn:
Hear me, for in thy torment I am torn;
Hear me, for in thy passion I have part.
O child, O child, how sadly sang the world
Its old old song of keen cold carelessness,
How blindly blew the wind of loneliness
About thy soul in frozen garments furled;
How with pale speechless lips and wan didst pace
Crushing beneath thy days that deadly feud;
How to the bitter wall didst turn thy face,
Glad from the glances of the multitude.
Ah! here or there; the same sad song of woe,
More desolate than world-despair or death,
The cry of souls the cruel sun severeth,
The moan of love to madness smitten low.
Ah, here or there; the same sad end of things,
The same fond fruitless ineffectual life,
High-feathered hope and passionate pulse of wings,
Chill sorrow, failure, and despairing strife.
Behold, beyond the mountains of the West,
Where sparkle white domes of the purple hills,
The light of evening Earth’s broad bosom fills
And like a golden dove broods o’er her breast,
And fades, afar—for you and me, afar,—
Shared token of our common deep desire,
Which fadeth not, but like a beacon-star
Devours the darkness of our hearts with fire.
THE ANGEL OF DEATH—AND LIFE
I call thee in all hours of life and death:
Friend, whom the days hide and the months and years
Darken before my face: I call and cry
Still, as of old time, ere the morning star
Mounts in the moonlit heavens; and still, ere dawn
Visits the vale of sleep, I call to thee.
Friend, like a stranger loved and known before,
Or brother long forgot, with intricate
World-written countenance, obscure to read,
Yet flashing ancient meanings: thou, for whom,
Morning and night, with ever-new desire,
I, waiting, watch without the gates of Time,
If haply at length thy vagrant feet efface
The way of our estrangement; yea, O thou,
Who in that way’s delay decipherest
These words of my great need, I call to Thee.
O wilt thou hear me: know that night by night
I dwell beside thee, and before the dawn
Touch thy loved forehead with my lips, and fill
With joy each hour of waking. Evernear
I gaze upon thee as thou goest forth
To each day’s due encounter; step by step,
And hour by hour each stroke of all thy work
Wears out the world to more transparency
Between us. Even now the flinty way,
Flaming beneath thy feet, is grown like glass;
My glance is on thee from the well-turned field,
The mill, the net, the loom, and woven stuff,
From desk and counter and rock-quarried gold,
Waste seas and stormbeat headlands, and from all
The faces of thine enemies in the fight—
Strike home: the stroke is fair for me and thee.
Nay, from these words I spring to meet thy soul,
Which else were lonely in the world of men;
O take them as the token of a love
Within, without thee, Lord and minister,
Unknown, of all thy actions, until death
Reveal it, visual, thine, the perfect life.
Yea, now I call to Love that is in thee,
And cry, as one that sees her shadow pass
And the lamp flash, waiting without the house
For his fair one at the window: O come forth,
That I may see thee as thou art, and hear
Thy hidden thought, and hold thy very self
In presence undisturbed. Thou are descried:
Thy light is beauty and cannot be hid;
But, through the tangle of frail purposes
That fringe the lattice windows of thy life,
Shines to perpetual promise. Fear thou not.
Ay, though I come clad grimly as for war,
In brazen heat or scaly northern cold,
By rock or river, famine, hatred, fire;
Though I assail thee at the cannon’s mouth,
Or drag thee down to listless years of pain,
Arise thou, and with forehead unabashed
Come forth, and so confront me. In that day,
Thine eyes, beholding mine, within their depths
Shall see, resurgent from the past, all forms
Of long-lost joy and lovely memory,
All faces and fair smiles of time, set forth
And forward in the future; all else fled.
O stand and conquer so: for see, I touch
Thee through this outer world, in the hot Sun
I slay thee with my lips, all day to thee
I whisper in the Light, and to myself
Desirous draw thee in the Lightning flash
Arrayed in death. Arise and vanquish me:
Grasp firm my tangled hair, brandish thy sword,
Breathe heavily thy hot breath in my ears,
And I will yield; and thou shalt know that Love
Stands ever by thy side through Life and Death,
Signing allegiance of a thousand hearts
That still are One.
O hear my voice once more.
I am with thee. Rise up, thy duty calls;
Pass down into the world; I am with thee.
Florence, 1873.
SONNETS
I
GENOA
Where Genoa spreads white arms crescent-wise,
Her feet o’er well-packed bale and polished spar
Step on the quay with men of every star.
Her heart stays with her people; but her eyes
From those high garden-terraces devise
New realms of peaceful conquest, where afar
Ocean’s white horses at the harbour-bar
Wait ever for their rider to arise.
Here boy Columbus stood, and o’er the blue
Immeasurable fields imagined new.
Here young Mazzini, while for men he yearned,
Another world within their eyes discerned—
The one Republic without place or date.
So both for men lived,—and died execrate.
II
BEETHOVEN
Betwixt the actual and unseen, alone,
Companionless, deaf, in dread solitude
Of soul amid the faithless multitude,
He lived, and fought with life, and held his own;
Knew poverty, and shame which is not shown,
Pride, doubt, and secret heart-despair of good,—
Insolent praise of men and petty feud:
Yet fell not from his purpose, framed and known.
For, as a lonely watcher of the night,
When all men sleep, sees the tumultuous stars
Move forward from the deep in squadrons bright,
And notes them, he through this life’s prison bars
Heard all night long the spheric music clear
Beat on his heart,—and lived that men might hear.
III
IN MORTEM. F. D. MAURICE
So day by day my life, thus nearer drawn
Down the dark avenues unto the dawn,
Cries to Thee: O Lord, Lord of life and death,
Whom from our gaze the sad night sundereth,
Reveal Thyself; be unto us no more
A darkly-felt thick darkness by the shore;
But like the wind, that wingeth cold and clear
Before the dawn by meadow-land and mere,
Blow on us; scatter from our sickly brains
The feverish fancies that ill conscience feigns;
Raise us to stand like men to meet the strife,
Fearless and grand, because within thy life
Our lives are hidden,—as is his to-day,
Thy servant who from sight hath passed away.
IV
WILLIAM SMITH
(AUTHOR OF “THORNDALE,” ETC.)
Such courage in so sensitive a frame
Had given the world rebuke, but that it came
In such light exquisite companionship
Of gentle glance and laughter-loving lip
That few, beholding, could forebode the force
Wherewith that inward current kept its course
In wave-like large emotion, calm and free,
Towards Truth, the high compelling deity.
So when, obedient to the heavenly guide,
Night-long the sea with stedfast-flowing tide
Rises along the land and searches o’er
Each bay and inlet of its bounding shore,
The moving goddess doth her empire trace
In lines of silver laughter on its face.
* * *
V
INSCRIBED ON A GRAVE
TO THE READER
O child of light and shadow: though I pass,
The mountains and the plains where we two played
Our part of earthly pleasance still are laid
Out in the open world of sun and grass,—
For thy fruition. Not in stone or brass
Seek any sign of me. Let no tear braid
Thy light-fringed lids because my path is made
Beyond the bounds thy sight cannot surpass.
Turn thee again unto the sunlit plain,
Let all pure influences of the air
And sweet sad fellowship of mortal pain
Wreathe round thy head immortal fancies fair.
Where’er suns rise on men or late moons wane,
I leave thee at this stone to meet thee there.
VI
DEATH
Since, small or great, and every man on earth,
Must know thee at the last, thy lonely gloom
Is bright with something of diviner birth—
The lamp of human love, that o’er our doom
Sheds undivided radiance. For in this
Our modern world of finely graded life,
The soul is nursed knowing nothing of the bliss
Of sorrow borne, since human. In this strife
Of complex individual interests
Poor man and princely, side by side, share not
One pain or passion of a common lot,
Till death, more liberal than life, invests
All men alike in his wide winding-sheet,
And in that suit of sorrow makes them meet.
* * *
VII
Since, in thine hour of sorrow, unto thee
Came sweet remembrance of the summer sea
And one who sat beside it—in his eyes
The far-off thought of sea and summer skies:
Since in thine heart the visionary gleam
Of one half-wasted life, more like a dream,
Pale in its pleading, stood to be the sign
Of Love, as Love is, passionate, divine:
Ah! since in all this world no fuller sound
Than my faint spirit’s utterance was found
Bidding thee cherish hope: so let it be.
Behold, beyond the summer and the sea
I utter not myself, but am His voice
Who bids all Nature live, and thee rejoice.
* * *
VIII
SEVERANCE
My life thy life unto itself doth fold
Closer than death. My soul clasps all of thine,
As in the bud rose-petals intertwine
Before the light divides them. I behold
Deep in the mystic shadow-caverns shine
Thine image on the fire-fed sources cold
Whereby my spirit dwells; and with the old
Foreboding unforgotten, dream divine,
Thou dost disturb me. Yet the dim-lit day
Dawns down between us, staring face to face,
Strange as the stormy Atlantic; with swift pace
We tread the track which sets our steps astray;
Thy lips are mute; mine move not; evermore
I wait and wearily knock at Death’s dark door.
IX
IT SHALL BE
It shall be. Although far away the sound
Dies in the infinite silence of the sky,
Although obscure, and hid in the profound,
Our days stream outwards, onwards, and pass by.
It shall be. Behold a new world is made
Out of the old, and the old dieth not;
For though the mountain-forms and flowers fade,
Ageless remains the far-informing Thought.
Ah! when this troublous dream and mortal sleep
Fades from our eyelids, and the end is near,
Down through the spaceless void and starry steep
Instinct with Love the dreaming soul shall hear
One whispered word; and all the past shall be
Up-gathered into Love’s eternity.
* * *
X
WALDSTEIN SONATA. BEETHOVEN
O changeless in thy beauty, stedfast, strong,
Exultant in the calm of victory,
A mighty poet flung thee forth, to be
A part of Nature. So that I, thus long
Listening to thy majestic voices, dream
Of some vast snow-veiled mountain far away,
Whose front is crimson fire at orient day;
Where in the dark Dian’s silver lances gleam;
Where shadows of the tireless storm-wreathed mist
Move on in changeless interchange; where call
Clamorous echoes of the waterfall
From crag to crag; whom Night alone hath kissed,
And everlasting silence, and the far
Glimmering magic of the Morning star.
November, 1869.
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