Remembering Como's languid side,
Where, pulsing from the citron deep,
The nightingale's aerial tide
Floats through the day, repose and sleep,
Reclined in groves,—
A voice reproves.
"Step, step, step," cracks the whip of the sky:
"Hurry up, jump along, rest when you die!"
Slave of electric will, which strips
From him the bliss of easeful hours;
And bids, as from a tyrant's lips,
Rest, quiet, fly, as useless flowers,
He wings his heart
To make him smart.
"Step, step, step," snaps the whip of the sky:
"Hurry up, race along, rest when you die!"
He maddens in the breathless race,
Nor misses station, power or pelf;
And only loses in the chase
The hunted lord of all,—himself.
His gain is loss,
His treasure dross.
"Step, step, step," mocks the whip of the sky,
"Hurry up, limp along, rest when you die!"
With care he burthens all his soul;
Heaped ingots curve his willing back;
Submissive to that fierce control,
He needs at last the sky-whip's crack,
Till at the grave,
No more a slave,—
"Rest, rest, rest," sighs the whip of the sky:
"Hurry not, haste no more, rest when you die!"
Celia Thaxter, the finest of poetic readers, read this to me one September morning at the Isles of Shoals, and at the conclusion she remarked: "If that could only be read every year in our public schools it might do the American people some good."
As compared with this, the sonnet on Pompeii has the effect of a strong complementary color,—for instance, like orange against dark blue. It echoes the pathetic reverie that we feel on beholding the monuments of the mighty past. It contains not the pathos of yesterday, nor of a hundred years ago, but as Emerson says, "of the time out of mind."
POMPEII.
The silence there was what most haunted me.
Long, speechless streets, whose stepping-stones invite
Feet which shall never come; to left and right
Gay colonnades and courts,—beyond, the glee,
Heartless, of that forgetful Pagan sea.
O'er roofless homes and waiting streets, the light
Lies with a pathos sorrowfuler than night.
Fancy forbids this doom of Life with Death
Wedded; and with a wand restores the Life.
The jostling throngs swarm, animate, beneath
The open shops, and all the tropic strife
Of voices, Roman, Greek, Barbarian, mix. The wreath
Indolent hangs on far Vesuvius's crest;
And beyond the glowing town, and guiltless sea, sweet rest.
Tom Appleton was greatly interested in the performances of the spiritualists, trance mediums, and other persons pretending to supernatural powers. How far he believed in this occult science can now only be conjectured, but he was not a man to be easily played upon. He thought at least that there was more in it than was dreamed of by philosophers. When the Longfellow party was at Florence in April, 1869, Prince George of Hanover, recently driven from his kingdom by Bismarck, called to see the poet, and finding that he had gone out, was entertained by Mr. Appleton with some remarkable stories of hypnotic and spiritualistic performances. The prince, who was a most amiable looking young German, was evidently very much interested.
Deafness came upon Mr. Appleton in the last years of his life, though not so as to prevent his enjoying the society of those who had clear voices and who spoke distinctly. When one of his friends suggested that the trouble might be wax in his ears, he shook his head sadly and said: "Oh no: not wax, but wane."