Flow on, dear river! not alone you flow
To outward sight, and through your marshes wind;
Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago,
Your twin flows silent through my world of mind;
215Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray!
Before my inner sight ye stretch away,
And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind.
Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell,
Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise,
220Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell,
Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise,
Where dust and mud the equal year divide,
There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and died,[11]
Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze.
[11] In Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, which treats in prose of much the same period as this poem reproduces, Mr. Lowell has given more in detail his recollections of Washington Allston, the painter. The whole paper may be read as a prose counterpart to this poem. It is published in Fireside Travels.
225Virgilium vidi tantum,—I have seen[12]
But as a boy, who looks alike on all,
That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien,[13]
Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call;—
Ah, dear old homestead! count it to thy fame
230That thither many times the Painter came;—
One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall.
Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow,—
Our only sure possession is the past;
The village blacksmith died a month ago,[14]
235And dim to me the forge's roaring blast;
Soon fire-new mediævals we shall see
Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree,
And that hewn down, perhaps, the bee-hive green and vast.
How many times, prouder than king on throne,
240Loosed from the village school-dame's A's and B's,
Panting have I the creaky bellows blown,
And watched the pent volcano's red increase,
Then paused to see the ponderous sledge, brought down
224By that hard arm voluminous and brown,
From the white iron swarm its golden vanishing bees.
[12] Virgilium vidi tantum, I barely saw Virgil, a Latin phrase applied to one who has merely had a glimpse of a great man.
[13] Undine is the heroine of a romantic tale by Baron De la Motte Fouqué. She is represented as a water-nymph who wins a human soul only by a union with mortality which brings pain and sorrow.
[14] The village blacksmith of Longfellow's well-known poem. The prophecy came true as regards the hewing-down of the chestnut-tree which was cut down in 1876.