I linger, until, at evening,
The town-roofs, towering high,
Uprear in the dimness their tall, dark chimneys,
Indenting the sunset sky,
And the pendent spear on the edge of the pier
Signals my homeward way,
As it gleams through the dusk like a walrus's tusk
On the floes of a polar bay.
Then I think of the desolate households
On which the day shuts down,—
What misery hides in the darkened tides
Of life in yonder town!
I think of the lonely poet
In his hours of coldness and pain,
His fancies full-freighted, like lighters belated,
All frozen within his brain.
And I hearken to the moanings
That come from the burdened bay:
As a camel, that kneels for his lading, reels,
And cannot bear it away,
The mighty load is slowly
Upheaved with struggle and pain
From centre to side, then the groaning tide
Sinks heavily down again.
So day and night you may hear it
Panting beneath its pack,
Till sailor and saw, till south wind and thaw,
Unbind it from its back.
O Sun! will thy beam ever gladden the stream
And bid its burden depart?
O Life! all in vain do we strive with the chain
That fetters and chills the heart?
Already in vision prophetic
On yonder height I stand:
The gulls are gay upon the bay,
The swallows on the land;—
'Tis spring-time now; like an aspen-bough
Shaken across the sky,
In the silvery light with twinkling flight
The rustling plovers fly.
Aloft in the sunlit cordage
Behold the climbing tar,
With his shadow beside on the sail white and wide,
Climbing a shadow-spar!
Up the glassy stream with issuing steam
The cutter crawls again,
All winged with cloud and buzzing loud,
Like a bee upon the pane.
The brigantine is bringing
Her cargo to the quay,
The sloop flits by like a butterfly,
The schooner skims the sea.
O young heart's trust, beneath the crust
Of a chilling world congealed!
O love, whose flow the winter of woe
With its icy hand hath sealed!
Learn patience from the lesson!
Though the night be drear and long,
To the darkest sorrow there comes a morrow,
A right to every wrong.
And as, when, having run his low course, the red Sun
Comes charging gayly up here,
The white shield of Winter shall shiver and splinter
At the touch of his golden spear,—
Then rushing under the bridges,
And crushing among the piles,
In gray mottled masses the drift-ice passes,
Like seaward-floating isles;—
So Life shall return from its solstice, and burn
In trappings of gold and blue,
The world shall pass like a shattered glass,
And the Heaven of Love shine through.