Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?

And who commanded (and the silence came),
Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?
Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-

Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts !

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder God!

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest !
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds !
Ye signs and wonders of the element !

Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise !

Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,
Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard,

Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene,
Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast-
Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou,
That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low

In adoration, upward from thy base

Slow travelling with dim eyes, suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest like a vapoury cloud

To raise before me- - Rise, Ō ever rise;

Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

One cannot look too often upon Mr. Wordsworth's charming

female portrait:

She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight:

A lovely apparition sent

To be a moment's ornament;

Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;

Like twilight too her dusky hair;

But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay,

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her upon nearer view
A spirit, yet a woman too!

Her household motions light and free
And steps of virgin liberty;

A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

And now I see with eyes serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill,
A perfect woman nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light.

I would add "Laodamia," if it were not too long, and the "Yew-trees," if I had not a misgiving that I have somewhere planted those deathless trunks before. In how many ways is a great poet glorious! I met with a few lines taken from that noble poem the other day in the "Modern Painters," cited for the landscape::

"Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine,

Upcoiling and inveterately convolved!

Beneath whose shade

With sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
Perennially-"

and so forth. Mr. Ruskin cited this fine passage for the picture,

I for the personifications:

'Ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope,

Silence and Foresight, Death the skeleton,

And Time the shadow !"

Both quoted the lines for different excellences, and both

were right.

BB

XXXI.

AMERICAN POETS.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLME

AMONGST the strange events of these strange days of ours, when revolutions and counter-revolutions, constitutions changed one week and rechanged the next, seem to crowd into a fortnight the work of a century, annihilating time, just as railways and electric telegraphs annihilate space—in these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of true and original poetry that has sprung up among our blood relations (I had well nigh called them our fellow-countrymen) across the Atlantic; they who speak the same tongue and inherit the same literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden ; and to my mind it would be well if some of our own bards would take the same journey—provided always it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought, and clear of word, we could fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of "Absalom and Achitophel," or of the "Moral Epistles," if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, and for that true reflection of the manners and the follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name.

[ocr errors]

The work of which I am about to offer a sample, all too brief, is a little book much too brief itself; a little book of less than forty pages, described in the title-page as Astræa -a Poem, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, August 1850, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and printed at the request of the Society."

The introduction tells most gracefully in verse that rather, perhaps, implies than relates, the cause of the author's visit to the college, dear to him as the place of his father's education :

What secret charm long whispering in mine ear,
Allures, attracts, compels, and chains me here,
Where murmuring echoes call me to resign
Their sacred haunts to sweeter lips than mine;
Where silent pathways pierce the solemn shade,
In whose still depths my feet have never strayed;
Here, in the home where grateful children meet,
And I, half alien, take the stranger's seat,
Doubting, yet hoping that the gift I bear
May keep its bloom in this unwonted air?
Hush, idle fancy, with thy needlesss art,

Speak from thy fountains, O my throbbing heart!
Say shall I trust these trembling lips to tell
The fireside tale that memory knows so well?
How in the days of Freedom's dread campaign,
A home-bred schoolboy left his village plain,
Slow faring southward, till his wearied feet
Pressed the worn threshold of this fair retreat;
How with his comely face and gracious mieu,
He joined the concourse of the classic green,
Nameless, unfriended, yet by Nature blest
With the rich tokens that she loves the best ;
The flowing locks, his youth's redundant crown,
Smoothed o'er a brow unfurrowed by a frown:
The untaught smile, that speaks so passing plain,
A world all hope, a past without a stain;
The clear-hued cheek, whose burning current glows
Crimson in action, carmine in repose;

Gifts such as purchase, with unminted gold,
Smiles from the young and blessings from the old.

Is not the portrait of the boy beautiful?

on :

The poem goes

Say shall my hand with pious love restore
The faint far pictures time beholds no more?
How the grave senior, he whose later fame
Stamps on our laws his own undying name,
Saw from on high with half-paternal joy
Some spark of promise in the studious boy,
And bade him enter, with paternal tone,
The stately precincts which he called his own.

[blocks in formation]

How kindness ripened, till the youth might dare,
Take the low seat beside his sacred chair,

While the gray scholar bending o'er the young,

Spelled the square types of Abraham's ancient tongue,
Or with mild rapture stooped devoutly o'er
His small coarse leaf alive with curious lore;
Tales of grim judges, at whose awful beck,
Flashed the broad blade across a royal neck ;
Or learned dreams of Israel's long-lost child,
Found in the wanderer of the western wild.

Dear to his age were memories such as these,
Leaves of his June in life's autumnal breeze;
Such were the tales that won my boyish ear,
Told in low tones that evening loves to hear.
Thus in the scene I pass so lightly o'er,
Trod for a moment, then beheld no more,
Strange shapes and dim, unseen by other eyes,
Through the dark portals of the past arise;
I see no more the fair embracing throng,
I hear no echo to my saddened song,
No more I heed the kind or envious gaze,
The voice of blame, the rustling thrill of praise :
Alone, alone, the awful past I tread,

White with the marbles of the slumbering dead;
One shadowy form my dreaming eyes behold,
That leads my footsteps as it led of old,
One floating voice, amid the silence heard,
Breathes in my ear love's long unspoken word ;-
These are the scenes thy youthful eyes have known,
My heart's warm pulses claim them as its own;
The sapling compassed in thy fingers' clasp,
My arms scarce circle in their twice-told grasp,
Yet in each leaf of yon o'ershadowing tree,

I read a legend that was traced by thee.
Year after year the living wave has beat

These smooth-worn channels with its trampling feet,
Yet in each line that scores the grassy sod,

I see the pathway where thy feet have trod ;
Though from the scene that hears my faltering lay,
The few that loved thee long have passed away,
Thy sacred presence all the landscape fills,
Its groves, and plains, and adamantine hills!

Ye who have known the sudden tears that flow,
Sad tears, yet sweet, the dews of twilight woe,-
When led by chance, your wandering eye has crossed
Some poor memorial of the loved and lost,
Bear with my weakness as I look around
On the dear relics of this holy ground,

These bowery cloisters, shadowed and serene,

My dreams have pictured ere mine eyes have seen.

And, oh, forgive me, if the flower I brought,
Droops in my hand beside this burning thought;
The hopes and fears that marked this destined hour,
The chill of doubt, the startled throb of power,
The flush of pride, the trembling glow of shame,
All fade away, and leave my Father's name!

The grace and pathos of this introduction must be felt by every one. It has all the sweetness of Goldsmith, with more force and less obviousness of thought.

The poem opens with a description of an American spring,

« ZurückWeiter »