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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Poetry: A Metrical Essay, Read Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Harvard</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">To Charles Wentworth Upham, the Following Metrical Essay is Affectionately Inscribed.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire! <br>Ye winds of Memory, sweep the silent lyre! <br>Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,<br>Break through the clouds of Fancy’s waning year;<br>Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,<br>If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Long have I wandered; the returning tide<br>Brought back an exile to his cradle’s side;<br>And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled,<br>To greet the land-breeze with its faded fold,<br>So, in remembrance of my boyhood’s time,<br>I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;<br>Oh, more than blest, that, all my wanderings through,<br>My anchor falls where first my pennons flew!<br>-----------------<br>The morning light, which rains its quivering beams<br>Wide o’er the plains, the summits, and the streams,<br>In one broad blaze expands its golden glow<br>On all that answers to its glance below;<br>Yet, changed on earth, each far reflected ray<br>Braids with fresh hues the shining brow of day;<br>Now, clothed in blushes by the painted flowers,<br>Tracks on their cheeks the rosy-fingered hours;<br>Now, lost in shades, whose dark entangled leaves<br>Drip at the noontide from their pendent eaves,<br>Fades into gloom, or gleams in light again<br>From every dew-drop on the jewelled plain.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">We, like the leaf, the summit, or the wave,<br>Reflect the light our common nature gave,<br>But every sunbeam, falling from her throne,<br>Wears on our hearts some coloring of our own<br>Chilled in the slave, and burning in the free,<br>Like the sealed cavern by the sparkling sea;<br>Lost, like the lightning in the sullen clod,<br>Or shedding radiance, like the smiles of God;<br>Pure, pale in Virtue, as the star above,<br>Or quivering roseate on the leaves of Love;<br>Glaring like noontide, where it glows upon<br>Ambition’s sands,—­the desert in the sun,—­<br>Or soft suffusing o’er the varied scene<br>Life’s common coloring,—­intellectual green.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus Heaven, repeating its material plan,<br>Arched over all the rainbow mind of man;<br>But he who, blind to universal laws,<br>Sees but effects, unconscious of their cause,—­<br>Believes each image in itself is bright,<br>Not robed in drapery of reflected light,—­<br>Is like the rustic who, amidst his toil,<br>Has found some crystal in his meagre soil,<br>And, lost in rapture, thinks for him alone<br>Earth worked her wonders on the sparkling stone,<br>Nor dreams that Nature, with as nice a line,<br>Carved countless angles through the boundless mine.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus err the many, who, entranced to find<br>Unwonted lustre in some clearer mind,<br>Believe that Genius sets the laws at naught<br>Which chain the pinions of our wildest thought;<br>Untaught to measure, with the eye of art,<br>The wandering fancy or the wayward heart;<br>Who match the little only with the less,<br>And gaze in rapture at its slight excess,<br>Proud of a pebble, as the brightest gem<br>Whose light might crown an emperor’s diadem.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And, most of all, the pure ethereal fire<br>Which seems to radiate from the poet’s lyre<br>Is to the world a mystery and a charm,<br>An AEgis wielded on a mortal’s arm,<br>While Reason turns her dazzled eye away,<br>And bows her sceptre to her subject’s sway;<br>And thus the poet, clothed with godlike state,<br>Usurped his Maker’s title—­to create;<br>He, whose thoughts differing not in shape, but dress,<br>What others feel more fitly can express,<br>Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,<br>Peeps through the bars, and calls the world his own.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">There breathes no being but has some pretence<br>To that fine instinct called poetic sense<br>The rudest savage, roaming through the wild;<br>The simplest rustic, bending o’er his child;<br>The infant, listening to the warbling bird;<br>The mother, smiling at its half-formed word;<br>The boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large;<br>The girl, turned matron to her babe-like charge;<br>The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand<br>The vote that shakes the turret of the land;<br>The slave, who, slumbering on his rusted chain,<br>Dreams of the palm-trees on his burning plain;<br>The hot-cheeked reveller, tossing down the wine,<br>To join the chorus pealing “Auld lang syne”;<br>The gentle maid, whose azure eye grows dim,<br>While Heaven is listening to her evening hymn;<br>The jewelled beauty, when her steps draw near<br>The circling dance and dazzling chandelier;<br>E’en trembling age, when Spring’s renewing air<br>Waves the thin ringlets of his silvered hair;—­<br>All, all are glowing with the inward flame,<br>Whose wider halo wreathes the poet’s name,<br>While, unenbalmed, the silent dreamer dies,<br>His memory passing with his smiles and sighs!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If glorious visions, born for all mankind,<br>The bright auroras of our twilight mind;<br>If fancies, varying as the shapes that lie<br>Stained on the windows of the sunset sky;<br>If hopes, that beckon with delusive gleams,<br>Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;<br>If passions, following with the winds that urge<br>Earth’s wildest wanderer to her farthest verge;—­<br>If these on all some transient hours bestow<br>Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow,<br>Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled<br>Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told,<br>Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave<br>Would wail its requiem o’er a poet’s grave!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If to embody in a breathing word<br>Tones that the spirit trembled when it heard;<br>To fix the image all unveiled and warm,<br>And carve in language its ethereal form,<br>So pure, so perfect, that the lines express<br>No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;<br>To feel that art, in living truth, has taught<br>Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought;—­<br>If this alone bestow the right to claim<br>The deathless garland and the sacred name,<br>Then none are poets save the saints on high,<br>Whose harps can murmur all that words deny!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But though to none is granted to reveal<br>In perfect semblance all that each may feel,<br>As withered flowers recall forgotten love,<br>So, warmed to life, our faded passions move<br>In every line, where kindling fancy throws<br>The gleam of pleasures or the shade of woes.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">When, schooled by time, the stately queen of art<br>Had smoothed the pathways leading to the heart,<br>Assumed her measured tread, her solemn tone,<br>And round her courts the clouds of fable thrown,<br>The wreaths of heaven descended on her shrine,<br>And wondering earth proclaimed the Muse divine. <br>Yet if her votaries had but dared profane<br>The mystic symbols of her sacred reign,<br>How had they smiled beneath the veil to find<br>What slender threads can chain the mighty mind!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,<br>And verse bestows the varnish and the frame;<br>Our grating English, whose Teutonic jar<br>Shakes the racked axle of Art’s rattling car,<br>Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird<br>Fast in its place each many-angled word;<br>From Saxon lips Anacreon’s numbers glide,<br>As once they melted on the Teian tide,<br>And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again<br>From Albion’s cliffs as o’er Achaia’s plain<br>The proud heroic, with, its pulse-like beat,<br>Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet;<br>The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,<br>Sweeps gently onward to its dying close,<br>Where waves on waves in long succession pour,<br>Till the ninth billow melts along the shore;<br>The lonely spirit of the mournful lay,<br>Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray,<br>In sable plumage slowly drifts along,<br>On eagle pinion, through the air of song;<br>The glittering lyric bounds elastic by,<br>With flashing ringlets and exulting eye,<br>While every image, in her airy whirl,<br>Gleams like a diamond on a dancing girl!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Born with mankind, with man’s expanded range<br>And varying fates the poet’s numbers change;<br>Thus in his history may we hope to find<br>Some clearer epochs of the poet’s mind,<br>As from the cradle of its birth we trace,<br>Slow wandering forth, the patriarchal race.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I.<br>When the green earth, beneath the zephyr’s wing,<br>Wears on her breast the varnished buds of Spring;<br>When the loosed current, as its folds uncoil,<br>Slides in the channels of the mellowed soil;<br>When the young hyacinth returns to seek<br>The air and sunshine with her emerald beak;<br>When the light snowdrops, starting from their cells,<br>Hang each pagoda with its silver bells;<br>When the frail willow twines her trailing bow<br>With pallid leaves that sweep the soil below;<br>When the broad elm, sole empress of the plain,<br>Whose circling shadow speaks a century’s reign,<br>Wreathes in the clouds her regal diadem,—­<br>A forest waving on a single stem;—­<br>Then mark the poet; though to him unknown<br>The quaint-mouthed titles, such as scholars own,<br>See how his eye in ecstasy pursues<br>The steps of Nature tracked in radiant hues;<br>Nay, in thyself, whate’er may be thy fate,<br>Pallid with toil or surfeited with state,<br>Mark how thy fancies, with the vernal rose,<br>Awake, all sweetness, from their long repose;<br>Then turn to ponder o’er the classic page,<br>Traced with the idyls of a greener age,<br>And learn the instinct which arose to warm<br>Art’s earliest essay and her simplest form.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">To themes like these her narrow path confined<br>The first-born impulse moving in the mind;<br>In vales unshaken by the trumpet’s sound,<br>Where peaceful Labor tills his fertile ground,<br>The silent changes of the rolling years,<br>Marked on the soil or dialled on the spheres,<br>The crested forests and the colored flowers,<br>The dewy grottos and the blushing bowers,—­<br>These, and their guardians, who, with liquid names,<br>Strephons and Chloes, melt in mutual flames,<br>Woo the young Muses from their mountain shade,<br>To make Arcadias in the lonely glade.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Nor think they visit only with their smiles<br>The fabled valleys and Elysian isles;<br>He who is wearied of his village plain<br>May roam the Edens of the world in vain. <br>’T is not the star-crowned cliff, the cataract’s flow,<br>The softer foliage or the greener glow,<br>The lake of sapphire or the spar-hung cave,<br>The brighter sunset or the broader wave,<br>Can warm his heart whom every wind has blown<br>To every shore, forgetful of his own.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Home of our childhood! how affection clings<br>And hovers round thee with her seraph wings! <br>Dearer thy hills, though clad in autumn brown,<br>Than fairest summits which the cedars crown! <br>Sweeter the fragrance of thy summer breeze<br>Than all Arabia breathes along the seas! <br>The stranger’s gale wafts home the exile’s sigh,<br>For the heart’s temple is its own blue sky!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Oh happiest they, whose early love unchanged,<br>Hopes undissolved, and friendship unestranged,<br>Tired of their wanderings, still can deign to see<br>Love, hopes, and friendship, centring all in thee!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And thou, my village! as again I tread<br>Amidst thy living and above thy dead;<br>Though some fair playmates guard with charter fears<br>Their cheeks, grown holy with the lapse of years;<br>Though with the dust some reverend locks may blend,<br>Where life’s last mile-stone marks the journey’s end;<br>On every bud the changing year recalls,<br>The brightening glance of morning memory falls,<br>Still following onward as the months unclose<br>The balmy lilac or the bridal rose;<br>And still shall follow, till they sink once more<br>Beneath the snow-drifts of the frozen shore,<br>As when my bark, long tossing in the gale,<br>Furled in her port her tempest-rended sail!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">What shall I give thee? Can a simple lay,<br>Flung on thy bosom like a girl’s bouquet,<br>Do more than deck thee for an idle hour,<br>Then fall unheeded, fading like the flower? <br>Yet, when I trod, with footsteps wild and free,<br>The crackling leaves beneath yon linden-tree,<br>Panting from play or dripping from the stream,<br>How bright the visions of my boyish dream<br>Or, modest Charles, along thy broken edge,<br>Black with soft ooze and fringed with arrowy sedge,<br>As once I wandered in the morning sun,<br>With reeking sandal and superfluous gun,<br>How oft, as Fancy whispered in the gale,<br>Thou wast the Avon of her flattering tale! <br>Ye hills, whose foliage, fretted on the skies,<br>Prints shadowy arches on their evening dyes,<br>How should my song with holiest charm invest<br>Each dark ravine and forest-lifting crest! <br>How clothe in beauty each familiar scene,<br>Till all was classic on my native green!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">As the drained fountain, filled with autumn leaves,<br>The field swept naked of its garnered sheaves,<br>So wastes at noon the promise of our dawn,<br>The springs all choking, and the harvest gone.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Yet hear the lay of one whose natal star<br>Still seemed the brightest when it shone afar;<br>Whose cheek, grown pallid with ungracious toil,<br>Glows in the welcome of his parent soil;<br>And ask no garlands sought beyond the tide,<br>But take the leaflets gathered at your side.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">II.<br>But times were changed; the torch of terror came,<br>To light the summits with the beacon’s flame;<br>The streams ran crimson, the tall mountain pines<br>Rose a new forest o’er embattled lines;<br>The bloodless sickle lent the warrior’s steel,<br>The harvest bowed beneath his chariot wheel;<br>Where late the wood-dove sheltered her repose<br>The raven waited for the conflict’s close;<br>The cuirassed sentry walked his sleepless round<br>Where Daphne smiled or Amaryllis frowned;<br>Where timid minstrels sung their blushing charms,<br>Some wild Tyrtaeus called aloud, “To arms!”</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">When Glory wakes, when fiery spirits leap,<br>Roused by her accents from their tranquil sleep,<br>The ray that flashes from the soldier’s crest<br>Lights, as it glances, in the poet’s breast;—­<br>Not in pale dreamers, whose fantastic lay<br>Toys with smooth trifles like a child at play,<br>But men, who act the passions they inspire,<br>Who wave the sabre as they sweep the lyre!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Ye mild enthusiasts, whose pacific frowns<br>Are lost like dew-drops caught in burning towns,<br>Pluck as ye will the radiant plumes of fame,<br>Break Caesar’s bust to make yourselves a name;<br>But if your country bares the avenger’s blade<br>For wrongs unpunished or for debts unpaid,<br>When the roused nation bids her armies form,<br>And screams her eagle through the gathering storm,<br>When from your ports the bannered frigate rides,<br>Her black bows scowling to the crested tides,<br>Your hour has past; in vain your feeble cry<br>As the babe’s wailings to the thundering sky!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Scourge of mankind! with all the dread array<br>That wraps in wrath thy desolating way,<br>As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,<br>Thou only teachest all that man can be. <br>Alike thy tocsin has the power to charm<br>The toil-knit sinews of the rustic’s arm,<br>Or swell the pulses in the poet’s veins,<br>And bid the nations tremble at his strains.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The city slept beneath the moonbeam’s glance,<br>Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France,<br>And all was hushed, save where the footsteps fell,<br>On some high tower, of midnight sentinel. <br>But one still watched; no self-encircled woes<br>Chased from his lids the angel of repose;<br>He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years<br>Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears<br>His country’s sufferings and her children’s shame<br>Streamed o’er his memory like a forest’s flame;<br>Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong,<br>Rolled through his heart and kindled into song. <br>His taper faded; and the morning gales<br>Swept through the world the war-song of Marseilles!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Now, while around the smiles of Peace expand,<br>And Plenty’s wreaths festoon the laughing land;<br>While France ships outward her reluctant ore,<br>And half our navy basks upon the shore;<br>From ruder themes our meek-eyed Muses turn<br>To crown with roses their enamelled urn.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If e’er again return those awful days<br>Whose clouds were crimsoned with the beacon’s blaze,<br>Whose grass was trampled by the soldier’s heel,<br>Whose tides were reddened round the rushing keel,<br>God grant some lyre may wake a nobler strain<br>To rend the silence of our tented plain! <br>When Gallia’s flag its triple fold displays,<br>Her marshalled legions peal the Marseillaise;<br>When round the German close the war-clouds dim,<br>Far through their shadows floats his battle-hymn;<br>When, crowned with joy, the camps’ of England ring,<br>A thousand voices shout, “God save the King!”<br>When victory follows with our eagle’s glance,<br>Our nation’s anthem pipes a country dance!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Some prouder Muse, when comes the hour at last,<br>May shake our hillsides with her bugle-blast;<br>Not ours the task; but since the lyric dress<br>Relieves the statelier with its sprightliness,<br>Hear an old song, which some, perchance, have seen<br>In stale gazette or cobwebbed magazine. <br>There was an hour when patriots dared profane<br>The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain;<br>And one, who listened to the tale of shame,<br>Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,<br>Whose eye still followed o’er his country’s tides<br>Thy glorious flag, our brave Old Ironsides<br>From yon lone attic, on a smiling morn,<br>Thus mocked the spoilers with his school-boy scorn.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">III.<br>When florid Peace resumed her golden reign,<br>And arts revived, and valleys bloomed again,<br>While War still panted on his-broken blade,<br>Once more the Muse her heavenly wing essayed. <br>Rude was the song: some ballad, stern and wild,<br>Lulled the light slumbers of the soldier’s child;<br>Or young romancer, with his threatening glance<br>And fearful fables of his bloodless lance,<br>Scared the soft fancy of the clinging girls,<br>Whose snowy fingers smoothed his raven curls. <br>But when long years the stately form had bent,<br>And faithless Memory her illusions lent,<br>So vast the outlines of Tradition grew<br>That History wondered at the shapes she drew,<br>And veiled at length their too ambitious hues<br>Beneath the pinions of the Epic Muse.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Far swept her wing; for stormier days had brought<br>With darker passions deeper tides of thought. <br>The camp’s harsh tumult and the conflict’s glow,<br>The thrill of triumph and the gasp of woe,<br>The tender parting and the glad return,<br>The festal banquet and the funeral urn,<br>And all the drama which at once uprears<br>Its spectral shadows through the clash of spears,<br>From camp and field to echoing verse transferred,<br>Swelled the proud song that listening nations heard. <br>Why floats the amaranth in eternal bloom<br>O’er Ilium’s turrets and Achilles’ tomb? <br>Why lingers fancy where the sunbeams smile<br>On Circe’s gardens and Calypso’s isle? <br>Why follows memory to the gate of Troy<br>Her plumed defender and his trembling boy? <br>Lo! the blind dreamer, kneeling on the sand<br>To trace these records with his doubtful hand;<br>In fabled tones his own emotion flows,<br>And other lips repeat his silent woes;<br>In Hector’s infant see the babes that shun<br>Those deathlike eyes, unconscious of the sun,<br>Or in his hero hear himself implore,<br>“Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more!”</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus live undying through the lapse of time<br>The solemn legends of the warrior’s clime;<br>Like Egypt’s pyramid or Paestum’s fane,<br>They stand the heralds of the voiceless plain. <br>Yet not like them, for Time, by slow degrees,<br>Saps the gray stone and wears the embroidered frieze,<br>And Isis sleeps beneath her subject Nile,<br>And crumbled Neptune strews his Dorian pile;<br>But Art’s fair fabric, strengthening as it rears<br>Its laurelled columns through the mist of years,<br>As the blue arches of the bending skies<br>Still gird the torrent, following as it flies,<br>Spreads, with the surges bearing on mankind,<br>Its starred pavilion o’er the tides of mind!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">In vain the patriot asks some lofty lay<br>To dress in state our wars of yesterday. <br>The classic days, those mothers of romance,<br>That roused a nation for a woman’s glance;<br>The age of mystery, with its hoarded power,<br>That girt the tyrant in his storied tower,<br>Have passed and faded like a dream of youth,<br>And riper eras ask for history’s truth.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">On other shores, above their mouldering towns,<br>In sullen pomp the tall cathedral frowns,<br>Pride in its aisles and paupers at the door,<br>Which feeds the beggars whom it fleeced of yore. <br>Simple and frail, our lowly temples throw<br>Their slender shadows on the paths below;<br>Scarce steal the winds, that sweep his woodland tracks,<br>The larch’s perfume from the settler’s axe,<br>Ere, like a vision of the morning air,<br>His slight—­framed steeple marks the house of prayer;<br>Its planks all reeking and its paint undried,<br>Its rafters sprouting on the shady side,<br>It sheds the raindrops from its shingled eaves<br>Ere its green brothers once have changed their leaves.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Yet Faith’s pure hymn, beneath its shelter rude,<br>Breathes out as sweetly to the tangled wood<br>As where the rays through pictured glories pour<br>On marble shaft and tessellated floor;—­<br>Heaven asks no surplice round the heart that feels,<br>And all is holy where devotion kneels. <br>Thus on the soil the patriot’s knee should bend<br>Which holds the dust once living to defend;<br>Where’er the hireling shrinks before the free,<br>Each pass becomes “a new Thermopylae”! <br>Where’er the battles of the brave are won,<br>There every mountain “looks on Marathon”!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Our fathers live; they guard in glory still<br>The grass-grown bastions of the fortressed hill;<br>Still ring the echoes of the trampled gorge,<br>With God and Freedom. England and Saint George! <br>The royal cipher on the captured gun<br>Mocks the sharp night-dews and the blistering sun;<br>The red-cross banner shades its captor’s bust,<br>Its folds still loaded with the conflict’s dust;<br>The drum, suspended by its tattered marge,<br>Once rolled and rattled to the Hessian’s charge;<br>The stars have floated from Britannia’s mast,<br>The redcoat’s trumpets blown the rebel’s blast.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Point to the summits where the brave have bled,<br>Where every village claims its glorious dead;<br>Say, when their bosoms met the bayonet’s shock,<br>Their only corselet was the rustic frock;<br>Say, when they mustered to the gathering horn,<br>The titled chieftain curled his lip in scorn,<br>Yet, when their leader bade his lines advance,<br>No musket wavered in the lion’s glance;<br>Say, when they fainted in the forced retreat,<br>They tracked the snow-drifts with their bleeding feet,<br>Yet still their banners, tossing in the blast,<br>Bore Ever Ready, faithful to the last,<br>Through storm and battle, till they waved again<br>On Yorktown’s hills and Saratoga’s plain.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then, if so fierce the insatiate patriot’s flame,<br>Truth looks too pale and history seems too tame,<br>Bid him await some new Columbiad’s page,<br>To gild the tablets of an iron age,<br>And save his tears, which yet may fall upon<br>Some fabled field, some fancied Washington!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">IV.<br>But once again, from their AEolian cave,<br>The winds of Genius wandered on the wave. <br>Tired of the scenes the timid pencil drew,<br>Sick of the notes the sounding clarion blew,<br>Sated with heroes who had worn so long<br>The shadowy plumage of historic song,<br>The new-born poet left the beaten course,<br>To track the passions to their living source.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then rose the Drama;—­and the world admired<br>Her varied page with deeper thought inspired<br>Bound to no clime, for Passion’s throb is one<br>In Greenland’s twilight or in India’s sun;<br>Born for no age, for all the thoughts that roll<br>In the dark vortex of the stormy soul,<br>Unchained in song, no freezing years can tame;<br>God gave them birth, and man is still the same. <br>So full on life her magic mirror shone,<br>Her sister Arts paid tribute to her throne;<br>One reared her temple, one her canvas warmed,<br>And Music thrilled, while Eloquence informed. <br>The weary rustic left his stinted task<br>For smiles and tears, the dagger and the mask;<br>The sage, turned scholar, half forgot his lore,<br>To be the woman he despised before. <br>O’er sense and thought she threw her golden chain,<br>And Time, the anarch, spares her deathless reign.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus lives Medea, in our tamer age,<br>As when her buskin pressed the Grecian stage;<br>Not in the cells where frigid learning delves<br>In Aldine folios mouldering on their shelves,<br>But breathing, burning in the glittering throng,<br>Whose thousand bravoes roll untired along,<br>Circling and spreading through the gilded halls,<br>From London’s galleries to San Carlo’s walls!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thus shall he live whose more than mortal name<br>Mocks with its ray the pallid torch of Fame;<br>So proudly lifted that it seems afar<br>No earthly Pharos, but a heavenly star,<br>Who, unconfined to Art’s diurnal bound,<br>Girds her whole zodiac in his flaming round,<br>And leads the passions, like the orb that guides,<br>From pole to pole, the palpitating tides!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">V.<br>Though round the Muse the robe of song is thrown,<br>Think not the poet lives in verse alone. <br>Long ere the chisel of the sculptor taught<br>The lifeless stone to mock the living thought;<br>Long ere the painter bade the canvas glow<br>With every line the forms of beauty know;<br>Long ere the iris of the Muses threw<br>On every leaf its own celestial hue,<br>In fable’s dress the breath of genius poured,<br>And warmed the shapes that later times adored.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Untaught by Science how to forge the keys<br>That loose the gates of Nature’s mysteries;<br>Unschooled by Faith, who, with her angel tread,<br>Leads through the labyrinth with a single thread,<br>His fancy, hovering round her guarded tower,<br>Rained through its bars like Danae’s golden shower.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He spoke; the sea-nymph answered from her cave<br>He called; the naiad left her mountain wave<br>He dreamed of beauty; lo, amidst his dream,<br>Narcissus, mirrored in the breathless stream;<br>And night’s chaste empress, in her bridal play,<br>Laughed through the foliage where Endymion lay;<br>And ocean dimpled, as the languid swell<br>Kissed the red lip of Cytherea’s shell.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Of power,—­Bellona swept the crimson field,<br>And blue-eyed Pallas shook her Gorgon shield;<br>O’er the hushed waves their mightier monarch drove,<br>And Ida trembled to the tread of Jove!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So every grace that plastic language knows<br>To nameless poets its perfection owes. <br>The rough-hewn words to simplest thoughts confined<br>Were cut and polished in their nicer mind;<br>Caught on their edge, imagination’s ray<br>Splits into rainbows, shooting far away;—­<br>From sense to soul, from soul to sense, it flies,<br>And through all nature links analogies;<br>He who reads right will rarely look upon<br>A better poet than his lexicon!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">There is a race which cold, ungenial skies<br>Breed from decay, as fungous growths arise;<br>Though dying fast, yet springing fast again,<br>Which still usurps an unsubstantial reign,<br>With frames too languid for the charms of sense,<br>And minds worn down with action too intense;<br>Tired of a world whose joys they never knew,<br>Themselves deceived, yet thinking all untrue;<br>Scarce men without, and less than girls within,<br>Sick of their life before its cares begin;—­<br>The dull disease, which drains their feeble hearts,<br>To life’s decay some hectic thrill’s imparts,<br>And lends a force which, like the maniac’s power,<br>Pays with blank years the frenzy of an hour.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And this is Genius! Say, does Heaven degrade<br>The manly frame, for health, for action made? <br>Break down the sinews, rack the brow with pains,<br>Blanch the right cheek and drain the purple veins,<br>To clothe the mind with more extended sway,<br>Thus faintly struggling in degenerate clay?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">No! gentle maid, too ready to admire,<br>Though false its notes, the pale enthusiast’s lyre;<br>If this be genius, though its bitter springs<br>Glowed like the morn beneath Aurora’s wings,<br>Seek not the source whose sullen bosom feeds<br>But fruitless flowers and dark, envenomed weeds.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But, if so bright the dear illusion seems,<br>Thou wouldst be partner of thy poet’s dreams,<br>And hang in rapture on his bloodless charms,<br>Or die, like Raphael, in his angel arms,<br>Go and enjoy thy blessed lot,—­to share<br>In Cowper’s gloom or Chatterton’s despair!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not such were they whom, wandering o’er the waves,<br>I looked to meet, but only found their graves;<br>If friendship’s smile, the better part of fame,<br>Should lend my song the only wreath I claim,<br>Whose voice would greet me with a sweeter tone,<br>Whose living hand more kindly press my own,<br>Than theirs,—­could Memory, as her silent tread<br>Prints the pale flowers that blossom o’er the dead,<br>Those breathless lips, now closed in peace, restore,<br>Or wake those pulses hushed to beat no more?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,<br>The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,<br>O’er thy slight figure floating lightly down<br>In graceful folds the academic gown,<br>On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught<br>How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,<br>And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,<br>Too bright to live,—­but oh, too fair to die!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And thou, dear friend, whom Science still deplores,<br>And Love still mourns, on ocean-severed shores,<br>Though the bleak forest twice has bowed with snow<br>Since thou wast laid its budding leaves below,<br>Thine image mingles with my closing strain,<br>As when we wandered by the turbid Seine,<br>Both blessed with hopes, which revelled, bright and free,<br>On all we longed or all we dreamed to be;<br>To thee the amaranth and the cypress fell,—­<br>And I was spared to breathe this last farewell!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But lived there one in unremembered days,<br>Or lives there still, who spurns the poet’s bays,<br>Whose fingers, dewy from Castalia’s springs,<br>Rest on the lyre, yet scorn to touch the strings? <br>Who shakes the senate with the silver tone<br>The groves of Pindus might have sighed to own? <br>Have such e’er been? Remember Canning’s name! <br>Do such still live? Let “Alaric’s Dirge” proclaim!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=472515" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Immortal Art! where’er the rounded sky<br>Bends o’er the cradle where thy children lie,<br>Their home is earth, their herald every tongue<br>Whose accents echo to the voice that sung. <br>One leap of Ocean scatters on the sand<br>The quarried bulwarks of the loosening land;<br>One thrill of earth dissolves a century’s toil<br>Strewed like the leaves that vanish in the soil;<br>One hill o’erflows, and cities sink below,<br>Their marbles splintering in the lava’s glow;<br>But one sweet tone, scarce whispered to the air,<br>From shore to shore the blasts of ages bear;<br>One humble name, which oft, perchance, has borne<br>The tyrant’s mockery and the courtier’s scorn,<br>Towers o’er the dust of earth’s forgotten graves,<br>As once, emerging through the waste of waves,<br>The rocky Titan, round whose shattered spear<br>Coiled the last whirlpool of the drowning sphere!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Oliver+Wendell+Holmes">Oliver Wendell Holmes</a></strong></div>

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