Written for the Celebration of the Introduction of the Cochituate Water Into the City of Boston
My name is Water: I have sped
Through strange, dark ways, untried before,
By pure desire of friendship led,
Cochituate’s ambassador;
He sends four royal gifts by me:
Long life, health, peace, and purity.
I’m Ceres’ cup-bearer; I pour,
For flowers and fruits and all their kin,
Her crystal vintage, from of yore
Stored in old Earth’s selectest bin,
Flora’s Falernian ripe, since God
The wine-press of the deluge trod.
In that far isle whence, iron-willed,
The New World’s sires their bark unmoored,
The fairies’ acorn-cups I filled
Upon the toadstool’s silver board,
And, ’neath Herne’s oak, for Shakspeare’s sight,
Strewed moss and grass with diamonds bright.
No fairies in the Mayflower came,
And, lightsome as I sparkle here,
For Mother Bay-State, busy dame,
I’ve toiled and drudged this many a year,
Throbbed in her engines’ iron veins,
Twirled myriad spindles for her gains.
I, too, can weave; the warp I set
Through which the sun his shuttle throws,
And, bright as Noah saw it, yet
For you the arching rainbow glows,
A sight in Paradise denied
To unfallen Adam and his bride.
When Winter held me in his grip,
You seized and sent me o’er the wave,
Ungrateful! in a prison-ship;
But I forgive, not long a slave,
For, soon as summer south-winds blew,
Homeward I fled, disguised as dew.
For countless services I’m fit,
Of use, of pleasure, and of gain,
But lightly from all bonds I flit,
Nor lose my mirth, nor feel a stain;
From mill and wash-tub I escape,
And take in heaven my proper shape.
So, free myself, to-day, elate
I come from far o’er hill and mead,
And here, Cochituate’s envoy, wait
To be your blithesome Ganymede,
And brim your cups with nectar true
That never will make slaves of you.
SUGGESTED BY THE GRAVES OF TWO ENGLISH SOLDIERS ON CONCORD BATTLE-GROUND.
The same good blood that now refills
The dotard Orient’s shrunken veins,
The same whose vigor westward thrills,
Bursting Nevada’s silver chains,
Poured here upon the April grass,
Freckled with red the herbage new;
On reeled the battle’s trampling mass,
Back to the ash the bluebird new.
Poured here in vain;—that sturdy blood
Was meant to make the earth more green,
But in a higher, gentler mood
Than broke this April noon serene;
Two graves are here; to mark the place,
At head and foot, an unhewn stone,
O’er which the herald lichens trace
The blazon of Oblivion.
These men were brave enough, and true
To the hired soldier’s bull-dog creed;
What brought them here they never knew,
They fought as suits the English breed;
They came three thousand miles, and died,
To keep the Past upon its throne;
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.
The turf that covers them no thrill
Sends up to fire the heart and brain;
No stronger purpose nerves the will,
No hope renews its youth again:
From farm to farm the Concord glides,
And trails my fancy with its flow;
O’erhead the balanced henhawk slides,
Twinned in the river’s heaven below.
But go, whose Bay-State bosom stirs,
Proud of thy birth and neighbor’s right,
Where sleep the heroic villagers
Borne red and stiff from Concord fight;
Thought Reuben, snatching down his gun,
Or Seth, as ebbed the life away,
What earthquake rifts would shoot and run
World-wide from that short April fray?
What then? With heart and hand they wrought
According to their village light;
’Twas for the Future that they fought,
Their rustic faith in what was right.
Upon earth’s tragic stage they burst
Unsummoned, in the humble sock;
Theirs the fifth act; the curtain first
Rose long ago on Charles’s block.
Their graves have voices; if they threw
Dice charged with fates beyond their ken,
Yet to their instincts they were true,
And had the genius to be men.
Fine privilege of Freedom’s host,
Of even foot-soldiers for the Right!—
For centuries dead, ye are not lost,
Your graves send courage forth, and might.
We, too, have autumns, when our leaves
Drop loosely through the dampened air,
When all our good seems bound in sheaves,
And we stand reaped and bare.
Our seasons have no fixed returns,
Without our will they come and go;
At noon our sudden summer burns,
Ere sunset all is snow.
But each day brings less summer cheer,
Crimps more our ineffectual spring,
And something earlier every year
Our singing birds take wing.
As less the olden glow abides,
And less the chillier heart aspires,
With drift-wood beached in past spring-tides
We light our sullen fires.
By the pinched rushlight’s starving beam
We cower and strain our wasted sight,
To stitch youth’s shroud up, seam by seam,
In the long arctic night.
It was not so—we once were young—
When Spring, to womanly Summer turning,
Her dew-drops on each grass-blade strung,
In the red sunrise burning.
We trusted then, aspired, believed
That earth could be remade to-morrow;—
Ah, why be ever undeceived?
Why give up faith for sorrow?
O thou, whose days are yet all spring,
Faith, blighted once, is past retrieving;
Experience is a dumb, dead thing;
The victory’s in believing.
Are we, then, wholly fallen? Can it be
That thou, North wind, that from thy mountains bringest
Their spirit to our plains, and thou, blue sea,
Who on our rocks thy wreaths of freedom flingest,
As on an altar,—can it be that ye
Have wasted inspiration on dead ears,
Dulled with the too familiar clank of chains?
The people’s heart is like a harp for years
Hung where some petrifying torrent rains
Its slow-incrusting spray: the stiffened chords
Faint and more faint make answer to the tears
That drip upon them: idle are all words;
Only a silver plectrum wakes the tone
Deep buried ’neath that ever-thickening stone.
We are not free: Freedom doth not consist
In musing with our faces toward the Past,
While petty cares, and crawling interests, twist
Their spider-threads about us, which at last
Grow strong as iron chains, to cramp and bind
In formal narrowness heart, soul, and mind.
Freedom is recreated year by year,
In hearts wide open on the Godward side,
In souls calm-cadenced as the whirling sphere,
In minds that sway the future like a tide.
No broadest creeds can hold her, and no codes;
She chooses men for her august abodes,
Building them fair and fronting to the dawn;
Yet, when we seek her, we but find a few
Light footprints, leading morn-ward through the dew;
Before the day had risen, she was gone.
And we must follow: swiftly runs she on,
And, if our steps should slacken in despair,
Half turns her face, half smiles through golden hair,
Forever yielding, never wholly won:
That is not love which pauses in the race
Two close-linked names on fleeting sand to trace;
Freedom gained yesterday is no more ours;
Men gather but dry seeds of last year’s flowers:
Still there’s a charm ungranted, still a grace,
Still rosy Hope, the free, the unattained,
Makes us Possession’s languid hand let fall;
’Tis but a fragment of ourselves is gained,—
The Future brings us more, but never all.
And, as the finder of some unknown realm,
Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see
On either side of him the imprisoning sea,
Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm
The valley-land, peak after snowy peak
Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm
Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak,
And what he thought an island finds to be
A continent to him first oped,—so we
Can from our height of Freedom look along
A boundless future, ours if we be strong;
Or if we shrink, better remount our ships
And, fleeing God’s express design, trace back
The hero-freighted Mayflower’s prophet-track
To Europe, entering her blood-red eclipse.
Bowing thyself in dust before a Book,
And thinking the great God is thine alone,
O rash iconoclast, thou wilt not brook
What gods the heathen carves in wood and stone,
As if the Shepherd who from outer cold
Leads all his shivering lambs to one sure fold
Were careful for the fashion of his crook.
There is no broken reed so poor and base,
No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue,
But he therewith the ravening wolf can chase,
And guide his flock to springs and pastures new;
Through ways unlooked for, and through many lands,
Far from the rich folds built with human hands,
The gracious footprints of his love I trace.
And what art thou, own brother of the clod,
That from his hand the crook wouldst snatch away
And shake instead thy dry and sapless rod,
To scare the sheep out of the wholesome day?
Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted Jew,
That with thy idol-volume’s covers two
Wouldst make a jail to coop the living God?
Thou hear’st not well the mountain organ-tones
By prophet ears from Hor and Sinai caught,
Thinking the cisterns of those Hebrew brains
Drew dry the springs of the All-knower’s thought,
Nor shall thy lips be touched with living fire,
Who blow’st old altar-coals with sole desire
To weld anew the spirit’s broken chains.
God is not dumb, that he should speak no more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And find’st not Sinai, ’tis thy soul is poor;
There towers the mountain of the Voice no less,
Which whoso seeks shall find, but he who bends,
Intent on manna still and mortal ends,
Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore.
Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,
And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone;
Each age, each kindred adds a verse to it,
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan.
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud,
While thunder’s surges burst on cliffs of cloud,
Still at the prophets’ feet the nations sit.
Hushed with broad sunlight lies the hill,
And, minuting the long day’s loss,
The cedar’s shadow, slow and still,
Creeps o’er its dial of gray moss.
Warm noon brims full the valley’s cup,
The aspen’s leaves are scarce astir,
Only the little mill sends up
Its busy, never-ceasing burr.
Climbing the loose-piled wall that hems
The road along the mill-pond’s brink,
From ’neath the arching barberry-stems,
My footstep scares the shy chewink.
Beneath a bony buttonwood
The mill’s red door lets forth the din;
The whitened miller, dust-imbued,
Flits past the square of dark within.
No mountain torrent’s strength is here;
Sweet Beaver, child of forest still,
Heaps its small pitcher to the ear,
And gently waits the miller’s will.
Swift slips Undine along the race
Unheard, and then, with flashing bound,
Floods the dull wheel with light and grace,
And, laughing, hunts the loath drudge round.
The miller dreams not at what cost
The quivering mill-stones hum and whirl,
Nor how for every turn, are tost
Armfuls of diamond and of pearl.
But Summer cleared my happier eyes
With drops of some celestial juice,
To see how Beauty underlies
For evermore each form of Use.
And more: methought I saw that flood,
Which now so dull and darkling steals,
Thick, here and there, with human blood,
To turn the world’s laborious wheels.
No more than doth the miller there,
Shut in our several cells, do we
Know with what waste of beauty rare
Moves every day’s machinery.
Surely the wiser time shall come
When this fine overplus of might,
No longer sullen, slow, and dumb,
Shall leap to music and to light.
In that new childhood of the Earth
Life of itself shall dance and play;
Fresh blood in Time’s shrunk veins make mirth,
And labor meet delight half-way.
How looks Appledore in a storm?
I have seen it when its crags seemed frantic,
Butting against the maddened Atlantic,
When surge after surge would heap enorme,
Cliffs of Emerald topped with snow,
That lifted and lifted and then let go
A great white avalanche of thunder,
A grinding, blinding, deafening ire
Monadnock might have trembled under;
And the island, whose rock-roots pierce below
To where they are warmed with the central fire,
You could feel its granite fibres racked,
As it seemed to plunge with a shudder and thrill
Right at the breast of the swooping hill,
And to rise again, snorting a cataract
Of rage-froth from every cranny and ledge,
While the sea drew its breath in hoarse and deep,
And the next vast breaker curled its edge,
Gathering itself for a mighty leap.
North, east, and south there are reefs and breakers,
You would never dream of in smooth weather,
That toss and gore the sea for acres,
Bellowing and gnashing and snarling together;
Look northward, where Duck Island lies,
And over its crown you will see arise,
Against a background of slaty skies,
A row of pillars still and white
That glimmer and then are out of sight,
As if the moon should suddenly kiss,
While you crossed the gusty desert by night,
The long colonnades of Persepolis,
And then as sudden a darkness should follow
To gulp the whole scene at single swallow,
The city’s ghost, the drear, brown waste,
And the string of camels, clumsy-paced:—
Look southward for White Island light,
The lantern stands ninety feet o’er the tide;
There is first a half-mile of tumult and fight,
Of dash and roar and tumble and fright,
And surging bewilderment wild and wide,
Where the breakers struggle left and right,
Then a mile or more of rushing sea,
And then the light-house slim and lone;
And whenever the whole weight of ocean is thrown
Full and fair on White Island head,
A great mist-jotun you will see
Lifting himself up silently
High and huge o’er the light-house top,
With hands of wavering spray outspread,
Groping after the little tower,
That seems to shrink, and shorten and cower,
Till the monster’s arms of a sudden drop,
And silently and fruitlessly
He sinks again into the sea.
You, meanwhile, where drenched you stand,
Awaken once more to the rush and roar
And on the rock-point tighten your hand,
As you turn and see a valley deep,
That was not there a moment before,
Suck rattling down between you and a heap
Of toppling billow, whose instant fall
Must sink the whole island once for all—
Or watch the silenter, stealthier seas
Feeling their way to you more and more;
If they once should clutch you high as the knees
They would whirl you down like a sprig of kelp,
Beyond all reach of hope or help;—
And such in a storm is Appledore.
When Persia’s sceptre trembled in a hand
Wilted by harem-heats, and all the land
Was hovered over by those vulture ills
That snuff decaying empire from afar,
Then, with a nature balanced as a star,
Dara arose, a shepherd of the hills.
He, who had governed fleecy subjects well,
Made his own village, by the self-same spell,
Secure and peaceful as a guarded fold,
Till, gathering strength by slow and wise degrees,
Under his sway, to neighbor villages
Order returned, and faith and justice old.
Now, when it fortuned that a king more wise
Endued the realm with brain and hands and eyes,
He sought on every side men brave and just,
And having heard the mountain-shepherd’s praise,
How he rendered the mould of elder days,
To Dara gave a satrapy in trust.
So Dara shepherded a province wide,
Nor in his viceroy’s sceptre took more pride
Than in his crook before; but Envy finds
More soil in cities than on mountains bare,
And the frank sun of spirits clear and rare
Breeds poisonous fogs in low and marish minds.
Soon it was whispered at the royal ear
That, though wise Dara’s province, year by year,
Like a great sponge, drew wealth and plenty up,
Yet, when he squeezed it at the king’s behest,
Some golden drops, more rich than all the rest,
Went to the filling of his private cup.
For proof, they said that whereso’er he went
A chest, beneath whose weight the camel bent,
Went guarded, and no other eye had seen
What was therein, save only Dara’s own,
Yet, when ’twas opened, all his tent was known
To glow and lighten with heapt jewels’ sheen.
The king set forth for Dara’s province straight,
Where, as was fit, outside his city’s gate
The viceroy met him with a stately train;
And there, with archers circled, close at hand,
A camel with the chest was seen to stand,
The king grew red, for thus the guilt was plain.
“Open me now,” he cried, “yon treasure-chest!”
’Twas done, and only a worn shepherd’s vest
Was found within; some blushed and hung the head,
Not Dara; open as the sky’s blue roof
He stood, and “O, my lord, behold the proof
That I was worthy of my trust!” he said.
“For ruling men, lo! all the charm I had;
My soul, in those coarse vestments ever clad,
Still to the unstained past kept true and leal,
Still on these plains could breathe her mountain air,
And Fortune’s heaviest gifts serenely bear,
Which bend men from the truth, and make them reel.
“To govern wisely I had shown small skill
Were I not lord of simple Dara still;
That sceptre kept, I cannot lose my way!”
Strange dew in royal eyes grew round, and bright
And thrilled the trembling lids; before ’twas night
Two added provinces blest Dara’s sway.
Nine years have slipped like hour-glass sand
From life’s fast-emptying globe away,
Since last, dear friend, I clasped your hand,
And lingered on the impoverished land,
Watching the steamer down the bay.
I held the keepsake which you gave,
Until the dim smoke-pennon curled
O’er the vague rim ’tween sky and wave,
And closed the distance like a grave,
Leaving me to the outer world;
The old worn world of hurry and heat,
The young, fresh world of thought and scope;
While you, where silent surges fleet
Toward far sky beaches still and sweet,
Sunk wavering down the ocean-slope.
Come back our ancient walks to tread,
Old haunts of lost or scattered friends,
Amid the Muses’ factories red,
Where song, and smoke, and laughter sped
The nights to proctor-hunted ends.
Our old familiars are not laid,
Though snapped our wands and sunk our books,
They beckon, not to be gainsaid,
Where, round broad meads which mowers wade,
Smooth Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks;
Where, as the cloudbergs eastward blow,
From glow to gloom the hillside shifts
Its lakes of rye that surge and flow,
Its plumps of orchard-trees arow,
Its snowy white-weed’s summer drifts.
Or let us to Nantasket, there
To wander idly as we list,
Whether, on rocky hillocks bare,
Sharp cedar-points, like breakers, tear
The trailing fringes of gray mist.
Or whether, under skies clear-blown,
The heightening surfs with foamy din,
Their breeze-caught forelocks backward blown
Against old Neptune’s yellow zone,
Curl slow, and plunge forever in.
For years thrice three, wise Horace said,
A poem rare let silence bind;
And love may ripen in the shade,
Like ours, for nine long seasons laid
In crypts and arches of the mind.
That right Falernian friendship old
Will we, to grace our feast, call up,
And freely pour the juice of gold,
That keeps life’s pulses warm and bold,
Till Death shall break the empty cup.