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I
WEAK-WINGED is song, | |
| Nor aims at that clear-ethered height | |
| Whither the brave deed climbs for light: | |
| We seem to do them wrong, | |
| Bringing our robin’s-leaf to deck their hearse | 5 |
| Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse, | |
| Our trivial song to honor those who come | |
| With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, | |
| And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, | |
| Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire, | 10 |
| Yet sometimes feathered words are strong, | |
| A gracious memory to buoy up and save | |
| From Lethe ’s dreamless ooze, the common grave | |
| Of the unventurous throng. | |
| |
II
To-day our Reverend Mother welcomes back | 15 |
| Her wisest Scholars, those who understood | |
| The deeper teaching of her mystic tome, | |
| And offered their fresh lives to make it good: | |
| No lore of Greece or Rome, | |
| No science peddling with the names of things, | 20 |
| Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, | |
| Can lift our life with wings | |
| Far from Death’s idle gulf that for the many waits | |
| And lengthen out our dates | |
| With that clear fame whose memory sings | 25 |
| In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates: | |
| Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all! | |
| Not such the trumpet-call | |
| Of thy diviner mood, | |
| That could thy sons entice | 30 |
| From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest | |
| Of those half-virtues which the world calls best, | |
| Into War’s tumult rude; | |
| But rather far that stern device | |
| The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood | 35 |
| In the dim, unventured wood, | |
| The VERITAS that lurks beneath | |
| The letter’s unprolific sheath, | |
| Life of whate’er makes life worth living, | |
| Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food, | 40 |
| One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving. | |
| |
III
Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil | |
| Amid the dust of books to find her, | |
| Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, | |
| With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. | 45 |
| Many in sad faith sought for her, | |
| Many with crossed hands sighed for her; | |
| But these our brothers, fought for her, | |
| At life’s dear peril wrought for her, | |
| So loved her that they died for her, | 50 |
| Tasting the raptured fleetness | |
| Of her divine completeness: | |
| Their higher instinct knew | |
| Those love her best who to themselves are true, | |
| And what they dare to dream of, dare to do; | 55 |
| They followed her and found her | |
| Where all may hope to find, | |
| Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, | |
| But beautiful, with danger’s sweetness round her | |
| Where faith made whole with deed | 60 |
| Breathes its awakening breath | |
| Into the lifeless creed, | |
| They saw her plumed and mailed, | |
| With sweet, stern face unveiled, | |
| And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death | 65 |
| |
IV
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides | |
| Into the silent hollow of the past; | |
| What is there that abides | |
| To make the next age better for the last? | |
| Is earth too poor to give us | 70 |
| Something to live for here that shall outlive us? | |
| Some more substantial boon | |
| Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune’s | |
| The little that we see | |
| From doubt is never free; | 75 |
| The little that we do | |
| Is but half-nobly true; | |
| With our laborious hiving | |
| What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, | |
| Life seems a jest of Fate’s contriving, | 80 |
| Only secure in every one’s conniving, | |
| A long account of nothings paid with loss, | |
| Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, | |
| After our little hour of strut and rave, | |
| With all our pasteboard passions and desires, | 85 |
| Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, | |
| Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. | |
| But stay! no age was e’er degenerate, | |
| Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, | |
| For in our likeness still we shape our fate. | 90 |
| Ah, there is something here | |
| Unfathomed by the cynic’s seer, | |
| Something that gives our feeble light | |
| A high immunity from Night, | |
| Something that leaps life’s narrow bars | 95 |
| To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; | |
| A seed of sunshine that can leaven | |
| Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, | |
| And glorify our clay | |
| With light from fountains elder than the Day; | 100 |
| A conscience more divine than we, | |
| A gladness fed with secret tears, | |
| A vexing, forward-reaching sense | |
| Of some more noble permanence; | |
| A light across the sea, | 105 |
| Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, | |
| Still becoming from the heights of undegenerate years. | |
| |
V
Whither leads the path | |
| To ampler fates that leads? | |
| Not down through flowery meads, | 110 |
| To reap an aftermath | |
| Of youth’s vainglorious weeds, | |
| But up the steep, amid the wrath | |
| And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, | |
| Where the world’s best hope and stay | 115 |
| By battle’s flashes gropes a desperate way, | |
| And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. | |
| Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, | |
| Ere yet the sharp, decisive word | |
| Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword | 120 |
| Dreams in its easeful sheath; | |
| But some day the live coal behind the thought | |
| Whether from Baäl’s stone obscence, | |
| Or from the shrine serene | |
| Of God’s pure altar brought, | 125 |
| Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen | |
| Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, | |
| And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, | |
| Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men: | |
| Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed | 130 |
| Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, | |
| And cries reproachful: “Was it, then, my praise, | |
| And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; | |
| I claim of thee the promise of thy youth; | |
| Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase, | 135 |
| The victim of thy genius, not its mate!” | |
| Life may be given in many ways, | |
| And loyalty to Truth be sealed, | |
| As bravely in the closet as the field, | |
| So bountiful is Fate; | 140 |
| But then to stand beside her, | |
| When craven churls deride her, | |
| To front a lie in arms and not to yield, | |
| This shows, methinks, God’s plan | |
| And measure of a stalwart man, | 145 |
| Limbed like the old heroic breeds, | |
| Who stand self-poised on manhood’s solid earth, | |
| Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, | |
| Fed from within with all the strength he needs. | |
| |
VI
Such was he, our Martyr-Chief, | 150 |
| Whom late the Nation he had led, | |
| With ashes on her head, | |
| Wept with the passion of an angry grief: | |
| Forgive me, if from present things I turn | |
| To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, | 155 |
| And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. | |
| Nature, they say, doth dote, | |
| And cannot make a man | |
| Save on some worn-out plan, | |
| Repeating us by rote: | 160 |
| For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, | |
| And, choosing sweet clay from the breast | |
| Of the unexhausted West, | |
| With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, | |
| Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. | 165 |
| How beautiful to see | |
| Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, | |
| Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; | |
| One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, | |
| Not lured by any cheat of birth, | 170 |
| But by his clear-grained human worth, | |
| And brave old wisdom of sincerity! | |
| They knew that outward grace is dust; | |
| They could not choose but trust | |
| In that sure-footed mind’s unfaltering skill, | 175 |
| And supple-tempered will | |
| That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. | |
| His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind, | |
| Thrusting to thin air o’er our cloudy bars, | |
| A sea-mark now, now lost in vapor’s blind; | 180 |
| Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, | |
| Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, | |
| Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. | |
| Nothing of Europe here, | |
| Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, | 185 |
| Ere any names of Serf and Peer | |
| Could Nature’s equal scheme deface | |
| And thwart her genial will; | |
| Here was a type of the true elder race, | |
| And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face. | 190 |
| I praise him not; it were too late, | |
| And some innative weakness there must be | |
| In him who condescends to victory | |
| Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait, | |
| Safe in himself as in a fate. | 195 |
| So always firmly he: | |
| He knew to bide his time, | |
| And can his fame abide, | |
| Still patient in his simple faith sublime, | |
| Till the wise years decide. | 200 |
| Great captains, with their guns and drums, | |
| Disturb our judgment for the hour, | |
| But at last silence comes; | |
| These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, | |
| Our children shall behold his fame, | 205 |
| The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, | |
| Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, | |
| New birth of our new soil, the first American. | |
| |
VII
Long as man’s hope insatiate can discern | |
| Or only guess some more inspiring goal | 210 |
| Outside of Self, enduring as the pole, | |
| Along whose course the flying axles burn | |
| Of spirits bravely-pitched, earth’s manlier brood, | |
| Long as below we cannot find | |
| The meed that stills the inexorable mind; | 215 |
| So long this faith to some ideal Good, | |
| Under whatever mortal names it masks, | |
| Freedom, Law, Country, this ethereal mood | |
| That thanks the Fates for their severer tasks, | |
| Feeling its challenged pulses leap, | 220 |
| While others skulk in subterfuges cheap, | |
| And, set in Danger’s van, has all the boon it asks, | |
| Shall win man’s praise and woman’s love, | |
| Shall be a wisdom that we set above | |
| All other skills and gifts to culture dear, | 225 |
| A virtue round whose forehead we inwreathe | |
| Laurels that with a living passion breathe | |
| When other crowns grow, while we twine them, sear. | |
| What brings us thronging these high rites to pay, | |
| And seal these hours the noblest of our year, | 230 |
| Save that our brothers found this better way? | |
| |
VIII
We sit here in the Promised Land | |
| That flow with Freedom’s honey and milk; | |
| But ’t was they won it, sword in hand, | |
| Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk. | 235 |
| We welcome back our bravest and out best;— | |
| Ah me! not all! some come not with the rest, | |
| Who went forth brave and bright as any here! | |
| I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, | |
| But the sad strings complain, | 240 |
| And will not please the ear: | |
| I sweep them for a pæn, but they wane | |
| Again and yet again | |
| Into a dirge, and die away, in pain. | |
| In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, | 245 |
| Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, | |
| Dark to the triumph which they died to gain: | |
| Fitlier may others greet the living, | |
| For me the past is unforgiving; | |
| I with uncovered head | 250 |
| Salute the sacred dead, | |
| Who went, and who return not.—Say not so! | |
| ’T is not the grapes of Canaan that repay, | |
| But the high faith that failed not by the way; | |
| Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave, | 255 |
| No bar of endless night exiles the brave; | |
| And to the saner mind | |
| We rather seem the dead that stayed behind. | |
| Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow! | |
| For never shall their aureoled presence lack: | 260 |
| I see them muster in a gleaming row, | |
| With ever-youthful brows that nobler show; | |
| We find in our dull road their shining track; | |
| In every nobler mood | |
| We feel the orient of their spirit glow, | 265 |
| Part of our life’s unalterable good, | |
| Of all our saintlier aspiration; | |
| They come transfigured back, | |
| Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, | |
| Beautiful evermore, and with the rays | 270 |
| Of morn of their white Shields of Expectation! | |
| |
IX
But is there hope to save | |
| Even this ethereal essence from the grave? | |
| What ever ’scaped Oblivion’s subtle wrong | |
| Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of song? | 275 |
| Before my nursing eye | |
| The mighty ones of old sweep by, | |
| Disvoicëd now and insubstantial things, | |
| As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings, | |
| Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust, | 280 |
| And many races, nameless long ago, | |
| To darkness driven by that imperious gust | |
| Of ever-rushing Time that here doth Blow: | |
| O visionary world, condition strange, | |
| Where naught abiding is but only Change, | 285 |
| Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and range! | |
| Shall we to more continuance make pretence? | |
| Renown builds tombs; a life-estate is Wit; | |
| And, bit by bit, | |
| The cunning years steal all from us but woe; | 290 |
| Leaves are we, whose decays no harvest sow. | |
| But, when we vanish hence, | |
| Shall they lie forceless in the dark below, | |
| Save to make green their little length of sods, | |
| Or deepen pansies for a year or two, | 295 |
| Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods? | |
| Was dying all they had the skill to do? | |
| That were not fruitless: but the Soul resents | |
| Such short-lived service, as if blind events | |
| Ruled without her, or earth could so endure, | 300 |
| She claims a more divine investiture | |
| Of longer tenure than Fame’s airy rents; | |
| Whate’er she touches doth her nature share; | |
| Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air, | |
| Gives eyes to mountains blind, | 305 |
| Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind, | |
| And her clear trump sings succor everywhere | |
| By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind; | |
| For soul inherits all that soul could dare: | |
| Yea, Manhood hath a wider span | 310 |
| And larger privilege of life than man. | |
| The single deed, the private sacrifice, | |
| So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears, | |
| Is covered up erelong from mortal eyes | |
| With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years, | 315 |
| But that high privilege that makes all men peers, | |
| That leap of heart whereby a people rise | |
| Up to a noble anger’s height, | |
| And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright, | |
| That swift validity in noble veins, | 320 |
| Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, | |
| Of being set on flame | |
| By the pure fire that flies all contact base | |
| By wraps its chosen with angelic might, | |
| These are imperishable gains, | 325 |
| Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, | |
| These hold great futures in their lusty reins | |
| And certify to earth a new imperial race. | |
| |
X
Who now shall sneer? | |
| Who dare again to say we trace | 330 |
| Our lines to a plebeian race? | |
| Roundhead and Cavalier! | |
| Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud, | |
| Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud, | |
| They fit across the ear: | 335 |
| That is best blood that hath most iron in ’t | |
| To edge resolve with, pouring without stint | |
| For what makes manhood dear. | |
| Tell us not of Plantagenets, | |
| Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods crawl | 340 |
| Down from some victor in a border-brawl! | |
| How poor their outworn coronets, | |
| Matched with one leaf of that plain civic wreath | |
| Our brave for honor’s blazon shall bequeath, | |
| Through whose desert a rescued Nation sets | 345 |
| Her heel on treason, and the trumpet hears | |
| Shout victory, tingling Europe’s sullen ears | |
| With vain revetment and more vain regrets! | |
| |
XI
Not in anger, not in pride, | |
| Pure from passion’s mixture rude | 350 |
| Ever to base earth allied, | |
| But with far-heard gratitude, | |
| Still with heart and voice renewed, | |
| To heroes living and dear martyrs dead, | |
| The strain should close that consecrates our brave. | 355 |
| Lift the heart and lift the head! | |
| Lofty be its mood and grave, | |
| Not without a martial ring, | |
| Not without a prouder tread | |
| And a peal of exultation: | 360 |
| Little right has he to sing | |
| Through whose heart in such a hour | |
| Beats no march of conscious power, | |
| Sweeps no tumult of elation! | |
| T’ is no Man we celebrate, | 365 |
| By his country’s victories great, | |
| A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, | |
| But the pith and marrow of a Nation | |
| Drawing force from all her men, | |
| Highest, humblest, weakest, all, | 370 |
| For her time of need, and then | |
| Pulsing it again through them, | |
| Till the basest can no longer cower, | |
| Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, | |
| Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. | 375 |
| Come back, then, noble pride, for ’t is her dower! | |
| How could poet ever tower, | |
| If his passions, hopes, and fears, | |
| If his triumphs and his tears, | |
| Kept not measure with his people? | 380 |
| Boom, cannon, boom to all the winds and waves! | |
| Clash out, glad bells, from every rocking steeple! | |
| Banners, a-dance with triumph, bend your staves! | |
| And from every mountain-peak | |
| Let beacon-fire to answering beacon speak, | 385 |
| Katahdin tell Monadnock, Whiteface he, | |
| And so leap on in light from sea to sea, | |
| Till the glad news be sent | |
| Across a kindling continent, | |
| Making earth feel more firm and air breathe braver: | 390 |
| “Be proud! for she is saved, and all have helped to save her! | |
| She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, | |
| She of the open soul and open door, | |
| With room about her hearth for all mankind! | |
| The fire is dreadful in her eyes no more; | 395 |
| From her bold front the helm she doth unbind, | |
| Sends all her handmaid armies back to spin, | |
| And bids her navies, that so lately hurled | |
| Their crashing battle, hold their thunders in. | |
| Swimming like birds of calm along the unharmful shore. | 400 |
| No challenge sends she to the elder world, | |
| That looked askance and hated; a light scorn | |
| Plays o’er her mouth, as round her mighty knees | |
| She calls her children back, and waits the morn | |
| Of nobler day, enthroned between her subject seas.” | 405 |
| |
XII
Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release! | |
| Thy God, in these distempered days, | |
| Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways, | |
| And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace! | |
| Bow down in prayer and praise! | 410 |
| No poorest in thy borders but may now | |
| Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow. | |
| O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more! | |
| Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair | |
| O’er such sweet brows as never other wore, | 415 |
| And letting thy set lips, | |
| Freed from wrath’s pale eclipse, | |
| The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, | |
| What words divine of lover or of poet | |
| Could tell our love and make thee know it, | 420 |
| Among the Nations bright beyond compare? | |
| What were our lives without thee? | |
| What all our lives to save thee? | |
| We reck not what we gave thee; | |
| We will not dare to doubt thee, | 425 |
| But ask whatever else, and we will dare! | |
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