O FAIRY island of a fairy sea, | |
| Wherein Calypso might have spelled the Greek, | |
| Or Flora piled her fragrant treasury, | |
| Culled from each shore her zephyr’s wings could seek,— | |
| From rocks where aloes blow, | 5 |
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| Tier upon tier, Hesperian fruits arise; | |
| The hanging bowers of this soft Babylon; | |
| An India mellows in the Lombard skies, | |
| And changelings, stolen from the Lybian sun, | |
| Smile to yon Alps of snow. | 10 |
| |
| Amid this gentlest dreamland of the wave | |
| Arrested, stood the wondrous Corsican; | |
| As if one glimpse the better angel gave | |
| Of the bright garden-life vouchsafed to man | |
| Ere blood defiled the world. | 15 |
| |
| He stood,—that grand Sesostris of the North,— | |
| While paused the car to which were harnessed kings; | |
| And in the airs, that lovingly sighed forth | |
| The balms of Araby, his eagle-wings | |
| Their sullen thunder furled | 20 |
| |
| And o’er the marble hush of those large brows | |
| Dread with the awe of the Olympian nod, | |
| A giant laurel spread its breathless boughs, | |
| The prophet-tree of the dark Pythian god, | |
| Shadowing the doom of thrones! | 25 |
| |
| What, in such hour of rest and scene of joy, | |
| Stirs in the cells of that unfathomed brain? | |
| Comes back one memory of the musing boy, | |
| Lone gazing at the yet unmeasured main, | |
| Whose waifs are human bones? * * * * * | 30 |
| Write on the sacred bark such native prayer, | |
| As the mild power may grant in coming years, | |
| Some word to make thy memory gentle there; | |
| More than renown, kind thought for men endears | |
| A hero to mankind. | 35 |
| |
| Slow moved the mighty hand,—a tremor shook | |
| The leaves, and hoarse winds groaned along the wood; | |
| The Pythian tree the damning sentence took, | |
| And to the sun the battle-word of blood | |
| Glared from the gashing rind. | 40 |
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| So thou hast writ the word, and signed thy doom: | |
| Farewell, and pass upon thy gory way. | |
| The direful skein the pausing Fates resume! | |
| Let not the Elysian grove thy steps delay | |
| From thy Promethean goal. | 45 |
| |
| The fatal tree the abhorrent word retained | |
| Till the last battle on its bloody strand | |
| Flung what were nobler had no life remained,— | |
| The crownless front, and the disarméd hand, | |
| And the foiled Titan soul; | 50 |
| |
| Now, year by year, the warrior’s iron mark | |
| Crumbles away from the majestic tree, | |
| The indignant life-sap ebbing from the bark | |
| Where the grim death-word to humanity | |
| Profaned the Lord of Day. | 55 |
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| High o’er the pomp of blooms, as greenly still, | |
| Aspires that tree,—the archetype of fame, | |
| The stem rejects all chronicle of ill, | |
| The bark shrinks back,—the tree survives the same, | |
| The record rots away. | 60 |
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