Hawthorne

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908)

HARP of New England Song,

That even in slumber trembled with the touch

Of poets who like the four winds from thee waken

All harmonies that to thy strings belong,—

Say, wilt thou blame the younger hands too much

Which from thy laurelled resting place have taken

Thee crowned one in their hold? There is a name

Should quicken thee! No carol Hawthorne sang,

Yet his articulate spirit, like thine own,

Made answer, quick as flame,

To each breath of the shore from which he sprang,

And prose like his was poesy’s high tone.

*****

But he whose quickened eye

Saw through New England’s life her inmost spirit,—

Her heart, and all the stays on which it leant,—

Returns not, since he laid the pencil by

Whose mystic touch none other shall inherit!

What though its work unfinished lies? Half-bent

The rainbow’s arch fades out in upper air;

The shining cataract half-way down the height

Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell

On listeners unaware,

Ends incomplete, but through the starry night

The ear still waits for what it did not tell.