A Summer Night

In the deserted, moon-blanched street,

        How lonely rings the echo of my feet!

      Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,

      Silent and white, unopening down,

        Repellent as the world,--but see,

      A break between the housetops shows

    The moon! and lost behind her, fading dim

        Into the dewy dark obscurity

        Down at the far horizon's rim,

      Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!

          And to my mind the thought

            Is on a sudden brought

      Of a past night, and a far different scene:

      Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep

            As clearly as at noon;

          The spring-tide's brimming flow

          Heaved dazzlingly between;

          Houses, with long wide sweep,

          Girdled the glistening bay;

          Behind, through the soft air,

      The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.

          That night was far more fair--

      But the same restless pacings to and fro,

      And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,

          And the same bright, calm moon.

      And the calm moonlight seems to say:--

    Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast,

          Which neither deadens into rest,

            Nor ever feels the fiery glow

        That whirls the spirit from itself away,

            But fluctuates to and fro,

          Never by passion quite possessed

      And never quite benumbed by the world's sway?--

          And I, I know not if to pray

        Still to be what I am, or yield, and be

          Like all the other men I see.

        For most men in a brazen prison live,

            Where, in the sun's hot eye,

      With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly

      Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,

      Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.

              And as, year after year,

              Fresh products of their barren labor fall

              From their tired hands, and rest

                    Never yet comes more near,

            Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.

                    And while they try to stem

    The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,

                Death in their prison reaches them,

          Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

                    And the rest, a few,

                Escape their prison and depart

                On the wide ocean of life anew.

            There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart

                      Listeth will sail;

                Nor doth he know how there prevail,

                    Despotic on that sea.

            Trade-winds which cross it from eternity:

            Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred

                    By thwarting signs, and braves

            The freshening wind and blackening waves.

            And then the tempest strikes him; and between

                    The lightning bursts is seen

                    Only a driving wreck,

            And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck

                    With anguished face and flying hair

                    Grasping the rudder hard,

            Still bent to make some port he knows not where,

            Still standing for some false, impossible shore.

                      And sterner comes the roar

            Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom

            Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,

            And he too disappears, and comes no more.

                Is there no life, but these alone?

                Madman or slave, must man be one?

            Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!

                        Clearness divine!

            Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign

            Of languor, though so calm, and though so great

              Are yet untroubled and unpassionate;

            Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil,

            And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!

              I will not say that your mild deeps retain

              A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain

            Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain--

              But I will rather say that you remain

    A world above man's head, to let him see

        How boundless might his soul's horizons be,

        How vast, yet of what clear transparency!

        How it were good to live there, and breathe free;

                How fair a lot to fill

                Is left to each man still!