A WINTER-EVENING HYMN TO MY FIRE

Beauty on my hearth-stone blazing!

To-night the triple Zoroaster

Shall my prophet be and master;

To-night will I pure Magian be,

Hymns to thy sole honor raising,

While thou leapest fast and faster,

Wild with self-delighted glee,

Or sink'st low and glowest faintly

As an aureole still and saintly,

Keeping cadence to my praising

Thee! still thee! and only thee!

Elfish daughter of Apollo!

Thee, from thy father stolen and bound

To serve in Vulcan's clangorous smithy,

Prometheus ( primal Yankee ) found,

And, when he had tampered with thee,

( Too confiding little maid! )

In a reed's precarious hollow

To our frozen earth conveyed:

For he swore I know not what;

Endless ease should be thy lot,

Pleasure that should never falter,

Lifelong play, and not a duty

Save to hover o'er the altar,

Vision of celestial beauty,

Fed with precious woods and spices;

Then, perfidious! having got

Thee in the net of his devices,

Sold thee into endless slavery,

Made thee a drudge to boil the pot,

Thee, Helios’ daughter, who dost bear

His likeness in thy golden hair;

Thee, by nature wild and wavery,

Palpitating, evanescent

As the shade of Dian's crescent,

Life, motion, gladness, everywhere!

Fathom deep men bury thee

In the furnace dark and still.

There, with dreariest mockery,

Making thee eat, against thy will,

Blackest Pennsylvanian stone;

But thou dost avenge thy doom,

For, from out thy catacomb,

Day and night thy wrath is blown

In a withering simoom,

And, adown that cavern drear,

Thy black pitfall in the floor,

Staggers the lusty antique cheer,

Despairing, and is seen no more!

Elfish I may rightly name thee;

We enslave, but cannot tame thee;

With fierce snatches, now and then,

Thou pluckest at thy right again,

And thy down-trod instincts savage

To stealthy insurrection creep

While thy wittol masters sleep,

And burst in undiscerning ravage:

Then how thou shak'st thy bacchant locks!

While brazen pulses, far and near,

Throb thick and thicker, wild with fear

And dread conjecture, till the drear

Disordered clangor every steeple rocks!

But when we make a friend of thee,

And admit thee to the hall

On our nights of festival,

Then, Cinderella, who could see

In thee the kitchen's stunted thrall?

Once more a Princess lithe and tan,

Thou dancest with a whispering tread,

While the bright marvel of thy head

In crinkling gold floats all abroad,

And gloriously dost vindicate

The legend of thy lineage great,

Earth-exiled daughter of the Pythian god!

Now in the ample chimney-place,

To honor thy acknowledged race,

We crown thee high with laurel good,

Thy shining father's sacred wood,

Which, guessing thy ancestral right,

Sparkles and snaps its dumb delight,

And, at thy touch, poor outcast one,

Feels through its gladdened fibres go

The tingle and thrill and vassal glow

Of instincts loyal to the sun.

O thou of home the guardian Lar,

And, when our earth hath wandered far,

Into the cold, and deep snow covers

The walks of our New England lovers,

Their sweet secluded evening-star!

‘ Twas with thy rays the English Muse

Ripened her mild domestic hues;

‘ Twas by thy flicker that she conned

The fireside wisdom that enrings

With light from heaven familiar things;

By thee she found the homely faith

In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay'th

When Death, extinguishing his torch,

Gropes for the latch-string in the porch;

The love that wanders not beyond

His earliest nest, but sits and sings

While children smooth his patient wings;

Therefore with thee I love to read

Our brave old poets; at thy touch how stirs

Life in the withered words: how swift recede

Time's shadows; and how glows again

Through its dead mass the incandescent verse,

As when upon the anvils of the brain

It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought

By the fast-throbbing hammers of the poet's thought!

Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred,

The aspirations unattained,

The rhythms so rathe and delicate,

They bent and strained

And broke, beneath the sombre weight

Of any airiest mortal word.

What warm protection dost thou bend

Round curtained talk of friend with friend,

While the gray snow-storm, held aloof,

To softest outline rounds the roof,

Or the rude North with baffled strain

Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane!

Now the kind nymph to Bacchus born

By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems

Gifted opon her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams,

Nicotia, dearer to the Muse

Than all the grape's bewildering juice,

We worship, unforbid of thee;

And, as her incense floats and curls

In airy spires and wayward whirls,

Or poises on its tremulous stalk

A flower of frailest revery,

So winds and loiters, idly free,

The current of unguided talk,

Now laughter-rippled, and now caught

In smooth, dark pools of deeper thought.

Meanwhile thou mellowest every word,

A sweetly unobtrusive third;

For thou hast magic beyond wine,

To unlock natures each to each;

The unspoken thought thou canst divine;

Thou fill'st the pauses of the speech

With whispers that to dream-land reach

And frozen fancy-springs unchain

In Arctic outskirts of the brain:

Sun of all inmost confidences,

To thy rays doth the heart unclose

Its formal calyx of pretences,

That close against rude day's offences,

And open its shy midnight rose!

Thou holdest not the master key

With which thy Sire sets free the mystic gates

Of Past and Future: not for common fates

Do they wide open fling,

And, with a far heard ring,

Swing back their willing valves melodiously;

Only to ceremonial days,

And great processions of imperial song

That set the world at gaze,

Doth such high privilege belong;

But thou a postern-door canst ope

To humbler chambers of the selfsame palace

Where Memory lodges, and her sister Hope,

Whose being is but as a crystal chalice

Which, with her various mood, the elder fills

Of joy or sorrow,

So coloring as she wills

With hues of yesterday the unconscious morrow.

Thou sinkest, and my fancy sinks with thee:

For thee I took the idle shell,

And struck the unused chords again,

But they are gone who listened well;

Some are in heaven, and all are far from me:

Even as I sing, it turns to pain,

And with vain tears my eyelids throb and swell:

Enough; I come not of the race

That hawk their sorrows in the market-place.

Earth stops the ears I best had loved to please;

Then break, ye untuned chords, or rust in peace!

As if a white-haired actor should come back

Some midnight to the theatre void and black,

And there rehearse his youth's great part

Mid thin applauses of the ghosts.

So seems it now: ye crowd upon my heart,

And I bow down in silence, shadowy hosts!