HEARTSEASE AND RUE

The electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill

Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes,

Confutes poor Hope's last fallacy of ease,—

The distance that divided her from ill:

Earth sentient seems again as when of old

The horny foot of Pan

Stamped, and the conscious horror ran

Beneath men's feet through all her fibres cold:

Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throe

From underground of our night-mantled foe:

The flame-winged feet

Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run

Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun,

Are mercilessly fleet,

And at a bound annihilate

Ocean's prerogative of short reprieve;

Surely ill news might wait,

And man be patient of delay to grieve:

Letters have sympathies

And tell-tale faces that reveal,

To senses finer than the eyes.

Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;

They wind a sorrow round with circumstance

To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace

The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance

The inexorable face:

But now Fate stuns as with a mace;

The savage of the skies, that men have caught

And some scant use of language taught,

Tells only what he must,—

The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,

I scanned the festering news we half despise

Yet scramble for no less,

And read of public scandal, private fraud,

Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,

Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,

And all the unwholesome mess

The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late

To teach the Old World how to wait,

When suddenly,

As happens if the brain, from overweight

Of blood, infect the eye,

Three tiny words grew lurid as I read,

And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead.

As when, beneath the street's familiar jar,

An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far,

Men listen and forebode, I hung my head,

And strove the present to recall,

As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall.

Uprooted is our mountain oak,

That promised long security of shade

And brooding-place for many a wingèd thought;

Not by Time's softly cadenced stroke

With pauses of relenting pity stayed,

But ere a root seemed sapt, a bough decayed,

From sudden ambush by the whirlwind caught

And in his broad maturity betrayed!

Well might I, as of old, appeal to you,

O mountains, woods, and streams,

To help us mourn him, for ye loved him too;

But simpler moods befit our modern themes,

And no less perfect birth of nature can,

Though they yearn tow'rd him, sympathize with man.

Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall;

Answer ye rather to my call,

Strong poets of a more unconscious day,

When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why,

Too much for softer arts forgotten since

That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince,

And drown in music the heart's bitter cry!

Lead me some steps in your directer way,

Teach me those words that strike a solid root

Within the ears of men;

Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel,

Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben,

For he was masculine from head to heel.

Nay, let himself stand undiminished by

With those clear parts of him that will not die.

Himself from out the recent dark I claim

To hear, and, if I flatter him, to blame;

To show himself, as still I seem to see,

A mortal, built upon the antique plan,

Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran,

And taking life as simply as a tree!

To claim my foiled good-by let him appear,

Large-limbed and human as I saw him near,

Loosed from the stiffening uniform of fame:

And let me treat him largely; I should fear,

( If with too prying lens I chanced to err,

Mistaking catalogue for character,)

His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame.

Nor would I scant him with judicial breath

And turn mere critic in an epitaph;

I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff

That swells fame living, chokes it after death,

And would but memorize the shining half

Of his large nature that was turned to me:

Fain had I joined with those that honored him

With eyes that darkened because his were dim,

And now been silent: but it might not be.

In some the genius is a thing apart,

A pillared hermit of the brain,

Hoarding with incommunicable art

Its intellectual gain;

Man's web of circumstance and fate

They from their perch of self observe,

Indifferent as the figures on a slate

Are to the planet's sun-swung curve

Whose bright returns they calculate;

Their nice adjustment, part to part,

Were shaken from its serviceable mood

By unpremeditated stirs of heart

Or jar of human neighborhood:

Some find their natural selves, and only then,

In furloughs of divine escape from men,

And when, by that brief ecstasy left bare,

Driven by some instinct of desire,

They wander worldward,‘ tis to blink and stare,

Like wild things of the wood about a fire,

Dazed by the social glow they cannot share;

His nature brooked no lonely lair,

But basked and bourgeoned in co-partnery,

Companionship, and open-windowed glee:

He knew, for he had tried,

Those speculative heights that lure

The unpractised foot, impatient of a guide,

Tow'rd ether too attenuately pure

For sweet unconscious breath, though dear to pride,

But better loved the foothold sure

Of paths that wind by old abodes of men

Who hope at last the churchyard's peace secure,

And follow time-worn rules, that them suffice,

Learned from their sires, traditionally wise,

Careful of honest custom's how and when;

His mind, too brave to look on Truth askance,

No more those habitudes of faith could share,

But, tinged with sweetness of the old Swiss manse,

Lingered around them still and fain would spare.

Patient to spy a sullen egg for weeks,

The enigma of creation to surprise,

His truer instinct sought the life that speaks

Without a mystery from kindly eyes;

In no self-spun cocoon of prudence wound,

He by the touch of men was best inspired,

And caught his native greatness at rebound

From generosities itself had fired;

Then how the heat through every fibre ran,

Felt in the gathering presence of the man,

While the apt word and gesture came unbid!

Virtues and faults it to one metal wrought,

Fined all his blood to thought,

And ran the molten man in all he said or did.

All Tully's rules and all Quintilian's too

He by the light of listening faces knew,

And his rapt audience all unconscious lent

Their own roused force to make him eloquent;

Persuasion fondled in his look and tone;

Our speech ( with strangers prudish ) he could bring

To find new charm in accents not her own;

Her coy constraints and icy hindrances

Melted upon his lips to natural ease,

As a brook's fetters swell the dance of spring.

Nor yet all sweetness: not in vain he wore,

Nor in the sheath of ceremony, controlled

By velvet courtesy or caution cold,

That sword of honest anger prized of old,

But, with two-handed wrath,

If baseness or pretension crossed his path,

Struck once nor needed to strike more.

His magic was not far to seek.—

He was so human! Whether strong or weak,

Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared,

But sate an equal guest at every board:

No beggar ever felt him condescend,

No prince presume; for still himself he bare

At manhood's simple level, and where'er

He met a stranger, there he left a friend.

How large an aspect! nobly un-severe,

With freshness round him of Olympian cheer,

Like visits of those earthly gods he came;

His look, wherever its good-fortune fell,

Doubled the feast without a miracle,

And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame;

Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign;

Amphitryon's gold-juice humanized to wine.

The garrulous memories

Gather again from all their far-flown nooks,

Singly at first, and then by twos and threes,

Then in a throng innumerable, as the rooks

Thicken their twilight files

Tow'rd Tintern's gray repose of roofless aisles:

Once more I see him at the table's head

When Saturday her monthly banquet spread

To scholars, poets, wits,

All choice, some famous, loving things, not names,

And so without a twinge at others’ fames;

Such company as wisest moods befits,

Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth

Of undeliberate mirth,

Natures benignly mixed of air and earth,

Now with the stars and now with equal zest

Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest.

I see in vision the warm-lighted hall,

The living and the dead I see again,

And but my chair is empty;‘ mid them all

‘ Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain

Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain:

Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most,

Of sense or spirit to the truly sane;

In this abstraction it were light to deem

Myself the figment of some stronger dream;

They are the real things, and I the ghost

That glide unhindered through the solid door,

Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,

And strive to speak and am but futile air,

As truly most of us are little more.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,

The latest parted thence,

His features poised in genial armistice

And armed neutrality of self-defence

Beneath the forehead's walled preeminence,

While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach,

Settles off-hand our human how and whence;

The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears

The infallible strategy of volunteers

Making through Nature's walls its easy breach,

And seems to learn where he alone could teach.

Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fills

As he our fireside were, our light and heat,

Centre where minds diverse and various skills

Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet;

I see the firm benignity of face,

Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,

The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,

The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips

While Holmes's rockets, curve their long ellipse,

And burst in seeds of fire that burst again

To drop in scintillating rain.

There too the face half-rustic, half-divine,

Self-poised, sagacious, freaked with humor fine,

Of him who taught us not to mow and mope

About our fancied selves, but seek our scope

In Nature's world and Man's, nor fade to hollow trope,

Content with our New World and timely bold

To challenge the o'ermastery of the Old;

Listening with eyes averse I see him sit

Pricked with the cider of the Judge's wit

( Ripe-hearted homebrew, fresh and fresh again ),

While the wise nose's firm-built aquiline

Curves sharper to restrain

The merriment whose most unruly moods

Pass not the dumb laugh learned in listening woods

Of silence-shedding pine:

Hard by is he whose art's consoling spell

Hath given both worlds a whiff of asphodel,

His look still vernal‘ mid the wintry ring

Of petals that remember, not foretell,

The paler primrose of a second spring.

And more there are: but other forms arise

And seen as clear, albeit with dimmer eyes:

First he from sympathy still held apart

By shrinking over-eagerness of heart,

Cloud charged with searching fire, whose shadow's sweep

Heightened mean things with sense of brooding ill,

And steeped in doom familiar field and hill,—

New England's poet, soul reserved and deep,

November nature with a name of May,

Whom high o'er Concord plains we laid to sleep,

While the orchards mocked us in their white array

And building robins wondered at our tears,

Snatched in his prime, the shape august

That should have stood unbent‘ neath fourscore years,

The noble head, the eyes of furtive trust,

All gone to speechless dust.

And he our passing guest,

Shy nature, too, and stung with life's unrest,

Whom we too briefly had but could not hold,

Who brought ripe Oxford's culture to our board,

The Past's incalculable hoard,

Mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old,

Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet

With immemorial lisp of musing feet;

Young head time-tonsured smoother than a friar's,

Boy face, but grave with answerless desires,

Poet in all that poets have of best,

But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims,

Who now hath found sure rest,

Not by still Isis or historic Thames,

Nor by the Charles he tried to love with me,

But, not misplaced, by Arno's hallowed brim,

Nor scorned by Santa Croce's neighboring fames,

Haply not mindless, wheresoe'er he be,

Of violets that to-day I scattered over him,

He, too, is there,

After the good centurion fitly named,

Whom learning dulled not, nor convention tamed,

Shaking with burly mirth his hyacinthine hair,

Our hearty Grecian of Homeric ways,

Still found the surer friend where least he hoped the praise.

Yea truly, as the sallowing years

Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves

Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days,

And that unwakened winter nears,

‘ Tis the void chair our surest guest receives,

‘ Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss,

‘ Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears;

We count our rosary by the beads we miss:

To me, at least, it seemeth so,

An exile in the land once found divine,

While my starved fire burns low,

And homeless winds at the loose casement whine

Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine.

Now forth into the darkness all are gone,

But memory, still unsated, follows on,

Retracing step by step our homeward walk,

With many a laugh among our serious talk,

Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,

The long red streamers from the windows glide,

Or the dim western moon

Rocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon,

And Boston shows a soft Venetian side

In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,

Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;

Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wide

Shivered the winter stars, while all below,

As if an end were come of human ill,

The world was wrapt in innocence of snow

And the cast-iron bay was blind and still;

These were our poetry; in him perhaps

Science had barred the gate that lets in dream,

And he would rather count the perch and bream

Than with the current's idle fancy lapse;

And yet he had the poet's open eye

That takes a frank delight in all it sees,

Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky,

To him the life-long friend of fields and trees:

Then came the prose of the suburban street,

Its silence deepened by our echoing feet,

And converse such as rambling hazard finds;

Then he who many cities knew and many minds,

And men once world-noised, now mere Ossian forms

Of misty memory, bade them live anew

As when they shared earth's manifold delight,

In shape, in gait, in voice, in gesture true,

And, with an accent heightening as he warms,

Would stop forgetful of the shortening night,

Drop my confining arm, and pour profuse

Much worldly wisdom kept for others’ use,

Not for his own, for he was rash and free,

His purse or knowledge all men's, like the sea.

Still can I hear his voice's shrilling might

( With pauses broken, while the fitful spark

He blew more hotly rounded on the dark

To hint his features with a Rembrandt light )

Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck,

Or Cuvier's taller shade, and many more

Whom he had seen, or knew from others’ sight,

And make them men to me as ne'er before:

Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred

Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea,

German or French thrust by the lagging word,

For a good leash of mother-tongues had he.

At last, arrived at where our paths divide,

‘ Good night!’ and, ere the distance grew too wide,

‘ Good night!’ again; and now with cheated ear

I half hear his who mine shall never hear.

Sometimes it seemed as if New England air

For his large lungs too parsimonious were,

As if those empty rooms of dogma drear

Where the ghost shivers of a faith austere

Counting the horns o'er of the Beast,

Still scaring those whose faith to it is least,

As if those snaps o’ th’ moral atmosphere

That sharpen all the needles of the East,

Had been to him like death,

Accustomed to draw Europe's freer breath

In a more stable element;

Nay, even our landscape, half the year morose,

Our practical horizon, grimly pent,

Our air, sincere of ceremonious haze,

Forcing hard outlines mercilessly close,

Our social monotone of level days,

Might make our best seem banishment;

But it was nothing so;

Haply this instinct might divine,

Beneath our drift of puritanic snow,

The marvel sensitive and fine

Of sanguinaria over-rash to blow

And trust its shyness to an air malign;

Well might he prize truth's warranty and pledge

In the grim outcrop of our granite edge,

Or Hebrew fervor flashing forth at need

In the gaunt sons of Calvin's iron breed,

As prompt to give as skilled to win and keep;

But, though such intuitions might not cheer,

Yet life was good to him, and, there or here,

With that sufficing joy, the day was never cheap;

Thereto his mind was its own ample sphere,

And, like those buildings great that through the year

Carry one temperature, his nature large

Made its own climate, nor could any marge

Traced by convention stay him from his bent:

He had a habitude of mountain air;

He brought wide outlook where he went,

And could on sunny uplands dwell

Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair

High-hung of viny Neufchâtel;

Nor, surely, did he miss

Some pale, imaginary bliss

Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was Swiss.

I cannot think he wished so soon to die

With all his senses full of eager heat,

And rosy years that stood expectant by

To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,

He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet

Took with both hands unsparingly:

Truly this life is precious to the root,

And good the feel of grass beneath the foot;

To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom,

Tenants in common with the bees,

And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees,

Is better than long waiting in the tomb;

Only once more to feel the coming spring

As the birds feel it, when it bids them sing,

Only once more to see the moon

Through leaf-fringed abbey-arches of the elms

Curve her mild sickle in the West

Sweet with the breath of haycocks, were a boon

Worth any promise of soothsayer realms

Or casual hope of being elsewhere blest;

To take December by the beard

And crush the creaking snow with springy foot,

While overhead the North's dumb streamers shoot,

Till Winter fawn upon the cheek endeared,

Then the long evening-ends

Lingered by cosy chimney-nooks,

With high companionship of books

Or slippered talk of friends

And sweet habitual looks,

Is better than to stop the ears with dust:

Too soon the spectre comes to say,‘ Thou must!’

When toil-crooked hands are crost upon the breast,

They comfort us with sense of rest;

They must be glad to lie forever still;

Their work is ended with their day;

Another fills their room;‘ t is the World's ancient way,

Whether for good or ill;

But the deft spinners of the brain,

Who love each added day and find it gain,

Them overtakes the doom

To snap the half-grown flower upon the loom

( Trophy that was to be of life long pain ),

The thread no other skill can ever knit again.

‘ Twas so with him, for he was glad to live,

‘ Twas doubly so, for he left work begun;

Could not this eagerness of Fate forgive

Till all the allotted flax were spun?

It matters not; for, go at night or noon,

A friend, whene'er he dies, has died too soon,

And, once we hear the hopeless He is dead,

So far as flesh hath knowledge, all is said.

I seem to see the black procession go:

That crawling prose of death too well I know,

The vulgar paraphrase of glorious woe;

I see it wind through that unsightly grove,

Once beautiful, but long defaced

With granite permanence of cockney taste

And all those grim disfigurements we love:

There, then, we leave him: Him? such costly waste

Nature rebels at: and it is not true

Of those most precious parts of him we knew:

Could we be conscious but as dreamers be,

‘ Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents

Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity;

Nay, to be mingled with the elements,

The fellow-servants of creative powers,

Partaker in the solemn year's events,

To share the work of busy-fingered hours,

To be night's silent almoner of dew,

To rise again in plants and breathe and grow,

To stream as tides the ocean caverns through,

Or with the rapture of great winds to blow

About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate

To leave us all-disconsolate;

Even endless slumber in the sweetening sod

Of charitable earth

That takes out all our mortal stains,

And makes us cleanlier neighbors of the clod,

Methinks were better worth

Than the poor fruit of most men's wakeful pains,

The heart's insatiable ache:

But such was not his faith,

Nor mine: it may be he had trod

Outside the plain old path of God thus spake,

But God to him was very God

And not a visionary wraith

Skulking in murky corners of the mind,

And he was sure to be

Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He,

Not with His essence mystically combined,

As some high spirits long, but whole and free,

A perfected and conscious Agassiz.

And such I figure him: the wise of old

Welcome and own him of their peaceful fold,

Not truly with the guild enrolled

Of him who seeking inward guessed

Diviner riddles than the rest,

And groping in the darks of thought

Touched the Great Hand and knew it not;

Rather he shares the daily light,

From reason's charier fountains won,

Of his great chief, the slow-paced Stagyrite,

And Cuvier clasps once more his long-lost son.

The shape erect is prone: forever stilled

The winning tongue; the forehead's high-piled heap,

A cairn which every science helped to build,

Unvalued will its golden secrets keep:

He knows at last if Life or Death be best:

Wherever he be flown, whatever vest

The being hath put on which lately here

So many-friended was, so full of cheer

To make men feel the Seeker's noble zest,

We have not lost him all; he is not gone

To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;

The beauty of his better self lives on

In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye

He trained to Truth's exact severity;

He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him

Whose living word still stimulates the air?

In endless file shall loving scholars come

The glow of his transmitted touch to share,

And trace his features with an eye less dim

Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes dumb.