Part 36 (1/2)
Then she heard a voice come onward Singing with a rapture new, As Eve heard the songs in Eden, Dropping earthward with the dew; Well she knew the happy singer, Well the happy song she knew.
Forward leaped she o'er the threshold, Eager as a glancing surf; Fell from her the spirit's languor, Fell from her the body's scurf;-- 'Neath the palm next day some Arabs Found a corpse upon the turf.
THE BIRCH-TREE.
Rippling through thy branches goes the suns.h.i.+ne, Among thy leaves that palpitate forever; Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned, The soul once of some tremulous inland river, Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever!
While all the forest, witched with slumberous moons.h.i.+ne, Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence, Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended,-- I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands, And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.
Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet, Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad, Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadow Slopes quivering down the water's dusky quiet, Thou shrink'st as on her bath's edge would some startled Dryad.
Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers; Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping; Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.
Thou art to me like my beloved maiden, So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences; Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets Sprinkle their gathered suns.h.i.+ne o'er my senses, And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.
Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble, Thou sympathizest still; wild and unquiet, I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river, Flows valleyward, where calmness is, and by it My heart is floated down into the land of quiet.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH.
I sat one evening in my room, In that sweet hour of twilight When blended thoughts, half light, half gloom, Throng through the spirit's skylight; The flames by fits curled round the bars, Or up the chimney crinkled, While embers dropped like falling stars, And in the ashes tinkled.
I sat and mused; the fire burned low, And, o'er my senses stealing, Crept something of the ruddy glow That bloomed on wall and ceiling; My pictures (they are very few,-- The heads of ancient wise men) Smoothed down their knotted fronts, and grew As rosy as excis.e.m.e.n.
My antique high-backed Spanish chair Felt thrills through wood and leather, That had been strangers since whilere, Mid Andalusian heather, The oak that made its st.u.r.dy frame His happy arms stretched over The ox whose fortunate hide became The bottom's polished cover.
It came out in that famous bark That brought our sires intrepid, Capacious as another ark For furniture decrepit;-- For, as that saved of bird and beast A pair for propagation, So has the seed of these increased And furnished half the nation.
Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats; But those slant precipices Of ice the northern voyager meets Less slippery are than this is; To cling therein would pa.s.s the wit Of royal man or woman, And whatsoe'er can stay in it Is more or less than human.
I offer to all bores this perch, Dear well-intentioned people With heads as void as week-day church, Tongues longer than the steeple; To folks with missions, whose gaunt eyes See golden ages rising,-- Salt of the earth! in what queer Guys Thou'rt fond of crystallizing!
My wonder, then, was not unmixed With merciful suggestion, When, as my roving eyes grew fixed Upon the chair in question, I saw its trembling arms enclose A figure grim and rusty, Whose doublet plain and plainer hose Were something worn and dusty.
Now even such men as Nature forms Merely to fill the street with, Once turned to ghosts by hungry worms, Are serious things to meet with; Your penitent spirits are no jokes, And, though I'm not averse to A quiet shade, even they are folks One cares not to speak first to.
Who knows, thought I, but he has come, By Charon kindly ferried, To tell me of a mighty sum Behind my wainscot buried?
There is a buccaneerish air About that garb outlandish---- Just then the ghost drew up his chair And said ”My name is Standish.
”I come from Plymouth, deadly bored With toasts, and songs, and speeches, As long and flat as my old sword, As threadbare as my breeches: _They_ understand us Pilgrims! they, Smooth men with rosy faces, Strength's knots and gnarls all pared away, And varnish in their places!
”We had some toughness in our grain, The eye to rightly see us is Not just the one that lights the brain Of drawing-room Tyrtaeuses: _They_ talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy!-- A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy.
”He had stiff knees, the Puritan, That were not good at bending; The homespun dignity of man He thought was worth defending; He did not, with his pinchbeck ore, His country's shame forgotten, Gild Freedom's coffin o'er and o'er, When all within was rotten.
”These loud ancestral boasts of yours, How can they else than vex us?
Where were your dinner orators When slavery grasped at Texas?