Personal Poems II, vol 4, part 2 | Page 5

the drone of bees,?The flail-beat chiming far away,?The cattle-low, at shut of day,?The voice of God in leaf and breeze;
Then lend thy hand, my wiser friend,?And help me to the vales below,?(In truth, I have not far to go,)?Where sweet with flowers the fields extend.?1858.
THE MEMORY OF BURNS.
Read at the Boston celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, 25th 1st mo., 1859. In my absence these lines were read by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
How sweetly come the holy psalms?From saints and martyrs down,?The waving of triumphal palms?Above the thorny crown?The choral praise, the chanted prayers?From harps by angels strung,?The hunted Cameron's mountain airs,?The hymns that Luther sung!
Yet, jarring not the heavenly notes,?The sounds of earth are heard,?As through the open minster floats?The song of breeze and bird?Not less the wonder of the sky?That daisies bloom below;?The brook sings on, though loud and high?The cloudy organs blow!
And, if the tender ear be jarred?That, haply, hears by turns?The saintly harp of Olney's bard,?The pastoral pipe of Burns,?No discord mars His perfect plan?Who gave them both a tongue;?For he who sings the love of man?The love of God hath sung!
To-day be every fault forgiven?Of him in whom we joy?We take, with thanks, the gold of Heaven?And leave the earth's alloy.?Be ours his music as of spring,?His sweetness as of flowers,?The songs the bard himself might sing?In holier ears than ours.
Sweet airs of love and home, the hum?Of household melodies,?Come singing, as the robins come?To sing in door-yard trees.?And, heart to heart, two nations lean,?No rival wreaths to twine,?But blending in eternal green?The holly and the pine!
IN REMEMBRANCE OF JOSEPH STURGE.
In the fair land o'erwatched by Ischia's mountains,?Across the charmed bay?Whose blue waves keep with Capri's silver fountains?Perpetual holiday,
A king lies dead, his wafer duly eaten,?His gold-bought masses given;?And Rome's great altar smokes with gums to sweeten?Her foulest gift to Heaven.
And while all Naples thrills with mute thanksgiving,?The court of England's queen?For the dead monster so abhorred while living?In mourning garb is seen.
With a true sorrow God rebukes that feigning;?By lone Edgbaston's side?Stands a great city in the sky's sad raining,?Bareheaded and wet-eyed!
Silent for once the restless hive of labor,?Save the low funeral tread,?Or voice of craftsman whispering to his neighbor?The good deeds of the dead.
For him no minster's chant of the immortals?Rose from the lips of sin;?No mitred priest swung back the heavenly portals?To let the white soul in.
But Age and Sickness framed their tearful faces?In the low hovel's door,?And prayers went up from all the dark by-places?And Ghettos of the poor.
The pallid toiler and the negro chattel,?The vagrant of the street,?The human dice wherewith in games of battle?The lords of earth compete,
Touched with a grief that needs no outward draping,?All swelled the long lament,?Of grateful hearts, instead of marble, shaping?His viewless monument!
For never yet, with ritual pomp and splendor,?In the long heretofore,?A heart more loyal, warm, and true, and tender,?Has England's turf closed o'er.
And if there fell from out her grand old steeples?No crash of brazen wail,?The murmurous woe of kindreds, tongues, and peoples?Swept in on every gale.
It came from Holstein's birchen-belted meadows,?And from the tropic calms?Of Indian islands in the sunlit shadows?Of Occidental palms;
From the locked roadsteads of the Bothniaii peasants,?And harbors of the Finn,?Where war's worn victims saw his gentle presence?Come sailing, Christ-like, in,
To seek the lost, to build the old waste places,?To link the hostile shores?Of severing seas, and sow with England's daisies?The moss of Finland's moors.
Thanks for the good man's beautiful example,?Who in the vilest saw?Some sacred crypt or altar of a temple?Still vocal with God's law;
And heard with tender ear the spirit sighing?As from its prison cell,?Praying for pity, like the mournful crying?Of Jonah out of hell.
Not his the golden pen's or lip's persuasion,?But a fine sense of right,?And Truth's directness, meeting each occasion?Straight as a line of light.
His faith and works, like streams that intermingle,?In the same channel ran?The crystal clearness of an eye kept single?Shamed all the frauds of man.
The very gentlest of all human natures?He joined to courage strong,?And love outreaching unto all God's creatures?With sturdy hate of wrong.
Tender as woman, manliness and meekness?In him were so allied?That they who judged him by his strength or weakness?Saw but a single side.
Men failed, betrayed him, but his zeal seemed nourished?By failure and by fall;?Still a large faith in human-kind he cherished,?And in God's love for all.
And now he rests: his greatness and his sweetness?No more shall seem at strife,?And death has moulded into calm completeness?The statue of his life.
Where the dews glisten and the songbirds warble,?His dust to dust is laid,?In Nature's keeping, with no pomp of marble?To shame his modest shade.
The forges glow, the hammers all are ringing;?Beneath its smoky vale,?Hard by, the city of his love is swinging?Its clamorous iron flail.
But round his grave are quietude and beauty,?And the sweet